Slashdot Mirror
Aaron Seigo On KDE SC 5.0 — and What Getting There Means
An anonymous reader writes "After years of focusing on further improving KDE4, two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer — and Plasma team leader — Aaron Seigo points out in an interview with derStandard.at/web, the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum. He also calls Frameworks 5.0 only the 'first step;' new Applications and Workspace releases are to follow later. Seigo goes on to talk about their chances in the mobile market with Plasma Active and further areas of collaboration with the other big free desktop: GNOME."
WTF? If you design something with cross-desktop in mind, or even just a shared KDE-GNOME technology, it is much more likely that your work will be well engineered and will stand the test of time, even if you end up being the only one using it.
Well, I was a KDE 3.x hold out for the longest time... but then I gave it a chance again.
I am glad I did.
It really has improved greatly since the 4.0 debacle. Try it, from one 4.0 hater to another.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I'm glad to hear that, because 4.0 truly sent me to Gnome. I don't really like Gnome, but the first few KDE 4 releases were almost unusable for me.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I was the same way. It took until KDE 4.5 before I switched. There's still a few things I miss from 3.5.10 but it is much improved.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Eh. Recent releases are better, but I still don't like the direction KDE's gone with the user interface with 4.x; I care neither for Plasmoids (or whatever those things are) nor for the way the K-menu hides the item hierarchies.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Agreed,
4.5 was the first usable
4.6 the first that felt stable
I think the changes to OpenGL make 4.7 really stable and smooth, even with crazy effects. I still miss the windows bursting into flames from Compiz though (there was something really satisfying about that, and when fast enough it wasn't distracting.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Aaron spend a lot of time speaking about a transition, in the long-term, to QML (I had to look it up) in the interview. He mentioned that it makes prototyping interfaces quicker, and I assume that also means implementation of the GUI aspects would therefore be quicker also. But I am confused. Is QML just for GUI stuff, or do you write the entire application using it? What other advantages over C++ does it offer?
Cheers
About damned time. Maybe the Nepomuk file indexer will stop crashing every time I start a large compile. I turn it on every point release to see if it has gotten any better. I let it go for a few days before I become fed up with its constant disk access... the damned thing never stops, ever. I'm not sure what it does really... it pisses me off that Dolphin uses it for its search. If you want reliable search you still have to use grep, find, or something not built on the KDE indexer. WTF man?
It's funny that now they have this huge file indexer thing they finally (in a recent release) removed the the indexer/search feature from their "Help Center" that hadn't worked since the end of 2.x. Now that they have a brand new indexer... ??? !!! Chuckles. It's OK though no one used it anyway. *cough*Google*cough*.
I love KDE and wouldn't use anything else but sometimes I gotta wonder what's going on in the QA dept. Some of the stuff really is half baked while most of it is great. It's that 10% making the rest look bad.
I want this account deleted.
I stuck with KDE 4x until the last updates, which made everything so sloooow that I'm posting this using LXDE instead. knotify4 is just one of many resource hogs.
It's insane that a desktop like KDE can kill a multi-core machine. Even Vista runs faster on the same box - which really was the last straw for me.
Like it or not, tablets are merely a fad. They have no staying power.
And I assume you're basing all this wonderful market research on yourself or a small group of like-minded friends? They sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter - for comparison they sold 3.95 million Macs. It's as much a fad as the iPhone, maybe you haven't found a use for it but the market has. The problem with Gnome and KDE chasing after the tablet market is that they think they'll be a "player" along with iOS and Android. If anything I think they have less chances of succeeding there on the desktop, they're ignoring the 1% desktop market share they have and chasing 1% of the mobile market. They haven't got the resources to run in two directions with two different teams, so they'll go halfway up both roads.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm really started to get burnt out on all the new versions for "mature" packages. There are multiple examples of this: MS-Windows, Firefox, KDE, even the Linux kernel (which recently rev'd major numbers just because). All of these things and others are mature; they do what they basically need to do and new major versions haven't really add anything all that useful lately. I'm tired of getting new GUIs, frameworks, etc just because the developers need to be seen as doing something. Stop it! How about fixing the existing bugs instead?
We know what OSes do and they do it well. Browsers get a bit of slack because of the new HTML5. But all the GUI changes "just because" are killing me (and a lot of others) because they force me to learn something new that doesn't give me anything to help me do my job better. Developers -- please think that thru very carefully! Please?!
When something truly new and innovative comes along, then I'll understand the new major version.
Our goal is to give us better tools for desktop app development, give our KDE mobile projects a leg up and make KDE's libraries something that Qt developers can and will use.
i'm aware that KDE's API is based on Qt but it has some big differences. including/assisting Qt people will add a large sum of people to the KDE development platform.
KDE is looking better for dev'rs but the desktop itself is not friendly enough for me right now and it doesnt help that ease of use for lay people isnt a focus.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Please correct me if I'm wrong in this analogy, Are _KDE_ Frameworks 5.0 is to QT the same as _Apache_'s many frameworks are to the Java SE/EE platforms? Really no major coupling at all?
