KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1

A few days ago, the KDE project shipped the first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release. Reader dmbkiwi submits a link to a rundown of what 4.7 looks like, snipping from which: "Previously it was Gnome that was the steady plodder making minor incremental changes through the 2.x series, building stability and only adding minor features. However, with the recent releases of both Gnome Shell and the Unity desktop on Ubuntu, the Gnome/Ubuntu side of the desktop linux equation has made radical and controversial steps away from the well loved Gnome 2.x series, leaving KDE 4.x as the 'steady as she goes' option."

Comments

The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[elucido]

People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar. However the good thing about linux is customizability. As long as we can customize it to look however we want most of us will be happy.

Gnome and Ubuntu Unity have removed the linux edge of customizability. It's only a matter of time before I switch from Gnome 2x to KDE 4x. The next big step for Linux would be to take advantage of 3d rendering to improve functionality further. The zoom is something I use on a regular basis. Perhaps being able to flip windows(frames) and being able to write on the back of them would be a useful feature as well. There are plenty of ideas for functional eye candy but I think linux is at the point now where it shouldn't look towards Windows or OSX for new feature ideas, and it shouldn't try to fix an interface which isn't broken, it should just be adding new features and options, new eye candy which increases usability, and new more powerful abilities, such as intelligent agents that a user can program to automate certain tasks such as burning a DVD, searching several search engines to find certain information on certain topics, all of this could benefit from agent based AI.

I suggested this to the linux community years ago and their excuse was there wasn't enough bandwidth. It's 2011. The majority of the country is broadband now. There is enough bandwidth to build an intelligent agent into KDE and if they wont do it then I might just go ahead and do it for them.

(For anyone who doesn't know what an intelligent agent is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system an agent is a robot, in this case multi-agent is multiple robots which search for and process specific information you tell it to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent )

The agents in a multi-agent system have several important characteristics:[4]
Autonomy: the agents are at least partially autonomous

Local views: no agent has a full global view of the system, or the system is too complex for an agent to make practical use of such knowledge

Decentralization: there is no designated controlling agent (or the system is effectively reduced to a monolithic system)[5]
Typically multi-agent systems research refers to software agents. However, the agents in a multi-agent system could equally well be robots,[6] humans or human teams. A multi-agent system may contain combined human-agent teams.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

The next big step for Linux would be to take advantage of 3d rendering to improve functionality further.

Yeah, we really need spinning cubes.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[elucido]

Thats actually not a bad idea. You could fit roughly 3 times the information (I hope my math is correct?) in the same space if you move from squares to cubes.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[billcopc]

I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).

Beyond that, the rest of KDE seems like truckloads of cruft to me. I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps. Rather than wasting so much effort on these bastard subprojects, why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel ? Let the GUI people focus on building the GUI, and let the app people focus on apps.

KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be. Less baked-in functionality, but plenty of hooks to extend it IF AND WHEN NEEDED. Isn't that supposed to be the Unix way ?

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

A cube has six sides, so it should be six times more.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[elucido]

They could use any shape they want to project the windows onto. They could project it on a shape with more sides than a cube. They could even wrap windows around a sphere.

The fact is we need more screen realestate and 3d is one way of getting it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[seyyah]

People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar.

Where does this notion come from? I've see in it before and I doubt it has any merit.

In fact, I would expect that the majority of people coming from Windows use Gnome since it is the default DE for Ubuntu and other popular distros.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[VortexCortex]

Uh... I already do this.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[seyyah]

Beyond that, the rest of KDE seems like truckloads of cruft to me. I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps. Rather than wasting so much effort on these bastard subprojects, why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel ? Let the GUI people focus on building the GUI, and let the app people focus on apps.

I think I agree with much of what you are saying. The only counter-argument I can think of is that KDE's inclusion of 'subprojects' might not really be a distraction to the main thrust of the project. I say this because the contributors to the little programs might not be the same as those who work on the KDE core. I think that the core team has provided a fairly good API and widget library (or Qt has) and this allows all these 'little programs' to exist.

That being said, I agree that many of them are just not quite there yet. It's a pity because the goal of having fully-integrated programs (but independent!) is a good one. This is what I miss the most about using KDE.

I don't think that this criticism is a KDE 4 criticism though. If KDE 4 suffers from this problem, then so did KDE 3.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2011. The majority of the country is broadband now.

It sure is a good thing that there is only one country on the planet, too, and that the Linux community is limited to this one country.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[drinkypoo]

KDE is at least by default more windowsish and GNOME is more Macish. Unity is even MORE Macish than that...

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Khashishi]

strangely enough, I found the Walgreens brand whitening toothpaste (which had a text blurb: Compare to Crest Whitening) to be far superior to Crest's Whitening toothpaste. go figure.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Bloodwine77]

KDE is the default DE for openSUSE, which is another very popular Linux distro. It is not quite as popular as Ubuntu, but openSUSE is big. Also, how much of Ubuntu's userbase actually uses Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu?

Between the two, KDE has much more of a Windows feel and if I were t set up Linux for a family member used to Windows then I'd opt for KDE for an easier transition.

I personallyuse Xfce these days and what I love about it is that I can make it look similar to Windows or make it look similar to Gnome 2.x ... a lot of flexibility. In the Gnome vs. KDE war, I decided to leave the battlefield and enjoy the other alternatives.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about anybody else, but I come from Windows (Vista) and use KDE. I can't stand Gnome.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Kjella]

They could use any shape they want to project the windows onto. They could project it on a shape with more sides than a cube. They could even wrap windows around a sphere. The fact is we need more screen realestate and 3d is one way of getting it.

Reality check: How does this give me more screen real estate? My screen is 1920x1200 pixels no matter what. I can flip the contents by hitting alt-tab, clicking an icon on the taskbar, switching desktops, picking from a list of tabs or just plain scrolling down the page as well as plenty other "2.5D" ways that give me infinite space - just not all at once. I agree that sometimes pseudo-3D can be useful like say flipping through album covers or something, but there's inherently no more "space" in 3D and I'd rather not throw a 1d6 to find what face of the cube I left my window on. But this is another case where I suspect we'll get thrown into it because 3D > 2.5D but nobody will really check if it actually is an improvement.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[MurukeshM]

One simple and minor point. In GNOME, You Edit your Preferences. In KDE/Windows, you go Tools menu, and then change your Options.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the interface needs radical changes. Not endlessly being number 2 by cloning number 1 + lag.

But nobody has the brains, let a lone the balls, to rethink things in a way that improves them. The highest they seem to go, is now cloning off of Apple instead of Windows (who themselves clone Apple), and especially listening to the loud retards on the lower end of the Gaussian distribution to make it "simpler". Instead of *more efficient*.
Which makes them end up with Gnome 3 and Unity. Or Clippy / MS Bob. (You heard it here first: Unity is the new Clippy! ;)
Removing features for a small sub-crowd of lazy asses who'd whine about it being too hard to even breathe. (Cue the fat people in Wally. ;)

If you want to see, what something radically better might look like, think about the UNIX principles, and then check out Maya (the 3D tool): everything you do is a command in the (normally hidden) CLI below. Everything can be stuck to everything, every output value to every input of the same type. Between small modules that have a unified way for you to change their parameters/properties. Creating what is essentially programs.
And in the end, you can just select the lines from the CLI, and drag them up into the shelf, making a new button/icon. (You could later then make more of it by adding dialogs, properties/parameters, etc.)
If you see Maya as an OS with a shell, then you notice that there are no big monolithic applications. There are only the interfacing modules, and views to display something.
Which, I think, is how really open software for a programmable machine would be designed. Instead of the big clumps that is "normal" applications.

How about that? Elegant, efficient, emergent. I love it. :)

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[hairyfeet]

Because, and I'm sure to get hatred for pointing this out, a lot of the developers out there seem to suffer from Cargo Cult Usability where they implement basic ideas without understanding the underlying structure which is why you saw a previous poster talking about "dept store knockoffs" because when you implement some of the front end without the underlying structure it feels like a badly done copy.

Take Gnome for example. they have ripped off (homage, whatever) a lot of the Mac GUI without understanding how the structure ties in which makes it 'off". For example they have the traditional Mac menu in the correct placement but their DE is windows based and Macs are application based which causes it to make no sense. Since Macs are app based all apps use the same menu at the top whereas with gnome each app typically has their own menu layout or at least did last time I tried it with Ubuntu 10.04, which makes having the top menu kinda pointless.

With KDE they seem to follow the Windows model but yet again they don't implement the features, just the look or at least that was the case last time I tried it (again with Ubuntu 10.04) because while they had a lot of the familiar layout they didn't have breadcrumbs or Readyboost or superfetch or many of the other features that makes Windows more usable.

So I think Canonical is in the right here, even if it falls flat or takes a while to get solid, in that the way to go is to forge a "Linux centric" model where you have a completely different GUI that won't make people feel "cheap knockoff" when features they are used to in Macs or windows aren't found or are different. By switching to Unity+Wayland they will have a different "look and feel" to other OSes, thus removing some of the preconceived notions people have when you use a Windows or Mac centric layout.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).

You were deprived of a proper desktop as a child. You know nothing of multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations is beyond your ken. It's like you were raised in a cage.

I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps.

I think you're out of your mind. Okular is the best document viewer I have ever seen. Show me a pdf reader that does a third of the things that Okular does, and does them half as well, and I will eat my hat. Kontact is absolutely gold. Even the file manager has been doing things for three years that Windows Exploder still can't even imagine doing. Marble...well, I was gonna say Marble's the best at what it does, but actually, it's the only application that I'm aware of that does what it does.

why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel

Yeah, we got that. We've had it for years. Have you looked? No you haven't, have you?

KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be.

"foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[SomeKDEUser]

No you don't. KDE is sensible: it has a settings menu...

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

KDE? Windows-ish? I can't imagine how people get that idea. They look nothing alike, they act nothing alike. I mean, other than "has a panel," what is Windows-ish about KDE?

I am not trolling you, and I welcome your reply. I have heard this over and over again, and as a KDE user of long standing, I just don't get it at all.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[kiwi_fb]

Funny that, in kde I don't go in "tools" to do that. In fact not all apps have a tool entry. I go into "settings" where I have access to various confgurations/management options. Even in the K menu I go into settings to change anything about my DE.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[goarilla]

hear hear i use kde 4.4.6 at work
and even that release is still not really out of beta

but i do remember even KDE 3.5 launching the crash handler way too often

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Shoe Puppet]

such as intelligent agents that a user can program to automate certain tasks such as burning a DVD, searching several search engines to find certain information on certain topics, all of this could benefit from agent based AI.

I suggested this to the linux community years ago and their excuse was there wasn't enough bandwidth. It's 2011. The majority of the country is broadband now. There is enough bandwidth to build an intelligent agent into KDE and if they wont do it then I might just go ahead and do it for them.

I'm afraid I can't follow you here. I can imagine AI development being held back by lack of CPU performance, RAM or simply the fact that this kind of thing is extremely hard to make, but... bandwith? What does an AI even need a lot of bandwith for?

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[similar_name]

They could project it on a shape with more sides than a cube. They could even wrap windows around a sphere.

I like compiz.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[fnj]

I don't think KDE4 is overblown except in one respect. If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect. Now, I haven't been able to figure out how to rip out that crippling piece of garbage from KDE, but I am sure the KDE team could easily add a single radio button to allow the user to just enable or disable it. It's like how they let you switch the start menu to the normal, useful "classic style," instead of the godawful new style which copies one of the most HATED and DESPISED "innovations" of Vista.

In all other respects, I see no fundamental flaw with KDE4. I find it in no way mysteriously slower or more ponderous than KDE3. I am just perplexed when people claim this. Obviously, the first thing you do when you bring it up is completely turn off all the "desktop effects" horse shit, and then it works fine.

And as far as I can see KDE has some wonderful apps. Kate, for example, is a superb multi-document text editor. Gnome has nothing remotely comparable. I know of no standalone one that is better. KDE Office would be a wonder if we weren't spoiled by Open Office, so I admit I don't use much of it. Obviously, I use Firefox instead of Konqueror (usually). But I see no way in which the KDE guys have built a less than first class API for 3rd partiesa to properly integrate with. If they won't do it, and instead use the GTK horror, it's hardly KDE's fault. KDE's is vastly superior in every way.

Konsole is so many orders of magnitude better than Gnome terminal or anything else, that it is like the adults vs the kindergarten to compare them.

If you really and truly want a bare desktop with no cruft at all, you just use Xfce or LXDE. But I must warn you that they have substandard "little things." The clock cannot be adequately customized. The other applets are similarly deficient. I suppose we could port forward all the superb Gnome2 applets if we had the energy, but gosh darn it, I just want to USE a desktop that is neither INSANE nor DEFICIENT as it is.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[WillKemp]

Gnome and Ubuntu Unity have removed the linux edge of customizability.

I've been customizing linux desktops for over 15 years now, and i'm sick of it!

Back in the mid-90s, you had no choice but to customize almost everything in a linux system, as the defaults were skeletal. But, gradually, over the years, more and more usable defaults were built in to distros - which has been a very good thing.

With virtually nothing i can waste hours customizing now, i can just adapt to what's there and spend that time doing productive work (or, more likely, unproductive procrastination, like this!).

Get used to it. It's the way it's been going forever!

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[fnj]

I agree almost across the board. My only issue is that I think Gwenview is a piece of crap from a UI standpoint compared to the old Kuickshow. Kuickshow was an inspired PERFECT app. You can still compile kuickshow under KDE4, and it still works perfectly. I just don't understand why they refuse to maintain it as a fully supporteds piece of KDE4.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[WillKemp]

The fact is we need more screen realestate and 3d is one way of getting it.

3D doesn't give you any more screen realestate at all - it's just a different way of organizing your open windows. You've still only got the same number or pixels in your screen and it doesn't let you see more windows at once.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[WillKemp]

I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals

They're not - unless you're a nerd who enjoys wasting time fiddling around with pointless things for the sake of it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[similar_name]

You may be right that there is not a 'real' gain to desktop space with 3d vs say 2d multiple workspace solutions but I do prefer the desktop cube (or cylinder etc.) I generally keep my applications windowed so some part of the desktop is usually visible. I like being able to 'grab' the cube with the middle button and move it around to get to other desktops. I like being able to roll the wheel to flip through them.

I agree that sometimes pseudo-3D can be useful like say flipping through album covers or something

I know not everyone runs a lot of applications at once but if I'm running a dozen or so then flipping through them can be handy. Anyway, I don't know if anyone is forced to use 3d on the desktop right now so it's not much of a problem if you don't like it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Even this story is phrased in such a way that it tries to equate Gnome's recent release with KDE's hilariously incompetent 4.0 release (you know... the one that was so bad/unfinished no distro would touch it and cemented the KDE project's reputation for version number inflation and amateur coding).

