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KDE's New Projects Take On Portable Devices
jrepin writes "Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, 'In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors.' For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds."
Whatever happened to E mobile?
KDE Kan't Do Everything.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've been looking for a Linux tablet in roughly the nook/ipad form factor for a while, but I can't find anything. What's out there? Whatever it is, it seems to hide itself really well.
I don't want an iOS or android tablet - I insist on having full control over my own computers. My requirements are:
* Roughly 7" screen, at least 1024x600 in color.
* 10 hours battery life
* Can run some Debian based distro ideally with KDE support
* Supports flash natively
* Touch screen supporting multitouch
* Less than $500
* Doesn't depend on an SD card slot to run Linux
There ought to be something, I should think, but I can't find it. The Color Nook is ruled out because it consumes the SD slot to hold Linux, it's Linux is apparently not so good (not polished), and if what I read was correct, it can be remotely wiped even if you root it since the firmware can do that behind your back.
I'm all set to give someone my money, but nobody seems too eager to sell me something.
I like KDE a fair bit, an generally use it on my main rig... but it's plugged into the wall.
I think they're gonna have to do a lot of slimming down for a mobile rig, to the point where you might not recognise it as KDE...
Sent from my PDP-11
That's right guys, follow that shiny thing, wherever it leads. Forget all about what you were doing before.
Personally I'm more interested in seeing the permissions model of Android applied to a standard Linux Distro, possibly an Android x86 that allows installation through apt-get, or some other repo system. (must be script-able for sys-admin use)
Indeed, the fine-grained permission model of Android should come to Linux.
- One file per application
- Easy to override permissions for application (e.g. restrict net access for an application to a certain IP address or domain or restrict access to the file system to one folder)
Such requests always meet with developers claiming that memory will be used inefficiently, yet, mobile devices work fine this way. It's time Linux was developed to meet the requirements of simple users.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Maemo absolutely fucking rocks. It'll even run Android applications now using a ported VM.
Just push forward on Maemo/MeeGo and start producing phones & tablets running it. All your "synergy" should come from the Android app store, not desktop KDE applications.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I had to buy a 2.6GHz dual-core processor and a GeForce 240 video card before its performance on my desktop became even marginally acceptable. The entire 4.x series of qt/kde applications nearly choke doing what kde3 did smoothly on 1/2 to 1/10 the resources - which is about what you'll have in a smartphone.
Unless there's some magical -DSTOP_BEING_HORRIBLY_SLOW flag I don't know about, I can't forsee kde 4 working on a portable device in a way that won't send people screaming.
Seriously, the screenshot in TFA looks like GNOME3.
And that was what the GNOME-ppl said: "we're making a system that works on desktop and portable" and you guys rant about the new interface.
Now KDE makes one for portables that looks like GNOME3 and I sure as hell know who's going to praise it.
Will we ever be able to try those concepts out before judging them?
Now KDE has successfully konquered the desktop with 0.43% desktop UI market share, they are going on to tablets, smartphones and whatever else. It's always struck me that many Linux has been an OS without users, it's just not used much at all outside of an enthusiast/developer base and this fate befalls many Linux based open source projects which can persist as long as someone wants to develop even if nobody wants to use it. Without much 3rd party adoption, anything of that sort is a no-go, it just doesn't take off. Despite this, many cross-platform open source efforts have epic success, such as Firefox, then again some don't like Gimp.
How about getting things right on the desktop first and actually getting real users to use KDE? Plasma to me, doesn't feel finished even. It was easy because OSX was a niche and Windows is easy to improve on. They're going up against iOS and Android. That's going to be hard.
*totally made up but based on on linux having 2% at most of the desktop market and gnome being the most popular.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
How is the effort "wasted"?
Let's say that Gnome was the only project to do a desktop environment. How would that be more efficient? Now everybody would be stuck with every boneheaded decision the Gnome project comes up with, and every time a new version came out, everybody would have to learn new ways to do old things.
On the other hand, if there's 5 or 10 desktop projects, then you're not stuck if your current favourite goes in a direction you don't like. The more choice the better.
Saying that putting effort into 5 or 10 desktop projects is wasted effort is like saying that free markets are a wasted effort: one single company selling things is more efficient than 5 companies competing.
My opinion about KDE is: it could use a good fork of KDE 3.5, which is converted to use Qt 4, and with some of the new composite features added on top of it.
The application suite should be a separate project rather than considered part of KDE, so that for example changes to mail or text editor programs are something independent than changes to the actual desktop and windowing system.
And all this for desktop computers of course.
My $0.02.
There does not seem to be an easy UI for this. Remember: it should be easy for simple users.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
... they want their meme back.
We hear the same tiring rant over and over again, and this is really becoming OLD. Plain and simple, in that case, this is bollocks. I've run every version of KDE since v. 1, and anytime there was improvements, whiners have complained they were too broke to afford the required computing power. Then, don't use it and be done with it !
But what's more, since KDE 4.5, this rant is completely delusional. I use daily a 2008 eeepc 900A (Atom powered low-end netbook w/ 1GB RAM and Intel graphics), with Fedora 13, KDE 4.5 (composite display enabled with bells and whistles), and libreoffice. This is my bread-and-butter computer. The speed of KDE is already perfectly adequate even if slowed down by the lousy 8GB SSD of the machine. All the graphics effects just work. And this from a computer that wouldn't be able to run Microsoft Aero effects.