Am I the only person in the universe who likes gnome 3?
I'm a sysadmin, so I usually have millions of windows open at once, and I've always been looking for ways to find the bloody one I'm after. I'm often in the middle of programming something when something urgent comes up, and I'm too lazy to switch to a new desktop so I just fire up a few more windows, then I always put my computer in standby every night (to keep my code open and remind myself what I was doing the following morning) until about twice a week I go about purging windows.
People complained about KDE4 because you couldn't put icons on the desktop. Instead that panel. Well, you could make it full-screen, but to me it was never a problem. If I have screen space available, I tend to put windows in it. Linus Torvalds talking about the number of mouse clicks to open a terminal hit two nerves for me:
1) To click an icon on the desktop, I would first have to stop using the keyboard and reach for the mouse
2) I would then have to drag possibly more than on window out of the way, possibly into some docs in another one I might be reading whilst I'm typing into another
3) I stopped having a backdrop image years ago for this reason.
So then there's the taskbar.
I used ION for a couple of years. I really liked it. It's a tiling window manager, but it uses "managed tiling"., KDE 4.5 gave us unmanaged tiling. It also gave us stacking, but the two don't work together. MASSIVE BUG. I want 5 windows on top of eachother in a tile, and well, people like the auto-tiling.. I don't.. it's unpredictable. it resizes your windows.
What I liked about ION is you created a tile, or at least moved your cursor to the tile you want your window in, THEN open the window, rather than opening the window and seeing where it turns up. WHY? because that 1.5 seconds of thought made me put it in the right place then it stuffed it into my short term memory and I could always remember where I put it.
Taskbar redundant.
Gnome3 tries to solve it by zooming out and clicking on the window. problem unless you have a very high res monitor is you can't tell one terminal from another. That will be resolved in time, but the taskbar has failed for me. "group windows by task" makes it worse. I'm a sysadmin. I've got 20 windows open.
I stopped using ION when the author started being a dick with the GPL and having an utterly uninformed opinion of antialiasing ("If monitors have the resolution of printers, then I would use antialiasing. If you want your fonts dragged through mud, use windows". Firstly, printers use floyd-steinburg dithering. They don't have shades of colour. They use very high resolution dithering for colour. Secondly, monitors do have shades. you increase resolution by antialiasing).
KDE 4.5 introduced stacking and tiling.
The tiling is auto-tiling. There's many who like the auto-tiling approach of WMs such as "awesome". I hate it. it's unpredictable. I would rather create the tile then put the window in it. It also has stacking, which awesome doesn't have. ION allowed you to put many windows in one tile. KDE has a MASSIVE BUG. tiling and stacking don't work together! and it forces you to put all terminals into one stack!!
KDE: either get more like ION for tiling, or allow zooming for gnome 3 users. some people like desktop icons and stuff. If I want to *click* on a terminal, I'll put it on the taskbar. I get that. So do you. Just do something for us who appreciate that the taskbar has failed. new era.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Like it or not, tablets are merely a fad. They have no staying power.
Don't count on it. Smart phones are tablets and they're here to stay.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Linus Torvalds... hit two nerves with me"
1) ;just top save you all being smartasses!
2)
3)
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Windows is, well, Windows
Honestly, (and if this gets me modded down, i have the karma to burn), I find the Win7 paradigm to be about the most functional and useable one. I miss the self-sorting menus (where software sticks itself in the right place), and I cant mod the heck out of it with Compiz, but out of the box it has VERY nice keyboard shortcuts, an uncluttered "active window" space, and the menu search is excellent.
Thats not to say im in love with Windows, but the new GUI (excepting their hiding of various control panel applets) is the reason I ditched XP on my desktop for 7.
Or try the Lancelot Launcher. I think it's in the kdeplasma-addons package in Kubuntu, not sure about other distributions, but it should be something like that. I actually use that pretty exclusively these days. I just really like it. It does not hide the item hierarchies like the normal K-Menu. Plus it's got small little things like the no-click interface that are kinda cool, and which I do use occasionally. It's at least worth checking out.
You claimed that Gnome was "dying" 3 times in only 6 sentences. Overcompensating with your rhetoric doesn't make it any more true, it just makes you sound like a fool. Or a politician.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I don't own an E-book reader. I do read e-books on my laptops, in fact I have an old IBM Thinkpad R32 that has 'only' 512 Meg RAM and if it wasn't for comparatively lightweight OS's like Kubuntu all it could probably still do is e-books. I may well switch to a tablet PC, but I would much prefer to go through the comparatively minor hassle of making that old Thinkpad run XFCE in a really lightweight distro like Puppy Linux if Kubuntu gets to big for the old laptop, long before I would buy any of the proprietary format e-book readers. The notebook has lasted about 9 years (I don't remember when I bought it, but C-Net reviewed one in Oct of 2002). Not that I'm planning on keeping it another nine, but I would estimate that the chance this old notebook will be around in another nine years and some form of Linux will still run on it are both far, far higher than the chance I'd be able to legally access all proprietary format e-book files I might purchase by then if I started buying in some proprietary format or other now.
