Testing the KDE 4.2 Release Candidate, On Windows 272
Verunks writes "Ars takes the KDE 4.2 release candidate out for a test drive on Windows. The popular open source desktop environment has moved beyond Linux and is becoming increasingly robust on other platforms. Even KDE's Plasma desktop shell is now Windows-compatible."
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
You aren't using a second windowing interface at all. You just use the applications unless you choose to use Plasma.
I am running the same RC just fine on my Windows partition. The only application I really miss is KMail.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:5, Informative)
Portability was one of the goals of KDE4, and it is encouraging to see it works.
Now if only the other parts of it would stop sucking...
Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.
I realize it's meant to be scalable, but why is it scalable right off the edges of the widget? And in a widget which is in the panel, by default?
Just one of many KDE4 WTFs which makes you wonder, "Forget QA, did anyone actually fucking boot it up to see if it was working?"
Please post a link to the bug report that you filed so that I can help triage it. Thanks.
Re:All for a text editor (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When a GNOME developer says KDE rocks, I'm elat (Score:4, Informative)
They wouldn't, because GNOME and KDE have two different design philosophies. Anyway, this argument is kind of similar to the "why waste time making so many distros?" one you see a lot.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect the reason you might want to do this is so that you can use Linux tools on a Windows base platform. Kate, for example, is rather a nice editor (although I tend to use Notepad++ under Windows). Don't forget as well that KDE almost certainly has more development than the Windows desktop - although this can be a mixed blessing in my experience due to random breakage.
As others have suggested just kill explorer.exe to free your machine from the default Windows desktop.
Re:Editors: Can we remove the first troll comment (Score:5, Informative)
If you find it offensive, then don't read it. I can tell you from experience that their have been far, far more offensive troll posts on Slashdot and that ALL of them have been modded to -1 in seconds. The system works, and I see no reason to change it in order to placate you or anyone else in the offense brigade.
You, and people like you, who think that material you personally object to should be destroyed or removed, are the single biggest problem in the western world today. Here we have a system that appropriately and expediently deals with troll posts, and yet you are still not happy. You want the material "purged". You find issue with its very existence, and moreover, insist that the rest of the world cater to your whims.
Do you know the difference between you and a fundamentalist mullah complaining about "immodest dress" or "images" for or of women? There is none. You're the same person, just with different hang ups. And the rest of us should not have to give up our freedoms to satisfy your scruples.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:4, Informative)
This may not be an obvious flaw. Text not fitting in a widget can happen if the user's font settings are outside the default range. So unless this is a case were the widget is in trouble on a virgin install - where there are no settings inherited from a prior KDE instance - or on a system were the user never altered any of the default settings - then how are the developers supposed to have seen the problem as "obvious"? What may be more obvious is that if you allow the user to tune his system some proportion of users will get theirs tuned so stuff like this appears.
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:3, Informative)
Konsole is not yet ported. Which makes me very sad since I switched to Windows 7 until KDE 4 stops being the trainwreck that it is, but I miss having a terminal emulator that doesn't suck (aka Konsole). Putty is pretty awful in comparison.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a developer, and I'm running KDE 4.2 RC. I have a clock on my panel showing the date and time. I do not see this bug.
From How to report bugs effectively [greenend.org.uk]:
The whole thing is worth reading, really.
Now, go file a damn bug, with a screenshot, and help make KDE rock!
Re:All for a text editor (Score:3, Informative)
Notepad++ [sourceforge.net].
The closest thing I've found in Linux is Geany, and it's a pale imitation. God, I wish I could get it to do highlighting on the corresponding open/close (x)html tag to the one the cursor is in--among other things.
I'm seriously considering running it in Wine; it's actually good enough to be worth that hassle. It's the only non-Adobe, non-game program that I miss from Windows.
Unless Kate has gotten better about resource usage and start time since I last used it, it's kind of a pig on any platform. So's Gedit, though to a much lesser extent. I've used both at different times, but eventually dumped them; even a featureful text editor has no business being so bloated.
Re:When a GNOME developer says KDE rocks, I'm elat (Score:4, Informative)
I apologize ahead of time for my language but speaking as someone who doesn't run kde as their wm (e17 for me), all I have to say to this is:
FUCK NO!
From my perspective, if I want to run any application that has to do with kde, and there's a lot of great ones, I have to wait for all the damn dcopservers, kio_slaves, kdeinits, etc. to load and it's a royal pain in the ass. The kde environment is bloated and irritating for anyone who doesn't want to run the kde wm. The gtk and gnome apps have no such irritations. Think about what you're saying, you'd turn kde precisely into what we all hate about windows, a monopoly. A huge bloated mess where somebody up on high says, thou shalt do it this way and no other and the rest of us have to live with it. Frankly, I'm waiting with baited breath for more mainstream qt4 apps to come out that aren't tied to kde. VLC has already done that and it's such an improvement over the wxwidgets interface.
