Slashdot Mirror
KDE 2.0 in Action
Stormie writes "KDE hacker Mosfet has just put up on his web page a section entitled KDE2.0 in action with a rundown of what is coming in version 2, along with a bunch of great screenshots. Exciting stuff!"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I hope some cleaner themes come out by the time KDE 2.0 comes out. I mean, it doesn't look very bad, but the designers need some professionals with graphics design to make some really snazzy looking themes so that desktop looks more professional.
Eh, but what do I know.
The thing I have always like about KDE is it's simplicity of use.
I am not a linux hacker and have never claimed to be, I am used to windows98 and NT4 and while I dislike it's bugs, security issues and lack of source they are still useful operating systems.
Until KDE came along I have to admit I was scared of linux... the WMs that were around were very basic and I was addicted to the Ms way of doing things.
Now this is all changing,I have been using KDE for quite a while now and anticipate the release of v2 with baited breath, it takes something like KDE to convert all us MS users who like the idea of linux but are scared of it.
You can run it quite happily after install, or you can hack it to bits. It's themeable and it has all the software bits and LAF of windows, while at the same time being quite different.
What more could a windows user want?
What's more, here in the office we are considering putting all the admin monkeys on a locked down version of linux with StarOffice and KDE too!
The future is bright.
Shameless plug: Here's brief, fun article on how nice it is to program with KDE these days.
However, I have to conceded that 2.0 is shaping up to look very nice indeed. Konq is something that, as a web designer, particuarly catches my attention. If they get it doing CSS and HTML4 properly then they'll be my friend for life :)
Also, I reckon I'd be far happier letting a new user out on KDE2.0 than gnome in its current state... Though whether KDE lives up to expectations remains to be seen... I for one am looking forward to it :)
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
That site seems to be slashdotted already, but there are some more screenshots here: http://www.inficad.com/~nytehorse/
I use Star Office, Netscape, and Window Maker. I occasionally fire up the Gnome file manager to tidy up the hard drive but I'm only interested in app's, not ugly, messy desktop simulations.
TWW
Wow! So rare to see a new version of a product that is actually a new version. :) KDE v2 is looking like a very nice little manager; I may even consider switching over from GNOME. It appears that they are really trying to make it more casual user friendly as well as more fully featured for the power user. I can't wait to get hold of the release. :)
Deosyne
What is KDE? Are there more WM's than Twm? What are they used for?
Screenshots with over 400kb in size are much too big. Together they have some 5mb.
:-(
If I'm not browsing themes.org, I don't want to see background images, start panels or whatever, just the plain application window.
Furthermore they're in gif format - all the colors are dithered down to 8bpp. I think this increases file size because it's less compressable. PNG files would be smaller.
These screenshots aren't the only big one in last time. There seems to be a trend towards big all-in-one screenshots. The bigger the better.
Either my browser is being odd or this page has been slashdotted out of existence.
I managed to load it once and then hit refresh for a reason which resulted in "reset connection with server".
Perhaps wait a little while until it is back up again?
I am a user of Windowmaker. My Linux box is a p166MMX box with
64Mb memory with Matrox Millennium II vga board. It's too slow
to run Gnome or Enlightenment, and although KDE is relatively
faster than Gnome on my box but I disliked the monolithic theme
of KDE. So I use plain-vanilla Windowmaker with Korean language
patch included.
I always envy the fantastic desktop themes of a PII-350 box
of my friends. He's running Gnome with Enlightenment. Well,
from the desktop screenshot, I think that KDE 2.0 desktop is
quite beautiful at least as various themes of E.
Hope soon I get KDE 2.0.
For those who want to try it themselves rather than just looking at screenshots, I've put up RPMs of a recent snapshot on http://people.redhat.com/bero/experimen tal/.
/opt/kde2, so they won't overwrite a KDE 1.x installation.
There will be a new snapshot today.
The packages install to
They're made for Red Hat Linux 6.1, but should run without problems on similar distributions.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I posted a complaint about image sizes in another article, but in this web page they appear to have done the decent thing and put thumbnail links to the main images.
PNG is undeniably more sophisticated than GIF, as well as being free of royalty problems; however it still doesn't enjoy universal browser support. Webmasters have a choice between being trendy and being compatible.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is not even pre-alpha stuff! Do not use this for everyday work!
Both KDE and Gnome takes up too much memory to be really fun on my system. One solution is to add more memory, I know, but I am still very interested, has anyone got any information on the Memory consumption of KDE2.0. More, Much more, Less much less or equal to KDE 1.1.2 ?
Roberto, it's "kdesktop", not "kdesk" :-) And yes, integration is nice. Even more integration coming along, for those who like it... This reminds me of making embedding in konqueror configurable :) David.
So I can't get through myself ;-) I'll upload them as soon as I can get in. mosfet@kde.org
I hope that they have improved the speed the the xlib thingmy (sorry dont know its name) the ORB they where useing before was not speedy to say the least (MICO) they should try OMNIORB from at&t research in cambridge (yes the real cambridge)
;-)
lets face it Desktop will not run well on a 486 let alone a P90
stick to the command line boys and girls anddont moan you can do everything there that you want to (vi rules
THemes can you drag KDE to GTK ?
(or the other way around)
vector surport I saw Koffice had some vector surport in it GNOME lacks this
PDF reading KDE has a pants one GNOME is good @ this (thanks !!)
pilot stuff hope thats improved !
overall I like what KDE is doing
KEEP GOING !!
peace
john
out
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
They have :)
While KDE 2.0 may be nice, etc, etc...
It still leaves the problem of the QT licensing. I know, I know... But last week I was at SD EAST and asked when they would be decreasing their licensing fees for commercial software. Their answer was "We need to live too!" (In a very snooty voice). Well excuse me!
I like Linux, even gave some Linux talks at SD. And I had the chance to talk to a few people about Linux. For Linux to attract the widest array of developers for the desktop they need to attract all developers. And the ones who cannot afford 2K USD are the shareware developers or small company.
And to be honest I find it disgusting considering companies like them charge so much, when companies like Cygnus charge only 199 USD for a development environment.
I have ranted and raved and until the commercial license changes I will not even look at KDE.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The site is completely out of reach from here.
Thank you.
