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KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing
An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."
I love eye candy, as long as there is an easy way to turn it off. I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows.
For the ignorant, please explain what KDE currently uses for composting? I know on my machine it's hardware accelerated and DirectX isn't available on Linux. Doesn't that mean, by default, that they used OpenGL?
or you just don't turn on the optional compositing in the first place? this is a new feature created and intended for newer machines.
All the people who really needed translucent bouncing icons already migrated to OSX. But I won't complain too much so long as distros still include fvwm.
No, you can turn off compositing. Unlike akonadi, which already makes KDE unusable.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
More things to brag to my friends about. My e-penis will be massive by the time it comes out.
KDE can use XRender and/or OpenGL 2.1.
Just the need to upgrade how Kwin uses OpenGL currently to do rendering. Right now its still using the old OpenGL 1.1 - style rendering (fixed-function rendering pipeline) to a programmable one using vertex and fragment shaders. This way, it'll be easier to port it on embedded devices that uses OpenGL 2.0 by default
More like the winds of stupidity. GNOME is still designed for idiots, and the KDE developers decided that being a rock solid DE with a good OLE model was less important than having cool looking visual effects and trendy desktop applets.
Palm trees and 8
Good luck with that.
People will be blaming KDE for the following issues until they abandon the idea:
1. Half the Intel users will blame KDE for the kernel panics you get when using a Hello World shader with some of the Intel drivers..
2. The other half of the Intel users will blame KDE that they can't use any of the items listed (frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers) because they still only support OpenGL 1.5 from 1865..
3. Then there will be the Linux people complaining about it running very slowly because some software driver is used by X11 due to distribution issues with distros and proprietary drivers.
4. The AMD users will probably be using some old buggy version of their driver that has buggy implementation of frame buffer objects or whatever.
5. See #4 but replace AMD with Nvidia.
6. Then there's the army of Linux users that do have a Nvidia or AMD card, but their card is from 1765 and therefore doesn't support OpenGL 3.0.
But besides all that OpenGL 3+ is pretty neat and you can do some fun shaders for your compositing. I wish them the best of luck!
This seems like it can only be a good thing. The major place where we're lacking (AFAIK) is in driver support, and having a major software suite such as KDE use OpenGL 3 will help the driver writers manage some of these bugs (the same way Compiz appearing on the scene majorly improved graphics drivers in Linux a few years ago). Perhaps this will also help to push Intel to OpenGL 3 (or 4 - I mean, COME ON!). At the same time, I have some Linux machines that don't have OpenGL 3 support (one has a GeForce 6600), so I really hope they keep functionality with OpenGL 2 for a while (that machine isn't getting upgraded - the next thing I do to it will be to replace it).
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
The title is wrong. Is not appropiate to say that KDE SC may use OpenGL 3. Is KWin, the window manager (KDE apps don't call OpenGL directly). KWin can be used in other desktop environments, and other window managers can be used in KDE.
Will the software implementations of OpenGL 3 be any slower than the version they're using now?
I don't know that we need any more eye candy in KDE 4. It already has a ridiculous amount of aesthetically pleasing features. How about we squash some existing bugs and add more usability features.
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Wait, wasn't there a story a few days ago about OpenGL 4.1? What's with the 3.0?
My Pineview Netbook is a new machine, you insensitive clod. And it composites just fine. But no OpenGL 3.0. Though, that's exactly a move that would fit the KDE projects policy regarding users.
I am using KDE4, but I am probably going to go back to fluxbox on my next machine I am building.
Or you could have RTFA and read that older systems will gracefully fall back to the slower implementations. The main purpose of using new OpenGL systems is performance. There's no reason why the slower methods can't be used.
Furthermore, it's also acknowledged that the free drivers won't be supporting OpenGL for another year, at least,
Surprise, there are other people thinking about backwards compatibility than you.
