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Interview with Sebastian Kuegler, KDE Developer

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Feb 01, 2008 05:30 PM
from the peering-inside dept.
GUI KDE Software
invisibastard writes "Linux Tech Daily has an interview with KDE's Sebastian Kuegler. Sebastian talks about the KDE 4.0 release event, goes into detail about how KDE has improved its processes and much more. '[...] there are many easy ways to help. The most obvious is helping people installing KDE, answering questions on forums, IRC and other media. Lately, we're getting also an increased amount of requests for speakers. Often local LUGs are interested in talks by KDE knowledgeable people. It might sound a bit scary, representing KDE in your local LUG, but it's really what KDE is about. Everybody comes from a local community, that is where our grassroots are. People often don't think that they are entitled to represent KDE, but that's just not the case at all. In fact, the marketing and promo team have a hard time finding enough speakers for all events. Slides are usually available, so it doesn't need all that much preparation.'
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Submission: Interview with Sebastian Kuegler, KDE Developer by invisibastard (620915)
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  • point oh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2008, @05:45PM (#22267928)
    "The fact that the definition of stable varies widely within our userbase and the expectations of everyone doesn't make it any easier."

    Unless your userbase consists of no one but fanboys, I would expect the userbase to define "stable" as not crashing every 20 minutes. Shame on KDE for redefining the meaning of a point oh release. I realize they want more people to test their beloved product, but misleading them into doing it was a mistake. In fact, the tradition in open source is in the opposite direction - not calling it a point oh until it's acquired the targeted features and destroys no data.
    • The article agrees, he believed that it should have been called a point-oh-oh release. But your completely wrong claiming they are redefining the meaning of a point oh release, the practice of releasing early and releasing often, is completely normal. They've got a development cycle quite similar to that of the kernel, only because kde is an end user "feature" they have to compromise with the distros and have a more ridged release cycle. I do however encourage you to go the the LKML and convince Linus that

    • Re:point oh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pherthyl (445706) on Friday February 01 2008, @06:27PM (#22268396)
      Shame on KDE for redefining the meaning of a point oh release.

      This gets tiring quickly. Gnome 2.0, PHP 5.0, Apache 2.0, Linux Kernel 2.6.0, etc, etc

      None of those releases were completely stable or polished, or had all features from the previous series. That's how .0 releases for large projects are, no matter if they are open source or proprietary (Vista, OS X 10.0).

      That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do better, but it's not like KDE 4.0 is an exception.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by digidave (259925)
        Nobody expected KDE 4.0 to be completely stable, but as of this moment Konqueror can't use the ctrl-tab shortcut to switch browser tabs because that shortcut crashes it. Kate can't properly save a new file (or save as an existing file) when using the fish protocol because it always saves into the root directory. Also try setting the alt-d shortcut in Konqueror (focus address bar to make it behave like Firefox) and a bug will actually reset all your shortcuts to their defaults instead of creating the new sho
  • I like the dudes comment about KDE not neing a Linux desktop but just an open source desktop environment.
  • Let me preface this by saying that I just downloaded and built KDE 4. I didn't get a prepackaged one, so, your milage may vary.
    Having said that- is it just me or does KDE 4 look cartoonish? I mean, I love the K apps- Ktorrent, Konversation, and K3B, which is probably the best burner software anywhere, and now looks great to boot, but KDE itself looks like mickey mouse and mario got together over a few powerups and decided to bang out some code. I can't really recommend it to clients anyway- even the KDE t

  • KDE rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Britz (170620) on Friday February 01 2008, @06:54PM (#22268642)
    No seriously, by now there are sooo many programs for KDE for every possible use. I just checked for a gui program for creating bibtex files: kbibtex was the first one I stumbled over. KDE 4 will run under OSX as well as Windows. Personally I also dislike the MS Office / OpenOffice.org approach to Office tasks. OpenOffice.org might be great for people coming from MS Office, but I rather like the KOffice way of doing stuff. Though there are a couple features I am still missing.

    The user also doesn't care about the os their programs and their guis are running on. They only care about what they are looking at while using the programs they want to use. So I think it is rather KDE vs. Gnome vs. Luna vs. (whatever Apple calls their desktop) vs. "that new thing in Vista.

    • Re:New processes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by oever (233119) on Friday February 01 2008, @05:43PM (#22267906) Homepage
      Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.

      We are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE.

      • Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.

        dWe are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE.

