I stayed away from the 4.x serious in particular. not least because of all the Akondai stuff. I think a DE should be as minimal as possible...provide a shell, file browser, and maybe some basic applications. KDE seems to want to manage everything
KDE is a software developer, not a product. KDE's desktop environment is called KDE Plasma Workspaces and doesn't include Akonadi.
As a daily KDE user, the only crashes I experience are from Amarok, and then because I am using the VLC Phonon backend (which isn't fully stable, but is getting there). It makes Amarok crash on exit and somewhat rarely when changing songs.
Delete VLC's PulseAudio output plugin. What you are experiencing is actually a bug in PulseAudio.
Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.
Distributors were warned all over the place that 4.0 and 4.1 were not completely ready. Additionally KDE 3.5.10 wasn't released one month after 4.1 for no reason.
One problem at that time was that everything was still called "KDE". Since pretty much exactly one year we have a more distinct branding in KDE. To put it in today's terms: KDE Platform 4.0 and KDE Applications 4.0 were ready for release. KDE Plasma Workspace was not.
observations are spot-on from an end-user's point-of-view.
KDE does not release any applications for end users. KDE releases source codes of applications to distributors who in turn deliver a preconfigured package set to their users. If you think that shipping Amarok to end users is wrong, don't bitch about KDE. Bitch about the distributors who decided to ship it instead of Juk, Clementine, Bangarang, or whatever.
that's funny. The release of 4.4 marked the day I stopped using it altogether. They decided that having 3 RDBMS (one for Amarok, one for Akonadi and one for strigi) is better than having one. They decided that Plasma and Kwin effects should come before memory leaks fixes (i.e.: Amarok) and so on.
1.) Amarok is NOT part of the KDE Software Compilation. KDE's music player of choice for the SC is Juk.
2.) Amarok and Akonadi both use MySQL.
3.) Nepomuk doesn't use MySQL because for its task Virtuoso offers better performance.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4
What are you talking about? I'm very happy with KDE SC 4 since its 4.2 release. Same with most critics who gave the 4.2 release great reviews.
KDE needs to be heavily customized to make it usable for the Joe Public end users. Which is fine. That's what distributions do. The thing is, each distribution does it different, so the user experience with KDE can vary greatly depending on which distro he installs.
Strange. When I look at Kubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora (just to name three big distros), apart from artwork they are pretty much identically preconfigured. OTOH when I see GNOME in Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora the differences are huge. Depending on the distribution the differences are: Nautilus is either in spacial or browser mode. Placement of window title buttons. Placement of desktop panels. Default "Start Menu". Etc.
So what does this teach us? According to your logic GNOME is unusable by default and requires heavy tweaking while KDE's Plasma Desktop is seen as good in its upstream configuration.
Btw: The differences will be even bigger in upcoming spring. openSUSE won't ship GNOME 3.0 and hence not use GNOME Shell by default. Fedora will use GNOME Shell, while Ubuntu will ditch it completely and adopt Unity.
I'm not a programmer either but I'm also not stupid which is why I can identify the cause for a problem when I see one. Considering the quality of your posts, I'm convinced that the cause for alleged poor performance are you alone and your inability to have a decently configured OS. My lowest end PC is a single core 32bit Pentium 4 with Radeon 9200LE GPU and 768 MB RAM. That machine is 6 or so years old and it runs Plasma Desktop (FOSS GPU drivers, without composite) and KDE applications just fine under openSUSE. The HDD is slow, so loading times are obviously not the best but that's a hardware problem and exactly the same under any DE.
My other PC is a Core2 Duo laptop with GeForce 9200M and 4GB of RAM and this one runs Plasma Desktop (proprietary GPU drivers, with composite) + KDE apps under openSUSE just fine as well.
And as I already wrote: Smartphones and netbooks can both run the software fine, too.
Wow, what a troll... you still did not explain anything at all.
What requires more memory? How is that even supposed to be possible at all considering that the very same software stack runs just fine on smartphones whose hardware specs are even lower than of netbooks?
