As for my feedback, I'd like to see more features from process explorer available. The tool provides _a lot_ for detailed information about a process: - the tcp/ip connections the process has open. - the libraries it has loaded - the environment variables the process has. - the security context of the process (think selinux) - the strings the process contains (both image and memory) - the threads it has open, including their starting point. - the cpu and memory usage per process.
The Linux way isn't perfect either because running applications do not benefit from the update. Such an application will effectively use the old DLL until it is restarted giving a false sense of security. If an affected service is not restarted, then the computer is still at risk.
this is a realy good point, and most people seam to forget that. After running updates, you can use this command to see which processes use old library versions:
lsof | grep inode=
I'd wish linux update tools/applets would check this too...
Together with puppet one really needs to look into Kiosk. This allows you to lock down the configuration of KDE applications, and it's *one* of the reasons KDE is used in enterprise deployments instead of GNOME.
Just three days ago at FUDCon, I saw someone try to use KGPG on their GNOME desktop. He had localized GNOME in Dutch, and when KGPG pops up...everything was in English
And that's something this distribution could have addressed already. The package manager knows the language setting too.
Yes... now you have a big, black box that has to be as big as the area you want icons in. Wow... that's so much more awesome.:)
The plasma developers are aware of the fact that a black box is ugly,
but they like to implement the applet background mechanism in a generic clean way first.
Not something hackish which causes compatibility issues later.
The idea is the following:
The folderview can be set as central desktop applet *by design*, to have the old situation if you like.
In KDE 4.2 (hopefully earlier) the background image can be set for it.
You can have multiple folder views.
Each one can display a different folder.
So instead of grouping icons yourself in various corners by theme,
you can have multiple folder views for your desktop, documents and download folder.
I think it will be far more powerful then grouping icons yourself.
Since the desktop background is just an applet, you could technically use every other applet for it.
Like an animated applet or 3D planet instead of a boring wallpaper:)
Plasma gives you all the building blocks to build your own desktop.
The background, panels, taskbar and systray are all applets.
Eveything can all be torn apart, replaced, and put together as you like.
How is that for a change?
On the developer side, everything is scriptable too.
So nothing stops you from making a desktop visualisation or taskbar in python:)
API's are provided to get the required data for the taskbar, window, clocks, icons, rss feeds, devices and more.
That avoids code duplication and makes it really easy to write applets.
You could imagine it takes time to implement all building blocks properly.
With the details I sketch here, can you imagine what would be possible in the future?
So we need some patience here. Plasma is going to rock!
Imagine the X.org, Gtk and GNOME release at the same date. You end up with integration issues because Gtk or GNOME were not tested on the latest stable X.org release during the alpha/beta development cycle. and visa versa. From this perspective the total opposite is better.
KDE has historically been able to make incremental releases on time with a 9 month scheme. Now that they are forced to a 6 month scheme some developers find themselves stuck between handling user bugreports and pushing new features before the next period of feature-freeze/bug-fixing settles in. This isn't helping development at all.
Forcing pressure on developers doesn't mean you'll get what you want. In a worse case scenario you're disrupting the eco system and slowing down development instead. Better marketing, worse products. How is that going to help?
Sometimes I think Linux would be better off with one option instead of many.
On what information did you base this desision? It's not like Mac OS or Windows provide one way. Last time I checked, the Windows platform offers you standard widgets (=notepad look), MFC, ComCtl, VLC (Borland), Windows Forms (.Net), WPF (.Net3) and each Microsoft app has it's own toolbars again.
MacOS gives you the choice between Cocoa and Carbon, and only gained a consistent look as of Mac OS 10.5.
I'd suggest keeping both Gtk and Qt because each option obviously attracts a different group of developers. With initiatives like this, Linux could offer something then far more consistent this.
You're making a simple math equation, but 1 + 1 is not always 2.
