The question "Is FOSS innovative?" itself is bogus. FOSS refers to a licensing scheme. A developer of software isn't suddenly innovative just because he releases software under a new license.
Seriously, I lost all hope in OpenOffice/LibreOffice. In my eyes it became a mere legacy application for opening MS Office files under X11 systems. Ever since StarOffice's 5.x source code was released and became OpenOffice.org, nobody had any interest in fundamentally renovating the code base that partially dates back to the 1980s. There was some talk two or so years ago but the "community" decided that the undertaking would be too huge for too little gain.
A while ago I had a look at Calligra (mostly Calligra Words) and damn I was blown away. For years its predecessor KOffice lived only a niche existence and was developed solely by hobbyists who hacked only every now and then on it. Then came Nokia, hired a tiny team (three people or so) and that tiny team transformed KWord / Calligra Words within a year from a 'Kinda OK-ish for a hobby project' application into into a great word processor that renders the ODT files I tried as good as LibreOffice (Calligra is still alpha, btw). Not only was ODT rendering improved and the whole layout engine was rewritten, the suite also received a touchscreen GUI.
That speaks volumes about the quality of Calligra's source code. If so much can be achieved by a handful of full-time programmers within a year, just imagine what they'll do in the time the new Apache OO crew spends its time getting rid of those "problematic" LGPL dependencies...
LibreOffice is under the SUSE umbrella, not Novell. Mono was dropped because it was part of Novell and not SUSE. SUSE was (if I understood it correctly) free to hire the old Ximian team to continue Mono. SUSE chose not to, although SUSE is still legally obligated to support it for paying SUSE Enterprise customers. So they'll likely have a guy or so to maintain Mono.
While I don't know Mandriva well, I agree with you to not recommend Ubuntu. I do it for the simple fact that Ubuntu is a bleeding edge distro: Lots of very new and not so well tested software. I had lots of problems esp. after upgrading to new releases. Something was always broken and had to be fixed. I'm not saying that Ubuntu is bad or anything. It's just that certain hickups occur when one is bleeding edge. For the same reason I wouldn't recommend Fedora to newbies, while OTOH it is said to be one of the best distributions for experienced users. Personally, I've settled with openSUSE. It has an eight months release cycle as opposed to Ubuntu's six and IMHO the two additional months of testing and polishing are actually noticeable.
It may be nitpicking but even that is not necessarily true. GNU/Linux means a GNU userland on top of the Linux kernel. These days it's at least not unlikely that the userland is not primarily GNU powered. KDE is not a GNU project. Neither is eglibc (used by at least Debian and Ubuntu).
Why, exactly, would you want to run an app designed for a phone on your desktop anyway?
Your assumption is wrong. Traditional "desktop" Linux isn't bound to desktops. See MeeGo or KDE's Plasma Active: Both develop touch-friendly GUIs on top of traditional Linux systems. With convertible tablets/laptops one may indeed want to run a touch-friendly app on the same system as mouse-driven apps.
... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal:-)
Yes, it is possible. I just checked: The minimum panel height is 10 pixels, although icons dragged to it don't scale below 16 pixels (so they're cut off when you have a smaller panel). Personally, I usually have a bigger panel and use the Quick Launch applet to to have two lines of smaller icons.
Nepomuk is two things: A set of specifications for saving metadata and a background server. Users don't interact with Nepomuk directly but software may use it. For example tags entered in Digikam or KMail are handled using Nepomuk.
I don't know how certain KDE Applications behave without Nepomuk. I have it enabled without any disadvantage. (Strigi is disabled for me.)
the attitude of developers in the 4.x series has been one of blatant, selfish, irresponsibility. If my apps had the "millions of users around the globe" that KDE claims, I'd sure as hell be listening more to their needs instead of rejecting their sincere requests as "hate".
KDE is a community project. As such they have no contractual obligations to any customers. So yes, they are selfish to the degree that they work on what they want -- just like any other FOSS community project.
The oxygen-gtk theme helps here, but you can still notice the difference.
Well, the KDE/Qt devs can only do so much. The KDE/Qt side built in GTK theming right into the toolkit while OTOH the GTK devs are not interested in doing such deep integration work. Oxygen-gtk was (again) written by KDE but as a mere theme it can't do as much as integration right in the toolkit.
Nokia is currently in the process of shaping the Qt project after WebKit in the way how the community and the rules are organized. That said, Nokia has increased Qt investments. There are even MeeGo-releated job offers posted on nokia.com. Nokia wouldn't do that if there weren't any secret plans (maybe a future tablet).
