I keep a WinXP install around to play Civ4. Yes, I could do something in VirtualBox, but the installation's already there, the game's there, why bother?
Anyway, what I did (making the very big and probably incorrect assumption that you're not playing games that use the network) is removed all the network services (I was not familiar with the process for doing this before, but found a very handy guide here). Basically cut its balls off, and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Hell, the first time I've had a Windows install last more than two years without slowdowns, still boots up in like 40 seconds, I'm up and playing Civ before I'm done with a cigarette. I can't play multiplayer, but/shrug.
No. It is ALWAYS the speakers responsibility to make himself understood. Thats a law of the universe fact bud.
It's this sort of attitude, more than the (often reasonable) technical criticism that I've heard, that really just burns my ass when people start talking about this subject. This "you owe me something, how dare you not satisfy my wishes" crap is getting stale. They didn't owe you shit. They don't owe you shit. I don't owe you shit.
Second, 'API Stable'? Too late. Defined already. By the rest of the world.
Could you provide a link to that definition that the rest of the world is apparently using? I can't find it.
You know who didn't get the message? Despite all the thousands of notices you just mentioned?
The maintainer who put it in Fedora. The one person who MOST needed to read and understand it.
Damn right. Throw the Kubuntu team in there too.
So, basically, STFU. Regardless of what you think, that right there is PROOF POSITIVE that the message was no good, and communicated poorly.
But then you have to go be an asshole and fuck up the one time I've ever come close to agreeing with you. That right there is proof positive (notice how I didn't feel the need to do OBNOXIOUS CAPITAL LETTERS) that the Fedora and Kubuntu teams totally screwed the pooch. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything else you extrapolate out of that is based solely on your own erroneous expectations, and totally contradictory to what the release notes said and what the release was supposed to be about.
The people who made the decision to call it knew damn well what they were communicating to the public by calling it 4.0.
Yup. It meant "API stable." If you'd read the damn release notes, you'd know that. But then you wouldn't be able to come on Slashdot and piss and moan and generally make my hair turn gray.
But I do that if I don't understand what you're saying, it's YOUR FAULT. EVERY TIME.
You are wrong. It's your fault. For not reading. And your use of caps is obnoxious. EVERY TIME.
In contrast to that ambiguity, "this is the 4.0 release" is pretty clear, at least in the open-source world.
Unless you can give me a link to the Holy Universal Version Numbering Spec, no it's not. It can mean all kinds of different things to different projects, and you know it. In this case, the KDE team was clear that what the.0 meant was "API stable; will eat babies." It wasn't a huge secret, they plastered it all over the internet..2 has always been the "feature-completeness" target, and I can tell you they totally nailed it. I knew what I was getting into. I mean, did no one else on the internet get that memo?
Yup. And in this case they were very clear that what it meant was "Here is a stable API upon which to build. The rest of this whole thing's completely fucked and will eat your children, but we've got a stable API, here it is, go code, file bugs." It was all over the internet, dude. The speaker (speakers, actually, like a fucking bunch of them) totally were understood. If someone chose not to believe them, then that person should stop blaming other people for their own mistakes.
See, there's the disconnect. Actually, people want Linux to work. This was a necessary if painful move to ensure that it would, in time, work. 4.0 (and to a lesser but still real extent, 4.1) was not for "end users." Distributions (yeah Kubuntu, I'm looking at you) packing it by default totally fucked the whole game up for everybody, but if you've got a problem (and I don't blame you if you do), you should take it up with them.
1. No I'm not. If you didn't read the release notes, or the blog posts, or the commentary from the peanut gallery here on Slashdot, or the reviews in the Linux press, and on and on and on, then you've got no damn business complaining. Blame yourself, learn from it, and move on.
2. I completely agree, see my other post about this. But you've gotta ask yourself whose fault that really was.
Absolutely. 100% agreed. But that's pretty much the opposite of what lots of people in the KDE camp said they wanted to see happen with 4.0 (and even 4.1), and something you'd need to take up with the Kubuntu developers.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd almost start to wonder if someone in the Ubuntu camp didn't want to see KDE4 succeed. I mean, it didn't take a very long look to tell that 4.0.4 (I believe that was the version first included in 7.10) was totally not ready for prime time, certainly not on a n00b-oriented distro like Ubuntu.
Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't think anybody was deliberately trying to hurt the KDE name, but incompetence or over-enthusiasm or an excess of fanboyishness (or what the fuck ever) accomplished exactly the same thing. Damn right I think they've got some questions to answer.
Then GTFO. I'm really excited about the prospect of leaving the "traditional desktop metaphor" behind, it's an idea that's way overdue. If you don't like it, find something you do like and use that.
