KDE 4.3 Released

Jos Poortvliet writes "After another 6 months of hard work by over 700 people, after fixing over 10,000 bugs and granting 2,000 wishes, KDE 4.3, or 'Caizen,' is here (the release takes its nickname from the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement). The KDE Desktop Workspace introduces, besides the usual stability and speed improvements, new widgets, the ability to 'peek' in a folder with folderview, and activities tied to virtual desktops. The KDE Application Suites feature improvements in the utilities like a more formats supported in Ark and the return of the Linux Infrared Remote Control system. Instant messenger Kopete introduces an improved contact list and KOrganizer can sync with Google Calendar. Kmail supports inserting inline images into email and the Alarm notifier has gained export functionality, drag and drop, and has an improved configuration. The KDE Application Development platform has seen work on integrating the Social Desktop and the new system tray protocol from Freedesktop.org. You can watch a screencast of the Desktop Workspace here."

Comments

Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[bheer]

...interesting to see the KDE team drop the K from a word where it'd actually be appropriate.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we're splitting hairs - you mean spelled?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

"Spelled" and "Spelt" are used by entire countries. "Caizen" is a non-standard Romanization of a foreign language purportedly used by KDE developers. A bit different.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[bheer]

Nope.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[davejenkins]

Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols. As noted above æ"å- is how one should write the Japanese word for "improvement". Unfortunately, many people outside East Asia has no idea how to read or pronounce that, so we "romanize" words based on a commonly accepted latin alphabet equivalent. The usual Latin alphabet equivalent is kaizen with a k. Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-- the most common example is the NTT wireless provider Docomo (meaning "anywhere"). Here endeth the lesson.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Grishnakh]

Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-

Why is that? What's wrong with 'k'? In languages using latin-based alphabets, 'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant, unlike 'c' which varies a lot depending on the language and the word. In English, 'c' is sometime a hard consonant that sounds like 'k' (like in "crap"), and other times is a soft consonant that sounds like 's' (like in "celestial"), and sometimes is combined with other letters for something else (like in "cheese").

If you want to use a Latin alphabet to show non-native speakers how a word is pronounced, and the word has a hard 'k' sound, why not just use a 'k'?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, sure. But this is the KDE project for pete's sake. Spelling the word with a C is a ... missed opportunity.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ChunderDownunder]

Hmmm, I thought 'spelt' was a variety of wheat.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha try telling that to the Japanese. People harp on about europeans don't understand other races, well it works both ways. Asian people have no clue about european culture or ways.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought 'svelte' was a variety of hips.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[thyristor pt]

The exact same thought stops me from reading the rest of the story. I always get stucK in Caizen.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[R.Mo_Robert]

Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-

Why is that? What's wrong with 'k'? In languages using latin-based alphabets, 'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant, unlike 'c' which varies a lot depending on the language and the word. ... If you want to use a Latin alphabet to show non-native speakers how a word is pronounced, and the word has a hard 'k' sound, why not just use a 'k'?

The biggest reason is probably that it looks less "foreign." Docomo looks at least a bit more Anglicized than Dokomo, which for whatever reason may be more appealing to some people.

Plus, it's usually not that hard to figure out. A handful of exceptions aside, c (and g, for that matter) is generally hard except when proceeded by e or i (formerly the non-low front consonants of English, which they still were when this phonological change took place and which they still are in other languages that also do this, such as Spanish). The combination ch is usually a digraph representing /tS/ (XSAMPA, not IPA--apparently Slashdot doesn't play well with Unicode), sometimes /k/, but rarely, if ever (in English) /kh/. Plus, if you know that the word is Japanese...

But basically, I would guess that the use of c appeals to more people because it looks more like an English(-ish) word.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[AvitarX]

I think they are trying to shake the K everywhere thing.

I mean Gwenview? really? that is quite confusing and has to be intentional.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Darinbob]

Why? Because it's Japan. They aren't using English and Roman letters because of accuracy or a desire to communicate, they use them because they're considered cool.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[fbjon]

Since we're splitting hairs - you mean spelled?

He merely meant that KDE is an ancient crop nearly declared extinct by Netcraft. I don't know where to put the 'K' in spelt, though.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly bunts.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

What a silly "bunt".

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Shatrat]

Why is that? What's wrong with 'k'?

Spelling like everybody else isn't kool.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant

What about words like "know" and "knife"?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[peppepz]

In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.
If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.
In English, there's no problem, because there is no doubt about the pronunciation of a starting C followed by an A.
Many other latin-based languages, such as Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, have no K and use C instead, except for loan words.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[xant]

Yes, but if you're going to use a Romanized word, and given the choice between K and C in this instance, why not choose K? Did someone miss the memo that all KDE/Qt terminology must begin with, or feature prominently, the letter K?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[vivin]

"Spelt" is also the past-participle simple-past form of "to spell". It's a little more common in countries that use British English. "spelt" and "spelled" are equally correct.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[MightyYar]

'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant

You know, I'm knot sure that is true...

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'all dones good wit that thar speelin i now beleevees i dont no more needen to go to that thar skoool tar git my lernen tarday.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[fireman sam]

Strange things are afoot at the circle K...

Woah.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, now I know three words in Japanese!

In case anyone's curious, the other ones being 'Sakura' and 'Bukkake'.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[orzetto]

Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-

Why is that?

Xenophilia. I have seen it happening in various countries: in Italy, nicknames often end in "y", like giusy, francy, etc. where using "i" would be correct with respect to Italian orthography; in Norway, there are more and more Jacob's and fewer and fewer Jakob's; in the US, Staci instead of Stacey.

This also comes into advertisement, as using a foreign language seems exotic and acculturated. It is however quite comical to see how many spelling mistakes end up in such advertisement: as an Italian I could write an encyclopaedia of misspellings of Italian food ("Spaghetti carbonara", "Pizza casa di Mama", "Cambozola", ...); similarly, good look to you English speakers figuring out what a "No Stir" shirt is supposed to be in Italy.

So, what's wrong with K you ask? There are already too many of them and it does not attract enough attention, that's what is wrong.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

That's "qunts" you moron.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mrmeval]

Yes but since KDE can't do "good change" dropping the K is at least honest on their part. Caizen is a meaningless word and that fits KDE to a T.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

So then I use burnt vs burned? And learnt vs learned?
I have often wondered about this.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[von_rick]

Yes, knives. If you use Gnome, you use a Ginsu knife. For KDE, use the Kinsu knife.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[dakameleon]

In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.

If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.

That quite ignores the fact that there's an official ISO standard, an addendum to the ISO standard endorsed by the Japanese government and taught in Japanese schools, and a widely used defacto standard system for transliteration used outside of Japan, and even inside.

All of which specify the transliteration of the word in dispute as 'kaizen'.

It's all the more ridiculous for being inconsistent with years of C-to-K swaps used throughout KDE.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[dakameleon]

Ed: The widely used system mentioned but unlinked above is the Hepburn system. We regret not paying attention to the preview.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes Japanese companies just want their names to be horribly mispronounced by most of the world population. Mazda, for example was founded by Mr. Matsuda. I don't know of any language outside of German maybe where the pronunciation would be anywhere close to the real pronunciation.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ChameleonDave]

Hmmm, I thought 'spelt' was a variety of wheat.

I've heard (sorry, "heared") Americans saying this before. I'm never quite sure whether they are making a bad joke, or they actually are that ignorant.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[KamuZ]

Well, a few years ago a weird trend started in Mexico where everyone using an internet chat started misspelling words like: "Como estas" as "Komo estas" or "te quiero" with "te kiero". Practically, if you go right now to a Chat room (IRC, web page) you can see what i am talking about. Why this happens? No clue, but i think this is worst that shortening words for SMS, at least there you have a reason to short or misspell words.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[selven]

Time to go even more exotic I guess. How does Qaizen sound (or rather, look)?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Random BedHead Ed]

Slow down, not all of us have memorizt every single participle yet.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Several developers of the KDE team have acknowledged this to be a deliberate, ironic move.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, what kids learn about the English language nowadays is dreadful. I cannot imagine it is any better then all terribly inadequate English classes I had growing up, especially in elementary school. Had I not had an interest in learning more about my native tongue, there would lots of things I would otherwise never really know or understand about it.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Please vote parent up, it is as accurate as it gets.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[SomeKDEUser]

About your sig: Yes, it says that the other nations of the world will actually rewrite/update their constitutions to get it right instead of appending "amendments".

Those are called "revisions".

It says a lot about your world view that you think a) everyone should know what those amendments are about and b) that you consider it a good thing that freedom of speech was added as an afterthought.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[muckracer]

Konkur kompletely!

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[WaroDaBeast]

C'mon Slashdot, we ought to know our regular/irregular verbs!

• to bend // I bended/bent // bended/bent

• to bereave // I bereaved/bereft // bereaved/bereft

• to bet // I betted/bet // betted/bet

• to bless // I blessed/blesst // blessed/blesst

• to dream // I dreamed/dreamt // dreamed/dreamt

• to learn // I learned/learnt // learned/learnt

And the list goes on... There are a many verbs out there that can be both regular and irregular. Some even have more than two forms for the preterite and/or past participle.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ookaze]

Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols. As noted above æ"å- is how one should write the Japanese word for "improvement". Unfortunately, many people outside East Asia has no idea how to read or pronounce that, so we "romanize" words based on a commonly accepted latin alphabet equivalent.

But he's not splitting hair, he's right.
And the alphabet you're talking about is called romaji (literally meaning "roman characters"), and sorry but in this alphabet, of which there are several variants, "k" is always used for "ka", in all the variants.

The usual Latin alphabet equivalent is kaizen with a k. Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-- the most common example is the NTT wireless provider Docomo (meaning "anywhere").

But why are they trying to do that. You read like they all do this just because, which is not true.
There's always a reason behind these uses of a c instead of k. Usually, it's to look like a french (or other roman based language) word, or for a pun, often coupled with the abbreviations that is an entertaining particularity of japanese language.
For example, for DoCoMo, it's the abbreviation of "DO COmmunication over MObile", thus why it's written DoCoMo with several capitals.
And of course, "dokomo" also means "anywhere", so this is a pun.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ChunderDownunder]

Well I'm not American, FYI.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, irony!

(trans. for USoids: Whoosh!)

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ChameleonDave]

What's with the link? Bizarre.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[GauteL]

"Plus, it's usually not that hard to figure out. A handful of exceptions aside, c (and g, for that matter) is generally hard except when proceeded by e or i (formerly the non-low front consonants of English"

As a non-native English speaker who has lived in England for years I have to say that it really is sometimes very hard to figure out. Especially with regards to names of places.

There are an enormous amounts of words in English which you actually have to know before you know how to spell them. Whenever I try to pronounce a new word/place I sometimes cringe a bit, because I'm afraid I'm getting it embarrassingly wrong.

Take the word Celtic for instance. This actually is pronounced in two different ways (Keltic or Seltic) depending on whether you are talking about the culture/language/people or the football team (Glasgow Celtic).

The reason for most of the problems is due to the enormous amounts of foreign influences in English. Roman, Saxon, Norman or Scandinavian place names for instance.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[aaaantoine]

The KDE team has been code-naming its releases with words starting with C for at least a little while, and this isn't the first time they forced a word's spelling to fit. For example: KDE 4.2.3 was called "Cuagmire" instead of Quagmire.

It's strange, but that's how they roll, apparently.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[MathiasRav]

It is however quite comical to see how many spelling mistakes end up in such advertisement: as an Italian I could write an encyclopaedia of misspellings of Italian food ("Spaghetti carbonara", "Pizza casa di Mama", "Cambozola", ...)

Don't forget the espresso machines found in local "Italian ice cream stores" that are branded "Expresso" - and I'm hearing that in speech a lot in Denmark.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[davejenkins]

I was trying to make a joke about the 'splitting hairs' concerning the word 'spelling', not the actual spelling-- but it doesn't seem to have worked. I know how romaji is used. As to your other question concerning "why" Japanease substitute the 'c' for 'k', I have no idea, except to perhaps invoke some sort of unique branding or maybe "frenchiness" as you postulate. As I said, I notice this with bars and clothing shops mostly-- not "all". yoroshiku.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[bheer]

The point was that most nations do not have anything that approach the rigor of the 1st and 2nd amendments, either as amendments or even in the main body of the text, or in revisions to the text.

And you miss the point of the amendments. Unlike most constitutions, which are massive *grants* of power to the legislature (effectively the party in power), the US amendments are red lines in the ground that *prohibit* certain kinds of laws. This is why even liberal countries like Sweden and Canada have laws that allow governments a lot of leeway in suppressing certain kinds of speech. See this thread for more details.

And yes, I do think everyone should know what the 1st and 2nd amendments are about. They are very powerful tools in ensuring against government tyranny and lots of countries, including several in Western Europe, would benefit from them.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG. You can't just let us enjoy our in jokes can you? ;-)

Yes, for the last 5 releases we've often used words usually spelled with a K as codenames - spelled with a C of kourse.

Exception was the 4.2 release, 'the answer' was just too tempting.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mqduck]

I see you're a fan of the old vaudeville blackface shows.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mqduck]

I've heard (sorry, "heared")

I'm pretty sure in Britain they spell it "heart".

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mqduck]

Because there are rules for Romanization schemes. No, you don't get a choice.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mqduck]

How do you know they don't want it pronounced "saizen"?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[xant]

Wrong, but even if you were right, Kaizen is spelled with a K . So if you don't get a choice, you spell it with a fucking K. Not a C.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mqduck]

My point wasn't that C was correct, though I suppose I made it sound that way. Where, though, did you hear that you get a choice?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[ChameleonDave]

You'd be pretty wrong then.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[mutu310]

Probably due to copyright / trademark issues with Kaizen Games.

Soo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone installed it yet? Any user reports on how it works?

Re:Soo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone installed it yet? Any user reports on if it works?

Deps and Packages.

[Icegryphon]

How many dependencies and packages is it? Besides Basic X Install.

Re:Deps and Packages.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considerably less than Gnome.

Re:Deps and Packages.

[Icegryphon]

How many how many libraries of congress is that?

Re:What's the point?

[Anne Honime]

c'mon... sh -> bash ; csh -> tcsh ; ksh -> pdksh

making progress

[hannson]

I'm not trying to troll here. It certainly looks more polished than the train wreck that 4.1 and 4.2 was, but is it just me or do QT4 and GTK applications just look ... bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?
 
That said, I like that it's making progress!

Re:making progress

[Rik Sweeney]

I hope so. KDE 4.2 was such a mess that I uninstalled Intrepid and went back to Hardy. Maybe 4.3 will work well in Karmic but if KPackageKit is anything to go by I'm not holding my breath.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should try a different theme.

Re:making progress

[ammorais]

No. If you are referring to the looks it's a matter of taste.
If you are referring to Qt, I can tell you that the Qt toolkit is at this point nothing less than Windows Libraries. If you are referring to polishment you should talk about specific applications and not the whole toolkits. Take Smplayer for example. It's an app that is exactly he same on windows an Linux(and I actually like it better on Linux).
Qt 4 is relatively new, and it was from my point of view a necessary break from Qt3. The great modifications are at the programming level, and I find it one of the best toolkits I ever programed.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

For starters, why is everything gray.
Can't they break the tradition where the whole UI uses only two colors (one for "3d" elements, one for list backgrounds), and add some differentiation?

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

I really liked 4.2 already and have been using it for a while now. As for the looks: I think it's just a matter of getting used to it. Now that I worked with 4.2 a while I find KDE 3 applications to look bigger / clunky / unpolished.
When I first switched from Windows to Linux I also found KDE 3 applications to look unpolished. After using it for a while and after getting used to the style I suddenly found Windows to look unpolished.

But I'd say it took me way less time to get used to the KDE 4 looks then it did with KDE 3 so I guess they are in fact more polished ;)

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno. Been running KDE 4.2 on Fedora 10 for a while now, and it seems to work just fine...
Bigger, clunky, unpolished? That's the great thing about KDE, if you want to have your apps big, clunky and raw, you're welcome. Tweaking themes can take you to a totally different workspace (smaller, more elegant and sleek), though.

Re:making progress

[Narishma]

Your problem is not KDE, it's Kubuntu. One of the worst KDE distros I've every tried.

Re:making progress

[Draek]

is it just me or do QT4 and GTK applications just look ... bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?

It's just you.

Also, if you honestly didn't want to troll you should've left out the "train wreck" comment from your post, it wouldn't have changed its meaning while being much less inflammatory.

Re:making progress

[ammorais]

For starters, why is everything gray. Can't they break the tradition where the whole UI uses only two colors (one for "3d" elements, one for list backgrounds), and add some differentiation?

Great idea. Why don't you design a new theme at your taste and submit it.

Re:making progress

[hannson]

I agree, it was a little too cold. I personally didn't like the 4.x but this looks like something I might actually like to use, a step to the right direction. I just find the difference from 4.2->4.3 that noticeable that I allowed myself to call previous versions a "train wreck". YMMV

Re:making progress

[Grishnakh]

You have to be careful when using too many colors, or else you might wind up with something like Windows XP which looks like it was designed by Fisher-Price.

