this is sort of off topic, but you have obviously never had to actually get exchange support working in a real world environment on GNOME then. or maybe you were one of the lucky few who had a half-decent experience. unfortunately right now there are no proper open source exchange clients. IMAP clients, sure. half-assed calendaring clients that mostly work with certain exchange server configurations, yes. but nothing better than that, and that doesn't cut it in the corporate world.
chasing the exchange rainbow is about as fruitful as chasing a real rainbow due to practicalities. a much more sound solution is getting people off of exchange and onto something more friendly. most companies that run exchange could do just as well with one of the alternatives out there.
but going around claiming "exchange compatibility" is just a way to lose credibility when people do their homework and check out the validity of said claim. losing credibility is not something the open source desktop needs right now.
a) it was already pretty standards complaint. apple and nokia have done a lot of work, but they also built on the mountain of work that those that went before them did. so kudos to all.
b) khtml and kjs were both already designed in a way to make the dependencies on the underlying toolkit pretty irrelevant. current kjs in kde's devel branch has no qt requirement, even. apple simply proved that the design was sound by porting it to their own toolkit (introducing a different dependency; not removing dependencies). so kudos to all.
thanks for trying to paint a picture of good guys and bad guys though. meh.
Re:Will their tools stay free?
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
actually, most of the core KDE developers don't work for Trolltech. many work for SUSE and other similar companies, are self-employed or are otherwise occupied with something else.
some of us are funded by TT, but in my case that simply means i get to do what i always did save that i don't have to have a day job.
your take on it mischaracterizes the Free Qt contract and the TrolltechKDE relationship pretty harshly. you're likely either a troll or someone who is very unhappy about KDE's success.
Re:Will their tools stay free?
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"new release" is defined in the definitions section of the contract and states that such a release must include bug fixes, performance enhancements and new features in line with an actively developed commercial C++ toolkit as gauged by other active libraries in the industry
we (KDE) have been getting faster with each release in the KDE3 series. optimization isn't exactly a new thing on our plate, but you are right that KDE4 will likely show additional improvements.
> I dont know of any company that puts money into > KDE
SUSE/Novell, Trolltech, Mandriva and Linspire all pay people to work on KDE directly, to name just four companies you probably know by name. i could also name a bunch of small you companies you don't know who each fund part of a developer to several developers, ranging from co's like kitty hooch who funds quanta developers to KDAB who does a ton of work with KDE and groupware..
actually, the rational was very carefully thought out. and i suggested that you can turn them off out of respect for the fact that you may not like them. but many other people do find them useful as they are informative and easy to read.
but here's a shocker for you, so you may wish to sit down: what you may like may not be what works for many others.
read that again until you get it and then step off your "kde developers don't think" soapbox, m'kay? not only is it tiring to read, but there's a great saying about how the best way to reveal how little you know is to open your mouth and say something about it.
anyways, people who have deployed kde in various professional and educational settings have actually asked for the mouse over tips to be extended to other elements in the panel as they tend to help their users quite a bit. in 3.5 you'll find them in use on the taskbar, the pager, the clock, the media applet and many other places. they expose additional information in a non-invasive manner.
and of course this is something that appears for a short period of time only when you put your mouse over it.
nobody requires you to personally love them, though. ergo the option to turn them off. thankfully your personal reactions (or my decisions, for that matter) don't have to ruin it for the rest of us.
Re:Exactly what is KDE, anyway?
on
Preview of KDE 3.5
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> Is KDE a window manager or a collection of > applications, or both?
KDE ships with a window manager, kwin. it's also a collection of applications that span the gammut from web browser to file manager to groupware to image viewing/editting to media playing to software development to......
it's ALSO an application development framework, and ALSO a desktop infrastructure (providing things like IPC, access to standard services, network transparent IO, etc)
> And when will they remove all those games that > no-one really plays?
when no one really plays them. =) just don't install the kdegames package. very easy =)
so you are comparing a desktop of one hardware family to a laptop of another desktop family running two wildly different versions of an operating system... and figure the difference is the desktop environment that runs on top of all that? heh.