I was not disappointed (using the strict definition of the word) in the 4.0 release either. Because I read the reviews and put on a cup before I installed it. I knew what I was walking into, and it was damn messy, lacked any configurability, regressed in many areas from 3.5, crashed hourly, major pieces of the KDE app suite weren't there at all, the ones that were were often pre-beta versions. Which is exactly what they said it was gonna be.
Through all that, I'm glad that I went for it and stuck with it. Watching this project evolve over the last year has been absolutely inspiring. Congratulations to the KDE team on the 4.2 release. It's been a hard road, thanks for sticking with it.
No, *you* are attempting to define the meaning of version numbering. There is no such standard. Lots of teams, companies, groups, and lone crazy hackers number their projects in lots of different ways. The current version of Ubuntu is 8.10. Not because it is the tenth update of the eighth major version, because it was released in October of 2008. Go bitch at them for their non-compliance with your holy version numbering scheme.
What exactly is this Worldwide Standard Numbering Scheme that people seem to be referring to when they make these comments? Did you pick it, Mr. Coward? Is there a spec for it? Did I miss a big email here or something?
What a bunch of bullshit, I am so sick of hearing this nonsense. There were blog posts by a lot of the KDE people, it was (obviously) all over the damn front page of kde.org, it was on frickin' Slashdot, it was in every Linux forum. Everybody knew. You knew. I knew. We all knew. "Here is KDE 4.0.0. It is API stable. It is totally gonna eat your children, but it's API stable. Now code, people."
To further butcher a bad analogy I saw a couple posts down, this is kind of like getting on an interstate with a big sign on the ramp saying "NO FUCKING GAS FOR A LONG TIME! TURN AROUND AND TAKE A LEAK!" and bitching about the incompetence of the highway department when your car runs out of gas.
Seriously. This is getting ridiculous. You can obviously read, because you can write. I'm sure you saw the announcements all over the internet when it came out, God knows everybody else did. If you chose not to believe them for whatever reason, I don't lend your ill-informed self-centered opinion one goddamn bit of credence. Why should anybody care what you think of anybody else's version numbering?
I don't think that's true at all. I use emacs quite a bit, for lots of things, hardly any of which are coding. Right now I'm browsing the web, checking the weather, chatting on Jabber, and editing my.fluxbox/keys files. I could also at any moment be playing chess, checking my calendar, using the file manager, etc., etc. And this is coming from a guy who's hardly written two dozen lines of original code in his life, and often needs help putting together regular expressions.
Same with mc. I came to it by way of Krusader, but I've gained a lot of appreciation for mc since switching from Gnome to Flux on my laptop this past year. The mc apps file may be what finally makes me learn regexps:)
KDE has a released product that many people hate (KDE 4.x).
Give it a rest. KDE has released a product that many people absolutely love, but as is typical in the free software echo chamber, the haters get way more airtime. Feel free to hang out in the late 90s as long as you want (really, it's cool, I've got a closet full of red flannels too), but the rest of us are moving on.
Panels: Not anymore. You used to be able to, I'm not sure when it got changed, but now you can't remove the panel if there's only one, and it's no longer available to turn off in the session settings.
Konqueror over Firefox or Opera?
Depends. Not usually, granted. But if I just want to open and read and close one thing, Konqueror all the way. I use Firefox as my live-in browser, but I leave Konqueror set as the default so when I just open a page from another application, it opens in Konq. Way faster.
Amarok: I don't use it. Not that I have any particular problem with it, I don't, but I use Gmusicbrowser and cmus on all my machines. But Rhythmbox is just unbearable for me. Banshee's not bad, though.
Koffice: I like them because they're not afraid to take some risks with their interface, even though sometimes I'm like wtf. I use OpenOffice, but that's not really a comparison to make here, as that's certainly not a "Gnome app." Gnome's office suite, such as it is (I'm thinking of Abiword and Gnumeric), while very quick are functionally equivalent to MS Works.
But if we're talking about applications, the biggest target of my wrath will always be Nautilus. I fuckin' hate it. To be fair, I also hate Dolphin (because it's just another Nautilus), but Konqueror's good, and Krusader's amazing. Krusader might be a solid one third of why I use KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep a WinXP install around to play Civ4. Yes, I could do something in VirtualBox, but the installation's already there, the game's there, why bother?
Anyway, what I did (making the very big and probably incorrect assumption that you're not playing games that use the network) is removed all the network services (I was not familiar with the process for doing this before, but found a very handy guide here). Basically cut its balls off, and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Hell, the first time I've had a Windows install last more than two years without slowdowns, still boots up in like 40 seconds, I'm up and playing Civ before I'm done with a cigarette. I can't play multiplayer, but /shrug.