Seriously, it's easier to be minimalist, as you won't offend or annoy people as much. If you try to do more bold things, aesthetically, you might find some people who love it, but a lot of people will absolutely hate it. GM just had to shed an entire car company that tried "bold styling" too much, called Pontiac. Here's an example of one of their more famous forays into non-conservative styling:
http://www.edmunds.com/media/reviews/top10/05.trucks.worst.residual.value/05.pontiac.aztek.500.jpg
I found this image in an article about "worst residual value". With something that ugly (though I'm sure the designers didn't think so), it's hard to find people to buy it from you. I recall this vehicle being an outright disaster in sales.

Of course, that's the beauty of themes. Unlike a car, where once it rolls out of the factory you can't easily change the way it looks or its color, changing a theme on your desktop environment is pretty trivial, taking only a few mouse clicks. So it's better if the DE uses a minimalist theme for the default, and then offers some more exciting themes as options which users can select if they want.

Re:making progress

[pyrico]

Actually, it's probably not just him.

Qt4 has larger spacing margins and padding on widgets by default in there layout system than Qt3. Also, I believe KDE4 uses larger fonts and more anti-aliasing than KDE3 systems, so the same dialog with the same set of widgets and text most likely is larger in KDE4 on a pixel basis.

That said, you can probably control this to some extent with font settings etc, but the widget padding and margins are up to the application developer.

Re:making progress

[Jorophose]

Mostly you, but it is true that GTK apps will use more images than their windows competitors. Don't know why, must just be a HID thing.

KDE seemed to have wasted space in the initial KDE4 release, but I haven't checked on it in such a long time so I have no idea what it's like.

Still, I find GTK and Qt to be a lot more colourful than Windows, regardless of themes on either platform.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? The time spent polishing 3.5 was far greater. Version numbers don't exactly tell you the amount of effort and time that goes into it's creation. The 4.x series will eventually reach the same polish level but it will take time. Getting lots of feedback helps accelerate development which was the main reason for the early and fast releases. Don't like it? Just because they released it doesn't it you have to use it. The 3.5 series are still supported. The kde group simply valued the benifit of increased feedback at the cost of reputation (nobody would say anything if they left this in the development branch but that means alot less feedback)

Re:making progress

[StormReaver]

It's a matter of opinion, as I see GTK and Windows looking ugly and clunky, and Qt/KDE looking beautiful and polished.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Their! Their! See, it's not that hard. It's even shorter.

It amazes me to see how americans are dumb. I'm not a native english speaker, and I never commit errors like this.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Look out Mac OS X!

Re:making progress

[owlstead]

Don't know, tried the live cd, couldn't get wireless working, downloaded Ubuntu. C'mon, that one they should have seen coming. If you can't get that right, you may as well release at a later date. Maybe they should have used 3.5 for 9.04, or they should have tried another wireless configuration utility, but this blows.

Re:making progress

[Enderandrew]

The wasted space issue is part of the Oxygen widget theme. It drives me nuts as well, but frankly I don't know how to make a new Qt4/KDE4 widget theme. So I keep waiting and hoping that someone else will come up with a tighter Oxygen theme. That being said, the actual Oxygen theme has been tightened up a bit since the 4.0 launch.

Re:making progress

[Enderandrew]

What gets me is that while there as some Plasma devs working on a Netbook containment for small screens, we haven't seen a widget theme/overall theme designed for small screens.

Between mobile phones, netbooks and smartbooks, you think Nokia/Qt would be all over this. If not, then perhaps the KDE devs themselves would come up with a good solution here.

Re:making progress

[AvitarX]

I know that KDE 4.0 widgets were quite bigger (approaching 5% I would say), but I found them quite attractive, so I wouldn't say clunkier.

This was during the beta, when I had kcalc-kde4 and kcalc installed side-by-side.

Re:making progress

[Svenne]

Agreed, ever since Kubuntu switched from KDE 3 to 4 it's been crap. After years with KDE, not wanting to give up the goodness that is Ubuntu (apt, mostly) I had to switch to GNOME. I've tried KDE 4.1 and 4.2 occasionally, but it's still unusable. Just something as stupid as the "search field" in the "K-menu" (or whatever it's called nowdays); sometimes it registers presing enter, and sometimes it doesn't. Maybe I'll want to start "konsole" and I'll just type "konsole" and press enter. Sometimes it starts, other times nothing happens. I'll wait, wondering if it's just a delay, "is the harddrive bogged down?," "did I miss enter?". Nope. It just didn't register. It completely kills the flow of working with the desktop. Utter crap.

At first I thought it was a bug in 4.0, but it's still there in KDE 4.3pre (whatever's in Kubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3).

Please name me a polished KDE 4-based distribution. Or two, because if you were going to say openSuSE I'll want to skip that one.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost threw up when you compared Qt to the Windows libraries. Having written applications in both I have to say Qt vs. WinAPI is like blowjob vs. getting kicked in the nuts repeatedly.

I know you didn't state otherwise, I just wanted to clarify.

Re:making progress

[Enderandrew]

The early Oxygen mock-ups were bland and very white, much like the Oxygen that was shipped with 4.0, except the mock-ups had a few nice splashes of green in them. I really loved the little splash of color and I find the Oxygen we have today is still lacking. They added blue stripes in the window deco, and I'm not sure that was the best place to add color.

Re:making progress

[binary paladin]

Is there a GOOD Debian based KDE distro?

Re:making progress

[Sir_Lewk]

Semi related to this, people using Fedora (which is probably packages and integrates KDE the best of any distro I've tried) can get 4.3 by enabling the Redhat KDE testing repos from http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

I just installed it about an hour ago and have been pretty impressed with the improvement from 4.2. In particular, the notifications are very improved and kopete is actually verging on usable again. General polish all around is certainly helping too.

Re:making progress

[ammorais]

Your anonymous coward origin just shows how much you are trolling. You probably never wrote a line of code on your life.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of people swear by Mandriva, others by Sidoux or something else. In the end it probably doesn't matter that much, since it can't possibly get any worse than Kubuntu. For me, opensuse with the kde factory repos (to get the 4.3 release that will be released in with 11.2 on 11.1) works just perfectly.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a GOOD Debian based KDE distro?

Yes! It is called Debian. Just add the packages in the app manager of your choice. I have had better luck leaving the gnome crud installed (which may manage the bootup screen itself but that is trivial, IMO) rather than uninstalling. This won't be the leanest from a hard drive space perspective, but I think most "good" distro's do not optimize for hard drive space.

Re:making progress

[FictionPimp]

This is oh so true. I like KDE, but I also like the ease of ubuntu. It seems you can have one or the other.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent KDE distros

http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/
http://www2.mandriva.com/
http://chakra-project.org/

Re:making progress

[SloppyElvis]

For starters, why is everything gray.

Three reasons:

1. Generic minimalist designs have broader appeal
2. Keeping the majority of the UI neutral affords using color for emphasis/focal points where appropriate
3. Some third thing

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should have used 3.5 for 9.04

Yes!

Re:making progress

[spikeb]

what IS a good kde distro? they don't seem to exist (aside from maybe fedora)

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no tool that'd allow regular people to design themes. As it is, they need to programmed in C++.
This guy is actually working on a generic theme:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/QuantumStyle?content=101088
Shame on the KDE devs for not doing it themselves.

Re:making progress

[nschubach]

I just installed KDE on my Debian Laptop about a week ago just to check it out. Last time I tried KDE was 3.[something]. (I grabbed the version from the testing repository, don't remember the version.) I have to say it's actually quite nice if you like eye candy. The widgets work fairly well. The only one I had a problem with was an RSS reader. There are quite a few customizations that can still be done and the theme process worked great (downloading, installing, etc.) I wasn't a big fan of Vista/7's look and feel, but I am quite happy with the direction that KDE is taking in that regard. I know a lot of people will disagree, but I think it's good for Linux's image of consumer friendly.

That said, there was a slightly annoying bug with access rights concerning the login screen themes a few quirks like the rss reader widget, and the apparent total lack of an integrated WiFi manager like Gnome carries with it (in most distros) but my connection did re-establish using my Gnome manager and worked flawless even though I didn't have that little icon to let me know.

I'm actually having more trouble trying to get ia32 libraries (I'm looking at you ia32-gtk-libs / ia32-apt-get conflict!) to work.

Re:making progress

[Svenne]

Thanks, I'll give Mandriva a shot. Haven't tried that since it was called Mandrake, oh the memories.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit! Forgot to mention to just install KDE3.5 if you so desire (I do!). Debian won me over Fedora because it kept 3.5 in addition to 4.who-the-fuck-cares-yet.

Re:making progress

[Narishma]

I'd recommend Pardus, Mandriva or Arch Linux.

Re:making progress

[david_thornley]

You know, bigger margins and padding are why I ditched the Aero look on Vista, and selected an earlier, uglier, but denser style. Criticize my aesthetics if you will, but I like displays that give me more information in a given screen area.

(Reminds me of a woman I knew in college, taking a "Physics for Poets" class and complaining about the two-sheet limit on exam notes, which really didn't allow all that much with beautiful handwriting and large amounts of whitespace. I compared it to a 3"x5" card I'd been allowed for a serious science course.)

Re:making progress

[Svenne]

Thanks. Both Pardus and especially Chakra looks interesting.

Re:making progress

[ammorais]

Why is it a shame? Because you don't like the current ones.
Guess what. Not everybody have the same tastes, and it's impossible to please Greeks and Trojans at the same time.

There's no tool that allow regular people to design themes.

The same suggestion than before. You can build one.
Or better. You can pay someone to build you one, if you don't know C++.
Just don't come here whining about how it's a shame that the KDE devs don't work for you for free to make you a theme that you do like.

Re:making progress

[PouletFou]

Being a KDE fan, when kubuntu switched from 3.5 to 4.0, I tried GNOME on one machine. But since the release of kubuntu jaunty with KDE 4.2, I happily came back without any problems. Can't wait to try 4.3. Kudos to the KDE team for that.

Re:making progress

[TemporalBeing]

Honestly I must agree with the AC/GP on this one.

I've been using Qt4.4/4.5 for a few months now - programming both for Windows and Linux; I don't have the KDE wrappers around it, but Qt4 is a god-send compared to any Windows API, for which I've been programming for nearly 5 years using MFC and Win32. (Win32 is a blessing compared to MFC, which is just horrid but partly necessary to make Windows programs faster to write at the cost of performance and programmability - e.g. CStrings are an absolute bastard from hell, but were necessary at a time.)

I'll never go back to MFC/Win32 if I can help it - though I will certainly have to from time to time for the Windows-only apps that I currently maintain for a living; even after they get replaced by Qt apps. Legacy support is a pain, but worthwhile for income.

Re:making progress

[Hurricane78]

You are new to Linux desktops, are you?
Here, looks literally are exchangeable. And I mean everything. If you can see it, you can change it. Opposed to most other OSes.
So the look really is a very bad indicator for the overall quality. It's more an indicator for the stylistic competence of the person who chose the visuals for your distribution.
My theme for example, is a wild mix of KDE, Gnome and Compiz Fusion. Can you see anything that resembles anything even close to the original design of those packages? :D (Yes, I left some things in the original style, because I liked them, and left anti-aliasing off, so you can't read everything. :P)

Re:making progress

[marcello_dl]

sidux has a nice 4.2 release

Re:making progress

[binary paladin]

I might check that out. Someone further down this thread mentioned Arch, and while they're not Debian based (I just like apt) they seem to be just what the doctor ordered. However, I'll give this distro a look too.

Re:making progress

[Runaway1956]

I'm not sure I'd call it "crap". I agree, though, that I don't like much of what I've seen in KDE recently. Eye candy is just unimportant at best, and distracting at worst. Don't need it, don't want it. Yeah, I played with Koraara when it was new, and I've played with Compiz. They were amusing for awhile, but it's not what I want on a working desktop. At present, Gnome's desktop is pretty decent, but I'll probably move to Enlightenment eventually. It's pretty as hell, offers features to compare with any eye candy desktop, but remains unobtrusive. Just a sweet, simple dropdown menu.

Ehhh. The more Linux moves into the mainstream, the more some of us will have to search for what WE like. Kinda sucks that competing with Windows seems to mean becoming Windows-like.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's considered "polished", but I've been running KDE 4.2 on my Gentoo laptop for a few months now without too much grief. I've encountered the occasional segfault while trying out the new widgets, but as a plain old desktop I find it quite alright. I'm a little annoyed by the Vista-style launcher, mostly because it doesn't double as a "Run" dialog, it merely searches the menu... I don't know if that's how it's supposed to work (never used Vista), but that's pretty much my only peeve.

Re:making progress

[Mad Merlin]

what IS a good kde distro? they don't seem to exist (aside from maybe fedora)

Gentoo.

Re:making progress

[hannson]

I'm not new to Linux desktops, I've been using them on and off since RedHat 7.2. I've used ready-out-of-the-box distros and customized, compiled from scratch distros (e.g. Gentoo).

Recently I've stopped using them because I found myself increasingly productive on Windows Vista and I also find it much better in terms of screen real estate than the themes I've found for the common widget toolkits used in KDE and Gnome (blasphemy, I know).

One day I'll switch 100% to the Linux/Unix desktop, even if I'd need to create my own desktop environment. I'm just not yet ready for the future, I guess :)

Btw, I like your theme

Re:making progress

[Tubal-Cain]

So do I, but what I don't see KDE as is functional. The 'Start' menu is just downright painful to use.

Re:making progress

[koreaman]

Allow me to recommend XMonad.

Re:making progress

[The Penguin Man]

I love Kubuntu but the first thing I install is Synaptic. KPackageKit is not for me.

Re:making progress

[shawn(at)fsu]

I was using Kubuntu and stopped for the same reason, couldn't get wireless (or wired for that matter) working, dropped it was about to go back to Ubuntu when I got the urge to try out OpenSuSE, I hadn't used it since it was regular SuSE. What I liked the most was that OpenSuSE 11.1 give you the option of KDE 3.5 or 4.x That's what did it for me.

Anyone know where the release notes are for 4.3? They say they added all this functionality and fixed thousands of bugs but i can't seem to find a nice list to see if what I wanted fixed or added was done. I don't like the idea of install it and find out. I'd rather read the documentation.

Re:making progress

[kayoshiii]

It seems to work fine as a launcher here - it seems to need a fraction of a second to filter the list before it can launch stuff though... If you really want to operate that way though - using ALT + F2 to activate krunner is a much more sensible way of doing things...

Re:making progress

[kayoshiii]

This seemed to be time based... if it hasn't done filtering the list you may need to press enter a second time. Though really I only have two words of advice....

ALT and F2

Re:making progress

[icannotthinkofaname]

I'm not trying to troll here. It certainly looks more polished than the train wreck that 4.1 and 4.2 was

If you aren't trying to troll, then you must be trying to be serious, but...I have to ask anyway...are you joking? I seem to remember KDE 4.2 being hailed as relatively stable when it was released, worlds better than 4.0 or 4.1. What happened to that?

Citations needed and provided:
http://www.osnews.com/story/20857/KDE_4_2_Released_Short_Interview_Aaron_Seigo/page2/
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6655/1/

And this one is a little more negative, but still along some of the same positive lines as the other two:
http://www.linux-ninja.com/2009/02/07/kde-42-review/

So...um...if I may ask...how was KDE 4.2 a "train wreck", as you put it? Are you sure you aren't trying to troll?

Re:making progress

[X0563511]

It amazes me to see how americans are dumb. I'm not a native english speaker, and I never commit errors like this.

1. It's a (stupid) assumption that the poster is American - there's no proof either way in this context.
2. You never make this error precisely because of that. You have to think much harder about it, and so are less likely to make a simple error like that.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Enlightenment? That's a joke, right?

e17 has been in development for how many years now? e16 was some cool shit 10 years ago but e17 has long since passed into irrelevancy.

Face it, this Achilles will never cross the finish line.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it's easier to be minimalist, as you won't offend or annoy people as much. If you try to do more bold things,

Not so much. People confuse minimalist with spartan, a lot. It's quite a deal more chalenging to take the minimalist approach and make it look good than people realize. The margin for error in minimalist design is much, much slimmer, given that every little detail sticks out so much more, and negative space becomes (a more significant) a design element, and puts extra emphasis on little things, like proportions, placement, alignment, colour schemes, and typography, and an fuller understanding of what exactly "less is more" means. Not to say that these things won't ruin a non-minimalist design, just that there's more margin for error (in non-minimalist), being a pixel off on padding or font-size won't completely ruin a 'standard' design, as it does for a minimalist one, also you're more limited in that, for example, you really can't get away with using a more baroque typeface in minimalism, while the inverse isn't true.

Even insofar as desktop themes are concerned, it is much harder to produce a good minimalist theme, since you have to balance two schools of thought which aren't always compatible: "Less is More" and 3F (Form Follows Function). Minimalism worked well in modern art, for example, because in art function and form are entirely arbitrary, "less is more" worked because mise-en-scene was replaced with experiments in colour theory which weren't possible in more traditional styles.

