KDE 4 Promises Large Changes 401
HatofPig writes "As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works."
Speed and memory consumption (Score:5, Interesting)
PLEASE PLEASE OPTIMIZE FOR MEMORY USAGE!
Its really sad that Windows with all its services and stuff uses 1/2 the RAM of KDE alone.
TODO: Clone Spotlight (Score:1, Interesting)
"The most obvious application of Tenor would be desktop search, giving KDE an analog to GNOME's brilliant search tool Beagle. But the Tenor project's chief architect, Scott Wheeler, wants to go further, asking, "how can we make it easier to work with the data we accumulate on the desktop?" So rather than just making it easier for users to search for documents, Tenor will provide application developers with data that can transform their interfaces. For example, the KDE Control Center, which currently organizes the configuration modules into a confusing hierarchy, may provide a search interface with results that show related items and learn from usage patterns."
Cheers,
Ian
I can't wait for the beta versions (Score:2, Interesting)
It'll be like a second Christmas!
Re:Big deal. Its still not grandma-friendly (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Speed and memory consumption (Score:3, Interesting)
I met a very attractive woman( hot blond ). As amazing fortune would have it, she was a reader in her spare time, of similar politics, was very witty and loved joking around. As if that could not get any better she was a linux users and attended linux meetup groups.
She recently switched to windows xp. I was shocked and I asked her about it. She told me that she wanted to use a remote client to work on her work machine from home. She told me that windows xp did it so significantly faster that she dumped linux because she could not stand the wait.
Then she proved it to me with a demonstration.
I could not argue with her.
It is truly sad that windows xp out performs the premier linux desktop.
I am with every one else. I have most of the features I want.
I could wait a year for new features if the good folks at the KDE wanted to spend a year working on performance and stability.
It could become a marketing strength, similar to the firefox people being able to brag about being able to patch holes light years faster than microsoft.
They can brag about taking a year to optimize their code..."who else will do that? Enjoy a product that was perfected over the course of a year ".
Re:Waste of all the progress! (Score:2, Interesting)
You are mistaken. You can pull off tightly integrated backwards compatibility and still migrate to a new toolkit and language. Apple has demonstrated this.
What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? [...] anything else is really just a matter of preference.
KDE4 has specific goals, and one has to ask the question whether Qt and C++ are the best platforms to support those goals. I believe they aren't. But, of course, since most KDE programmers are heavily invested in Qt and C++, they wouldn't agree.
In the end, the market will decide. I suspect that around the time KDE4 comes out, you are going to see other mainstream Linux desktops that are more user friendly and easier to develop for.
You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it
Yes, that's another problem, and that's exactly the problem the LGPL was intended to address. Putting a GPL license on software that has less restrictive substitutes discourages its use. Most of the software I develop is open source, but I'd still have to pay for Qt if I ever only want to temporarily distribute a single copy in binary form only.
Re:I hope its not bloated (Score:2, Interesting)
KDE version 2 started eating memory and resources because it added a whole lot of underlying engineering, most of which a technical user who doesn't use it as just a desktop to manage xterms and other X programs doesn't use. You needed at least a Sun Ultra 1 with 256MB of RAM for it to be useful.
KDE version 3 increased the overhead quite a bit and increased the disk usage a lot. Unless you had a 440MHz Sun Ultra 10 with half a gig of RAM it's painful.
I'm guessing that KDE 4 won't even run on platforms which don't use an X server without the new Xorg server extensions and a gigahertz processor or two.
You may ask yourself why I'm not talking about the power of PC's running Linux as a comparison against which to judge the different versions.. well, firstly, KDE is supposed to be fully cross (unix-like) platform. Secondly, we're a mostly Sun shop for the research side of things here, with Linux increasing in number, but because of the extended nature of machine replacement in academia I still have to support and run 8-10 year old machines. To me, being able to run a reasonably modern desktop for my users is important. KDE used to be the ideal replacement for the really increadibly crummy CDE which comes with Solaris.. it's getting harder and harder to keep it running on the old hardware.
Re:Speed and memory consumption (Score:3, Interesting)
I for one have been folowing the progress of KDE since its 2.0 days and all I can say is they do an amazing job. Yeah, I agree, it always used a lot more memory than the Windows Explorer shell but I bet you would never notice that if you were not with you eyes on the memory gauge. And I can bet you that in the unlikely event some component in KDE crashes, you don't need to restart.
I run KDE 3.5_beta1 on Gentoo right now and have had no issues with it in 3 days usage. This includes desktop, file manager, instant messaging, mail, address book, calendar etc.
All I can say: KDE developers, keep up the good work!
Re:Stability, ease of use and speed (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the entire difference. Most modern operating systems (and I'll exclude OS X here) don't rely heavily on the processor to do work, and thus, aren't optimised for one platform, and just use the processor as they see fit. As most DEs don't do work that's that processor intense, it's not a problem (although, I will have to admit that there is currently a bug/feature/something wrong with Nautilus that causes older computers to have a heart attack when viewing media folders; either something is wrong with the VFS not caching thumbnails, or Nautilus is improperly threaded to deal with the issue).
To the point, I have a Pentium Pro machine at home that I have loaded with 256 megs of EDO. The desktop is every bit as responsive and quick on it, as it is my Pentium II 450 here at work with 256MB of SDRAM, (of course, except for the media bug *shakes fist at GNOME developers*), but feels absolutely sluggish compared to my Pentium 4 (2.8) in my kitchen at home with 2GBs of DDR (of course, these are just my desktop machines, all running GNOME).