E book readers are cheap because some prices are hidden - people will pay several prices later, just like they pay the full price for their low cost printer when they have to buy ink cartridges. One of those real prices will be re-buying and re-buying any media they want to keep longterm.
I'm perfectly cool however if KDE ignores tablets. Most of what I would want one to do doesn't take a really modern operating system at all. A tablet has more than niche purposes, but it doesn't substitute for everything I would do with a laptop, let alone a desktop. Now best of all worlds might be KDE doing a bang up job of supporting things big enough to include keyboards and still finding a way to deal with tablet environments as well, but I will gladly praise KDE if the deliver far less than that, just so they don't forget desktop machines.
Who is John Cabal?
That's silly - there's plenty of work that is non-specific to any of the desktops, under the freedesktop moniker. The KDE and Gnome people are working on a wallet that works under both, but that also means it could work under XFCE and WindowMaker, etc.
Meanwhile, by not doing it all themselves (e.g. PAM integration) they have more resources to spend on KDE-specific stuff. This is a non-zero-sum game.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
KDE would do quite well if they ignore this tablet fad. In a couple of years, when everybody has forgotten about tablets, KDE will be a far better desktop environment than it currently is.
Actually, I disagree somewhat. KDE actually doesn't have only one UI, it has at least two. There's a netbook version of it, which I believe (haven't tried it myself) on the newest KDE versions you can switch to pretty easily. As you might expect, it's designed for netbooks with small screens, and looks very different from traditional KDE. However, this doesn't detract from KDE, because the traditional mode is still there and still the default. Apparently, someone over there got the bright idea that they don't need to have the exact same interface on all devices, and can instead have different interfaces, optimized for different devices, while the architecture underneath is still the same. This of course flies in the face of Unity and Gnome3, where the devs think that everything needs to be exactly the same everywhere, whether you're using a 4" smartphone or a desktop with quad 30" monitors.
So there's really no reason (if they haven't done it already) that KDE can't support tablets as well; they'd just make that a different UI mode, similar to the netbook mode but optimized for touchscreens of course. As long as it defaults to the traditional mode when you install it on a regular desktop system, users who don't want a smartphone interface on their desktop PC aren't going to complain.
Just as you use different tools for different jobs, and just as sports cars have different controls than tractor-trailers (and also different from airplanes), computing devices should have different interfaces optimized for their input/output devices.
The problem with Gnome and KDE chasing after the tablet market is that they think they'll be a "player" along with iOS and Android. If anything I think they have less chances of succeeding there on the desktop, they're ignoring the 1% desktop market share they have and chasing 1% of the mobile market. They haven't got the resources to run in two directions with two different teams, so they'll go halfway up both roads.
Regardless of what Siego may have said, I don't see KDE chasing after the tablet market, since last time I looked, KDE still had a very traditional desktop UI. It's only Gnome3 and Unity that are chasing the tablet market. I do hope they don't change direction though.
Aside from that, you're exactly correct. The tablet market is already dominated by iOS and Android (and I'm sure Windows will try to make a play there too, no matter how badly it flops the first iteration or two). Gnome/Unity trying to get in on that is just dumb, because they've pissed off and disenfranchised all the Linux desktop users who relied on them for a stable desktop computing environment to get their work done with. No, desktop Linux users weren't a giant majority of the market, but they're probably a lot more than people realize (since you can't go by retail sales or license counts to count them), and it's still a much larger number than the number of people who really want to wipe out iOS or Android and install a Linux distro on their tablet.
Um, not exactly. I can see how you might be confused, since the hardware is largely the same, though not exactly. There's two giant differences:
1) the tablet isn't a phone. You can't talk on it. While some of them do have 3G radios, I don't know if any of them actually allow talking on them, or if they only do data over the 3G radio. Even if you could talk on them, it'd be a little clunky, since you'd need a headset. When was the last time you saw someone holding a 10" tablet up to their head?
2) the screen is much bigger on the tablet. Because of this, it's quite impossible to put a tablet in your pocket, while that's easy with a smartphone (unless you have some giant pockets...).
Lots of computing devices these days have very similar hardware under the hood. The touchscreen terminals you use at the checkout line at the supermarket are nearly the same as smartphones: same CPU, video capabilities, touchscreen, some have 3G radios, etc. That doesn't make them a smartphone, because the physical form factor is different, and the software is different. With a whole lot of work, you might be able to get one to work as a smartphone (once you figure out how to break the encryption on the bootloader), but it's a lot easier to just buy a smartphone.
So no, smartphones aren't tablets. They're two different devices, with different uses.
That's utter bullshit. Good software arises from doing one thing, and only one thing, well. That's a cornerstone of the UNIX philosophy.
Supporting multiple desktops is the antithesis of that philosophy. All you end up doing is offering a shitty, compromised "solution" for everybody, rather than an optimal solution for a smaller number of users.
I think you meant "supporting multiple computing devices" or something like that, because having multiple virtual desktops is something most KDE users seem to appreciate.