2.0 was hobbled and very slow in many ways compared to 3.4. put them side by side for work tasks and the improvements are pretty obvious.
but for your measure here, i'd suggest loading KDE 2.0 on your IBM laptop, or 3.4 on your Ultra 1 =)
yes, we prescribe meaningful verbs whenever reasonable. you'll still find situations where 'Ok' is the best fit, but most of our dialogs do use verbs these days.
if you'd like to help police this, you're more than welcome to join the project =)
> Politics I guess is the main reason for not > doing this
no. it's because we've done it this way forever, as has the DOMINANT desktop: microsoft windows. there's little to be gained in practical usage from switching the buttons around, except to annoy users who are used to it the other way around.
i'm highly unimpressed at GNOME for having broken this otherwise consistent placement of buttons on X11 by opting for a theory that in practice is largely nascent in benefit. fortunately now Gtk+ allows you to switch those button orders at runtime in its dialogs, thanks to SUSE wanting Gtk+ apps to look proper in a KDE desktop.
> with nice and clear icons and a nice solid feel > to things.
> Have you seen a list of things that will be > removed from KDE4?
i haven't either. perhaps you could educate all of us;)
if you're afraid KDE4 will be "KDE, without the features" then perhaps you're thinking of that "SimpleKDE" fork thing or perhaps you just got wrong information.
we are certainly aiming for a more usable KDE, but not a featureless one. popular perception aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.
you can turn them off quite easily, and if you pay really close attention you might notice that they are more than "just a bigger copy of the icon you are already hovering over". this has actually proved to be amazingly useful for users who aren't intimately familiar with all of KDE/Linux's icons and apps.
well, middle clicking already has a well defined meaning throughout KDE. we could offer it as an option, but at what point does one draw the line between "odd options, but we've got them all!" and "the software is too inflexible". this seems to fall into the former category to me =)
yes, and kde has had features for years that Mac hasn't and is far more portable... so what's your point? MacOS X is great, but it's hardly the wonderland of happy fairies flitting in between magic applications of happiness that so many Mac fanatics consistently report it to be. really.
unless you consider SUSE, Novell Linux Desktop (which provides both desktops equally), Mandriva, Linspire, Xandros, Knoppix, etc, etc, etc as inconsequential "one man band" distros (well, Knoppix may still be a one person effort, not sure), then your argument is demonstrably false.
about a year and a half ago ESR claimed during a radio interview that KDE would be irrelevant by now. he basically used this exact same argument and yet.... KDE is more popular now than ever and continues to gain momentum.
i'm sure you've heard of projects like the city of Vienna?
i don't think we need to continuously break things to do this, and i also don't want to alienate our users by delivering a completely alien desktop.
if you think MacOS X introduced a bunch of "brand new ways" of doing things all at once, then i suggest you go back and compare OS9 with OSX and ignore the eye candy.
they certainly have layered in the new concepts with each release, and the initial release was still pretty mac-like. the biggest deviation (and probably their biggest mistake =) was the dock, really.
plasma will provide a number of new concepts and changes, and it will be coherent. but perhaps getting rid of application windows is a bit much right out of the gate, no?;)
of course... we have a number of usability pros around these days. within the Appeal project, which Plasma is associated with, we have 2 of them that are core members. they are a real asset.
seeing as i've been one of those people working on various usability issues within kde for some time now, it's probably safe to say that it's high on my agenda =)
btw, why does everyone on/. state the obvious, and do so rudely as if the obvious would never occur to you? bah. no wonder i dislike this site so much =P c'mon people, don't be haters! enjoy each other's company. or.... is this how you always are? in which case, please don't invite me over for dinner;)
i'm amazed you could tell all of that from those 3rd party mock ups! wow!
well, you're wrong on just about every count. while plasma itself is being written in C++, language bindings for javascript+html, python, ruby and java are all committed to (e.g. we have people to do them =). a visual designer is also on the roadmap.
as for applications not talking to each other.. well... wait a few months until there's something to play with. i think you may be impressed =)
you're right that nothing you listed is innovative. there will be lots of things that aren't innovative in plasma, such as how it will continue to use popup menus! *gasp*;)
i've commented elsewhere in this story about innovation in plasma. feel free to find it =)
and really, please hold back on the analysis until we publish something. i'm happy that people are all excited and posting this to/. every couple of weeks, but you may notice that it isn't myself (i happen to be the project lead) or even other plasma developers, just very enthused users who have probably talked to me directly on irc or elsewhere and have an idea of where it's going.
anyways.. yeah... give us a few month, m'kay? i promise i'll keep you all updated when there's something i'm content with trotting out =)
seeing as nobody's seen it yet, that's an interesting statement to make;)
right now we are working with a large number of artists who are all throwing ideas and concepts for different parts of plasma into a pot. i, and a few others from the project, go back to the artists with feedback, questions, critiques and the cycle starts over.
we've done perhaps 1 or 2 cycles thus far and have a few months more to go. the final look and feel is by FAR not decided upon. in fact, in august we'll be getting together with the artists doing Oxygen (a new theme and icon style in quiet development that is aiming to be the default in kde4) while at aKademy and banging out some hopefully hi-octane work then.