How is supposedly to be technically possible at all that a non-compositing window manager (KWin 3.x) faster than the same window manager that is able to leverage the power of GPUs (KWin 4.x)? The consequence is that the CPU load is lower! And KWin's main developer is improving KWin's performance even more: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/10/optimization-in-kwin-4-6/
You could argue that KDE should drop deprecated stuff from the Platform libraries but in order for this to happen, a Platform 5.0 has to be made first! In this case demanding to "fix their code" on one hand and OTOH demanding to not think about 5.0 is a huge contradiction -- one only someone who's either a troll or a clueless person could demand. And what you completely ignore is that KDE is actually working on further modularizing the Platform via profiles. This work is really happening and not some mind game for some hypothetical event in the future. Platform 4.5 already contains some groundwork. In the end you may opt-in to use those compile-time profiles but KDE won't support them for their desktop releases because they'll break ABI stability on that platform and features will be sacrificed for them (those which are not needed on smartphones). As for the desktop platform, KDE is reducing the number of dependencies there as well if those don't lead to binary incompatibility but this is (except a single item on the following list) already done: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Mobile/PlatformModifications Completely dropping deprecated features, btw, only leads to lower disk space consumption and not necessarily lower RAM consumption because application developers are already free to not load those libraries into memory in the first place (IIRC Kontact 1.x and Konqueror are the last two applications that use KHTML by default and Kontact 2.0 is about to be released and Konqueror can use WebKit instead of KHTML -- distributions start to replace Konqueror with the WebKit-based Rekonq anyway...) And who in the realm of desktop computing actually cares about those few MBs of RAM anyway? My low-end desktop PC has 768MB RAM. The fact alone that I prefer GNOME's nm-applet over KDE's Network Management Plasma applet causes my system to have ridiculous GNOME dependencies (like gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor) to be loaded into RAM and it doesn't even matter. 768MB RAM is more than enough to load both KDE's as well as GNOME's base libraries into memory without causing performance lags! Upgrade you PC to have more than 128MB RAM if you feel "bloat".
Whatever your PC's specs are, my point stands: Either you are clueless because you demand contradicting features and omit KDE's actual work. Or you are just a troll.
PS: Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Awards 2010 tie GNOME's and KDE's desktop environments at #1 which wonderfully shows that your claim about "core dev team and a few fanboys" is utterly wrong. As many like KDE's desktop as GNOME's desktop. All other desktops don't have a approval rating of more than 3%. If your claims were true, LXDE or so would've been far ahead of KDE's desktop...
Who cares about what developers of a desktop used by 12 or 13 people think ?
Those 12 or 13 care about that.
PS: Your comment makes me proud. Until just now I thought I was an insignificant part of a user group that's tens of millions in size. Now I alone make up ~ 1/12 of the overall user base. *whoo!*
KDE's default music player is Juk, not Amarok. Most distributions just opt to ship Amarok by default and not Juk (personally, I prefer Juk over Amarok). Feel free to file bug reports at the distributors' bug databases to revert to Juk.
KDE and Amarok developers are two different communities
I wouldn't say different. Amarok is a KDE Extragear application (it's always been that way). It's not part of the SC but the Amarok developers are a group within the KDE community. People like Lydia Pintscher are not only active in the Amarok team but other KDE teams as well (in her case IIRC the Promo team but I'm not entirely sure right now).
You confuse the Netbook UX itself with applications. Yes, Chromium is written with GTK. Yes, same with Banshee and Evolution Express.
MeeGo Netbook UX itself is written using the Mx toolkit and not GTK.
It's a bit confusing because you have to tell the difference between the MeeGo project and the code that resides in its git repo (which in this case is the UX and almost nothing else) and MeeGo as Linux distribution that ships with GTK apps. I meant the former and I'm sorry that I didn't make myself clear.
LibreOffice was launched by the corporations Red Hat and Novell to hurt their competition (Oracle). LibreOffice has nothing to do with "corporate-phobia".
But may I ask: What does your "corporate-phobia" post have to do with the previous posts?
It's a compilation of software. It's not that hard to understand that over time the KDE project grew from a mere Desktop Environment into a supplier of many different kinds of software of which most is non-essential for a DE.
No. What part is supposedly bloated? The applications? Is Marble bloated? Is Gwenview bloated? I don't think so. Therefore the applications part of the SC can't be the problem.
So the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Desktop is meant to be used similar to classic GUIs like K Desktop Environment 3.5, GNOME 2.x, or Windows. The libraries that serve the foundation are small. libplasma is a mere 3MB in size. Since on top of libplasma KDE produces also a netbook shell as well as a smartphone shell and both run well on those low-performance devices, it can't be the code that's supposedly bloated. Maybe it's the GUI part of Plasma Desktop? Considering that the supporters of K Desktop Environment 3.5, incl. the people who work on the Trinity project, feel that Plasma Desktop is "dumped down" and offers too few options, that explanation can't be the one either.
