The usual pep talk. Yet, most people who actually read kde.org are the KDE developers and rarely KDE users.
That's actually why in my gp post I repeated it twice: KDE 3.5 as perceived by many people is not monolithic product (a-la GNOME) and is made of many part developed by many independent parties. Core KDE4 might have being ready already in 4.0 times. Yet, rest of the applications were in early alpha state.
In fact, I have used KDE 4.0 and can attest that Alt-F2 minicli worked and xterm/bash/vim was also running under KDE 4.0 without problems;) Core stuff already worked. But rest of it - what actually people perceive as "KDE" wasn't yet there.
I'm not going to defect KDE folks for their pep talk (pep talk == bad thing), yet nobody was forced (except for Fedora users) to upgrade to KDE4. Most people made a choice to try the 100% new technology. Alpha quality was only to be expected.
This is off-topic, but apparently you never dug Mac OS X keyboard preferences. Mac OS X is much much more keyboard friendly then any Windows ever was (probably with exception of Win 3.x which still tried to follow the aforementioned UI guidelines).
That was actually surprising to myself - when I first started with Mac OS X 10.3
They had to publish to give new API broader testing. Unlike centric GNOME, KDE is composed of many application written by different people for different purposes. Yet most distros bundle all the stuff together, completely blending line between KDE.org developed stuff and 3rd party stuff.
That's why KDE4 had to be released earlier - to let other developers to catch up with new interfaces and new functionality. Switch is rather big: both KDE and Qt got a elaborate rewrite. So KDE developer simply acknowledge that biggest challenge is not core KDE4 itself - but all the application people write for it. Early release of 4.0 was targeted precisely at developers and in fact release notes claimed nothing else but "stabilized interface for KDE 4.x series".
What GP said is pretty much the rules of UI design devised many years ago by Microsoft and IBM. It's just the both never followed their own UI design rules. Actually M$ has quite strict internal UI design rules - yet they are to accommodate disabled, not to improve overall usability.
Apple generally follows style and common sense. Unlike M$/etc who are driven by business logic of max profit, Apple folks always try to make computer they would want to own themselves. That's why they experiment more - and invent more - than the rest of industry.
In that sense KDE4 is much closer to Mac OS X (while e.g. GNOME is closer to M$Windows). KDE folks develop (on their spare time) system which they themselves use on daily basis. There are no politics nor business pressure. That's why they are slow - but generally end result is much better than rest of the crop.
I've given up again after getting about 1/6 of the way down this page [interlinked.org] and seeing the diagram detailing movement commands. ctrl+e, ctrl+d, and ctrl+f to move various portions of a page up?
WTF. I'm pretty pissed myself that most such VIM tutorial are written by "vi" old farts. Forget about the darn thing - it is a copy past from ancient vi-compatible "vimtutor".
Learning VIM is relatively easy. Arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn - unlike vi - work. Pressing F1 as one would expect brings help screen. Searching help is trivial: type ":help something" (do not press Enter yet!) and press ^D - default competition key - and VIM would show you all help topics which have "something" in their names. Check output of ":set all" to see available configuration options. Check also out VIM Wiki. Generally, VIM documentation is written by and for human being, in contrast to Emacs documentation written by and for RMS or other aliens.
If you have real questions... Well you can always ask me;) As my/. homepage (link in the header of the post) I have my own vim blog which was initially started as a way to preserve and document my own.vimrc. Anonymous comment posting enabled.
I never actually learned VIM - simply started using it, only knowing that Ins switches between insert and command mode. Trying to type text in command mode sometimes can be really funny.
In the times when I was starting with Linux, friend gave the same advice to me. The same way I was forced to use Linux (business reasons), I forced myself to work with Emacs for two weeks and then VIM for two weeks. After spending two weeks with Emacs I felt myself pathetic. After spending one week with VIM I suddenly felt myself empowered.
