1. Me. I picked the most nefarious example. 2. I am from an area that is covered in snow and ice for 4 months out of the year; you are obviously not. Those people buy minivans. 3. I am aware of that. I never said anything to the contrary.
On top of that, the vast majority of the buying public DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FOSS. It would be nice if they did, but they don't. Geeks constantly make the mistake of thinking that everyone wants what they want, and guess what? Most don't. Get that through your thick skulls.
Wrong. The vast majority of the buying public doesn't have a clue what free software is. And many of those who have heard of it in some vague way have been handed a line of bullshit about it and told it's communism. By assholes like you.
The Free Software Foundation's political activism (Bad Vista, Defective By Design, etc.) does not seem geared toward making friends. Rather, they're trying to make the right enemies. And I'm a fan of that.
No one has a legitimate need to drive a Hummer unless they are serving in Iraq. People who try to rationalize their SUV purchase should have bought a pickup.
"oh man i saw a new kde version in my update manager today and i installed it and it crapped out my system. what gives"
Just out of curiosity, are there distros that actually updated KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4? The only distros I'm really familiar with are Debian and Ubuntu. Debian still has KDE 4 in Experimental as far as I know. Ubuntu has it in Main, but the packages are named differently.
See this blog post. You can call them excuses or rationalizations or whatever you want, you're not breaking anybody's heart. You disagree with their decision, that's all. Don't make it out to be some kind of personal betrayal or something.
I said "no credible reason", not "no reason". Perhaps I should've simply said "no good reason".
The simplest answer I have heard is, they released it as 4.0 to get developers to start using it.
In other words, it was a simple publicity stunt, and they did, in fact, want to trick users into trying it, even though it wasn't ready. And it's kind of imploded on them -- many users (myself included) reacted badly, so not that great of a publicity stunt.
I just disagree, and that's all there is to it. I think there was a hype problem, I don't think it really came from the KDE camp so much as from the general free software noise machine (yes, Slashdot, I do mean you). There was a lot of talk about it, but through it all the message I got for 4.0.0 was "Here it is, it's rough, we're gonna be doing rolling bux-fixes on it in the midst of working on 4.1 (hence the rapid progression through 4.0.x releases), it might eat your children but we hope not. Have fun." In fact, that is almost exactly what Aaron Seigo said the moment 4.0.0 got out the door.
Regarding the following: Bear in mind that these are based on impressions from very close after the 4.0.0 release. Some things may have improved.
As stated, I'm on Kubuntu8.04-KDE4.1 RC, so I'll try to fill the following in with up-to-date information as I have it...
The problem is that changing the panel size to "tiny" introduced a brand-new bug, at least on Kubuntu-KDE4: The menu now wrapped around to the top of the screen.
I had that once on a Saturday afternoon as well, I think. The problem was fixed almost instantly, but unfortunately a lot of these critical buxfixes haven't moved out of the ppa repository into main yet for Kubuntu, and some may not be fixed in Kubuntu until 8.10. If you weren't aware, you can get very up-to-date packages for KDE4 here (thanks to the unceasing work of people who love you).
Regarding Katapult, the menus, and so forth: You can manually bind a shortcut for the menu now, but I don't remember how to do so (because I haven't done so, that's why). There is no option for it in preferences yet. This is "coming soon to a theatre near you." I agree that it's a major lack. Alt-F2 right now has most of the Katapult functionality (search menu entries, address book contacts, web bookmarks, run one-liners, all that happy crap). One thing I really like about it over Katapult is it shows all your options as you type instead one at a time, and you can arrow through them. Really and truly, Alt-F2 is the Katapult replacement. And last but certainly not least, the menu editor is there now and you can assign shortcuts to menu items (but not the menu itself, grrrr).
How's Kmail? Especially on large IMAP folders?
[sarcasm] Every bit as wonderful as it always was. [/sarcasm] Not especially great. Evolution and Thunderbird still beat the pants off it, at least for me (although I credit a lot of my problems to Gmail's pisspoor IMAP service).
I would also like to point out that Konqueror was "replaced" by Dolphin, which in my opinion was a bad decision. I enjoyed all the things in Konqueror's filemanagement profile like tabbed browsing, and the ability to open Konsole pointed to the current location in an easily accessible logical place. The switch to Dolphin has utterly dumbfounded me. And it's likely I just have issues with it because I don't recognize it, as is expected with something new, but I still have yet to see the logic in the switch to Dolphin in it's current form.
