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KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making
jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.
Looks like the fucking faggots are at it again! Ban FAGGOT MARRIAGE once and for all!
These are two words that don't go together. Not since day 1. Not now. Not ever.
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
KDE Lightweight = Razor-QT, it's already been done MATE. ;-)
are for people that want linux to be windowsified.
Real h4x0r5 use the CLI. Anything else is just n00b. I'm browsing slashdot and posting with lynx, because I'm 1337.
People buy KDE installs now?
To be about 3oing 7ook at the parties, but here
While I applaud the programmer's efforts, I must say that it's efforts like these in the Open Source Community, that end up as wasted!
You see, everyone who is talented, ends up "doing their thing," resulting in duplication and waste. One wonders why the talent of this programmer doesn't get absorbed into the larger KDE project. What would the harm be?
To make a lighter KDE, you have to use less code, so while this sounds good in theory its impossible unless you leave out whole lilbrarys of stuff you may not need. Then if you need it you can call it up from the repostitory. So in effect you could make a lighter version but then as you add programs that need components you dont have,just add them back in and then you have the same bloated mess.
Same on gnome, download Kate and you get half of KDE desktop as part of the deal, nothing you can do about it unless you choose a different application to use.
KDE and lightweight is an oxymoron.
OS X has won. Why do prolong the slow death of the linux desktop needlessly? Wouldn't your time be better spent writing software for OS X so that actual people you know, USE, it?
So the Kool Ly Desktop Environment?
Makes no sense.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
If KDE's "modularity" makes it faster, when will I start to see these modules in my favorite Linux distros.
Grace. if you, thought Gregory`s st0rry is impressive, on friday I got themselves a Audi Quattro from having made $4864 this last 5 weeks and over 10-k this past munth. it's certainly the coolest work I have ever done. I started this five months/ago and immediately started to make minimum $77 per-hour. I went to this web-site,, WWW.BIC4.COM
and suggesting support GNAA, 7he developer 'superior' machine. Outreach are isn't a lemonade Talk to one of the is not prone to a GAY NIGGER That has lost 'superior' machine. another special Baby take my you got there. Or Usenet is roughly Pro-homosexual
you mean the OSX that is a spiffy UI on a freetard OS, and people USE OSX?
laughing my fucking ass off
It's clear what lightweight means just from examining its two parts: "light" and "weight" both allude to there not being much there, little mass or volume. The words are of course a physical metaphor when applied to software.
When something has little physical mass and volume then it tends to move fast for any given force, and so as a consequence we tend to associate "lightweight" also with higher speed, but it's only a consequence, not the primary meaning.
In software, being lightweight and being fast are properties that do not always track each other. As a first rule of thumb, smaller code tends to have more locality simply through being smaller, and hence it can run faster through producing fewer cache misses. However, small code is often somewhat dumb code, and a large and complex beast of a program can be designed to have greater locality in its innermost loops and hence to be more cache friendly and run faster. As a result it is hard to generalize whether lightweight also means fast. You have to examine each case separately.
As a counter-example to "lightweight == fast", the browser Midori is extremely lightweight (very small), consisting of little more than a simple graphic Gtk+ wrapper around webkit. Firefox in contrast is a huge monster of a program and could never ever be called lightweight. However, Firefox runs much faster than Midori, because its designers have used its complexity very productively to make its performance top notch.
So, you really can't generalize beyond observing that smaller programs load faster from disk and, everything else being equal, tend to have better cache locality and hence higher speed. However. heavier programs can buck this general rule by using more complex designs and algorithms to boost their runspeed.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I think it is good that he did this. Not just to make KDE lightweight. There are DEs that are lighter, but that he did it.
This is what hacking is about: because he can.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A handful of years ago I ended up switching from a custom window manager / desktop setup (WindowMaker based, if you care) to Gnome2. The driver for this was simply effort required to get something useful running in a short amount of time. As a developer I'm not getting paid to faff around with getting a desktop environment up and running. Gnome served me well, and even convinced me to switch away from xterm/uxterm. On a fresh Ubuntu install, all I needed was a few tweaks to the terminal config, a keyboard shortcut or two (launch terminal + virtual desktop switching), and I could feel "home" enough to be productive. Fantastic.
== Caution: incoming rant. ==
However, as of a few months ago I'm back to using WindowMaker. Why? Because of the unholy fustercluck which is known as Ubuntu / Unity / Gnome3. I had a perfectly fine desktop environment running on my 10.04 install. After upgrading to the next LTS release, my entire desktop was, to put it mildly, fubared. Whoever thought they were entitled to completely replace a user's desktop environment, and not provide a fallback option is worthy of being C-level at EA.