It really all boils down to personal tastes. If you like GUI interactive editing - then go with Emacs. If you like text editor to not to bother you and simply obediently do whatever you are commanding it - then go with VIM.
I'm using pretty happily KDE 3.5.9 on Sidux for past couple of month and I haven't seen single crash yet. And this is plain Debian unstable aka Sid. Frankly, I have seen single crash in KDE 3.5. In KDE 3.0-3.2 they were happening daily/weekly, but in KDE 3.5 it is all better.
Major complain about KDE on RedHat was always that they adjust all system tools to GNOME conventions. That means generally in past I had to hack RH's KDE settings heavily to play nice with rest of distro. I had to create scripts so that KDE could properly launch some application, since on RH they have GNOME compatible names. Integration with FireFox/Thunderbird was always problem because they are always compiled in RH with GNOME compatibility mode.
I see Fedora quite rarely now - can't say what are problems now - I'm mostly on something Debian/based or SUSE. (On SUSE KDE always worked better - I never had the problems of RH.)
And even more so: RedHat was always openly supporting GNOME and was always shipping half backed KDE. I have experience that starting from RH 6.x times and it didn't changed a bit in RHL or Fedora times.
For good KDE experience, try some native KDE distro. If you like bleeding edge try Debian-based, KDE centric "Sidux" (which is what I use atm).
Porting unix software to Windows instead of improving Cygwin to run these apps without porting is an awful waste of time.
CygWin??? Have you EVER tried to actually use CygWin for anything serious????? Their imitation of *nix is at best "sucks".
Even M$ own "Unix Services for Windows" is on average better.
I had to use CygWin for 2.5 years and and find it most retarded and worthless effort ever. Of course for many commercial companies this is godsend: tapping into all the power of Linux tool chain in Outlook-compatible environment. Yet, CygWin has piles and piles of problems, starting from very poor overall performance to major breakage of IO.
P.S. I had this funny experience. I have installed on my desktop VMware and guest Linux. Under Linux the project was compiled in ~10 minutes. Under CygWin the process takes ~30 minutes. Yes, CygWin on real hardware is at least three times slower than Linux on virtual hardware.
Have no clue what Etherape is, but I have KDE4 installed on my Windows solely for KMahjong: SVG based graphics is simply awesome. Ironically it is one of the best looking Mahjong for Windows. And it is best of the best free Mahjongs available on Windows.
You apparently never tried to make even simple application in GTK. Anything more complicated than HelloWorld is complicated as hell. Why actually most GNOME applications switched to Glade to help generate code.
Qt library is magnitudes easier to program for.
The only problem - in past - with Qt was that it used GPL license. GTK was preferred because it is covered by LGPL allowing commercial applications to link against it. This is more than ironic and flies right into the face of many RedHat's (historically major GNOME supporter) openness claims.
But somehow I feel that the comment "failed experiment" still holds.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if KDE folks would rerelease some later KDE4 build as KDE5 - simply because of amount of negative press KDE4 already generate.
But it seem that it will not happen fast: many projects right now only consider a rewrite for KDE4/Qt4. Many forget that KDE is not a monolithic, corporate supported project like GNOME. KDE is pretty much bunch of folks who like to code. Only relative minority of them are employed by TrollTech (now Nokia).
The situation reminds me a lot the case of kHTML: everybody said that devels should lower their ambitions and simply adopt gecko. Yet they persisted and wrote what is now regarded as one of the top implementations of HTML/JavaScript engine.
Honestly to some extent I like KDE4 and have it installed since past summer on my Linux. Though many things are still missing and clearly not finished, it is quite usable.
... any software can be described as much-criticized...
It's much criticized, because some top tier distros flushed it on heads of innocent users.
KDE folks said that from beginning: KDE3 works perfectly, it's a good opportunity to fix long term problems by rewriting KDE4 from scratch.
Regardless of whether many people are happy with the changes, you'll find a group that is very vocal in its discontent.