I completely agree, I can't stand Dolphin and don't know what was wrong with Konqueror that it needed replacement in the first place. But I'm a Krusader man myself, so I'm not exactly Dolphin's "target market."
KDE 4.0 seems all pretty, little function.
This I couldn't disagree with more. In its current (4.1 RC) form, I find the pretty to be kinda lacking, expecially for users who are used to all the bells and whistles of Compiz. It's the new backends that really have me excited for the future of KDE. Not just Plasma, although that's what you read about most, but Nepomuk, Solid, Phonon... I meant it when I said this was a total break from the past. Exciting things are happening here, we're watching the future of the free desktop being born.
I typically enjoy reading your comments and I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but I've just seen so much piss poured on KDE4 here on Slashdot that I've got to reply to someone or I'll blow my damn stack. So bear that in mind, because I'm gonna go off a little here. Nothing personal.
KDE had no credible reason for releasing it as 4.0
The KDE development team elaborated very well their reasons for releasing 4.0.0 on the schedule and in the manner that they did. This topic has been covered at least 5409 times in the last two weeks on Slashdot. Can we please move on now?
Where's Katapult? Where's Kmail/Kontact? Where's Amarok? Why is Konsole huge? Why's everything huge, including the panel, with no way to reduce it? Why is the menu so weird -- and if this is a replacement for Katapult, why can't I open it with a keystroke?
In order:
Katapult's not there anymore.
Kontact is there. I have it open on another desktop right now.
Amarok is also in the middle of a development cycle. The development version is there, the stable version hasn't magically disappeared either. It's not easy to rewrite an application to not only a new version of the DE, but a new version of the underlying frameworks and a new version of the widget set. It's hard hard hard hard work. You could help. Or at least shut up and let them work.
Konsole looks pretty much the same to me as it always has. Yakuake, btw, has improved dramatically.
You can change the panel size, this functionality has been there now for months.
If you don't like the new menu, use the old one. It's still there.
The new menu is not a replacement for Katapult. Alt-F2 is the replacement for Katapult. Which is good. Katapult had more bugs than a badger's asshole.
major apps like Konqueror, Kopete, and Amarok simply crash, and frequently.
I don't use Konqueror, so I can't speak to that. I have had Kopete open on this machine for weeks on end, it has not once crashed out on me. Not once. The development version of Amarok is just that, a development version. Expect it to crash. On the flip side, Kontact puked all over the place on a daily basis for me on KDE 3.5, and it's much more stable now. The crashes I do get regularly are KTorrent (when exiting the program, and also when trying to remove >3 torrents from the list), and sometimes Plasma when I log out. Bugs have been filed. I have no doubt that they will be fixed. Have you filed bugs on your crashes?
Listen, I'm not trying to get bitchy here, but seriously, can we all tone down the vitriol here? Considering that KDE4 is a complete break on all levels from KDE3 (both in the sense of "a break from the paradigm" and "compatibility break"), I'm thrilled with how quickly problems have been spotted and fixed (sometimes to the point where the problem I noticed in the morning has been fixed by dusk).
Installing software on Linux is a goddamned pain. Why can't I just download an installer and run it? It could check for prerequisites and pull them itself.
Oh for... Okay everyone, one more time here before I give up. You can just download an installer and run it. Once more with feeling: You can just download an installer and run it. You will know it when you find it, because the filename will end in.deb. It will check for prerequisites and if possible pull them itself.
Rebuttal the first: If you are doing things like hand-rolling multiple versions of libraries or using non-distro repositories or building rocket ships, you are kinda expected to be an advanced enough user to know how to do those things or at least know enough to go find out before blindly typing "make install". I think we're pretty far outside the realm of "common computing tasks" here.
Rebuttal the second: I think you're full of shit. When did this happen to you?
Flip that idea around for a minute. "The for-profit model has a built in drawback in that once the people controlling a project decide that making a change is not a priority, you the user are FUCKED."
That holds true across the board, with any OS on any platform. Mac users have convinced themselves they don't need games, and Windows users have convinced themselves they don't really need a working security model. Next troll please!
I didn't say "flawless," I said "better than anything else anyone's come up with to date." I have had similar issues in the past (if rarely), and it can be a PITA, and if you do get into trouble it can be hard to get back out. These things are true, they are problems. But they are not problems with apt. They're problems with sloppy packaging; apt is trying to do what it's told, and even if there are conflicts, 99.8% of the time you will be warned about them before any actions take place.