Design is different, you can't do away with 3F like you can in visual art (or even music, for that matter), I'd say that there's even more to offend with in a minimalist theme, if you don't do it "right", and not everyone can, and yes, there are "right" and "wrong" approaches to minimalist design. You need a ridiculous levels of precision, eye for detail and aesthetics to make minimalism work, and good designers rarely work for free, probably not a good idea to take that approach in OSS (which doesn't seem to care much for aesthetics, but that's probably a catch-22).

Changing a theme may be trivial process, designing a theme, however, is not.

Re:making progress

[Macka]

So "Eye candy is just unimportant at best, and distracting at worst", but "I'll probably move to Enlightenment eventually. It's pretty as hell" ??

Make your mind up.

Re:making progress

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Use another launcher then. Personally, I prefer the Run Command (Alt-f2, type three letters and get some suggestions. Doubles as calculator, unit translator and many other things), but there is also Lancelot, besides the classical kmenu (which looks much like the KDE 3.5 version.)

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Conspiracy?

Re:making progress

[SomeKDEUser]

It grows on you, really. It actually works well: usually, recently used and favourites are all you use, and the rest is fine to go look for apps at random.

Because if you know vaguely what you are looking for, the search will help you much more.

Of course there is alt-F2 which is much more powerful than the KDE3 version ever was :)

Re:making progress

[bcmm]

This is actually true. A basically unpatched KDE; no fancy branding breaking things or integration of custom system configuration tools (systemsettings already does pretty much everything other distros might want to add as extra configuration tools). KDE doesn't really require a "KDE distro" which goes to lengths to integrate it (unless you desperately require a bootsplash theme which matches your login manager or something); give it hal, dbus and networkmanager* and it integrates itself very well indeed.

There are probably binary packages for people who don't like compiling. And there are sets and metapackages for installing all of kde, or just kdebase and kdepim, or just base and koffice, or whatever, without having to go down a long list of packages.

Also, while I haven't tried it other than using the rescue CD to install Gentoo, Sabayon looks interesting as an easy way to install a polished KDE distro based on Gentoo.

* That said, I don't actually use networkmanager because my computer doesn't move about and I like the network to come up before login.

Re:making progress

[cbhacking]

Just out of curiosity, what's your beef with openSuse? My current Linux install is Mandriva (with KDE 4.2, I'll upgrade soon) but I used openSuse for years prior to that and only switched with the new system because I wanted to try something that came with 4.2 in the default install, which openSuse didn't at the time. It's a damn good distro though, and provides a *very* polished KDE experience.

Re:making progress

[quantumphaze]

my connection did re-establish using my Gnome manager and worked flawless even though I didn't have that little icon to let me know.

Run "nm-applet" and see if that helps out. NetworkManager is the backend and there are a couple front ends like Gnome's nm-applet, networkmanager-plasmoid (still buggy) and a terminal friendly version.

Re:making progress

[quadrox]

Make your mind up.

Mind your make up.

Re:making progress

[quadrox]

GTK also does this, and I agree with the OP that it looks like shit and annoys the heck out of me. You can get some very few themes that deliberately decrease the margins to saner values, but while this does reduce the clunkyness, it ends up looking even worse than before. I don't see why controls can't look a bit more like they do in windows with respect to size and margins. I'd really love that.

Re:making progress

[EsbenMoseHansen]

KDE 4.3 defaults to the Air theme these days. No idea if that theme is more or less dense than Oxygen, I don't see stuff like that.

Re:making progress

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Use one of the alternatives, then: Classic or Lancelot. Personally, I prefer Alt-f2 these days: Quicker and sleeker if you know what you want.

Re:making progress

[quadrox]

- Gtk widgets usually are ugly, clunky and have low usability.
- QT/KDE are semi-ugly (the eye candy is overdone), slightly less clunky and not too much usabilty,
- windows (the classic theme) controls are ugly, not clunky and have high usability.

I would take ugly windows controls over clunky "linux" controls any day. Too bad I can't make that choice (I don't actually want to run windows).

Re:making progress

[Enderandrew]

Air is the plasma theme. It still uses the Oxygen widget theme. And depending on the distro it uses Oxygen or Ozone for the window decoration.

Re:making progress

[Svenne]

I actually can't remember. I know I tried it just after 11.1 was released, but that's about it. Maybe it's because it uses KDE 4.1 while I was used to a desktop environment that works.

I think I'll give the next release of openSUSE a try, just because so many recommend it and there must be something I'm missing about it.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Their! Their! See, it's not that hard. It's even shorter.

You're correct about the usage, but, by my count, they have the same number of letters.

Re:making progress

[tenco]

Yes. Debian. KDE 4.3.0 already hit experimental today.

Re:making progress

[tenco]

The Oxygen Qt theme is really ugly. I use QtCurve. It's not only a Qt theme, Gtk+ and kwin is supported, as well. Gives a unified look across Gtk+ and Qt applications. Recommended. :)

Re:making progress

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Ok, I just noticed that the window buttons and stuff like that was different, so I --- naively it would seem --- assumed that the widget theme was changed, too.

Personally, as long as it wobbles, it's ok by me ;)

Re:making progress

[tenco]

s/experimental/unstable/

Re:making progress

[RiotingPacifist]

pardus looks nice unfortunatly thier english release page stops at 2008.2 (released in jan 09 so not too bad)
madriva seams nice, but i sometimes get the impression that they cripple their free version a bit
chakra-project is arch linux, some people love it but generally rolling release distros are not great for the masses.

Re:making progress

[RiotingPacifist]

I kept hearing people bitch about kubuntu so switched to fedora, while a change is good i don't see how F11 is any better than for kde than the last kubuntu i used (granted it has been a while since i left kubuntu because i preferrf kde3.x)

Re:making progress

[RiotingPacifist]

Any specifics? I've always heard people bitching about kde+ubuntu, but it seamed better than kde+debian and no worse than kde+fedora. What is all this anti-(K)ubuntu stuff about anyway? yes it is less supported than ubuntu but its not noticeable worse than the competition.

***I do all important configuration from CLI anyway so some perhaps I'm only talking about day to day use not configuration.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

SLED 10 sp2, if you don't care about weird graphics.

openSUSE, if you do care.

They're always (well, not in the original openSUSE 10.1) polished to a fare-thee-well, and nowadays (since about SuSE 9.2 or 9.3) pretty responsive too.

I really like KDE 3.5, and have really, really disliked Kubuntu. Bad default configuration (well, bad by Linux standards, meaning not excellent).

Re:making progress

[celle]

There's also freebsd which has kde4.3 in ports as of yesterday.

Re:making progress

[hansamurai]

Physics for Poets? Did you go to UW-Madison? I took that class my freshmen year... what a waste of time.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

openSUSE should also be on that list. Always had a polished KDE desktop.

Re:making progress

[david_thornley]

No, the University of Minnesota, and I honestly can't remember whether "Physics for Poets" was the course or book name now that I think back on it.

I didn't take it myself, being a better physicist than poet.

Re:making progress

[Yfrwlf]

I don't understand why they can't make everything scale nicely, IMO that should be top priority. Having an easy way to scale the size of everything on the desktop would make it very easy for those who can't see well to make their desktops usable without having to fiddle around with font sizes and themes and such. It would also make it a snap to make the same desktop usable on a netbook.

To go off on a small tangent, that's the of the main things the open source movement should be centered around is portability with all things, including desktop environments and any and all programs, so that users will have more freedom to use things easily where they want and how they want without difficult tweaking/reprogramming. Software that makes both developer's lives easier as well as end users, it should be possible to fulfill both.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

I'm afraid I wont get personally excited about any KDE release until they get it working with the Orca screen reader, which works very well with Gnome.

I only read at 250 words per minute, but my listening speed is now at 460wpm for reading fiction, and over 500wpm for Orca reading web pages. I have a blind friend who listens to his computer at 860wpm. This is very cool stuff, so it's a shame KDE is late to the game.

Per-desktop activities assignments

[davidsyes]

"Activities can now be tied to virtual desktops, allowing users to have different widgets on each of their desktops."

THIS is what i've been waiting for. I don't know why it was not there to begin with. Glad it's here. I wonder if it'll break my Mandriva One-modified KDE4.x, however. It would be nice to get back the ability to change the backgrounds on the login widget as well as the background when the desktop is locked. Mandriva seems to cripple that feature for the non-paid installs, and none of my sleuthing has let me to how to undo that cripple. It was one reason i paid $50 contribution to PCLOS 2007/8.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[carlmenezes]

So does this mean that different virtual desktops can have different wallpapers? I'm a very visual person, so different wallpapers are very important to me to emphasize the difference between each virtual desktop.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[shawn(at)fsu]

For KDE when did that ability go away? In 3.5 you can have each virtual desktop have it's own wallpaper.
I was told that in 4.3 you would finally be able to have SystemTray widgets on two differnt toolbars. I've ofetn lamented for this at work were I use a dual display setup on y laptop.

When I read the release notes I hope it's there.

My new wish is that if you use dual displays then each display is it's on virtual desktop.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[0racle]

It went away when Plasma became another layer above the window managers virtual desktops. Had plasma simply been a library and a method for displaying desktop widgets this wouldn't have happened but some retard had to have it this way, so away went different wallpapers for different virtual desktops, along with a lot of other features KDE3 had though most regressions were not because of plasma.

I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't.

Anyway, now with KDE 4.3 you can have one activity for all your virtual desktops or have one activity per virtual desktop. If you do the former, you can have all your desktop widgets on all desktops (handy so you don't have to switch around to use that folder you put on your desktop or to check the weather) but loose the ability to have different wallpapers for those desks OR you can have different wallpapers by having a different activity on each virtual desktop and loose the ability to share widgets across all desktops. So if you want that folder or your weather widget on every desktop, you're going to launch a separate instance for each activity.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[davidsyes]

I want to mod funny... But, i want to respond, too.

It's really nice to be able to show off the KDE (compiz/KDE/Mandriva/et al) desktop rotting the cubes and polygon desktops around, in ONLY 256 MB of SHARED VIDEO RAM,not the umpteen .75 GB or 2GB vista demanded before even turning on Aero. It's a nice, good feeling to have people looking over my shoulder or asking about that desktop, and being able to say, "No, this is not Vista. It's KDE, in Linux. And, this has been possible about or more than a year prior to Vista's release, and i had some of these features working on a 128 MB graphics card from CompUSA, and even wowed the Comcast guy who was restoring my service back in late 2006..."

Makes people wonder who the hell decided vista needed all that graphics power to do what Linux (and Mac) have been on lesser resources. Conjures up thoughts of collusion/screwing the consumer --- depending on one's perspective, that is...

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[AvitarX]

I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't.

I like KDE activities, and now that they can work with virtual desktops even better.

They allow me to have a desktop with all the files from different folders on it readily available. I love having various stuff I am working on readily scattered about the desktop (but I love working with files scattered on the desktop, so I could be an oddity).

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[PeterBrett]

Had plasma simply been a library and a method for displaying desktop widgets...

...then it would have been an entirely pointless exercise that completely failed to complete its objectives.

I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't.

I see that ignorance is still bliss.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[Rick17JJ]

I am wondering the same thing. I use KDE 3.5 and have my own favorite wallpaper for each virtual desktop. That was one of my favorite features of KDE. Then I upgraded to the latest version of Kubuntu which was using KDE 4.something, and that was no longer possible. They expected me to use the same wallpaper or slide show, for each of the virtual desktops. So I went back to using the old version of Kubuntu and KDE 3.5.

Support and updates for that version of Kubuntu was ending soon, so earlier this year, I switched to Debian 5.0 instead. When Debian 5.0 came out earlier this year, I was pleased to see that it was still using KDE 3.5. With Debian 5.0, I can now keep on using my favorite wallpaper for each virtual desktop, for a few more years.

I keep hoping that some version of KDE will eventually add that feature back, so that I can happily go back to using the latest versions of KDE. So does this version allow that or not?

My preference is not merely a matter of aesthetics, just like you, the wallpaper tells me which virtual desktop I am looking at. I know which wallpaper goes with which virtual desktop. I am also in the habit of opening each of my favorite applications, in a particular virtual desktop. The the wallpaper effortlessly and instantly tells me which virtual desktop I am in.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

You don't need that amount of RAM/VRAM to run Vista successfully. I have a laptop that hums nicely with an i915 integrated video chip and 1GB system memory. Most of those numbers are inflated from people not realizing that Vista will consume tremendous amounts of memory if it is available. I've actually booted 2 systems with comparable load side by side. The one with 1GB of memory and one with 4GB of memory. Post boot, the 4 GB laptop is using 2.3 GB of RAM and the 1GB laptop is only using ~750MB.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[smash]

Of course, then you try to do something like, oh I dunno, run a 3d game and it craps out because you cant run compiz and openGL apps at the same time.

Or couldn't (no doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong now) - haven't tried running Compiz/beryll/whatever for a while now because I just don't see the point...

But, point being - you can (and have been able to since release) run 3d shit on vista (or OS/X for that matter) by pointing, clicking and drooling... for the most part it "just works"

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[c0d3g33k]

I see that ignorance is still bliss.

Do you care to dispell that ignorance? Can you explain concisely how plasma activities are different from virtual desktops? And how they are an improvement over that approach that will make the desktop experience better? I've been on the desktop environment treadmill since the days of Macintosh and GEM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager), and I don't understand what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do either. I'd love to ascend to the next level of desktop enlightenment, having traveled so far and learned so much. But ... forgive me, master ... I do not know the way. Please. Enlighten me.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[PeterBrett]

But ... forgive me, master ... I do not know the way. Please. Enlighten me.

Actually, you'll be pleased to hear that it's fairly straightforward-ish. Firstly, activities are layer *under* virtual desktops, not above them. As I understand it:

Virtual desktops:

• Provide a way to organize sets of application windows.
• Associates applications with each other within the same activity.
• Are typically switched between with high frequency (every few minutes).

Activities:

• Provide a way to organize the way that you organize application windows (the virtual desktop switcher and taskbar are Plasmoids!)
• Provide a context within which applications are run (i.e. associates applications with a particular activity).
• Are switched between less frequently (e.g. once every few hours, possibly).

So, for instance, an Activity allows you to change the icons on *all* of your virtual desktops at once, because if you are changing the "activity" you are currently involved it you'll probably want to run different applications on all of your virtual desktops (or so, I believe, the logic goes).

TBH, I use neither Activities nor virtual desktops, so I'm not exactly arguing from a position of strength here!

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[SomeKDEUser]

It works like that: you used to have a single desktop. And then it became apparent apps can be grouped by sets of activities, for example, email-messaging a set of konsoles for admin, ide + browser for dev and so on.

But in many case, especially with a large screen, you might want a wholly different desktop, perhaps displaying a different directory (even remote in the case of KDE4 -- how cool is that?) Perhaps in your "comm" desktop you want many clocks bacause you communicate with people around the world, which are useless on the other desktops.

And so for notes, and so on.

So it is the level beyond the desktop. And it is a good idea in practise.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[Rick17JJ]

Replying to my own comment, I did find an article about KDE 4.3.0, which does specifically say that it is now possible to have separate wallpapers on each virtual desktop. So even though I don't know what a plasma shell or a plasma widget is, it sounds like separate wallpaper on each virtual desktop is now possible once again.

http://www.kdenews.org/2009/08/04/kde-430-released-caizen

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[SomeKDEUser]

I find it amazing you find people which will complain about widgets which are useless because you never see the desktop, and people which will complain about the choice of wallpapers that they will resist change for this sake.

Obviously one of the two groups is wrong :)

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[kayoshiii]

KWin seems to run fine with compositing switched on and opengl games.... I know that because I work on a game engine all day (it's my day job) and I am running KDE 4.3 desktop. Furthermore compositing can be switched on and off with using SHIFT + ALT + F12 (compositing does cause a modest loss in FPS). Furthermore compositing is automatically disabled in any fullscreen app.

Also note that I am running a reasonably recent and highend nVidia card on this machine.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[cbhacking]

Um, you're confusing system RAM and VRAM (video RAM). Aero runs quite happily on 128MB of VRAM shared from the main system, as long as there is a gig or so to start with. It'll actually work on less than that (Intel Integrated) but you start noticing delays, which is either due to the sub-128MB of video RAM (still shared, so very slow too) or the fact that Intel GMAs suck.

My first Aero-capable laptop had 1280MB os total RAM, of which its graphics chip (integrated, but by ATi not Intel) would claim 128MB. The CPU was a single-core Turion64 (1.8GHz). It ran Vista, including Aero, just fine. The computer is now about 4 years old; it was over a year old at Vista's release, and was never anywhere near top-of-the-line.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[EsbenMoseHansen]

You could make an activity for each desktop and set the desktop wallpaper for each Activity. It would probably be closer to what you want than your 3.5 setup, but more work in setting it up. Just a suggestion...

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[SpooForBrains]

I've had earlier versions of Compiz working (and working well) on a 32MB nvidia laptop adapter.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[10Ghz]

"I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't."

Well, I see the difference like this:

VIrtual desktops are for _applications_. You have different apps running on different desktops.

Plasma activities are for _widgets_. You have different widgets running on different activities. You can have different panel-layouts and the like, depending on the activity. You could change your desktop, while keeping your activity. What would happen is that the apps would change, but the widgets (panels etc.) would stay the same.