Normally that are people who are unwilling to change anything in their default Linux install. If their got half backed KDE4 instead of properly working KDE3 - it's not really fault of KDE folks.
I personally refrain from KDE4 comments. In a way it works for me under Sidux for past 6+ months. It's just my requirements for *nix system are very minimal: bash, vim and gcc. From KDE4 I use handful of widgets, new desktop and Alt-F2. And that's it.
Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.
From the top of my head. Try to hit Ctrl-L once: widgets in KDE4 can't voluntary change their size. To allow resizing/etc, Ctrl-L is used to toggle the "Lock Widgets" mode.
Long term solution is of course to set font to monospace. Or even better - report bug and ask KDE folks to fix it...:|
Learn some good *nix editor - vim or emacs - and you would be rewarded in long term by ability to work under essentially any *nix.
Or in other words, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
I personally also love Borland's IDEs and Notepad++. I feel very nostalgic about them. Many thousands locs were written in them. Yet, after going (Linux and) VIM, I simply can't go back to the editors: one can't be efficient in GUI editor as in batch oriented VIM.
... there would be only kgbd (if test $LOGNAME = "vputin") or fsbd (for the rest of populace) daemon running in background. Though it's fsbd is plain symbolic link to kgbd, the name of daemon defines whether you are being spied upon or other way round.
P.S. They will not do it. KGB already controls all types of communications in Rasha. That is more reliable than tinkering with OS.
Slashdot Mirror
The usual pep talk. Yet, most people who actually read kde.org are the KDE developers and rarely KDE users.
That's actually why in my gp post I repeated it twice: KDE 3.5 as perceived by many people is not monolithic product (a-la GNOME) and is made of many part developed by many independent parties. Core KDE4 might have being ready already in 4.0 times. Yet, rest of the applications were in early alpha state.
In fact, I have used KDE 4.0 and can attest that Alt-F2 minicli worked and xterm/bash/vim was also running under KDE 4.0 without problems ;) Core stuff already worked. But rest of it - what actually people perceive as "KDE" wasn't yet there.
I'm not going to defect KDE folks for their pep talk (pep talk == bad thing), yet nobody was forced (except for Fedora users) to upgrade to KDE4. Most people made a choice to try the 100% new technology. Alpha quality was only to be expected.
This is off-topic, but apparently you never dug Mac OS X keyboard preferences. Mac OS X is much much more keyboard friendly then any Windows ever was (probably with exception of Win 3.x which still tried to follow the aforementioned UI guidelines).
That was actually surprising to myself - when I first started with Mac OS X 10.3
After Googling for 0.5s - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343 and also google for "Full Keyboard Access".
They had to publish to give new API broader testing. Unlike centric GNOME, KDE is composed of many application written by different people for different purposes. Yet most distros bundle all the stuff together, completely blending line between KDE.org developed stuff and 3rd party stuff.
That's why KDE4 had to be released earlier - to let other developers to catch up with new interfaces and new functionality. Switch is rather big: both KDE and Qt got a elaborate rewrite. So KDE developer simply acknowledge that biggest challenge is not core KDE4 itself - but all the application people write for it. Early release of 4.0 was targeted precisely at developers and in fact release notes claimed nothing else but "stabilized interface for KDE 4.x series".
KDE4's control center has a search function, if that what you are asking for.
Xfce is nice too and I'm using it on my aging lappie.
Yet for work I prefer IceWM. It's very easy to configure and one can configure pretty much everything.
KDE4 starts on my WS in about 10s. IceWM - 0s (below error margin).
When icon bounces - they are confused. This is whole of point of counter-productive eye-candy.
But if people performed some action and icon started bouncing, pretty much everybody guesses right first time where to click and what to expect next.
Still. It was very funny when people said that it is much improved compared to Vista.
Frankly I OTLed the whole two minutes.
What GP said is pretty much the rules of UI design devised many years ago by Microsoft and IBM. It's just the both never followed their own UI design rules. Actually M$ has quite strict internal UI design rules - yet they are to accommodate disabled, not to improve overall usability.