If you combine the developers working on GNOME and KDE you won't end up with one project that's twice as productive. In fact, it will be very unproductive because each set of developers have vastly different vision.
Two parallel projects keep each other motivated to become the best one. It also creates playground to implement new features. Sometimes GNOME might not like an idea because it's to controversial. When the developer can implement it in KDE and get successful with it, GNOME may copy the feature. -- and visa versa. So no productivity is really lost here.
Merging two two commercial companies gives a similar problem. Sometimes managers refrain from merging two companies after all when it becomes clear the cultures are too different. It would cut the productivity making the merger useless; the added value of merging the companies would be lost by the lower productivity.
I think he's referring to things like "The Gimp," everything that starts with a lower-case "g" or "k" (why call it "gedit" instead of just edit? Yes, I know, to point out that it runs under Gnome, but most people outside the Linux community don't care about that difference), "Xine, (Media Player actually describes what the software does)" "K3b (I would imagine more people get the burn reference with Nero than with KDE Burn Baby Burn)," and so many more that are even weirder and more obscure.
Yeah, and that's why people choose to use Nero, WinAMP, Norton Ghost, McAfee and Irfanview instead? And how descriptive are names like Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher and Visio? In your point of view those products couldn't be a success, but yet they are. Think about it, and you'll see their names don't say anything.
Different market, same issue: why do you order a Pasoa, Piña Colada, or Bacardi? Like their names tell you what the product tastes like. You either heared about them, or tried them yourself A commonly shared opinion makes "Bacardi" sound cool but in reality it is no different then "Pacardi" yet that sounds strange.
It's not the names that matter. The branding does. All those products above have well established brandings. K3B and Xine also have it.
many of the developer tools MS puts out are top notch as well, something OSS is still 10 years behind on - easy to use gui development, and i say that as someone who programmed in wxpython for 2 years solid on both windows and freebsd, and has since moved to a windows shop. no doubt there will be some out their who will equate this with VB programmers and the usual snobbery, but the truth is i can put together a windows apps many times faster and just as robust as anything currently out there int he linux world.
Agreed, Microsoft makes good development tools. And a powerful GUI designer helps if you need to create some dialogs fast.
I think you missed some OSS solutions though, judging from your wx reference. Take a look at this Qt demo video (yay, no reading!), and compare it with the VS.Net solutions. There is a reason KDE has so many apps, Qt makes it possible to develop applications just as fast and customers drool over the API's.;-)
KDE is important for Trolltech and Qt
on
Nokia Buys Trolltech
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You're missing an important detail here. KDE is important for Trolltech and the continued development of Qt. The CEO of Trolltech explained a few weeks ago in fact that Trolltech became a successful company because of KDE, not despite KDE.
Trolltech profits from the tons of feedback and publicity they get through KDE. In their first years they didn't have to do marketing at all! Qt has credibility in the commercial world because a complete desktop environment is built upon it.
New Qt features or API's are pushed to their limits due to their immense use by KDE. This improves the overall quality of Qt, ability to reach enterprise customers, and we're back to square 1.
Destroying that upward spiral would hurt Qt development. Trolltech knows this, and so does Nokia.
* KDE also benefits from the relation with Trolltech, since they get an enterprise-quality toolkit in return. Trolltech also does the boring stuff which is typical for toolkit development (they can pay people to work on it!), and sponsors some KDE core-developers full-time.
What's even worse is that MS removed the * hack from IE6 that people were using to 'rebuild' IE6 to be more standards-compliant.
Well they had to.. The abuse of IE 6 bugs in the star-html selectors is so heavy that pages would break each time the IE 7 team fixed a bug. Standard-compliant web pages are filled with hacks like these:
* html... { height: 1%; }
Do you really want that to be rendered at 1% in IE 7? That's what your code really states, and it's what IE 7 will render because they fixed the expanding box problem. That bug is abused heavily to enforce containment for the floats in IE 6, since IE 6 magically enlarges the box if is too small.