> lets not forget that we don't want to go with > too radical a change all at once
yes, i couldn't agree more!
when working out how plasma might work, i ended up at some rather radical concepts. but as you note, we can't drop some totally new way of doing everything on people.
it needs to be introduced step by step.
thus plasma will be familiar enough in its default configuration for people to transition without really noticing it from KDE3, Windows or Mac... but it will introduce subtle new concepts that will allow us to start edging in a direction that gets us out of the WIMP-jail.
the first concept is that the desktop is not a file manager view, but harmonizes with your panels.
the second concept is that the desktop and panels are meant to be first class citizens that actively enable your workflow.
i'd love to say more about it, but i don't particularly like talking about things which i can't let people play with right now (aka "vapourware") even though development is going forward at a terrific pace. i also don't like it when people snag ideas and run off with them, as has happened a few times in the last couple of years. =/
yes, that's not a final art mock up. it's like how you draw circles and squares on a [white|black]board to map out plays for a sports team? yeah, same thing.
*sigh* ever since this year's GUADEC i've heard this fallacy more and more. Red Hat defaults to GNOME, but also ships KDE. SUSE defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. NLD ships both and you choose. Debian ships both and you choose. Ubuntu has GNOME and KDE flavours. Mandriva defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix and Slackware provide KDE only. the list goes on.
as you can see, despite some people loving to claim from the roof tops that GNOME is the default desktop in Distroland, it's a falsehood.
actually, they don't all do the same thing. one is for embedded use, one is for people who like an xmms style players and another for those who like jukebox style players. then there is kscd which is for, well, playing CDs.
now, you could say that there should be one app that does everything. and that would certainly be bloatware.
Slashdot Mirror
this is sort of off topic, but you have obviously never had to actually get exchange support working in a real world environment on GNOME then. or maybe you were one of the lucky few who had a half-decent experience. unfortunately right now there are no proper open source exchange clients. IMAP clients, sure. half-assed calendaring clients that mostly work with certain exchange server configurations, yes. but nothing better than that, and that doesn't cut it in the corporate world.
chasing the exchange rainbow is about as fruitful as chasing a real rainbow due to practicalities. a much more sound solution is getting people off of exchange and onto something more friendly. most companies that run exchange could do just as well with one of the alternatives out there.
but going around claiming "exchange compatibility" is just a way to lose credibility when people do their homework and check out the validity of said claim. losing credibility is not something the open source desktop needs right now.
a) it was already pretty standards complaint. apple and nokia have done a lot of work, but they also built on the mountain of work that those that went before them did. so kudos to all.
b) khtml and kjs were both already designed in a way to make the dependencies on the underlying toolkit pretty irrelevant. current kjs in kde's devel branch has no qt requirement, even. apple simply proved that the design was sound by porting it to their own toolkit (introducing a different dependency; not removing dependencies). so kudos to all.
thanks for trying to paint a picture of good guys and bad guys though. meh.
actually, most of the core KDE developers don't work for Trolltech. many work for SUSE and other similar companies, are self-employed or are otherwise occupied with something else.
some of us are funded by TT, but in my case that simply means i get to do what i always did save that i don't have to have a day job.
your take on it mischaracterizes the Free Qt contract and the TrolltechKDE relationship pretty harshly. you're likely either a troll or someone who is very unhappy about KDE's success.
"new release" is defined in the definitions section of the contract and states that such a release must include bug fixes, performance enhancements and new features in line with an actively developed commercial C++ toolkit as gauged by other active libraries in the industry
we (KDE) have been getting faster with each release in the KDE3 series. optimization isn't exactly a new thing on our plate, but you are right that KDE4 will likely show additional improvements.