There is no KDE5 and there will never be: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/ With Qt 5 approaching in 2012 and provided the world doesn't end that year, we'll see KDE Frameworks 5.0 relatively soon. According to current rough estimates posted on mailing lists likely the winter (January) release 2013 will make the advent of KDE Frameworks 5.0. So far I didn't read of any plans to shift away from KDE's usual 6 months release cycle and Summer 2012 should be too early.
That said, I'm not aware of any plans to dump Plasma Workspaces or KDE Applications to 5.0 as well. They don't guaranty any ABI stability and can stay with 4.x version numbers until they make an actual big transition instead of just adopting a newer Qt.
I find it to be less of a reason to try something out and more looking for insight from others. I can look at a toolbox and bang around with a few tools on my own. But I might overlook the finer points of a particular tool.
If he wanted to have that, he wouldn't have asked to be convinced to even try it. He'd try it any maybe ask here what the users' favourite features are.
Personally, I use LibreOffice with KDE integration and Firefox with KDE integration. LibreOffice-KDE doesn't even use GTK because its own VCL toolkit only optionally interfaces with GTK. That said, I'm pretty impressed with current Alphas of Calligra (KOffice's successor). Ever since Nokia invests in it for MeeGo (contributing a smartphone GUI as well as vastly improving file compatibility among other improvements) I have had only one RTF file not reading properly in mine (granted: limited) testing of Calligra Words. Rekonq became a very good web browser, too, in recent months.
Konqueror 3.5x is still far and away the best file manager ever, the terminal emulator worked properly, meta-data worked perfectly, you could even edit music tags from the file manager. In the meantime KDE4 has a new tags/comments functionality that I wonder if ANYONE ever uses, but I wouldn't know if it would come in handy because the first thing I do in a new install is disable the Nepomuck Semantic desktop search shit which completely lugs my machines and NEVER finishes indexing my admittedly largish file system, even when the database begins to fill entire partitions.
Nepomuk doesn't search anything. Strigi does. Nepomuk works without Strigi. The Konqueror 3.5 developers became largely inactive for whatever reason. The file browsing part is now almost exclusively developed by the Dolphin guys who do not care much for Konqueror. (Such things can happen in a volunteer effort.)
Less text, less icons. If you need to have icons, make them BIG. Reduce the visible options.
Why should the KDE community mimic GNOME? GNOME exists already. There is no point in acting like GNOME with GNOME still very active. Plasma Desktop and KDE Apps are targeted towards a different audience.
Moving away to design tablet-y interfaces while those apps are still an eyesore is beyond me.
Not the same people work on all apps and interfaces. The mobile work is mostly done by people paid by Nokia, open-slx, and basysKom.
I don't care about Marble, and I don't think improvements to it should be "release notes".
Pre-release notes are not as detailed as the final notes. KDE releases three software bundles every 6 months: Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Frameworks. In the final release, each bundle gets its own release announcement. Marble in one of the most active KDE Applications and when the devs work hard, they deserve to be mentioned in the (pre-)release notes, be it Marble, Kate, or even some game.
Kate also has significant improvements this update, but no one but Kate developers mention them at all.
Nobody is hindering any Kate dev to extend the release notes draft on KDE's Etherpad instance. It's open to edit for anyone. I look at the draft for the final release announcements at this moment. Heck, even the comments sidebar say that another application than Marble should get spotlight in the upcoming announcement. So far nobody stepped forward with an improved application that was not featured in the KDE Apps 4.6 announcement (even Kate was featured last time http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.6/applications.php ) Looking at http://kate-editor.org/ I see no posts mentioning new features for 4.7. There is a quite extensive one for 4.6 but not for 4.7. There are some articles about current GSoC progress but those won't show up before 4.8.
Who is writing the release notes?
The ones who volunteer to do it, like with any other community project. Feel free to extend release notes drafts yourself.
So yeah, less effort on Nepomuk/Strigi
KDE is a community project mostly made up of volunteers. You cannot force a volunteer to work on something he doesn't want to. Though you can hire one of the firms that do business around KDE to improve the things you prefer.
that everyone but the main devs seem to hate, at least I haven't read or heard anything positive not coming from a KDE dev
I'm not a KDE developer and I like Nepomuk. GNOME/Tracker developers also like Nepomuk which is the reason they've adopted it long ago.
more visible, non-refactoring work so people can stop saying KDE sucks every time.
Haters will hate and are the vocal group. I happen to like KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
The question "Is FOSS innovative?" itself is bogus. FOSS refers to a licensing scheme. A developer of software isn't suddenly innovative just because he releases software under a new license.
Seriously, I lost all hope in OpenOffice/LibreOffice. In my eyes it became a mere legacy application for opening MS Office files under X11 systems.
Ever since StarOffice's 5.x source code was released and became OpenOffice.org, nobody had any interest in fundamentally renovating the code base that partially dates back to the 1980s. There was some talk two or so years ago but the "community" decided that the undertaking would be too huge for too little gain.