Will KDE 2 support right click desktop menu (with access to any program)? I find this to be the most useful feature of the WM I use, blackbox. All the apps and utils I use plus several SSH sessions are merely two clicks away no matter where my mouse is at the time. Quite a time saver. Plus any start-menu type thing takes up way too much screen real estate on my dinky monitor.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
http://www.openface.ca/~navindra/mosfet/screenshot s.html
I'm not making this a hyperlink on purpose. If you've seen this site at all, please don't visit this page. PLEASE, PLEASE be very gentle.
Actually, if you have a working version right now there are no major stability or performance problems. If you refresh from CVS than it may happen that at some hour of the night some applications are out of sync.
Of course some applications are incomplete, etc. But I am using it for daily work from July and I had weeks of uptime.
The big letter warnings are more of a legalese kind of stuff, and what day really say is "please do not put it as default in the distribution (yet)".
L.
DCOP IPC !
IPC done whithout a standard corba is a nightmare yes you can do it and yes you can make programing easyer wich is why they are doing it I surpose
BUT its incompatable nightmare and the only thing that would save it would be Koffice and the fact its open source (easy to change the whole thing write bridges and such)
IPC is for people who are speed freaks (im talking Cray people money to burn on development)
WHY NO CORBA ??
this is what Corba was designed to do and very well to it makes runing services easy and abstract ie you may run it where you like a server in hong kong or on your laptop and you dont have to worry because it was a standard thats why they where useing Mico
there where lots of flames and I read them and they seemed to say DCOP would be complemtry and you need an ORB DCOP would help speed things up relieing on the X way of doing things
am I wrong ?
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Pain in the butt software (aka shareware) is a concept I would rather not see on Linux. As far as commercial development, I don't see any real companies minding and AFAIK quite a few have Linux/KDE/Qt port projects.
Can someone else please just mirror this now?
KDE is alright, but there should be something better. Screw system performance. What most people are interested in is "eye candy". The jump from DOS to Macintosh in 1984 was proof of that. The same goes with the eventual mass migration of the genpub to Window 9x from 3.1. I know a whole lot of folks who made the move from Win9x to Linux just to use Enlightenment. One thing a lot of "techies" seem to forget (and I am one) is that the ONLY thing that draws crowds is the "cool factor". I keep hoping that someone will add cinematic MPEG window animations to a window manager so that you can have a window "blow away" like grains of sand rather than just close. Or minimize into the background in a pseudo 3D environment. Does it help system performance? No. Does it improve the functionality of the OS and apps? No. But, frankly, who cares? If you are going to run a GUI on a Linux box, make it cool, easy to use and fun. Those are concepts that appear to be ignored too often. If you don't like these ideas, then pick another GUI, but don't think you will ever convince anyone that your choice of GUI is better than theirs. They picked theirs for a reason and so did you.
Peace Out
D.B.
Don't complain about my web page. It's mine. ALL MINE.
Read www.technology.html. It uses all standard libraries that come with X such as libICE and is easily programmable via langs like C.
"kdelibs is frozen. This means that you should not introduce any changes to the API of kdelibs.
kdebase and koffice is feature frozen. This means that you should try to concentrate on bugfixing and getting the basic functionality to work correctly.
On 15 dec we will release. Make sure the important things work by then. It's up to you to decide what is important. "
quote from KDE news
Koffice looking good how about porting the functions to a GTK front end ? (GTK is nier the QT because I like to give windows(the microkernel one) a chance to use my apps QT makes you pay to use under windows
full respect to the KDE team !
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
From the KDE FAQ:
It looks to me as though some of other OSes' (namely, Windows 95) worst features were also gleaned. For example:
While I have no doubt that the designers of KDE did not intentionally make parts of their interface bug-for-bug compatible with Windows, it is obvious that they have, at times, been trapped in the Microsoft paradigm. I can only hope that KDE 2 will have addressed these misfeatures. If not, I recommend the designers pick up a copy of Windows 9[5|8] Annoyances lest they repeat more of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were looking to "glean features" from an OS GUI, Windows 95 would not be high on my list of interfaces to emulate.
Regards,
KWM's window placement is configurable and what "animation" are you talking about? The only animation I see is KFM's gear spinning, not unlike Netscape.
KDE comes with a lot more stuff now so it takes longer to compile, but the default setup is a lot more streamlined to takes less memory to run.
The QT Free License allows you or anyone else to develop free software. All this talk about free OS's, free desktop environments, and free software in general is great. But when it comes down to it, QT is a very complex and necessary element to KDE. You and I will probably always be able to use it for free, and if you're developing free software, it stays free. Commercial software and development on the other hand, will cost you. Let's examine the phrase commercial software. Commercial is derived from Commerce, which is transactions usually for businesses involving money. Should the Troll people who worked hard for QT not eat and clothe their children at the expense of businesses? You have to be realistic here.
In the real world, people make money and buy food clothing and shelter. Free software doesn't pay the bills.
KDE & Gnome are slow (at least for now), whatever you people say. Gnome is helped a bit by not using E (some people say that sawmill is better). About KDE: i simply find the user interface too cluttered and confusing.
I used fvwm until some 3 months ago [i was a former Slackware userSome apps i use:
I admit it I DONT KNOW
... I would like to write my app and it work in all windowing systems without to much hassle
so am I right in thinking if you wanted to port KDE to a non X based windowing system you would need to port a chunk of X the libICE and so on ??
this seems mad to me !
(of course mad things go down well sometimes, ugly shaped blue machines sell who would have thought that ! buy an SGI and see colour)
linux and hurd and Mach and
I like X but what happens when we slowly convert to X12 ? or berlin takes off ? or want to write apps for MAC OS 10 (knowen as macosX now)
confused
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
These screenshots have been around for a while now. I think. Can't check because the server's slashdotted. The ones I saw looked pretty nice though. Looking forward to check it out.
This
You can turn off window resize animation in the
Window manager properties config screen.
You can change your window placement policy to one
of several different schemes in the same place.
It would be nice if KWM remembered window postions but presumably you can launch xemacs with "-geometry" specified.