Apple generally follows style and common sense. Unlike M$/etc who are driven by business logic of max profit, Apple folks always try to make computer they would want to own themselves. That's why they experiment more - and invent more - than the rest of industry.
In that sense KDE4 is much closer to Mac OS X (while e.g. GNOME is closer to M$Windows). KDE folks develop (on their spare time) system which they themselves use on daily basis. There are no politics nor business pressure. That's why they are slow - but generally end result is much better than rest of the crop.
I second.
Yet, DRM very likely requires that executables are signed - to prevent cracking.
Normally to run program with invalid/absent certificate you simply need to tell Windows "OK" when it barks.
I've given up again after getting about 1/6 of the way down this page [interlinked.org] and seeing the diagram detailing movement commands. ctrl+e, ctrl+d, and ctrl+f to move various portions of a page up?
WTF. I'm pretty pissed myself that most such VIM tutorial are written by "vi" old farts. Forget about the darn thing - it is a copy past from ancient vi-compatible "vimtutor".
Learning VIM is relatively easy. Arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn - unlike vi - work. Pressing F1 as one would expect brings help screen. Searching help is trivial: type ":help something" (do not press Enter yet!) and press ^D - default competition key - and VIM would show you all help topics which have "something" in their names. Check output of ":set all" to see available configuration options. Check also out VIM Wiki. Generally, VIM documentation is written by and for human being, in contrast to Emacs documentation written by and for RMS or other aliens.
If you have real questions... Well you can always ask me ;) As my /. homepage (link in the header of the post) I have my own vim blog which was initially started as a way to preserve and document my own .vimrc. Anonymous comment posting enabled.
I never actually learned VIM - simply started using it, only knowing that Ins switches between insert and command mode. Trying to type text in command mode sometimes can be really funny.
In the times when I was starting with Linux, friend gave the same advice to me. The same way I was forced to use Linux (business reasons), I forced myself to work with Emacs for two weeks and then VIM for two weeks. After spending two weeks with Emacs I felt myself pathetic. After spending one week with VIM I suddenly felt myself empowered.
It really all boils down to personal tastes. If you like GUI interactive editing - then go with Emacs. If you like text editor to not to bother you and simply obediently do whatever you are commanding it - then go with VIM.
I'm using pretty happily KDE 3.5.9 on Sidux for past couple of month and I haven't seen single crash yet. And this is plain Debian unstable aka Sid. Frankly, I have seen single crash in KDE 3.5. In KDE 3.0-3.2 they were happening daily/weekly, but in KDE 3.5 it is all better.
Major complain about KDE on RedHat was always that they adjust all system tools to GNOME conventions. That means generally in past I had to hack RH's KDE settings heavily to play nice with rest of distro. I had to create scripts so that KDE could properly launch some application, since on RH they have GNOME compatible names. Integration with FireFox/Thunderbird was always problem because they are always compiled in RH with GNOME compatibility mode.
I see Fedora quite rarely now - can't say what are problems now - I'm mostly on something Debian/based or SUSE. (On SUSE KDE always worked better - I never had the problems of RH.)
So why the hell you use Fedora Rawhide then??
Rawhide is RedHat's alpha testbed.
And even more so: RedHat was always openly supporting GNOME and was always shipping half backed KDE. I have experience that starting from RH 6.x times and it didn't changed a bit in RHL or Fedora times.
For good KDE experience, try some native KDE distro. If you like bleeding edge try Debian-based, KDE centric "Sidux" (which is what I use atm).
Porting unix software to Windows instead of improving Cygwin to run these apps without porting is an awful waste of time.
CygWin??? Have you EVER tried to actually use CygWin for anything serious????? Their imitation of *nix is at best "sucks".
Even M$ own "Unix Services for Windows" is on average better.