Oh for god sakes people. Kwin provides pluggable back ends for rendering engines for compositing. Currently we support xrender and OpenGL 1.1, soon we will support the next version of OpenGL. Big deal. You can turn compositing on or off, or choose which engine is best for your platform. We will not remove the old engines or force everyone to use compositing. So stop your trolling.
No, then you just carry on using OpenGL 1.1 or xrender
Funny, I don't recall you ever having paid me anything
Ever have a power outage while in the KDE? Good luck getting the DE back with your old preferences. That whole "integrated" aspect is a bitch to recover from - one thing goes wrong, and it's a slow death of cascading issues with everything else that's intertwined. Don't get me wrong, I've been a die-hard KDE user for about 8 years, and would have recommended it in a heartbeat, but it has really become a monster - trying to troubleshoot it is like trying to troubleshoot a Windows box, now. I took KDE 4.something for a quick spin not long ago, and couldn't believe how slow it had become. I've migrated to XFCE-4.1, and in many ways, it feels like KDE used to feel. I still miss Konqueror for file management, but am getting my head around Thunar. Everything else works just as well as the KDE without all that psychotic overhead, plus you can run those "needed" KDE apps in XFCE as well.
If such a change happened, I'd imagine there would be alternate rendering paths, just as you can fall back to xrender right now; old hardware likely won't be left out.
I can tell you that 4.5rc2 automagically loads up akonadi and all of its fluff/garbage/helpers if you have a clock plasmoid. Without option to turn it off.
Akonadi and Nepomuk are simply jokes. Enforcing them on the user, specially considering how useless both services are, is a really bad idea©.
Nepomuk can be disabled easily, not so much for Akonadi. You literally need to cheat it by giving empty path strings, or no clock.
I'm a major KDE advocate, but those two services get on my nerves way too much, specially because they are rather hefty for what they do (for me, nothing at all, for others, very limited usage).
Rant mode ON:
KDE seems exceedingly dependent on itself right now. And integration efforts (with popular apps out of KDE) are pretty much non-existent or unknown even among devs (I discovered after a friendly rant about the current "closed" state of things, that Krunner now does index Firefox bookmarks. The person who corrected me learned it by pure chance it seems, as no "user friendly media" (getting deeeeeeeeeeeep into mailing lists and all the bulk of svn commits is not user friendly, it costs more than mere minutes to check all that) reported on it at all).
I don't know who is to blame but whoever is responsible for this, is not helping the already damaged (by 4.0) reputation of KDE. Half-baked and/or mandatory apps are not helping. Neither does the silly "KDE SC" gimmick.
I can only think something in the management chain is broken, leading to absurd/rushed/experimental decisions pulled off. Either that or the exceeding majority of the 6-month release cycles is translation/bugfixing. As new features talked about during the release of "KDE 4.X" are implemented in "KDE 4.X+1" in the same state shown during the 4.X release (Look at tiled windows in the 4.5 branch. It's there, but...)
Rant mode OFF
Sorry, I really needed to put that up for discussion. Whenever Akonadi is mentioned I go berserk as I am reminded of stuff like it being a requisite for the standard clock.
The worst is that I am an enthusiastic KDE user and I follow development closely, trying betas and reporting bugs. I don't feel "betrayed" or anything like that, but some things are too annoying/habit breaking/RAM eating. Krunner, a Quicksilver/Kupfer-like launcher, can't be disabled and I was told by KDE people that it governs over logout functions (WHY THE LAUNCHER? why can't I just have my alternative of choice without option to take it out or disable it?).
Well, at least the project is dynamic and a good fix/decision changes for better can happen eventually.
Why not? Serious question. There are some companies and government agencies out there that still use 1960s mainframes. This idea that we should code only for new hardware is only appropriate for a certain washington based software company whose profits depend on making people buy entirely new software suites every time they upgrade their hardware.
There's not as much profit in selling a minor software upgrade that works on an older computer compared with selling a full new software version that works only on a newer computer. By deliberately making newer software unusable on old hardware, customers are forced to upgrade their hardware, and incidentally have to buy a new bundled Windows OS, which then forces them to upgrade all the otheir software that they use as well. It's a mug's game.
