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Some KDE news
The KDE Development team progress seems very good these days. You can now take a look at some screenshots from the KDE 2 pre alpha. Also, the KDevelop team has announced today the 1.0 Beta 1 version of KDevelop. I must say it looks very promising.
First, I personally do not need networking and I suspect that a lot of home users (i.e. desktop users) will not need it either. Yet I cannot turn the networked architecture off and switch to something more direct and efficient and with fewer components communicating between themselves.
I think that this statement is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how UNIX works. It is clear (I hope) that any effective display server has to be a separate process from the programs which display on it. Given this, there obviously must be some means of communication between the server and the clients. On a UNIX system this generally means opening a socket of some form, be it TCP, Unix domain, or just a pipe. This is not only the standard way of doing things, it is quite efficient most of the time; the only place where it really fails is *extremely* high-bandwidth transfers (think big pixmaps being written all over the screen), which is why shared-memory was invented. Any halfway modern app will probably detect that it's running on a local X server and use shared memory where appropriate -- ie, for bandwidth-intensive things like moving images around. (eg: *any* Imlib-based program will use SHM) The Myth2 demo is a good example of this -- on a *framebuffer X server* -- a server entirely lacking in acceleration -- I acheived a high framerate with the game running *in a window*. (I couldn't find how to clock it but it seemed like it had maxed out -- I noticed little improvement on a PII/400 with an accelerated server)
Without networking, there's no reason to have a client-server architecture
This is completely false. Even the kernel itself is in many ways a client-server architecture: programs connect with system calls and request stuff from it. (the Hurd just makes this explicit)
How would you allow multiple programs to access a single display at once without some sort of server?
I suspect all of stand-alone X desktop functionality can be written as one file for maximum speed and efficiency.
Which functionality are you referring to?
A networked version is only good as an option.
But given that programs are *already*, for reasons mentioned above, connecting in a client-server fashion using localhost UNIX sockets why not make the simple jump to supporting TCP and get five times the flexibility?
Second, I hope someone starts a page dedicated to pointing out what's wrong with X.
Most criticism I've seen of X is a slightly more literate version of "X sux, it's too big!" or "X sux, it scares me!" There are some real warts but the "X must die!!!!" camp generally doesn't even mention them (probably because most of them just mean that specific issues need to be fixed rather than throwing out the entire system they've got so much vitriol for)
If nothing else, it'd help X evolve in the right direction.
Read: the one I want.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
MY favoite app for linux right now is the kwm. IT rocks. I use to dislike it because its was a little bit slower then the rest of the windows managers but its getting pretty to look at with each new kde release and the new themes for it look really cool. My main reason for living it is the intergration with the kde desktop and the tool bar and everything else about kde. I really love kde as a whole bunch of programs that interact with each other. Microsoft is allways worried about the next killer app that will come out under there nose and I believe they found there match. WOrse yet its not windows based. :-)
.4 to install. Something about obstdc not found. I cant fidn this fiel anywhere. :-( BUt version .3 rocks on my mahcine. Its loaded with application wizards just vc++ and I can have a wizard for a kde app, qt app, or even jstu a consule app. THere is even a documentation windows so I can load a c-reference manual, kde programmer reference manual, or even just a help manual for kdevelop itself. KDe even can use emacs style key bindings. IT ROCKS. GO download it. If you can't afford code warrior this is the next great thing.
.3 from this time last year where it was about as easy as windows 2.0 is a huge leap that scares ms half-to-death. IF this progess continues you could expect microsoft to have a terrible headache when widnows 2002 wich will ship in 2004 :-) will not be the easest to use on the block and linux will be the number1 OS in Germany, Japan, China, Korea and perhaps spain or Italy. WHo knows. All I know is that 5 years ago linux was just a toy that only cs nerds heard of. This is just my perspective on kde and how its going to change unix.
MY second favorite app for linux is kdevelop. I had trouble getting kdevelop
I also have a friend who works at microsoft and he told me that kde scares the sh*t out of Steve Balmer more then any other linux app besides apache. I believe in 5 to 7years from now, kde will match if not surpass the ease of use of wibdows. KDE is allready passed windows 3.1 and is right now close to windows95 in terms of ease of use. Its still in the middle though. BUt compared to the kde beta
I would love to have crystal ball and look five years into the future. I could bet you that kde will be aorund and be probably the defacto standard in xwindows managers by then with machines ranging form 768- 2 gigs of ram where the preformance drop in kde will not be that noticable compared to windows maker at that time. I imagine that linux will still run on very old machiens though so the other windows managers wills till be there. All I know is that Caldera only uses kde and has kde and qt intergrated in everything. Suse loves kde as well and even redhat who invested ing gnome also a default configuration for kde.
In 4 weeks kde 1.2 will be done. It included lots of themes and high color icons. I cant wait for it.
Use ssh. It will take care of your cookie handling and can encrypt your X traffic.
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It seems to me IDEs should be one of the most effective applications for open source development. A significant percentage of programmers want one on a variety of platforms, its users are mostly capable of improving it, and having an IDE lowers the barrier to new developers for projects.
SlickEdit looks pretty cool though, it's the first place I've seen intra-line file differencing as opposed to plain old line-by-line file differencing. I've been thinking of hacking a version of diff to have an option to do that, or perhaps a post-process filter on the diff output.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I sincerely hope that that last screenshot that shows the "system" theme isn't the theme that kde uses out of the box. Lemme tell you a secret about themes:
They suck. They're hideous, garish, clashing, and make your entire professional body of work look like some 3L337 kiddie's toy. I hate them. Everyone I've shown them to sneers at them.
At least this is true for well over half of them (I have seen some nice ones, E's default theme these days is a nice one). If this is made the default KDE theme, I hope to god distributions will change it to something they can demo without embarrassment.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Look here:
http://www.de.kde.org/webmirrors.html
Does anyone know if the KDE and Gnome guys have agreed on a common IDL interface? It's great to have two CORBA based desktops, I just hope that we can mix and match the applications.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
It amazes me when Open Source advocates defend The X Window System. It makes you wonder if anyone has bothered to look at who controls X.
:)
The X Consortium is a closed group of members with a membership fee of $50,000/year to do any significant work on X. X is far from the nice open development environment of traditional open source applications.
This is why all sorts of development has gone into what goes ontop of X rather than what goes in X and is the reason behind projects such as Berlin. It's simply not possible to get things added to X unless you have some serious weight behind you... especially the sort of radical changes the Berlin folks are doing.
Of course, I am biased in this
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The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
1.1 also had some warning about "security hole in libmedia.so, so KDE's system sounds are turned off by default." If this were fixed, it'd be excellent--the standard system speaker beep gets really annoying. I also noticed that the old kvt doesn't seem to be on the panel. Have they finally managed to get konsole working correctly?
And is there really a need for kfm to be able to run Java? It'd be cool, yes, but probably of limited utility unless you used kfm as a Web browser...
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Not to take away anything from any of the other free software projects...but these guys truly amaze me; they are taking on Microsoft, not with words, but with deeds.
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Correction, you mean UNIX, not LINUX!
Linux is not the only OS that can run KDE, Gnome, etc... Don't count my IRIX and FreeBSD boxes out yet, I am quite happy with them, and have no intention of converting them to Linux.
X is efficient, flexible, and runs completely separately from the kernal. Its networked display capabilities have still not been matched by Windoze or the Mac. Xlib has served as the basis for Athena, Motif, Openlook, GTK, and QT interfaces. What more could you want it to do?