Also, real programmers do not "copy con: file.exe" they go "dd if=/dev/tty of=/usr/bin/myfile"
Regards
If you look on the KDE page there is a KDE/Free Qt foundation which has legally signed documents by TT that if they try ever try to restrict the free version of Qt or fail to update it within a certain amount of time Qt automatically shifts to a BSD license.
I tried kdevelop recently -- what an amazing job they've done of providing a completely usable IDE -- in a surprisingly short time. Yeah yean, "just gimmie vi 'n a couple-o' xterms". Well, me and John Carmack know that a strong IDE with docs and a debugger make you much, much more productive than old-style environments. The question I have: what is it about KDE that's so great that the kdevelop crew were so efficient in producing the app? Is the QT class library that good?
As far as X12, I doubt they will dump support for all X applications. And berlin? Who knows?
I hope the KDE people would speed up the development of Harmony, as long as they don't use a LGPL'ed toolkit it will allways feel like it is failing to be a true Linux product. Alternativly they could make it possible to create integrated KDE applications using Gtk--, that would be just as great. Until that time I limit my choices to the three desktop environments that offer this: XFCE3, Gnome and Enlightenment.
I find it humorous that in this day and age, when powerful computers are so inexpensive, that people whine about this desktop environment or that one not running on their trusty 486/66 with a whopping 8 megs of ram. X isn't intended to run on your Yugo of the computing world, let alone a window manager or a desktop environment. Actually, DOS would be a good choice for you. And could you please pass me a 5 1/4" diskette? I need a new copy of turtle logo.
How come whenever I open a new window in Gnome it doesn't become the active window. All I want is to be able to click on the Terminal icon, have it pop open a terminal and begin typing. But noooo... I have to then click on the terminal window to make it active first. What a pain in the ass.
Gnome's keyboard shortcuts suck. I can't remember why they suck becuase I have avoided Gnome like the plague recently.
There was no reason for it to continue with Qt2.0 being free software.
slashmirror, maximum 25 users.
Frankly, -ALL- the window managers (yes, even including twm) have their strengths and weaknesses. Most of them, I've not used in a while, but I have the knowledge that if I need to do something for which some old, half-forgotten window manager is absolutely ideal and everything else is just blah, it's there.
People can complain about (insert name of WM or desktop environment hee) being too slow, too bloated or too cheesy, but I think they're missing the point. The point, to me, is that X allows choice, in a useful sense, in a way that almost no other windowing system ever created does.
Actually, even the complaints are good, IMHO, in that they show that people -expect- choice, and are picky about what works for them, not letting someone else tell them what they -should- want, and why they're wrong if they don't agree.
Summary: Long Live REAL Freedom Of Choice!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Only now your mirror is /.'ed too, so I can't get to the files.. :(
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
After all, "you" can do it just as easily as "they", and it is "you" who sais "it" would be a good thing.
"Baited breath?" Been eating sushi?
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
ftp://128.253.254.56/upload/screenshots.html
here
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Oh yeah, it's an afternoon's task to port all of KDE to the crappy GTK C-based API... why would anyone want to do away with a beautifully designed C++ UI class library anyway? People are idiots.
at least for me.
GTK and it's C++ wrappers don't support half the widgets, classes, or templates needed to reimplement KOffice on Gtk/Gnome. They are doing there own office suite, but it is much further behind.
When they dropped CORBA support, their binary sizes went down by 50%! Nevermind that programmers efficiency went up dramatically. What good is a supposedly interoperable toolkit (CORBA) if no-one understands it and it's a memory PIG? No good at all. The KDE guys did the right thing.
It seems that the server hosting these files has gone down. It's been down since 0900 EST.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Making the newly popped up window active is the window manager's job. While most distros enable Enlightenment as the default window manager by default (well, OK, the distros I have seen) you can use any Gnome compliant window manager. Unlike KDE, there really isn't a specific Gnome WM.
I suggest you look at the config for whatever window manager you are running. I believe both Enlightenment and WindowMaker (the two Gnome-aware WM I've used) allow you to set policies like this.
Ok, I can't take it anymore, Karma points be damned. Regarding your .sig: if your spelling were the only problem, I could MAYBE live with that. But your entire stream-of-consciousness style of writing is short circuiting my brain cells, and they are revolting in the form of this reply.
Just to let you know, most humans have a linguistic preprocessor, a sort of Pretty Print if you will, that allows them to arrange random thoughts into linear, formatted output compatible with most other people's I/O standards. USE IT!
....when Windows runs more efficent than your latest GUI for X, you know something's wrong with the later.
KDE just eats up too much memory and is way too slow. I tried on a 300MHz machine with 192MB of Ram, and it didn't feel "snappy" enough for me.
Now I am back to plain Windowmaker.
I think I can do that same thing in even less lines:
int main()
{
system("/usr/bin/netscape");
return 0;
}
I am not sure how that proves developer-friendliness, but apparently it does...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Regards,
Has anybody any data showing a correlation between the appearance of KDE and the increase of Linux's popularity? I imagine KDE could be more responsible than any other application for the crossing of the credibility threshold (as far as popular use is concerned).
Adam:What kept you?
God:Rome wasn't built in a day
Well, I guess it might be possible to port KOffice to Gtk+, but ...
1) The KDE class hierarchy derives off of the Qt hierarchy, and KOffice naturally uses the KDE libraries. So, porting KOffice means porting all of the KDE libraries first.
2) There's already much to do for finishing KOffice and KDE2, so I think it's not very likely that the KOffice or KDE developers are going to take the time to port to Gtk+.
However, there is a bright side. If you'd really be interested in it, I should think it would be possible to port it yourself, or put together a group of porters yourself, because all of the KDE code is GPL.
Oh, random thought before I go... I suppose it might be possible just to make a modified version of the widget classes, to make kdeui, khtml, and the rest of the libraries use the Gtk+ widgets, while still keeping the Qt programming interface.
First, don't judge the whole project by its window manager.
Second, If you hate KWM, and its window placements, that much, do this to your startkde file:
- sleep 2 ; exec kwm
+ sleep 2 ; exec wmaker
And, whamo! No more KDE window manager. (Note: you obviously have to have Windowmaker installed for that to work.)
You do know that it's possible to use Windowmaker with KDE, right?