Well, ok, then CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE.
I do. I call it GNU/Linux (but then someone ends up bitching about that), or I call it whatever the distribution's name is.
Actually, I half-think the current confusing naming is on purpose, so there's always an 'out' to people who complain about Linux GUI problems.
Blakely, Have you ever finished a whole post without attempting some lame dig at GNU/Linux?
No. It is ALWAYS the speakers responsibility to make himself understood. Thats a law of the universe fact bud.
It's this sort of attitude, more than the (often reasonable) technical criticism that I've heard, that really just burns my ass when people start talking about this subject. This "you owe me something, how dare you not satisfy my wishes" crap is getting stale. They didn't owe you shit. They don't owe you shit. I don't owe you shit.
Second, 'API Stable'? Too late. Defined already. By the rest of the world.
Could you provide a link to that definition that the rest of the world is apparently using? I can't find it.
Um... no. No, not at all. This is not a democracy. What the hell gave you that idea in the first place?
You know who didn't get the message? Despite all the thousands of notices you just mentioned?
The maintainer who put it in Fedora. The one person who MOST needed to read and understand it.
Damn right. Throw the Kubuntu team in there too.
So, basically, STFU. Regardless of what you think, that right there is PROOF POSITIVE that the message was no good, and communicated poorly.
But then you have to go be an asshole and fuck up the one time I've ever come close to agreeing with you. That right there is proof positive (notice how I didn't feel the need to do OBNOXIOUS CAPITAL LETTERS) that the Fedora and Kubuntu teams totally screwed the pooch. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything else you extrapolate out of that is based solely on your own erroneous expectations, and totally contradictory to what the release notes said and what the release was supposed to be about.
No one read that sentence
Their own damn problem.
The people who made the decision to call it knew damn well what they were communicating to the public by calling it 4.0.
Yup. It meant "API stable." If you'd read the damn release notes, you'd know that. But then you wouldn't be able to come on Slashdot and piss and moan and generally make my hair turn gray.
But I do that if I don't understand what you're saying, it's YOUR FAULT. EVERY TIME.
You are wrong. It's your fault. For not reading. And your use of caps is obnoxious. EVERY TIME.
In contrast to that ambiguity, "this is the 4.0 release" is pretty clear, at least in the open-source world.
Unless you can give me a link to the Holy Universal Version Numbering Spec, no it's not. It can mean all kinds of different things to different projects, and you know it. In this case, the KDE team was clear that what the .0 meant was "API stable; will eat babies." It wasn't a huge secret, they plastered it all over the internet. .2 has always been the "feature-completeness" target, and I can tell you they totally nailed it. I knew what I was getting into. I mean, did no one else on the internet get that memo?
Calling an application -.0 MEANS something.
Yup. And in this case they were very clear that what it meant was "Here is a stable API upon which to build. The rest of this whole thing's completely fucked and will eat your children, but we've got a stable API, here it is, go code, file bugs." It was all over the internet, dude. The speaker (speakers, actually, like a fucking bunch of them) totally were understood. If someone chose not to believe them, then that person should stop blaming other people for their own mistakes.
See, there's the disconnect. Actually, people want Linux to work. This was a necessary if painful move to ensure that it would, in time, work. 4.0 (and to a lesser but still real extent, 4.1) was not for "end users." Distributions (yeah Kubuntu, I'm looking at you) packing it by default totally fucked the whole game up for everybody, but if you've got a problem (and I don't blame you if you do), you should take it up with them.
1. No I'm not. If you didn't read the release notes, or the blog posts, or the commentary from the peanut gallery here on Slashdot, or the reviews in the Linux press, and on and on and on, then you've got no damn business complaining. Blame yourself, learn from it, and move on.
2. I completely agree, see my other post about this. But you've gotta ask yourself whose fault that really was.
Absolutely. 100% agreed. But that's pretty much the opposite of what lots of people in the KDE camp said they wanted to see happen with 4.0 (and even 4.1), and something you'd need to take up with the Kubuntu developers.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd almost start to wonder if someone in the Ubuntu camp didn't want to see KDE4 succeed. I mean, it didn't take a very long look to tell that 4.0.4 (I believe that was the version first included in 7.10) was totally not ready for prime time, certainly not on a n00b-oriented distro like Ubuntu.
Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't think anybody was deliberately trying to hurt the KDE name, but incompetence or over-enthusiasm or an excess of fanboyishness (or what the fuck ever) accomplished exactly the same thing. Damn right I think they've got some questions to answer.
Then GTFO. I'm really excited about the prospect of leaving the "traditional desktop metaphor" behind, it's an idea that's way overdue. If you don't like it, find something you do like and use that.