Anyway, I disagree. KDE is more than just a UI, it's a lot of back-end systems as well; a subsystem for video/audio, a network manager, etc. Google for "KDE netbook"; KDE has another mode that's optimized for netbooks with their tiny screens, and it looks very different from regular KDE. Someone over there seems to realize that different computing devices need different UIs, and they've designed KDE to be able to change based on the device. There's no reason you can't have the same DE on different devices, but obviously it needs to be "skinned" differently: with a traditional interface for desktops with dual 30" screens, keyboards, and mice, and a totally different interface for tablets, and another interface for netbooks, etc. There's no reason these can't be combined into one DE, instead of forcing users to have a single interface that looks the same on all devices.
This is nothing new, and has always been part of KDE philosophy, and the same goes for GNOME. With KDE, the key was always configurability: you like window decorations that look like MacOS? You can choose that. You want the panel on the side or top or bottom, or ever two panels? You can choose that too. In GNOME, it's always been the opposite: we tell you what your desktop's going to look like because we know what's best for you, and you better like it. Gnome has long been removing configuration options because they're "too confusing".
So now that tablets and touchscreens are du jour, the Gnome fools think that we all need a UI that's, as you put it, a shitty, compromised solution for everybody, so that people don't get confused, whereas the KDE folks think that different devices can have different UIs, and that their users are smart enough to be able to adapt.
It's a little bit silly to complain about KDE's user interface when the things you complain about are user-configurable. Configurability has always been the hallmark of KDE; if you don't like the way it comes by default, there's probably a setting to change it under System Settings->Workspace Appearance and Behavior.
As the other posters said, there's actually three different modes for the K-menu: classic (which is probably what you want), the new one, and Lancelot. If you don't like the one set by default, try another one.
This isn't GNOME, where you're stuck with whatever the "usability experts" there think you should use, and aren't allowed to change anything. You can have it your way (with apologies to BK).
Plus, no one's forcing you to put plasmoids on your desktop. You can leave it totally blank if you want.
Gnome was a big desktop when KDE screwed up with the great KDE4.0 debacle about 3 years ago. Tons of KDE users got pissed off (mainly because 3.5 was no longer supported by the distros, and 4.[0-4] were broken and buggy), and defected to Gnome2, and have been using it ever since.
As for Gnome3, they just released that, what?, this month? This you're talking about it like it's ancient history.
I certainly can gripe about that being non-obvious, now can't I?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How much more obvious can they make it, other than putting into the control panel (called "System Settings" in KDE, but the same thing)? What else should they do, stick a giant button on the menu itself that says "configure menu"? Who wants to see that every single time they open the menu? If they did that on every UI element, the whole desktop would be filled with configuration buttons for every little item. That's why it's all put in the control panel (or should be; KDE4 falls down a little in this area with certain things compared to 3.5).
I'm not sure printing is the bailiwick of KDE.
There has been some problematic regression in CUPS of late and that may be the source of your problems.
Its critical that the the "source-incompatible" changes be held to virtually ZERO, because KDE can't stand another
debacle like the release of KDE 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 only to have it finally become reasonably usable by 4.4.
The new KDE framework is all the work of the current team, they should have no problem supporting a few dual methods to handle current code in the current way while adding what ever "source incompatibilities" that are seen as necessary.
I understand the break from the KDE 3 baggage forced on them, but what we have here is all their own work.
It should transition smoothly. It must, or no one will be left to use it.
4.6 and 4.7 have been wonderful releases. Please lets not regress this time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But they are:
1. Big. Bigger than a netbook. As big as a laptop.
2. Hard to write seriously on.
3. Much more expensive than ebook readers.
I summary, I agree with you and GP: KDE needs to ignore tablets.
I have no idea what tablet you are looking at, but the ones I've seen are much smaller than most netbooks, handle standard bluetooth keyboards and mice, and the price is dropping all the time.
Ebook reading is just about the last activity that comes to mind with them.
They are the couch computer, the commuting computer, the brain trust, the portable desk, the shop floor, the shipping dock, and the GIS computer, as well as the doctors exam room computer. No they are not going away. Oh, and the funny rodent thingie with a wheel and two buttons is not going away either. They said that was a fad too.
KDE might do well on tablets, other than the fact that KDE is still a resource hog.
All you need is a touch screen driver (perhaps such exists already - backported from Android) to make
KDE viable on the more powerful Tablets.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Wrong on both counts.
1) Any of the current line of tablets will run CSipSimple, with which they instantly become a phone. Add the ubiquitous bluetooth headset and you don't even have to take the tablet out of your briefcase or back pack to answer it. My tablet has a phone number, and I pay exactly ZERO dollars for that service. No boot loader hacking involved. Install and run. Somewhere I had a How To on this, now slightly dated.
2) 7 inch tablets fit in a coat pocket or purse, 10 inch in your brief case.
Some Android tablets come with 3G and could handle voice anywhere, not just when near wifi.
Cellular networks are moving to LTE, and once completed, there is no distinction between data and voice.