That leaves the Platform libraries that are supposedly bloated. As I've written in the previous paragraph, libplasma is small. The rest of the Platform is not put in one giant library. Instead it's split in many small libraries. No KDE application I'm aware of loads everything into memory. KDE gives application developers a set of Platform libraries to toy with. Nobody is forced to use complete set. With Qt adopting some of KDE Platform's features (eg. web rendering), app developers are free to switch from the older KDE solution to the pure Qt one. KDE guaranties binary compatibility in kdelibs, so KDE can't just drop them before a Platform 5.0 release. When you write a KDE application with QtWebKit instead of KHTML, nothing forces KHTML upon you. It's the same approach GNOME takes since years. If guarantied binary compatibility equals bloat, GNOME 2.x is just as bloated and to get rid of the deprecated parts, GNOME will release 3.0 in spring. But Lord Kano doesn't mean that because he doesn't want a "KDE5".
As I wrote: Are KDE Applications bloated? No. Are the Workspaces bloated? No. Is the Platform bloated? No.
So what the heck is supposedly bloated? Is Kano's problem that to simplify the release process, all three pillars are released at the same time? Does he think that to use the Plasma Workspaces one has to install all applications? KDE releases all individual components at the same time but they remain individual.
He makes a lump-sum statement withaout backing anything up and gets an "Insightful" rating. I merely ask what exactly he means and get "Troll"??? WTF?? At time of writing this, no one, not even you, was able to clarify what he means.
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I just stopped using Amarok around 4.0.
There is no Amarok 4.0. It is currently at version 2.3 and a separate project from the Software Compilation.
If you hate KDE so much, why are you even visiting this story?
I stayed away from the 4.x serious in particular. not least because of all the Akondai stuff. I think a DE should be as minimal as possible...provide a shell, file browser, and maybe some basic applications. KDE seems to want to manage everything
KDE is a software developer, not a product. KDE's desktop environment is called KDE Plasma Workspaces and doesn't include Akonadi.
openSUSE's Unstable repo contains weekly snapshots of KDE SC trunk.
As a daily KDE user, the only crashes I experience are from Amarok, and then because I am using the VLC Phonon backend (which isn't fully stable, but is getting there). It makes Amarok crash on exit and somewhat rarely when changing songs.
Delete VLC's PulseAudio output plugin. What you are experiencing is actually a bug in PulseAudio.
Funny, because 4.0 was released as being usable.
No, it wasn't. The following article was distributed via KDE's info channels: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html
All major distributors except Fedora stayed with KDE 3.5 for that reason.
Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.
Distributors were warned all over the place that 4.0 and 4.1 were not completely ready. Additionally KDE 3.5.10 wasn't released one month after 4.1 for no reason.
One problem at that time was that everything was still called "KDE". Since pretty much exactly one year we have a more distinct branding in KDE. To put it in today's terms:
KDE Platform 4.0 and KDE Applications 4.0 were ready for release. KDE Plasma Workspace was not.
To be fair to the KDE dev team, they did warn everyone all over the place - it's just that many chose to ignore the warnings.
Which of the big distributions was only Fedora. Kubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Mandriva etc. all continued to ship KDE 3.5 at that time.
observations are spot-on from an end-user's point-of-view.
KDE does not release any applications for end users. KDE releases source codes of applications to distributors who in turn deliver a preconfigured package set to their users.
If you think that shipping Amarok to end users is wrong, don't bitch about KDE. Bitch about the distributors who decided to ship it instead of Juk, Clementine, Bangarang, or whatever.
that's funny. The release of 4.4 marked the day I stopped using it altogether. They decided that having 3 RDBMS (one for Amarok, one for Akonadi and one for strigi) is better than having one. They decided that Plasma and Kwin effects should come before memory leaks fixes (i.e.: Amarok) and so on.
1.) Amarok is NOT part of the KDE Software Compilation. KDE's music player of choice for the SC is Juk.
2.) Amarok and Akonadi both use MySQL.
3.) Nepomuk doesn't use MySQL because for its task Virtuoso offers better performance.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4
What are you talking about? I'm very happy with KDE SC 4 since its 4.2 release. Same with most critics who gave the 4.2 release great reviews.
KDE needs to be heavily customized to make it usable for the Joe Public end users. Which is fine. That's what distributions do. The thing is, each distribution does it different, so the user experience with KDE can vary greatly depending on which distro he installs.