I heard it the other way round. The KDE team said that 4.0 (even as far as 4.2) is to be a developer-only release and urged distros and users NOT to use it and stick with the 3.x branch. Many distros (or users) didn't listen and were massively disappointed thinking it was stable and ready to go calling the entire branch and effort crap.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Loomismeister]

The taskbar at the bottom with a start menu in the same location. The kde desktop is nearly identical to the windows desktop.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think KDE4 is overblown except in one respect. If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect. Now, I haven't been able to figure out how to rip out that crippling piece of garbage from KDE, but I am sure the KDE team could easily add a single radio button to allow the user to just enable or disable it.

How convenient! This already exists - right click the desktop, choose Desktop Settings, and select Layout: Folderview.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Kjella]

You were deprived of a proper desktop as a child. You know nothing of multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations is beyond your ken. It's like you were raised in a cage.

And in 2011, Linux still has such fundamental issues such as Ctrl-V and RightClick+Paste not giving the same result. Or such ridiculous things like when you have copied something to the clipboard, it disappears if you quit before pasting. It was probably written down in some POSIX standard 40 years ago that this should forever be absurd, and so no amount of sanity can prevail.

"foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.

I do. Three and a half years of struggling with Linux was enough, thank you.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have that. As a matter of fact, they even call it "Folder View", just as you did.

Just choose the "Folder View" layout in Desktop Settings, which is in the desktop's right-click menu.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[elucido]

It's not hard to make. The CPU performance will be used but CPU's have evolved steadily. Ram? Ram isn't an issue.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Afief]

Is this really actual? The last time something disappeared on me when I closed the app was 2006.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[fnj]

You are a gentleman and a scholar. None of the users I talked to knew you could do that, nothing I read hinted at it, the wording of the settings screen is cryptic, but it's easy once you know the trick.

Now I have NO reservations about KDE. OK, some of the applets are way underformed, but I am confident THAT can be fixed, even if I have to do it myself.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Threni]

"Not quite as popular"? LOL! Ubuntu is way, way ahead of any other distro on the desktop. And Gnome is on Ubuntu, which makes it the the which Windows users switch to, not KDE.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[fnj]

Kind sir, a thousand times thank you! I searched and asked and couldn't find that simple fact

I now have NO reservations about KDE. Once you know 1 or 2 tricks; this one being the absolutely critical one, there is no reason to despair.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[karper]

Regarding the ctrl+v and rightclick-paste comment, it's quite simple to 'fix' this. There's an x clipboard and there's a system clipboard. You can sync them using klipper (the thing that looks like a pair of scissors in the kde system tray). If sync'd, you can copy by selection or copy by ctrl+c and pasting (ctrl+v) always pastes the last copied thing.

Your complaint is valid, though, in that middle-clicking pastes only what you selected and copied, not what you ctrl+c'd. My solution to this is simple: use select/paste. Use ctrl+c/v only if you plan on selecting multiple things which you don't plan on adding to your "clipboard".

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[karper]

I like this about the kde philosophy. They pick what they feel is a good default (usually, it's pretty good), but you're by no means confined to using their product that way. Hell, you can kquitapp plasma-desktop and just use krunner (alt+f2 originally, mapped to alt+space for speedier access) for *everything*. Yes, *everything*.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think KDE4 is overblown except in one respect. If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect.

Right click on desktop -> Desktop Settings -> Layout -> Folder View ?
If I understand correctly, this is probably what you want.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[karper]

Both have a panel on the bottom with a start menu on the left and a system tray on the right. That's pretty much as deep as most non-users see and thus the reputation. Somehow, somewhere, the message that even if KDE picks some defaults, they're all changeable and customizable seems to have gotten lost.

I usually put my panel on the top, center it and shrink it to maybe 50% of the desktop width. That way, there's two areas to the left and right of the panel where there's empty space (even when windows are full screened). These areas are extremely handy to change the desktop by scrolling.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[karper]

In KDE, you configure your Settings. Only it sounds backwards if you say it. :)

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[sisinka]

I guess I suffer from the 'OSX envy' too, and therefore I chose the Bespin KDE style, which allows for the application menu in a plasmoid, that is placed in the top panel/bar. I love this feature on Macs and love it on my KDE too, as it saves the desktop space on my small & wide screen (11,6''). That I guess would not be possible without having most of the applications I ever need to use are bundled in. Contrary to what you present, I'm absolutely fine with them. (e.g. I write this comment in Kontact.) There are some downsides, but for me it's well worth it :)

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[sisinka]

There are different kinds of "people coming from windows". My girlfriend wants the computer to STFU and leave her alone to get her work done. She is perfectly happy with Gnome 2.32, which "just works" and doesn't ask her any frakking questions. I couldn't stand it's dull invariability, so my openSUSE sports KDE with 7 plasmoids on the desktop, app menu in top panel (XBar/Bespin), a dock on the left and another panel with various things on the right... She wouldn't stand such a mess :-)

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jra]

"should look similar [to Windows]"

Did I miss something? Or did they finally fix Plasma so mere mortals can figure it out?

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jra]

Oh. I see that they *haven't* fixed Plasma. Got it.

Since there seem to be some KDE devs here, I will engage.

I concur with some posts below me that KDE3.x was much more similar in UX design than Gnome to the post-95 Windows's, which is what the entrenched user base is coming from, in large part. I always preferred it to Gnome myself for that reason.

Plasma? Can't figure it out at all. I'm sure it's The Cutting Edge, but it left me bleeding. And while I see that the Trinity project is still chugging along on it, SuSE dropped KDE3 after 11.2, so I can *either* ship to clients a desktop that they can understand without a 3000 level college course, *or* I can ship an OS that's still getting security upgrades (SuSE 11.1, the last release to offer KDE3 from the installer, is EOL).

That's a pretty coffin corner situation, folks, for a desktop manager that breaks as much new ground (read: been at this for 3 decades, really sat down and tried to understand what they were on about, failed miserably) as Plasma does...

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Polumna]

You're wasting your breath. Despite supposedly using Linux for three and a half years, he blames a Qt bug on POSIX and has such a hard time wrapping his head around the concept of multiple paste buffers that it's a "fundamental issue."

Linux has its fair share of problems and idiosyncrasies, but this guy is whining because the car has a weird third pedal and there's no D on the stick thingy between the seats. Not gonna get it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[devent]

And please let it stay that way. I swear, if Linux ever changes the behavior of selecting+middle click I will switch to Windows. That feature alone is just so freaking awesome. For all the mouse-addicts, like me: just select a text, drag your mouse, middle click and you have copy&pasted it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[The Master Control P]

If only there were some terms like "alpha" and "beta" and "rc" to describe software that's not yet ready for general use and only for developers.

Or in the case of kde 4.0, "early sub-pre alpha." I remember quite vividly at the time of launch that they weren't saying anything like "don't use this if you're not a developer." No, I remember reading article after article raving about how awesome it was, how innovative that was, how pretty it was, how it and all the new backends like Akonadi and Strigi and Nepomuk were gonna revolutionize the whole desktop experience. Then everybody absolutely hated it, I personally found it used 10x the memory to do the same things as before, it turned my screen into a slideshow, and it crashed every 10 minutes. The only unequivocally positive change I noticed was that kmail now remained responsive while waiting on the remote mail server!

The "4.0 was a dev-only release" bullcrap started to try and retcon away just how badly they'd screwed up. And I can understand... I wouldn't want to remember 4.0 either.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2

Herp-a-fucking-derp, the ability to change the desktop's type has been available since 4.2. Along with the default "Widget" layout, alternatives such as the aforementioned "Folder view" are available.

And as far as I can see KDE has some wonderful apps. Kate, for example, is a superb multi-document text editor. Gnome has nothing remotely comparable.

I should mention that GNOME has gedit which is somewhat comparable. It's been a long time since I used it so I don't really remember the interface to well, but it without a doubt has most of what I use in Kate; syntax highlighting and editing multiple documents simultaneously.
I don't know if it has alternative ways to display the opened documents (like how kate has a list view and a tree view) or if it allows you to view multiple documents side by side inside the same window (but last I checked, it did allow you to drag one of the open documents elsewhere and it would spawn a new window focusing that document).

Konsole is so many orders of magnitude better than Gnome terminal or anything else, that it is like the adults vs the kindergarten to compare them.

While true, the GNOME/GTK camp do have another shell called "terminator". Frankly, it does a far better job than Konsole, especially in regards to tabs and split views.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[TheABomb]

You get more screen space that way the same way you can fit more words in a whole book than on a single page.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Marble...well, I was gonna say Marble's the best at what it does, but actually, it's the only application that I'm aware of that does what it does.

Yikes, you have never heard of Google Earth? Obviously cave dwellers love KDE, I guess because they don't spend much time actually getting stuff done on the computer.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jbonomi]

Aw, did someone hurt your feelings?

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

If something like that does come to pass, I would expect it to find its way into compiz before it gets into KDE or GNOME. As far as the 3D desktop goes, it still seems to be the most customizable compositing window manager available.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, dude. Take a break, have a Kit Kat. You say "we" like you're Legion or something. Did you have your ls -Ffed too hard? We're all geeks here. Even me, and I just solve Internet problems on the phone for cat ladies, grandpops and people my parents' age. It would be nice to contain yourself in a public forum, unless you have some personal vendetta involving a drunken marker moustache and being folded into a fold-out bed in your sleep.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Homburg]

Because KDE apps have so many settings, you need a whole menu just for them.

And then when you open up a settings dialog, it has its own settings menu.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder who is living in the cage.

Multiple workspaces are kinda useless if you don't try to multitask between completely different tasks or have a little screen. I've given up on them since I can fit all apps I need at the same time on my two screens. Helps productivity.

Changing color of the window decoration. Are you serious? Have you ever used Windows? It's the software you put on your computer not the thing with the shutters.

I'll applaud the data sharing ability of desktop linux systems once they figure out how to get copy and paste to work reliably and consistently between different application generations/frameworks and I no longer find applications loosing clipboard content once they are closed. Sure you are talking about the Anakonda stuff and its siblings but it's pretty much useless at this point and will be for some time to come imho.

Okular is maybe the worst and most restricted PDF reader I've ever used coming in close before Adobe Reader X on my list of awfullness. Fonts look ugly, it's almost to slow to be even usable and the search functionality is a pita. Try PDFXChange viewer on windows to see a great PDF viewer / editor with a lot of features even in the free edition.

I don't quite get what features the windows file manager lacks that konqueror, thunar and co are supposed to have.

What it is Marble does that Google Earth can't I don't know.

OP is completely right in saying that most apps shipped with Linux DEs are cheap knockoffs of software found on the two other big platforms. It's just the way it is. There are perls here and there but most of the stuff really does suck.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've said Akonadi not Anakonda. Though I guess since I had a K in there it's alright.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[ifiwereasculptor]

Yes, it is. Try pasting anything in a terminal with Ctrl+V. Won't work. Right-clicking -> paste does. Try copying from the URL bar, closing Firefox/Chrome/whatever and then pasting the previously copied address somewhere. It's gone. At least in Gnome 2.30. Dunno if using KDE makes any difference.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

[right click on desktop]->Layout->Folder View. (you may need to click the unlock widgets if the layout option is greyed out) will get you what you want.

The default design is not however imbecilic... Consider that you can only put so many icons and launchers on your desktop before it gets difficult to find anything. This is the problem that the new design is trying to solve. To this end you can place multiple file views on your desktop. This allows group of icons on the desktop and also for the files to be organised in the file-system as well.
The second feature is quick context switching so that you just see the icons and launchers relevant to what you happen to be doing at the time.

At work I have a context for each project I am working on , in which the desktop contains a folderview for the files in that project, a Folder view containing common shortcuts and tools, a tasklist widget that displays what I need to be doing that day and a time-tracking widget that keeps track of my hours for invoicing purposes.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't got a standard API; that's bullshit. You have GTK+ and Qt, both which look completely out-of-place when being run under the desktop that doesn't use it by default.

And yes, the KDE 4.x theme is terribly bad. It's like the designers never heard of this concept called 'padding'.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have things ass about.
The fact that both Mac and Gnome have a menu at the top is largely coincidental. The design is not supposed to be an ape of the MacOS design. Gnome has placed elements there for completely different reasons (mostly because most people read from top left to bottom right) so the first elements the user will need to access are in the top left part of the screen. IIRC the basic Gnome 2 design was the result of usability studies done by Sun.

KDE doesn't follow the Windows model so much as allow you to build your own model (more so in KDE 3.5) but start out with defaults reasonably similar to Windows. The similarities between KDE and newer versions of windows have been the product of convergent design rather than aping (though a few specific features were stolen directly).

I work with Windows users every day and I have never heard the terms ReadyBoost or Superfetch and I can't grok them from the names of the features (could somebody explain what these are). Breadcrumbs however seem to work for me as they do in Windows - what am I missing.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jra]

Basic statistics: ~10% of the desktop audience is on a Mac, well under 5% on Linux. So *by definition*, people coming to KDE as their first Linux desktop are coming there from Windows.

Yes, yes, he doesn't actually say that in the quote, per se, but he implies it, and you accept it in your reply.

So the *real* question is: who set those machines up, and what did *they* prefer.

And yes, KDE (3, and now 4) was the preferred desktop on SuSE, all the way back to, I think, 9.0, which was my first version of that work.

Note that what you're *really* replying to is an assertion he did not *make* in the section you quote: that people coming from windows are *going to* KDE. He's talking about the people *already on KDE*, a different proposition entirely.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Preview stacks up well against Okular based on the format page description, only deficient in the format numbers — which is not a problem generally.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jon_doh2.0]

Firstly, you need to Ctrl + Shift + V to paste in terminal, as you must also press Shift as well as Ctrl when attempting shortcuts that normally just require Ctrl.
Secondly, opening Chromium copying URL, quitting Chromium and copying URL to Leafpad and Terminal worked fine just now, for me. Dont know if its because i am using Glipper to manage clipboard, also using Openbox and Gnome-Panel.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[oursland]

A monitor is a two dimensional surface and can never hold more information than that. Sure, a higher dimensional figure can be projected to the two dimensional surface, but this is an inherently lossy transform.

I don't need a three dimensional interface to my two dimensional display. My interface should be optimized to showing me information on my display efficiently and effectively, not with a bunch of needless transitions, shading and projections.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Kate, for example, is a superb multi-document text editor. Gnome has nothing remotely comparable. I know of no standalone one that is better.

LMFTFY:
sudo apt-get install vim

(and let the wars begin! ;-)

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[bonch]

Gnome and Ubuntu Unity have removed the linux edge of customizability.