        Unfortunately releasing 4.0 like this makes KDE look bad. I really doubt distributions will include it as a default option until it becomes more polished. Granted, I never used KDE much before 3.0, but IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was much more polished than 4.0. The problem is that KDE did so well with the 3.5 branch that no users except for developers are going to want to switch over to something that is not as stable or as polished

        • Re:New processes (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pizzach (1011925) <pizzach@@@gmail...com> on Friday February 01 2008, @06:04PM (#22268138) Homepage
          To summarize: The closer something is to perfection, the easier it is to screw it up when trying to improve it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pherthyl (445706)
          IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance

          You're looking back with rose coloured glasses. KDE 3.0 had a hideous default look and wasn't terribly stable. The only reason it was reasonably featureful was because not a lot of the core changed from KDE 2. But then it turned into a great series, just like KDE 4 will eventually.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by KugelKurt (908765)

          Unfortunately releasing 4.0 like this makes KDE look bad. I really doubt distributions will include it as a default option until it becomes more polished.

          KDE 4.0 was not intended by the KDE team to become the default desktop in any distro (AFAIK the next Fedora-KDE release ship with 4.0 as default).

          Granted, I never used KDE much before 3.0, but IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was much more polished than 4.0.

          KDE 3.0 was mainly a port of KDE 2.x to Qt 3. In KDE 4.0 major components have been rewritten. That wasn't the case with KDE 3.0 -- with one (AFAIK just one) notable major exception: KDevelop. KDevelop 3.0 wasn't released until IIRC KDE 3.2.
          KDE 4.0 can better be compared with KDE 2.0 and GNOME 2.0.

          Now, in a year 4.1 and 4.2 will probably get close to the 3.5 branch, but I'm just worried that KDE's reputation might suffer in the mean time.

          Does GNOME's reputation suffer because of the 2.0 release?

          • Re:New processes (Score:5, Interesting)

            by cp.tar (871488) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Friday February 01 2008, @06:54PM (#22268644) Journal

            Does GNOME's reputation suffer because of the 2.0 release?

            Yes. It does.

            I loved Gnome back in the days of 1.4, which was the last good version in my book.
            Ever since 2.0, Gnome has started turning into a confining environment, restricting more choices with every release.

            First they made a new window manager; I'm sorry, but until this day I don't see what Metacity has that Sawfish did not. But I immediately noticed all the options it did not have.
            Then they started dropping options from various configuration dialogs, basically turning applications from tweakable tools to one-size-fits-no-one crap.

            I know I'm not the only one who hates what Gnome is turning into, and while I do keep trying out different UIs (and I'm very partial to E17, BTW), KDE 4 may prove to be interesting and comfortable enough for me to convert.

            Then again, I'm less likely to mind the "yeah, sorry, we haven't had the time to implemet $OPTION properly, but we'll have it in the next version" attitude than the "it was confusing some users, so we removed it" one.

            • Then again, I'm less likely to mind the "yeah, sorry, we haven't had the time to implemet $OPTION properly, but we'll have it in the next version" attitude than the "it was confusing some users, so we removed it" one.

              That's the key right there. Features missing in KDE 4.0 aren't there because although the devs tried their best, they just didn't have time to add everything. Most of these features will be added back in due course.

              • Re:New processes (Score:4, Insightful)

                by cp.tar (871488) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Friday February 01 2008, @08:21PM (#22269266) Journal

                That's the key right there. Features missing in KDE 4.0 aren't there because although the devs tried their best, they just didn't have time to add everything. Most of these features will be added back in due course.

                ... which is why many people here bitch about them releasing the 4.0 version.

                While I do understand the sentiment, I feel this release was kind of jumping in the cold water — not very pleasant, but now it's done, it had to be done either way, and let's please move on. The product is here, bugs are being taken care of, features are being added, just keep swimming... You had been warned anyway.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by erikdalen (99500)
          but I wish they had at least stated that 4.0 was a developer release and that users should not switch until 4.1 - it would make things much smoother in my opinion.

          KDE developers did state that. [kdedevelopers.org]

          Quote:
          # KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt [btw said to have only 6 months support for its packages]).
          # KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big

        • I've got to agree... 4.0 really disappointed me. I guess it's a balancing act -- do you delay the release and risk people losing interest, or do you release unfinished product and risk people getting a bad impression? Personally, I wish they would have waited. I looked at 4.0 and there's some cool stuff in there, but it's definitely not good enough for me to use regularly. I would have gone to check out 4.0 even if it came out in January of 2009 instead of January of 2008.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by setagllib (753300)
          A similar thing happened with FreeBSD 4->5. FreeBSD 4 was at some point the fastest, most stable and most administratively sane operating system for the x86. Linux 2.4 was already ahead in SMP scalability, but since this did not affect many users back then, not many people cared.