Strange. When I look at Kubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora (just to name three big distros), apart from artwork they are pretty much identically preconfigured.
OTOH when I see GNOME in Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora the differences are huge. Depending on the distribution the differences are:
Nautilus is either in spacial or browser mode.
Placement of window title buttons.
Placement of desktop panels.
Default "Start Menu".
Etc.
So what does this teach us? According to your logic GNOME is unusable by default and requires heavy tweaking while KDE's Plasma Desktop is seen as good in its upstream configuration.
Btw: The differences will be even bigger in upcoming spring.
openSUSE won't ship GNOME 3.0 and hence not use GNOME Shell by default. Fedora will use GNOME Shell, while Ubuntu will ditch it completely and adopt Unity.
I'm not a programmer either but I'm also not stupid which is why I can identify the cause for a problem when I see one.
Considering the quality of your posts, I'm convinced that the cause for alleged poor performance are you alone and your inability to have a decently configured OS. My lowest end PC is a single core 32bit Pentium 4 with Radeon 9200LE GPU and 768 MB RAM. That machine is 6 or so years old and it runs Plasma Desktop (FOSS GPU drivers, without composite) and KDE applications just fine under openSUSE. The HDD is slow, so loading times are obviously not the best but that's a hardware problem and exactly the same under any DE.
My other PC is a Core2 Duo laptop with GeForce 9200M and 4GB of RAM and this one runs Plasma Desktop (proprietary GPU drivers, with composite) + KDE apps under openSUSE just fine as well.
And as I already wrote: Smartphones and netbooks can both run the software fine, too.
So STFU and properly configure your OS.
Wow, what a troll... you still did not explain anything at all.
What requires more memory? How is that even supposed to be possible at all considering that the very same software stack runs just fine on smartphones whose hardware specs are even lower than of netbooks?
How is supposedly to be technically possible at all that a non-compositing window manager (KWin 3.x) faster than the same window manager that is able to leverage the power of GPUs (KWin 4.x)? The consequence is that the CPU load is lower!
And KWin's main developer is improving KWin's performance even more: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/10/optimization-in-kwin-4-6/
You could argue that KDE should drop deprecated stuff from the Platform libraries but in order for this to happen, a Platform 5.0 has to be made first! In this case demanding to "fix their code" on one hand and OTOH demanding to not think about 5.0 is a huge contradiction -- one only someone who's either a troll or a clueless person could demand.
And what you completely ignore is that KDE is actually working on further modularizing the Platform via profiles. This work is really happening and not some mind game for some hypothetical event in the future. Platform 4.5 already contains some groundwork.
In the end you may opt-in to use those compile-time profiles but KDE won't support them for their desktop releases because they'll break ABI stability on that platform and features will be sacrificed for them (those which are not needed on smartphones).
As for the desktop platform, KDE is reducing the number of dependencies there as well if those don't lead to binary incompatibility but this is (except a single item on the following list) already done: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Mobile/PlatformModifications
Completely dropping deprecated features, btw, only leads to lower disk space consumption and not necessarily lower RAM consumption because application developers are already free to not load those libraries into memory in the first place (IIRC Kontact 1.x and Konqueror are the last two applications that use KHTML by default and Kontact 2.0 is about to be released and Konqueror can use WebKit instead of KHTML -- distributions start to replace Konqueror with the WebKit-based Rekonq anyway...)
And who in the realm of desktop computing actually cares about those few MBs of RAM anyway? My low-end desktop PC has 768MB RAM. The fact alone that I prefer GNOME's nm-applet over KDE's Network Management Plasma applet causes my system to have ridiculous GNOME dependencies (like gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor) to be loaded into RAM and it doesn't even matter. 768MB RAM is more than enough to load both KDE's as well as GNOME's base libraries into memory without causing performance lags! Upgrade you PC to have more than 128MB RAM if you feel "bloat".
Whatever your PC's specs are, my point stands: Either you are clueless because you demand contradicting features and omit KDE's actual work. Or you are just a troll.
PS: Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Awards 2010 tie GNOME's and KDE's desktop environments at #1 which wonderfully shows that your claim about "core dev team and a few fanboys" is utterly wrong. As many like KDE's desktop as GNOME's desktop. All other desktops don't have a approval rating of more than 3%.
If your claims were true, LXDE or so would've been far ahead of KDE's desktop...
Who cares about what developers of a desktop used by 12 or 13 people think ?
Those 12 or 13 care about that.