I admit, the difference between the two is not 100% obvious. But the new feature of giving the user possibility to tie activites to desktops should simplify things. When you change your desktop, you also change the activity.

What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

the release takes its nickname from the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement

Which. let's face it, is something KDE4 could benefit from for a long time. Why would anybody opt for continuous and gradual improvement when they can simply install openbox and get a huge improvement all at once?

"granting 2,000 wishes"

[FooAtWFU]

I wish for a hundred million dollars.

And world peace. And a pony. And the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[evanbd]

What? No blessed +2 silver dragon scale mail?

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

And KDukenNukenForever...

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

And I wish kubuntu 0910 will get KDE 3.6 ....

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon this is Slashdot...You'll never Ascend with that! Try a +3 grey dragon scale mail? A wand of wishing perhaps?

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"...And a pony. And the year of Linux on the desktop."

You can easily make 2009 The Year of a Pony Wallpaper on Your Linux Desktop. In almost no time, believe me.

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[orzetto]

I wish for a hundred million dollars.

INVALID

And world peace.

LATER

And a pony.

WONTFIX

And the year of Linux on the desktop.

WORKSFORME

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Hurricane78]

Make Linux the gaming platform of the PC, or ever of all things, and you will have Linux on the desktop.

But you now thinking that this is a bit unrealistic, is the main reason it hasn't happened yet. The other is that Linux on the desktop is mainly about imitation. (Of Windows, MacOS X, etc) Only the social desktop idea is a glim of light.

I think we all first of all, have to think of Linux as the gaming platform, and really believe it.
Then the plan how to make it true will form in our heads.
We can't just try to guess how we could possibly maybe with a big chance hopefully somehow reach a state where is could maybe be dreamable.
We must do it right now. Fixed points in time and space, and no words of eventuality.

Or do you think Microsoft, Google, Apple, or any successful company will ever say that they wish that it hopefully happens somehow?
No. They say they will do it, and be done until $fixedDate. And then run with it.

So I say, 2010 will be where the thoughts stand and the realization starts. And by 2012, the year of Linux on the desktop will be done. December, 21th, to be exact. ;)
But it will not be what you think it will be. Because what we know as Linux, is something that is specifically and explicitly not made for the average Joe. And this is its greatest feature!

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

  Ain't proof against rocket launchers, last I heard ;)

SB

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[deathguppie]

I actually asked for a pony when we did an offer on our current house.. they thought I was joking.. the bastards!"

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

And a pony

Your wish is granted.

http://happypenguin.org/show?Pink%20Pony

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why +2? You can just as easily wish for +3.

Of course, personally, I prefer gray dragon scale mail anyway since I don't usually wield Magicbane, but that's just me. ;)

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[sorak]

And the year of Linux on the desktop.

WORKSFORME

Shouldn't that also be "LATER"?

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[evanbd]

Nothing wrong with GDSM, entirely a personal preference thing. SPOILERS (as if the original post didn't have spoilers...) Wishing for a +1 item is guaranteed to work. Wishing for +2 is a 4/5 chance of working, and a 1/5 chance of providing +0. Wishing for +3 is a 3/5 chance of working and a 2/5 chance of +0. Either option has a higher average enchantment than wishing for +1. Wishing for +3 trades a very slightly higher average (1.8 vs 1.6) for reduced reliability (60% vs 80%). Sacrificing reliability is almost never a good idea in Nethack. It's hard to argue that wishing for +3 is wrong, but my preference goes to +2 on balance. To each his own, etc.

That's cool and all.

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many distros already have 4.3 in their non-testing repositories? /me is a happy arch camper :)

Re:That's cool and all.

[cripeon]

Grr, still waiting for KDEmod to catch up!

Re:That's cool and all.

[pseudonomous]

Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.

Re:That's cool and all.

[cripeon]

Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.

Well, there's a great discussion of it on the Arch forums (great before it got bogged down with bickering, although I didn't see Godwin's law being invoked).

Frankly, I think I'll move to offical [extra]/KDE tonight. KDEmod has served me great, but I think I can handle to live without all the extra patching and branding they do if it means I get 4.3 goodness a week early.

Re:That's cool and all.

[Mad Merlin]

It's been in Gentoo's Portage since earlier today.

Re:That's cool and all.

[PBoyUK]

Great, that means Gentoo users will finish compiling it sometime tomorrow then, right? ;)

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Wow, so you listen to 7.6 words per second when "reading" fiction. Let me guess, your favorite is steven king? (I heard he writes it at a slightly slower 6 words per second).

But all joking aside, KDE should be compatible with audio readers for the benefit of blind people.

Re:What's the point?

[TheCowSaysMooNotBoo]

What, not everyone uses a computer the same way? I'm shocked & appalled I tell you!

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 4.2 sure wasn't

Even suckier!

beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

[Anne Honime]

kde 3.5 (and windows, last I looked at it) had much more tiny graphics because the screens they were intended to be displayed on were much smaller. Nowdays, 1280x1024 19" lcd is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago. So qt & kde evolves, and that's fine by me. I run 4.2 ATM, and while I'm eagerly waiting for 4.3, to iron out some quirks, I don't consider it a train wreck. 4.0 was rushed out and 4.1 made it somewhat barely usable, but 4.2 is really what 4.0 should have been in the 1st place. Not perfect, but sort of okay for everyday use.

Re:beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

[gspawn]

I was going to make a longer post and allude to my point, but instead I'll just say it- I view KDE as the majority of Slashdotters view Vista. Only KDE hasn't come out with a Windows 7 yet.

Re:beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I'm sorry, but I bought a damn 17" widescreen laptop so that it would be freakin' huge, NOT so that it could act like a 15" laptop from last year. I don't want my DE to have that space, _I_ want that space! So when I drag a panel, I want to drag a panel, not a representation of the panel that's three times as large. Screens should be getting bigger, not staying relatively the same.

Re:beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

[vlm]

1280x1024 ...... is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago

Sure about that? I bought a nice CRT in the mid 90s with that res, maybe 1996 when the 1600x1200s came out and the price for the "old" 1280s started dropping. It was by no means top of the line at that time. I haven't owned a monitor below 1600x1200 since the turn of the millennium. And I've always bought new, and never spent more than $500 (always thought the $2000 monitor guys went a little overboard).

According to

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/video-resolution.htm

1280x1024 was first released in 1994 but I'm sure it's older than that. Wikipedia speculates it was available in the mid 80s, although I don't know if "available" means 5 figure technology demonstrators vs off the shelf at our dear, departed comp usa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SXGA

Re:beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do hope that the KDE developers are not retarded enough to just change the size of the icons and call it a day.

Screen size and resolution varies wildly nowadays. A truely evolved desktop enviroment is one which lets you adjust font size and icon size to any size you want, and adapts the dialog windows so they don't run out of vertical or horizontal space.

Sadly, I have yet to see this mythical beast. I don't know about KDE, since I use Gnome mainly, which is still not ready in this respect. Yes, you can adjust icon size, but they're not observed across the entire desktop. And there are rogue applications all over the place, which will concoct huge screen-overflowing windows.

Re:WOAH!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

INLINE IMAGES IN EMAIL??? DOUBLE WOAH!!!!

Seriously. I was surprised to see that one listed; you would think they would be too embarrassed to mention it. Outlook Express, the free piece of crap email reader included with Windows, has had that feature forever. Welcome to 1999.

fixing 10,000 bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they did not fix 10,000 bugs. They closed 10,000 bug reports, which is a completely different thing.

Many of the bug reports were dupes. And many more were closed for one reason or another without actually fixing the reported problem.

Re:fixing 10,000 bugs

[Enderandrew]

And many bugs were simply closed WONTFIX because the bugs pertain to old versions that are no longer being maintained.

Re:fixing 10,000 bugs

[JohnFluxx]

Many bugs, presumably, were fixed without having bug reports.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds noble but securely making all text available to a screen reader would be a complete mess. I for one don't want kcalc to be able to read my email.

KDevelop4?

[DoofusOfDeath]

While we're on the topic, does anyone know if/when KDevelop4 will be released?

Re:KDevelop4?

[Vectronic]

It's currently in Beta 4, and judging by the release times of the previous Betas, and assuming Beta 4 is the last before the final release, I would guess the somewhere between the end of this month, and the end of September.

I know that doesn't really help, but if you are really that interested, start playing with the beta.

Re:KDevelop4?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Beta 4 was released on 28 June, so you'll need to wait a bit.

Re:KDevelop4?

[deathguppie]

I'm actually more interested in when k3b will finally port to kde4

Re:KDevelop4?

[kayoshiii]

It mostly has -- For better or for worse Kubuntu already has that version. It still isn't as stable as I would like... for more info on why it took such a long time you can look at http://www.k3b.org

Re:infamous begin bug

[Anonymous Coward]

It worked so well it took Microsoft until Windows SP2 to finally patch OE trashing whatever followed a 'begin ' (with 2 blank spaces trailing) at the start of line. Wow. Impressed. Used that feature for years on news groups to p*ss off OE users.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[FesterDaFelcher]

Did you possibly mean wpm/10? Or are you that guy from the MicroMachine commercials in the '80s?

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

Well, "words" are a bit fuzzy. Openoffice reports this text as 925 words. This is an mp3 of Orca reading it, which lasts 120 seconds. It's fun to listen to. I'm on my 7th novel in 4 weeks, which I play in the car, at the doctor's office, or anywhere else that's normally down time.

one word

[Anne Honime]

Themes.

They work great.

Re:one word

[Anonymous Coward]

So does ' sudo apt-get purge -y kde* '

Re:one word

[Anne Honime]

yes, but it makes more or less 5 words (depending on your counting style) ;-)

Re:one word

[Anonymous Coward]

The round is yours.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[TheGothicGuardian]

They're working on supporting the deaf people first.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Razalhague]

I once tried that, but it was very much problmatic as it left my eyes with nothing to do and conflicted with my usual aural distraction for (reading) fiction; listening to music.

After Caizen, Caroshi?

[argent]

After the Japanese word Karoshi.

Best to just pick one and not change it

[droidsURlooking4]

This reminds me of a few years ago when Koreans unofficially changed the spelling of Cheju (it's an island off of South Korea) to Jeju. It's really all the same to them, but think of all the headaches from a systems perspective, particularly with air travel.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[bcmm]

You posted a link to an ADSL line on Slashdot?

Good luck!

I Ran KDE4.2

[mpapet]

Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.

I still have it on my Debian testing/unstable laptop. It's not a very new laptop and KDE4.2 ran very quickly on it. The desktop itself did not have glaring issues. None of the eye candy is enabled by default, so it doesn't look immediately fabulous on Debian. But turn stuff on and there's plenty of prettiness available. There were issues with Korganizer, so it sounds like they cleaned it up quite a bit. For the most part, I don't use konqueror any more since I found bojourfoxy. http://andrew.tj.id.au/projects/bonjourfoxy/

It's clear there is a huge amount of activity going into these releases because whole features have been rewritten since kde4.0. Over time, it looks like most of the common KDE applications have been ported to kde4 too, so there's still solid interest in the desktop.

It looks like they are continuing their efforts to simplify working with KDE as a programmer. So, maybe the bigger KDE4 story that isn't covered as much on slashdot is the programming side?

I'm actually using XFCE4 at the moment for no good reason other than change is good. It's leaner, with enough eye candy for me.

Re:I Ran KDE4.2

[c0d3g33k]

The thing is ...

Nobody really cares about the bigger KDE4 story. It's kind of like the "bigger hammer redesign story". It's nice to make things easy for the hammer designers, but if it can't pound in nails like it used to, it's not really a very good hammer, is it? But hey, it does wrench-stuff too now, so that old-fashioned hammer stuff that used to work perfectly isn't that important, right? You really want a wrench to pound in those nails. Yeah, we know it's not a great wrench/hammer yet, but we're working on it.

KDE4 is kind of like that. Things that used to work before suddenly were broken or "coming soon". Different ways of "striking the nail" were introduced when the old ways seemed to work just fine. Not a problem, aside from the fact that the new ways didn't always work as well.

A desktop environment is a tool as is everything else on a computer. People use a computer as a tool to *do* things, and most of those things (almost all of them) don't involve futzing around with the tool itself. If a development team doesn't understand that basic fact, they run the risk of redesigning the tool without full awareness of what needs to absolutely work and what is optional.

KDE4 is shaping up to be a fine desktop environment. It just got there in a roundabout way that could have been a lot less painful had the developers connected with the community better so that the important stuff was working first.

My biggest fear is now that things are working well, people are going to get bored, throw everything out the window and start hacking on KDE5 rather than making KDE4 realize its ful potential.

Re:I Ran KDE4.2

[ingwa]

> Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.

First they ignore you
Then they ridicule you
Then they fight you
They you win.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which step we are at now. :-)

I want to be optimistic!

[VincenzoRomano]

So I hope a real step towards real stability and feature richness as seen in KDEv3.5.
KDE v3 is dead, long live to KDE ... v4!

Re:I want to be optimistic!

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE3 is certainly not dead: it makes for a lovely desktop in Debian 5.

Re:I want to be optimistic!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use (K)Ubuntu. KDEv3 is dead.

Re:What's the point?

[Grishnakh]

I hope you wrote that post using Lynx (or better yet, a custom Perl script using LWP), or else you'd be a hypocrite.

KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Enderandrew]

It really bothers me when I hear people make uninformed silly comparisons saying that KDE 4 just copies Vista or 7. Honestly, I think there are some great "pillars" that have great potential, but sadly are still under developed, such as Sonnet and Nepomuk I think KDE 4 is just starting to really come into its own and can become a truly great desktop. I just don't think it has delivered on its potential yet.

Conversely, in the areas that perhaps KDE should consider taking a page from Microsoft, they refuse to do so. When I've suggested to Aaron Seigo that he solve the "no-right-click" problem when designing Plasma to also be fully usable on a touch-screen, I suggested he take a page from 7 and use a multi-touch gesture such as 7's for a right-click. In 7, you hold one finger down and then tap with a second finger for a right-click. Aaron deleted my suggestion. I made it a second time thinking maybe I didn't post it, and he deleted it a second time. I've made suggestions to maybe take a few cues from 7's taskbar, and those are always deleted as well.

Is it honestly some great sin to emulate the better features of other desktops? Hasn't KDE done that from the beginning?

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[PeterBrett]

One word with respect to blatantly copying ideas from Microsoft (even if they are very good ones!): "Patents."

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Enderandrew]

Fair enough. Microsoft hasn't patented everything. You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.

As for multi-touch gestures, Apple has Microsoft beat there. So there is is prior art, and even Apple is having trouble getting patents on the gestures from what I understand.

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Anonymous Coward]

This attitude "anything but copying Windows" of KDE is just silly. There is some good things in Windows too.

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Bill Dimm]

You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.

Life is not that easy. You can look, but you won't see anything until the patent is published, which may not happen for a while. From wikipedia: "...Currently, the majority of U.S. patent applications are published within 18 months after the filing date..."

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Hurricane78]

From what I've seen, they both heavily copy MacOS X. :(

It is no great sin to copy others' good ideas. The sinning starts, when all you do, is running behind others. Trying to be just as loved. Or only just as good.
Because then, your perfect goal will never be better than what you copy, and so you by definition can never beat it. Ever.

The idea is, to lead. And let others play catch-up instead. Then you don't even need to imitate others, because your genuine own features will be so important, that people do not care if you miss other less important or worse implemented ones.

If you ever program for Linux, think of yourself of an innovative leader for a new generation. You're a role model for a whole generation of programmers. Only with such a mindset (while of course not being arrogant, but knowing that you are right and know it better nonetheless) can you reach that goal.

On in one sentence: You have to be able to imagine and believe it, before you can do it. (Not the other way around!)

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[stilborne]

the only time i delete comments on my blog is when someone steps over the line and starts being overtly rude, and then only after i've asked them to be constructive versus non-constructive. it had nothing to do with the idea of using multitouch (which has issues on non-multitouch devices, but anyways..).

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Enderandrew]

I've heard from others that KDE is just copying OS X. Certainly Oxygen bears a certain resemblance to OS X, but overall I find the KDE 4 desktop to be very different.

* No dock.
* Dolphin and Finder are worlds different
* No Mac-style application menus at the top
* Windows buttons on the left in Mac, on the right in KDE

OS X borrowed virtual desktops from Linux. I believe OS X and Compiz borrowed some visual effects from each other.

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Enderandrew]

I've seen people make personal attacks and snipe at you on your blog. I know you've taken a lot of flack since the KDE 4.0 release, much of personally directed as opposed to polite differences over design decisions.

And I don't want to call you a liar. But the suggestions I made had no personal attacks or criticisms. They were short, simple suggestions and they were deleted.

In the end, it is your blog. You're entitled to do what you want with it. And while I'm sure most would say the best place to make such suggestions is a plasma mailing list, it doesn't make sense for me to join a mailing list for plasma development when I'm not a developer. I left the comments on your blog because I see other casual suggestions and discussion there from time to time.

As for non-multi-touch devices, not a whole lot of people are even using touch hardware today, though I expect that to change real soon. Windows 7, and OS X both support multi-touch. The iPhone has suddenly laid down the mobile gauntlet, and all would-be competitors are using multi-touch. Android devices have multi-touch.