Just substitute wmaker for kwm in your startkde script.
great. but it's still a bloated, crappy win95 wannabe. could be worse though. could be gnome.
come on. you'd think an OS as cool as Linux would have some desktop environments that weren't shameless win95 clones.
of course this is just my opinion, and i may be wrong. (to quote Dennis Miller)
> Screw system performance. What most people are
:)
>interested in is "eye candy". The jump from DOS
>to Macintosh in 1984 was proof of that.
Nope. They were competeing with 4.7 (?)mhz 8088s (though you could get 8mhz 8086's at the time, which were about twice as fast).
The mac was *significantly* faster than the dos machines, even after spending most of its power on the graphical system.
We put my 128k mac next to an 8088, running the same number crunching operation (numerical integrations, iirc) in microsoft basic. The mac was graphing the solutions it calculated faster than the 8088 could do the calculations--and aside from the plotting, the code was identical (we typed my code into tony's machine. He was shocked; he had been convincedhis machine was much faster).
Hmm, I think i just dated myself
Just make sure you're not theming as root, I'm not sure if the themes will enter the global shared folder or not...
Here's how you remove the offensive theme. Just rm everything from ~/.kde/share/apps/kwm, and restart kde / kwm.
If you backup your kwm folder, you can freely experiment with themes without fear of losing your original settings.
How is the WM supposed to remember your preferred position for XEmacs? How is it supposed to even know the window belongs to XEmacs?
In X, the application can remember its position. It can move itself there. It can do that regardless of WM. Why not ask XEmacs people to do it?
Because its actually a good GUI design?
the lowest common asshole. An elitist geek. Worried that someone with a life will invade your own personal geekdom? Get a grip.
Much better than Windows. I don't know what people are doing to their systems but it's obviously different than mine.
If you would bother to check the sizes of both the KDE and Gnome packages, then you'd see that Gnome + GTK is about twice the size of KDE + QT. And Gnome isn't even a windowmanager, you need an extra few megs to include Windowmaker, E, or any other WM you want to use with Gnome.
If you're so willing to complain about the desktops, why don't you start designing something better?
You shouldn't be fooling yourself. Everyone knows what a huge memory hog X is (internal TCP-IP, anyone?); put something like KDE or GNOME on top of that, and then try to run Netscape...
And then go back to Windows. You'll feel the difference in speed, no matter how much RAM or CPU you have, even on Windows NT.
Ok, so there's the possibility of running pure TWM and browsing the web with Lynx. Or better yet, ditch X and be a console freak. THERE's speed for ya, and imagine how kewl you'd be.
All I'm saying is, why try to be something we're not? A lot of people hear amazing things about how fast Linux is, and as soon as they try it out for themselves, they post to newsgroups asking what's wrong with their installation since it's so slow compared to Windows. So let's get real.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Ongoing royalties are what kills me as a software developer. I don't want to have to send 2% of my revenue stream to every #%%@ vendor library that's linked into my code. All those percents adds up too quickly, and they're all volume-oriented so I have to tell them "I'm going to sell 50,000 copies so you charge me the 1.5% instead of the 2% rate for 20,000 copies". The problem there of course is how the hell do I know how many copies I'm going to sell?! This is the computer business, folks! Great programs fail to sell all the time because the projected market for it dried up and moved on to other things, or because the market isn't there yet... per-copy volume based royalties are the utter PITS.
Remember, if you're an independent developer writing programs with QT, you can still develop the program with the QPL version. It's just when you actually sell it (get some money for it!) that you must send your $2k to the Trolls. If you can't make $2k off of a piece of software, you shouldn't be trying to release it as "shareware" anyhow, you should just GPL it and toss it onto the pile of Open Source code that already exists!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Heaven forbid that you would actually help somebody use Linux, you unmitigated a-hole!
Linux Rules.
You Suck.
Out.
KDE starts faster than Windows 98 on my P166, apps start faster - even simple ones like KWrite, the screen updates more quickly, KFM is faster...
Let's push this "contest" a bit further.
:-)
I can add another 5 lines of code and modify any arbitrary object in the page in any arbitrary way
using DOM.
Add that to your version
ok, make that "left click menu", for KDE 1.x,
:-)
as you can guess from the key "Left" in the config file.
I've just implemented it in kdesktop (the one for KDE 2.0), this way :
you can assign ANY menu to ANY mouse button,
the possible menus being : the applications menu,
the window-list menu, the usual desktop menu or nothing.
Happy ?
(The apps menu showing up in kdesktop doesn't work yet though)
Looking at KWord AbiWord is way, way, behind. And KPresenter has a lot of features not even in MS Office.
If you read the gnome list they are developing a "standard" Gnome WM because they finally realized not having a optimized WM for your environment sucks. You can still use other WM's just like you can in KDE, but they are developing one true Gnome WM - just like KDE did 2 years ago.
A lot of people don't seem to understand one of the major points behind environments such as KDE and Gnome. Of course, you could always use just plain old Windowmaker, Enlightenment or fvwm2, but then you'd leave out a huge amount of functionality. These new desktop environments aren't just pretty user interfaces; they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Simply looking at package size can be a bit misleading. Depending on how many icons and graphics you include, how big they are, and what color depth, it can drastically change those sizes. Sound files, additional programs, even graphical help files or desktop backgrounds can have a large effect. I'm not going to say either way which is more bloated, or how much bloat in each case could be removed from the code, because I really don't know. I'm partial to gnome myself for other reasons.
I have no clue what Gnome-db's status is, no clue what gill is. But I know Gnumeric isn't up to anything near a 1.0 and Gimp ain't no Gnome app
I've been seeing this overpricing-on-Unix problem for years. There will be a program XX that's $50 on Windows, but $500 on the Unix platforms. The marketing strategy seems to be: "We don't expect to sell a lot of these, so we've got to charge a HUGE amount per copy (which ensures that we won't sell a lot of these)." Pricing is one of the few "innovations" that Microsoft got right.
I managed to get 2.x up on my Linux box once, when I got the base to compile. Since then, I've had a few difficulties compiling a few parts, which caused the whole makefile to bomb. The ODBC library, for instance, did not compile, which would be okay, hunky-dory, it's unstable, but I couldn't even get make -k to get over it. Had to manually edit the makefile.