Linux has too much customizability, leading to a lack of standards. Ever heard of the "tyranny of choice?"

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

And in 2011, Linux still has such fundamental issues such as Ctrl-V and RightClick+Paste not giving the same result.

For KDE terminal apps, it's [Shift]+[Ins], which is easy enough to find out from the context menus.

  Or such ridiculous things like when you have copied something to the clipboard, it disappears if you quit before pasting. It was probably written down in some POSIX standard 40 years ago that this should forever be absurd, and so no amount of sanity can prevail.

Agreed, this "clear the *system* clipboard when shutting down any app" behaviour is beyond stupid.

Go ahead and enjoy your Windows 7. It's not so bad, really -- first decent thing to come out of the MS OS mill since Win2K. Just always remember that Microsoft don't consider it "your" computer, and you'll be just fine.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[cavebison]

multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations

As a Windows person, these don't really amount to much. Maybe I'm missing why multiple workspaces are so great, but the general user will only have a handful of windows open, usually all maximised. I'm a developer and don't have a problem using 10+ windows. (With the help of a free little tool that lets me rearrange them logically on the task bar.)

Sharing data - the average user will be using Office, or an equivalent, and occasionally perhaps a CSV export or most likely cut & paste.

Windows decorations... ok, you got me there. :) I feel people eventually don't bother much with desktop backgrounds, because generally windows are maximised all the time - you hardly ever see the desktop during the day!

This is why MS is also having trouble getting past XP. Even they can't name killer features that the average user will want above what is working very well for them right now. IMO Linux is up against this as well, no matter how pretty it looks, and MS would have to fuck up royally several times (more) for that to change.

However, *devices* is where I see the battle going on. But, ironically, iOS and Android have made more inroads into public awareness in a single year than Linux has in all its existence. Linux will have to watch out for Android, in a way. I think the sudden profusion of OS's is going to make Linux look like a non-starter in comparison. Different products I know, but the public don't know that. And so Linux will stay a specialised OS for servers and serious geeks only, with Apple and Google OS's taking over where Windows can't cut it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[dudpixel]

I was just going to post the same as you, until I read yours. Like you said, Ctrl+Shift+V does the trick in a terminal. Nothing wrong with that. I wonder if the OP ever tried using Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V in a windows command prompt window? So to copy/paste in windows you have to go into the menu and do it from there. You cant just select text either...you have to activate the menu and select "mark", and then I think it automatically copies when you right-click or something. its completely unintuitive.

I think you'll find that replying to these people is tiresome, and it becomes bleedingly obvious that reading is a rare skill and much more difficult than complaining. People would much rather complain than read, it seems.

I have a theory that Linux is actually SO consistent in its UI and guidelines, and SO near-perfect that it gripes people all the more when there are things broken or missing. Windows is a complete mess - find me 2 applications from different vendors that look or work the same. The MS Office UI changes with every release, as does every other piece of software, and many apps even paint their own ghastly UI over the top. There is so little consistency that we get used to it and dont expect so much. But linux, being "nearly there" makes things more obvious when 99% is just right but 1% is out of place.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[dudpixel]

well said!

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[walshy007]

You haven't got a standard API; that's bullshit. You have GTK+ and Qt, both which look completely out-of-place when being run under the desktop that doesn't use it by default.

So, I'm running kde but qt and gtk apps at the same time, so I just opened up konqueror (qt) and pidgin (gtk) for comparison. Differences noted:

qt apps have the alt-button shortcut for menu items underscored, gtk one didn't. Different icons in the submenus for the same things (about etc)

Is this the kind of level where it is really worth bitching about that? really?

And yes, the KDE 4.x theme is terribly bad. It's like the designers never heard of this concept called 'padding'.

They are screwed if they do, screwed if they don't. The moment they add padding people will bitch about said padding wasting screen space. Me included, it's called efficiency. Dolphin already wastes too much screen space for me so I use konqueror, making it worse will only make people bitch more.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[walshy007]

Hell, you can kquitapp plasma-desktop and just use krunner (alt+f2 originally, mapped to alt+space for speedier access) for *everything*. Yes, *everything*.

This. It's my standard operating procedure, people look at me funny for some reason though when they see me using my machine.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[RichiH]

> "foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.

To be fair, KDE 3.5.10 _is_ extremely fast. From the end user's perspective KDE 4 seemed to focus on eye candy first and everything else second. Using it on non-current hardware was and is horrible even though performance has increased significantly.

Plus, you can really not blame anyone for being annoyed at KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.3 (ish). No matter what it was announced at, a .0 implies at least "well-working beta" by convention.

Anyway, starting with KDE 4.4 or KDE 4.5, most issues have been resolved and KDE 4.6 has, imo, reached feature parity with KDE 3.5.10. Or will do, as soon as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269939 is solved ;)

I'll stop babbling now and I do agree with everything you said, but it's undeniably true that KDE 3.5.10 is faster than KDE 4.x. Which is a pity as I need to run LXDE and Fluxbox on my X31.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Zontar The Mindless]

Re-read the GP.

Bloodwine77 actually said that openSUSE is not quite as popular as Ubuntu, not the other way round.

In fact, his exact words were, "...not quite as popular as Ubuntu...".

Hope you enjoyed venting some unrelated frustration, even so.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[bertok]

The hilarity is that Windows now has a better CLI shell than any Linux or Unix too.

If you Linux fans don't believe me, then quickly, tell me how to get the following three pieces of information as a CSV formatted text file:

- The list of running processes
- The list of running system services
- The list of installed OS hotfixes/patches

For each one, make sure you capture at least a few columns of relevant or related information (e.g.: the pid of a process).

I can do all three with Windows PowerShell in seconds:

  Get-Process | Export-Csv 'processes.csv'
  Get-Service | Export-Csv 'services.csv'
  Get-HotFix | Export-Csv 'hotfixes.csv'

Don't like it so verbose? You can also use the shorter aliases instead, such as: "ps | epcsv procs.csv"

Yes, Linux is free and open, and that's a good thing. Yes, it scales well and runs on all sorts of unusual or purpose-built hardware. Yes, it can be very secure if managed properly. But no, it is absolutely not more usable than Windows.

Linux doesn't have the central control required for the kind of consistency of design that is required for user friendliness. The "ps" and "service" programs were written by different people in different ways, and are wildly different. The OS hotfix install/query commands aren't even consistent across contemporary Linux releases!

What Linux desperately needs is a set of guidelines for developers. For an example, take a look at Microsoft's guidelines for PowerShell snap-in developers.

Imagine for a second what a nirvana Linux CLI scripting would be if every Linux tool was written that consistently!

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're out of your mind. Okular is the best document viewer I have ever seen. Show me a pdf reader that does a third of the things that Okular does, and does them half as well, and I will eat my hat.

Okular still does not know how to handle text with columns, which makes it a non-starter for scientists, engineers and lawyers. Hell, even evince knows how to do it.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161324

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Compaqt]

I personally don't like the global menu (though I think it's great for netbooks).

More power to you if you do.

KDE allowed you work the way you like, unlike Gnome/Unity which are forcing straitjackets on users with no way out.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Compaqt]

Can you have 2 panels in KDE (as in Gnome2)?

Menu/system stuff on top, apps/windows on the bottom.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

you can have OVER 9 THOUSAND panels if you really want to... would suck to configure, but KDE as such makes no restrictions on how many panels you may have, where to place them or even what they should contain.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does this notion come from? I've see in it before and I doubt it has any merit.

In fact, I would expect that the majority of people coming from Windows use Gnome since it is the default DE for Ubuntu and other popular distros.

Ubuntu is the new kid on the block.

The classical user-friendly distributions were SuSE and Mandrake which both featured KDE default desktops.

Serious users would prefer Red Hat Linux (later Fedora) or debian - both defaulting to Gnome.

SuSE became SUSE and got eventually bought by Novell who prefer Gnome to KDE.

Madrake Linux became Mandrakelinux became Mandriva - constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. They fired their founder Gael Duval (who then created his own distribution Ulteo) and recently many Mandriva developers jumped ship and created their own fork Mageia.
Mandrake/Mandriva seems to fade into obscurity although it does allegedly still have a strong userbase in France (just as SUSE has in Germany) and PCLinuxOS (a Mandrake fork) seems to be popular in the US.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Kjella]

I guess you missed the part where Qt closed the bug as OUT OF SCOPE, as in not a Qt problem but a Linux problem. But I see the anything that breaks with the holy gospel gets modded down, so...

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of performance I have to disagree. On my computer with an nvidia card it's so slow it's painful. There is so much tearing going on it's unbearable, and window resizing slows to a crawl. I use to use Kate on a daily basis but have switched to Notepad++ under wine b/c Kate has some memory leaks. After a while it slows down to a crawl and the code folding ceases to work properly.

My experience with KDE 4 is that it's still buggy as hell; which is really frustrating b/c I HATE gnome 3 and unity and really want to come back to KDE.
Oh, and none of the KDE styles I've found are attractive. They are so fugly compared to Equinox themes.

Ok, I feel much better now....

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[donaldm]

And please let it stay that way. I swear, if Linux ever changes the behavior of selecting+middle click I will switch to Windows. That feature alone is just so freaking awesome. For all the mouse-addicts, like me: just select a text, drag your mouse, middle click and you have copy&pasted it.

Actually Unix has had this on Graphical displays for over 30 years. Since Linux got a GUI the same method of copy and paste is also used (about 15 years). Actually double left mouse click selects a word and triple click selects a line although I rarely use the triple click.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

adding to my previous comment:

KDE 2 had more features, was more stable, had better configuration tools and was more easy on Windows users than Gnome 1.
Decisions like keeping the DE and the wm seperate (Gnome could be used with pretty much any window manager out there with varying levels of success) were hard to understand for new users (also the default Gnome WM was Sawfish - which was configured with a Lisp-like language^^).

Only with Gnome 2 (eventually featuring Metacity) did Gnome catch up on KDE (3) - in my recollection Gnome 2.0 was cool but buggy & slow, Gnome 2.2. was much more usable

Later, the introduction of spatial mode as default in Nautilus did make life harder for Window converts as well.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[tokul]

KDE4 is basically perfect

D stands for Desktop. Why KDE4 does not have desktop? Only some plasmoid file system explorer pretending to be desktop.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Shoe Puppet]

Only some plasmoid file system explorer pretending to be desktop.

If it looks like a desktop, and it displays files in front of the wallpaper like a desktop...

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[drinkypoo]

Augh, thank you, this is what I hate about KDE but was always too filled with incoherent nerd rage to express. For all the things to hate about GNOME or Unity, at least they're comprehensible. A million tiny widgets leave me wishing for less. Let the user add stuff as they want it, by all means. And I am terribly annoyed with the lack of easy customization in everything else. GNOME marching away from configurability has annoyed me, but not enough to drive me into WBL land.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jhigh]

However, *devices* is where I see the battle going on. But, ironically, iOS and Android have made more inroads into public awareness in a single year than Linux has in all its existence. Linux will have to watch out for Android, in a way. I think the sudden profusion of OS's is going to make Linux look like a non-starter in comparison. Different products I know, but the public don't know that. And so Linux will stay a specialised OS for servers and serious geeks only, with Apple and Google OS's taking over where Windows can't cut it.

You realize that Android == Linux, right?

http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

So like I said, other than "has a panel..."

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I usually put my panel on the top, center it and shrink it to maybe 50% of the desktop width.

Wow, you too? That's how I set mine up. I don't use the mouse wheel for scrolling, I just like the look.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Omestes]

In GNOME, You Edit your Preferences.

Not any more.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I guess I don't have an issue with Gwenview, but my usage of it is extremely limited. Mostly one-shot image viewing of things where the preview image in the file manager isn't sufficient for me. Now that I stop and think though, I do find that navigating directories and such in the UI is rather cumbersome.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

That's because Ctrl-V and Ctrl-C do other things in the shell. Add in a shift modifier, you're golden.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

Neither of those things happen to me on KDE 4.6. I just tried them both, and behavior is as expected.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I had written half a paragraph on it, actually, and then deleted it. I deliberately did not draw a comparison with that processor-hungry, GPU-pegging piece of crap. Google Earth is so utterly terrible that I didn't want to even go there. And it's ugly.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

As a Windows person, these don't really amount to much.

Of course they don't. You're not allowed to use them.

Maybe I'm missing why multiple workspaces are so great, but the general user will only have a handful of windows open, usually all maximised.

Hell, that's how I work too (sans the maximized bit, because I have plenty of screen for everyone). And it makes my life tremendously easier to be able to group those on desktop by task. Try it for a week, and you'll never go back.

I'm a developer and don't have a problem using 10+ windows. (With the help of a free little tool that lets me rearrange them logically on the task bar.)

Heh, Windows makes you use a third party tool to do that? Hoo boy. It must just be too confusing for Granny.

Sharing data - the average user will be using Office, or an equivalent, and occasionally perhaps a CSV export or most likely cut & paste.

Again, this just shows your blind spots. The contacts in your chat program are typically the same people that are in your address book, are they not? Wouldn't it be neat if both programs knew that? And hey, what if you're looking at an image in your image viewer and you think "Hey, I'd like to send this to Bob?" (These were the first and easiest two examples I could pull out of thin air in five seconds. If you'd like more, just ask.)

Windows decorations... ok, you got me there. :) I feel people eventually don't bother much with desktop backgrounds, because generally windows are maximised all the time - you hardly ever see the desktop during the day!

Re: Window decorations, if you've ever had to work all damn night with a bright color theme scorching out your eyeballs, you don't need to be told that being able to change those colors is good.

Re: Backgrounds and whatnot, well, you've been force fed bad, counter-productive, time-sucking habits for a decade. Of course your windows are maximized all the time, because your desktop navigation is broken to the point of making window placement largely useless.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

To be fair, KDE 3.5.10 _is_ extremely fast. From the end user's perspective KDE 4 seemed to focus on eye candy first and everything else second. Using it on non-current hardware was and is horrible even though performance has increased significantly.

I don't find this to be the case. I'm running 4.6 on a Pentium D processor, Intel graphics, and 3 Gb of RAM. It's fine. Not great, but fine. On my Pentium Dual Core laptop, 4 Gb of RAM, also with Intel graphics, it is great. I know, neither of those is quite "old," (but Pentium D is getting there, damn I've had this rig forever) and two anecdotes don't equal data, but there they are.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently haven't used Win 7 much. Readyboost is useful for eating up excess jump drives you have no use for, if your computer cannot handle a Win 7 install though don't pretend like you can make it better with a few readyboosted jump drives. Superfetch is the one thing that every tech I know that supports Win 7 (not many people yet, unfortunately) immediately disable before expecting usefulness out of it. I've seen way too many hung 7 boxes where superfetch was the culprit to allow it to lurk.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect.