Any touch screen put into a netbook/notebook/smartbook for Windows 7 is going to be multi-touch. I'm not sure limiting design to the lowest common denominator is always necessary. You do have to weight it against leaving a set of users behind for certain features, but arguably that is the decision those users made for themselves in their hardware purchase.

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Single tap to Select.
  Two rapid taps to do the open function "doubletap"
  Three rapid taps to open a "right click" menu.

  For default, anyway, there's no real limit on how configurable you can make a GUI to operate with any sort of hardware, mouse, kbd, etc... ;)

SB

 

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, its just he has a linux solution, edit some random .conf file with some 3 char acronym = 1 flag on.
Restart X.
Then you can hold down one finger for 1 second, then a dialog appears, "are you sure to show rightclick menu?"

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Microlith]

I suggested he take a page from 7 and use a multi-touch gesture such as 7's for a right-click. In 7, you hold one finger down and then tap with a second finger for a right-click.

To be fair, OS X has supported doing that since 10.4, possibly earlier. I was doing that for a right click on my Macbook in 2006, and I'd be suprised if it wasn't being done before.

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[deathguppie]

I think it's more about liability, and having your hands tied by being afraid that you are copying. They don't want to copy anyone else's work and they don't want to be influenced for or against it. They want a fresh clean outlook on the DE and they are willing to listen to suggestions. Just don't try to tell them to copy any one else's work.

Here's an idea for you. Try coming up with new and inventive ideas to give them. ;)

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[gnud]

I would think that right click should be simulated in the touch screen driver, not in the desktop shell?

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[tepples]

I would think that right click should be simulated in the touch screen driver, not in the desktop shell?

The sort of touch screen driver you're talking about shoehorns touch input (tuples of x, y, area) into the model of mouse input (delta x, delta y, delta z, button 1, button 2, button 3). But not all possible gestures on a touch screen map easily to a mouse, nor vice versa. Therefore, the long-term solution is not to treat a touch screen as a ghetto mouse but instead to translate both touch input and mouse input into different kinds of higher-level events (select this object, activate this button, etc).

Re:KDE vs Vista vs 7

[jospoortvliet]

Well, KDE sure copies things - there are good ideas out there and we use them. But innovation is high on our agenda, if you follow dot.kde.org and planet.kde.org you'd know that. We want to lead, not recreate win'98 with a bit more usability sauce. Until 2 years ago we were working on an infrastructure which would allow us to move much faster and do things no competitor could do, the last 2 years we've been polishing our current product and we're slowly moving to innovation now. You think we'd fully re-design the desktop infrastructure (plasma) into something which can do virtually anything - just to re-create the traditional desktop (panel on bottom with start menu left, taskarea center, systray & clock right and a background with icons)? Hell, no, but we had to - the users demanded it. So we started out with that, now we're moving on to actually make use of what we developed. The 4.3 release with an activity for each desktop is just the humble beginning. We've got great stuff in the pipeline for 4.4, like the social desktop things, a netbook interface and much more.

Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

From the KDE 4.0 launch and on, Kubuntu/Ubuntu has been shipping some pretty broken packages. I don't want to hate on the Kubuntu developers/packages, but it is the simple truth. And it sure seems like everytime I hear a complaint about KDE 4.x, it is from someone who had a bad experience trying KDE 4.x in *buntu land.

If that is the case, might I suggest that you try a better KDE distro? openSUSE, Arch Linux and Sabayon would be recommendations, in that order.

Here is a weekly snapshot openSUSE/KDE 4 SVN live CD.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/KDE4-UNSTABLE-Live.i686-1.3.62-Build1.1.iso

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[RAMMS EIN]

I've noticed this, too. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 at some point (because the kernel has support for some of the hardware in my PC that kernels in other Ubuntu versions don't support), and about every single KDE app I used was seriously broken. I know KDE is better than that. Now, I know 9.10 is not an actual release yet, so there is time to fix things, but I find it interesting that there is nowhere near as much breakage outside KDE packages. What gives?

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not denying your claim, but I thought Kubuntu had pretty vanilla KDE packages. I always wondered what they did to break them.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

>openSUSE, Arch Linux and Sabayon would be recommendations, in that order.

Nah ! Debian is a pretty good one once you get rid of all these #@&\ gnomish things. ;)

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[moonbender]

And it sure seems like everytime I hear a complaint about KDE 4.x, it is from someone who had a bad experience trying KDE 4.x in *buntu land.

That could also be due to the fact that *buntu is the most popular distribution (I'd guess by a fair margin these days), particularly among newbies who tend to get stuck (and, sometimes, give up) easily.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

This did occur to me even as I was typing it. I think there is certainly some truth to your statement.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Kalinda]

The problem, as ever, is that Kubuntu gets the seriously short end of the stick. I used to use it (before I switched to Arch with KDEmod/Chakra) and it worked alright before KDE 4 came out. However, since KDE 4 it's been generally slow and the developers have taken longer than other distros to get new KDE releases or beta/RCs out. And then there was the idea of forcing KDE 4 on all their users in version 4.1 when it wasn't ready for regular use. I see they've since realized the error and are offering both KDE3 and 4, although KDE4 has is now pretty damn good.

I'd put this down to the vast majority of *buntu users using Ubuntu/Gnome. It also gets more press than the other variants.

That's not to say the developers haven't made good contributions to the KDE community. Like making OpenOffice 3 work with KDE file dialogues.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

I'm no expert, but from what I was reading on the dot near the actual 4.0 release, the problems were the switch to Cmake, and where packages were located. From what I understand, the Kubuntu team had trouble properly compiling and packaging.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[FlyingBishop]

This is true. Though honestly, all I used was Amarok, and I probably would've sat through the bugs if they hadn't dropped several of the key features that made it better than Rhythmbox, all while eating up twice as much of my limited system resources.

(Though the second part could be the result of bad packaging, it seems more to be the result of KDE4 having a really bloated API.)

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[rainmaestro]

I've noticed the same with Kubuntu. I was constantly struggling to get things working right. Then I tried KDE in openSUSE when setting up a box at work. It was remarkable how much better everything worked. I'm not a big SUSE fan (or Ubuntu for that matter), but I definitely saw fewer issues on the openSUSE box.

I see lots of odd quirks like that in Ubuntu. One of my annoyances is how the VLC package displays. The video displays in a separate window, whereas in openSUSE it is one window with an autohide mini-panel in fullscreen mode. I've never been able to get that in Ubuntu, and I'm not sure *why*.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

Amarok 2 now uses Plasma to display plugins in the middle portion of the window. If your graphics driver doesn't like Plasma, then you're likely to have issues here.

Sadly it seems Plasma, and other Qt 4 apps/libraries don't really like the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Luthair]

This is definitely true, the knetwork plasma has been broken since the launch of Jaunty for a variety of wireless configurations (even common ones such as hidden essid) and more recently Firefox 3.5 cannot be installed as through broken dependencies it requires firefox-3.0

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, their packages are just plain broken. I've long since given up KDE 4.x on Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, same thing). They seemingly take a stock KDE 4.x environment, slap it into some packages and push it onto their repo. It's as much their fault as it is the stock KDE 4.x for sucking. Other distributions make it look smooth and run just as well.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[naveenkumar.s]

More than the broken packages, the one thing that stops me from trying KDE4 on (K)ubuntu is the broken intel video drivers. Kwin compositing using EXA is awful, X crashes frequently and UXA is just not ready. Which made me run all the way back to Lenny.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

Well that is because Intel seems to be seriously rewriting their drivers.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[DMUTPeregrine]

That is a known bug in VLC. There was a race condition with something else, I forget exactly what. It should be fixed in the 1.0 version.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Artifakt]

Flakeyness with those Plasma elements in Amarok 2 drove me to go back to Qmmp. It seemed the middle window's widgets never displayed the same way twice. Just closing Amarok and reopening it usually resulted in some borders and edges being realigned, scroll bars being lost or inactivated, font sizes changed, and so on. And this was on a system with only onboard graphics, on a genuine Intel motherboard, no ATI or Nvidia drivers supposedly needed.

The upgrade from KDE series 3 in Kubuntu 8 to series 4 in Kubuntu 9 definitely meant some graphics features quit working unless you had a bigger graphics card. I admit to running Kubuntu 9 on a box with only 16 Meg of graphics memory. It's probably under the minimum specs even for Linux these days. But still, that box had transparency for terminals windows, both in Konsole and Yakuake. A slide show type screensaver could easily use all the various wipes and spot transition effects and still change pictures every 20 seconds (and 20 seconds is the default setting). Widgets such as the Luna moon phase display also had transparent backgrounds. KDE 4 lost all this on my older box, and couldn't do the fancy things it wanted to replace them with like the rotating cube and jello wigglies even if I had wanted those effects. Some of those problems are getting better, and at least multiple wallpapers seems to be coming back, but I would love to understand why people could spend months fixing some graphics problems, only to have the fixes only help one the problems of one program in five, make one working one break, and change the problems of one other program to different problems, but not to any easier to accept problems.

It's like taking a car back to the mechanic, and the wibbly noise is finally fixed, but the skree from the left windshield wiper is now moved to the trunk, and the button that lowers all the windows at once now misses the passenger side rear, then when you go through the next cycle, the button lowers all the windows at once, but now raises all except the driver's side rear, the skree has become a thumpa-thumpa-poit!, and the wibbly noise has come back, but an octave lower. By KDE 4.3, I'm pretty resigned to learning half these bugs are fixed, but there's still a few, and the left turn signal will now suddenly run twice as fast as the right. Never are any of these really critical, yet never does the whole thing 'just work'.

          It's got me wondering, just how many ways are there to implement transparency? I used to be able to get a bunch of different transparent effects on a windows 98 box (using third party apps). I thought I knew a bit about tricks like 8 bit pallet swapping for pseudo transparent tinted notepad applications, real alpha blending, subtractive mip-mapping, and masking layer transparency (like PNGs usually use). But evidently, some KDE aps are using all of these at once, plus five or six other strange methods to get to clear, that are all totally non-standardized, mutually don't play well with each other (or much else), and all have to be reimplemented for KDE 4.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[westyvw]

Nvidia driver. Absolutly no issue with KDE 4.2. Intel drivers maybe, but certainly not Nvidia.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[gbarules2999]

Also, Sidux.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[deathguppie]

I use Kubuntu.. ya there have been things in the past that made me upset about the way Kubuntu's packages seemed to work. So this last year I decided to reinstall with OpenSuse, actually just before I did a seminar at Linuxfest Northwest on 3d game character modeling.

The Seminar went great as far as attendance, and I had material I had created just for it.. but OpenSuse's nvidia driver was not working properly, so people were asking questions like "why is the animation so jerky". I had no recourse but to say.. "I just installed OpenSuse"..

I'm back on Kubuntu and quite happy actually this release has been very nice.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "Karmic burning"? ;-)

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like taking a car back to the mechanic, and the wibbly noise is finally fixed, but the skree from the left windshield wiper is now moved to the trunk, and the button that lowers all the windows at once now misses the passenger side rear, then when you go through the next cycle, the button lowers all the windows at once, but now raises all except the driver's side rear, the skree has become a thumpa-thumpa-poit!, and the wibbly noise has come back, but an octave lower.

+1 for funny car analogy with good sound effects
-1 for coffee spillage resulting

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact is that we want a distribution where enough software is available for: Ubuntu.

I don't want to get back to RPMs

apt-get install myprogram

Okay, I could try Sidux but never again do I want rpm hell.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Galactic Dominator]

Q. What does plasma have to do with your video driver?

A. Nothing.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[slyguy135]

I can confirm this. It's why I moved to openSUSE, whose KDE 4.1 is actually pretty decent.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[SomeKDEUser]

You like apt, not deb. deb is as sucky as RPM.

Each time someone gets mixed-up between archive formats and package dependency solver, $PANTHEON kills a kitten.

Folder Sneek??

[B5_geek]

I'd like to give all these dev's that pushed/forced us away from tree/folder view a boot to the head. X-Tree Gold in the DOS days had more functionality then a modern file-manager does.

Here is a hint that you are doing something wrong:

If you have to spend time adding functionality to a program that worked before you removed another function, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

I have recently moved to OSX for a big project I am working on, and I curse Steve Jobs mother every time I need to use Finder and open a dozen different windows/work my way through several nested folders that 3 mouse clicks would do in Windows Explorer/Konq. (from v3.5)

Re:Folder Sneek??

[jabithew]

Just use Spotlight? Or alternatively switch to the view that shows you all previous folders. It's the one that looks like french windows.

Re:Folder Sneek??

[Enderandrew]

Konqueror still ships as a file manager in KDE 4.x. Dolphin is default in most distros, but you can switch that back. And I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.

Re:Folder Sneek??

[stilborne]

> I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.

it did. system settings did too. just turn them on in the view options.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Davorama]

I think I still have his tape cassette somewhere. 10 classics in 10 minutes...

mod up

[Anne Honime]

please...

Re:Fuck your captchas slashdot

[Dustie]

Slashdot has captcha?

Insert Happiness Here

[MonsterTrimble]

Disclaimer: I have not installed KDE 4.3 - yet - and I run Kubuntu 9.04.

First off, I would like to applaud the team for the work they did and continue to do for KDE. I have really pleased with how far they have come from 4.0 - which made Enlightement look full featured and bug free. I'm looking forward to improvements to Amarok and Kopete - especially with respect to the new Kopete Facebook chat plug-in. (I currently use Pidgin because it has facebook chat and it has killer-apps status - soon I'll kill someone because of it).

That being said, I'm not thrilled with their Akonadi PIM database. I have found it to be a serious resource hog and that many applications simply do not play nice with it. And the insistance that it must scan EVERYTHING again at start up is a serious WTF. I'm also not sold on the social desktop concept either - but I haven't played with it yet and I prefer for my desktop background to be more of a ever changing photo album, so I like it empty. Taskbar, thank you!

Again though, I want to thank the people at KDE and the volunteers who support the project. Good job!

Re:Insert Happiness Here

[SomeKDEUser]

you want to update, then, akonadi is much better behaved, now.

When finally all the PIM apps will have been migrated it will be the source of much coolness (at last, contacts really integrated! mail and IM as system services!)

I do agree...

[Anne Honime]

... but I was speaking of LCD (it should work better with caps), because while you and I made the wise choice to stay crt when they became affordable in big sizes, all the people I knew were lured toward the newer LCDs coming in miserable sizes unheard of for years (like 15") ; I even remember LCDs being given marketing "size equivalent" to crts, to try (and most of the time succeed in) luring the buyer into spending more on a tiny LCD than on bigger and better crt.

Conclusion : the general public was long accustomed to tiny screens and WMs had to take that in account.

Re:What's the point?

[Carewolf]

How is this useful? I just want a fucking command line. It hasn't needed improvement in 30 years.

If you think the commandline can't improve or isn't. Try zsh.

And if you are a real daredevil, try running multiple terminals in X. For instance by using the Konsole program. It really improves the command line productivity. No kidding!

Save me from the polish

[Burz]

I like GUIs as much as anyone (and its the reason why the last system I bought is a Mac) but as a 10-year Linux user I already know this new package of FOSS loveliness is not going to save Kubuntu from being truly awful. It doesn't change the fact that so much in the Kubuntu GUI is broken (like not being able to set a static IP).

And I suspect this release will not suddenly display some inspiration or direction for either of those projects. What I will have, yet again, is a pile of (sometimes brilliantly coded) pieces that don't quite fit together or come together to make end users say, "Oh, I get it!"

There is a heap of stuff that KDE (and Gnome, and the distros) won't do because no one (not a single soul) will ever take responsibility for facilitating critical use cases across these projects. And that is why after all these years, the Linux desktop still "feels wrong" to most techies (and more confounding to average users than other OSes).

Some weeks back I was considering a switch to Gnome, but then a story popped up on Slashdot (with impeccable timing) announcing that Gnome will be put through the same whole-integer re-write process that KDE just went through.

No thanks.

Re:Save me from the polish

[dotancohen]

There is a heap of stuff that KDE (and Gnome, and the distros) won't do because no one (not a single soul) will ever take responsibility for facilitating critical use cases across these projects.

Such as what? State some examples so that the ball can get rolling. If it is a ball that KDE needs to get rolling, I'll file the bugs but I need you to tell me what is missing. Thanks!

Re:Save me from the polish

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Which use cases are these?

This weekend, I was going to play a DVD on a Kubuntu install for the first time since 3.5 (don't laugh, I don't do that much). So I popped in the DVD. Got a popup in "recently plugged in something" saying that this DVD had been inserted. Clicked on the DVD, and it suggested I either ignored it, burned it, ripped it or played it. I selected play, and the it suggested I install support for reading (encrypted?) DVDs. I clicked yes, and after a bit, the DVD started playing in a window. A mouseover showed a "fullscreen" icon, after which the DVD just worked, menus and all.

A fairly nicely working expericen, working across several systems.

Re:Save me from the polish

[MajorCatastrophe]

Such as what? ...

/facepalm

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Seriously. After so many, many, many years of of "Linux desktop" development...