... rough. Almost like they were hand-drawn (though a true "hand-drawn" theme that introduced little variances in each widget would be COOL, if a little slow)
Recently, I've had to edit the makefile for kdelibs again because it compiles them out of order and several dependencies don't work. It would seem not one of the developers ever recompiles this system from scratch, because there is no dependency checking.
Anyhow, when I got it working, I was impressed by the speed and looks (a bit crashy, but this was EARLY stuff and I didn't have everything installed either). The wizard was incomplete, but the art was good, but "My name is Kandalf"??? OH PLEASE. The wizard doesn't need a name, much less such a god-AWFUL corny (Korny?) one. Just a nitpick, but I just about gagged. Really.
Anyhow, slightly less trivial notes: I certainly hope it's not the default QT 2.0 look that I saw there. There *is* too much of a thing as "too much 3d". The buttons had these ultra-rounded edges, and the radio buttons looked not only way too bumpy, but
Kicker wasn't terribly impressive. I do not like having my taskbar crunched into a little, or even large applet space. I like to smack my mouse to the top of the screen (yeah i keep it at the top) and have the whole edge to select my app. yes, the idea of the "K" menu is also awful, I guess it's a necessary concession to people used to the equally awful "start" button. This is a gripe I had with gnome, and now KDE replicates it.
BTW, what the heck is krootwm called now? It was really crashy when I was using it, and I would have liked to be able to restart it.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
For a real commercial software company having a set and friendly policy towards commercial software development (such as the QPL) is much more important than a trival no-cost-to-the-user fee for non-free software development. If I was developing commercial software for Linux I wouldn't want to use a toolkit whose licenses' organizatonal leader (RMS) wants to ban commercial development on. Plus, no one outside on Unix codes GUI applications in C anymore and no one really uses Gnome's bindings.
At least KSpread, KPresenter, KIllustrator, and KWord are further along than anything Gnome has. It's in CVS, check it out.
Gimp isn't even a Gnome app, much less part of the Gnome Office project. For every app that is KDE has a better, more functional equivanlent. You are right about KImageShop tho, that and the database thingy are not likely to be in KDE2.0 while the spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing thingy, and word processor are.
KImageShop is in CVS. It compiles. It does what the screenshot shows. How can that be wishful thinking?
The KDE developers made a working port of the Gimp to KDE a long time ago, but the Gimp people were jerks and didn't allow them to distribute it.
I am begining to realize that the problem isnt really the window managers....its X. The fact that X uses 20 megs and the WHOLE NT kernel uses 20 megs on my system tells me something is wrong with that piece of crap. Is there anyway that X will every improve? I know about berlin but i would like to see something useful sometime during the next millenium
How do I find out which WM's let me do something like this, and for that matter how do I find the documentation on how to do it? Frankly, the RTF(M4)S for FVWM has me annoyed. (I do C, Fortran, lisp, HTML, and hard-core numerical algorithms; my brain doesn't have the space left over to hold everything else, too!)
Thanks!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
First the taskbar. That, the date applet, and the minipager are plugins and replaceable. I plan on doing an iconbox at least which I prefer, imagine I will do a external taskbar as well. Second, the K button has been there since the beginning of KDE, is what users are familiar with, so it's there in 2.0. Third, krootwm is gone - it's part of kdesktop. Hope this helps, mosfet@kde.org.
Middle-click on the background.
My experience with gnome/E was so bad with the version that shipped with RH6.0 that, even though I loved the way it looked, I probably won't try it again for quite a while.
Yah, even the GNOME people admit that the version that shipped with Red Hat 6.0 had way too many bugs. But I can say that the October GNOME release, which I am currently running, is very stable, and works quite well.
I do think GNOME needs to drop Enlightenment in favor of another window manager. I mean, E! has some great eye candy and is very feature-filled, but it really isn't designed to integrate with GNOME the way kwm integrates with KDE.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Windows, meanwhile, now comes with a bug submit program -- they just bury it real deep.
A bug submit program for Windows? Wow, that's kind of like a windshield wiper on a submarine. Run it all you want, and things still aren't going to get any better.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
GNUMERIC: Yes, I've seen kspread; and I've seen gnumeric.
There is simply no comparison. Gnumeric is over 60,000 lines of code (counted by ';') and, this doesn't include dialog boxes which are stored in another form. Kast I checked, kspread was less then 14,000 lines of code, and did a lot, lot less.
Gimp: A GTK+ app. It has been bonobized, which is perhaps the most important bit. Gnomifying it would be fairly easy (and, for the most part, not that interesting, as it's already duplicated most of the code needed)
Gnome-db: yes, it is useable. It's also usefull.
Gill: It's an illustrator. Renders SVG.
Dia: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
I also question where the GUI areas of Linux have been heading.
:-)
They are aiming for the sorts of features Microsoft claims's windows has: Integration, easy-to-learn, drag-and-drop, object embedding, that sort of thing. Generally, power users are only minorly interested in these sorts of things, which is why, up until recently, Unix programs often did not have them. This explains why an bare-bones Xlib program is faster: Because it is a bare-bones Xlib program. TANSTAAFL, and you're not going to get all of those new features for free, either. Fortunately, power users are generally quite content to continue to use their bare-bones Xlib programs, while "home users" get their pretty icons and such.
Fotunately, Linux is still about freedom and choice as much as it is about performance and stability.
When I started using Linux, it was touted as being an entire OS that could live in 40 megs of HD space and 16 megs of RAM on a 286.
Minor nit-pick: Linux requires protected, virtual memory, something the i286 cannot do. So an i386 is the minimum processor Linux runs on. (While there are other projects based on Linux that are targeting the 286, they are not Linux.) Additionally, no one ever claimed you could run Enlightenment on a 386.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This was on Slashdot the other day, but we only got one screenshot of the elusive Konqueror browser. Follow this link for lots more. From what I see, it's pretty amazing - if this really was conceptualized and designed less than two weeks ago, that's very impressive that they already have a functioning browser that displays Slashdot and other sites perfectly, and has built in support for PDF and DVI. Not bad.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I'm running KDE2.0almostalpha and KOffice on a Pentium Pro 150 with 64MB and they're running fast. Normally I use CDE and VUE on my work, but this is great. The only problem is the QT-license.