There's no reason why open source should follow that model. It's free, and it's intended to *help* users make the most of what they have, not just grab the most of their money. Moreover, making software run on older and different hardware is a great way for developers to find bugs, and thereby improves the quality of the code. And that means that other developers will have more confidence to reuse it for their own projects.
Open source should have a 50+ year outlook. That's how the real world works. Look around you, how many buildings, roads, bridges, companies, laws etc, are 50 years old? How would you live if you had an arbitrary rule that you couldn't enter a building or cross a bridge or drive in a car built before the year 2000, and could only do business exclusively with companies founded after 2000, etc?
IF i have to RTFA then what value is a summary? Or Slashdot at all? The entire point is to aggregate news so you don't have to run off and read every single story out there at its original source.
Blaming /. because you're both lazy and wrong is... well, lazy. And wrong.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Or use Compiz Fusion, which I find faster and much more feature rich than the KWin compositing.
Nepomuk can be disabled easily
I haven't really figure out what it's good for. When I log in it balloons me with a message that Nepomuk couldn't find redland and that my data isn't available. To fix this, a mailing list post said that I'd need some kind of soprano tool but that doesn't really work most of the time. I still have no idea really what these are, I'd just like a dot-release upgrade to succeed. I hack on stuff, but I don't want to hack on everything.
I hope KDE4 gains resiliency after it's feature complete. I still think they're doing more right than GNOME, though, and their architecture looks great on paper.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I would have to agree about Akonadi. I recently did an install of Arch Linux, and used KDE for about a week before it started annoying me more than Windows 7 does. I removed KDE and just went back to Gnome. At least there I can strip out all of the stuff I don't want to use.
As computers get more powerful, things become feasible that were not in the past. People want those features. Problem is, making software that uses them doesn't work with older systems.
That is just life. Now as for your example with mainframes, in that case someone chooses to pay for support for a system. They cost a ton to maintain. Also, you do not, in fact, get new software, just support on what you have. If you own an IBM/390, as we do, you don't get to run the new version of zOS on it. You are stuck with old software. Supported software, but old software.
Nowhere did I see anything that said support for old KDE would stop, just htat new KDE may need hardware to do composition. I fail to see the problem here.
It's pretty amazing seeing someone actually openly whine about having to RTFA. Apparently that would slow down on the amount of trolling one can accomplish.
Had the article said "may add support for OpenGL 3.0" instead of "may use OpenGL 3.0" then it would have been more obvious that they weren't getting rid of the fallbacks.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
What would be the big deal? Unless you immediately end all support for an old version when a new one comes out, who cares? Part of the march of technology is that sometimes, old hardware gets deprecated. New software requires features and power not found on it. So you have to use the older versions, or update the hardware. Nothing wrong with this unless it is done in an abrupt or forceful manner.
I've no doubt some day KDE will jettison software rendering. It will be so rare to find a non-accelerated computer (getting harder all the time as it) that it won't be worth including in the new version. However I've also no doubt that you won't go and delete the old versions off the net.
No, you're not a customer. If you were, you would know that KDE falls back to no compositing when there is no HW acceleration available. You're just a whiner on an internet message board.
Why are you using a 15 year old PC anyway?
Oh, shut it. OS X 10.0 was barely beta quality as well, and somehow people stopped complaining when it started becoming usable, even though the upgrade to 10.2 cost money. Same with Windows Vista (6.0) --> Win7 (6.1). With KDE4, you were even warned not to use 4.0. But you still had to run off and use it, didn't you?
You're a user, not a customer. There is a difference. Unless you know some place that sold you KDE, and in that case you got ripped off, because you can download it right from your distro's repository like the rest of us users.
Because i dont subscribe to upgrading just because there is new and shiny available. The old functions perfectly well, and its appalling that people code like they do today, rendering perfectably good hardware simi-functional.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, how is OpenGL 3.0 more bloated than 1.x? How is it slower?
about OpenGL decorating my windows.