You absolutely can use it as a "classic" 90's desktop if you wish. Drag an icon to the desktop, there it is. I for one really love the new workspace, but you can use it the old-fashioned way if you want. Another poster already mentioned how to turn the desktop into one big folder view, but if all you want are icons on the desktop, just put icons on the desktop.

godawful new style which copies one of the most HATED and DESPISED "innovations" of Vista.

Plasma was actually in development before Vista was released. If anyone copied anyone, it was Microsoft. But aside from the superficial visual similarity, I wouldn't really call them "copies." They don't act alike at all.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I lol'd.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

With KDE they seem to follow the Windows model

If that's the mentality you're going in with, no wonder you don't like it. Plasma bears zero resemblance to Windows. They both have a panel. That's it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard North Korea has a suitable amount of customizability for your needs. So... when are you moving?

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[wild_berry]

We would definitely herald 2012 as the Year Of Linux On The Desktop if we had a UI which used a 20-dimensional hypercube. Redmond's Photocopiers couldn't keep up with that kind of innovation!

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[RichiH]

As I said, performance in the 4 series has improved significantly. Try it with 4.0 to 4.2 and weep ;)

Also, 3 GiB of RAM for a normal desktop is a lot by any standard.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[tokul]

If it looks like a desktop, and it displays files in front of the wallpaper like a desktop...

It does not look like desktop. Put more files in that directory and you will see scrollbars. It is filesystem browser window.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[jon_doh2.0]

I pretty much agree.

I have been running Linux for around three years now, had been an old ibook before then (which had been dual booting Ubuntu at its end of days), and before that OS 9.

I had a pretty good experience of an integrated, stable OS, from Apple, and i maintain that the Apple OS is great, and really stable, at least as for as 10.4 (thats as far as i know about), however the privilege of using there OS is not worth the mugging you receive when you buy one of their computers, i mean they make it so hard to find out the exact specifics of their machines on their site, but when you do a bit of digging you find that they were using the lowest end of any one range, just so they can advertise that they are using that range, at least when i last checked. I remember finding out they where using really low end Core 2s, when Core2s where already out of date, and also advertising dual core i7s, assuming everyone would think they were quad, as that's what i7 were famous for being. It was a complete racket, pay above they odds, for sub par hardware, oh did we mention you can upgrade RAM, HD, etc, on checkout? What do you think of our prices?

Go suck a a fucking pee-pee, Jobs.

Guess what i have now? A cheap Dell Inspiron 1300, released only about a year after my ibook, as Dell's bottom of the range laptop, and it screams compared to that old ibook, certainly it helps that the laptop was designed with the customer in mind and all main components are easily accessible and upgradable.

Furthermore, Linux is just as stable and well integrated as OS X, and so much more fun to use, not to mention the freedom to control your own system Linux affords.

And Windows, well lets just say my girlfriend uses Vista, shall we? Perhaps not the fairest comparison. However, it's not just the awful, grindingly slow OS. Its the whole bully, threat level, daddy knows best philosophy they force on users as well. Say we are rushing out and we turn of our computers, and Windows decides it's going to force some updates after shutdown has been initiated, without warning and without telling us what they are, and which takes ages, meaning we have to sit and wait or opt to leave the power on for however long. She is so used to being bossed around by Windows though, she thinks its normal.

Good news is, she has taken to KDE, because, yes, it does appear much more Windows like than say, GNOME, so would be a more comfortable transition for her. And lets face it, it's more glitzy and visually appealing to casual users.

I do believe if Windows wasnt pre-loaded on all PCs there is no way they would have won the desktop, at least not on merit (look at the sever space).

But, we also have to accept that currently Linux is probably too involved for many casual users to feel comfortable using, certainly after a lifetime of being babied by MS. Not because its too hard necessarily, but because they aren’t interested in and dont want to give the time it takes to learn.
That said though modern Linux distros are pretty much idiot proof out of the box, it's just when something goes wrong or some tweaking is required and they find out, say from a forum or readme (which often assume some prior knowledge), that they have to edit a configuration file or mess with terminal, and this can be a bit intimidating, they just want to point and click.
I remember when we were kids and our old PowerPC Performa would display that warning with the little bomb logo my dad would freak out, tell us not to touch anything and move away. He later told me he thought it was going to explode. HA ha. People are intimidated by computers and Windows fosters that in the way it words things, which in turns feeds that unease and lets you believe that that a paternalistic OS is good because it somehow protects you from yourself and what you might do. Oh yeh, and Windows goes horribly wrong enough to enforce that fear.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[billcopc]

To some extent, sure, but what does the user see ? They see a touch interface that is mostly self-explanatory. Ask that same user what Linux is, and if they even know, they'll say it's that "matrixy shit with all the hacker typing stuff".

Then tell them Android is Linux and see what happens. Hint: you might get called a bullshitter.

The Linux in Android is just a kernel. We know what that means, but the average user does not, nor do they care. They care about the things with which they interact, and that is the GUI. In that respect, Android's GUI is, considering its environment, light-years ahead of KDE and Gnome.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[billcopc]

You know, I wouldn't mind the launcher so much, if it actually opened by pressing Meta, and not Meta+1 or Meta+Space or some other Mac-like contraption.

I'm quite used to tapping the Win key, then typing the first few letters of what I want. Sure, I'll assign direct shortcuts to a few main apps like the browser, konsole and a couple others, but for those occasional-use apps the launcher is one of the easier ways to find stuff. I'm not about to go hunting through folders when I already know the name of the program.

The KDE launcher does need a some TLC to make it more consistent and keyboard-friendly, but I don't consider it a bad thing. If it spares me from reaching for the mouse, that's a win.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, Gwenview is the best app in its field I've ever had the pleasure to use. I love it.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

If you right click on the desktop you can change the layout to ""folder view" instead of "desktop" in the settings. This is the functionality you are requesting.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click on your desktop, select 'Activity', and choose "folder view".

More on multi-agent based AI

[elucido]

So I mentioned this in my previous post and I recognize some people don't know why or don't understand why this would be useful. So I'll give some examples of what agent based AI can do for those who don't know and how it could be implemented.

To implement multi-agent based AI on linux first there would need to be a backend or a framework of some sort that would allow scripting languages such as python, ruby, and perl to connect to it. The framework or backend would have to be written in C for certain intense data processing tasks. The front end should allow programmers of all sort to write their own scripts in their favorite scripting languages to create robots. These robots should have the ability to automate system processes.

For example I decide I need to do research on artificial intelligence because I don't know what it is, so I should be able to tell the robot to search Google, to find X amount of articles on artificial intelligence which meet certain criteria. This could be done using regular expressions. But of course this isn't all that I need to do. I have a to-do list for this specific robot related to the topic of AI, to download certain files from the net and install them, to then load up and use certain files to process certain data. All of this should be automated completely and should happen in the backround and it all should be related to the topic of AI.

The news robot on the other hand I would program to act as an RSS feed, this robot would look not just at specific websites such as slashdot, but for specific articles on slashdot and present those articles along with research on certain keywords or buzzwords it thinks or suspects I know little about or wont understand.

The log analyzer robot could analyze logs for me and highlight any potential redflags, and then if it finds them run through an automated process that I determine is best for dealing with these redflags.

Each robot would be assigned to a task. Each robot should have the ability to do what the user could do, and it should be simple to show the robot or program the robot into doing it a number of very highly complex tasks.

The problem with using computers is most of the stuff we do each day is just routine. Most of us fit into certain patterns. Robots would allow us to save time, we can leave the computer on all day or all night and it will do a number of boring clicks and boring tasks that take up a great deal of time. This saves time and increases productivity.

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[Kjella]

multi-agent based AI

It's an army of Clippys

it should be simple to show the robot or program the robot into doing it a number of very highly complex tasks

Yeah... how many decades have we dreamed about the Star Trek computer or Lt. Cmdr. Data by now? Computers aren't ever going to figure out what you're trying to do and make all the complex decisions themselves. The fact of the matter is that to make it to complex things you have to write complex scripts. And try as people may, we still haven't found anything better than the current programming languages, which most people can't grok. Every attempt to "humanize" it has failed because it lacks the precision to be interpreted by a computer and the computer will never realize it's doing nonsense work.

For example I decide I need to do research on artificial intelligence because I don't know what it is, so I should be able to tell the robot to search Google, to find X amount of articles on artificial intelligence which meet certain criteria.

Just to take one example, how's your agent going to know this link, unlike all the other links, is fetching the next results? Somebody has to program that logic into it, you can't just say give me the top 100 links. And what tells sponsored links from actual search results, assuming you just want the search results? Again, more logic. What should it do if a link is unavailable, should it just take the next results, try again, try later, panic and error out? All of those COULD be reasonable choices under some circumstances. Where should it store it? Should it keep historical data, or clear it out each time? Does it need to keep a history so it doesn't download the same article twice? What about the same article on two different URLs, do we need fuzzy matching? Do you need just the article, and if so do you get it without all the navigation, header, footer and other text since it's just one HTML page? By the time I've narrowed down exactly what it is your agent to do, the "agent" is really a complex script that wasn't really all that valuable to automate anyway. Or you could have it try guessing, but then we're back to an army of Clippys again.

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi-agent AIs are a hobbyist/research endeavor and does not have appeal for the masses (and some would argue) is not proper to be included with an OS. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.

You can use Silk Test, Sikuli, or expect scripts for common tasks, and if you are research inclined then perhaps you should still keep up with the research. There is a fine line between clever and lazy, and people have various degrees of both. If you want to build this, by all means go for it, but don't be surprised if it doesn't become standard.

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[elucido]

Yeah... how many decades have we dreamed about the Star Trek computer or Lt. Cmdr. Data by now? Computers aren't ever going to figure out what you're trying to do and make all the complex decisions themselves.

I never said the computer has to make decisions. I said you tell the computer precisely what to do, and it can follow instructions autonomously. It's not as difficult to code as you make it seem.

The fact of the matter is that to make it to complex things you have to write complex scripts.

I could write some of the scripts myself, so apparently it's not so complex that we (the linux community) wouldn't collectively be able to write them. Provide the right programming environment and most of us would feel right at home writing complex scripts.

And try as people may, we still haven't found anything better than the current programming languages, which most people can't grok.

Python is easy enough for most people to grok. There are plenty of people who know plenty of languages so if you support enough languages you'll have plenty of different scripts which allow the bots to do plenty of different complex activities. Using pipes you can pass information through various parts of the operation system or from one bot to another bot.

Every attempt to "humanize" it has failed because it lacks the precision to be interpreted by a computer and the computer will never realize it's doing nonsense work.

Do you have any clue what you are talking about?

Just to take one example, how's your agent going to know this link, unlike all the other links, is fetching the next results?

You use a sort algorithm, and you use a loop to check for each character in the string that makes up the link, to evaluate the string, you can encode the link via hash, and if I'm missing something there is probably some algorithm somewhere designed specifically to solve this problem. It's just a matter of sorting through a sequence of strings in some cases and in others you can just tell the robot exactly what you are looking for via regular expression, such as to look within the url http://www.slashdot.org/ and search for stories with a specific topic, and then look in those stories and search for posts containing "http://" and then evaluate the strings of the url to fetch only the ones on the topic of artificial intelligence or related. It wouldn't be as difficult as you think to program this as Google and others already have robots that do web crawling.

What about the same article on two different URLs, do we need fuzzy matching? Do you need just the article, and if so do you get it without all the navigation, header, footer and other text since it's just one HTML page? By the time I've narrowed down exactly what it is your agent to do, the "agent" is really a complex script that wasn't really all that valuable to automate anyway. Or you could have it try guessing, but then we're back to an army of Clippys again.

The agent would be as smart as the series of scripts you feed into it. So if you give it fuzzy matching capability, or any other kind of capability you think would be useful to solve your specific problem it would become better suited to solve it. But another idea would be just to train the agent via your own habits, what links do you typically click on within a slashdot article of that type? The robot could then just use your own probability ratios to figure out what you might click in that situation and only fetch those URLs. It would be a matter of setting that specific robot on learning mode and browsing slashdot enough so that it can try and learn about your browsing habits.

This would simplify the process of teaching the artificial intelligence.

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[VortexCortex]

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?

Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...

For now I'll just keep typing things like:
http://google.com/search/?q=AI
http://google.com/search/?q=site:slashdot.org+AI
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=ai

-- or --

Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...
Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:

javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0; for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match( /\bAI\b/ ) ) window.open( a[x].href ); if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; } void(0);
(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)

But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.

I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.

Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).

Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[elucido]

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?

Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...

For now I'll just keep typing things like:

http://google.com/search/?q=AI

http://google.com/search/?q=site:slashdot.org+AI

http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=ai

-- or --

Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...

Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:

javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0;
for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match( /\bAI\b/ ) ) window.open( a[x].href );
if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; }
void(0);

(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)

But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.

I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.

Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).

Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....

You are making it a lot more complicated than it has to be. It's not hard already to do certain parts. The problem is it would take a lot of code to do it right. You don't need to use screen shots because we are talking about strings here.

It's not difficult to work with strings and regular expressions. There are a lot of capabilities already. The problem is there isn't a unified framework or backend to make it simple enough that everyone could do it.

And no I haven't decided that this will be MY project, but if nobody sees it as valuable, and I do, then at some point I will write some code and see what can and can't be done. Robots are easy to write, and so are webcrawling robots. Screen shots aren't necessary. It would have to rely on a framework from which applications run on top of.

Python scripting for example can already allow a lot of stuff. The way unix is designed, applications can communicate with each other in that the output of one application can be made into the input for another. If the framework is designed under the methodology that all applications should be able to communicate with each other, then all robots should also be able to communicate with each other. If each robot is sufficiently specialized, you can have fairly complex operations broken down into highly specialized simple tasks.

It's easy to write a bot which bro

Re:More on multi-agent based AI

[RichiH]

You are basically describing UNIX shell scripting.

Transforming this power into a GUI-based system has been tried in the past and is highly non-trivial.

Anyway, you plan makes sense, but you are glossing the hard part: Someone needs to create a framework. Once a framework exists, someone has to write bots for it.

steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

is gnome 2 or kde 3, none of the new offerings can even provide you with a working desktop

Re:steady as she goes

[lennier1]

At least KDE doesn't force you to use some damn tablet mode if you don't want to.

And that's coming from someone who has preferred Gnome over KDE since the days Gnome became mature enough to be an alternate option.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

no it just forced me to spend a shit ton of time searching through forum threads to figure out how to set the durn thing up where I could drag a icon from a window on to the desktop

~brilliant~

Re:steady as she goes

[Risen888]

You're dumb.

