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KDE Celebrates 10 Years of Existence
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat Oct 14, 2006 02:30 PM
from the and-hopefully-many-more dept.
from the and-hopefully-many-more dept.
Rob Kaper wrote in to tell us about KDE's 10th anniversary. From the article:
"Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software."
Rob adds this thought: "We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"
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Where can you improve ? (Score:4, Insightful)
how about memory usage ? be nice to run KDE on older hardware to replace those soon-to-be-defunct Win98 boxes
Re:Where can you improve ? (Score:5, Funny)
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I read that at the end of the Akademy they made the kde window manager OpenGL aware (without needing GLX). That would mean that the each window can be cached on the graphics card and switching between windows will be very fast in KDE 4 even on a slow cpu, the cpu will have more time to spend on other tasks, making KDE faster and feeling significantly faster.
Use xfce (Score:3, Informative)
http://xubuntu.com/ [xubuntu.com]
Where to improve? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this one...
All "official" KDE apps get restructured to be command line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) front ends to shared object libraries. In every KDE app you can find an entry in the "about" function that shows you how the CLI would do various tasks, including the last task you did. You can even make it optional as a compile-time option in source code. (Power users would rather not have that function bloat up their code, no doubt.)
In a flash, any GUI using novice with a hunger to know more about Linux, can look right there and see how it's done.
In no time you'll have tons of people speeding up their KDE by doing everything on the command line and perhaps even using less memory (as far as CLI vs GUI memory usage is concerned).
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It's not the 1970s any more...
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The one thing I like about K* stuff is that it's sort of like Perl, in that it doesn't force users to do things "This way, or else".
Re:Where to improve? (Score:4, Funny)
Your post gives me a hankering to boot up DOS 3.3, the last true great OS if you ask me.
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Obviously you've never used OpenVMS.
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Since most of the GUI libraries used by KDE are shared if you have one KDE app open then you have 90% of the memory use required to display an interface for *all* of them (discounting the actual functional code, which is required if you are using the UI or CLI).
Welcome to the past (Score:5, Informative)
Do you want to send the oputput of ls -l to your IM contact via Kopete? Just do "dcop kopete KopeteIface messageContact jabber.com "`ls -l `"
Those are the kind of things that make many people use KDE instead of Gnome BTW
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Re:Welcome to the past (Score:5, Funny)
Do you want to send the oputput of ls -l to your IM contact via Kopete? Just do "dcop kopete KopeteIface messageContact jabber.com "`ls -l `"
Wow. Here I'm sitting, thinking "Hmm, a suitable task for my friends Copy and Paste." And then you bring your simple and intuitive solution. Just WOW! Thank you.
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Well. It was Gnome who was lacking a IPC system, not KDE. So yes, it find it sensible that the ones who didn't have it are who implemented it. In the same way, since they've lacked it for years it's reasonable that they have built a comparable competitor.
and it was built in such a way that there are no desktop dependencies. Had it been done by KDE hackers, it would have been tied to Qt
Bullshit. Dbus does depend on glib.
DBUS is heavily used in recent GN
A song... (Score:3, Funny)
Kappy Kirthday to you,
Kappy Kirthday Kister Kresident,
Kappy Kirthday Ko Kou
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Congratulations! (Score:3, Insightful)
s/Congratulations/Kongratulations/ (Score:2)
Improve? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Or disable it in the configuration options. In fact, the several times I've used KDE in the not-too-distant past, it was off by default.
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Use your brain next time, kid.
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Where to improve - VOIP (Score:2)
Even better, throw it out and start something from scratch that aims to be a good SIP phone while being modular so you can expand it with plugins to a useable Asterisk switchboard console or add codecs that cannot be GPLed (or both).
This is possibly the only KDE app that I feel like missing when using KDE.
Disclaimer - I have not looked at kphone for a
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Currently NAS and ESD in a network environment are rather useless because there is no way to control the volume and mix correctly into NAS or ESD input on the server. Having the mixer done in software and mapping it onto hardware only if hardware is present will definitely help here. It will also allow to emulate some capabilities not present on some of the less supported hardware.
No flame please (Score:2, Insightful)
KDE Possible Improvements (Score:5, Informative)
I was a KDE user on FreeBSD before I bought a Mac a few months ago. I was generally very happy with my KDE experience, and they seemed to have done a great job with their desktop. There are a few complaints that I've had:
Those are my only complaints about KDE. KDE is a very nice desktop environment. These improvements will make it the perfect desktop environment for me, and a serious contender to GNOME, Windows, and OS X for most other users. Keep up the good work.