DO care about things like "desktop works" and "can find a fast, professional theme that makes taskbar look like window title bars," neither of which is available with KDE since KDE 4 was released.
Yes, I have recently tried KDE, up to and including KDE 4.4.5 on Fedora. It continues to suck eggs. KDE 3 was professional and powerful. KDE 4 seems to have all the options I don't want, none of the options I actually used, no way to get a unified KDE/GNOME/Plasma theme (hell, you can't even get a unified kwin/plasma theme), ugly artifacting with 3D compositing off, craptacular stability and a distinct inability to remember many settings, dog-slow previews compared to Nautilus, no "compact" mode in Dolphin, either, poor dual-display support that fails to automatically handle them elegantly, and a distinct lack of KDE4-specific, complete alternate icon themes at kde-look.org to do away with the bright colors (I don't want red icons and blue icons both on my desktop at the same time; my desktop PC is not an Icee machine, it's totally unprofessional).
In short, I find KDE 4 totally considerably less usable than GNOME or KDE 3.5 and I'm fairly sure that pouring more development hours into 3D compositing is not going to make it moreso. How about just fixing the artifacting with 2D rendering? That I could actually give a damn about, though it would be one problem solved amongst many, many problems that didn't exist until KDE 4.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
To truly hate akonadi, you need to be logging in with $HOME on an nfs mount. And shutting down the box from time to time.
What happens is that KDE issues telinit 6 without waiting for akonadi and mysqld to terminate, which means that your nfs mount is still active at shutdown, so when the system forces the unmount the database is not coherent. Thus you get the dreaded "akonadi could not start" error on next login. Well, that's easy enough to solve by just whiffing $HOME/.local/share/akonadi -- as long as you don't have anything useful stored in there.
Which the KDE team is making harder to do all the time. Good thing the system backs up that akonadi database on a regular basis.
Oh, wait ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You have made a great set of observations and I wish that KDE mgmt would give this a read.
Then don't upgrade! No one is forcing you to install software that is incompatible with your old hardware...
I very much doubt there's anyone seriously using a 1960's mainframe. Using a mainframe that's compatible? Sure.
Ah, yes, the good old days of KDE, back when it had exactly five options that could be configured, and the only way to modify the menu was by hacking an XML file.
Funnily enough I recently made the reverse migration. Xfce served me well for a while, but every single recent version has replaced something that worked fine with a rewritten version that has fewer features and/or simply doesn't work properly at all. KDE meanwhile is very pleasant to use, runs perfectly fast even on my underpowered netbook, and is the only mainstream Linux desktop environment that actually bothers to support widescreen monitors properly by implementing usable vertical panels.
Well said. I agree completely. If you haven't already, you should check out one of Aaron Seigo's posts from earlier this year on his blog:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html
He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.
In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.
I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).
What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.
Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...
It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Care to list all the current hardware that has usable support for OpenGL 3.0 in the open source driver? Feel free to expand that list from current to any hardware if you so desire.
I second the motion to get rid of Nepomuk and (especially) Akonadi. KAddressBook worked fine in KDE 4.3. With 4.4, I have to view/edit my V-Cards in GNU Nano. :/
Luke-Jr
Bah, old hat Trolling. I read the exact same story almost 10 years ago. It was not true then and is not true now.
Not even a nice try.
Because i dont subscribe to upgrading just because there is new and shiny available.
Unless it's KDE.
Really. OpenGL is nice. The one thing that the KDE team could really do to make the DE better is fix the contact manager in Kontact. Please! Fix it. On every install I have, the DE whines about Akondi can't start, and the contact manager does not work. Everything else in the PIM works, but what good is a PIM if it can't keep contacts?
The rest of the DE is great. It looks nice, works well, and is more stable than Win7. I will go so far as to say I love KDE 4. But the contact manager is horribly broken. If any of the KDE devs are watching, please fix it. Or maybe someone can make a working contact manager plugin for Kontact. Dam, I wish I could code.