Re:steady as she goes

[SomeKDEUser]

As opposed to this part of the desktop conveniently labelled with the path it links to? See, some of us like to be able to drag stuff to where we want the files to be (no, not the _stupid_ "Download folder"). And some of these locations might be remote! You might be living in the nineties, but some of us have this amazing thing called Internet (not, "the web") and we use it.

Re:steady as she goes

[fnj]

This is the most insightful of all the comments here and I would mod you +100 if I could. The KDE4 desktop that is not a desktop was a WTF moment from the instant I first saw it. And it is the ONLY thing wrong with KDE4. If only they would just let you TURN IT THE FUCK OFF.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

I dont know what your deal is, if you looked at the original comment instead of instantly going KDE Fanboi to the rescue you would notice I said gnome 2 and kde3 are fine

And I find it really fucking silly that I have to read a god damned tech doc to be able to drag an icon from the fucking start menu to the desktop, maybe I am living in the 90's, why in the hell would I want a shortcut some place convenient without making it a obnoxious widget or spending time engineering my workspace with a fucking interior designer?

Re:steady as she goes

[WillKemp]

none of the new offerings can even provide you with a working desktop

Gnome 3 provides me with a desktop that works just as well as any other desktop i've used on linux systems over the last 15 years. It took a day or two to get used to it, but maybe i'm more adaptable than some.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

Care to explain or do you have an issue where you randomly insult someone without the tiniest amount of thought?

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

I havent spent a lot of time in Gnome3 admittedly, but the reason for that is most of what they tout is of little or no use to my daily personal computer

I think I would love it on my work PC but hell, thats a 1.8ghz p4 with sd ram and a 2x agp rage, so even if I could break the windows cycle at work, its not going to run it worth a crap

Re:steady as she goes

[MrHanky]

It doesn't need an explanation to the rest of us. Consider that.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

no I would like to know why I am dumb for thinking that these new GUI's cant even provide something as simple and as old as a desktop

its not an unreasonable request, I happen to like the desktop vs having to manually setup little semitransparent boxes to replicate that function with widgets

apparently its becuase I am stuck in the 90's or as I like to read it, know how to operate a computer and not force myself to use something that functions like a set top box

Re:steady as she goes

[karper]

If only they would just let you TURN IT THE FUCK OFF.

Step 1: alt+f2
Step 2: kquitapp plasma-desktop
Problem solved, gramps.

krunner. Learn it. Use it. Love it.

Re:steady as she goes

[Anonymous Coward]

Set it to folder view. Done.

Ooh, that was horrible.

Re:steady as she goes

[SomeKDEUser]

There are no good reason to drag an icon from the start menu to the desktop. Which, BTW, works. If you want a launcher, you want it accessible, thus on the panel. I never understood why windows installers seemed all adamant that I absolutely put their icon on my destop.

The deal is that the folder views of KDE 4 are massively better than the desktop of KDE3 or GNOME2. They make complete sense: the desktop is this very useful scrapbook of files currently worked on. But it makes sense to have them organised in a couple folders, all visible at once. It also makes sense to be able to have some of these folders distant.

For example, I am running calculations that will occasionally write intermediate solution files. Using a folder view, I can see them appearing. I can the manually open them when I want to.

Using nepomuk, I can have one such folder which will display all the files created in my home in the last week.

KDE4 is a truly modern desktop, and although I liked KDE3 a lot, it was only a best-in-class 90s desktop. Clearly, you are living in the 90s, but you may yet come to appreciate the present...

Re:steady as she goes

[MrHanky]

1) You can use it as a 90s desktop computer. The setting is 2 clicks away.
2) You evidently don't know how to operate a computer. Hello, you just provided evidence yourself. See 1).
3) Your inability to learn new things and grasp simple concepts suggest that you're not very smart indeed, and further that as in 2), you're not much more than a trained monkey. Oh noes, now you need new training!

Re:steady as she goes

[Risen888]

I offered as much explanation as you did.

Re:steady as she goes

[Risen888]

no I would like to know why I am dumb for thinking that these new GUI's cant even provide something as simple and as old as a desktop

its not an unreasonable request, I happen to like the desktop vs having to manually setup little semitransparent boxes to replicate that function with widgets

You know, that's pretty funny. I don't put icons on my desktop, but just to check, I just right now dragged an icon out of my menu onto my (KDE 4.6) desktop, and what the fuck do you know, it created an icon on my desktop! Holy shit, alert the media!

know how to operate a computer

Really?

Re:steady as she goes

[Risen888]

Better yet, in KDE that setting is zero clicks away. I just tried to put an icon on my desktop (which I don't do in my daily use, but I just wanted to try) and damned if it didn't Just Work!

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

no it didnt fuckwit, it created a widget, now widgets and icons do not play by the same rule so if you dare have a fucking document on there at the same time they will stack on top of eachother, if you mouse over one it has a box expand to 3 times the size of the icon and you have to dance around these fucking idiot wigets with little semitransparent boxes flashing all over the screen

god fucking damit thats so much better than a fucking icon, wouldnt you say so dipshit?

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

I did not insult you, now apparently per our other conversation you dont know the difference tween an icon and a widget and I am the fucking dumb one?

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

1) no you cant, you can almost turn it off but it never goes the fuck away
2) yea I can, it does not involve a wiimote and a set top box ui
3) I dont have time to learn some fucked up specialty UI on a nieche OS only used by nerds, call me when linux is on the desktop. Oh thats right you cant even get a basic UI working anymore

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

you created a FUCKING WIDGET you god damed retard, do you know what the difference is? ones a FUCKING PICTURE that repersents a program the other IS A FUCKING PROGRAM to represent that picture to repersent that program

its fucking dumb and it gets in the way when icons and widgets mix, thats why they give you that stupid box for your desktop, and I dont like having my desktop in a fucking window

maybe if I was a 12 year old looser with no life I would sit down and figure this shit out like you, but you know what? when your GUI requires a manual in 2011, you fucked it up

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

yea there is a good reason, I want shit there! and no I dont want widgets launchers and whatever else goes on, I want a link with a picture

KDE on that FAIL

and sorry no this is not the desktop of the future ha lets try this? what other windows system require all your programs live in side of little boxes on a sterile and blank background, give up windows 3.1, yea your UI model is the freaking program manager with 3dfx and you expect me to buy in to this "of the future"?

bullshit

Re:steady as she goes

[SomeKDEUser]

This is what you get. A link with a picture. The box depends on the theme.

I don't see why KDE should accommodate your needs rather than mine: yours is a minor esthetic complaint. My work pattern is impossible on any other desktop.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

im sorry no its not a minor esthetic thing, I sat down with this thing and after fighting with it I had icons that you can move in boxes coved in a layer of widgets on top, and it totally broke every single thing I do to the point where I just got rid of it

I like my stuff orginized too, I dont like having someone elses perfect model of workflow in my fucking face to the point where seemingly harmless things like a folder on the desktop (and I mean the real desktop not the program manager window labeled as desktop) were just broken. Hell I gave up after spending a bunch of time trying to move icons in the folder view "activity"
 

Re:steady as she goes

[SomeKDEUser]

Plus, you are full of crap. I just did that: dragged an icon from the menu to the desktop (not the folderview, the desktop) and it created the link. And in fact, there wasn't even a box.

The box thing, I remember from KDE 4.0-4.1. Two years ago. So there you are, insulting people spending countless hours of their lives to give a better desktop to the world, and you can't even fact-check.

Re:steady as she goes

[Osgeld]

no you get a widget which ignores other icons in folder view really fucking handy to have 2 dozen widgets sitting on top of the spreadsheet file you need to work on

and I installed the latest and greatest of mint kde, so whatever the fuck it and kbuntu are using as install, besides its not my fault your precious little desktop is an unuseable pile of garbage meant for touch screen media players I actually have more important things to do other than twist my mind around some minority desktop on some minority OS that thinks its being cute by adopting windows 3.1 conventions and more effects than a fucking xbox360 game

let us know how that turns out for you fanboi

Re:steady as she goes

[SomeKDEUser]

Oh, I think this comment of yours is all illustration one needs to evaluate the value of your opinion. But for the record, when one drags a launcher to a folderview, it creates a .desktop link which will launch the program when clicked. It will, however, warn you that an executable is launched the first time and ask for permission.

So bottom line, I don't know what you are doing. The desktop actually behaves exactly like you want it to, in folderview mode. Your "latest and greatest" clearly is from a couple years ago, or a figment of your imagination. Not that KDE doesn't have bugs. Just not those you describe.

Re:steady as she goes

[Risen888]

Lol. Whatever, man. They're icons.

It's true. Nerd rage is the funniest rage.

Improve GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

While I love new features, the KDE devs should spend more time on polish. The photo featured in TFA makes a good case. The buttons (at the windows bottom) clearly lack the necessary paddings.

Re:Improve GUI

[betterunixthanunix]

the KDE devs should spend more time on polish

That has been the KDE4 story since the very first release. The KDE team shot themselves in the foot by focusing too much on new features and not enough on fixing bugs and making old features better.

Re:Improve GUI

[SomeKDEUser]

But if they did add the padding, some other guy _will_ squeal like a pig that the EVIL KDE DEVELOPERS are stealing his precious pixels... They can't win.

Re:Improve GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

The buttons (at the windows bottom) clearly lack the necessary paddings.

The fact that the padding isn't there proves that it isn't necessary.

Also, the panel in that screenshot has quite clearly been set to some sort of "compact" mode. Adding more padding would be totally inappropriate.

Re:Improve GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so much that... KDE4 was a rebuild from scratch. Which means that everything was new features even stuff that was implemented in KDE 3.5...

Given that the list of new features was only a few items. you can guess that the rest was bugfixing polishing.

two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

before someone mods me '-1 flamebait', let say a few things:

1- NOT a gnome fanboy. i dislike gnome in all it's incarnations, always did.
2- i use windowmaker. always have, always will
3- i only had parts of KDE installed to use some of it's applications from inside wmaker (mostly K3B, koppete, ktorrent and dolphin)

now, in the last two weeks i apt-get purged all things KDE4 from my system (kept only pana, a fork of amarok 1.4). the reason is that newer versions of KDE were starting to interfere with my way of doing things. what tipped the scale was keyboard configuration.

you see, i don't use graphical login managers, i log from good old fashion console, then type "startx" by hand. i consider this a must, since i use debian unstable, so breakeage of x.org because of updated kernel, ati drivers, etc sometimes happens. this means i have keyboard with swapped ctrl and caps lock, as well as locale (pt_BR) configured on the console. with wmaker i don't even need a keyboard section on xorg.conf, it just goes with what's configured on the console. that is, until you fire up a KDE app and it loads all those libraries. other thing that i had configured manually was CPU frequency management, so i don't run the risk of overheating the notebook when doing something CPU intensive on the console. i use userspace governor with kpowernowd and it works just fine.

keyboard becomes all messed up, KDE insisted in changing the frequency governor to wathever it damn well pleased, not to mention taht the load time for all those libraries was atrocious, i had to wait some 20 to 30 seconds until kopete, bluetooth applet and power applet loaded.

after i ditched everything, now i'm using XFE as file manager, pidgin for IM, gnome's bluetooth applet, xfburn and qbittorrent (a qt app. it doesn't load all the KDE libs like ktorrent). the result is faster load times for the GUI, less anoyance and no loss of functionality.

if the KDE guys make their environment behave better when a KDE app is loaded from some other window manager, maybe i'll give it another shot. until there, it'll stay out of my computer. i have better things to do with my time than fight against misbehaved apps that try to wrestle control of my system out of me.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[jd]

I use WindowMaker, Enlightenment, AfterSTEP, FVWM2, OpenLook, KDE, Gnome and the one that's an Archimedes GUI ripoff. Not usually at the same time, though that's happened, but whichever one happens to fit my mood and/or fits with whatever I'm doing better. I can't understand those who live in a single GUI. It's like trying to live in a single country.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Anonymous Coward]

Posts like this are the reason people don't want to use Linux.
Too much work.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Anonymous Coward]

i use windowmaker. always have, always will

you see, i don't use graphical login managers, i log from good old fashion console, then type "startx" by hand.

since i use debian unstable

Well, you are probably not the target audience for KDE. I appreciate all the effort you put in on debian unstable (hopefully you're sending feedback so future releases become rock solid!), but quite frankly, the KDE guys don't have you in mind when they develop. I'm not surprised KDE flipped out on you, if debian unstable is requiring you to mess with x and drivers at every boot, poor KDE probably doesn't have solid ground to stand on, of course its going to behave funky.

I don't mean to this to become a anecdote battle, but I can say it works just fine for me. OpenSUSE 11.4 personally, but I have a few distros floating around under my control (at the office, etc.) People at my university run linux machines in the labs and tutoring centers and all, and some students will ocassionally ask "What is this computer running?". "Kubuntu/OpenSUSE/Linux". "Oh, cool. I like it. I've heard of it but never used it before." They must be doing something right! And some of KDE's tools I find fantastic, to the point where I miss them when I'm running Ubuntu or, even worse, back on a windows box. I work in math and honestly I've begun to enjoy pulling up things like Kmplot to just pump out a graph quick, for example. I like the interface, and every release I feel like KDE grows more polished and user friendly. Some things Windows 7 does drives me nuts (I absolutely can't stand how the "Downloads" folder is not a Library like the rest of the folders and so anytime I want to attach a download to an email I have to hunt through my user directory to get to it, for example). Probably no one is ever going to like a single DE 100% for everything it does, there's always points where we think it can improve because we all have different workflows and ideas. And KDE does pretty well on memory I find. More than we're used to, but hey, I still remember my first computer as a kid and so 1 GB of RAM still sounds like a lot to me; but when computers from Dell come standard with at least 2 GB, many times 4 GB, we have to keep perspective and realize, in the scheme of things, it's not that big a deal, partially because our desktops and software do more than they did before. It's PERFECTLY OK that it uses more memory than it used to. I personally find my laptop runs cooler with linux than it did with windows. I didn't change any hardware or anything, just wiped out windows and replaced it. Bam, snappier interface AND it runs cooler. Linux has really come a long way, and KDE especially I really enjoy using.

I just had to throw in my 2 cents because I get a little tired of all the "GNOME/KDE/whatever sucks!" and the justification is some obscure use case.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like trying to live in a single country.

Nice choice of analogy, proves your point very well ;)

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Linzer]

if the KDE guys make their environment behave better when a KDE app is loaded from some other window manager, maybe i'll give it another shot.

Now, this is a problem right there. If you load a KDE app in a different window manager, then it isn't "their environment" anymore. Making KDE apps behave nicely in other environments is definitely not KDE people's priority. The same goes for GNOME, to be honest: I've had some unpleasant time trying to setup applications with GConf while not using GNOME.