As for the browser, Konq is excellent, and as testimate Apple uses much of the code in WebCore (horray gpl). But it also shows how adamant KDE developers are to do things their own way, and not make consessions to anyone, so there are always drawbacks to every situation (open source would benefit a lot if the desktop environments ratified Firefox as their official browser, simply because it would simplify the amount of knowledge a user has to have to use Linux. Not that there's anything wrong with Konq; it's great, it's just severely outnumbered).
It's the little things about attitude and situational awareness that really keeps the Linux community at a constant holy war with itself, and IMO it's the reason they don't innovate and simply copy their role models (see GNOME and OS X, KDE and Windows). While I love choice, the problem is that someone has to choose, and the uninformed is as clueless as most people would be going to shop for a car (even though this is a bad analogy; cars at least have a standard interface, and the largest choice is based on the look, power and features, verses how easy it is to use).
Re:Stability, ease of use and speed (Score:3, Interesting)
echo "KDE_NO_IPV6=true" >> /etc/environment
But I think they did something about it anyway; I've recently installed SuSE again and at first forgot to set the variable but I've yet to find a page with the painfully slow rendering that was caused by the ipv6 lookup lags in earlier versions.
Also SuSE (well their performance enhanced version; get it here [opensuse.org]) has the fastest KDE I've ever seen.
Re:Linux needs a good, easy desktop. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea, it's called Gnome.
Gnome is getting pretty good, but compared to Windows or OS X the point at which the windows-icons-mouse-pointer paradigm falls down still comes much sooner than in Windows or OS X
Linux is nice, and serves me as a Unix zealot quite well for a home desktop, but I still haven't seen a Linux distribution in which it is as easy to install an application as in the mainstream OSes.
"For example, Sometimes, sound on linux can be an absolute bitch to get going."
What does this have to do with the desktop?
I (like most people with computers) have a large collection of music on my computer, because it's so much easier to manage than a giant pile of CDs. Listening to music from one's computer is a common use for desktop machines these days. There's no way in hell a consumer or non-power-user is going to knowingly choose an OS with such weak audio abilities that it can only play one sound at once without the assistance of some program which makes the sound choppy and/or laggy on certain hardware. I have set up dmixer on my computer which should mean that I should be able do away with those awful sound daemons, and some people have those new fangled cards with a hardware mixer, but the obsolete sound daemons have become so entrenched that they're still required for the respective desktop environments and their applications to function properly.
There is no stable ABI for vendors to create hardware drivers to, the ABI is in a constant state of flux along with the rest of the kernel and drivers compiled for a certain version are progressively more unlikely to work with each successive minor version of the kernel. The situation is nearly as bad for open source drivers which need regular maintenance to remain in sync with the audio API. It's no wonder most hardware vendors don't want to touch Linux with a stick.
The situation with sound in Linux is confusing, fragmented and in many ways just plain broken. I don't know what you do with your desktop, but it's obviously not typical if you don't consider sound to be important.
"The point is, that as long as simple issues like playing a video become mammoth tasks,"
What does this have to do with the desktop?
You don't suppose all those millions of ATA DVD drives being sold are finding their way into servers do you?
Wake up Buck, you've arrived in the 21st century. Playing videos and listening to sounds is actually commonplace nowadays, in fact a nice screen for playing videos was why I chose a midsize laptop instead of a subnotebook, and last I looked there are increasing numbers of wide screens coming onto the market. I'm pretty sure sales of wide screen laptops and monitors isn't booming because of people wanting to put 6 xterms on screen at once.
None of your complaints have anything to do with the desktop. You are wanting applications and drivers.
None of his complaints have very much to do with the GUI but they are certainly related to the experience of trying to use a Linux machine as a desktop operating system.
Few people (except those like me whose brains seem to be running some variant of Unix in muscle memory) are going to choose a desktop that limits their computers abilities. Everything seems pretty straightforward to me and I feel empowered rather than limited by Linux, but I'm a wee bit of a nerd and few of my non-nerd friends who've sampled Linux have kept at it even with remote tech support at their bidding.
Re:Include CVS/SVN stuff in Konqueror! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stability, ease of use and speed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Big deal. Its still not grandma-friendly (Score:3, Interesting)
- Comment 1 [slashdot.org]
- Comment 2 [slashdot.org]
- Comment 3 [slashdot.org]
- Comment 4 [slashdot.org]
- Comment 5 [slashdot.org]
- Comment 6 [slashdot.org]
The guy is called ClintJCL [slashdot.org]: one of his posts [slashdot.org]. You can find the same post in his blog [blogspot.com], but he says, that he just copied it fromRe:Stability, ease of use and speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, our "eye-candy"'s main point is to make it easier to use. All our eye-candy has a function, its not just for show.
not quite true (Score:1, Interesting)
to counter your list:
- Suse is on its way out as a desktop, these days Novel is pushing Novel Linux Desktop, which is a gnome centric distro.
- Sun uses gnome in JDS.
- Ubuntu uses gnome only.
- Fedora and Redhat are both default to gnome.
so yeah, its a tossup which is really "in the lead"... which make such claims like in this story laughable and basically FUD.
Re:Stability, ease of use and speed (Score:3, Interesting)