I finally broke down, and while reinstalling Gentoo on my main desktop, went ahead and merged KDE 3. I haven't ever used a "desktop environment" other than ion and zsh before, except to briefly install and then immediately uninstall in a tooth-chattering rage, so this will be the longest (about 6 hours) that I've used either KDE or Gnome so far.
It's technically very impressive, although by dfault it is certainly a HCI trainwreck of epic proportions. Given a relatively small amount of fiddling, though, it can be rendered very usable.
Things that I like so far:
kcontrol is amazing. It hasn't crashed yet, it's very well organized, and almost everything that I could possibly want to control is in one location, using a single UI. This might be the best thing about the system.
konqueror is also very good, although I have a couple of beefs with the web operation.
konsole is a competent xterm replacement.
The panel is very easy to manage, as far as things like that go. I'm used to starting programs either the old-school way (emacs &), or via ion keybindings, so I tend to ignore kicker, but in the interests of maybe learning something useful, I horsed around with it a bit last night.
Things that bug me:
konqueror apparently doesn't allow you to really, seriously, no, I'm not kidding force a single set of fonts for all web pages to use, or to disable popup windows. I tried the CSS/customize panel, but I'm not interested in changing the rendering of pages except for disallowing font size and style changes, and enabling custom CSS pretty seriously b0rks colors. And even after disabling all popups in the Javascript panel, stopping and restarting konq, I would get the occasional popup.
I also dislike having konq's toolbars shared across the wildly different tasks of file management and web browsing. I like the previews and the ability to do some file stuff via a nice click 'n drag interface, but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE, as at least Windows can present you with a different interface to folders and web pages. I know about the View Settings; but they don't extend to the toolbars. Is it possible to define new toolbars? I want different choices, different layouts, and different interfaces on my toolbars when I'm doing very different things. This ought to be the default.
There's way too much clutter. Too many menus, too many choices on the root level of those menus, too many redundant window decorations -- for instance, why do I need to be able to click in the upper left to get the same exact menu as right clicking on the title bar?
I DON'T WANT THE WINDOWS KEY-BINDINGS. Why can't I get emacs keybindings for text editing, without changing the "shortcuts" en masse? And why isn't the shortcut editor smarter? If I enter a key binding that's already taken, instead of refusing with the unhelpful message that that binding is already taken, why not change it (after all, that's more likely to be the behavior that people want) with a warning that my new choice overrides the old one?
The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.
Overall, from someone who has used twm far more than either kde or gnome, I have to admit to being very impressed. I don't know if I'll stick to it, but it certainly Doesn't Suck That Much Hardly At All, which, given the dismal state of pretty much every computer program written, ever, is more than I could have expected.
Best, (jfb)
Always nice to see
on
.NET at JavaONE
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
... our captains of industy acting like petulant teenagers. Restores one's faith in late imperial capitalism, it does.
Bleah, (jfb)
Everytime I read one of these things
on
Exegesis 4 Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have the Kinesis Classic ergo 'board (actually two, one for work and one for home), and it has made a huge difference for me. I can type without having to fear that my wrists are going to start burning.
That said, a keyboard is like a monitor; be sure to try one out in person before you drop $250 on one.
... which totally misses the point. That ssh and ncftp (and every other damn command line program) uses a different command vocabulary is *lame*. It's a *bad thing*. It's why Unix CLI is so hard to learn; not because a CLI is more difficult than a GUI, but because the damn Unix CLI is *inconsistent*.
peace, (jfb)
PS: The reason some people zcat into tar is because not every tar is gnu-tar. Not every Unix user uses Linux, you know.
I should point out that I do in fact believe in Free Software, and the
distribution of source is an invaluable gift. But it's not going to
make problems disappear without a reevaluation of the culture of
software.
An absurd fallacy. Perhaps for fetchmail or hello, world! or other,
similarly sized projects, but nowhere else. Debugging require not
merely a pair of eyeballs, nor even crackerjack programming skills,
but mostly an understanding of the problems and compromises that went
into the creation of the software system in the first place.
To produce better software, we need better programmers, and better
tools, not meaningless platitudes about the business justification of
Open Source licensing.
Peace,
(jfb)
Re:Itanium at 1.6 GHz in 2003 ?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 2
Good god, are you serious? 512mb RAM for a VIDEO GAME? O tempora! O
mores!
Yeesh.