          Then FreeBSD 5 was planned to include a major architecture shift to modern parallel programming, which required changing almost all of the kernel code sooner or later. FreeBSD 5 was downright unusuable until the 5.3 "stable" rele

      • Re:New processes (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kjella (173770) on Friday February 01 2008, @06:10PM (#22268204) Homepage

        Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use.
        Well, the "very nice environment to develop for" is because Qt4 is something like 2+ years old. Qt 4.0.0 was rather terrrible, the current version is great (kde libs on top or not). As for nice to use, that's not what I heard. I'm sure it'll get there, and I think the design goals are vastly superior to GTKs, but it's not quite there for the end user yet. Unless Nokia really screws up Trolltech, I think QT will be the dominating toolkit for Linux very soon.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by junglee_iitk (651040)
      Oh come on! Open early, open often is the mantra of open source, remember? All the problems with KDE 4 being "unprofessional", "incomplete" etc. are only coming from people who expected that KDE 4 will be awesome and revolutionary. Although it has a lot to do with marketing (the same kind of marketing that is being discussed in TFA), but also the fact that KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.

      Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead? "Until everything is finished" - tada

      • but also the fact that KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.

        While i am a linux newbie, is this really true?
        i switched because i found that gnome limited me too much (although this was before i was confident with the CLI) and xfce was well ugly ( having tested it recently i realise that this isnt true but i still think that kde looks nice *disclaimer* for me *disclaimer* )

        also i recently suggested kde over gnome to a newer newbie and he felt that gnome was better, i think its not a question of newness but taste. ( although stupidly i said that xfce probably wasn't w

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        All the problems with KDE 4 being "unprofessional", "incomplete" etc. are only coming from people who expected that KDE 4 will be awesome and revolutionary.

        The KDE developers themselves have flat out stated that KDE 4.0 is not intended for end users as it is incomplete.

        Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead?

        No, I expect them to be honest with their release processes. The reasons stated for releasing KDE 4.0 in an incomplete state was that the framework was complete and tha
      • One thing is release early, release often. Another thing is trying to bluff that this more stable and complete than it really it. I saw many wonderful cases of rationalization going on when KDE4 was released. If you want "KDE 4.0.0 final" to mean "somewhat working compile" then that's fine, Microsoft does it all the time. Just don't ever blab about Microsoft's or Google's devaluation of "beta", "release candidate" or "release" if we're going to be worse ourselves. It's the inverse of crying wolf, it's cryin

      • Re:New processes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bogtha (906264) on Friday February 01 2008, @06:47PM (#22268574)

        Open early, open often is the mantra of open source, remember?

        The full quote is "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.", it's directed at getting code out there in the open rather than waiting until it is perfect before letting anybody see it. It doesn't mean that you should label anything you can compile as a stable release, just that you shouldn't do all your work behind closed doors until it's perfect. Not to mention the fact that the advice was garnered from the Linux kernel, something significantly smaller than KDE and not anywhere near as directly exposed to end-users. And if that advice is so useful, how come the KDE project doesn't follow two-thirds of it? They have very long release cycles, ignored anybody who told them that it wasn't ready to be called 4.0 and told anybody asking where the missing features were to wait until 4.1.

        KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.

        I'm a KDE user myself, but I would not go so far as to say that. KDE is for power users, and almost all the distributions default to GNOME, which is quite a bit simpler.

        Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead?

        The problem is that they are too much like the enlightenment release cycle. KDE tried to do too much in one go. I remember when KDE 4 was supposed to be a short release cycle that was nothing but a straight port to Qt 4. Somehow they decided to totally rewrite everything important and invent major new subsystems that everything critical is based upon — while porting to Qt 4 at the same time! There is simply no way a step that large is compatible with "Release often" or "Listen to your customers", because it's an incredible amount of work just to remain where you are.

        • They have very long release cycles, ignored anybody who told them that it wasn't ready to be called 4.0 and told anybody asking where the missing features were to wait until 4.1.

          To be fair this is what end users have come to expect. Also any new project can either release 0.9 releases or has a userbase that will test thier beta enough ( e.g firefox) but KDE has a large scope but few users are going to switch there DE to a beta. They didnt lie they didnt say it was a finished DE.

          KDE tried to do too much in one go. I remember when KDE 4 was supposed to be a short release cycle that was nothing but a straight port to Qt 4.

