Slashdot Mirror
Interview With KDE On Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin
paugq writes "Last week KDE 4.5.4 was released for Windows as a late Christmas present from the KDE on Windows team. Almost at the same time BehindKDE, the site for interviews with KDE contributors, has started a new series of interviews with the 'Platforms' theme. In the first interview, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks with Patrick Spendrin, the current release manager of KDE on Windows and asks about the current status of the project, challenges and difficulties. In future interviews, Mac, Solaris, BSD (it's not dead, after all!), Haiku, OS/2 and more."
Ehm... Read the article? Oh right, this is Slashdot. Sorry, never mind.
But some of those operating systems are pining for the fjords.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Ehm... Read the article?
Oh right, this is Slashdot. Sorry, never mind.
FTFA, the only statement close to answering the question is:
and we want to support free tools also on Windows (that's why we do KDE on Windows, right?)
Doesn't really answer *why* KDE for Windows is a good thing -- one is left thinking "there are already lots of free beer/speech tools for Windows, why add one more?"
Sure, you probably have an answer to that. My point is the article itself doesn't answer it, so "Read the article" is a boneheaded response.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Some googling turned up some resources and eventually I realized there actually were links on the article page to a main KDE Windows Initiative page...
But none of those have any explanation of what it does, how it works inside Windows, or why you would want it.
That is, unfortunately, my experience with KDE generally. They have no concept, ability, or desire to explain to us, the Great Unwashed, how, what, or why.
It is not enough to have a technically superior product, folks -- you also have to "sell" it to your customers!
The headline reads as if KDE was interviewed on the topic of the Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin. I might have been a bit negligent in following KDE since 4.0 came out, but how could I miss its ascension to sentience?? Also, it has opinions about human developers now? That can't be good... did the KDE team learn nothing from Terminator?
ehm....why?!
Because a lot of the KDE applications are great and if one does not like dual booting you can enjoy them on Windows as well?
I really like Kate for writing code and Okular is a nice Adobe Reader alternative. I haven't tried many LaTeX GUIs but I feel really productive in Kile. Now I can enjoy those applications on Windows as well.
BTW if you do install KDE on Windows, make sure you read the fine tuning step in their wiki for a getting a more native look and feel.
kde4-win !!! i see why the called it that now!!
Because sometimes, you want to launch a kde software on windows.
As a web developer, I used a few years ago, before virtualisation was as usable as now, because I had to work on windows to be able to test sites on internet explorer. And I had a client who wanted his site to be tested on every browser including konqueror, so I used kde on windows to test his site on konqueror (then I explained to my boss why it was a bad idea to sell "tested in konqueror" web sites, and never used kde on windows again)
Does it work on Wine?
Or you could just run Evince, which surprisingly works great under Windows. Both Evince and Okular use Poppler as the PDF backend, so the rendering should be the same, but Evince doesn't require the bloat of the entire KDE on Windows package.
I've used the official Adobe reader (yech!), Sumatra (poor rendering, performance and stability), Foxit (nag nag nag) and Evince. Evince is the best one by far.
The Windows Shell/GUI is perfectly servicable. It isn't the shell thats the cause of Windows problems , its IE and the boiling morass of poorly written and tested code underneath it making up the core OS services that causes 99% of the problems.
I love okular. That said it doesn't even support pdf annotations.
You can annotate pdfs, but these are stored separately, so if you send it to someone else they're all gone. In all fairness the problem is actually in poppler and not directly in okular but in the end it does affect the later.
... it's exposure to the Win crowd. Infiltrate the enemy, and they will turn! Mwhua ha ha!
Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on). The default is of course explorer.exe, but it's settable. You could try setting up a Plasma desktop, with the kicker, tray, menu, and so forth. You'd probably still need Windows components for some stuff, like the control panel and management console, but they'd be launched from within KDE, not the other way around.
That said, while KDE provides the most critical stuff - file manager, web browser, media player, archive handling, etc. - I doubt everything is as mature as on *nix (example: Ark used to run, but couldn't open anything except tarballs, when I last tried KDE on Windows). Also, some things are just better done with non-KDE apps, most likely - KOffice may be free and open source, but if you're on Windows anyhow it makes a lot more sense to run MS Office. On the other hand, you do get a lot of stuff that doesn't come with Windows but works perfectly fine on it, like PDF reading (and some editing), a torrent client, a programmer's text editor, IM and IRC clients, and so forth.
I found it worth installing to play with, if not to replace Explorer with.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
KDE SC is so much more than the plasma desktop shell. Replacing the shell on Windows may not be to everyone's taste, but that doesn't mean that they might not appreciate any of the other apps, such as Konqueror, Dolphin (I find the "fish:" handler invaluable) Marble, Okular, Akregator, Kopete, Ktouch or any of the 3 dozen games, etc..., or allowing KOffice installs to share the KDE/Qt libs, etc...
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Your hard-earned time and money, right? Oh, no, it isn't. Let people do what they want with their time.
Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on).
It is. I used to run blackbox and openbox on windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbox
Or you could just run Evince, which surprisingly works great under Windows. Both Evince and Okular use Poppler as the PDF backend, so the rendering should be the same, but Evince doesn't require the bloat of the entire KDE on Windows package. I've used the official Adobe reader (yech!), Sumatra (poor rendering, performance and stability), Foxit (nag nag nag) and Evince. Evince is the best one by far.
Looking for a suitable suggestion for a LaTeX editor and PDF viewer for Windows (cross platform would be a big plus) in our math department, I have tested several PDF viewers: Evince failed to render certain math symbols that did appear in Okular (and in Acroread and in TeXworks for what it is worse). Okular does not print. TeXworks lags some usability. Sumatra has not been tested, yet, but is next on our list -- your comment is not very encouraging in that regard. We have not found anything else that even advertises the functionality we need. (The build-in PDF viewer in Chromium maybe...)
Yes, print support in Okular would be great, especially since now that there are Kile binaries for Windows for the current version of KDE and Kile, Kile+Okular could be a nice cross-platform TeX environment. (TexmarkerX has severe bugs in the editor, TeXworks and Texmarker lags functionality in the editor, Emacs+AUCTeX is great but some people are simply scared by the Emacs shortcuts.)
People in our math department already use Firefox, Thunderbird, Matlab etc. that are all available cross platform. Some still do not even consider swapping from Windows to Linux for the change in the TeX environment. KDE for Windows could help getting people used to cross platform tools (but not without print support in Okular).