I can't believe the gall of slashdotter who piss all over KDE. Its simply the most advanced environment for linux, by a longshot.
I am not sure where that came from. The Java/DOM HTML widget was entered into CVS during the KDEII conference and was in development long before that. People have been working on Konq itself since KDE2 development started. mosfet@kde.org
Why all the complaints about KDE and Gnome looking like Winduhs? Come on people, it's a GUI
Why all the complaints about KDE and Gnome looking like Winduhs? Come on people, it's a GUI; there're only so many ways to make a button or a scrollbar. Ask someone that trains lusers how to use Winduhs stuff... change the rendering of a button in the slightest and they're frightened half out of their wits. Ask the Tk people what the Great Complaint about the initial Winduhs port was... "It doesn't look right".
Practically everyone confesses that the block to Linux/*BSD on the desktop is the GUI; if you want people to be able to move from Winduhs, you've got to give them an interface they'll recognise. If you long for one of those scrollbars with so many twiddlers it needs its own manpage, make the APIs so it's a matter of skinning... and leave the default be something familiar to the "unwashed". Let Gnome and KDE have the one thing Winduhs never had- configurability. Then it can work like Winduhs for those that need it so, while not tying the rest of us to something irritating.
Foam Off...
Drats, ./ and my regular browser don't like each other; I reposted with Lynx, in case you see two of this.
Those are insignificant. The cool things in the KDE page is how all this cool stuff is actually coming out.
I'm currious if the list of processes will be as configurable under 2.0 as 1.0. Every screenshot I've seen shows the list as an applet of some sort in the panel. This is the way Gnome does it. The panel seems to have integrated some nice gnome-like features (it's good to see the two projects pushing each other to improve), however, the process list being there in Gnome is one of the worst, most poorly thought out parts of Gnome. In fact the whole idea of the windows-like bottom of the screen fixed-size process list is extremely stupid. The ability for the KDE to put its process list at the top-left corner, and let it expand down is a great feature. KDE and BeOS use a similar type of interface for this, and its a good one. I'd hate to see KDE go from doing the right thing to the wrong one. Perhaps I'll download krash just to check this out, and bitch (or write some code) if it doesn't.
The other relevant topic is how these applets are handled. KDE has a rather cool API for applets. The applet area is resizable and individual applets can specify a "stretch" hint so some applets can stretch more than others, or they can be fixed in size. When you resize that little splitter all the applets "stretch" to the new size. Applets also can take advantage of full client/server access to the KDE menu. It's all a rather powerful. mosfet@kde.org
...all you would have to do is port the free version of Qt2 to win32. Despite what misinformed people may say, the actual license of Qt2 doesn't say that it is not free for win32.
It is just that the free version doesn't include the win32 code.
The Windows interface sucks, so why not copy something good like MacOS? Or any other good GUI...except that god forsaken crap that crawled out of Redmond.
If you double the amount of RAM in the system, didn't you expect to see a major difference in performance?
It's a bit more complicated than it looks. Apparently it's due to it allocating all the memory on the graphics card twice; as a result X using 24MB with my 8MB Matrox G200 doesn't sound nearly as bad.
:)
The Linux kernel uses hardly anything compared with the NT one as well.
And whatever people say, KDE (and Gnome) don't really use so much memory - a lot of it is in shared libraries. The real culprits are Netscape (obese) and StarOffice (makes Netscape look positively skinny). Netscape on my system uses more memory than KDE and XFree86 put together.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Please see this document on Ompages that describes how to set up a very functional graphical desktop based on Debian and Windowmaker specifically for use with low end hardware. If you are running debian you can 'apt-get install package1 package2 ...' these packages and you will have a nice fast desktop for your 486. I wrote this as part of the the Ompages Project it is my contribution to the project to put together a software selection that people with low end and legacy hardware can participate in modern computer culture. Let me know what you all think.
Needless to say, I'm a huge proponent of retaining feature parity between legacy and modern desktops. It is essential to proliferation of computers throughout the world. It is also quite feasible. You sacrifice no functionality, but you will sacrifice some ease of use and look and feel qualities in some applications. But that is not such a bad thing, people who are forced for financial reasons to use older hardware are getting the added benefit of an opportunity to learn about computers in a much more thorough way than his/her counterpart with KDE, W2K. I greatly admire how far KDE has come. But we must remember who they cater to. KDE is to woo people away from W95/NT in the corporate/business setting. What about the rest of the world with an old computer? If you read and apply the above document you will have a very useful desktop that gives away *no* functionality and is based _mostly_ on free software. I have a fairly powerful desktop but love the speed and stablity my system has after applying what is in that document. I have applied it to my girlfriend's 486 and it is not all that much slower. I enjoy it; I hope you all do too.
I'm a windows convert as well. I'd prefer to use linux all the time, but unfortunatly there are still a few things i need windows for. I installed redhat 6, played around in gnome for a while, but i really like the simplicity of KDE. I like the layout and i'm really looking foward to the new version.
I boot _MacOS_ for that sort of thing.
...er, things didn't exactly work out that way...
Linux offers me things that I CANNOT get from MacOS or Windows, in a million years, not in Jobs and Gates' wildest dreams. At this time, mostly what it offers me is an escape hatch. I am typing this in MacOS, from which I've been reading interesting news such as the fact that newer MacOSes are bringing in auto-update behaviors that are the antithesis of what I can tolerate on my computer.
I don't think either KDE or Gnome are remotely comparable to MacOS for usability. I don't _ask_ Linux to be as usable as what I pay for with MacOS. Instead I ask different things of Linux: first, I ask that it be there if I need it, and second, I ask it to be something I can completely control and audit, the power to reconfigure the system being in _my_ hands- lastly, I ask it to not forget this, but I am thankful that the nature of Linux is to preserve areas of difference and iconoclasm where I'd be able to settle.
I dispute that a desktop environment adds functionality. I _totally_ dispute that. I use one every day in MacOS and I still dispute that claim... what's happening is that the desktop environment is _attempting_ to provide _other_ _interfaces_ to data and ideas that might otherwise have to be jotted down as notes or interacted with by words and sentences.