Also, every package comes with the email address of its maintainer. When running into problems like the ones you mentioned, that should be the first stop for help. "Hey, I'm trying to install your package $FOO, it says it needs library $BAR version x.xx, and the newest version in the repository is x.xx-2. WTF?" Pulling from unofficial repositories or hand-compiling libraries is a great way to fuck yourself.
So no, not foolproof. But really, pretty damn close.
Well, what can I say, the rest of the world is doing it wrong;) IIRC (hopefully someone will chime in on this point), you can even configure your RHEL/Fedora/CentOS system to use apt instead of rpm.
Now, what does RPM do? package stuff up into directories. Gee, how is that defined? By the developers! Is there a common code of conduct (again, I don't know) for packaging apps? *snip*
That's a good question. The answer is "kinda, but it does (as you noted) have some slight variations by distro)." But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, because modern systems are smart enough to look for those files in multiple places. For instance, I can run/bin,/usr/bin, and/usr/local/bin commands by simply typing the name of the command, without having to give a path, because bash is smart enough to know that that's where the executables live.
A fine example of fallacious reasoning.
You're right, and that's why I gave a real rebuttal directly afterward.
I do agree that Synaptic suffers from "yellow pages syndrome," where it can be hard to find something if you don't already have an idea of where/what it is. Add/Remove Programs attempts to fill this hole, but it would be nice if there was a better selection of index applications for it, there's a lot of stuff that's not listed there.
But all that having been said, you pretty much lost me on "download a windows program." From where? How do you find it? How do you know it's safe? How do you upgrade it later? How do you ensure that it plays nicely with the rest of the system? With apt, all these things have been done for you. As noted above, I agree that there are issues yet to be addressed, but the free world is so far ahead of proprietary software in the area of installing and managing components of your system in a consistent and sensible manner that it's pretty ridiculous to even try to make the comparison.
And again (this is a drum that I love to beat), why is that? It is because of freedom. Freedom is the killer app, apt is just a interface for it.
Slashdot Mirror
If I buy a Microsoft or Apple product, they have an obligation to fix my bugs, or they lose my money and get bad publicity.
No. No they don't.
1. Me. I picked the most nefarious example.
2. I am from an area that is covered in snow and ice for 4 months out of the year; you are obviously not. Those people buy minivans.
3. I am aware of that. I never said anything to the contrary.
I think you're just trying to justify yourself.
OMFG TERRORISTS!
u r dum.
On top of that, the vast majority of the buying public DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FOSS. It would be nice if they did, but they don't. Geeks constantly make the mistake of thinking that everyone wants what they want, and guess what? Most don't. Get that through your thick skulls.
Wrong. The vast majority of the buying public doesn't have a clue what free software is. And many of those who have heard of it in some vague way have been handed a line of bullshit about it and told it's communism. By assholes like you.
The Free Software Foundation's political activism (Bad Vista, Defective By Design, etc.) does not seem geared toward making friends. Rather, they're trying to make the right enemies. And I'm a fan of that.
No one has a legitimate need to drive a Hummer unless they are serving in Iraq. People who try to rationalize their SUV purchase should have bought a pickup.
"oh man i saw a new kde version in my update manager today and i installed it and it crapped out my system. what gives"
Just out of curiosity, are there distros that actually updated KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4? The only distros I'm really familiar with are Debian and Ubuntu. Debian still has KDE 4 in Experimental as far as I know. Ubuntu has it in Main, but the packages are named differently.
See this blog post. You can call them excuses or rationalizations or whatever you want, you're not breaking anybody's heart. You disagree with their decision, that's all. Don't make it out to be some kind of personal betrayal or something.
Sorry, I missed a link. The end of the first paragraph should be: "In fact, that's almost exactly what Aaron Seigo said..."
You had me going until the 'shut up'...
You're right, reading that today I realize that was a little over the top. Hey, I said in the first line there would be a little of that, didn't I? :)
-p.
I just disagree, and that's all there is to it. I think there was a hype problem, I don't think it really came from the KDE camp so much as from the general free software noise machine (yes, Slashdot, I do mean you). There was a lot of talk about it, but through it all the message I got for 4.0.0 was "Here it is, it's rough, we're gonna be doing rolling bux-fixes on it in the midst of working on 4.1 (hence the rapid progression through 4.0.x releases), it might eat your children but we hope not. Have fun." In fact, that is almost exactly what Aaron Seigo said the moment 4.0.0 got out the door.