There is really no difference between a tablet and a smartphone other than the size of the pocket it takes.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The netbook UI is half the battle. KDE is still pretty huge.
There is no reason it couldn't run on an Android Kernel with a little work. But it needs to go on a diet.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Well, KDE has hidden a ton of stuff just as deeply as Windows 7 did.
But, otherwise I agree, Win 7 is quite good.
I actually prefer KDE 4.7 to Windows 7, even though I spend most of my day on Windows 7. Something about having multiple desktops, allowing you to leave one a cluttered mess of windows while you use a fresh one to handle some interruption.
I even ran into a tablet (Atom processor HP Slate) running windows 7 and it was eminently usable, in spite of all the ranting you read all over the web about windows 7 never being designed for touch screens. Not as cool as the Android tablet, but pretty close.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Agreed. Windows 7 is nice.
KDE sucks too. Kde 3.6 was better but I remember it feeling cluttered back in the day before KDE 4.x so it was not perfect either but at least on par to Windows XP.
If KDE wants to do well they need to take their time for a nice desktop and not rush it like Gnome 3 without extensive R&D from people who have zero experience working with UIs.
I want features that are not hidden, but rather simple to use and Windows 7 fits this fine. Autoscroll and aero preview are perfect. I feel Windows 8 has it well done with tablets and a traditional UI together and you can switch to one or the other. I pray KDE 4 puts power and functionality back in but keeps its UI simply to use in a perfect balance. I think a tile startup screen like Windows 8 is perfect.
http://saveie6.com/
Quite the opposite is the case. Your only hope to work well on several desktops is to use that principle. Because otherwise your stuff will be so deeply entrenched into one desktop that it simply won't work well on the other one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
G3 and unity suck because of the emphasis on tablets.
As long as KDE doesn't do that, it'll be OK. But they sorta hint, from TFA:
"Doesn't that also mean, that the traditional desktop is losing importance? Aaron Seigo: It's losing importance in the sense that newspapers have lost importance."
If KDE wants something for tablets, they should pick a certain version of their DE that they deem provides the minimal functionality that a tablet needs, and fork it from there. That way, the tablet side of things can meet its own requirements, w/o touching the desktop.
Gnome 3 should be renamed something else for tablets altogether, and be a tablet only DE. Stop pushing it on the desktop, and in the process, making the thing look more ridiculous. Even Gnome 2 was unsatisfactory with respect to what one could or couldn't do w/o certain tweaks.
The rest of the Gnome project, as far as desktop goes, should be merged into GNUSTEP, which also seems to be more of an object model environment than Gnome was supposed to be, but never was. Maybe give the Gnome name to the GNUSTEP object model environment.
Wasn't Meego already targeted @ the tablet market, granted non-KDE, but w/ the Qt tools & everything? When neither Nokia nor Intel could make it popular on tablets, how can KDE pull that off? Since Gnome 3 has made itself good for tablets only, KDE's best chance is to stay on the desktop, and not to compete for the #4 position (after Android, iOS and Blackberry)
Since Gnome 3 is there now, it may be an opportunity for any tablet vendor to try its luck outside the somewhat crowded Android market by making one with that interface. Let that project try it by all means, but drop the idea of KDE getting in there as well.
The ability to (relatively) easily whip up different UIs was a large part of the major disruption of KDE4.
Plasma was designed ground-up with that in mind. In a video I watched, they spent a lot of time bragging about it, this was before 4.0 was released.
Sounded essentially like MVC type talk.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Wouldn't the Netbook UI look pretty much identical to their desktop, just like Windows does? Or do they change things quite a bit?
This is actually quite a good idea, but it should be named differently so that it's clear that it's a completely different interface, something like OS-X vs iOS. The Gnome guys could have done well w/ this. As for Unity, is Ubuntu now making tablet OSs, or is Unity their all purpose UI? Some innovations, like their software center is good, but I'm not sure about Unity itself. Incidentally, is software center there in Kubuntu as well?
I don't want to see the KDE developers wasting time and effort by collaborating with GNOME. GNOME is a dying project. It is the XFree86 of the open source desktop world. The complete failure of GNOME 3 means that it'll be a dead project in, at most, a couple of years. There's no reason for the KDE devs to get involved with a dying project like GNOME. They should instead focus on making improvements to KDE, which will bring real value to all KDE users. KDE is a very lively and continually-improving software project. GNOME is not.
Yeah, while Gnome was previously dominant and it made sense to be inter-operable w/ them, that's now gone. I wonder who now pre-installs Gnome3 w/ their desktop - Fedora? Debian? Instead, KDE should work on making their own improvements, as well as seeing what they can use from GNUSTEP, and even making themselves inter-operable with them - not for any reason other than GNUSTEP is better, and provides what GNOME was originally supposed to deliver, but never did.
If Debian doesn't want to pre-load KDE on their desktops, they should offer GNUSTEP instead. I know they offer one distribution of GNUSTEP on Linux. Oh, and is Kubuntu still an option? Because if I can get a Linux w/ a KDE interface but w/ Debian update capabilities, as opposed to RH/yumm, I'm happy. Particularly if the software center is available in Kubuntu.