          It makes alot more sense to have the 4.0 release contain all the major changes instead of doing:
          4.0 to port, 4.1, 4.2 to stabilize, 4.3 major rework, 4.4 -4.6 to stabilize
          For end user products it makes mor

        • Their naming convention for version numbers is know, and has been discussed to death on Slashdot everytime someone says KDE 4.0

          I am no fan of KDE 4.0 myself. I have been hearing the hype about it since what, end of 2004? That is 3 years ago. They had something on kde-look.org where users will be posting mockups of what they want and other users would look and say, wow, KDE 4 is going to be so great. They promised Kopete which will have proxy support (WTH is it not a priority for Thiego is something I could
    • agreed, I have had this problem as well.

      I am really looking forward to the OS X and windows ports for KDE 4 when they become stable. I have actually been looking forward to this for years. This would allow me to use all the same stuff in windows and linux and make everything uniform. The only reason to boot to windows will be to play games I want to play though. This could also help linux adoption. First people switch to firefox and pidgin and maybe even openoffice, then they see someone using KDE on wind

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pembo13 (770295)

      I've been using KDE for a long time and I really like it. There is one thing that annoys me though, I'll find a bug and try to report it, only to be told that I'm not on the latest version. I'll need to upgrade and see if it's still a bug. Well, as much as I'd like to help make KDE better, I'm not going to upgrade my entire OS just to test a bug. They're not very receptive to bug reporting.

      Well... KDE isn't an entire OS, as big as it may be. Besides that however... the bug may be of the kind that was likely fixed

      Besides that however, have you ever submitted a ticket and got that as a response? This wouldn't be a good thing, but not specific to KDE either

      • Well... KDE isn't an entire OS, as big as it may be. Besides that however... the bug may be of the kind that was likely fixed
        Have you tried updating *one* KDE application? In my case it pulled all of KDE out of stable for 450MB of downloads. You're right, it's not an entire OS... but it tends to replace everything BUT the kernel!

      • Well... KDE isn't an entire OS, as big as it may be.

        What distribution do you use that always has the latest KDE in the current version repositories? It's unreasonable to expect users to update a major package like KDE (and quite likely all the arcane dependencies it has) just to verify a bug.

        The point is, the developers _are_ running the latest version and, assuming the bug report has enough information in it, they should be able to verify the bug, or verify that it's been fixed in the latest version. Put

      • I just got this response from OO.org for a bug I filed. I'll check when I next upgrade but in common with most users don't have time to "upgrade and see if it's still an issue".
    • Simpler Fix report it to you distro. I have reported issue in Fedora many times. People who do the porting look at find the issue a either back port the fix or fix it and send it upstream. Either way they are the best way to fix many thing.

      Thanks
      Robert
    • Aside from the thousands you'll spend on Windows licenses, Visual Studio licenses, and pre-built closed source components and other developer tools. Don't fool yourself into thinking that developing for windows is cheap.
      • Windows Vista = ~200.00 USD Visual Studio Express 2008 - 0.00 USD
        • Sure, if you're a hobbyist that'll be enough. But no serious software development company uses Visual Studio Express. Then if you're building a big projects you need access to libraries, and you'll have to buy software components to accomplish certain tasks.

          So yes, if you're wanting to write a little shareware utility, then Windows will be a cheaper target (not to mention that there is about zero point in writing that kind of stuff for Linux), but if you're at all serious about getting into the business,

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by pherthyl (445706)
              You listed some of them. But also reusable software components on windows need to be purchased. You get all the KDE libraries for free once you have a Qt license. MFC and its ilk are not comparable, so then you have to go to .NET which brings its own set of restrictions. Just look at software development companies and see how much professional tools cost.

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by DAldredge (2353)
                Trying that again.

                Visual Studio Express consists of the following separate products:

                * Visual Basic (.NET) 2008 Express Edition
                * Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
                * Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
                * Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
                * SQL Server 2008 Express Edition (to be released in the first half of 2008)

                Microsoft Visual J# 2005 was not updated for this release
    • Gnome has a lot LESS to offer. I tried gnome once...You have to click twice to open a file? WTF you want carpal tunnel? So you want a bar on the top with 3 items like Ubuntu Configured Gnome? No problem with KDE, just set it up. KDE doesnt have to look like OpenSuse, and Gnome doesnt have to look like Ubuntu, but KDE gives you greater flexibility and more contextual menus then Gnome, along with their awesome KIOSLAVES (well with KDE 3.x anyways). BTW you can double click in KDE and Single click in Gnome, if

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RedK (112790)

        When I use Gnome it feels like somebody took KDE and broke it.
        The most ironic part of that statement and of the OP's post is that the most successful commercial fork of Gnome, the Java Desktop System, was made to look more like KDE than GNOME.
        • That's a pretty ironic statement, too, because you're saying that Sun really wanted KDE but had to settle for Gnome. Why do you think that is? I think it's because of licensing issues.

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