PS: Your comment makes me proud. Until just now I thought I was an insignificant part of a user group that's tens of millions in size. Now I alone make up ~ 1/12 of the overall user base. *whoo!*
KDE's default music player is Juk, not Amarok. Most distributions just opt to ship Amarok by default and not Juk (personally, I prefer Juk over Amarok). Feel free to file bug reports at the distributors' bug databases to revert to Juk.
KDE and Amarok developers are two different communities
I wouldn't say different. Amarok is a KDE Extragear application (it's always been that way). It's not part of the SC but the Amarok developers are a group within the KDE community.
People like Lydia Pintscher are not only active in the Amarok team but other KDE teams as well (in her case IIRC the Promo team but I'm not entirely sure right now).
You confuse the Netbook UX itself with applications.
Yes, Chromium is written with GTK. Yes, same with Banshee and Evolution Express.
MeeGo Netbook UX itself is written using the Mx toolkit and not GTK.
It's a bit confusing because you have to tell the difference between the MeeGo project and the code that resides in its git repo (which in this case is the UX and almost nothing else) and MeeGo as Linux distribution that ships with GTK apps.
I meant the former and I'm sorry that I didn't make myself clear.
Feel free to hire a C++ developer to fix the tools you apparently need for your web development job.
LibreOffice was launched by the corporations Red Hat and Novell to hurt their competition (Oracle).
LibreOffice has nothing to do with "corporate-phobia".
But may I ask: What does your "corporate-phobia" post have to do with the previous posts?
It's a compilation of software. It's not that hard to understand that over time the KDE project grew from a mere Desktop Environment into a supplier of many different kinds of software of which most is non-essential for a DE.
Did you really not know what he meant?
No. What part is supposedly bloated? The applications? Is Marble bloated? Is Gwenview bloated? I don't think so. Therefore the applications part of the SC can't be the problem.
So the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Desktop is meant to be used similar to classic GUIs like K Desktop Environment 3.5, GNOME 2.x, or Windows. The libraries that serve the foundation are small. libplasma is a mere 3MB in size. Since on top of libplasma KDE produces also a netbook shell as well as a smartphone shell and both run well on those low-performance devices, it can't be the code that's supposedly bloated.
Maybe it's the GUI part of Plasma Desktop? Considering that the supporters of K Desktop Environment 3.5, incl. the people who work on the Trinity project, feel that Plasma Desktop is "dumped down" and offers too few options, that explanation can't be the one either.
That leaves the Platform libraries that are supposedly bloated. As I've written in the previous paragraph, libplasma is small. The rest of the Platform is not put in one giant library. Instead it's split in many small libraries. No KDE application I'm aware of loads everything into memory.
KDE gives application developers a set of Platform libraries to toy with. Nobody is forced to use complete set.
With Qt adopting some of KDE Platform's features (eg. web rendering), app developers are free to switch from the older KDE solution to the pure Qt one. KDE guaranties binary compatibility in kdelibs, so KDE can't just drop them before a Platform 5.0 release.
When you write a KDE application with QtWebKit instead of KHTML, nothing forces KHTML upon you.
It's the same approach GNOME takes since years. If guarantied binary compatibility equals bloat, GNOME 2.x is just as bloated and to get rid of the deprecated parts, GNOME will release 3.0 in spring.
But Lord Kano doesn't mean that because he doesn't want a "KDE5".
As I wrote:
Are KDE Applications bloated? No.
Are the Workspaces bloated? No.
Is the Platform bloated? No.
So what the heck is supposedly bloated? Is Kano's problem that to simplify the release process, all three pillars are released at the same time?
Does he think that to use the Plasma Workspaces one has to install all applications?
KDE releases all individual components at the same time but they remain individual.
He makes a lump-sum statement withaout backing anything up and gets an "Insightful" rating. I merely ask what exactly he means and get "Troll"??? WTF??
At time of writing this, no one, not even you, was able to clarify what he means.
How about they fix the steaming bloat-fest that is KDE4
There is no "KDE4".
What do you mean by "KDE4"? Platform 4(.5)? Plasma Workspaces 4(.5)? The whole Software Compilation 4(.5)?
Qt (Nokia) doesn't care about KDE.
So why is Nokia KDE's biggest sponsor?
It won't change usability at all. KDE is already unusable.
KDE is an organization. It can't have usability.
If you want to troll against KDE and/or its software, at least check Wikipedia at least once per year to get terminology right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_Workspaces