I haven't had any real problems when the star-html parser bug was removed. IE 7 renders almost everything like Firefox because Microsoft fixed most of the bugs. There is one thing that I did have problems with, which is missing support for:after. This is typically used to enforce containment for standard-compliant browsers.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to work arround that problem. A min-height of 0 will also trigger "hasLayout", and cause the box to contain all floats. So a nice way to clear floats without structural markup becomes:
bet that you're using FF.. Nope, it was konqueror and I was checking some news sites. Nothing fancy we didn't do in the 90's. Opening a tab is next to impossible due heavy I/O in the background. With 1 GB of ram swap wasn't the issue either, and a AMD 1800 should be able to handle something as simple as opening a tab. The I/O hinders interactive foreground tasks this bad nowadays.:-|
Call me stupid, but the Linux desktop already crawls.
There used to be a time I could download 5 shared files, burn a CD and watch a DivX movie at the same time. That was with Slackware 9.0 and Linux 2.4.20.
Nowadays it takes my browser 2 seconds to open a *tab*, and another 2 seconds per website. This happened because there was continuous I/O activity in the background. After the I/O completed everything was back to normal. Bottom line: every serious I/O activity causes the desktop to crawl.
It's still the same machine (AMD 1800 and DMA-enabled) but interactivity my Linux system had is unmatched by the recent kernels. The problem is too many commercial developers care about server performance alone, or test desktop performance with their quad-core raid array configuration. Patches get rejected too when they affect server performance.
I'm honestly not surprised people want a change here, or even start suggesting a fork.
I think what I really want is a third professional, commercial operating system that will run my software and light a fire under MS and Apple I believe they call that option Red Hat Enterprise Linux:P
If they managed to compile KDElibs without SSL, and if that's something KDElibs allows you to do (easily), then it is not their fault for custom-compiling something, it is your fault for not specifying SSL as a dependency. I'd you've got a point here. Note however that I don't depend directly on openSSL. I only use a class called "KSSL". Whatever it uses internally shouldn't be my problem. When you write a Java app you can say you need JRE 1.2. Not JRE 1.2 compiled with String, Thread and SSL support. Not having a stable platform to develop on makes it more difficult to write stable software.
What you see there are the true dependencies of the application. All others are only used indirectly and waste linker startup time if you have them hard linked.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it long past time it be updated and possibly the correct one be used?
Bill Gates hasn't worked at Microsoft in years, and really has almost no involvement with the company any longer.
You mean we need a Ballmer version of the icon with Borg implants? :-)
Awesome news, thank you for your work on this area!
I'm unfortunately short of time to do my share part, but perhaps others would be able to if they know about this feature. :-)
As for my feedback, I'd like to see more features from process explorer available. The tool provides _a lot_ for detailed information about a process:
- the tcp/ip connections the process has open.
- the libraries it has loaded
- the environment variables the process has.
- the security context of the process (think selinux)
- the strings the process contains (both image and memory)
- the threads it has open, including their starting point.
- the cpu and memory usage per process.
See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127728
Oh and other nice features of it:
- killing an app by pressing delete
- a brief highlight of a row on process creation and destruction.
Could you consider some of these points? It would be yet a reason less to open a terminal, and rival `top` :-)
1) does it force the use of RPM? Some prefer DEB, or even ebuilds.
Yes, because it produces a openSUSE derivative.
Fortunately, openSUSE also comes with zypper as high level tool. It's quite like apt is a high level tool to dpkg and DEB packages.
For a comparison:
Zypper is also just as fast as apt-get. So it may not be that bad after all. :-)
Secondly the openSUSE build service allows you to search for an insane number of packages in community / addon repositories.
The Linux way isn't perfect either because running applications do not benefit from the update. Such an application will effectively use the old DLL until it is restarted giving a false sense of security. If an affected service is not restarted, then the computer is still at risk.
this is a realy good point, and most people seam to forget that. After running updates, you can use this command to see which processes use old library versions:
lsof | grep inode=
I'd wish linux update tools/applets would check this too...
