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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."
From E.org: "Enlightenment libraries already power millions of systems, from mobile phones to set top boxes..."
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There's definitely not enough coverage on that then... And not only on
KDE Kan't Do Everything.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
Qt4 port - not going to happen. But the 3.5-series is still being developed, see Trinity desktop
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 this would be different from the current situation how, exactly? If your distribution lumps KDE into few huge packages, blame your distribution, but KDE itself is highly modular. Changes to Kwin have no impact on KMail, for example (other than potentially changing the way the windowing system works, which is obvious). Furthermore, due to the modular nature of KDE, changes to KatePart affect KWrite, Kate and KDevelop (and all applications that use the text editor widget).
... 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.