I was not disappointed (using the strict definition of the word) in the 4.0 release either. Because I read the reviews and put on a cup before I installed it. I knew what I was walking into, and it was damn messy, lacked any configurability, regressed in many areas from 3.5, crashed hourly, major pieces of the KDE app suite weren't there at all, the ones that were were often pre-beta versions. Which is exactly what they said it was gonna be.
Through all that, I'm glad that I went for it and stuck with it. Watching this project evolve over the last year has been absolutely inspiring. Congratulations to the KDE team on the 4.2 release. It's been a hard road, thanks for sticking with it.
No, *you* are attempting to define the meaning of version numbering. There is no such standard. Lots of teams, companies, groups, and lone crazy hackers number their projects in lots of different ways. The current version of Ubuntu is 8.10. Not because it is the tenth update of the eighth major version, because it was released in October of 2008. Go bitch at them for their non-compliance with your holy version numbering scheme.
What exactly is this Worldwide Standard Numbering Scheme that people seem to be referring to when they make these comments? Did you pick it, Mr. Coward? Is there a spec for it? Did I miss a big email here or something?
I switched to KDE because of KDE 4.
Yes, it is manifestly your inability to read the phrase "early adopting users" and parse what the hell it meant. Next question.
What a bunch of bullshit, I am so sick of hearing this nonsense. There were blog posts by a lot of the KDE people, it was (obviously) all over the damn front page of kde.org, it was on frickin' Slashdot, it was in every Linux forum. Everybody knew. You knew. I knew. We all knew. "Here is KDE 4.0.0. It is API stable. It is totally gonna eat your children, but it's API stable. Now code, people."
To further butcher a bad analogy I saw a couple posts down, this is kind of like getting on an interstate with a big sign on the ramp saying "NO FUCKING GAS FOR A LONG TIME! TURN AROUND AND TAKE A LEAK!" and bitching about the incompetence of the highway department when your car runs out of gas.
Seriously. This is getting ridiculous. You can obviously read, because you can write. I'm sure you saw the announcements all over the internet when it came out, God knows everybody else did. If you chose not to believe them for whatever reason, I don't lend your ill-informed self-centered opinion one goddamn bit of credence. Why should anybody care what you think of anybody else's version numbering?
I don't think that's true at all. I use emacs quite a bit, for lots of things, hardly any of which are coding. Right now I'm browsing the web, checking the weather, chatting on Jabber, and editing my .fluxbox/keys files. I could also at any moment be playing chess, checking my calendar, using the file manager, etc., etc. And this is coming from a guy who's hardly written two dozen lines of original code in his life, and often needs help putting together regular expressions.
Same with mc. I came to it by way of Krusader, but I've gained a lot of appreciation for mc since switching from Gnome to Flux on my laptop this past year. The mc apps file may be what finally makes me learn regexps :)
Midnight Commander is bad because... it's too simple?! God bless you, stuff like this is why I read /.
I don't get it. What's why there will never be a year of the Linux desktop?
Have you used the svn version of Krusader lately? I think it's better than ever. What "needs love?"
But more importantly, a whole hell of a lot of what I love in Krusader came straight out of mc. I couldn't be more thrilled with this news.
+1
KDE has a released product that many people hate (KDE 4.x).
Give it a rest. KDE has released a product that many people absolutely love, but as is typical in the free software echo chamber, the haters get way more airtime. Feel free to hang out in the late 90s as long as you want (really, it's cool, I've got a closet full of red flannels too), but the rest of us are moving on.
Panels: Not anymore. You used to be able to, I'm not sure when it got changed, but now you can't remove the panel if there's only one, and it's no longer available to turn off in the session settings.
Konqueror over Firefox or Opera?
Depends. Not usually, granted. But if I just want to open and read and close one thing, Konqueror all the way. I use Firefox as my live-in browser, but I leave Konqueror set as the default so when I just open a page from another application, it opens in Konq. Way faster.
Amarok: I don't use it. Not that I have any particular problem with it, I don't, but I use Gmusicbrowser and cmus on all my machines. But Rhythmbox is just unbearable for me. Banshee's not bad, though.
Koffice: I like them because they're not afraid to take some risks with their interface, even though sometimes I'm like wtf. I use OpenOffice, but that's not really a comparison to make here, as that's certainly not a "Gnome app." Gnome's office suite, such as it is (I'm thinking of Abiword and Gnumeric), while very quick are functionally equivalent to MS Works.
But if we're talking about applications, the biggest target of my wrath will always be Nautilus. I fuckin' hate it. To be fair, I also hate Dolphin (because it's just another Nautilus), but Konqueror's good, and Krusader's amazing. Krusader might be a solid one third of why I use KDE.