Just looked at some screenshots of KDE4. It looked like Vista.
Interestingly enough the designers of Oxygen didn't look at Vista at all, and implemented their own vision of a nice desktop style :-p
If black == vista, then yes, almost everything can look like vista..
KDE 4.2.2 will be released in a few days and still it will not contain KDevelop/Quanta/K3B.
All 4.2.x releases only contain bugfixes. They won't include new features, let alone new applications.
There are no dates given beyond KDE 4.2.2.
*kuch* http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_3.4_Release_Schedule ..?
Together with puppet one really needs to look into Kiosk. This allows you to lock down the configuration of KDE applications, and it's *one* of the reasons KDE is used in enterprise deployments instead of GNOME.
Just three days ago at FUDCon, I saw someone try to use KGPG on their GNOME desktop. He had localized GNOME in Dutch, and when KGPG pops up...everything was in English
And that's something this distribution could have addressed already. The package manager knows the language setting too.
Someone else already did this as well. :-)
The plasma developers are aware of the fact that a black box is ugly, but they like to implement the applet background mechanism in a generic clean way first. Not something hackish which causes compatibility issues later.
The idea is the following:
So instead of grouping icons yourself in various corners by theme, you can have multiple folder views for your desktop, documents and download folder. I think it will be far more powerful then grouping icons yourself.
Since the desktop background is just an applet, you could technically use every other applet for it. Like an animated applet or 3D planet instead of a boring wallpaper :)
Plasma gives you all the building blocks to build your own desktop. The background, panels, taskbar and systray are all applets. Eveything can all be torn apart, replaced, and put together as you like.
How is that for a change?
On the developer side, everything is scriptable too. So nothing stops you from making a desktop visualisation or taskbar in python :)
API's are provided to get the required data for the taskbar, window, clocks, icons, rss feeds, devices and more.
That avoids code duplication and makes it really easy to write applets.
You could imagine it takes time to implement all building blocks properly. With the details I sketch here, can you imagine what would be possible in the future? So we need some patience here. Plasma is going to rock!
Imagine the X.org, Gtk and GNOME release at the same date. You end up with integration issues because Gtk or GNOME were not tested on the latest stable X.org release during the alpha/beta development cycle. and visa versa. From this perspective the total opposite is better.
KDE has historically been able to make incremental releases on time with a 9 month scheme. Now that they are forced to a 6 month scheme some developers find themselves stuck between handling user bugreports and pushing new features before the next period of feature-freeze/bug-fixing settles in. This isn't helping development at all.
Forcing pressure on developers doesn't mean you'll get what you want. In a worse case scenario you're disrupting the eco system and slowing down development instead. Better marketing, worse products. How is that going to help?
On what information did you base this desision? It's not like Mac OS or Windows provide one way. Last time I checked, the Windows platform offers you standard widgets (=notepad look), MFC, ComCtl, VLC (Borland), Windows Forms (.Net), WPF (.Net3) and each Microsoft app has it's own toolbars again.
MacOS gives you the choice between Cocoa and Carbon, and only gained a consistent look as of Mac OS 10.5.
I'd suggest keeping both Gtk and Qt because each option obviously attracts a different group of developers. With initiatives like this, Linux could offer something then far more consistent this.
You're making a simple math equation, but 1 + 1 is not always 2.
If you combine the developers working on GNOME and KDE you won't end up with one project that's twice as productive. In fact, it will be very unproductive because each set of developers have vastly different vision.
Two parallel projects keep each other motivated to become the best one. It also creates playground to implement new features. Sometimes GNOME might not like an idea because it's to controversial. When the developer can implement it in KDE and get successful with it, GNOME may copy the feature. -- and visa versa. So no productivity is really lost here.
