Social Desktop Starts To Arrive In KDE

FrankKarlitschek writes "At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost."

Comments

The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

It will not take five minutes before the experienced KDE users stop using the widget because they are being bugged by people.

Love or hate forums they are a better way to collate helpful information than using a disparate bunch of people all over the place.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

Forums, as most of them exist now, are actually an exceptionally lousy way of publishing collective wisdom. The problem is that they don't just collect actual wisdom, they collect lint, cruft, and other sundry garbage as well... and all too often even a smart person can't always discern one from the other.

There is as much or more MISinformation accumulated in forums as there is useful information.

Now, if you wanna invent the Next Big Thing in online collaborative problem-solving that will obsolete vBulletin and phpBB and all the rest, please get back to me! Until then, I'm pretty much sick and tired of spending hours trying to sift forums for that one nugget of informational gold hidden amongst all the pyrite, feldspar, mica, and hematite.

Re:The Widget

[who knows my name]

I think it's called a wiki.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

Yes, it is, isn't it? :-)

Forums are useful for the collaboration that precedes the creation of a wiki page, but they certainly do a lousy job trying to supplant one. If the initial post in a thread is consistently updated to reflect the best and latest collective wisdom of the discussion, it can almost take the place of a wiki, but in my experience that is rarely done, and even when done is even less rarely done well.

Wikis are indeed better storehouses of collective wisdom, but there aren't enough of them and they often don't rank as highly in search engines as the forum posts they should be superceding. That's perhaps what needs to be fixed: more, and more easily found.

Re:The Widget

[fyoder]

Or this aggravation, when you're searching for a solution to a problem, find a forum where someone has asked exactly the question you're asking, and the only reply is "Google it. Google is your friend."

Google might be my friend, but that asshat sure as hell isn't Google's friend, the poster's friend, nor anyone's. Answer the fricken question, or STFU and stop adding to the noise.

Re:The Widget

[lennier]

"I think it's called a wiki."

Sort of. A wiki is great for topic-based material. Not so great for time-based (blogs and calendars) or thread-based (comments/forums).

It seems like there should be a framework sitting midway between wiki, blog, forum and calendar: something which deals with chunks of text in a standard safe markup language (Textile/Markdown or the like), tagged with fields (date created, date modified, date due, creator) and then aggregated into views (blog post, blog comment, forum thread, forum comment, wiki page, wiki edit, wiki history).

Why don't we have this yet?

Cool

[stoolpigeon]

I like the idea. I find that I tend to look for desktop clients for a lot of connected stuff that I do. In fact I'm writing my own PyQT twitter client right now because I couldn't find a desktop client for linux that really works well and has the features I want. (The adobe air stuff is close but is flaky - crashes, etc.)

I wouldn't mind at all seeing more of this being pulled tighter into my workspace.

Re:Cool

[ouder]

For a long time KDE was regarded as the stable businesslike desktop and Gnome was for the experimenters. It is interesting to me that the roles have largely reversed. Gnome is now taking an incremental, evolutionary approach while KDE is the one taking risks and being more revolutionary.

MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Hoplite3]

I know, I know. This is probably different, but when I read the description, I pictured MS Bob with bright, colorful rooms that someone far away thought would put me at ease when using a computer. Then when I start a task, the helpful animated dog pops up, but instead of the vanilla "looks like you're writing a letter," some random jerk from the low end of the internet gene pool pops up and says something in between "Nice letter, fag!" and
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/4/27/

I feel like there's too much desktop in my face most of the time. I want it to be a helpful tool, but most often being helpful means staying out of the way. But I am glad KDE is so configurable, so I can mold it into the desktop I want. That part is great.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[pongo000]

I feel like there's too much desktop in my face most of the time. I want it to be a helpful tool, but most often being helpful means staying out of the way. But I am glad KDE is so configurable, so I can mold it into the desktop I want. That part is great.

Then why would you use KDE, instead of a minimalist desktop/WM like XFCE?

Not a troll, not a flame. But I can't quite figure out those who run KDE, and then complain about how "thick" KDE is.

Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[orkybash]

Don't get me wrong, I love the KDE 4 desktop (though lets not start that debate...), but one thing that has been plaguing KDE is the introduction of new "revolutionary" desktop paradigms that no one actually uses.

Nepomuk, for example, was supposed to launch us into the era of the semantic desktop, with everything tagged with all sorts of metadata andd actually searchable. The problem is, applications don't use it. Developers for Amarok and Digikam, two major KDE apps, have both stated that they have no interest in integrating with Nepomuk for the time being.

It gives me hope that there are already ideas on how to use this (Plasmoids, or desktop widgets for those of you who don't speak KDE), but those strike me as the moral equivalent of being able to tag things in Dolphin (the file browser) but not being able to make use of those tags elsewhere.

So until I see commitment from developers, I'm not excited.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[tick-tock-atona]

WTF?

Because a lots of new codes have been done in digiKam for KDE4, we need to stabilize current implementations before to play with Nepomuk. Also, the new Database interface from Marcel which is already very stable need to be polished before to be interfaced with Nepomuk. So, it's something planed for 0.11.0 release.

Gilles Caulier

Decentralization

[ultrabot]

Decentralization is not necessarily a good thing. It spreads possibly valuable information to isolated cells (private chats?) with no googleability.