Cheers, RM
Nobody's as dumb, as I appear to be
I am the customer, they need to cater to my needs, not their wants.
They cater to the wants of the majority userbase. They don't have to cater to your needs.
It doesn't take an old machine to make kde 4.x unusable.
Now that I think about it, kde 4.x is like the hot but totally completely brainless girlfriend... Nice eyecandy, initially very pleasing and exciting, then rapidly becomes tiresome as the reality that most of your interaction occurs outside of the bedroom sets in.
Likewise, kde 4.x is very pretty and the first half hour is spent checking out all the cute/neato things it does. Horray, kmail finally keeps responding while checking mail in! Konqueror supports more of web 2.0!
Then the dream begins to crack: Why does my desktop's framerate crash to a slideshow when I first move a wobbly window? Why does my desktop require me to install a complete SQL server for something that doesn't work worth a damn anyway?
Then you wake up and the house is on fire: Wait, I swear Konqueror used to fit twice as many file icons on this page... Did its html engine just completely stop updating the display on some random webpage? Why does it seem to randomly forget settings?
Then you call the fire department and realize that everything 4.x does, 3.5.10 does faster, better, more stably and while using half the ram.
Every new version that's released I try out, and since 4.2 (when the showstopping breakage was mostly fixed) every time I end up going back to 3.5 muttering about how they don't seem to have fixed a damned thing.
IF i have to RTFA then what value is a summary?
Because a summary - by definition - does not go into the specifics of the prose it is summarising.
They only have to cater to the needs of their target customers, not their current customers. They obviously don't want you as a customer anymore =(
Yes but you can't stick with old outdated hardware, and then whine when the software surpasses it. No one is forcing anyone to upgrade. Don't want to upgrade your hardware? Fine. Just don't expect the software world to just stop progress because you don't want to upgrade.
Have you reported this as a bug? It certainly sounds like one.
Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).
What with XDG (I think) now also encouraging the use of ~/.local, I fear it's only got to get worse. :(
I ended up just having a truly local ~ and just rsyncing it to the server every night for backup. (But I don't actually have to access my ~ from mulitple locations, so YMMV.)
HAND.
screw usability. can we drop "SC" from any communication ? ;)
it looks bad, is unclear and took 3 releases of kde (ha) for me to care enough to find out what sc means. and that's as a kde user, and somebody who had read about this "sc" thing before... imagine the dilution of the brand for non-users.
confused about this post ? have no idea what "sc" means ? vote against it in the next election !
Rich
Neither does the silly "KDE SC" gimmick.
ahh, at least i'm not the only one ;)
that one, hopefully, will be presented as one of the great marketing mistakes of the early days of opensource software centuries later. or something.
Rich
Or not use KDE at all, sticking with XFCE or XMonad or any of the other lightweight window managers.
I really wasn't trying to post flamebait. It was an observation from the perspective of someone who used to dabble but hadn't paid much attention to [k]ubuntu, etc., in about 3 years.
I want HOW the API being used updated. Our desktops should be a perfectly rendered 3d wheat field, gently rustling on a cool summer's eve. Think Far Cry, but no game, just the desktop eye candy. This field would have a button not unlike the start button in the bottom left. It would open many very useful free and open source applications. All of your email contacts with DreamOS would be automagically merged and synced with your iphone or android. If you were at home, your phone would know to route the call through google voice to the computer screen. There, in the field, your contact would appear, either webcam fed background culled, or as an avatar, or more interestingly a blend of the two. Think, just the head on any body imaginable, man or beast. There your friend's disembodied representative would speak with you in perfect 5.1 audio. This OS would also have a plugin system allowing these avatars to conduct basic games real time. Nintendo 64 games, chess, cards....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It'd be nice if they updated it sometime.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Uhhhh...dude? Currently running XP Pro on a circa 99 1.1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM. It runs fine. By the time XP Pro is EOL that box will be so old it probably won't even load web pages, so really, how long can you expect it to run, considering most folks change boxes every 5 years? Hell I doubt even Linux guys would want to keep using hardware any older, simply because web page bloat will make surfing painful on anything less.