Re:Save me from the polish

[Yfrwlf]

Oh you can stick with the old versions of KDE and Gnome if you want, if there are enough who like them then they will stick around. As for the Mac GUI though, hated it. Tried it for several hours and scrambled to get back to Gnome. Out of all the DE's I've ever used, Gnome = 3. Enlightenment and some of the other DEs are pretty nice though once you get used to them, but OS X I just could not get used to, nor am I interested in ever trying to support and use closed source DEs ever again.

exaggerate much?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTS: "After another 6 months of hard work by over 700 people"
FTA: "Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors."

I always find it amusing (and annoying) when people say "Over 40 new features!" or some such, and then you read the details and find out new_features = 40.
Please, don't exaggerate. God literally kills a kitten every time you do. ;)

Re:exaggerate much?

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Interesting how many people can write but not read.

There is no contradiction with 690 people checking in and 800 people's work - I consider myself a contributor, because I test, report back make bug reports and triage bugs reported by other. But I did not check in any code into KDE since 1999....

So you are forgetting the work of translators, UI testers, bug reporters and other contributors, who contribute but do not check in.

Re:exaggerate much?

[JohnFluxx]

Maybe because of userability people, artists, organisers etc who do work without checking in changes.

Organisers in particular do a huge amount of work for the yearly Akademy.

Re:exaggerate much?

[Spewns]

He kills another everytime you forget to close a tag too. Actually, he kills at least two, because you're forced to preview your post before publishing it, so it's quite a feat to miss it. In addition, our murderous God's kitten killing spree is doubled for any edit you made to your post before publishing and after having been made aware of the problem via a post preview. How do you sleep at night? Git wid da program. (Should be git's slogan.)

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you enjoy novels this way? I can barely understand what he's saying!

I think if I heard something like this most of the time my brain would be processing loose words instead of processing the plot.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[moonbender]

Wow, that's pretty intense. I can't understand a word. How long did it take you to get to such a speed? I listen to audio lectures a lot, but they're held by non-digital professors who for the most part ... speak ... very ... slowly.

What's the easiest way to try 4.3?

[crazybilly]

What's the easiest way to try 4.3? Kubuntu-desktop has been a train wreck every time I've installed it on my normal Ubuntu install, and I don't mind downloading a live cd or some such.

Is there a OpenSUSE live cd with 4.3 ready to go out of the gate or some such?

KDE4 anti-fanbois much?

[pak9rabid]

Since 80% of what im reading from others here about KDE4 is complete utter bullshit, let me summarize KDE4's progress in nutshell from a user's point of view:

• KDE 4.0: Utter crap..completely unuseable
• KDE 4.1: A slight improvement upon said utter crap, but still unusable on a productive system
• KDE 4.2: Alas, a working version that's actually usable, horray!
• KDE 4.3: ??? - I'll find out this week perhaps...unless the KDE devs regressed a lot of stuff from 4.2, I'm expecting a welcomed upgrade

Re:KDE4 anti-fanbois much?

[RPoet]

You're modded "Troll", but I agree with you (except "alas" is not the same as "at last"). I stuck with 3.5 until 4.2. I tried both 4.0 and 4.1, but they were just too unstable and lacked too many features for me to be productive and content. 4.2 was good enough to use. It was a little rough around the edges, but the 4.2.x versions fixed many things. Lately I've been using the 4.3 RC versions, and they've been great. Not only do I not miss anything, but it has some new features that are really useful (e.g., alt-f2 can not only start programs, it can convert currency and units, look up dictionary words, and much more). I still get some weird crashes, possibly plasma-related, that makes me have to restart KDE perhaps once a week, but other than that, I'm pleased as punch.

Re:KDE4 anti-fanbois much?

[pak9rabid]

Heh, yeah. I figured it would probably result in some negative feedback (especially from those who have no idea whats going on in KDE land). But yea, I installed 4.3 last night, and to my expectations it's quite nice. Keep up the great work KDE devs!

Re:KDE4 anti-fanbois much?

[Teun]

A Troll?

I fully agree with this summary.

Kubuntu should never have incorporated KDE4.0, period.

App Geometry

[kmahan]

Did they fix the ability to specify a geometry when starting an app (like Konsole) AND have it honored?

In 4.2 you could specify it, but it was ignored.

Of course they are spelled (or spelt).

[PeanutButterBreath]

Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols.

Japanese has three phonetic writing systems, Hiragana, Katakana and "Romaji", the latter being their word for the Roman alphabet. These are traditionally reserved for separate contexts, but any can be used to spell any of the symbolic Chinese characters (Kanji), and may be at various times for a variety of reasons.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[segedunum]

Why don't you just use Orca with KDE then, since Qt 4 supports ATI-SPI as far as I know? However, you can always count on someone to troll with the accessibility card.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[JohnFluxx]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2006/07/4535.ars

This discusses Windows having 28,700 bugs in RC2

Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[RogueSeven]

As a windows user for my entire life making the switch to Linux over the summer of 2007, I was nothing but thrilled with the looks, functionality, and personalization (through customization) KDE 3.5 had to offer. At the time, I wrote off Gnome as too different from what I was used to. After several months of falling completely in love with my OS/KDE, I began to strongly evangelize the use of Linux on the desktop, convincing a small handful of friends (doing my part for the whole "Year Of.." thing).

I went with the flow when KDE 4 took over. Although I was pretty disappointed with a lot of things (removal of a ton of Konqueror functionality that Dolphin sure as heck didn't replace/replace well, plasma crashing all the time, list could go on but I'm not trying to bash KDE or anything here), I kept patiently waiting for the promise of a stable, beautiful, better-than-3.5 desktop. When even 4.2 didn't fix a lot of the things wrong with my system, I finally decided to switch desktops until they got their act together.

KDE's problem is that my original plan has changed. I've gotten so acquainted to my new environment, that I can't see myself switching back to KDE anymore. It's not just inertial that's a factor here, I genuinely like my current setup. I used the word problem there not because I believe a single user matters to KDE, or any other F/OSS project for that matter, but because I wonder how many people are just like me: Hopped off the KDE bus, originally planning to get back on a few stops down the road, but have now opted for a different mode of transportation altogether (do I get points for bad car analogy here??). To boot, I am relatively young, and a sworn lifelong Linux user; there are many years of my life of Desktop Environment usage left.

At any rate, when Linus slammed KDE months ago, I was still on the fence. Now I'm pretty much in full agreement with him, minus the whole flamewar thing.

Here's the part where I'm pouring out champagne on my floor. "Thanks for the memories, KDE". I loved you, and I'll miss you.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[atomic-penguin]

I cannot believe the parent was modded troll. I have been a desktop Linux user, going on 12 years now. I've used many other window managers, Fvwm, twm, WindowMaker, Blackbox, Fluxbox, CDE, xfce, and even Gnome. So I have tried many different window managers, and have been able to easily adapt to different GUIs with relatively little pain. KDE has been my primary desktop for the last 5-6 years, that is until KDE 4.x came along.

I gave KDE 4 an honest test drive, that lasted less than a week. Much of the KDE 3 functionality you would expect to be included in KDE 4 is gone. A good example is the KDE regular expression editor which comes as a standard KDE utility in KDE 3. The desktop wasn't really a traditional desktop interface at all. The desktop somehow became this ill-behaved widget container. My right mouse button wouldn't do anything, at least not what I wanted it to do. The worst part was the customization which has been part of every window manager I have ever used; customization was gone. There was no way to make KDE 4 work in a way which I want to use. Those are a few examples off the top of my head. I used KDE 3.5 until April, it was still available in the main repository of Hardy, as well as having KDE 4 available as a choice from the same repository.

I upgraded to Ibex in April, and tried out KDE 4.1; it is still not what I expect. I switched to Gnome for maybe a day, and couldn't get it to handle multiple desktops with Xinerama the way I want. Finally, I switched to xfce. It works the way I want, I can change the behavior if I don't like it. I have been using xfce all summer. I will undoubtedly give KDE another try. I have to wonder how many hours of productivity has been lost on frustrated KDE users not able to adapt to the radical changes presented in KDE 4.

Why is it that the two most divisive window managers, KDE and Gnome, seem to be immune from forking especially when their most loyal users are dissatisfied? Why is it that the KDE developers insist on radical changes, even when critics and loyal users claim KDE 4 is on the wrong track? I, for one, would much rather have ugly 2-D widgets in a useful environment and fully functional interface. As opposed to 3-D compositing and widgets that are pretty, lack any practical use, and result in a half-working interface.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I just spent a bunch of mod points between this article and a few others upmodding completely unjustified -1 Disagree/Troll stuff.

I don't know what's changed in the past few months but I'm seeing an exponential rise in -1 disagree modding. Maybe it has to do with how the proliferation of mod points.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[segedunum]

Much of the KDE 3 functionality you would expect to be included in KDE 4 is gone. A good example is the KDE regular expression editor which comes as a standard KDE utility in KDE 3...There was no way to make KDE 4 work in a way which I want to use...I upgraded to Ibex in April, and tried out KDE 4.1; it is still not what I expect. I switched to Gnome for maybe a day, and couldn't get it to handle multiple desktops with Xinerama the way I want. Finally, I switched to xfce.

If KDE 3.5 did what you wanted then why didn't you stay on it until KDE 4 did? Why didn't you use the regular expression KDE 3 app? You can install KDE 3 apps under KDE 4. I have no clue whatsoever why some people get to something that works then mysteriously 'upgrade' for some reason and then bitch that something that they're getting entirely for free doesn't do what they want.

Finally, I switched to xfce. It works the way I want, I can change the behavior if I don't like it. I have been using xfce all summer.

Wow. Can you really? If you want a desktop that does nothing but the one or two things that you want then by all means use it. However, Xfce isn't venerated as the desktop that will answer all our prayers because it does just that. Nothing. It's a shell that launches applications and that's about it. Customisation is zilch, pretty much, and I can't fathom how you're satisfied with it in that department after KDE 3.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[atomic-penguin]

If KDE 3.5 did what you wanted then why didn't you stay on it until KDE 4 did? Why didn't you use the regular expression KDE 3 app? You can install KDE 3 apps under KDE 4. I have no clue whatsoever why some people get to something that works then mysteriously 'upgrade' for some reason and then bitch that something that they're getting entirely for free doesn't do what they want.

I have installed it from a backport tree. Sorry for bitching, but I am just very dissatisfied with KDE 4, just simply wanted to voice my opinion and vent a bit.

Wow. Can you really? If you want a desktop that does nothing but the one or two things that you want then by all means use it. However, Xfce isn't venerated as the desktop that will answer all our prayers because it does just that. Nothing. It's a shell that launches applications and that's about it. Customisation is zilch, pretty much, and I can't fathom how you're satisfied with it in that department after KDE 3.

I never said it was perfect, and no it doesn't answer all my prayers. I know it is not very customizable. For now, it is simply good enough, and to tide me over until the next time I upgrade my machine. Then I will probably re-evaluate what the best desktop for me personally is. Like I said, last time that I checked KDE 4 is not for me.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

I could have written pretty much the same thing. Long time Linux user, almost exclusively KDE for many years until kde4 came. I tried various 4.x versions, several times, but it is pointless for me. Now I have switched to Gnome and have no intention whatsoever to come back.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[ion.simon.c]

*shrug*
a) You should check out 4.3. It's nice.
b) Xinerama is going away, dont'cha know? If you haven't tried xrandr, you might want to. If you have, and it doesn't work like you'd expect, see if the fixes are in the works.
c) When you try out 4.2 or 4.3, give the "Folder View" configuration a spin:
* Right-click on the desktop
* Click on "Appearance Settings"
* Change the "Desktop Activity" "Type" to "Folder View"
* Click "Okay" or "Apply"

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[atomic-penguin]

Thanks, that's informative!

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

You're like the Creationists who keep trying to refute Darwin, even though he died long ago.

Make your comments against KDE 4.3, NOT 4.0. Yes, everyone knows it sucked as a user experience. MOVE ON.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[garvon]

Wow. Can you really? If you want a desktop that does nothing but the one or two things that you want then by all means use it. However, Xfce isn't venerated as the desktop that will answer all our prayers because it does just that. Nothing. It's a shell that launches applications and that's about it. Customisation is zilch, pretty much, and I can't fathom how you're satisfied with it in that department after KDE 3.

I know I can. (with the exception of single click desktop icons) I have almost the same desktop set up with xfce+compiz now that I had with kde 3,5+compiz. I run the kde backend ,still use krusader as my file manager and yakuake for an xterm. Most of the kde 4x Apps are fine. and the kio still works. Personally I have no problems with kde 4.x except the actual desktop part.
It is too much of a pain in the ass to try to get it to configure to give you want you want instead of what someone else decided you should have.

Xfce is fast and more stable then kde 4.2. (I have not ran 4.3 final yet)
Right click on gives my what I want. (Yes I own a regular mouse not a old macbook.) I also find that I don't have to fight the xfce panel to give me the layout and size and shape I want. Also now with qt 4.5 I can make kde apps use gtk to draw the widgets so they match my theme.

I did download the 4.3RC a few nights ago after fighting with the desktop to try to get something I could use. I decided it ain't worth it.and ctl+alt+backspace
I am afraid for kde that kde 4x is Wordstar2000 all over again. And like ws2k it will in the long run be the cause of loss of momentum and mind share for kde.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[deathguppie]

I agree with you in some points.. I loved the KDE3 polish. The way I could right click on an image and change it from tga to png on the fly. The way sftp, and smb worked in all the save and open dialogs. It was a pleasure to operate. However, I'm a graphics nut and I do love the new interface. I also like the search in the menu. I can no longer get used to Gnome for that one reason.

KDE is coming together, albeit slowly but it is coming. I've been using Digikam, and Amarok, and Kdenlive lately. Watching them progress so much this last year has reminded me of what it was like to whatch kde3 progess. All of the amazing changes that happened, and we waited for almost daily.

Now with KDE4 we just expect that all of the stuff we got with KDE3 was just going to magically hop on the train, but it hasn't. It is taking time just like it did with the 3 series, and we are impatient because we have work to do and our lives to go on with. I understand how you feel, but I also understand now though that it will work out... and I am now at least OK with that and certainly willing to wait.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll be in for a surprise when GNOME 3 hits... Chances are you'll be running to KDE 4 just like you ran to GNOME.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been stated countless times which versions aren't meant for daily use, especially by lamers. Your strawman arguments have been struck down countless times already. Go back to school and learn to read.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[SomeKDEUser]

Of course XFCE does not even have a regexp editor. But don't let reality get into the way of your little rant.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[SomeKDEUser]

But you don't make sense, see. You complain of the lack of features in KDE4 when compared to KDE3, which is a legitimate opinion.

And then you explain that you are really happy with XFCE -- which has less features than either.

Uh?

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

My right mouse button wouldn't do anything, at least not what I wanted it to do. The worst part was the customization which has been part of every window manager I have ever used; customization was gone

I tried KDE4 when I upgraded to OpenSUSE 11.1. Having used KDE 3 for quite a while, I was appalled at the lack of customization in the new version. On every workstation I've used for the past decade or so, I had a list of applications available under the right mouse button and a window list of running apps under the middle button. After much googling and dicking around with the config files, I found the only way to configure the menus was to recompile KDE4. Compiling is no big deal, but to simply change menu options? No, thanks! KDE4 is pretty, but I have work to do. I removed it and went back to fluxbox.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[10Ghz]

"KDE is coming together, albeit slowly but it is coming."

Slowly? Huh? 4.0 was crap. 6 months later we got 4.1 which was a lot better, but not there yet. 1 year after 4.0 we got 4.2 which was really good. And now we are getting 4.3.

KDE4 is only 18 months old. 18 months. During that 18 months KDE4 has changed A LOT. Compared to KDE3, KDE4 is progressing really, REALLY fast. In KDE3, 18 months got us from KDE 3.0 to KDE3.1.4.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[Teun]

If KDE 3.5 did what you wanted then why didn't you stay on it until KDE 4 did?

It seems you have not understood or even heard of "Go west boy"

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's great to hear, I expect KDE 4.3 to work flawlessly with my Creative X-Fi, which supports deaf people on Linux with absolutely no glitches.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Wow. I did not understand a word and I have actually read Huckleberry Finn. You are either some sort of savant or hard core meth user.

Are you sure you actually read the books, i.e., understand what in the world is happening?

Why...

[KDEWolf]

...even with the UI looking each time better, all Linux typefaces suck so badly? (don't come with the not free excuse, please... there are plenty of them available on-line)

Re:Why...

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

The free ones are sucky! AFAIK good, well designed typefaces that work well at different resolutions, include hinting, and cover bold and italic variants are sold for good money. The free fonts on the other hand, lack this completeness.

That said, I still think the sub-pixel hinting provided by Ubuntu (Gnome) is better than WinXP ever managed -- I find a lot of fonts under XP have small amounts of colour at the edges whereas they look much sharper under Ubuntu.

Re:Why...