Incidentally, what does Debian offer on their other non-Linux OSs, such as BSD, or Hurd? Gnome?
The problem with Gnome and KDE chasing after the tablet market is that they think they'll be a "player" along with iOS and Android. If anything I think they have less chances of succeeding there on the desktop, they're ignoring the 1% desktop market share they have and chasing 1% of the mobile market. They haven't got the resources to run in two directions with two different teams, so they'll go halfway up both roads.
The problem is that you and the people who voted you as Informative didn't even read the interview.
Unlike iOS OSX there is no porting required to get workspace elements to work on different form factors. Apple developed two closely related code bases whereas KDE develops a single code base that works everywhere. With Plasma Active the KDE devs create a framework that's so flexible that one only needs to write a simple shell in QML and all existing QML widgets will just work. Plasma Desktop widgets usually work just fine as fullscreen widgets in smartphone form factors. That means developing Plasma with one formfactor in mind, the other formfactors automatically benefit because all improvements are shared across the code base.
What you also don't understand is that KDE is no commercial project. As a community project it doesn't matter if 1% of the population use it or 99%. Community projects do the work for themselves and as long as there are devices available to run the software on, the community members are fine with that.
In addition to that you forgot that Qt also works on Android (currently in Alpha state). So even without MeeGo devices Plasma Active will at some point be available on Android devices (MeeGo is just a mostly traditional Linux distro which makes sense to support first because the underlying toolkit Qt does not have to be completely ported first).
That part in the interview where he called the GNOME designers a "bunch of punk-ass bitches" was a bit uncalled for, I think.
I'm glad to hear that, because 4.0 truly sent me to Gnome. I don't really like Gnome, but the first few KDE 4 releases were almost unusable for me.
How often do we have to repeat that 4.0 and 4.1 were not meant for end users and that the 3.5.10 release (which happened AFTER 4.1) is proof of that?
4.2 was for end users. Granted, there were a few glitches in 4.2.0 but after 4.2.1 the Plasma Desktop ride was nothing but pleasant for me.
True that.
I run KDE mainly because it's the only thing that supports my triple monitor setup. But it's also really wel done. It allows for stuff like a vertical taskbar that works well (Unity's is horrible, Gnome forces it to be wide and have text instead of just icons, KDE does it right, and supports the 'pin to taskbar' thing that windows does) - this is something that took me a while to get used to, but really is worth it. With widescreen monitors, vertical space is at a premium. I used to run the linux-traditional taskbar on top, but taskbar on left is definitely a much better solution, and KDE supports it well. With Gnome 3 - they have removed your ability to even move the taskbar (or the thing that replaced it). Not to mention gnome 3 refuses to run on many drivers, and multi-monitor setups.
KDE really does work nicely, it has a lot of good features built in, and it's a lot nicer than it used to be. I hated KDE 3.x, but 4.6 is the best desktop I can find, and I was lucky to be forced to use it.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The difference is KDE are doing it the right way - it's a choice, not a forced feature. If you want to run in a tablet-suited mode, you go for it. But you don't *have* to.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Windows 7 is fine, but once Windows 8 is out, Windows users will experience what Gnome 3 users are experiencing today. Their interface is completely tile based, which is totally different from the start menu that people have been used to since Windows 95. In short, an user experience that is now close to 20 years old is being replaced by this (there was nothing in the cited article that suggested that a Windows 8 user could use, say, the Aero interface, much less the old Windows XP or the 2000 interface.
With KDE, you can at least adopt their 'Redmond' theme that would give you the Windows look & feel. I doubt it'll be do-able w/ WIndows 8. This is what beats me - previously, Microsoft used to allow users to use older interfaces, but it's not sure that they will this time. Also, by having the same interface for both desktop & tablet, MS is doing what GNOME did rather than what KDE did. If that ends the Windows desktop, it'll probably take down the x86 CPU w/ it, since Windows is the only reason the x86 is ubiquitous (or else, everybody would be using ARM or MIPS)
G3 and unity suck because of the emphasis on tablets.
No, they suck because they're both relatively new desktops with documented missing functionality and they both have a lot of work to do before they can be considered mature. Unity is designed for Netbooks and a lot of its problems stem from that e.g. the massive icons, the global menu and launcher anchored to the left work really badly large screens. Gnome 3 has piles of missing functionality (e.g. desktop icons which have to be manually reenabled), and the activities launcher is annoying for living offscreen like it does.
Neither is especially useful tablets. I'm not even sure that either even supports touch properly, or implements stuff like onscreen keyboards.
Given the shitstorm KDE 4 got when it was released for similar reasons, one would expect some empathy with their situation even if you still prefer KDE. Neither IMO is ready but given them a point release or two and I think they'll both be fine. Personally I think Unity is a more conventional design and closer to what people expect but GNOME 3 appears better thought through and doesn't suffer from prominent positioning of Ubuntu's stupid online store at every turn.