While I am can totally understand your case and sympathize with it, I think you're right that KDE is not for you. It's meant to be much more exclusive. It's designed for KDE users, if you will (no irony intended).

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[pjt33]

It's like trying to live in a single country.

It saves you from having to hire an expert because you need detailed advice on matters such as double-taxation treaties?

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[goarilla]

hear hear
but i had a lot of the same issues with KDE 3.x
and it's a shame since ktorrent, k3b and konqueror in my opinion are awesome apps
as was amarok

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[SomeKDEUser]

- You should not set the frequency manually. This is the job of the OS/the hardware. And they know best.
  - KDE respects the locale unless you have specifically told it not to (as in, configured alternate keyboards)
  - Login managers do not prevent you from logging on the console: if there is a lockup, reboot and specify the runlevel at the grub/lilo prompt
  - The first KDE app will take 20s to start, because it needs to start the configuration cache and the system bus. These apps benefit from integration, but this incurs a cost when run standalone

But yeah, I mean, you are running windowmaker, so why run KDE apps? These apps are great because they are integrated and work well together, in their environment. Of course, there is nothing like Amarok (2, yes, I'm a fan) or K3B or kate, or quite like kontact outside of KDE. But these apps are great because of the integration and the shared features!

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[SomeKDEUser]

On the other hand, the guy is really trying hard to make his life miserable...

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[walshy007]

Of course, there is nothing like Amarok (2, yes, I'm a fan)

For media playback, I recommend you try mpd, of course that is just the daemon, there are many front-ends for it and I imagine a qt one (I use ncurses one and the firefox plugin when people are over)

Amarok doesn't play well with jack, which is what all the cool kids that want serious low latency audio use for that audio subsystems many neat features.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[WillKemp]

Posts like this are the reason people don't want to use Linux.

People do want to use linux - lots of them.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Anonymous Coward]

You have qt installed so you should try qtfm filemanager, its superb. Kicks the shit out of xfe, which is just, well, ugly...

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[SomeKDEUser]

But I like the integration with the lyrics, and wikipedia, and the videos! If I just wanted the music, I would never launch a GUI.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not set the frequency manually. This is the job of the OS/the hardware. And they know best.

Except that frequency scaling in Linux sucks. Do some benchmarks that use a single CPU/core and compare the difference between "ondemand" and "performance" for CPU scaling. The ondemand governor is slower because a single thread will bounce around between CPU cores causing the governor to keep scaling on and off and the resulting delay introduced affects performance negatively.

There is little to no power/heat consumption difference between using a CPU scaling governor and just turning it off (eg. with the "performance" mode). At least for Intel CPU's the hardware itself will scale back power usage much more efficiently than the OS can.

Back to the OP, you're right that manually configuring the CPU scaling using user-space applications is idiotic. Just push it to performance mode at the system level and forget about anything more complicated.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[walshy007]

I'm not sure about you, but for the most part I consider music a mostly background thing. While it plays you can do other things. Looking at the lyrics and videos is an active affair, and one that takes all of five seconds to google. Why have that clutter in your music selection interface? And why introduce the dependency of a network to retrieve said information?

It is more than readily accessible via google if so inclined.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[imsabbel]

You are really so funny.

You use a system that is so unstable that you dont even dare to login in GUI (as its broken so often due to all the reasons you list), and still feel superior about it.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[MonsterTrimble]

I used to be in the Pana camp with you, but it looks like development died. I highly, highly, highly recommend Clementine. I was a bit leery of it to start but it's really come together the past couple of releases and development seems to be increasing.

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

there's still some stuff in pana that clementine don't do yet, at least not as well. one is support for scripts (at least i couldn't find it), transcoding on the context menu, configuration of transcoding options (bitrate, sampling size, etc), a separate tab on the side bar for playlists, instead of several tabs on the top, and other small stuff...

hmmm, maybe a bug report ?

Re:two weeks without KDE... and not missing it

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

my system is not "so unstable that i don't dare to login in GUI". it's a just that i got bitten in the ass a couple of times in the past by new kernels breaking the proprietary drivers, which means rolling back the kernel by hand.

oh, you probably tought that my system is "unstable" because i used the word on my post right ? well, read it again, i said i use "debian unstable", which in debian lingo means "debian beta". but based on my own experience, debian unstable is of higher quality, more stable than the most recent "stable" ubuntus.

Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Viol8]

... that they programs are just a shell , an interface to the applications that do the actual work. It doesn't matter how many times they rearrange the spaces in the car park , its the cars that are important. I just want a GUI to allow me to manage applications. End of. I don't need some all singing and dancing bloatware that sucks cycles from the CPU because it gives the devs - who couldn't quite make the grade as games or graphics package developers - a hard on to come up with silly animations and other BS that no one needs. This applies to KDE, Gnome, Windows and OS/X. And for that reason I don't use any of them. twm works for fine me.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Microlith]

Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager. The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are so l337, your parents must be so proud! Seriously, what's the point of coming here and posting something like this?

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

bring a different, but no less valid point of view to the discussion ?

i'm still on windowmaker, another mid-90s WM. it's clean, fast, practical and allows me to do some tricks at work that makes me much more productive than the guys who use gnome/unity/kde.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[gilesjuk]

You can manage applications from the command line. Why do you even need a GUI? :)

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[cb88]

twm is mid 80's and that was a blatant troll ... lol seriously nobody uses twm.... on the other had FVWM2 isn't half bad and is highly customizable on top of using less memory than twm.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[MrHanky]

Actually, it's a less valid point of view. He just doesn't get it. He doesn't get what a GUI is, what an application is, what a desktop environment is.

Windowmaker is fine, but it doesn't make you more productive than others who are as proficient with their preferred desktop. You're just arrogant and stupid, like the GGP.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[jd]

GUIs are overhead in a lot of areas. Graphics can be done via framebuffers, for example, and if you're simply wanting to flip through a photo album you're far better off doing it that way than to have the overheads of X in there. On the other hand, I'd hate to do video editing in a console app.

It's like arguing whether axes are better than arrows. Even with a 170 lb. longbow, it'll take time to cut down a tree, but an archer will still beat an axe-wielding maniac.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with that, but when my X broke a few weeks ago, I realized why I need a gui. I can do almost everything from cli- even browse the web with lynx (one of my favorite browsers :) - but I have to write and submit papers. Turns out there's not much you can do with LO from the cli.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with a 170 lb. longbow, it'll take time to cut down a tree, but an archer will still beat an axe-wielding maniac.

Only if he keeps his cool and doesn't miss.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Anonymous Coward]

use latex

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[WillKemp]

twm works for fine me.

What's wrong with bash?

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[WillKemp]

i'm still on windowmaker, another mid-90s WM. it's clean, fast, practical and allows me to do some tricks at work that makes me much more productive than the guys who use gnome/unity/kde.

I hope they pay you more for that!

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Artifakt]

If you can really draw a bow with 170 lbs of pull, then it doesn't really matter if you miss once or twice, unless the opponent is starting out at much less than your normal working ranges for a bow.:
1. Even a limb hit will probably result in instant crippling at that pull. Bows like that will shoot through cinderblocks. At ranges of less than 100 yards, you aren't really doing archery any more, because the arrow doesn't perceptibly arch, it's as straight a shot as with a rifle.
2. You can always rip the maniac in half with your bare hands if he gets too close.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[muuh-gnu]

> Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager.

Why changing something that works, for the worse?

> The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.

I wouldnt mind if all those fabulos capabilities you allegedly "enjoy", were for the better, but they arent. They are mostly a superficial, never ending designer circlejerkoff in fight for winning the useless "oh shiny, now wheres my starbucks app" crowd. But you cant win that crowd for more than a year, because they change trends faster then you change underwear. You fool yourself by thinking that every time you completely jettison the old, working configuration, for a completely new design, you are improving something, but you arent. Youve just entered the fashion zone, without realizing it.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers concentrate on optimizing GUIs now a days. So much so that it is now the CLI that is suffering. Believe it or not the command line interface suffers more performance penalties now that the GUI does.

Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise...

[drinkypoo]

Using Compiz with Expo and Window List really IS better. One keystroke and I can see all my desktops or all my windows laid out before me. I have the extraneous decorative bullshit turned off, so I just have mipmapped live desktop images tiled seamlessly across my displays when I use Expo.

What's the deal with KDE, Qt, and Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

... especially for closed source (shrink wrap) application development, e.g. games. I understand that there are few if any issues for developers of "free software", but some may have a different business model/monetization plan.

Or stop fucking wasting space.

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need all of this 3D bullshit that you're proposing. We just need application developers to stop wasting screen space with stupid shit.

For crying out loud, look at the goddamn KDE 4.7 beta 1 screenshots in the article! LOOK AT HOW MUCH WASTED SPACE THERE IS! In the screenshot of Dolphin, look at how shitting massive the icons are! If they were half the size, you could get twice as many shown at once, and still be able to see the thumbnail image just fine.

Then there's all the wasted space to the right of the toolbars, and below the list of directories/places on the left side. In the "old days", we used to just put that shit in the menus, with it taking up very little space. But since menus aren't "trendy" these days, functionality that was conveniently hidden is now in-your-face and wasting a lot of screen real estate.

Look at the other screenshot. Everywhere you look, there's space wasted. What the fuck is the point of buying increasingly-larger monitors every year if the application developers will just triple the size of their icons and the empty space between UI components every few years?

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[Hultis]

Jevons paradox. I'll just leave that here and let you think about how it works with increasingly fast hardware, increasing hard drive space and the obvious parallell to increasing screen real estate.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[Risen888]

In the screenshot of Dolphin, look at how shitting massive the icons are! If they were half the size, you could get twice as many shown at once, and still be able to see the thumbnail image just fine.

Then there's all the wasted space to the right of the toolbars, and below the list of directories/places on the left side. In the "old days", we used to just put that shit in the menus, with it taking up very little space. But since menus aren't "trendy" these days, functionality that was conveniently hidden is now in-your-face and wasting a lot of screen real estate.

You can change every one of those things in thirty seconds, you obnoxious piece of shit. Godalmightychrist, do you ever piss and moan.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[fnj]

He may be a Gnome guy and simply doesn't realize that the KDE structure isn't designed by totalitarian bastards who KNOW what is BEST FOR YOU and damn sure won't be caught dead giving you the CONTROLS to actually TUNE IT.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[walshy007]

For crying out loud, look at the goddamn KDE 4.7 beta 1 screenshots in the article! LOOK AT HOW MUCH WASTED SPACE THERE IS! In the screenshot of Dolphin, look at how shitting massive the icons are! If they were half the size, you could get twice as many shown at once, and still be able to see the thumbnail image just fine.

Everyone that has been using kde since the pre-dolphin era uses konqueror for their local file storage browsing, dolphin is horrendous in comparison.

Those of us that use kde day to day likely don't encounter most of the suckier new items, simply because we keep on doing it the older way. (most useful aspect of konqueror imho, browsing sftp like it were local and copy/pasting etc like normal)

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[M1FCJ]

Also from the article, "reduced clutter"... It's not clutter people, it's functionality! Don't make them hidden / removed!

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[karper]

I seriously doubt that's the default icon size. I've been on kde for a while, so I don't get to see the default icon size too often, but at least as of 4.6, the default icon size is pretty tiny. It's highly likely that the blogger pushed the slider all the way to the right to get a pretty screenshot.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[karper]

Don't know about that. I started using kde towards the last year of the 3.5.x series (I think) and if you use konqueror for file managing in 4.x, it's basically a dolphin kpart. Of course, you get arbitrary window splits as a bonus, but otherwise, it's pretty much the same thing as dolphin.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[Artifakt]

Then there's Nautilus, which is increasingly popular for KDE, and has very accessible configuration controls. You can specify Icon size, spacing, whether text is present, whether text is underneath or beside icons, and even whether the same spacing as the largest icon and text needs should be used throughout or icons should be spaced minimally. You can decide what file types should be shown as thumbnails, and further specify what the maximums size files to trigger thumbnails are. You can even have it play samples from.MP3s on hover if you want. You can make a fast system with lots of real estate do tricks like Lassie, or tweak it to run in more minimalist mode on a slow, small monitor system you would have trouble running XP on at all, let alone Win 7. Admittedly, It probably won't really help get something useable on a slow, stupid machine if you want all the tricks and are trying to drive lots of screen real estate with no separate GPU, but then, what will.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[theshowmecanuck]

Icon size is my one big... make the really BIG complaint with KDE and especially their file managers like Dolphin. I agree they should be way smaller. And the icon size in Dolphin should not be linked to icon size in any other part of the desktop. The other big waste of space that I abso-fucking-lutely hate, is the lack of MS style list layout of files in the file manager. I don't like the columns layout... fuckit, I don't like any of the ways they display files in a directory in Dolphin. I want an MS style list. Show me all the files in as small a space, without being a jumbled and icon filled mess. I agree also with keeping visual junk the fuck off the screen real estate.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[simcop2387]

It is far less than 30 seconds as another commenter proposed, more like half a second. the zoom bar is in the lower right and defaults to something more sensible compared to what that screenshot shows. I suspect he blew them up in order to make them look better in the thumbnail on the site. And to be pedantic, if the icons were half the size you'd fit 4 times as many, not twice. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the "wasted space to the right of the toolbars". And while I partly agree with the space on the left with the quick directories is sparser than it should be, it's also in the direction of where most screen real estate is on most monitors these days, making it less annoying than you would appear to be indicating. I'm also curious how you'd avoid "wasted space on the right" with a menu that only has the 5 "in-your-face" options on the toolbar, that are what 80% of people I've seen do in windows, osx, linux and on any other system I've ever seen. And the other screen shot is the desktop he has setup in kde4.7. What you're looking at is the toolbar on the bottom and him browsing more widgets and things to add to the screen. the big shiny white thing on the bottom with gigantic icons and empty space between the components is the setup dialog for it. it's only shown on request and designed to make it easier to select what you want from it rather than to be minimalistic and out of the way, since it's always hidden until you ask for it.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[walshy007]

Dolphin is not the same. (even if it uses the same backend for regular file browsing)

For starters it defaults without a location bar, with an information bar and folder selection bar. These things can be fixed of course, but are a very annoying default that konqueror doesn't have to deal with. However a few things that can't be fixed (or at least I haven't seen how after briefly loading it) you cannot get rid of the icon size buttons that take up considerable space and clutter the interface, the forward and back buttons take up 3x as much space for some reason, there is no up (parent directory) button. And when enabled the location bar takes up it's own line as opposed to simply being between the next/back buttons and search bar. Window splits are useless because two tabs are better.

These things just get in the way.

