To be totally honest, I don't use Amarok. I don't have any real specific problems with it, I just like Gmusicbrowser way better than anything else out there. Banshee's pretty good once you disable that "automatically open Banshee when any goddamn thing at all happens" behavior. I will not use Rhythmbox.
Re: Evolution, here's one tiny example. In Kmail, I can specify a custom trash folder. As a Gmail user, I find this feature indispensable. To have my delete key actually do something useful is pretty nice. Also, I find Evolution's endless parade of configuration wizards to be a useless waste of time. Just give me the damn configuration dialog and leave me alone, I know what I'm doing.
Metoo. All I really use it for is to put Home and Trash on the desktop, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do that without it. Why I can't just drag the fucking things onto the desktop and make shortcuts like I can with everything else is completely beyond me.
And having the use of gconf be the standard for GNOME means less stupid dotfiles and dotdirs in your homedir
That is one of my bigger problems with Gnome. With KDE, I always know where to find my settings, they're in.kde/share, always. So no, they don't "clutter up your homedir with dotfiles." They make one count em one dotdir, and put it all there. Shockingly sensible, no?
Maybe because one of the problems with Linux is that there is always some little nagging problem. The answer is always next release, next release, it will be fixed, so everyone goes out and upgrades as soon as they can.
Boy, that's so unlike proprietary systems./sarcasm
I expect KDE 4.2 to be a vast improvement, mostly in stability, over 4.1. But I don't expect it to be as stable as 3.5.10. I'm hoping they get there within the next 6-12 months, but I don't expect the 4.2 release to be there.
Running Kubuntu 8.10/KDE 4.2RC here. The only crasher I've had since upgrading is some plasmoids that were written to 4.1 not removing themselves cleanly, not being able to "make uninstall" due to some 4.1-specific hacks in the makefile, and sometimes crashing Plasma when I tried to remove them. Had to rm the files in install_manifest.txt and restart KDE. Otherwise it's been pretty smooth sailing (surprisingly so).
Clearly communicated to "the world"? Uh, just who ordinarily reads the KDE website regularly other than professional KDE developers?
Well shit, you might not, I might not (actually I do), but I'd hope KDE packagers for the various distros read it. Obviously that was not the case, but sheesh. What more do you want?
Just to be a datapoint, I've gotta say that FF3.0 was a total wash for me. I stuck with 2 for a long time after the 3.0 release because 3 was sluggish as hell on my system and broke about half my extensions, and this was at least a month or two after release. I am now happily using 3.0.5, ftr.
This does not invalidate your statement, I just wanted to provide a counter-example.
Thanks for posting this, if I hadn't commented already in this story I'd mod you up. I'm sick to death of people bitching about how they don't like the numbering scheme. For $DEITY's sake, they told everyone what was going on when they did it. Didn't listen? Didn't believe them? Well, whose damn problem is that?
No they don't. Lots of projects have lots of numbering schemes. The fact is that the KDE team clearly communicated what their numbering scheme meant. If you chose not to believe them, that's not their problem.
The only late Ubuntu release I can recall was Dapper. Was supposed to be 6.04, ended up being 6.06, but they maintained the overall release schedule despite it and 6.10 came out on schedule.
A few little things I can do that I can't do in Gnome (these aren't blowout features by themselves, but they do add up):
1. Run without panels. 2. Rearrange items in the task manager. 3. Figure out where my settings live. gconf can kiss my ass. 4. Okay, here's a cool one. Qt4 (and don't ask me how, because I have no idea) "translates" (forgive me, I know that's the wrong word) non-Qt apps into native Qt widgets. So when you open up Firefox, it's displayed with Qt, not GTK. I don't know how this is done, but it's frickin' awesome. 5. The KDE application suite knocks the shit out of Gnome's across the board, all day every day. I mean, Rhythmbox? Evolution? Nautilus, for cryin' out loud? Pfft.
Really? What's your Fluxbox gripe? I've been using it for a while now (since the "black screen of death" bug in Ubuntu's version of Compiz last year forced me to make a jump somewhere) and I love it. The aforementioned Compiz bug is long since fixed, and I still haven't fired up Gnome in months and months. The one thing I have yet to replace is gnome-power-manager, but I just start it up on login in ~/.fluxbox/startup. I mean, yeah I've had to learn some stuff, but I haven't hit any showstoppers.