> I dont know of any company that puts money into
> KDE
SUSE/Novell, Trolltech, Mandriva and Linspire all pay people to work on KDE directly, to name just four companies you probably know by name. i could also name a bunch of small you companies you don't know who each fund part of a developer to several developers, ranging from co's like kitty hooch who funds quanta developers to KDAB who does a ton of work with KDE and groupware..
actually, the rational was very carefully thought out. and i suggested that you can turn them off out of respect for the fact that you may not like them. but many other people do find them useful as they are informative and easy to read.
but here's a shocker for you, so you may wish to sit down: what you may like may not be what works for many others.
read that again until you get it and then step off your "kde developers don't think" soapbox, m'kay? not only is it tiring to read, but there's a great saying about how the best way to reveal how little you know is to open your mouth and say something about it.
anyways, people who have deployed kde in various professional and educational settings have actually asked for the mouse over tips to be extended to other elements in the panel as they tend to help their users quite a bit. in 3.5 you'll find them in use on the taskbar, the pager, the clock, the media applet and many other places. they expose additional information in a non-invasive manner.
and of course this is something that appears for a short period of time only when you put your mouse over it.
nobody requires you to personally love them, though. ergo the option to turn them off. thankfully your personal reactions (or my decisions, for that matter) don't have to ruin it for the rest of us.
> Is KDE a window manager or a collection of
......
> applications, or both?
KDE ships with a window manager, kwin. it's also a collection of applications that span the gammut from web browser to file manager to groupware to image viewing/editting to media playing to software development to
it's ALSO an application development framework, and ALSO a desktop infrastructure (providing things like IPC, access to standard services, network transparent IO, etc)
> And when will they remove all those games that
> no-one really plays?
when no one really plays them. =) just don't install the kdegames package. very easy =)
so you are comparing a desktop of one hardware family to a laptop of another desktop family running two wildly different versions of an operating system ... and figure the difference is the desktop environment that runs on top of all that? heh.
2.0 was hobbled and very slow in many ways compared to 3.4. put them side by side for work tasks and the improvements are pretty obvious.
but for your measure here, i'd suggest loading KDE 2.0 on your IBM laptop, or 3.4 on your Ultra 1 =)
yes, we prescribe meaningful verbs whenever reasonable. you'll still find situations where 'Ok' is the best fit, but most of our dialogs do use verbs these days.
if you'd like to help police this, you're more than welcome to join the project =)
> Politics I guess is the main reason for not
> doing this
no. it's because we've done it this way forever, as has the DOMINANT desktop: microsoft windows. there's little to be gained in practical usage from switching the buttons around, except to annoy users who are used to it the other way around.
i'm highly unimpressed at GNOME for having broken this otherwise consistent placement of buttons on X11 by opting for a theory that in practice is largely nascent in benefit. fortunately now Gtk+ allows you to switch those button orders at runtime in its dialogs, thanks to SUSE wanting Gtk+ apps to look proper in a KDE desktop.
> with nice and clear icons and a nice solid feel
> to things.
=)
> Have you seen a list of things that will be
;)
> removed from KDE4?
i haven't either. perhaps you could educate all of us
if you're afraid KDE4 will be "KDE, without the features" then perhaps you're thinking of that "SimpleKDE" fork thing or perhaps you just got wrong information.
we are certainly aiming for a more usable KDE, but not a featureless one. popular perception aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.
you can turn them off quite easily, and if you pay really close attention you might notice that they are more than "just a bigger copy of the icon you are already hovering over". this has actually proved to be amazingly useful for users who aren't intimately familiar with all of KDE/Linux's icons and apps.
well, middle clicking already has a well defined meaning throughout KDE. we could offer it as an option, but at what point does one draw the line between "odd options, but we've got them all!" and "the software is too inflexible". this seems to fall into the former category to me =)
yes, and kde has had features for years that Mac hasn't and is far more portable ... so what's your point? MacOS X is great, but it's hardly the wonderland of happy fairies flitting in between magic applications of happiness that so many Mac fanatics consistently report it to be. really.
yay! this trollmeme again!
.... KDE is more popular now than ever and continues to gain momentum.
;)
unless you consider SUSE, Novell Linux Desktop (which provides both desktops equally), Mandriva, Linspire, Xandros, Knoppix, etc, etc, etc as inconsequential "one man band" distros (well, Knoppix may still be a one person effort, not sure), then your argument is demonstrably false.
about a year and a half ago ESR claimed during a radio interview that KDE would be irrelevant by now. he basically used this exact same argument and yet
i'm sure you've heard of projects like the city of Vienna?
heck, KDE is still even in Red Hat
i don't think we need to continuously break things to do this, and i also don't want to alienate our users by delivering a completely alien desktop.
