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KDE Turns 19
prisoninmate writes: Believe it or not, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE). "Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI," wrote the developer back in October 14, 1996.
Dang, I missed it.
I stopped using kDE because of its name. The K in kDE has political meanings in Argentina. K is synonym of corruption.
Change its name. Delete all traces of K in kDE and I will return. Until then, I prefer to use Unity, Gnome, Xfce, even WindowMaker.
And I stopped eating snickers because it rhymes with knickers.
It's come a long way and the current incarnation is robust, intuitive and quite pleasing on the eye.
better ditch the metric system while you're at it. Nobody needs corrupt mass measurements.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
While we celebrate, add to this that KDE extended its reach to a huge fraction of the online world with the KHTML rendering engine.
My first permanent Linux installation (permanent in the sense that I wound up keeping and using it instead of Windows) was Caldera Open Linux 1.0. which shipped with KDE-1.0. Finding its limitations quickly, I moved to Red Hat 6.2 (KDE 1.1) and compiled each new KDE release from source until v. 3. I then switched to Knoppix and Mepis (Debian), still using KDE. I now use 4.x on Mint-14.04-3. For a short time, I tried XFCE, but returned to the integration of KDE.
KDE still looks and acts pretty much the same now as it used to, just moreso.
Everything looks like a nail.
No one feature is going to jack Linux into mainstream.
What has propelled Linux to it's current position is price point and versatility.
The ability to fold spindle and mutilate an OS as desired.
I fear elevation to mainstream would be its demise.
More is better is marketspeak for more money, I think Linux is pretty great right now.
Rick B.
I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?), and I have found Plasma to be gaudy and bloated compared to MATE and Xfce. But that's just me. Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?
And this is why the metric system is wrong and should be abandoned: it's used in North Korea. Since North Korea is a horrible regime and uses metric, I refuse to use it.
Also, Iran has a horrible regime, and they fly F-14 jets. Because of this, I refuse to watch Top Gun, and because Tom Cruise is in Top Gun, I refuse to watch any movies with him in it.
This is just plain idiotic. Qt uses less memory than Gtk+, and is a far superior and more complete toolkit as well. Qt is commonly used in low-resource embedded systems; Gtk+ is not.
Christ, the whole point of KDE was that it used an excellently architected C++ core library instead of a clunky crude C core library trying to imitate OO on a flat procedural programming environment. A long time ago, before Qt went straight full free software, the whiners had a point about shying away. As it is now, why would KDE ever switch away from the best?
UI retrogression abandoning use standards is a universal hipster problem. It has nothing whatever to do with KDE. Microsoft started it, Firefox copied it, and Gnome took it up with a vengeance. KDE to this day is still a rational GUI. Windows are properly decorated, with proper controls in the proper places, no hidden now-you-see-it, now-you-don't scrollbars, and no idiotic bullshit abortions like only-the-one "current" window having a title bar, with the title bar at the top of the display.
As for "slow app loading", what piece of shit hardware are you running on? I use a mix of KDE, GTK, and other apps, and they all load instantaneously on my decidedly trailing-edge boxes. The absolute nauseatingly worst offenders for RAM bloat are Firefox and Thunderbird, which are both GTK-based.
If you've got absolute lightweight religion for whatever reason, I won't knock it. I will just point out that all the usual DEs are pigs for RAM use, and that disk space use has been a complete non-factor for at least 15 years. Even Xfce has caught the pigginess. With LXDE pretty much withering and Razor-Qt developing at a glacially-slow pace, I personally think Lumina has a lot of promise.
Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.
Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.
I vividly remember my Klamath choking and Fireball trashing all over the place when the library dependencies pulled in
/dev/hda to X11 emacs and have responsive parenthesis matching at the same time!
as konsole was trying to start (I was wary of loading a whole window system, this was C++ you know).
I wept many tears and bled my eyes on the bulky pixel-fear-inducing window that appeared
and burnt into my 15" aquarium after minutes seeming hours.
The experience reminded me of the furious Emacs vs. VI battles, yet Emacs seemed to fly on the machine.
Obviously, I was reminded at some newsgroup or other to use better compile options, as gcc 2.7.2 was *really*
not up to par with other c++ compilers or standards these days, how could I expect anything else?
So I spent days figuring out how to tune and compile the latest PGCC with the greatest options ever. Really.
I made sure anything binary that would come out of the compiler would be stripped, framepointer-ommitted,
loop-unwinded, MMX-enabled, -ftry-harder and optimized with -O9999 (if unfamiliar, just imagine the
greatest bbq sauce recipe in existence).
After this excruciating and cumbersome process, if fed the compiler source to the newly built compiler until
I was satisfied and sure *nothing* unoptimized was escaping my toolchain. Then I repeated this process to
assure my conscience; you know, these nights punch holes in your confidence.
And again. I was relentless and unforgiving, no 386 opcode would be left in favor of 586 optimization.
After that, I spent nearly the same time on LFS'ing and kernel-tuning my system on another partition with this übertoolchain.
I can honestly say the system booted and flied -- it flied like a rocket.
Rodney McKay would agonize in self-pity at the sight of it.
Were any Stampede or Gentoo developer to see this, it would wet their pants
and send them home crying for mommy. I'm pretty sure one of my fellow CS students
quit shortly afterwards and took up a job at the local grocery store.
I could pipe
Then, confident but modest, started konsole on a prompt:
% konsole
Segmentation fault (signal 11)
After that I dumped the computer only to discover some time after the kid next door used it to play Hind on Windows98.
I'm sure there's some point in this story but I'm sure as hell not touching KDE to unbury it out of my brain.