This is a far cry from providing _added_ functionality. Particularly with the Windows paradigm, it's actually a loss of functionality in many ways- the attempts at other interfaces end up so strange and convoluted that the 'visual' environment has more unwritten rules than the old CLI environments had. This all must be memorized, just as CLI rules were: another nasty gotcha is the tendency to assume that the GUI approach is inherently so 'intuitive' that controls and objects can be strewn around and reshuffled arbitrarily.
These new desktop environments are not remotely new- they are simply implementations of 'the other paradigm' in computer interaction. First there was language-based interaction, and 'talking' to the computer with words, commands, and remembering what it said in reply. Then there was the graphic-based interaction, which was originally intended to convey the sense of a logical, consistent environment like a physical object such as a desk, 'mapping' to direct physical manipulation of realworld objects, and operating on specific rules worked out in advance.
But I have a question that might stand a chance of being answered here. It is this: What more could a Unix user want? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that KDE suffices to mollify those vendors and users who are really just interested in Winix. But what about the real hackers? What do they want?
Obviously, it's not Winix. But what is it?
Apologies, but the browser I used to post that comment (!Browse on an Acorn RiscPC 600) managed to lop off three or four paragraphs that described how the new code made it a lot easier for people writing the applications.
:)
Say, if you want to add a print function. You wouldn't have to write some automatic Postscript generator, you'd simply get KDE/Qt (or Gnome?) to do it for you, using the exact same code used to draw whatever it was on the screen.
The end result would be much faster development of new applications, and much less code-bloat due to common features being re-used so many times.
And as a bonus, these desktop environments also look nice, too, and provide lots of common GUI features.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Chris, you seem to repeat this mantra once every few months here or in usenet ;-)
So your reason to use linux is to have things your Mac does not do. Big deal. I want linux to be good enough so that I don't need to even think on buying a mac, and I'm willing to spend my effort making it so.
"I don't think either KDE or Gnome are remotely comparable to MacOS for usability."
It's not a matter of thinking. Try them. Try them for a long while so you lose your MAC habits. Trying them briefly will simply make you hate them because anything that is not a Mac will be foreign to you.
I personally believe your mac is probably better in usability. I also believe it's not so much better that it's worth paying even $100 for it, at least for MY use.
Who told you KDE "is to woo people away from W95/NT in the corporate/business setting"?
I write KDE programs for entirely different reasons, and I know for a fact that others have their own personal reasons that don;t match that either.
Aren't you being way too quick to assign a motive to people you simply don't know?
For what it's worth, most KDE people I have asked work in it for fun and to have a desktop they can use themselves, in that order.
Laz`: we turned off uunet, to force more traffic out of Uu.Net
I meant to say that we forced the traffic through Nap.Net.
UU.Net = 1.544Mbps T1
Nap.Net/GTEI/BBN = 100Mbps Ethernet
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
I apologize if this has already been asked and answered, but:
Does anyone know why KDE is not included as part of the debian distribution? I know that there are some licensing issues with QT 1.x, but are these not resolved in QT 2.x?
Furthermore, when I check dselect's list of available packages, QT *is* available, in the non-free section. Why isn't KDE available in the non-free section therefore as well?
PS: Yes, I am aware that deb packages are available directly from KDE, I just want to know why they're not included in the distibution by default.
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Thus the speed ;-)
I am on the Gnome list and kwm having more integration was specifically mentioned.
I'm not sure whether to be pleased or insulted that my arguments are so memorable to top KDE people without having them actually convice said top KDE people ;) ("insulted!" ;) )
It _is_ a matter of thinking. And yes, I _have_ tried both KDE and Gnome. KDE let me log onto the net using kppp before I'd even sorted out pppd. I owe KDE lasting thanks for being an important part of my Linux adoption process.
That said, you're completely, stubbornly wrong about your assumption that it's all just a matter of habits. That's a crock: it's also both uneducated and insulting that you're claiming I hated KDE simply because it was unfamiliar- if that is the case, why did I enjoy bash? My objections to _BOTH_ KDE and Gnome are simply that they attempt to do desktop interface _badly_. They bring nothing new and make little or no effort to actually present a consistent, predictable visual 'picture' of the computer.
In fairness, I will point out one of the major points that always leads me to this conclusion- I have never seen _any_ file manager, other than the MacOS Finder, that behaves as though the user's placement of an icon or object is in any way significant or worthy of notice. It's always 'and now we sort everything and line it up in neat rows, because we can'. I _realise_ that's what everybody but MacOS does, but can't you see that it screws up people's orientation? That's not how a desk behaves. On a desk, you put stuff down and it stays where you put it- witness the cluttered workbenches of a thousand techies all over the world. If someone came in and organised everything alphabetically, they would be _lost_. Why do you and just about every other GUI maker insist on taking control of the graphical objects and reshuffling them?
To add to this, you may well do better than most X developers (particularly singling out the GNU developers, who should know better!) at providing keyboard shortcuts to operations. However, you seem to not have a clue as to how prevalent and consistent this is in the environment I'm talking about- it really loses you credibility to claim that my switching to KDE and doing everything that way is merely a matter of habit. You don't seem to know what you're talking about... so you insist, repeatedly, that it's just a matter of my being personally prejudiced against your way of doing things, which you maintain is not merely comparable but equal. Do you have _any_ _idea_ of how many millions of dollars a company like Apple spent on human interface design? On how many hundreds of hours designers like Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini spent designing and testing and working to make these things sensible and usable? Have you actually read the work of others in this area? Hell, you could read _Microsoft_ Human Interface Guidelines- they don't obey their own rules, but they too have put the effort into this area, and that's for just one reason: it's not just a matter of what people are used to, there are actual rights and wrongs involved.
I don't care if you say 'I personally believe your mac is probably better in usability'. I am saying this: as somebody who is concerned with human interface design, I would like to see you making less assumptions. Yes, the world is heavily biased (polluted?) due to the vast numbers of people who have been extensively taught Windows HI rules. Yes, I personally am out in left field using a Mac but espousing purely CLI human interface guidelines, something I haven't even really begun to properly develop on a large scale. Still, every time (and it's been several times, hasn't it?) I see you come back at a critisism with 'That's just your habits speaking, there's no difference so just try it and lose your other habits', I cringe. You CAN'T learn anything if you deny there's anything to learn. KDE is ill served by those assumptions. Keep them if you must- I choose to challenge them.