Wow, you're a real jerk. Someone made what you saw as a usage error. Instead of correcting him and supplying terminology and definitions, you snidely said "go to wikipedia, n00b!" He did. He quoted it. And all you can say is "yur rong and dum, n00b!" Well then, by all means enlighten us with your shining wisdom.
I have to explicitly switch printing from A4 to US Letter *every* *single* *time* I re-open Okular
Oh god yes. I want to beat somebody with my keyboard.
I'm still scratching my head as to why Kubuntu has gone with KDE4.1 as its only option on 8.10
I jumped to the unstable version pretty much immediately upon upgrading to 8.10 (the Kubuntu team has a ppa with the latest and greatest, you can get the goods at kubuntu.org) and to tell you the truth, I have found it more functional and more stable and faster than the "stable" version. YMMV.
They released a dot-oh release. If that was the only thing they did, it shows that they don't know how to name their product.
You and I have batted this back and forth before. They told you what the deal was with it. I remember one of Aaron Seigo's blog posts from directly after the 4.0 release that said very clearly that it was the "eat your babies" release. No one forced the distro maintainers to make the jump when they did (and certainly no one forced the Kubuntu team to try and shoehorn them both in with that crazy/usr/lib/kde4/* scheme that broke upgrades far and wide).
Yes, you can complain about their "non-conforming" version numbering, but it's not like there's a recognized standard (even-unstable/odd-stable is certainly not universally adhered to, I could point to any number of projects that don't do it like that, but if you insist of harping on that I can only point out that 4 is an even number). The bottom line is they told people what was up and people chose to... I dunno, not believe them? I certainly knew what I was getting into with 4.0.
It was already 4.1 by the release, not just 4.0. And 4.1 was the release that was supposed to be "so much better" and "actually ready to replace 3.5".
Now it's 4.2 that's supposed to be -- but I'm wondering if we'll get feature parity with 3.5 by the time we get 4.5.
It is. I'm writing from 4.2RC right now. Kontact is finally back to feature parity (that was my personal bitch, btw), Okular beats the shit of kpdf, ditto krunner and katapult (but I never liked katapult), ditto kwin and every other window manager out there. Even little stuff like the system tray and the task manager are noticeably better (I have longed to be able to move items around in the task manager for as long as there have been task managers). Devs are finally starting to code for Plasma. The future's so bright I gotta wear shades.
Furthermore, they still need probable cause to search. If they continually look through your locker because they feel like, and just mess up your stuff for no real good reason
No they do not, and yes they can, respectively. As I said to the other response, I think it's bullshit too but it is the law.
I recall a case from the late 90s (that I'm too lazy to find a link to) of a school cutting off a student's lock because it wasn't registered with the school and rifling through his belongings, finding nothing, and suspending him for a week for not giving them not volunteering the combination to his lock. It went to court and the school won. Kid was like 15.
Specifically, high school or college? If it's college, they're yours and the professor may be guilty of trespass. If it's high school, you have no right to private property whatsoever. They can raid your backpack, trash your locker, steal your cell phone, force you to empty your pockets. As a high school student (in America, at any rate) you have no rights.
Now, if you want to talk ethics, that's a different issue altogether. I'm talking about the law.
Do you think countries that don't have their own automobile, airplane, computer, food industry are sacrificing some weird notion of security?
Hell yes. For example, America doesn't have any energy production to speak of. As we've seen in grisly detail on the 6:00 news, there's a price to pay. Many African nations don't grow their own food, and instead are dependent on American aid. There's a price to pay. We don't make our own electronics here in America anymore, and instead are dependent on cheap Chinese crap. The real bill on that hasn't arrived yet, but you can bet your dumb anonymous ass that there's gonna be a price.
Boy, it just burns your ass that he's right, doesn't it? See, this is the internet. Around here we typically try to argue on merit, not identity. It shouldn't matter who's on the other side of the screen. If you can refute his argument, do so. If not, STFU.
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To be totally honest, I don't use Amarok. I don't have any real specific problems with it, I just like Gmusicbrowser way better than anything else out there. Banshee's pretty good once you disable that "automatically open Banshee when any goddamn thing at all happens" behavior. I will not use Rhythmbox.