As for your "50 year outlook" that might be fine for big iron, but for desktops? With the exception of the business class desktops I built for rough environments here in the shop I just don't see many PCs past 6 years old. The race to the bottom has created some seriously cheap and shitty hardware, and it frankly just don't last that long. Blown caps, blown PSUs taking the mobo with it, all this cheapo China crap just don't last that long. The few I see going that long (like the one above I'm working on) end up getting shitcanned because web bloat is going nowhere but up and folks want to use their FB and MySpace.
So while I agree that developers should always try to eliminate bloat (which is why I hated Vista and love 7, much nicer without the bloat) spending any real time and effort caring about truly old hardware is just nuts. Besides with Linux there are lightweight DEs so it isn't like those with ancient hardware can't still use a modern OS. I would say the cutoff point should probably be around 6 years. Keeping hardware older than that just costs you more in the longrun as those old Pentiums weren't exactly eco-friendly anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Bah, old hat Trolling. I read the exact same story almost 10 years ago. It was not true then and is not true now.
Not even a nice try.
With the bits about token ring and ext2 I think he copied a 10 year old troll...
Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas. Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.
All you people complaining about the state of Akonadi and the interconnectedness of KDE are missing an important part of the picture.
No matter what OS or desktop or GUI apps you have been using for the past 20 years, all of them have an implied conceptual data model underlying the collection of apps that you are using. For the most part, the "implied" bit has followed the old X11/Windows 2.0 "shared nothing" model, where bits and pieces of the data has been either replicated or ad-hoc shared (apps explicitly being aware of other apps and sharing data with them). This has worked okay for a long time, since users have assumed that this is the way it will always work.
Some of you folks may remember PalmOS, or are using Symbian and/or Android phones now. These platforms make the data model explicit, and all apps are aware of them. On an Android phone, the SMS, IM, Calendar and Contacts apps all know how to access the user's address book without knowing anything at all about each other. If you write a contacts sync backend, you don't need to care about any of those apps - you know how to access the contact data already from the database API.
What ends up happening is that YOUR DATA becomes the central focus of the platform. Not the app's data, or its storage format or anything like that. The apps are relegated to being clients of the larger data model. This is the correct approach for the future of the UI.
The KDE project has had its eye on this model of the future UI for a decade now. There has been bumbling and disorganization, miscommunication, dozens of key people coming and going, cat-herding and unfinished code. This is hardly surprising considering the size and nature of the KDE development team and its organization. Despite your irritations with the current state of a given KDE release, I think it's worth remembering what is being attempted here.
Of course, everyone's threshold is different and you may decide that being part of this massive experiment is not worth the headache. For you folks there are plenty of alternatives and I don't think anyone is going to be upset if you go back to the 80s-style UIs of other desktops such as KDE 3.x.
At the same time, don't be surprised if the KDE project doesn't make it a high priority to enable picking bits and pieces to run elsewhere; it's worthwhile, but it comes with a high opportunity cost that dilutes effort on the larger goals of the project.
The software does what it does because the people that MADE it wanted it that way. KDE, nor any other free software, is not being made for YOU - you don't pay for it. It's being made to suit the developers and if you get some use out of it, great!
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ohh, you need to give Gnome more credit here. I used to be very much a KDE guy and I really didn't like Gnome at all. But that's changed now - I still like KDE (and I look forward to using a more stable and supported KDE 4) but Gnome has come a long way. It's very usable, customizable, and stable.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The worst is that I am an enthusiastic KDE user and I follow development closely, trying betas and reporting bugs. I don't feel "betrayed" or anything like that, but some things are too annoying/habit breaking/RAM eating
I wholeheartedly agree with the Akonadi & Nepomuk rant, and feel similar to you. I feel 4.5 has become waaaaaay too power hungry for not a lot in return. Frankly, aside from the few killer apps & such KDE has (K3B, Dolphin, slideshow background) I have left for LXDE (I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 minimal + LXDE testing). LXDE is lightweight, doesn't have a lot of cruft running around and is familiar - It reminds me of KDE3 & Windows Classic interfaces which I still think are probably the best done ever.