Merging two two commercial companies gives a similar problem. Sometimes managers refrain from merging two companies after all when it becomes clear the cultures are too different. It would cut the productivity making the merger useless; the added value of merging the companies would be lost by the lower productivity.
Yeah, and that's why people choose to use Nero, WinAMP, Norton Ghost, McAfee and Irfanview instead? And how descriptive are names like Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher and Visio? In your point of view those products couldn't be a success, but yet they are. Think about it, and you'll see their names don't say anything.
Different market, same issue: why do you order a Pasoa, Piña Colada, or Bacardi? Like their names tell you what the product tastes like. You either heared about them, or tried them yourself A commonly shared opinion makes "Bacardi" sound cool but in reality it is no different then "Pacardi" yet that sounds strange.
It's not the names that matter. The branding does. All those products above have well established brandings. K3B and Xine also have it.
Agreed, Microsoft makes good development tools. And a powerful GUI designer helps if you need to create some dialogs fast.
I think you missed some OSS solutions though, judging from your wx reference. Take a look at this Qt demo video (yay, no reading!), and compare it with the VS.Net solutions. There is a reason KDE has so many apps, Qt makes it possible to develop applications just as fast and customers drool over the API's. ;-)
You're missing an important detail here. KDE is important for Trolltech and the continued development of Qt. The CEO of Trolltech explained a few weeks ago in fact that Trolltech became a successful company because of KDE, not despite KDE.
Trolltech profits from the tons of feedback and publicity they get through KDE. In their first years they didn't have to do marketing at all! Qt has credibility in the commercial world because a complete desktop environment is built upon it. New Qt features or API's are pushed to their limits due to their immense use by KDE. This improves the overall quality of Qt, ability to reach enterprise customers, and we're back to square 1.
Destroying that upward spiral would hurt Qt development. Trolltech knows this, and so does Nokia.
* KDE also benefits from the relation with Trolltech, since they get an enterprise-quality toolkit in return. Trolltech also does the boring stuff which is typical for toolkit development (they can pay people to work on it!), and sponsors some KDE core-developers full-time.
Well they had to.. The abuse of IE 6 bugs in the star-html selectors is so heavy that pages would break each time the IE 7 team fixed a bug. Standard-compliant web pages are filled with hacks like these:
* html ... { height: 1%; }
Do you really want that to be rendered at 1% in IE 7? That's what your code really states, and it's what IE 7 will render because they fixed the expanding box problem. That bug is abused heavily to enforce containment for the floats in IE 6, since IE 6 magically enlarges the box if is too small.
I haven't had any real problems when the star-html parser bug was removed. IE 7 renders almost everything like Firefox because Microsoft fixed most of the bugs. There is one thing that I did have problems with, which is missing support for :after. This is typically used to enforce containment for standard-compliant browsers.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to work arround that problem. A min-height of 0 will also trigger "hasLayout", and cause the box to contain all floats. So a nice way to clear floats without structural markup becomes:
Yes, and note the *+html selector. :-)
Call me stupid, but the Linux desktop already crawls.
There used to be a time I could download 5 shared files, burn a CD and watch a DivX movie at the same time. That was with Slackware 9.0 and Linux 2.4.20.
Nowadays it takes my browser 2 seconds to open a *tab*, and another 2 seconds per website. This happened because there was continuous I/O activity in the background. After the I/O completed everything was back to normal. Bottom line: every serious I/O activity causes the desktop to crawl.
It's still the same machine (AMD 1800 and DMA-enabled) but interactivity my Linux system had is unmatched by the recent kernels. The problem is too many commercial developers care about server performance alone, or test desktop performance with their quad-core raid array configuration. Patches get rejected too when they affect server performance.
I'm honestly not surprised people want a change here, or even start suggesting a fork.
You are changing the EULA of your latest product. cancel or allow? :-)
That's 14, not 35 or 30! ;-)
What you see there are the true dependencies of the application. All others are only used indirectly and waste linker startup time if you have them hard linked.