Re: Evolution, here's one tiny example. In Kmail, I can specify a custom trash folder. As a Gmail user, I find this feature indispensable. To have my delete key actually do something useful is pretty nice. Also, I find Evolution's endless parade of configuration wizards to be a useless waste of time. Just give me the damn configuration dialog and leave me alone, I know what I'm doing.
Remove all the panels and make them stay gone without removing gnome-panel from your system. Do get back to me if you figure this out.
Let me remove all the panels, let me rearrange items on the task manager, or come stock with a PIM that doesn't make me want to rip out my hair.
Metoo. All I really use it for is to put Home and Trash on the desktop, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do that without it. Why I can't just drag the fucking things onto the desktop and make shortcuts like I can with everything else is completely beyond me.
lmao!
And having the use of gconf be the standard for GNOME means less stupid dotfiles and dotdirs in your homedir
That is one of my bigger problems with Gnome. With KDE, I always know where to find my settings, they're in .kde/share, always. So no, they don't "clutter up your homedir with dotfiles." They make one count em one dotdir, and put it all there. Shockingly sensible, no?
We have a winner! Please choose any one internet from the front two rows.
Maybe because one of the problems with Linux is that there is always some little nagging problem. The answer is always next release, next release, it will be fixed, so everyone goes out and upgrades as soon as they can.
Boy, that's so unlike proprietary systems. /sarcasm
I expect KDE 4.2 to be a vast improvement, mostly in stability, over 4.1. But I don't expect it to be as stable as 3.5.10. I'm hoping they get there within the next 6-12 months, but I don't expect the 4.2 release to be there.
Running Kubuntu 8.10/KDE 4.2RC here. The only crasher I've had since upgrading is some plasmoids that were written to 4.1 not removing themselves cleanly, not being able to "make uninstall" due to some 4.1-specific hacks in the makefile, and sometimes crashing Plasma when I tried to remove them. Had to rm the files in install_manifest.txt and restart KDE. Otherwise it's been pretty smooth sailing (surprisingly so).
Clearly communicated to "the world"? Uh, just who ordinarily reads the KDE website regularly other than professional KDE developers?
Well shit, you might not, I might not (actually I do), but I'd hope KDE packagers for the various distros read it. Obviously that was not the case, but sheesh. What more do you want?
Just to be a datapoint, I've gotta say that FF3.0 was a total wash for me. I stuck with 2 for a long time after the 3.0 release because 3 was sluggish as hell on my system and broke about half my extensions, and this was at least a month or two after release. I am now happily using 3.0.5, ftr.
This does not invalidate your statement, I just wanted to provide a counter-example.
Thanks for posting this, if I hadn't commented already in this story I'd mod you up. I'm sick to death of people bitching about how they don't like the numbering scheme. For $DEITY's sake, they told everyone what was going on when they did it. Didn't listen? Didn't believe them? Well, whose damn problem is that?
No they don't. Lots of projects have lots of numbering schemes. The fact is that the KDE team clearly communicated what their numbering scheme meant. If you chose not to believe them, that's not their problem.
The only late Ubuntu release I can recall was Dapper. Was supposed to be 6.04, ended up being 6.06, but they maintained the overall release schedule despite it and 6.10 came out on schedule.
A few little things I can do that I can't do in Gnome (these aren't blowout features by themselves, but they do add up):
1. Run without panels.
2. Rearrange items in the task manager.
3. Figure out where my settings live. gconf can kiss my ass.
4. Okay, here's a cool one. Qt4 (and don't ask me how, because I have no idea) "translates" (forgive me, I know that's the wrong word) non-Qt apps into native Qt widgets. So when you open up Firefox, it's displayed with Qt, not GTK. I don't know how this is done, but it's frickin' awesome.
5. The KDE application suite knocks the shit out of Gnome's across the board, all day every day. I mean, Rhythmbox? Evolution? Nautilus, for cryin' out loud? Pfft.
Really? What's your Fluxbox gripe? I've been using it for a while now (since the "black screen of death" bug in Ubuntu's version of Compiz last year forced me to make a jump somewhere) and I love it. The aforementioned Compiz bug is long since fixed, and I still haven't fired up Gnome in months and months. The one thing I have yet to replace is gnome-power-manager, but I just start it up on login in ~/.fluxbox/startup. I mean, yeah I've had to learn some stuff, but I haven't hit any showstoppers.