[KDEWolf]

The free ones are sucky! AFAIK good, well designed typefaces that work well at different resolutions, include hinting, and cover bold and italic variants are sold for good money. The free fonts on the other hand, lack this completeness. That said, I still think the sub-pixel hinting provided by Ubuntu (Gnome) is better than WinXP ever managed -- I find a lot of fonts under XP have small amounts of colour at the edges whereas they look much sharper under Ubuntu.

No, no. I know that those "OMG FREE FONTS LOLZ!!" sites don't have high-quality and standardized fonts.

I'm a graphic designer, and I'm not talking this out of the blue.

There are great quality freeware typefaces available out there, like http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html or http://www.fileguru.com/Rubicon-Unifont/info

Great fonts, with everything you mentioned (work well at different resolutions, include hinting, and cover bold and italic variants, etc). And free! No excuses. Sometimes I think their people just don't ever thought about it...

Re:Why...

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I'm a graphic designer, and I'm not talking this out of the blue.

Cool! I must admit I had assumed you were more likely to be a *techie* given that this is /.

With any luck, given that newer web browsers support downloadable typefaces, we might see more attention paid to typefaces in the future... hope so anyway!

Re:Why...

[sandGorgons]

I've always recommended Droid fonts for all your linux desktop font needs. This is the font that was released by Google for its Android OS and is available for free. It's a gorgeous font on the Desktop!

It is the first thing I do when I install a clean machine - use Droid fonts and turn on subpixel hinting.

Re:Why...

[the_womble]

Droid fonts are non-free.

http://www.droidfonts.com/info/droid-fonts-eula/

Re:Why...

[sandGorgons]

The Droid Pro fonts are non-free. Droid fonts (as used on Android) are licensed under Apache Public License.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[cheftw]

Wow, wasn't that enjoyable.

Do you put your dinner into a blender and then compress it into a tiny pellet and see how fast you can swallow it?

Watch speedruns instead of buying games?

Drive slowly?

It seems to me like you're doing it wrong, comprehension is not what I look for in a novel. Have you thought of stopping to smell the flowers and cogitate, savour?

  What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?â" WH Davies

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[msuarezalvarez]

All text has been available to GNOME accessibility apps for ages now... Why do you think it is hard?

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[von_rick]

... and I have actually read Huckleberry Finn.

I thought it was the dictation for source code to Vista's SP1, which by its very design isn't supposed to make any sense.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

It's taken me about six weeks and 7 books to get here. I started at about my normal reading speed, around 250wpm, which sounded really fast. Audio books are normally around 170wpm. After each book, the words start sounding really slow, so I sped it up. There are several tricks. First, use Eloquence (Voxin on Linux), since it's easy to understand at high speed. Second, always use the same voice. You're ear is good at understanding speaker-independent speech, but it's even better at learning a specific voice. I'd bet most people here on slashdot could understand speech at this speed after a similar effort.

Unfortunately for me, learning to understand even faster than this is going to be harder. I don't have any problem understanding individual words at higher speed, but I start losing comprehension. My brain isn't wired to assemble concepts that fast. A blind friend of mine has solid comprehension at over 800wpm, which is just amazing, but he's been blind since childhood, and he's freaking brilliant. He says I could eventually get near his speed, though I'm doubtful.

Desktop environments and panning.

[ColaMan]

Does KDE/Gnome do a panning widget yet? Spent months trying to get panning working on my 800x400 eeePC, wrote a little hacked up util to watch the mouse and pan screen as necessary, eventually gave up with that kludge and went back to XP which does panning out of the box.

Fucking xorg - all they responded with after they dropped 'native' support for panning in xrandr is that it's a problem for the DE to deal with. DE's don't seem to care too much as all they're doing is working on 3D eye-candy. Forget basic functionality like a virtual panning screen, that's in the too-hard basket.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Hurricane78]

Hmm, I listened to all of those 1:20 min, and at the end, I could understand nearly everything. Also, it's not even my first language, but my third of four.
So it's apparently not that hard.

But I also speak very fast, and usually write around 50 words / >300 characters per minute on the keyboard. (German NEO 2.0 layout [best thing ever!])

Not something to brag about anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that they even had 10,000 bugs available for closing within one release cycle is not something I would be bragging about... and I don't imagine they closed all of them, how many are still out there?

I mean holy shit, sounds like it's a fairly poorly written buggy piece of crap if you ask me.

That's real kaizen!

[hackingbear]

Changing the letter K to C is clearly a big Kaizen! Don't think so? You will when you try to locate this wonderful product from the list of GUI desktops.

You can check it out on Windows too

[oneandoneis2]

I'm stuck with XP all day, but courtesy of the folks at KDE on Windows it's still possible to check out the release candidate for 4.3, and soon 4.3 itself should be available too. As detailed on my blog, it's as simple as:

Go to the website and grab the installer (kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe). Should download in seconds, then you can run it to start the REAL downloading and installation process.

Stick with all the default unless you have good reason not to. Apart from anything else, most servers don't seem to have the "unstable 4.2.95" package. I got mine from ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de

Skip all the language packs unless you really need them, install the rest. Let it get on with it. When it finishes, check the "run system settings after exit" box and finish.

It has some slightly odd choices for the defaults, so I went through and set everything to "Oxygen" to make it consistent & easy. But the main reason to run this thing is just to check that the QT apps work on your machine before you try and run the full KDE environment.

Assuming it works, try a few of the other KDE apps that will have appeared in your Start menu. It has games! :o)

To get KDE itself running, you need to run something which is, for some reason, not in the options in the KDE submenu in the Start menu. Go figure. Why would they want to make it easy to run KDE on Windows after you've downloaded KDE for Windows..?

To get the actual desktop environment, you need to run plasma-desktop.exe, which in a default install will be in C:\Program Files\KDE\bin

That should launch your KDE experience, and you can have a play from there. So far, it's a little unstable (Should be better once 4.3-proper is available) but otherwise performing fairly well.

Re:You can check it out on Windows too

[SpooForBrains]

Annoyingly I can't seem to find anything but 4.2.3 or lower stable release on any of the mirrors I tried ...

Worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

crap.

Uh?

[jotaeleemeese]

In Spanish k, q (as in que, qui) and c (as in ca,co, cu) sound exactly the same.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Typing Monkey]

Never thought of using something like Orca to get thru text quickly before, but I must say that was pretty damn efficient. It took me a couple of seconds to get used to the pace, but after that it wasn't to difficult to understand.

XFCE is for slow processors only. SRSLY.

[ciderVisor]

I'm actually using XFCE4 at the moment for no good reason other than change is good. It's leaner, with enough eye candy for me.

XFCE...eye candy...your head asplode.

I'm reminded of Bill Bryson's assessment of The Blackpool Illuminations - "I suppose if you had never seen electricity in action, it would be pretty breathtaking, but I'm not even sure of that."

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Tubal-Cain]

And were do you get the ebooks from?

Phonetic alphabet FTW!

[msimm]

C'mon, it'd be fun AND accurate!

Re:Fuck your captchas slashdot

[Mad Merlin]

Yes, if you're not logged in.

10, 000 bugs!

[postmortem]

Not even Microsoft has that many bugs? (not trolling, just asking)

Re:10, 000 bugs!

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is a piece of software. Microsoft is a company with many pieces of software.

If you take only Windows, then there are surely tens of thousands of known bugs.

Re:10, 000 bugs!

[10Ghz]

I remember one hearing the number of open bugs in Mozilla. I believe it was slightly under 50.000. And that was ONE APP!

All software has bugs. 10.000 is nothing unreasonable for a big project like KDE.

Re:10, 000 bugs!

[Teun]

You've just noted the difference between open and closed source. (the number of disclosed bugs)

Kmail just sux

[EEPROMS]

WOW Kmail has in-line images welcome to 1994, I use Linux in business (not IT) and not having good html and image editing features in an email client is just "DUMB". So now I am so used to using Thunderbird that I cant see any logical reason for learning K-(crippled)-mail. Don't laugh I have been complaining about the lack of basic html support in Kmail for over 6 years, I just gave up complaining and now have assigned kmail to the failed bin of software history.

Re:Kmail just sux

[Hatta]

HTML email is evil.

Re:Kmail just sux

[westyvw]

WTF? Why the hell would you have HTML in EMAIL? I read and send email from various devices, and the last thing I want is images and HTML because I want to read it and get to the point. Mobile devices drive home the issue: no HTML in email.

Re:Kmail just sux

[EEPROMS]

Oh I dont know, maybe because I send a few hundred emails a week to marketing types who like in line images and samples of end layouts "in-line" rather than having to open a second application to view a simple layout. How about another question, how will kde make me want to use Kmail in future based on the above "we all live in the 70's and only use text" comments ? How about this, how many emails out of the over 6 million emails we received last year were edited in Kmail, 0 nothing, zip, nada, we got more emails from gmail and thunderbird than Kmail (pretty easy to do when we got Zero). So way to go folks making me want to use kmail "never".

Why don't they show the Air theme in the video?

[Theovon]

They've talked about making the window theme consistent with the rest of KDE's styling. And the plasma widgets have this new theme. But then they mention how it integrates with KWin and then don't show it. Why?

Re:Why don't they show the Air theme in the video?

[Lazaryn]

Because there isn't an Air KWin decoration yet. The description may be a little confusing but "Plasma integration in KWin" means that KWin now uses the Plasma theme (Which by default is Air) for displaying popups such as alt+tab window switching, desktop effect text, etc. that all used to be unthemed. There is currently a decoration under development that allows for SVG-based decorations that will be included by default in KDE 4.4 called Aurorae which should make it very easy to create an Air decoration. Aurorae is currently also available for KDE 4.3 via KDE-Look.org .

Full disclosure vs none

[Oblong_Cheese]

KDE = open source. Windows = closed source.

KDE talks about *all* its bugs, mundane, show-stopper or otherwise.

Microsoft only talks about bugs when it absolutely has to, and only then when it is wrapped in a lovely, protective PR spin.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

Get any PDF, HTML, TXT, etc. Copy and paste it into gedit. Orca does a great job reading from gedit.

Creating the mp3 is trickier. Save the TXT file from gedit. Then, strip all the UTF-8 characters, like "circumflex", which is easy: just strip all the characters with the high bit set using a simple C program called stripUtf8. Then, use a customised version of the Voxin 'say' program to create the .wav, and 'lame -V2 file.wav' to create the mp3. To use the 'say' program, you'll need to pay under $10 to a non-profit in the UK. I hate to sound like a add for them, but that's the only legal way to get it cheap.

I've put the source for stripUtf8 and my customised 'say' program here.

Re:Kmail just ROCKS!

[rec9140]

I use KMail, and ONLY KMail.

I do not want HaTeMaiL in my email

Images -> ATTACHMENT
Pretty text in fonts and colors >/dev/null

I hope all that junk can be disabled,as I don't want it active.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

They are hard at work at it, but no, Orca does not yet work with QT4. Something about a 'dbus' interface that has to be written. On the positive side, it sounds like initial support is very close, probably just one more release away. I'm working on a QT4 app at work right now, and Orca can't do anything with it. Trolltech has been promising Linux support for screen readers for years, but this time, I think it will actually happen. I installed Kubuntu 9.04 last month. After finding it wouldn't run Orca, I wiped the disk and installed normal Ubuntu.

I also have had to use speech recognition to control my computer. For three years, I couldn't type. I wrote most of the first version of the Synplify HDL Analyst by voice. Now that I've got it talking back to me, I want to build a conversational computer interface. Something like Star Trek... "Computer! How long before this laptop explodes from the weight of all the stupid slashdot comments I've posted?" Elisa responds: "Don't you know anything?"

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[ChameleonDave]

What you've posted is just a travesty. You have an excuse only if you are actually blind, and need to consume large amounts of text aurally.

After a few seconds, one gets used to the voice, and its incomprehensible stream of sound becomes a comprehensible but ugly stream of sound. I'm currently listening to the Arabian Nights, read by Johanna Ward, with her precise, velvety voice. Each character sounds different, emphasis is where it needs to be, etc. With your way of doing things, not only is there no emphasis, no change of pace, no different intonation for dialogue, but things such as italics are deliberately stripped out even before the text reaches the synthesiser, along with all the diacritics necessary for words to be properly spelt and uttered. Résumé will become resume.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

Very good point. I got a set of over-the-ear ear-buds that let me here the audio-book without blocking traffic sounds. Driving while listening works for me. As I write this post, my wife is reading in bed, and I'm about to go back there with my audio-book on my phone. She'll be reading, and I'll be starring around, sometimes at her, sometimes at the ceiling... but what the heck, we're all true geeks here, right?

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

It doesn't really mean anything. All software of sufficient complexity has tons of defects that are almost never triggered. Its the same way that the bug counters of all the linux distros and KDE/Gnome have thousands of bugs open at any given time.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You gave KDE an honest test drive for less than a week? That doesn't sound like much of a test drive.

As for how KDE can do the things it does without forking, that's easy to answer.
1. They forked it themselves, continuing to develop the 3.5.x branch and the 4.x branch at the same time.
2. A lot of people like the new KDE4 system. The first few releases were a bit lacking, but 4.2 is an amazing desktop. I switched to 4.2 without a glance back.
3. The system continues to improve. People who don't like it at its current status can use the older 3.5 series.
4. Developing a desktop system like KDE or Gnome takes a lot of work. A lot. 10,000 bug reports. 2,000 feature requests. How many developers are going fork a project and pull that off?

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

  You're a real asshole, you know that? What, did you go to the Harvard School of Business Management?

  What other sorts of people do you consider inferior?

  There are much more polite ways of telling someone that you think they are wrong about something. Obviously this isn't something you learned.

SB - (Temporary Self-Appointed Idiot In Charge Of Detecting Assholes, SAIICODA, CoC, DCoC, SpecAdminAsstCoC, Etc*)

  *See footnotes

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

I think it is rather, all consumer software of sufficient complexity. My whole point was about workflow and tools used. In the end it is all about the bugs-per-line-of-code measure. I think NASA software is not the same as Gnome/KDE. However, it doesn't mean Gnome/KDE cannot adapt some of the useful NASA workflows.

Re:KDE

[atomic-penguin]

You gave KDE an honest test drive for less than a week? That doesn't sound like much of a test drive.

Yeah, if it had an intuitive interface, maybe I would have given it more of a chance! Really, didn't expect the jump from 3.5 to 4.0 or 4.1 to be as drastic. Is that really so much to ask, that the interface remain intuitive, and to not strip away classic functionality that users expect?

As for how KDE can do the things it does without forking, that's easy to answer.
1. They forked it themselves, continuing to develop the 3.5.x branch and the 4.x branch at the same time.
2. A lot of people like the new KDE4 system. The first few releases were a bit lacking, but 4.2 is an amazing desktop. I switched to 4.2 without a glance back.
3. The system continues to improve. People who don't like it at its current status can use the older 3.5 series.
4. Developing a desktop system like KDE or Gnome takes a lot of work. A lot. 10,000 bug reports. 2,000 feature requests. How many developers are going fork a project and pull that off?

I personally haven't tried 4.2 or 4.3. From what I have heard here, it sounds like things are making a turn around for the better. That's great if they are. I'll give it KDE 4 a whirl again some time. I never meant to slight the hard-working developers, or start a flame war.

On the other hand, I can also understand the concerns of the critics. I can empathize with users such as the grandparent poster, and Linus who has been vocal about the changes and were not comfortable with these in the early 4.x releases. I certainly have not been the only person to cry foul over the last few releases of KDE, and doubt I will be the last.

Quanta for KDE4?

[JoeCommodore]

Does that mean that Quanta web development tool will be native to KDE4 finally?

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

This only proves my observation further. Imperative programming is just not a good way to produce high quality code, application regardless, and more so for larger projects, because we humans cannot be expected to make correct decisions on behalf of the machine all the time, most of the time. We often make small but often subtly fatal mistakes in the most mundane structures - loops, conditional statements, array organization etc - the most "boring" parts of the actual task programming, less often in actual task logic. And imperative programming, something most programmers do most of their time, is all about that - telling machine HOW to go about performing a task, not WHAT task to perform. You are bound to underestimate the performer constantly, when slavishly telling him not only what to do but also how to do it, every time, and sooner or later it will be evident how much the results suffer because the "programmer" assumes the performer is dumb, has no memory, cannot learn. A question also - if we collectively had invested in more intelligent compiler research right from when it began to be possible (real memory/speed constraints), would software today be cheaper to produce and maintain, with regards to what bugs have cost both producers and consumers ever since? Such "more intelligent" compiler would refer to not-having to compromise on machine code efficiency when translating from VHLL (very high level language) source code, as opposed to from say C-like syntax, which in comparision would be LLL (low level langauge) - which otherwise is one of the reasons programmers prefer something in the middle of the tree - distrust to the dumb machine - "oh this can never be trusted to produce efficient code for me, I better do it all by hand with C". Which is oftentimes right even today. I mean, would Linux kernel be as efficient when written in ML or Haskell or Lisp? To continue with that question - would the benefits of dealing with "behavioral" code and executing it outweigh the energy spent on compiler research and otherwise all those bugs? I think such "alternate timeverse" is not without merits indeed.

10,000 bugs?

[smash]

So, in 6 months, in going from the KDE 4.2 that was widely lauded as "the KDE4 for end users" or "what KDE4 should have been", they've squashed over 10,000 bugs?