Also, do you really want to be interrupted even more than you used to, by some newbie that can't be bothered to google around?

Re:Decentralization

[Gerzel]

Who pray tell is posting all these magical answers to questions that may or may not be asked by someone googling?

Googling around only gets you so far with most interface/specific computer questions. Often there are bugs which take time to reach forums let alone well written help pages. More often then not your problem isn't going to be what people are linking to/talking about on many pages and so will NOT show up on Google page rank. Many problems also are rooted in individual configurations and individual mistakes made along the way thus appear vastly different to different users.

Oh and the kicker is often to get the most out of google you have to know a bit about what you are searching for which for newbie help is almost never going to be the case.

Perhaps one day when we put as much time and thought in writing the helpfiles and user information bits of programs then google will be the ultimate answer but for now it is in most cases thirty minutes of frustration that would be more helpful just hitting IRC or a forum to ask someone who might have a clue as to what they are doing or might have seen the problem before.

I wish they would focus their energies elsewhere

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate the efforts KDE programmers have put into making KDE really usable, I wish they (KDE developers), would focus their efforts at reducing the huge number of bugs in KDE 4.x and improve the user experience.

I know KDE is a mostly voluntary effort but in the current situation of over 50,000 bugs, introducing even more features which translates to more bugs does not help at all.

I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed. The system (Kubuntu) was so slow.

Heck...why is it so hard for programmers to make KDE beautiful by default?b Operative word here is "default". Why do the menus and widgets have to be huge...wasting space?

I had to say this otherwise I know I will be castigated for saying what is true and is on my mind.

Existing Features

[nurb432]

How about get 4.x as stable as 3.5x before we start moving forward?

Re:Existing Features

[lbbros]

You do know it took seven years for the 3.x codebase to stabilize, right?

Re:Existing Features

[lbbros]

You see news about this, but not about the millions of bug fixes that go in for a particular component. Pushing out stories about new ideas does not mean there is no polishing going behind the scenes. There is quite a lot, and if you see lack of "polish" remember also that manpower, especially for some KDE areas, is quite limited.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[freedumb2000]

Just looked at some screenshots of KDE4. It looked like Vista. Why do the always have to emulate a current Windows version for looks? Windows has _always_ been ugly. Vista especially being hard on the eyes with it's glossy black style.

Keeping the Open Source Desktop Relevant

[segedunum]

Like it or lump it, I see KDE as the only open source desktop trying, or even able to, to keep open source desktops relevant and on the radar with people with respect to what the proprietary competition is doing and will be able to do in the future - graphics, resolution independence, development tools and libraries, searching with semantic meaning....... With the foundation of all of that in KDE 4 they have the ability to create actual tools, applications and widgets that can make the social desktop a reasonable reality rather than just creating the appearance of it with hastily put together front-ends to Facebook because that foundation isn't there. I'll mention no names there.

Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows. Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use. If Psystar wins its case that will probably get several times more difficult and Apple will make a crapload of cash bizarrely, but I digress.

anti-social apps

[ifeelswine]

am i the only one that pines for anti-social applications? and in this case a desktop? i don't want a picture of me smiling gaily or puking my guts out on facebook. i don't want my professional qualifications smeared across the interweb. i don't want to 'tweet' my latest bowel movement to the universe. 1. write app to crawl the interweb and cleanse the world of references to your name 2. ??? 3. profit!

Re:it's already here

[tick-tock-atona]

One of the major ideas behind the Social Desktop is desktop network transparency.

KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[speedtux]

Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows.

Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting. And the people who owned CDE thought that because it was ahead of the competition, they could charge a premium for it. Meanwhile, in the PC market, companies were pushing out low-cost machines with crappy and cumbersome low-level GUI libraries by the millions.

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[segedunum]

Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting.

No, they focused on the wrong things and some of the right stuff they focused on was half-baked to the point of being unusable so it never turned into anything an end user might feel the benefit of.

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Which is exactly what the CDE guys did about fifteen years ago when they declared CDE as a 'standard', looked at Windows and Mac OS and said "We don't need anything developer friendly. We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff. Who wants to play something called Half Life anyway?" Microsoft also said "Who needs the internet?" and quickly realised they were wrong. I'm sure no user asked for any of those things until they came along. The world moved on and left CDE in its own sad little world.

We all now that no one uses any of that stuff and Microsoft was right about the internet, right? Your statement is so stupid on so many levels it isn't even funny. Why bother with any new functionality at all? We all know that each new version of software can be sold on the basis that it has 'less' functionality so it 'doesn't get in your way' right? I'm afraid no one is moving off Windows and Mac OS with that strap-line. The sad part is that you probably believe it even when the contrary has been pointed out and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on. Either people don't see it or they just don't want to see it.

Chagning the subject line of the thread won't make it true either.

Re:Experts Exchange

[macraig]

I've seen it, indeed, but I was put off by the "business model". Since the people who help, for whom it happens to be free, are not actually paid for their expertise (are they?), the site is actually abusing BOTH ends of the process: making the "users" pay and abusing the knowledge of the "experts".

Experts Exchange operates on a business model exactly like many dating services, where women are allowed to join for free and then the desperately horny men are milked for all it's worth: women = experts, men = users with problems.

Java version of a social semantic desktop

[Paul Fernhout]

I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
"The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."