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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.
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?
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.