As stated, I'm on Kubuntu8.04-KDE4.1 RC, so I'll try to fill the following in with up-to-date information as I have it...
I had that once on a Saturday afternoon as well, I think. The problem was fixed almost instantly, but unfortunately a lot of these critical buxfixes haven't moved out of the ppa repository into main yet for Kubuntu, and some may not be fixed in Kubuntu until 8.10. If you weren't aware, you can get very up-to-date packages for KDE4 here (thanks to the unceasing work of people who love you).
Regarding Katapult, the menus, and so forth: You can manually bind a shortcut for the menu now, but I don't remember how to do so (because I haven't done so, that's why). There is no option for it in preferences yet. This is "coming soon to a theatre near you." I agree that it's a major lack. Alt-F2 right now has most of the Katapult functionality (search menu entries, address book contacts, web bookmarks, run one-liners, all that happy crap). One thing I really like about it over Katapult is it shows all your options as you type instead one at a time, and you can arrow through them. Really and truly, Alt-F2 is the Katapult replacement. And last but certainly not least, the menu editor is there now and you can assign shortcuts to menu items (but not the menu itself, grrrr).
[sarcasm] Every bit as wonderful as it always was. [/sarcasm] Not especially great. Evolution and Thunderbird still beat the pants off it, at least for me (although I credit a lot of my problems to Gmail's pisspoor IMAP service).
best regards
-p.
I would also like to point out that Konqueror was "replaced" by Dolphin, which in my opinion was a bad decision. I enjoyed all the things in Konqueror's filemanagement profile like tabbed browsing, and the ability to open Konsole pointed to the current location in an easily accessible logical place. The switch to Dolphin has utterly dumbfounded me. And it's likely I just have issues with it because I don't recognize it, as is expected with something new, but I still have yet to see the logic in the switch to Dolphin in it's current form.
I completely agree, I can't stand Dolphin and don't know what was wrong with Konqueror that it needed replacement in the first place. But I'm a Krusader man myself, so I'm not exactly Dolphin's "target market."
KDE 4.0 seems all pretty, little function.
This I couldn't disagree with more. In its current (4.1 RC) form, I find the pretty to be kinda lacking, expecially for users who are used to all the bells and whistles of Compiz. It's the new backends that really have me excited for the future of KDE. Not just Plasma, although that's what you read about most, but Nepomuk, Solid, Phonon... I meant it when I said this was a total break from the past. Exciting things are happening here, we're watching the future of the free desktop being born.
I typically enjoy reading your comments and I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but I've just seen so much piss poured on KDE4 here on Slashdot that I've got to reply to someone or I'll blow my damn stack. So bear that in mind, because I'm gonna go off a little here. Nothing personal.
KDE had no credible reason for releasing it as 4.0
The KDE development team elaborated very well their reasons for releasing 4.0.0 on the schedule and in the manner that they did. This topic has been covered at least 5409 times in the last two weeks on Slashdot. Can we please move on now?
Where's Katapult? Where's Kmail/Kontact? Where's Amarok? Why is Konsole huge? Why's everything huge, including the panel, with no way to reduce it? Why is the menu so weird -- and if this is a replacement for Katapult, why can't I open it with a keystroke?
In order:
Katapult's not there anymore.
Kontact is there. I have it open on another desktop right now.
Amarok is also in the middle of a development cycle. The development version is there, the stable version hasn't magically disappeared either. It's not easy to rewrite an application to not only a new version of the DE, but a new version of the underlying frameworks and a new version of the widget set. It's hard hard hard hard work. You could help. Or at least shut up and let them work.
Konsole looks pretty much the same to me as it always has. Yakuake, btw, has improved dramatically.
You can change the panel size, this functionality has been there now for months.
If you don't like the new menu, use the old one. It's still there.
The new menu is not a replacement for Katapult. Alt-F2 is the replacement for Katapult. Which is good. Katapult had more bugs than a badger's asshole.
major apps like Konqueror, Kopete, and Amarok simply crash, and frequently.
I don't use Konqueror, so I can't speak to that. I have had Kopete open on this machine for weeks on end, it has not once crashed out on me. Not once. The development version of Amarok is just that, a development version. Expect it to crash. On the flip side, Kontact puked all over the place on a daily basis for me on KDE 3.5, and it's much more stable now. The crashes I do get regularly are KTorrent (when exiting the program, and also when trying to remove >3 torrents from the list), and sometimes Plasma when I log out. Bugs have been filed. I have no doubt that they will be fixed. Have you filed bugs on your crashes?