A while ago I had a look at Calligra (mostly Calligra Words) and damn I was blown away. For years its predecessor KOffice lived only a niche existence and was developed solely by hobbyists who hacked only every now and then on it. Then came Nokia, hired a tiny team (three people or so) and that tiny team transformed KWord / Calligra Words within a year from a 'Kinda OK-ish for a hobby project' application into into a great word processor that renders the ODT files I tried as good as LibreOffice (Calligra is still alpha, btw). Not only was ODT rendering improved and the whole layout engine was rewritten, the suite also received a touchscreen GUI.
That speaks volumes about the quality of Calligra's source code. If so much can be achieved by a handful of full-time programmers within a year, just imagine what they'll do in the time the new Apache OO crew spends its time getting rid of those "problematic" LGPL dependencies...
LibreOffice is under the SUSE umbrella, not Novell. Mono was dropped because it was part of Novell and not SUSE. SUSE was (if I understood it correctly) free to hire the old Ximian team to continue Mono. SUSE chose not to, although SUSE is still legally obligated to support it for paying SUSE Enterprise customers. So they'll likely have a guy or so to maintain Mono.
While I don't know Mandriva well, I agree with you to not recommend Ubuntu.
I do it for the simple fact that Ubuntu is a bleeding edge distro: Lots of very new and not so well tested software.
I had lots of problems esp. after upgrading to new releases. Something was always broken and had to be fixed. I'm not saying that Ubuntu is bad or anything. It's just that certain hickups occur when one is bleeding edge. For the same reason I wouldn't recommend Fedora to newbies, while OTOH it is said to be one of the best distributions for experienced users.
Personally, I've settled with openSUSE. It has an eight months release cycle as opposed to Ubuntu's six and IMHO the two additional months of testing and polishing are actually noticeable.
Most Linux Distros -> GNU/Linux.
It may be nitpicking but even that is not necessarily true. GNU/Linux means a GNU userland on top of the Linux kernel. These days it's at least not unlikely that the userland is not primarily GNU powered. KDE is not a GNU project. Neither is eglibc (used by at least Debian and Ubuntu).
Why, exactly, would you want to run an app designed for a phone on your desktop anyway?
Your assumption is wrong. Traditional "desktop" Linux isn't bound to desktops. See MeeGo or KDE's Plasma Active: Both develop touch-friendly GUIs on top of traditional Linux systems.
With convertible tablets/laptops one may indeed want to run a touch-friendly app on the same system as mouse-driven apps.
... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal :-)
Yes, it is possible. I just checked: The minimum panel height is 10 pixels, although icons dragged to it don't scale below 16 pixels (so they're cut off when you have a smaller panel).
Personally, I usually have a bigger panel and use the Quick Launch applet to to have two lines of smaller icons.
The first Unity release builds on Mutter but subsequent releases were ported to Compiz and no longer even work with Mutter or anything else.
Nepomuk is two things: A set of specifications for saving metadata and a background server.
Users don't interact with Nepomuk directly but software may use it. For example tags entered in Digikam or KMail are handled using Nepomuk.
I don't know how certain KDE Applications behave without Nepomuk. I have it enabled without any disadvantage. (Strigi is disabled for me.)
the attitude of developers in the 4.x series has been one of blatant, selfish, irresponsibility. If my apps had the "millions of users around the globe" that KDE claims, I'd sure as hell be listening more to their needs instead of rejecting their sincere requests as "hate".
KDE is a community project. As such they have no contractual obligations to any customers. So yes, they are selfish to the degree that they work on what they want -- just like any other FOSS community project.
GTK application yes, full-blown GNOME applications not.
The oxygen-gtk theme helps here, but you can still notice the difference.
Well, the KDE/Qt devs can only do so much. The KDE/Qt side built in GTK theming right into the toolkit while OTOH the GTK devs are not interested in doing such deep integration work. Oxygen-gtk was (again) written by KDE but as a mere theme it can't do as much as integration right in the toolkit.
Well, it's a netbook interface, not some for full-size laptops.
Nokia is currently in the process of shaping the Qt project after WebKit in the way how the community and the rules are organized.
That said, Nokia has increased Qt investments. There are even MeeGo-releated job offers posted on nokia.com. Nokia wouldn't do that if there weren't any secret plans (maybe a future tablet).
There is no KDE5 and there will never be: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/
With Qt 5 approaching in 2012 and provided the world doesn't end that year, we'll see KDE Frameworks 5.0 relatively soon. According to current rough estimates posted on mailing lists likely the winter (January) release 2013 will make the advent of KDE Frameworks 5.0. So far I didn't read of any plans to shift away from KDE's usual 6 months release cycle and Summer 2012 should be too early.