;)
if you think MacOS X introduced a bunch of "brand new ways" of doing things all at once, then i suggest you go back and compare OS9 with OSX and ignore the eye candy.
they certainly have layered in the new concepts with each release, and the initial release was still pretty mac-like. the biggest deviation (and probably their biggest mistake =) was the dock, really.
plasma will provide a number of new concepts and changes, and it will be coherent. but perhaps getting rid of application windows is a bit much right out of the gate, no?
> it's meant to be _used_ primarily.
... we have a number of usability pros around these days. within the Appeal project, which Plasma is associated with, we have 2 of them that are core members. they are a real asset.
/. state the obvious, and do so rudely as if the obvious would never occur to you? bah. no wonder i dislike this site so much =P c'mon people, don't be haters! enjoy each other's company. or.... is this how you always are? in which case, please don't invite me over for dinner ;)
of course
seeing as i've been one of those people working on various usability issues within kde for some time now, it's probably safe to say that it's high on my agenda =)
btw, why does everyone on
i'm amazed you could tell all of that from those 3rd party mock ups! wow!
.. well ... wait a few months until there's something to play with. i think you may be impressed =)
well, you're wrong on just about every count. while plasma itself is being written in C++, language bindings for javascript+html, python, ruby and java are all committed to (e.g. we have people to do them =). a visual designer is also on the roadmap.
as for applications not talking to each other
you're right that nothing you listed is innovative. there will be lots of things that aren't innovative in plasma, such as how it will continue to use popup menus! *gasp* ;)
/. every couple of weeks, but you may notice that it isn't myself (i happen to be the project lead) or even other plasma developers, just very enthused users who have probably talked to me directly on irc or elsewhere and have an idea of where it's going.
i've commented elsewhere in this story about innovation in plasma. feel free to find it =)
and really, please hold back on the analysis until we publish something. i'm happy that people are all excited and posting this to
anyways.. yeah... give us a few month, m'kay? i promise i'll keep you all updated when there's something i'm content with trotting out =)
if i hadn't been posting like a fool to this story, i'd give some mod points to this. you are, IMHO, exactly right.
innovation, spreading risk and allowing us to address a broader audience by appealing to a wider variety of personal tastes.
vive la open source desktop!
> but its appearance here is horrendous
;)
seeing as nobody's seen it yet, that's an interesting statement to make
right now we are working with a large number of artists who are all throwing ideas and concepts for different parts of plasma into a pot. i, and a few others from the project, go back to the artists with feedback, questions, critiques and the cycle starts over.
we've done perhaps 1 or 2 cycles thus far and have a few months more to go. the final look and feel is by FAR not decided upon. in fact, in august we'll be getting together with the artists doing Oxygen (a new theme and icon style in quiet development that is aiming to be the default in kde4) while at aKademy and banging out some hopefully hi-octane work then.
> lets not forget that we don't want to go with
> too radical a change all at once
yes, i couldn't agree more!
when working out how plasma might work, i ended up at some rather radical concepts. but as you note, we can't drop some totally new way of doing everything on people.
it needs to be introduced step by step.
thus plasma will be familiar enough in its default configuration for people to transition without really noticing it from KDE3, Windows or Mac... but it will introduce subtle new concepts that will allow us to start edging in a direction that gets us out of the WIMP-jail.
the first concept is that the desktop is not a file manager view, but harmonizes with your panels.
the second concept is that the desktop and panels are meant to be first class citizens that actively enable your workflow.
i'd love to say more about it, but i don't particularly like talking about things which i can't let people play with right now (aka "vapourware") even though development is going forward at a terrific pace. i also don't like it when people snag ideas and run off with them, as has happened a few times in the last couple of years. =/
yes, that's not a final art mock up. it's like how you draw circles and squares on a [white|black]board to map out plays for a sports team? yeah, same thing.
*sigh* ever since this year's GUADEC i've heard this fallacy more and more. Red Hat defaults to GNOME, but also ships KDE. SUSE defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. NLD ships both and you choose. Debian ships both and you choose. Ubuntu has GNOME and KDE flavours. Mandriva defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix and Slackware provide KDE only. the list goes on.
as you can see, despite some people loving to claim from the roof tops that GNOME is the default desktop in Distroland, it's a falsehood.
actually, they don't all do the same thing. one is for embedded use, one is for people who like an xmms style players and another for those who like jukebox style players. then there is kscd which is for, well, playing CDs.
now, you could say that there should be one app that does everything. and that would certainly be bloatware.
s,kwrite,kword,