The system tray still doesn't work. KDE4 apps appear in it, but KDE3 or non-kde apps don't. So for an application that keeps running in the system tray when you close the window (e.g. skype), you then have no way to close it.
There's no way to set a default transparency for foreground windows. That was there in 3.5, I filed a bug about it, but five minor versions later it's still not there.
I am trolling
Yes, it does. The skype icon on my KDE 4.7 system appears in the systemtray, just like any other systray app I've ever tried.
I hope they can at least get the geek market. I know, so many of us are already just about married to either iOS or Android but come on... think about it. What's better, two versions of the same api, one for desktop and one for mobile devices making it VERY EASY TO PORT the same app to both platforms or the current paradigm?... Virtually no effort applied towards coding a mobile app is useful on the desktop or vice versa.
And yes... KDE IS trying to go after the mobile market (tablets AND phones). KDE is based on Qt. In trying to turn it from being just a desktop GUI API into a mobile environment Qt has had a lot of the functionality added to it that KDE was originally handling itself. Now KDE is full of stuff that it does itself that Qt has it's own classes and methods for. This is supposed to be getting merged better, making KDE into more of a meta environment that can be a desktop or something else.
We would be a lot better off if Sharp had added a GSM chip to the Zaurus years ago. It would have probably started out not available in the US though. I'm not sure they could have ever come up with a reasonable agreement with any of the cellphone carriers here.
it needs to go on a diet.
Which part of modularizing in the interview didn't you understand?
If KDE wants something for tablets, they should pick a certain version of their DE that they deem provides the minimal functionality that a tablet needs, and fork it from there. That way, the tablet side of things can meet its own requirements, w/o touching the desktop.
Your way increases the workload by 100% which is insane for a community project with very limited resources. KDE's approach is so much better because it does not need any forks.
Who still carries a briefcase? I've spent the last few years trying to reduce the number of things I carry. I got a keyless car system in my latest car so I stick the thing in my pocket and forget about it. I walk out of work with my sunglasses on and nothing in my hands. I don't wear a coat all year, so what do I do with the thing in the summer months?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
That is the genius of KDE. Here is a gross over generalization. The plasma engine runs in the background, Then there are a few "containers". Each container has rules about how plasmoids can be arranged and provide a few menu/configuration options. Then everything else is a plasmoid. For all intent and purposes consider each plasmoid a resizeable canvas using SGV and truetype fonts.
So a menu, it is plasmoid. Tasklist, it is a plasmoid. Clock, yup, it is a plasmoid as well. Throw them into any container and away you go. Consider the desktop a container, consider the taskbar a container called a panel. Now take these parts and the dozens (if not hundreds) of plasmoids and design the desktop you want.
The cool thing here is that the "laptop" or "netbook" or "tablet" or "phone" interface uses the exact same plasmoids, and even uses many of the containers. All it takes to customize to some new device type is for someone to write a new "container" that encapsulates the behavior they want, and any new plasmoids they think will be useful. As an added bonus, those plasmoids will work on all other KDE4 systems.
The majority of KDE marches ahead doing what they have always done, working on a great desktop. Very little time or energy is wasted in working on these other environments. A small team of 2 or 3 programmers could come up with their own "container" and create a new metaphor for their device environment. All without stealing away people, mind share or resources from the main KDE project.
vi +
Conceded on #1, but I'm sorry, a briefcase doesn't equal a pocket, and neither does a purse or coat pocket. For one thing, I'm quite sure none of the coats I wear have pockets big enough to fit a 7" screen. Maybe big overcoats do, I dunno, but I never wear those. And coat-wearing is rather rare for me anyway since I live in Phoenix. And since I'm a man, I don't have a purse; as this is Slashdot, I imagine 99.9% of the other readers here are in the same boat as me on that point. As for briefcases, since I'm not a "suit", I don't generally carry one of those either. Again, this being Slashdot, I imagine 99% of other readers are like me on that point.
If I'm out in public, I need a phone that actually fits on my person, either in my pants pocket or on a belt holster. A 7-inch or worse 10-inch screen won't work; it's just too big. So maybe if you're a purse-carrier, or one of those weirdos that actually carries a briefcase around everywhere, you can get your 7-inch tablet to totally replace a phone. For the rest of us, it won't work, and we'll still have to have that regular palm-sized phone. A tablet might be a useful additional item, but not a total replacement.
Finally, I'm not understanding how you can get 3G (or 4G) cellular service on a tablet and not pay anything for it, even if you're just using data. I thought all the US carriers charged pretty high monthly fees for cellular data access per-device. Having two devices means you have to pay fees twice, unless you want to swap SIM cards every time you change devices, unless I'm missing something.
You can always switch to the classic menu.
My wife was a huge KDE 3.5 fan. She now uses KDE 4.6 and is liking it very much. That is an accomplishment. Here requirements were 1) A translucent kicker, 2) A classic menu 3) A classic desktop 4) A wallpaper rotator. KDE 4.2 and onward deliver.
vi +
It's not a black-and-white distinction, just like these days there's no longer a b&w distinction between cars and SUVs, with all these mini-SUVs and "crossovers" out there, to make an obligatory car analogy. But the existence of a Nissan Rogue or Honda Accord Crosstour does not suddenly make Suburbans and Tahoes equal to Lotuses. It just gives you some options in the middle.