Wait, what?

What actual advantages are there to KDE3.5 for "getting shit done"? Really, I want to know...

I've briefly checked out KDE4.0, 4.1 and 4.2, and immediately been turned off (as a long time KDE user since before 1.0). Its as if they got rid of all the developers who had a clue and replaced them with Javascript web flunkies.

It just feels "wrong", unfamiliar and awkward to use - for no good reason that I can discern (why the fuck do i need a "plasmoid" to store folders in, what the fuck is wrong with my desktop - just for starters?)... and thats coming from someone who loved KDE 2.0 through 3.5 and was looking forward to further development down the same path...

Re:10,000 bugs?

[lee1]

What actual advantages are there to KDE3.5 for "getting shit done"? Really, I want to know...

I want to know what advantages there are to any desktop for getting things done. I try them (gnome, kde, xface, ...) out from time to time, but always go back to a simple keyboard-operated window manager (happy with dwm for some time now). When setting up a machine for a naive user, of course I supply a desktop, but I don't see the appeal for a literate user.

Best. Car. Analogy. Ever.

[melikamp]

Best. Car. Analogy. Ever.

KDE4 was a disaster

[lanner]

Yes, this is just another complaint post of whining and griefing about how I upgraded from KDE 3.5 to 4.x and got all butthurt.

Individually, these complaints are just whining, but when you look at just how many people are really upset about KDE4 and protesting loudly about it, you can't deny that KDE4 has received a very cold welcome from it's existing user base.

I stayed away from KDE4 for awhile after it came out because I had read the very negative reviews from KDE3 users. But, after after 4.2 was out, I decided to go ahead and check it out. Couldn't be that bad, right?

The similarities with Vista are pretty clear to me. It looks like Visturd, and it was about as unstable, buggy, and design deficient.

Thanks to other stupidity by Debian about which display manager to use, and other fun with dpkg, nothing worked after upgrading. After getting into KDE for the first time, my old desktop was completely destroyed. There is absolutely no point in trying to "migrate" any configuration or data from KDE3 into KDE4, as it just broke things and I had to start over from scratch anyway. It was incapable of bringing over anything like my color templates, sound schemes. As far as I could tell, the migration process did nothing but break crap that otherwise would have worked by default.

It has been a month or two since I upgraded and I'm still thinking of ditching KDE completely now. I'm totally disillusioned. I'll have to try out Gnome and XFCE, as they seem to be my best bet. I was fortunate that I've been able to do a lot of my work on my Macbook Pro.

Maybe the KDE4 release would not have been so bad if expectations had been managed. Version 4.0 - 4.1 was BETA only, and 4.2 was barely release-quality ready.

The most upsetting facet of KDE4 is that it seems like it was designed for idiots/newbs. If I wanted Vista, I would just buy it already. If you design for idiots, nobody will be happy; the idiots are still idiots and can't use it, and everyone else is gone.

So, from me to you KDE4 developers, as a long-time KDE user, fark you too.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

Forgot to mention that obligatory remark here: KDE is 4 million lines of source code; Windows these days is about 50 million (Windows Vista, acc. to Wikipedia); KDE 4.3, a subsequent version of a desktop software, manages to have had 10000 bugs for its 4 million lines of (hopefully system-abstract) source code, which puts it at having a bug in each ~400 SLOC. Windows Vista, a physical hardware operating system purportedly partly re-written from ground-up, is reported to have had about 30000 bugs and is 50 million SLOC, hence a bug in each ~1600 SLOC. When a desktop software has 4 times more bugs in the same volume of source code as an entire computer operating system, I say something is wrong with the former. Not to mention 4 million lines of code for a desktop environment - they either reinvented every little wheel there was to the system ("System libraries? We write that ourselves."), or their C++ -fu is way too fine-ground, perhaps more like assembly language even. I am not defending Gnome, neither Vista. My point had to do solely with the fact that the bug count is way too high as for what KDE 4.3 is (desktop "environment" in its 4th evolution, written in C++).

I speak Japanese, but thought "Caizen" = Chinese

[zooblethorpe]

I'm fluent in Japanese; I earn my bread and butter by translating Japanese documents into English. But this "Caizen" silliness had me scratching my head wondering what Chinese word it was supposed to be. "C" followed by a vowel is the usual romanization from Chinese for a "ts" sound plus a vowel. Meanwhile, unless someone's trying to get cute, the hard "K" sound in Japanese words is always romanized as a "K". Given too the KDE project's tendency to use "K"s in software titles, the deliberate non-"K"-ness of "Caizen" made me think they must be trying to spell something pronounced without a hard "K" sound.

Silly me; silly them.

Cheers,

Ret's Belly Guddo Engrish!!

[zooblethorpe]

My favorite T-shirt design (emblazoned across some teeny-bopper girl's chest in the north of Japan):

Taxi Drivers Whip

The Sprinkle Dressing

Gotta love teh Engrish.

Cheers,

and the K still stands for

[Anonymous Coward]

Krap

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Trogre]

I looked at your post for some time before deciding to reply, but I'm curious as to exactly what your point is.

Are you suggesting that the very act of picking up a book, smelling the paper, pausing at the turn of each page, and finishing each chapter with a brandy is the only way one can properly assimilate a literary work?

Some people might really want to read novels but might lack the time for dedicating a day and a half to staring at nothing but inky markings between meals and cigars. I'm all for taking time to smell the flowers, but prefer taking the time myself rather than having it forced upon me by artificial limitations.

Personally I have no problem with listening to audio-books, once I've gotten used to the voice as the OP mentioned. Then again I also don't mind listening to pre-recorded music *without* being in the presence of the original band, so what do I know?

 

I'm unmoved (Re:making progress)

[mi]

bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?

I did not even analyze the design or look/feel — as soon as I realized, that none of the KDE-3.x settings are preserved, I went right back to 3.5.10.

Yes, I suppose, one could bite the bullet and change everything once. But by the time I'm done, KDE-5 will require an all new effort. Unless there is an official "settings migration tool" of some kind, I'm sticking to KDE-3.x, despite KDE Project's arm-twisting (they would not even accept bug-reports for KDE-3.x any more). And if I do get the feeling later on, that KDE-3 is really obsolete, I am just as likely to move to a non-KDE environment

Re:I'm unmoved (Re:making progress)

[SomeKDEUser]

There is no reason to follow the settings of a different environment. The various apps should follow the old settings, depending on whether your distro kept the same config directory or not.

KDE3 security bugs are still accepted and fixed. Feature requests no. especially not if the feature exist in KDE4 -- can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Also, there will be no KDE5 until quite a few years. from which one must conclude from your configuration comment you are amazingly incompetent and should not be allowed near a computer.

Re:I'm unmoved (Re:making progress)

[mi]

There is no reason to follow the settings of a different environment.

It is not "a different environment". Gnome is a different environment. KDE4 is a new version — number 4, to be precise — of KDE, and ought to use the settings of the previous version(s), certainly of the immediately preceding version KDE3.

The various apps should follow the old settings, depending on whether your distro

I build from source, using ports-system, thank you very much. But kmail, kopete, and knotes had no idea, what to do. My friend on Kubuntu had the same problem — their old ~/.kde was ignored in favor of the newly-created, virgin ~/.kde4. Which means, it is KDE's problem, nothing to do with "distro". There may be reasons to create a new settings-directory, but there ought to be an official migration tool for copying the relevant settings from the old one.

KDE3 security bugs are still accepted and fixed. Feature requests no.

Nothing was accepted, as long as the KDE-version is reported as below 4.x, when I tried last week. One may not want to accept feature requests for an old version, but bug-reports (both, security and non-security), ought to be accepted. Seems like the site (bugs.kde.org) is fixed now — maybe, even in response to criticism. This is good...

When the migration tool arrives, I'll try switching to KDE-4 one more time...

Still Wont work on Dual Screen

[Delifisek]

This fucking fuck of KDE 4.x wont work on dual ATI system.

This was most frustrating experiment After 12 years of Linux experience.

Absolute mess, absolute faliure.

I don't care who is responsible. Kubuntu, KDE or ATI.

This was mess. I was so much happy with 7.10 and after than that. everything goes bad.

I'm running Kubuntu 9.10 alpha.

Still wont work.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[SomeKDEUser]

You need to meet Mr paragraph. A neat device to separate your long rambling posts into manageable chunks.

Patent issue?

[Britz]

If he goes as far as deleting that stuff maybe this is about software patents. If he didn't like your suggestions he probabely would just ignore them.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[GauteL]

Could someone mod this total asshole down instead of giving him +4 insightful?

The moderators that modded him up either did it without thinking, or lack the empathy to understand what it is like to be sight-impaired.

First; most people can read much faster than what it takes to read out loud. Just try it yourself. Read a paragraph silently and time yourself, then do the same thing while reading it out loud. Reading it out loud is going to take much longer.

This also means for many people, their natural reading speed is much faster than a typical audio book, meaning the typical speed of an audio book can get quite irritating after a while if you really want to know what is happening next, but your mind is left waiting for input as the reader progresses at his/her own speed.

Slowly speeding up audio and training your comprehension seems to me to be a very sensible way of getting the speed of an audio book up to your natural reading speed.

So fuck you very much, but I'm willing to bet that I (and the original poster) know perfectly well when to read and when to "savour" something.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

This is not a web-design forum. I was typing WITH paragraphs, if you have objections, direct them at whoever is responsible for resetting my "Post as" preference to "HTML formatted text" and whoever forbid editing posts. After that, you may look at the head of the page, it should bring you back to what the discussion is about.

If your attention span limits you to only comprehend three sentence posts with no lasting meaning, I guess you are part of the target KDE audience.

Fix for not being impressed

[Ilgaz]

What people need for geek self treatment is, find a Windows machine or OS X when binaries released, install entire KDE 4 binary and use it for couple of hours trying to understand what kind of a revolution it is.

It is a bit hard to understand, I build from source via Fink project on OS X and I had hard time explaining the OS X nerds what kind of change this means, for OS X. Of course, OS X having a auto triggered, aqua powered X11 which integrates with desktop kills half of the magic&impression.

Or... they could be a bit patient and buy first Symbian Foundation powered convergence device likely from Nokia and use it. It would be real stupid if Nokia didn't use KDE (in modified form) on their devices. I think S60 like ordinary phones will run it too while they look exactly like S60 on user level.

I agree to you, nobody has seen the full potential of KDE yet. It seems to deliver what NeXT promised before getting acquired by Apple and had to prison itself to OS X for financial reasons.

Your KDE 4 suggestion has been implemented by MS

[Ilgaz]

Comparison to Windows or even OS X is funny. You know why? KDE is also a gigantic suite of Windows applications which uses native Windows frameworks, controls. Same for OS X version. For example, a lot of open source developers expect ogg native playback on the host OS. What do I do? I simply install quicktime componenents from Xiph.

Best way is watching it compile on OS X, you will figure the magic.

That is a single proof you need when you talk about people -not- understanding what KDE 4 revolution is for open source. It is not "bigger, more stylish" KDE 3. As I said on my previous post, one should find a real or virtual windows and install kde 4 to it before talking about it.

For example, if Windows 7 sends a "right mouse button pressed" signal when one does that gesture, KDE 4 under Windows 7 will have it. You understand what I mean? Think beyond Linux&BSD.

That's English English to you...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the way people refer to "British English" desperately trying to avoid the obvious - that English and all its variations originated in England.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[SomeKDEUser]

Your excuses would have more weight if there was no preview functionality.

BycottNovell

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Mono is a default install with anything SuSe has to offer. Beware, here be dragons!

Re:BycottNovell

[Enderandrew]

As a KDE user, I don't have Mono installed with the default desktop. I install Mono only as a dependency for moonlight for the few websites that require it.

I don't see Mono as being inherently evil. It allows people to get away from Microsoft by creating an alternate implementation using free software. Isn't that a good thing?

Microsoft has said that the Mono team completely owns the Mono code, and they made a patent pledge to never sue for patents that might be covered by Mono. They can't simply go back on that pledge, since it is part of the deal to appease the EU.

That being said, I am a little disappointed to see Gnome devs make Mono a dependency for more and more apps, given that many people don't want to go anywhere near Mono.

In laptops, 1024x600 is low-end

[tepples]

Nowdays, 1280x1024 19" lcd is pretty much low end

In laptops, 1024x600 (9"/10") is low-end, and a few bargain-basement models have 800x480 (7").

Re:In laptops, 1024x600 is low-end

[Anne Honime]

In laptops, 1024x600 (9"/10") is low-end, and a few bargain-basement models have 800x480 (7").

1024x600 and less are netbooks and they ship with icewm (or after some tweaks kde 3.5) for a reason ; my asus 900A now runs WindowMaker for that same reason.

Linux set-top boxes without TiVo style restriction

[tepples]

And the year of Linux on the desktop.

WORKSFORME

I wish for Linux on the set-top where the owner of the machine is root.

Re:KDE

[SomeKDEUser]

the tech of KDE3 had reached its limits. It was necessary to re-architecture the whole thing. So they did.

Then of course you need time to rebuild the features. But no one is forced to leave KDE3: it cannot have new features because it coded itself to a corner, but it is not going away.

KDE4 will (already has actually) have more features than 3, because the architecture is so much better. But they will not appear magically, nor instantly. When the devs released 4.0, it said "look, we have this new architecture, it is going to be cool, help us"

And the people whined "we wanted no change! and more features!". And the devs were unhappy. But still that way progress happened. And could not have happened so fast otherwise.

Unfathomably however, people are still ranting more than a year after. About free stuff they are not forced to use, on issues since then resolved. This is utterly mad.

It takes time to learn to read in any medium

[tepples]

I think if I heard something like this most of the time my brain would be processing loose words instead of processing the plot.

When you first learned to read with your eyes, be it through McGuffey Readers or Dick and Jane or Hooked On Phonics or the "politically correct" readers used by public schools, your brain was processing loose words. No matter the medium, it takes time to learn to read.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

I was blindly assuming I am posting in plain text, since I had personally set it up so in user preferences long ago. Which it now wasn't, probably because I flushed my cookies not long ago, even though I don't know if the actual preference is bound to the user profile or a separate cookie indeed. Was it so hard to understand what I was "rambling" about? You actually come across as more intelligent than many people here, who like to push sarcasm in front of their lack of relevant argument, which they do not even bother talking about, instead using Slashdot as a convenient place to spit out their unprocessed hate.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[cheftw]

I didn't mean to go that far at all. I was only saying that just getting through something isn't half as enjoyable as taking it at a leisurely pace.

And as an aside, I think most people like to listen to live music when in the presence of the original band.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[cheftw]

A bit of decorum wouldn't go amiss.

Nor would a look at the numbers involved. He was talking about having the audiobook read at much faster than reading speed.

It was too fast, in my opinion to enjoy and seemed to me to be again the spirit of reading a novel.

Is that ok with you?

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[cheftw]

I did know. But thanks.

It wasn't intended to be taken fully seriously, nor was I telling him he was wrong.

For the record I'd rather die than do business management. We assholes study Physics.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[segedunum]

They are hard at work at it, but no, Orca does not yet work with QT4. Something about a 'dbus' interface that has to be written.

Probably because Orca and GTK/Gnome support is behind in porting over to D-Bus. I really thought they would have made more progress by now. Qt 4 already has pretty ample support for AT-SPI, but Gnome/GTK apps use the older CORBA interfaces which makes interoperability difficult.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[tenco]

Wow. I have to slow it down to at least 60% of it's speed to understand it. Nice skill. :)

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[tenco]

What about using the preview button?

Re:I speak Japanese, but thought "Caizen" = Chines

[Anonymous Coward]

It's tongue-in-cheek: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/08/inspired-by-freedom.html

Is the taskbar still Plasma?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hate Plasma. Specifically, I hate any app that doesn't use native widgets.

I want a taskbar and K-menu that uses native widgets, not that plasma crap. This is part of why I'm sticking with KDE 3.5.

no bookmarks in KDE 4.x

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 3.5 had a bookmark applet for the panel and via right-click on the desktop. In KDE 4.2, there is no applet and the only way to get to bookmarks is from within konqueror. Dolphin, the new, redundant file manager, doesn't even support bookmarks. As for my user experience 4.x has been more about useless eye candy and extremely limited functionality. (I like the snow desktop effect)

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Teun]

Them long emphases of the periods between sentences really spoil this example.

;)

This might be a way to quickly gather a lot of info but you better have an unusual brain to parse it correctly, forget enjoyment.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[JohnFluxx]

And what's your contribution to all this? Or do just sit on the sidelines and moan about you would do it better?

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[JohnFluxx]

Yes it does. If KDE adopted the NASA workflows, then we'd have a tiny tiny fraction of the code.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

Don't give me that crap.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[JohnFluxx]

Ah, so you're one /those/ guys. You could do all oh so much better of course. But of course you don't.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

I hate to repeat myself, but here goes: don't give me that crap. And here is bonus line, since space is obviously so cheap here: gods forbid I ever attempt to write something like KDE in KDEs spirit.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[JohnFluxx]

God forbid you contribute anything at all.

Re:Cat aint got my tongue

[amn108]

Yes.