Listen, I'm not trying to get bitchy here, but seriously, can we all tone down the vitriol here? Considering that KDE4 is a complete break on all levels from KDE3 (both in the sense of "a break from the paradigm" and "compatibility break"), I'm thrilled with how quickly problems have been spotted and fixed (sometimes to the point where the problem I noticed in the morning has been fixed by dusk).
What a ridiculous conspiracy theory! Everyone knows it's really Shub-Internet!
You've already got it. It is called KDE 3.5.x. Why can't other people have what they want too? Next caller, please.
2000 called, it wants its talking points back. Add/Remove has been part of Ubuntu since (I think) 5.04.
Oh, and they want to play movies do they? Surprise! There's already a program included in every single desktop Linux distro that I've ever seen!
Installing software on Linux is a goddamned pain. Why can't I just download an installer and run it? It could check for prerequisites and pull them itself.
Oh for... Okay everyone, one more time here before I give up. You can just download an installer and run it. Once more with feeling: You can just download an installer and run it. You will know it when you find it, because the filename will end in .deb. It will check for prerequisites and if possible pull them itself.
Am I speaking English here?
Rebuttal the first: If you are doing things like hand-rolling multiple versions of libraries or using non-distro repositories or building rocket ships, you are kinda expected to be an advanced enough user to know how to do those things or at least know enough to go find out before blindly typing "make install". I think we're pretty far outside the realm of "common computing tasks" here.
Rebuttal the second: I think you're full of shit. When did this happen to you?
Flip that idea around for a minute. "The for-profit model has a built in drawback in that once the people controlling a project decide that making a change is not a priority, you the user are FUCKED."
That holds true across the board, with any OS on any platform. Mac users have convinced themselves they don't need games, and Windows users have convinced themselves they don't really need a working security model. Next troll please!
I didn't say "flawless," I said "better than anything else anyone's come up with to date." I have had similar issues in the past (if rarely), and it can be a PITA, and if you do get into trouble it can be hard to get back out. These things are true, they are problems. But they are not problems with apt. They're problems with sloppy packaging; apt is trying to do what it's told, and even if there are conflicts, 99.8% of the time you will be warned about them before any actions take place.
Also, every package comes with the email address of its maintainer. When running into problems like the ones you mentioned, that should be the first stop for help. "Hey, I'm trying to install your package $FOO, it says it needs library $BAR version x.xx, and the newest version in the repository is x.xx-2. WTF?" Pulling from unofficial repositories or hand-compiling libraries is a great way to fuck yourself.
So no, not foolproof. But really, pretty damn close.
For Debian, but what about the rest of the world?
Well, what can I say, the rest of the world is doing it wrong ;) IIRC (hopefully someone will chime in on this point), you can even configure your RHEL/Fedora/CentOS system to use apt instead of rpm.
Now, what does RPM do? package stuff up into directories. Gee, how is that defined? By the developers! Is there a common code of conduct (again, I don't know) for packaging apps? *snip*
That's a good question. The answer is "kinda, but it does (as you noted) have some slight variations by distro)." But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, because modern systems are smart enough to look for those files in multiple places. For instance, I can run /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin commands by simply typing the name of the command, without having to give a path, because bash is smart enough to know that that's where the executables live.
A fine example of fallacious reasoning.
You're right, and that's why I gave a real rebuttal directly afterward.
I do agree that Synaptic suffers from "yellow pages syndrome," where it can be hard to find something if you don't already have an idea of where/what it is. Add/Remove Programs attempts to fill this hole, but it would be nice if there was a better selection of index applications for it, there's a lot of stuff that's not listed there.
But all that having been said, you pretty much lost me on "download a windows program." From where? How do you find it? How do you know it's safe? How do you upgrade it later? How do you ensure that it plays nicely with the rest of the system? With apt, all these things have been done for you. As noted above, I agree that there are issues yet to be addressed, but the free world is so far ahead of proprietary software in the area of installing and managing components of your system in a consistent and sensible manner that it's pretty ridiculous to even try to make the comparison.
And again (this is a drum that I love to beat), why is that? It is because of freedom. Freedom is the killer app, apt is just a interface for it.
but I don't think anyone ever promised you a goddamn thing.
Go back to Windows or buy a Mac and leave the rest of us the fuck alone. You're all set.