However, I firmly object to the idea of a 7" tablet being "pocketable". I don't know what kind of jacket you wear, but no jacket I've ever owned in my life has a pocket that large. A 5.6" screen is probably the limit.
Wouldn't the Netbook UI look pretty much identical to their desktop, just like Windows does? Or do they change things quite a bit?
Netbook screens are too small to show all the detail and small icons that a full-size desktop screen can. Here's a review of the latest Fedora with KDE, showing some screenshots of the netbook UI (on page 3). Of course, these shots aren't quite right because it looks like they took them on a standard desktop screen instead a real netbook (or least a simulation of one), but you'll get the idea. It looks quite different from the traditional desktop UI (they have screenshots of this too if you're not familiar with the latest KDE releases).
This is actually quite a good idea, but it should be named differently so that it's clear that it's a completely different interface, something like OS-X vs iOS.
Why? It can run on the exact same OS (or even a different one; KDE isn't limited to Linux), it's just a different "skin". I'm pretty sure there's actually more significant differences between iOS and OS X than just the UI.
The Gnome guys could have done well w/ this.
Except that this is absolutely contrary to their fundamental philosophy, which is to dumb down everything as much as possible. They think that having different UIs on different devices is "too confusing" for users, and that you need to have the exact same interface everywhere.
I agree. In fact, I have one PC here with a relatively ancient KDE 4.5.5, and Skype works just fine with the systray on that.
This is nothing new, and has always been part of KDE philosophy, and the same goes for GNOME. With KDE, the key was always configurability: you like window decorations that look like MacOS? You can choose that. You want the panel on the side or top or bottom, or ever two panels? You can choose that too.
Not that I disagree with you regarding philosophy, but it's interesting to note that those two examples you bring up here were both possible with GNOME until the latest release. GNOME 2 was about removing stupid configuration options, of the kind that replaced figuring out sensible defaults. But yes, GNOME 3 seems to be much more radical, as you say.
Unfortunately, this IS opensuse, and it's the same problem. knotify4 is a pig. There are a few other issues that don't help.
Look, neckbeard, I'm sorry I'm insulting your Favorite Desktop Environment, but some of us have lives.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You sound like a complete moron. You complain that KDE isn't set up exactly the way you want it, as if they're somehow supposed to be able to read your puny little mind, and then when someone shows you how to change it to be exactly the way you want it, you complain more that "it's too hard!!!" Maybe you should go buy a Mac if you're that stupid, or maybe you shouldn't even be using a computer at all.
You sound like a complete moron.
Who's the greater idiot: the idiot, or the one who argues with him?
You are what people complain about when they say how needlessly hostile $OPEN_SOURCE_PROJECT's fora are; you're more interested in being right than you are about solving someone's problem, and out here in the real world that's pathetic.
Take it from an older nerd: fuck off and learn some social skills.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
you're more interested in being right than you are about solving someone's problem
You're the pathetic one, asshole. I told him how to solve his problem, but no, that wasn't good enough. What's the point of telling people how to solve their problems if they throw it in your face.
Fuck you.
From what I have seen is the tile interface is akin to the log in screen. You open the areo Windows 7 desktop to use Office and do work stuff. So in essence both interfaces are used which is an interesting twist. The betas out only have the Windows 7 aero interface as the tile is still being developed.
As long as you can choose I think that is fine. The tile interface might be sweet on tiny netbooks and pads or to check the weather or email before you open the regular desktop for work.
http://saveie6.com/
Your mother's first in that line, chum.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Go suck a cock, you pathetic piece of shit.
Show me how, expert.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Happens for me on two different distros. Wish I was making it up.
I am trolling
I never was really able to use more than 2 desktops on Gnome/KDE; I ended up forgetting I had the apps open, and would reopen eg firefox, and it just ended up getting in the way. Possibly I just need a Compiz / Linux GUI Guru to set me up, but nothing has really fit quite as nice as the new startbar in 7.
Are you using the same home partition for both distributions? It's not unlikely it's a configuration problem in that case -- some setting in the shared .kde4 directory messes up.
Nah, I'm just trolling him now.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Nope. Home machine and work machine, entirely separate.
I am trolling
Yeah. The idea that if you wanted to change the way the workspace appeared and behaved, you'd look in "Workspace Appearance and Behavior" is just so...
Oh wait, no. It's bloody obvious.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Kubuntu is the suckiest KDE distro around. Linux Mint Debian edition is where it's at.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
>> How often do we have to repeat that 4.0 and 4.1 were not meant for end users and that the 3.5.10 release (which happened AFTER 4.1) is proof of that?
That line is some backpeddling bullshit if I ever heard it. And I have heard a lot of that sort of thing.
The KDE team royally fucked up, Don't know why they can't admit it.
Oh well it is history now.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.