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[donaldm]

I definitely agree to your comments. It is very easy to configure "Dolphin" to something approaching Microsoft's file browser the question to ask is why? when you can customize it to something that is IMHO much more usable than the Microsoft offering. Of course as many have said before there are other ways of browsing under Linux if you wish, at least you have the choice.

Most people who use Microsoft's file browser for the first time initially see a huge (about a third) waste of space and have to configure the browser to something that is much more streamlined. Doing this can take quite some time and you either have to get that information from someone or read the help files (in Linux/Unix land "RTFM"). Using a Linux distribution is no different than using MS Windows, however it can take some time to get use too if you come from a MS Windows background.

As far as I am concerned people who look down on on Linux or even Unix applications saying "It is not like Windows" really aught to grow up and remember that they still had to learn MS Windows initially since no one is born with the Microsoft gene. :)

Re:Or stop fucking wasting space.

[zenmunk]

You can resize icons in Nautilus.

Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[G3ckoG33k]

Is Android a next gen KDE competitor? Android is after all essentially a desktop environment, but also a layer isolating the Linux kernel. Despite being a childishly avid KDE-fanboy I imagine that neither KDE or Gnome will "make it", get total dominance on the Linux desktop. Therefore, what are the chances that Qt, controlled by a "Microsoft controlled" Nokia, could be considered a risk by Google ... Hmmm... Ramblings, as I could not not fit the pieces together, and I'm getting very offtopic... Help me out! Still, the Android factor is probably too important to forget here, even for the pc.

Re:Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[SwedishPenguin]

Android throws away too much of the GNU userspace and replaces it with Java/Dalvik-based userspace to be of any use to a desktop Linux distribution. If any migration of desktop environments from the mobile space is to happen, my bet would be on MeeGo, they build on top of GNU userspace and allow anything X or terminal-based to still run.

Re:Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[the linux geek]

Nokia sold Qt, and you have no real logical thread that I can detect.

Re:Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[the linux geek]

Note that I'm aware that they did not literally sell Qt itself, just the commercial Qt business unit. I think at this point Nokia just doesn't give much of a fuck about it.

Re:Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[jd]

No more so than Sugar is. One of the great things about heterogeneous environments is that you tend to see specialization and optimization rather than outright competition (which just drains resources from everyone). Everyone gets a perfect whatever-they-want rather than half-baked one-size-fits-all solutions (which, by trying to compete with everyone, will always lose against everyone).

Re:Is Android a next gen KDE competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android throws away too much of the GNU userspace and replaces it with Java/Dalvik-based userspace to be of any use to a desktop Linux distribution.

I couldn't agree more. Ever since I rooted my Android (which I did right after ripping out a whole bunch of Google from it), it have been annoyed that the console programs and the shell sucks. No tab completion, ls that treats "/dir1/dir2" differently from "/dir1/dir2/", and so on. As soon as I get enough free time from work, Android is gone in favor for any real Linux distribution (don't care much which one at this point).

Giving KDE a new chance.

[Balinares]

Maybe it's time to be cautiously optimistic again.

When Unity came out, I gave it its 21 days[*]. After that time, I was still not very happy with it, so I figured that after using Gnome 2 for a while, it was time to give KDE another chance.

Well, I'm glad I did. There are still little niggles here and there if you look up close, but as a whole, things work pretty darn well. They've finally managed to return to that KDE sort of state from the 3.5 days, where multitudes of little features activate as needed to support your workflow and otherwise stay the fuck out of the way. Klipper is still so freaking convenient that I miss it sorely wherever I don't have it (the Gnome equivalent, Glipper, unfortunately didn't work very well for me). Also, Chromium now natively supports the KDE password storage thing. Quassel is like a smoother X-Chat with less bugs.

All in all I've been somewhat pleasantly surprised, and I think I may keep it after its 21 days. There are still things that annoy me -- their overthought Akonadi thing, for instance; seriously, guys, I shouldn't need an RDBMS to freaking read mails -- but much fewer so than I feared. Maybe it's time to be hopeful again for that Linux desktop thing we've been hearing about.

[*] When trying out a new tech, you've got to give it at least three weeks of real use, it is said; otherwise you can't necessarily tell if it sucks or if it's just different from what you're used to, and thus, uncomfortable at first.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[sarhjinian]

I'd agree. Interestingly, I'm finding this with GNOME 3: it's surviving the "three week" test pretty well so far. I think it's the "interface gets the hell out of the way" factor, too: you end up working with apps and documents, not fussing with settings.**

The problem, if you can call it that, is that the distro of choice for GNOME3 (Fedora 15) makes it a little hard to get going out of the box. It's not by any means insurmountable, but it's a little harder than it should be as some things are missing entirely (an Office suite really ought to come preinstalled) and playing "find the repo/RPM" is a lot harder than "It's probably already there, and if not it's trivial to find a PPA" of Ubuntu.

I'm interested to see what, if anything, the Linux Mint folks will make of GNOME 3, and it's unfortunate that Ubuntu isn't going this route. It really is a good DE, and it would benefit from Canonical's (former, traditional) user interface polish.

** I find myself fussing with settings a lot in KDE, and more often than I'd like in Ubuntu 11.04.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[rasmusbr]

Yeah, I hear you. I wish there was a way to get Gnome 3 in Ubuntu or an app store in Fedora.

I guess what I'm saying is I wish Canonical would have released Ubuntu with a customized version of Gnome 3 instead of inventing what feels like a preschool version of Gnome 3. Maybe they'll turn Unity into something palatable in 11.11, but as it is now it's way too buggy and it's not configurable enough.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Bambi Dee]

I believe Ubuntu 11.10 will be based on Gnome 3, just with Unity again instead of Gnome Shell. From what I've heard, Gnome Shell will nonetheless be available in the repositories. And you can quite easily try Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell now as they're available through this or that PPA. (I'm a nigh-fulltime KDE user, and my experience with Gnome Shell was brief, but I certainly preferred it to Unity... which I found quite bewildering.)

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[SomeKDEUser]

About akonadi: when 4.7 comes out, if you are using kmail/kontact you will be happy: it is really faster than the current non-akonadi-using mailer. If only for IMAP PUSH it would be worth it.

And the integration with nepomuk, I am pleased to say, works! full-text search in attachments is cool. Having the link to the right mail pop-up when doing alt-f2 "some relevant text" is awesome.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[DMFNR]

I found Gnome Shell in the repos for Ubuntu 10.04 so I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find it for whatever version you're running. You probably will have to enable Unsupported Updates or something in Software Sources but it's there surprisingly. It was fun to mess around with for awhile and see what all the fuss was about, but I think I'll wait until I have time to upgrade to an actual distro that supports Gnome 3 out of the box hoping it's configured a little bit better. I really doubt there's a ton of effort being put in to making sure Gnome Shell runs well on 10.04.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[WillKemp]

The problem, if you can call it that, is that the distro of choice for GNOME3 (Fedora 15) makes it a little hard to get going out of the box. It's not by any means insurmountable, but it's a little harder than it should be as some things are missing entirely (an Office suite really ought to come preinstalled) and playing "find the repo/RPM" is a lot harder than "It's probably already there, and if not it's trivial to find a PPA" of Ubuntu.

I dunno what a "PPA" is, but if you're finding it hard to install things like LibreOffice on Fedora, you're probably not using yumex. The first thing i install after a new Fedora install is yumex. It's not quite as good as synaptic, but it's close. The only repo you're likely to need, other than the default fedora ones, is rpmfusion - and it's trivial to install that from their web site.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Suiggy]

I tried KDE for a few days due to the switch to Unity to Ubuntu 11.04. I found it rather slow and heavy wait still, compared to the last time I tried it.

I'm now using XFCE in conjunction with Compiz and I'm enjoying it immensely. I suggest you give XFCE a try.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[sarhjinian]

That's what I found as well. You could install it on Ubuntu, but it didn't really work well and much of what patches and packaging is done to make Ubuntu Ubuntu actually make matters worse. Fedora 15 was designed with GNOME3 from the get-go and it shows.

I can see what the point of Unity and GNOME 3's Shell are, and I think GNOME is a little closer to the mark, at least at this juncture. Both could learn from each other, as they have complementary strengths

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[sarhjinian]

Word. Yum isn't bad (PackageKit is, though), but I find myself craving Aptitude and Synaptic

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[rasmusbr]

That's a good point. Gnome 3 and Gnome shell seem to work fine on my "just dicking around" virtual machine with Ubuntu 11.04.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[theweatherelectric]

The problem, if you can call it that, is that the distro of choice for GNOME3 (Fedora 15) makes it a little hard to get going out of the box. It's not by any means insurmountable, but it's a little harder than it should be as some things are missing entirely (an Office suite really ought to come preinstalled) and playing "find the repo/RPM" is a lot harder than "It's probably already there, and if not it's trivial to find a PPA" of Ubuntu.

It might not have been there by default if you installed from one of the live CDs as opposed to the full DVD. I don't know what's included on the Fedora CD spins by default as I tend to use the full DVD versions or I use preupgrade to update an existing system in place.

Still, installing office applications is trivial and you don't need to play "find the repo/RPM". RPMs are organised into groups and the groups are easy to list with either on the command line with yum or with the several graphical package managers available (like yumex, gpk-application, etc). You should have an entry in your desktop environment's menu called "Add/Remove Software" by default (which will probably be gpk-application). Go to the Office group and pick the packages you want. Alternatively, you can just install by group on the command line with yum groupinstall Office. LibreOffice is part of the default group install for the Office group.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, yumex is hands down the best GUI frontend for yum.

Unfortunately that's not saying much. If we're honest for a moment, it's rather a long ways behind Synaptic in both usability and performance. But it's much, much better than any of the terrible PackageKit-based GUIs, so there's that. (And kyum has the worst interface of any program ever. I am not joking. It is unbelievably bad.)

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Sipper]

I've been using KDE4 since about KDE 4.2.2, and have just upgraded to KDE 4.6.3. For the most part I really like it; it's got a long list of features and a large feature-rich set of applications, and I enjoy the Qt backend, too. There are three major exceptions to the things I like, and one minor exception.

Tthe major exceptions:
1) Strigi
2) Nepomuk
3) Akonadi

Strigi and Nepomuk are what turn most people off to KDE4, because these both cause performance problems. Strigi is a Desktop file indexer; Nepomuk deals with metatagging of files for tagging or rating. Strigi immediately wants to index files on the system as soon as you first log in, and that heavy immediate I/O load makes the first impressions of KDE4 to be poor. Nepomuk is a more consistent performance problem -- last I used it, even selecting a hundred files in Krusader took multiple seconds (and on my old Desktop, more like half a minute to a full minute). The system pretty much has no choice but to perform badly in file operations because inotify has to watch the entire system for file moves. None of these performance problems are discussed in the documentation. >:-| Discussing it with developers is extremely frustrating; it starts with "get used to it, Nepomuk and Strigi are not going away", and ending with dropping the job of documenting the performance problems onto some user's lap.

Thankfully, both Strigi file indexing and Nepomuk metatagging can be disabled within the "Desktop Search" settings. That fixes the performance problems most of the time. Last I checked, disabling these does not clear out the database, though -- on my Desktop system the Virtuoso SQL database grew to be > 2 GB as stored on the filesystem, and I had to clear that out manually. (And as I mentioned, performance was abysmal.)

Akonadi is the storage for personal information (names, email addresses, phone numbers, etc) which uses SQL for storage: and by default it wants to use MySQL server for this. Using a 30 MB MySQL server instance required just in order to hold a few contacts is overkill. There are now several Akonadi SQL back-ends such as Sqlite3, however the configuration defaults to using MySQL and changing the back-end is done on an individual basis within each user's home directory (in ~/.config/akonadai/akonadaiconnectionrc) -- and as far as I know there is no way to change the system-wide default. >:-| That is not pleasing.

See: http://api.kde.org/kdesupport-api/kdesupport-apidocs/akonadi/html/classAkonadi_1_1DataStore.html

So the combination ends up by default being a large SQL database file index in Virtuoso for Strigi and Nepomuk, and a separate SQL database in MySQL for Akonadi.

The last minor issue I have with KDE4 have to do with plasmoid configurability, such as the clock, network monitoring, temperature monitoring, etc. There are always details I would like to see which I cannot get to be shown, such as being able to manually choose rendering font and font size, colors, and whether or not to show a number value as well as a graph. The plasmoid configuration options change between KDE4 versions, sometimes adding features and sometimes removing them. For instance, in the previous version of KDE4 the Digital Clock plasmoid was one of the few plasmoids that allowed changing not only the font used to display the clock, but also the font size... however now in KDE 4.6.3, the font size options have been removed for that plasmoid. ? Weird

I consider KDE4 a great achievement, and I enjoy using it. At the same time, I still don't consider KDE 4.6.3 to be on-par with where KDE 3.5 left off -- KDE 3.5 was a well-oiled machine, and KDE4 is getting close but isn't quite at that same level yet.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[sqldr]

one thing I've learned in recent years is to stop pissing about with my window manager and get off my stupid arse and code something.  And I can do that in any OS which includes using windows visual studio express which I can download for free.

IDEs are full screen anyway.   Yeah, I'm an expert at vim (it's got so many shortcuts that each user has their own quirky way of using it.  None of us use more than about 20% of them).  The point is to stop moaning about how many clicks it takes to do something, and do something useful.  As long as you open-source it, it doesn't matter what window manager you wrote it in, and as an IDE convert, I'm doing it quicker these days in fullscreen mode.

KDE, or rather QT has an absolutely awesome programming interface, and qmake makes hand-writing makefiles a thing of the past for unix people.  Microsoft did this long ago.  kdevelop 4 is bloody brilliant (semantic highlighting is awesome.. you spot bugs a mile off because your variable is the wrong colour).  You start referring to a member function you haven't written yet and it gives you the option of creating the prototype in a class you didn't even have open, then bookmarks it.  genius.

it's a shame kdevelop switched to cmake for me.  i had to read a lot of manual to make it do what I want.  which is ironic, because I knew what to do in raw make, for its sins (yes, it's a tab.. shut up)

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[WorLord]

It's funny. I remember the one thing I thought when I first saw KDE 4.0, freshly released:

"You gotta be _kidding_ me... are they serious with this? What group of people thought this paradigm was a good idea? And who could possibly have actually thought this product was finished enough to release?"

Oh, how the tables have turned.

Gnome 3, as a concept, is simply made of fail for me. My job often requires me to work with several apps simultaneously, something G3 makes almost _impossible_. The whole idea behind Gnome 3 is that the G3 team knows more about how a user best works with a computer than the user his/herself, and the problem I have with it is that they are wrong. When I use Gnome 3, I am blind to how much space I have left, how busy my computer is, whether or not an app has crashed or gone zombie, or even what my other applications are doing. Its too constricting; in the struggle to be "distraction free" (although I don't recall Gnome 2 actually being "distracting"), they end up treating me like a horse and making me wear blinders so I can get things done "the Gnome way". Too bad if you are doing a task that requires peripheral vision.