That said, I'm not aware of any plans to dump Plasma Workspaces or KDE Applications to 5.0 as well. They don't guaranty any ABI stability and can stay with 4.x version numbers until they make an actual big transition instead of just adopting a newer Qt.
I find it to be less of a reason to try something out and more looking for insight from others. I can look at a toolbox and bang around with a few tools on my own. But I might overlook the finer points of a particular tool.
If he wanted to have that, he wouldn't have asked to be convinced to even try it. He'd try it any maybe ask here what the users' favourite features are.
Personally, I use LibreOffice with KDE integration and Firefox with KDE integration.
LibreOffice-KDE doesn't even use GTK because its own VCL toolkit only optionally interfaces with GTK.
That said, I'm pretty impressed with current Alphas of Calligra (KOffice's successor). Ever since Nokia invests in it for MeeGo (contributing a smartphone GUI as well as vastly improving file compatibility among other improvements) I have had only one RTF file not reading properly in mine (granted: limited) testing of Calligra Words.
Rekonq became a very good web browser, too, in recent months.
Konqueror 3.5x is still far and away the best file manager ever, the terminal emulator worked properly, meta-data worked perfectly, you could even edit music tags from the file manager. In the meantime KDE4 has a new tags/comments functionality that I wonder if ANYONE ever uses, but I wouldn't know if it would come in handy because the first thing I do in a new install is disable the Nepomuck Semantic desktop search shit which completely lugs my machines and NEVER finishes indexing my admittedly largish file system, even when the database begins to fill entire partitions.
Nepomuk doesn't search anything. Strigi does. Nepomuk works without Strigi.
The Konqueror 3.5 developers became largely inactive for whatever reason. The file browsing part is now almost exclusively developed by the Dolphin guys who do not care much for Konqueror. (Such things can happen in a volunteer effort.)
Less text, less icons. If you need to have icons, make them BIG. Reduce the visible options.
Why should the KDE community mimic GNOME? GNOME exists already. There is no point in acting like GNOME with GNOME still very active.
Plasma Desktop and KDE Apps are targeted towards a different audience.
Moving away to design tablet-y interfaces while those apps are still an eyesore is beyond me.
Not the same people work on all apps and interfaces.
The mobile work is mostly done by people paid by Nokia, open-slx, and basysKom.
I don't care about Marble, and I don't think improvements to it should be "release notes".
Pre-release notes are not as detailed as the final notes.
KDE releases three software bundles every 6 months: Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Frameworks.
In the final release, each bundle gets its own release announcement. Marble in one of the most active KDE Applications and when the devs work hard, they deserve to be mentioned in the (pre-)release notes, be it Marble, Kate, or even some game.
Kate also has significant improvements this update, but no one but Kate developers mention them at all.
Nobody is hindering any Kate dev to extend the release notes draft on KDE's Etherpad instance. It's open to edit for anyone. I look at the draft for the final release announcements at this moment. Heck, even the comments sidebar say that another application than Marble should get spotlight in the upcoming announcement. So far nobody stepped forward with an improved application that was not featured in the KDE Apps 4.6 announcement (even Kate was featured last time http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.6/applications.php )
Looking at http://kate-editor.org/ I see no posts mentioning new features for 4.7. There is a quite extensive one for 4.6 but not for 4.7. There are some articles about current GSoC progress but those won't show up before 4.8.
Who is writing the release notes?
The ones who volunteer to do it, like with any other community project.
Feel free to extend release notes drafts yourself.
So yeah, less effort on Nepomuk/Strigi
KDE is a community project mostly made up of volunteers. You cannot force a volunteer to work on something he doesn't want to. Though you can hire one of the firms that do business around KDE to improve the things you prefer.
that everyone but the main devs seem to hate, at least I haven't read or heard anything positive not coming from a KDE dev
I'm not a KDE developer and I like Nepomuk.
GNOME/Tracker developers also like Nepomuk which is the reason they've adopted it long ago.
more visible, non-refactoring work so people can stop saying KDE sucks every time.
Haters will hate and are the vocal group. I happen to like KDE.
No, just have limited time for trying out new stuff when what I have is working quite well.
If you have enough time to waste for Slashdot, you have enough time to try a live CD (either native or in VirtualBox).
The nice thing about Kubuntu is that it doesn't have Unity as the default window manager.
Unity isn't a window manager. It's a workspace that uses the Compiz window manager (and can't use anything else).
If you need convincing to even try something out, you're too close minded anyway.
Seriously, who wouldn't want to play Star Wars like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJaLC0870Hc
Here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/discovery-of-worms-from-hell-deep-beneath-earths-surface-raises-new-questions/2011/05/31/AGnzJTGH_story.html