Wow, you're a real jerk. Someone made what you saw as a usage error. Instead of correcting him and supplying terminology and definitions, you snidely said "go to wikipedia, n00b!" He did. He quoted it. And all you can say is "yur rong and dum, n00b!" Well then, by all means enlighten us with your shining wisdom.
I have to explicitly switch printing from A4 to US Letter *every* *single* *time* I re-open Okular
Oh god yes. I want to beat somebody with my keyboard.
I'm still scratching my head as to why Kubuntu has gone with KDE4.1 as its only option on 8.10
I jumped to the unstable version pretty much immediately upon upgrading to 8.10 (the Kubuntu team has a ppa with the latest and greatest, you can get the goods at kubuntu.org) and to tell you the truth, I have found it more functional and more stable and faster than the "stable" version. YMMV.
They released a dot-oh release. If that was the only thing they did, it shows that they don't know how to name their product.
You and I have batted this back and forth before. They told you what the deal was with it. I remember one of Aaron Seigo's blog posts from directly after the 4.0 release that said very clearly that it was the "eat your babies" release. No one forced the distro maintainers to make the jump when they did (and certainly no one forced the Kubuntu team to try and shoehorn them both in with that crazy /usr/lib/kde4/* scheme that broke upgrades far and wide).
Yes, you can complain about their "non-conforming" version numbering, but it's not like there's a recognized standard (even-unstable/odd-stable is certainly not universally adhered to, I could point to any number of projects that don't do it like that, but if you insist of harping on that I can only point out that 4 is an even number). The bottom line is they told people what was up and people chose to... I dunno, not believe them? I certainly knew what I was getting into with 4.0.
It was already 4.1 by the release, not just 4.0. And 4.1 was the release that was supposed to be "so much better" and "actually ready to replace 3.5".
Now it's 4.2 that's supposed to be -- but I'm wondering if we'll get feature parity with 3.5 by the time we get 4.5.
It is. I'm writing from 4.2RC right now. Kontact is finally back to feature parity (that was my personal bitch, btw), Okular beats the shit of kpdf, ditto krunner and katapult (but I never liked katapult), ditto kwin and every other window manager out there. Even little stuff like the system tray and the task manager are noticeably better (I have longed to be able to move items around in the task manager for as long as there have been task managers). Devs are finally starting to code for Plasma. The future's so bright I gotta wear shades.
Furthermore, they still need probable cause to search. If they continually look through your locker because they feel like, and just mess up your stuff for no real good reason
No they do not, and yes they can, respectively. As I said to the other response, I think it's bullshit too but it is the law.
I recall a case from the late 90s (that I'm too lazy to find a link to) of a school cutting off a student's lock because it wasn't registered with the school and rifling through his belongings, finding nothing, and suspending him for a week for not giving them not volunteering the combination to his lock. It went to court and the school won. Kid was like 15.
Specifically, high school or college? If it's college, they're yours and the professor may be guilty of trespass. If it's high school, you have no right to private property whatsoever. They can raid your backpack, trash your locker, steal your cell phone, force you to empty your pockets. As a high school student (in America, at any rate) you have no rights.
Now, if you want to talk ethics, that's a different issue altogether. I'm talking about the law.
Great article, thx for the link!
Do you think countries that don't have their own automobile, airplane, computer, food industry are sacrificing some weird notion of security?
Hell yes. For example, America doesn't have any energy production to speak of. As we've seen in grisly detail on the 6:00 news, there's a price to pay. Many African nations don't grow their own food, and instead are dependent on American aid. There's a price to pay. We don't make our own electronics here in America anymore, and instead are dependent on cheap Chinese crap. The real bill on that hasn't arrived yet, but you can bet your dumb anonymous ass that there's gonna be a price.
Please read up on basic economics.
"Basic economics" got us into this damn mess.
Um... That's your prerogative, I guess. It does make you sound like a douchebag, though.
Boy, it just burns your ass that he's right, doesn't it? See, this is the internet. Around here we typically try to argue on merit, not identity. It shouldn't matter who's on the other side of the screen. If you can refute his argument, do so. If not, STFU.
-Risen (is a real boy, not a sockpuppet)