(jfb)
Re:Itanium at 1.6 GHz in 2003 ?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 2
IA32 and IA64 are radically different ISAs aimed at radically
different markets. There's nothing on any recent Intel roadmaps that
will have Itanic replacing x86 on the desktop. Conversely, 4ghz of
Hot P4 Action is meaningless to an application that requires more than
4gb of process address space.
A 1.6ghz McKinely ought to be a very competitive performer, especially
on floating-point intensive code.
> Curiously, the Apple guys who stopped by the booth seemed completely
> uninterested as all the Linux guys drooled over the TiBook.
Probably because there's nothing in the PPC Linux world that's all
that interesting to Apple; whereas, the TiBook is a magnificent piece
of kit that everybody drools over, even Windows users.
This thing looks to have the same terrifying memory bandwidth as its
big brother, the Octane2. 3.2GBps. On a dedicated port crossbar.
The Mac is STILL struggling along with PC133 SDRAM. And the Mac has a
"Geforce4MX", which is basically a faster GF2MX, not a fourth
generation part. Compare that to the SGI graphics subsystem for a
laugh.
For processor bound tasks, yes, the 7455 G4 will be faster than the
R14k, but for overall system performance, ESPECIALLY when pushing big
models around, you'd be goofy stupid to try and use a Mac if you could
afford one of these babies (to say nothing of the Octane2).
Well, for starters, vi is way smaller than Emacs, and it starts up
much faster. But then, my cat is housebroken, and I've never met a
dog that was smart enough to shit in a box. Don't forget also that
the Amiga has a MUCH broader selection of games to choose from than
the ST, and while the GNU people seem to think that their indentation
style is superior, it has been proved that K&R is much easier to read.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled religious war.
Slashdot Mirror
Good stuff, thanks. I forgot to mention that I'm very impressed with krun as well. Good call.
Best,
(jfb)
I could easily have missed it. I'll check it out tonight.
Thanks,
(jfb)
Thanks! I'll check that out when I get home tonight.
Best,
(jfb)
I finally broke down, and while reinstalling Gentoo on my main desktop, went ahead and merged KDE 3. I haven't ever used a "desktop environment" other than ion and zsh before, except to briefly install and then immediately uninstall in a tooth-chattering rage, so this will be the longest (about 6 hours) that I've used either KDE or Gnome so far.
It's technically very impressive, although by dfault it is certainly a HCI trainwreck of epic proportions. Given a relatively small amount of fiddling, though, it can be rendered very usable.
Things that I like so far:
kcontrol is amazing. It hasn't crashed yet, it's very well organized, and almost everything that I could possibly want to control is in one location, using a single UI. This might be the best thing about the system.
konqueror is also very good, although I have a couple of beefs with the web operation.
konsole is a competent xterm replacement.
The panel is very easy to manage, as far as things like that go. I'm used to starting programs either the old-school way (emacs &), or via ion keybindings, so I tend to ignore kicker, but in the interests of maybe learning something useful, I horsed around with it a bit last night.
Things that bug me:
konqueror apparently doesn't allow you to really, seriously, no, I'm not kidding force a single set of fonts for all web pages to use, or to disable popup windows. I tried the CSS/customize panel, but I'm not interested in changing the rendering of pages except for disallowing font size and style changes, and enabling custom CSS pretty seriously b0rks colors. And even after disabling all popups in the Javascript panel, stopping and restarting konq, I would get the occasional popup.
I also dislike having konq's toolbars shared across the wildly different tasks of file management and web browsing. I like the previews and the ability to do some file stuff via a nice click 'n drag interface, but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE, as at least Windows can present you with a different interface to folders and web pages. I know about the View Settings; but they don't extend to the toolbars. Is it possible to define new toolbars? I want different choices, different layouts, and different interfaces on my toolbars when I'm doing very different things. This ought to be the default.
There's way too much clutter. Too many menus, too many choices on the root level of those menus, too many redundant window decorations -- for instance, why do I need to be able to click in the upper left to get the same exact menu as right clicking on the title bar?
I DON'T WANT THE WINDOWS KEY-BINDINGS. Why can't I get emacs keybindings for text editing, without changing the "shortcuts" en masse? And why isn't the shortcut editor smarter? If I enter a key binding that's already taken, instead of refusing with the unhelpful message that that binding is already taken, why not change it (after all, that's more likely to be the behavior that people want) with a warning that my new choice overrides the old one?
The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.
Overall, from someone who has used twm far more than either kde or gnome, I have to admit to being very impressed. I don't know if I'll stick to it, but it certainly Doesn't Suck That Much Hardly At All, which, given the dismal state of pretty much every computer program written, ever, is more than I could have expected.