I had to use CygWin for 2.5 years and and find it most retarded and worthless effort ever. Of course for many commercial companies this is godsend: tapping into all the power of Linux tool chain in Outlook-compatible environment. Yet, CygWin has piles and piles of problems, starting from very poor overall performance to major breakage of IO.
P.S. I had this funny experience. I have installed on my desktop VMware and guest Linux. Under Linux the project was compiled in ~10 minutes. Under CygWin the process takes ~30 minutes. Yes, CygWin on real hardware is at least three times slower than Linux on virtual hardware.
RTFA is too long, but it is probably because he is using Fedora and it switched to KDE4 in its recent release.
KDE4 atm is no replacement to KDE3.
Have no clue what Etherape is, but I have KDE4 installed on my Windows solely for KMahjong: SVG based graphics is simply awesome. Ironically it is one of the best looking Mahjong for Windows. And it is best of the best free Mahjongs available on Windows.
You apparently never tried to make even simple application in GTK. Anything more complicated than HelloWorld is complicated as hell. Why actually most GNOME applications switched to Glade to help generate code.
Qt library is magnitudes easier to program for.
The only problem - in past - with Qt was that it used GPL license. GTK was preferred because it is covered by LGPL allowing commercial applications to link against it. This is more than ironic and flies right into the face of many RedHat's (historically major GNOME supporter) openness claims.
But somehow I feel that the comment "failed experiment" still holds.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if KDE folks would rerelease some later KDE4 build as KDE5 - simply because of amount of negative press KDE4 already generate.
But it seem that it will not happen fast: many projects right now only consider a rewrite for KDE4/Qt4. Many forget that KDE is not a monolithic, corporate supported project like GNOME. KDE is pretty much bunch of folks who like to code. Only relative minority of them are employed by TrollTech (now Nokia).
The situation reminds me a lot the case of kHTML: everybody said that devels should lower their ambitions and simply adopt gecko. Yet they persisted and wrote what is now regarded as one of the top implementations of HTML/JavaScript engine.
Honestly to some extent I like KDE4 and have it installed since past summer on my Linux. Though many things are still missing and clearly not finished, it is quite usable.
It's much criticized, because some top tier distros flushed it on heads of innocent users.
KDE folks said that from beginning: KDE3 works perfectly, it's a good opportunity to fix long term problems by rewriting KDE4 from scratch.
Regardless of whether many people are happy with the changes, you'll find a group that is very vocal in its discontent.
Normally that are people who are unwilling to change anything in their default Linux install. If their got half backed KDE4 instead of properly working KDE3 - it's not really fault of KDE folks.
I personally refrain from KDE4 comments. In a way it works for me under Sidux for past 6+ months. It's just my requirements for *nix system are very minimal: bash, vim and gcc. From KDE4 I use handful of widgets, new desktop and Alt-F2. And that's it.
Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.
From the top of my head. Try to hit Ctrl-L once: widgets in KDE4 can't voluntary change their size. To allow resizing/etc, Ctrl-L is used to toggle the "Lock Widgets" mode.
Long term solution is of course to set font to monospace. Or even better - report bug and ask KDE folks to fix it... :|
Learn some good *nix editor - vim or emacs - and you would be rewarded in long term by ability to work under essentially any *nix.
Or in other words, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
I personally also love Borland's IDEs and Notepad++. I feel very nostalgic about them. Many thousands locs were written in them. Yet, after going (Linux and) VIM, I simply can't go back to the editors: one can't be efficient in GUI editor as in batch oriented VIM.
Because... we can?
Moving huge developer base tied into M$ platform isn't easy task as RedHat/RMS/etc's PR departments try to paint.
On other side, providing people on dark side the thread of salvation is always a good deed.
And as cherry topping to the Zune's EOB they need to shutdown their DRM servers along with it...
What would again prove that they do not get how to deal with customers directly.
Do not forget that Soyuz success was built in large on many past failures. But human lives were cheap in USSR...
P.S. They will not do it. KGB already controls all types of communications in Rasha. That is more reliable than tinkering with OS.