You don't like KDE : fine. But stop smearing it for imaginary defects produced only by your incapacity to configure it properly.
So, my little smartphone, KDE wants your UI to lock up as often as the sessions on my openSuSE box do. And you're music player is gonna turn to junk.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Good. That's the way I like it.
Then I can sit on my little hill above the main stream, work the way I know for years with the same software that doesn't change much, sipping rum while I watch the other guys wash downstream with their hands flaying because they drown in the main stream. ;-P
( Of course that is not really possible with KDE anymore, so I have to use something more stable and no-nonsense like LXDE. )
I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say that consumer choice is efficient. In fact, I think I could argue that it's terribly inefficient. That's not to say that I want one company creating a particular product (because we all know how that ends up poorly.) As inefficient as it is, it's been proven that competition is always best for the consumer... and as a consumer, I support that.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The early beta of firefox mobile was unusable, but the release was quite good.
I find it quite fast, but it draws oddly, doing nothing then everything rnders at once.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
KDE doesnt even run all that good on a 2.8ghz 4gig dual core, how do you think its going to fare on a freaking mobile
There's a such thing as too much competition. With no competition (monopoly), you get a company that sells a shitty product at an exorbitant price, just because they can. It's human nature: people are greedy assholes, and the greediest, most assholic people are always the ones who rise to the top. So you need competition to keep people on their toes, and keep them working hard to make their products better and cheaper.
However, with too much competition, you have too many people duplicating the same work, and little difference between them, and overall probably higher prices and less features, as too many small competitors can't exploit the economies of scale that larger ones can.
For this reason, it seems like things usually work out best when there's 3 or 4 big competitors in a mature industry, and that's it. The danger, however, is that they'll become an oligopoly or cartel, and that's what we need government for (as much as the libertarians hate this).
It's different with Free software projects, however. Free software projects like Linux, X11, KDE, etc. are not for-profit enterprises, they're free and Free downloads for anyone who wants them. These things work best when there's only one, or maybe two. For instance, how many of you Linux users are using anything besides x.org's X11 system? zero? There's a reason there's only one: no one sees the point in wasting effort making something that works exactly the same, so we all use the One until someone else makes something that's not exactly a competitor, but actually renders it obsolete. Wayland may become this, time will tell.
However, unlike proprietary companies, Free software projects have the property that the source code is freely available, and can be forked. 10 years ago, we were all using XFree86, which had some seriously bad management. Some people got sick of the crap, and forked the project to x.org, and now that's what we're all using, and the 2 people who still use and run XFree86 are still sitting around delusionally thinking they're relevant (with statements like "XFree86 is the premier open source X11-based desktop infrastructure" on their website). This is something that can't be done with proprietary companies (software-based or otherwise), which is why we don't really need competition so much in OSS; the licenses and ease of copying constitute a "threat" of competition.
my machine at work is a newer, much more powerful desktop from HP (I don't know the exact specs) that (critically) also has a much bigger screen that it has to compute pixels for. The linux drivers are OK, but not great. KDE fucking sucks on it.
It this can be of any consolation to you, my mother's computer is a fancy quad core HP, and it sucks donkey's ass under windows too (would freeze, reboot on its own in the middle of the night, and some other surprising oddities). Odd as were most HP PC I came across for years. HP is a very over rated brand.
OTOH, my home built computer made from various bits and pieces around an AMD 64 X2 and an Asus budget MB with 4GB RAM is rock stable. I just suspend it to memory at night, and almost never reboot it fully unless I need to unplug it from the wall socket. And KDE just flies on it. The only trouble I had so far were blown caps on the preceding MSI motherboard, I swapped the offender out, fiddled some time with initrd because fedora's idea of setting up LVM2 is braindead, and finally the frankenputer was back into service. Linux + KDE just work for me, YMMV.
Efficiency of economics is ultimately about how well consumer demands are satisfied, not about any sort of objective quality of the product. Anything else really doesn't make any sense.
It's just the standard android running on top of Quemu. Someone may have wrapped it all up together, but is shouldn't be that difficult to do yourself.
I can not even..... I have to use windows at work, fortunately I can use Linux in a VM. Windows just sucks away my time, while Linux gets work done, and done fast. I cant even fathom what you are talking about.
Sort of like Android, Meego, Unity...
I'm sorry to tell you that but your comment shows you have no clue.
Plasma Active is not "like Android, MeeGo, Unity".
Unity for example is a desktop and netbook GUI. It's hardly fitting for touchscreen devices.
As for MeeGo: Intel so far only develops a relatively simple reference GUI that's not targeted to be actually used. Not even Nokia had any plans to adopt it. Nokia just like any other MeeGo adopter wanted to create a proprietary GUI on top of MeeGo Base OS.
Plasma Active is nowhere "like" MeeGo. It's FOR (!) MeeGo. So far it's the only credible attempt to create a commercial-grade, fully FOSS, community-based mobile shell.
Concerning Android: Android is no community project. It's developed behind closed doors by Google alone and in case of Android 3.0 not even the source code has been released so far.
And what you may not realize: KDE also hosts the port of Qt to Android and since Plasma is based on Qt, Plasma Active may just as well be used as shell for Android (heck, even on top of Windows!).
As far as I'm aware, the effort already has two commercial supporters with more in the pipeline.