Best,
(jfb)
... our captains of industy acting like petulant teenagers. Restores one's faith in late imperial capitalism, it does.
Bleah,
(jfb)
... it just ends up making Lisp look better.
(jfb)
... everyone who *knew* that there was a "spinning egg" problem.
Peace,
(jfb)
Yes. At least, I found it so. My alternative was to stop typing, as the pains in the backs of my hands were so severe.
Peace,
(jfb)
I have the Kinesis Classic ergo 'board (actually two, one for work and one for home), and it has made a huge difference for me. I can type without having to fear that my wrists are going to start burning.
That said, a keyboard is like a monitor; be sure to try one out in person before you drop $250 on one.
Peace,
(jfb)
... which totally misses the point. That ssh and ncftp (and every other damn command line program) uses a different command vocabulary is *lame*. It's a *bad thing*. It's why Unix CLI is so hard to learn; not because a CLI is more difficult than a GUI, but because the damn Unix CLI is *inconsistent*.
peace,
(jfb)
PS: The reason some people zcat into tar is because not every tar is gnu-tar. Not every Unix user uses Linux, you know.
> ... the first version of GNU Emacs was released in *19*96!
You mean as opposed to the steam driven Emacs released in *18*86?
Peace, &c,
(jfb)
It's penises. Deprecated plural, penes.
(jfb)
So what was so difficult about (cd /usr/ports/gnome; make install),
anyway?
(jfb)
I should point out that I do in fact believe in Free Software, and the
distribution of source is an invaluable gift. But it's not going to
make problems disappear without a reevaluation of the culture of
software.
Peace,
(jfb)
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
An absurd fallacy. Perhaps for fetchmail or hello, world! or other,
similarly sized projects, but nowhere else. Debugging require not
merely a pair of eyeballs, nor even crackerjack programming skills,
but mostly an understanding of the problems and compromises that went
into the creation of the software system in the first place.
To produce better software, we need better programmers, and better
tools, not meaningless platitudes about the business justification of
Open Source licensing.
Peace,
(jfb)
Good god, are you serious? 512mb RAM for a VIDEO GAME? O tempora! O
mores!
Yeesh.
(jfb)
IA32 and IA64 are radically different ISAs aimed at radically
different markets. There's nothing on any recent Intel roadmaps that
will have Itanic replacing x86 on the desktop. Conversely, 4ghz of
Hot P4 Action is meaningless to an application that requires more than
4gb of process address space.
A 1.6ghz McKinely ought to be a very competitive performer, especially
on floating-point intensive code.
Peace,
(jfb)
> Curiously, the Apple guys who stopped by the booth seemed completely
> uninterested as all the Linux guys drooled over the TiBook.
Probably because there's nothing in the PPC Linux world that's all
that interesting to Apple; whereas, the TiBook is a magnificent piece
of kit that everybody drools over, even Windows users.
Peace,
(jfb)
No, I think it's safe to say that he's lying. Ellison is a world-class loon, a psychopath, and basically as full of shit as a hog farm.
Peace,
(jfb)
% make sense
make: don't know how to make sense. Stop
Perhaps the world would be better off if these "gems" were forgotten?
Peace,
(jfb)
Look up the difference between crossbar and bus based memory
subsystems and then get back to us with "nForce".
Peace,
(jfb)
A faster Mac? Please.
This thing looks to have the same terrifying memory bandwidth as its
big brother, the Octane2. 3.2GBps. On a dedicated port crossbar.
The Mac is STILL struggling along with PC133 SDRAM. And the Mac has a
"Geforce4MX", which is basically a faster GF2MX, not a fourth
generation part. Compare that to the SGI graphics subsystem for a
laugh.
For processor bound tasks, yes, the 7455 G4 will be faster than the
R14k, but for overall system performance, ESPECIALLY when pushing big
models around, you'd be goofy stupid to try and use a Mac if you could
afford one of these babies (to say nothing of the Octane2).
Peace,
(jfb)
Considering that the original poster was refering to myrinet and not
gigabit ethernet, I'd hazard a "yes" there.
Peace,
(jfb)
You of course meant Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, right?
Peace,
(jfb)
Well, for starters, vi is way smaller than Emacs, and it starts up
much faster. But then, my cat is housebroken, and I've never met a
dog that was smart enough to shit in a box. Don't forget also that
the Amiga has a MUCH broader selection of games to choose from than
the ST, and while the GNU people seem to think that their indentation
style is superior, it has been proved that K&R is much easier to read.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled religious war.
Peace,
(jfb)