Not to say LXDE doesn't have areas which need to be addressed:
1) Lack of a solid feature complete media player. Aqualung & Deadbeef, beyond just playing MP3s, having nothing. No playlist management, no scrobbling, nothing. I use Pana for this. It's a rebadged Amarok 1.4.x which is still being updated.
2) File Management & Network Navigation. Much respect to PCManFM, but it's not ready for primetime. Fuse doesn't work properly with PCManFM, and using pyNeighborhood is just scary bad. I bit the bullet and installed Dolphin. Works with everything, plus has the split pane function which for me is a killer feature.
3) Menu Management. In LXDE, it doesn't exist. Period. To edit anything you have to break out leafpad and edit config files. And when the menu doesn't put things in the correct place or even put things on there at all, that's a problem.
I still think KDE could win me back quite easily if & when they get their act together and really start cleaning up their stuff from a resource point of view. I still think their package is top notch, but takes too much system to run it.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
He might not be wrong, but I think his attempt is doomed. Nepomuk and Akonadi are not applications, so to the user they are meaningless. However KDE4 is generating messages about them, so that's confusing at least - usually annoying, too. On top of that there seem to be no applications which actually use them in a way which would get the user interested - he states himself that he turned off Nepomuk on his own system, so apparently he hasn't found a use for it either.
The KDE developers want these services available to applications, and that makes a certain amount of sense. However they cause problems and eat a lot of resources which leads to user complaints. Instead of starting the services by default (and using a setup which consumes lots of memory and CPU) they should default to off. Then when an application is first started which uses these services, that should start a wizard which lets you configure the services. Then you could decide which service to run and control the resource requirements. The user would understand what the services are for in this context. Right now he needs to find out what they are for by noticing the high system load and identifying the process which eats up all the resources - that's not a good experience.
Yes, they did. The last 3.x release was 3.5.10, released days before 4.1.1. A good, solid and mature desktop you could use for a year while contemplating whether upgrading to the then rather usable 4.3.1 or moving to a different system. Sure, Microsoft is better at maintaining old versions of the OS. Apple is worse. Gnome's latest major version was back in 2002 or so, and I'm not going to bother with digging up the release history of 1.4, the last Gnome version I used (although I've stopped complaining about Gnome 2.0 now).
If only this would all work with Xinerama.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
All the above comments aside, it sounds to me like linux *did* work in this troll's example. The part they didn't like was that they believed they had to give away all their work "for free", which while probably true, doesn't mean "linux" didn't work, as it clearly did. The troll even mentions (s)he (and/or their company) was pleased with how it worked, and had planned to expand its usage.
Really, troll -- if you're going to spit this crap unto the comment system, at least come up with something that makes sense.
bork bork bork!
As I said, if you feel it's a waste, don't upgrade!
Well you could always remove gnome-panel, which is exactly what I did because I use AWN as a replacement for it. Any more "gotcha" questions?
A huge number of people are having serious problems with the KDE 4.x series.
If they're having issues, they need to file detailed bug reports. Software developers are generally neither mind readers nor are they working for the NSA. ;)
Let me know when they manage to fix all of their fuck-ups from the 3.5.x to 4.0 transition.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I used (yes past) Linux on my Work desktop for 10 years. I always used KDE. I know it from the first version until know.
Until KDE 3, KDE really improved, but KDE 4 was a horrible start. I actually didn't start to use it until 4.2, and still it didn't have all the features for KDE 3.5. And it felt slow. Really slow. On the same machine I just suddenly had 15~20% x.org/kde cpu usage. And when I updated to 4.3 and so on it became even worse.
At the end just focus move the mouse took about 3~4s. Well, I ditched, I now work with OS X. It is not perfect, but at least I can do my work compared to KDE 4 which didn't let me do it all.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919