Spotlight clone exists (Score:3, Informative)
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Presents? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just tried Kubuntu for the first time... (Score:2)
But Kubuntu....well, it sucks. The interface is cluttered as hell. I actually had a couple of apps FREEZE, which I've never seen before. It's slower than Gnome on my machine. File management is goofy. The themes are ugly. And, honestly, it seems to me that most of the cooler applications are written for Gnome/GTK, and don't fit in very well under KDE.
I was suprised at how bad it was, actually. I used KDE way back when, becaus
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Misc GUI improvements (Score:3, Interesting)
- One of our machines has a TV for it's second head, but the TV is almost always turned off or displaying a movie from our DVD player. Since the TV is never used for anything but movies, KDE should be able to ignore the presence of it entirely when a new window is opened, but still let me drag an already-open window over to it if I want to.
- From the point of view of an advanced user, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for the Dock-Apps panel to exist. Why can't I just dock my WM/AS apps into a regular panel instead?
- As one other user pointed out, there are a few sluggish spots here and there that shouldn't happen on a fast box like mine (AMD64x2 3800+ with 1GB RAM and Nvidia 6600). These seem to concentrate on Konqueror when it's used for file management.
- When the Control Center can't load a settings module, it should display a warning message and tell me what to do to fix the problem, instead of just saying "Loading..." and then returning to the 'main' start screen after a couple of seconds.
Other than these, KDE seems to do pretty well for my husband and I. I've tried several other environments (Gnome, E, Windowmaker, Afterstep, FVWM, XFCE) and KDE just had the best round-up of features for my needs and preferences.This is my take on KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
For me, it's the two major sub-items covered under one big one: Beauty.
KDE problems, fixed (Score:3, Informative)
The fonts are ugly.
Font anti-aliasing isn't even enabled in the screenshot you linked to. That's a very easy fix. Control Center --> Appearance & Themes --> Fonts --> Tick "Use anti-aliasing for fonts". The difference will be dramatic. Everything will look beau
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Re:KDE problems, fixed (Score:4, Insightful)
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That basically is my problem with KDE. There's so many ways to fix just about every problem with it that to work it out, you have to spend ages searching. But some problems which I haven't yet worked out the solution to:
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The offense is even worse if KDE is technically capable of better, and yet is set to look crummy by default. What are the developers thinking?
Improvements... (Score:2)
As ridiculously poor user-interface decisions go, introducing extra clicks to achieve a common goal rather than defaulting to the almost universal standard of assuming a drag-and-drop means "move" ranks right up there as one of the worst I've seen.
Re:And I thought the Christian Fundies were nuts (Score:4, Funny)
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 140 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: The trivial issue os what to call Linux continues to hound Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest or count all of them. Sixty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma. Another three people had to get their jaws wired shut.
Fact: Linux is plagued by a lack of professionalism. The stereotype of Linux users being fat unwashed dateless geeks who still live in their parents' basements and refuse to shower more than once a month is all too true. The best example of this is RMS who claims to have a "water phobia" and thus rarely bathes. RMS also looks like he has been living in a cave for the last 5 years. In fact, RMS has been arrested twice because he has been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden. While RMS has always been found to not be Osama Bin Laden, it has created a perception of that Linux is the "terrorist operating system". Linus Torvalds has been forced to spend a great deal of time correcting this perception instead of working on the Linux kernel. Alan Cox quit Linux kernel development since he got tired of everyone saying that he was a terrorist.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that most people think the word, "Ubuntu", is an obscure term for a homosexual orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers. An attempt to save Ubuntu by creating a derivative distro called Kubuntu has also failed.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes out to the backyard and sh
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MOD PARENT FUNNY (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A few thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
This is most likely your video card drivers. KDE is plenty fast, but if you dont have acceleration working in X, then everything will seem sluggish. My card is poorly supported (ATI Xpress 200m) and it makes everything seem slow.
Memory usage. The memory requirements of KDE and and Gnome are ridiculous.
Yes, if you mean ridiculously low. Fresh boot, Debian with KDE 3.5.4 on my old box, 32MB of ram used. Start up konversation (irc client) and it's about 45MB. Every subsequent application uses less extra ram, because the libraries are already loaded. Fresh boot on windows xp is at least 100MB, on my laptop more like 150. Most likely you have no idea on how to measure memory usage on linux. Have a look here: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/ [kde.org]
Clutter.
You've got a point there, it's getting better with every release though. And no, sacrificing features for simplicity like Gnome did is not a good strategy.
Consistency.
That's one of the strengths of KDE actually. Everything works the same across the KDE apps. Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.
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Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.
I
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