Jesus Christ ... that is a _ton_ of money for a fricking GUI library, and I say that coming from a DOS/Win16/Win32 background where we are used to spending real money for tools. $1550 is just crazy ... we spent less than that for our VAX Pascal compiler back in the "good old days".
... no way. Let's clone it.
How about $295? They need to think "volume" - "discount it and they will come".
$1550
Chris, despite what you seem to believe, it is perfectly possible to disagree with you and not be wrong, not be ignorant, know what I'm taking about and not being based on prejudice.
Patches is only an example of the ways it can be distributed. You could just as easily set a CVS server with public access.
Besides, if all you wanted was to keep a win32 port of latest version of Qt, you patch a whole 5 files or so.
As for why the Open Source definition allows this: Because otherwise TeX would not be Open Source.
Ditto about the FSF's definition of "free software".
There is a file on TeX that can only be modified using an auxiliary web file, something awfully similar to a patch.
Well, what the subject says :-)
Not other free software licenses. And don't mention BSD, you have to change the BSD license of your app to GPL in order to release it.
How Do I choose If I want to Use KDE1 or KDE2 as a desktop after installing your rpms ? I have RH6.0
- Make sure that in optimizing the program interface for the two-minute beginner, you haven't pessimized it for the two-year daily-user.
- Keep it touch-typist friendly.
- Let me keep my eyes on the screen at all times, not on the input peripherals.
- Mimimize the context switches between mouse and keyboard. It slows me down. I can type much, much faster than I can mouse around.
- Minimize all required mouse use, because it causes RSI. Let me keep my hands on the homerow as much as possible, not dancing around the funny keys that require me to look down to find, like HOME, END, PAGEUP, etc. Put those on real keys.
- No prior Windows knowledge expected, required, nor in fact, even beneficial.
- All programs, configurations, library functions, and interfaces must be completely documented.
- Never make me do anything tedious and repetitive, like holding some an arrow key or a mouse for a long time just to move a large distance.
- I shouldn't have to read the library code to figure out how Gtk works, nor existing themes to figure out how to make a new one
- nor should I have to click on happycons to get some dribbled out set of web pages for how to run or configure a program
- The documentation should searchable, indexable, typesettable, and printable.
- Follow POSIX 1003.2 requirements that all commands have a minimal manpage.
- Scriptability. Automatability. All the knobs need to be exposed either via raw text files or else normal CLI programs.
- Respect for the user's existing preferences where applicable.
- X defaults -- If I have *visualBell: on, then that should suffice for all applications.
- stty settings -- If I think ^H is what I want to erase a character, don't make me use DEL or ^?, or worse still, the BACKSPACE key (which sends a ^H anyway) yet not Control-H). And if I have my werase set to ^W, pay attention to that, too.
- Preferred editor -- if I have an editor setting in my environment, don't make me learn a new one just for your program. Most toolkits' text widgets have insultingly idiotic editing abilities -- pop up my preferred editor instead, or at least, give me that option. Perhaps prefered newsreader, shell, mailer, etc should come into play as well, but the sorry excuse for an editor is the most annoying thing.
- A way to leverage existing knowledge of words. This may sound bizarre, but nothing is more frustrating to this Unix user than to have a program pop up a set of seventeen tiny graphical stickpin icons. Don't make me guess what your cutes idea of a neat bitmap for an exit or reload or search button is. Allow me the option of using real words, not happycons. And allow for keyboard shortcuts on all functionality.
- Don't make me suffer through a tedious manual search through scads of cascading menus each time I want to find something. There is no way to search, analyse, or print a cascading menu system. This is insane. A common mechanism provided by the low-level toolkit and managed by the desktop or window manager must be invented. Life is too short for hunt and peck. For example, the window manager could provide a way to search the menus of the current focussed program for a particular text string. That way you never have waste your life on an idiotic recursive but linear visual search.
That's enough for now. I'm sure it's far too late to expect almost anyone to read this. You might want to check out the short Unix as Literature or the longer In The Beginning for more background on Unix culture.Since the topic at hand is kde2.0, and compiling Koffice requires 2.0 snapshots, I actually would like to ask a question. First, has anybody been able to compile koffice with the latest snapshots(i.e., 19991107)? Second, if you have, how do I do it? I've been trying and trying. I get qt-2.1.0 to compile just fine, but I cannot get past that point. When I try to compile kdesupport-199911XX, I get a lot of missing or not used statements, and finally a reccursive error that kicks me out. I think the last missing integer is klast. Just a little info: I'm using both RH6.0 and OL2.3. Thanks.
It really depresses me to see the KDE team devoting so much time developing an HTML renderer when Mozilla's Gecko engine is a far better product and is in dire need of help. Imagine if their talents had been devoted to the greater good of Mozilla. Not only would KDE have a far more mature rendering engine(read support for HTML 4.0, CSS1 & 2, XML), but they could have contributed a great deal of the stability to Mozilla. I don't buy into any integration issues. According to Mosfet's own web site, KParts make the integration issue trival(note his integration of ghostscript and dvi). It also begs the question -- how much time could have been devoted to improving the desktop environment of KDE? Last I checked, we are pissed at Microsoft for bloating their desktop with a browser. These guys needs to stop including the kitchen sink and work on the nut and bolts -- a good desktop environment.
Just to address the issue of competition. Competition is unnecessary in this situation. Obstensively, the KDE crew wants open source to succeed. Therefore, they should embrace the Mozilla project. It's success would drive their success and vica versa. But then, no one will ever accuse the KDE crew of being good, open source community members. Heaven forbid they help another project when it would also benefit them.
It seems the Mosfet's ego was placed ahead of a good product management decision which points to larger general issue in open source projects. Egos seems to hamper projects, and in some cases, kill them. Established software engineering practice states that a project should maximize reuse. A common theme of projects that "roll their own" solutions is that the "reusable" piece wasn't quite good enough. The GNOME team's complaints about imlib are perfect example of this phenomenon. A GNOME user, I am not exactly thrilled that valuable time will be wsated developing a bew imaging library instead of either working with current imlib or with Raster to correct the perceived flaws. The bottom line in my mind is that these egos are impeding the progress of these projects, and clearly points out that open source is not perfect as some would portend.