Even after manually adding "gnome-shell" back to the system to try to get my desktop environment back in a working order, I discovered that my keyboard short-cut settings were gone, as were half my panels and virtual desktops. Evicting the gnome-shell and loading up MATE didn't improve the situation (it kept missing keyboard shortcuts, amongst other issues). I tried KDE, but it was, quite frankly, far too "flashy" for me. Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!
I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.
Here endeth rant.
I've been using Linux since Slackware in 98 and CDE on Solaris before that. I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
A classic example of this is back in '08 I switched to a 16:9 monitor. Well thanks to a 6 year old bug in gnome #86382 this rendered gnome unusable for me.
Unfortunately this was also about the time KDE 4 was released. After giving a dozen other DEs a shot, I joined the the dark side.
To this day that 11 year old gnome bug remains unpatched. In an Apple or MS OS this kind of major usability issue would never make it out if Alpha never mind a "stable" release.
In the early days of Linux when It was for hackers by hackers this was acceptable and expected. They want to add cool features not fix bugs. Fine.
But now there's some serious money in Linux. Between Redhat and Ubuntu How the Linux Desktop can remain in such a sorry state. And I fail to see how another fork will make this situation any better.
Sorry for any grammar errors/typos, this message was written on my phone in topically useless all hands meeting.
Well, It' very good idea to have KDE without Akonadi and Nepomuk. Only this can make KDE lightweight. :)) That are the parts I always turn off and I'd love to get rid of entirely. MySQL is another piece of shit that must be cleaned out. If some developer needs "select my,shit from config where other=shit and blahbalbal" to read simple app config, then it's clinic. I used Kmail for years and when it started to use mysql and Akonady I switched to Thinderbird because I do not need all this smartass stuff done by e-mail client in background. So, there's a lot of stuff to simplify in KDE.
But "Less tuning" sounds as not good idea because users love KDE of it's flexibility.
No one will be able to spell your product name correctly if you use a weird combination of upper and lower case letters.
You don't need to focus on the fact that it is a DE. In fact, you already decided that when you came up with a name, instead of an acronym. Make a choice: is it an acronym, or a proper name? You can't have both, it confuses.
Just name it "Klyde".
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
How about Xubuntu?
CentOS still has that old environment. Of course you can't run the new gimp locally at the same time due to the gnome people managing to bring something very much like DLL hell to *nix for the first time since linux was thought of.
Funny thing is that since 1998 I've been using Enlightenment 16, it's still available and I still use it as my work desktop. There's a few others from then still in use as well. Your consistent UI has been there all along while MS and even Apple changed a few times.
Thus I don't think your suggested complaint is the reason for your post - it looks instead that you are trying unsuccessfully to find a means to fit your goal of a bit of bashing.
how about debian + openbox?
seriously, I do java and php development and have had squeeze installed since it went stable. Currently have iceweasel 20 and linux 3.2 kernel from backports as well and haven't met a hitch that wasn't self-induced yet (touches wood)
KDE 3.0 happily ran on 64MB of ram, with a pentium III, and walked 15 miles to school. If Linux really wants to cut into the end of life of XP markets they should look at old versions of Linux first
Now off my lawn, and this post sent from my Windows 8 pro workstation with 24GB of ram.
Will this be different than the Kubuntu meta package "Low Fat Settings"?
...Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!
I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.
Just a wild ass guess here, but it sounds like you were hacking on a Debian-based system as if it was Slackware. This may be helpful if you decide to give it another chance.
P.S. Switching to a different theme is a good and fast way to wipe all the flashiness off KDE (and especially Plasma) in short order. I must admit though, it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
If OS X was free and open source (at least to the amount my linux system at the moment is) I'd *begin* to consider it.
To use the same "matter of fact" tone you are:
The goal was to develop an open system that meets my needs. Linux has won.
it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
The window shadow is a giant blue glow.
I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
Well you'll need to give up on Windows then, thanks to Win8. Your argument had merit about 2 years ago, with Windows UIs being quite stable all the way back to Win95, but that's all out the window now, pardon the pun. Now we just have to wait to see if Apple jumps on the "let's royally fuck up stable UIs!" bandwagon and completely screws up OS X.
All I seem to be able to do currently is change the desktop colors, which often results in poor BG/FG combinations for the tool bar.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yeah, that can be irritating at first, indeed. :(
Luckily, you can turn it off at System Settings > Workspace appearance > Configure Decoration > Shadows tab.