Unity... I really wanted to like it. And to be fair, I do like it; but it is so unpolished, unadjustable, and riddled with fairly severe pixmap/memory leaks that I can't possibly use it for production purposes. I have a feeling the next release or two will be good, and even this one will be fine once they fix those leaks, but right now... not so much. And the crouching tiger, hidden menu thing is far more annoying than the concept of a Global Menu all by itself.

XFCE is good. Really good. But there are some problems with it, particularly with the Compositor, that made me look elsewhere.

So I bit the bullet and installed KDE 4.6.

I can not BELIEVE how much I like it. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am in complete control of my computer, and can do anything with it. Everything is configurable, and while that used to cause me headaches and hours of twiddling with knobs in the control center, things have changed. The options are organized so well and/or so easy to access (you can configure most objects by simply right-clicking on them) that I never really have to *find* the option to change. The hard-to-hit skinny scrollbars can be changed without hacking a gtkrc file. So can the window management buttons; it seems silly to me now that there was such an uproar when Ubuntu changed them to be on the left, since KDE 4 seems to have always allowed you to put them on any side and in any order you want, just as part of the package. The OpenGL composting is vsync'd by default, and this works *even with videos*, something Compiz still has yet to get right on the nVidia driver. The effects and animations have gone from "ridiculously excessive" to subtle, informative, effective, and at times, breathtakingly gorgeous.

If there are too many options, there is usually a text search bar to narrow things down.

And all of this comes without full machine hard-locks, or having that stupid dragon show up every twenty minutes to tell me something else core dumped. I can tell you that between 4.0 and 4.6, things seemed to have become very solid, very fast, and very reliable in a hurry.

And that's just the UI in general. The KDE apps are similarly well-done, and this time they've hired a designer to make them look as good as they work. Gone are the overbearing, wall-of-text-and-doodads interfaces; they seemed to have taken notes from Gnome 2 for a lot of apps (I swear Dolphin is like a clone of Nautilus Elemantary; reKonq looks almost indistinguishable from Chrome; Pidgin and Gaim bear more than a passing resemblance, etc). And while we're on the topic of Gnome apps, I'll never know if I'm actually using one, because Oxygen-GTK renders them in whatever KDE theme I happen to be using at the time.

Sure, there is an overabundance of strange and somewhat unnecessary toys ("Plasmoids"). The whole "deskto

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[walshy007]

It might not have been there by default if you installed from one of the live CDs as opposed to the full DVD.

I still don't get why people bother with the live cds, With a single dvd you can have basically all the software you will ever need, and in an age of 1tb+ hard disks too. Yet people still insist on getting a horrendously cut-down system. Using the dvd people can install kde AND gnome at first installation, along with any other window manage they choose. But people insist on having their entire system and apps come in at under 700mb, lunacy.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Gnome 3 didn't survive a 30 minutes test with me, however I've a AWN user and didn't think of using it on Gnome 3. I've heard that Gnome 3+ AWN is very usable which I believe since it's just awn with an annoying bar on the top.

Seriously what with that top panel? Were they trying to implement apples top menubar and gave up mid way? Gnome 3 doesn't even work with gnome-global-menu from what I've gathered. If Gnome wanted to rip off Mac (no shame in copying what works) they should have focused in supporting that.

The truth is that Gnome 3, like Unity are optimized for tables, actually scratch that, they are optimized for iPads! that's been the only thing in the head Ubuntu's people for a while.

In fact I doubt Mark and his team of Cupertino rejects *ehem* I mean the Canonical Design team have been using anything other than iPads for a while now.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[MarkRose]

Interestingly, the thing I like about KDE is that I have to change settings so infrequently, that I actually have no idea where the settings are.

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[rdnetto]

I just spent the last week looking at different Linux distros after establishing that I wasn't going to be using Unity. So far, Kubuntu seems to be my favourite (largely because I'm familiar with Ubuntu and wanted to keep the same backend). It seems quite polished and everything appears to work together quite well. It also doesn't shit itself when it realises that the PC doesn't have hardware acceleration. (On a side note, I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me how to get Gnome 3 working VirtualBox or any other virtual machine with usable performance. Unity works fine, so it should be possible.)

I wouldn't be surprised if KDE becomes a lot more popular now, hopefully reversing a rather disturbing trend....

Re:Giving KDE a new chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

KMail/Akonadi features IMAP-PUSH, although the support is buggy.

Ubuntu-compatible KDE distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is an alternative to Kubuntu:

http://www.netrunner-os.com

It features a nicely configured KDE4.6.1, with Gnome apps mixed in.
I found it to be simple and with just the right apps when switching from windows to linux.

Kde 4 is so last decade

[Billly Gates]

I want a new cell phone interface. One where key functionalty is removed and only one app can be shown at a time with strange mouse gestures that take up the whole screen to shuffle between apps with no buttons focused on single tasking.

Re:Kde 4 is so last decade

[Bambi Dee]

No problem! Try the Plasma Netbook interface!

Re:Kde 4 is so last decade

[WillKemp]

[......] strange mouse gestures that take up the whole screen to shuffle between apps [......]

Try <alt><tab> - it's worked forever.

Re:Kde 4 is so last decade

[WillKemp]

And it works even better in Gnome 3 - you can use the mouse or arrow keys to pick the window you want while you've got alt + tab held down. You can also use alt + ` (backtick - probably immediately above the tab key) to switch between different windows of the same app.

The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[fnj]

You're right. Actually your screen is NOT 1920 x 1200 - it's unlimited x unlimited because of multiple desktops. Your DISPLAY is a 1920 x 1200 WINDOW into this unlimited screen. These multiple desktops give you a SINGLE control to access all the information that is there. This is far better than a multitude of idiosyncratic 3D widgets on a single desktop, each of which contain separately hidden information (IMPOSSIBLE to discover without reading help systems I might add), with access SEPARATELY controlled by each of the multitude of widgets.

I'm with you. It AIN'T busted, the BEST solution has already been in place for a long time, DON'T try to "fix" it, kiddies.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[WillKemp]

Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. They really don't give you any more work space than having all your windows piled up on one desktop - specially if you've got a small screen.

The only way to get more desktop realestate (it's impossible to get more screen realestate without replacing your monitor/laptop) is to use a virtual desktop that's bigger than your screen size. I used that setup for many years - until X stopped supporting it on my laptop's video card for some reason.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[fnj]

Color me baffled; I have no idea how you can say multiple desktops don't give you more work space. I'm willing to believe it's just one of those little things I don't understand how anyone could look at it that way. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong; I'm just going to say that, yeah, other people find it a fine solution.

What is hard for me to accept is that you can't set up a panning X any more. Just because I could never stand the thought of using it that way shouldn't mean they should take that functionality away. Perhaps the Xorg guys just pointlessly changed the syntax. They've been known to do that.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[TheABomb]

Color me baffled; I have no idea how you can say multiple desktops don't give you more work space. I'm willing to believe it's just one of those little things I don't understand how anyone could look at it that way.

I'd walk up behind you and smack some sense into you, but apparently you'd see me coming. And creationists say people aren't evolving!

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[WillKemp]

I have no idea how you can say multiple desktops don't give you more work space

Does it allow you to have more windows open on your screen at once? No. The screen's your work space, not some bunch of virtual desktops. Open windows in the foreground are where you work and multiple desktops don't allow you any more space for that. All it does is allows you to organise your background windows in a way that maybe suits you.

I can imagine if you regularly switch between several different tasks, all of which require an exclusive set of windows, and you stay with each task for a reasonable amount of time, then multiple desktops might save a bit of hassle. But all it really does is divide your window list into sections.

What is hard for me to accept is that you can't set up a panning X any more.

I can't remember the details now, and i don't think they withdrew support for it from all drivers, but a couple of years ago or so they dropped support for it from the driver that worked with my Thinkpad. I'd been using large virtual desktops for years, but after that, when i wasn't able to, i got used to a window-sized desktop and i never even tried setting the netbook i use nowadays up for it (even though it would probably be useful on a netbook!).

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[donaldm]

Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. They really don't give you any more work space than having all your windows piled up on one desktop - specially if you've got a small screen

If you find multiple desktops a pain then don't use them. As for a virtual desktop that is bigger than your physical screen I think "fvwm" still supports that. Personally under KDE I have 4 multiple desktops and can add or subtract them in less than 3 seconds. I can even open up a multiple desktop view and slide any GUI applications between sessions. Forget which GUI app is in which desktop you can display all applications on the screen at once in a very logical way that makes selection easy, to do this I setup hot corners which takes less then a second to activate. Of course i can also setup "Cover Switch " that will give me a much more functional display (all apps or apps per desktop) than what MS Windows 7 offers. Don't like KDE then use Gnome or fvwm or some other session manager, after all it is your choice.

I actually use a 17 inch laptop and find I can actually have over 20 active GUI windows spread across 4 desktops and can easily manage them. I can connect my laptop to one or more monitors and have my display desktop session spread across screens. MS Windows can do this as well although natively it can't do multiple desktops. At least with Linux/Unix you can customise to what you like.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed AT ALL

[HiThere]

Some people in this thread are talking about software windows and screen, others are talking about hardware. So they assert different truths that are each correct in their respective domains. It gets confusing when they use the same terminology. (Intentionally confusing in some of the posts.)

KDE is fast on OpenSuSE, but slow on Ubuntu

[PythonM]

Why KDE on OpenSuSE is so much quicker than on Ubuntu?

Re:KDE is fast on OpenSuSE, but slow on Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSuSE is a lag monster for my systems. Kubuntu runs flawless and fast. For the noobs still buying dell, hp, and so on to run linux. lol no wonder your problems. Clone baby. Clone computer systems don't inheret marketing things keep out of the public eye as names do:D

Given up on Gnome/ KDE / Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I loved Gnome 2 and KDE 3. Hate what everyone has turned into. Now I've been on Xfce for a few months and am totally happy. I do have the horsepower to run any WM I want with i7 / 8GB Ram / Nvidia 450 etc... But the good old Xfce just "fits".

Re:Given up on Gnome/ KDE / Unity

[taiwanjohn]

Same here. I've been using Gnu/Linux since 1995 (before KDE and Gnome), and things kept getting steadily better. I started using Kubuntu several years ago, but switched to Ubuntu when KDE4 came out, because that newfangled interface was incomprehensible to me. Now that Gnome 3 is here, I've switched to Xubuntu. No frills. No cruft. It just works.

Times change.

[elucido]

Multi-agent AIs are a hobbyist/research endeavor and does not have appeal for the masses (and some would argue) is not proper to be included with an OS. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.

You can use Silk Test, Sikuli, or expect scripts for common tasks, and if you are research inclined then perhaps you should still keep up with the research. There is a fine line between clever and lazy, and people have various degrees of both. If you want to build this, by all means go for it, but don't be surprised if it doesn't become standard.

When they said that there wasn't a Facebook, Google was still somewhat new, there wasn't a twitter, there wasn't a Web 2.0, and people weren't dealing with the amount of information they deal with now. Now it's practical and desirable to be able to search your own desktop like you search Google. Typing in a name to produce a photo, or a movie, or a song, makes sense today while 10 years ago that was considered just for hobbyists, or just a research product, because nobody could possibly have terabytes worth of files to sort, search, organize, and review.

It's 2011. Now we have users who literally have millions of files. We have users who have to multi-task more efficiency. The main reason to have robots would be to increase the multitasking capability of the user so that it can keep up with the hardware capability. We have solid state drives, quad core CPUs, 12 gigs of ram, and ridiculously fast graphics cards.

The times have changed and it's time for Linux to either get ahead of the times and paradigm shift, or always be playing catch up. Agent based AI is already here and already implemented on websites. It's already being used by Google for webcrawling robots and was implemented in Google Wave. The only reason it never caught on was because it's only being implemented on the web.

I think it's exactly the sort of technology which should be implemented on the desktop level. If I want to search 20 search engines all night long because there's thousands of search results from each, just to find a specific type of information, I should be able to define the type of information I'm looking for, and it should spend all night gathering as much information on it as possible. This would be the basic use, it would help with research.

Beyond that there are a million other uses but the only reason you can think of not to do it is because it's too powerful for the desktop? If it's too powerful why move to quad core 64bit CPU's with 12 gigs of ram if you aren't going to put it to use?

i'm a KDE user. I actually like gnome 3

[sqldr]

Call me some kind of neophile, but after all the "where's the bloody taskbar?" and "too much clicking!" (read the manual!  you don't have to click it!) gnome 3 is actually being the first gnome to actually convert me from gnome 3.<br>
<br>
I got well into tiling window managers.  I used ION for 2 years and swore that I would never go back.  Then the author started acting like a cunt.  On the question of anti-aliased fonts he said "if you want your fonts dragged through mud".  Well no.  He went on to say "until monitors have the same resolution as printers, i will never use anti-aliasing" which is ironic because printers don't use anti-aliasing, they use floyd-steinberg dithering to achieve the same effect because of the resolution so there is no need for antialiasing.  he then changed the licensing and started using windows.<br>
<br>
So gnome 3.  it's actually converted me.  I don't mind swinging my mouse around to find shit.  I'm a sysadmin.  Ask any sysadmin how many terminals they have open while they're at their desk.  Probably about 20.  Then ask them how many they are using :-)<br>
<br>
That's the problem.  The taskbar contains hundreds of terminals I should've closed when I'd stopped using them, but they just sit there, and when I want to click on one I AM using, the list is too long.  That's the point of the gnome3 thing.  trying to persuade the masses is another story.

Re:i'm a KDE user. I actually like gnome 3

[sqldr]

shit... forgot i switched it to plain text :-D

No menu bar in Dolphin? Wtf...

[Anonymous Coward]

Removing the menu bar in Dolphin by default is fucking stupid. People who use KDE use it because it doesn't follow the continual reductionism of GNOME. KDE users expect ALL existing functionality and layout to remain consistent, with new features simply added on with each release. On today's desktops with 1920x1200 screen resolutions, removing the menu bar in a file manager is one of the dumbest things KDE could possibly let happen. This had better be reversed for 4.7 final, or at least not made the default.

Re:i'm a KDE user. I actually like gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

You also forgot to disable your "trying to force others to read my posts in a monospace font makes me so 1337" FONT tags.

Bye-bye, desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

kdm + bare bones plasma desktop + konsole + htop > 500MB

X + evilwm + aterm + htop + Firefox showing this page = 154MB

And everything is instant. No annoying warning sounds, ugly icons and animations. No focus stealing. No nagging, "do you really want to blow your entire X session to hell?" And I can still use any app I want.