Re:All for a text editor (Score:1, Informative)
I've tried it, works just fine on wine, no hassle during the installs, even when the numbering system was dates
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:4, Informative)
meanwhile you can try console2, it supports tabbing and transparency http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:Editors: Can we remove the first troll comment (Score:3, Informative)
The post incites racial hatred. They would be arrested in any public place for saying such things...
Not in the U.S. it won't. Unless the speech incites to riot, is slanderous or poses a direct physical danger (i.e. -- shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, causing a stampede), it is perfectly legal in the U.S. in a public place. Actually, there would be more repercussion in private in the U.S., as speech like that will get you fired or evicted and banned from a private location rather quickly. The U.S. is rather zealous about the right to free speech.
Re:What about my right to be offended ? Easy ... (Score:5, Informative)
Set your read level to -1. Others avoid any posts by ACs by reading only level one or higher. The option is yours, why hadn't you noticed? Are you predisposed to complain?
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:4, Informative)
KDE 4.2 is no trainwreck. Here's my take [blogspot.com] on KDE 4.2. My personal verdict is that KDE 4 has surpassed KDE 3.5 for daily use and is ready for primetime.
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:3, Informative)
Check out Puttycyg:
http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/ [google.com]
Or Poderosa:
http://en.poderosa.org/ [poderosa.org]
Both allow you to open a Cygwin terminal session without the need to have a local SSH server running.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:3, Informative)
Please post a link to the bug report that you filed so that I can help triage it. Thanks.
I suppose, being unemployed now, I have less of an excuse not to file bug reports.
But understand, so much was broken in 4.0 and 4.1 that reporting bugs could be a full-time job. I realize this might be unique to my hardware, or to my setup -- but it was one thing, after another, after another. It's not an exaggeration to say daily WTF, here. Today's WTF is, why can't kde3 apps connect to the kde4 kdewallet? Kubuntu seems to have "solved" this problem by castrating kdewallet support right out of kde3 apps -- which is really frustrating, for things like networkmanager.
I mean, the API is, what, a hash table? How hard can it be? It's not like we're trying to embed a whole browser plugin...
Another WTF: At some point, I had a USB sound device plugged in. Solid chose to inform me -- in a gigantic message, which covers up the entire system tray, and can't be closed except by waiting a few seconds -- and on every single boot -- that it couldn't initialize this device which I had plugged in for one evening. I had to manually open the config file and remove the entries for that card -- but I would like that card to work, if I plug it in again.
Another: My soundcard, at one point, lacked a "master" volume control in ALSA. Now it has one. Despite this, I still cannot get the volume keys to work. The closest I got was volume keys working for the PCM control (not Master), yet the display was of the Master control, so the display was broken, and it would control the volume of the video, but not the rest of the system -- one beep from the system could be deafening.
Another: No bluetooth support in Kubuntu. I know it's Kubuntu's fault -- but there you go, how do I determine who's fault it is?
Another: The font spacing/size in Konsole changed, with no way I could find of changing it back.
Another: Can't flatten out the clock. I want it to display the date and time on the same line, and stretch out, so I can make the panel even smaller.
Another: When typing in alt+f2, pressing enter launches whatever the cursor was on at that point, rather than finishing the search first. This means that if I type too fast, even if I know there is only one possible completion for something (example: kons should launch konsole, whereas konq should launch konqueror), I might get konqueror instead of konsole, or vice versa, simply because it took the results for a search on "kon" before I typed the last character. Only workaround is to pause for a second or so after typing, to make sure it gets the right one, or type the full name each time.
I can do this all day.
I did occasionally track down some of them and found they'd been reported. Not all of that matters -- I realize Amarok is a separate project, but the problem now is, the old version is depricated, and the new version isn't done. (I know it's released. It's not done.) So bugs against the old version will be marked "wontfix", for that reason -- meaning there is, for the moment, no working version of Amarok, for some of the things I want to do.
Re:When a GNOME developer says KDE rocks, I'm elat (Score:5, Informative)
GNOME uses DBUS as well (and therefore dbus-server). KDE no longer uses DCOP but uses the same thing GNOME uses.
KIO Slaves are launched on demand as needed, not just because kdeinit loads up.
On the other hand there is usually at the very least a kbuildsycoca step involved when running your first KDE app in a session. I'm sure GNOME has something similar (gconf?) although it may be faster, no doubt.
Really a lot of the startup time concern in my experience has been related more towards C++ symbol bloating (which is significantly reduced nowadays between prelinking and symbol visibility support). The kdeinit you talk about was actually a hack designed to work around that problem, by turning KDE applications into shared libraries (that would startup up much faster as a result).
I will say that I also am cheering on the adoption of more plain Qt apps, for the same reason that I have quite a few GTK+ utilities but no GNOME ones. Less startup time is always a good thing. Unlike the grandparent though I'm not hoping that one DE ends up winning out, I'd actually prefer there be choice available (as long as it interoperates).
Re:EU (Score:3, Informative)
You think that is funny, but back in the Windows 3.x days there was actually a thriving market for alternate Windows desktops. Norton desktop and Central Point desktop come to mind as several popular ones. OEMs regularly bundled alternate startup shells with tutorials and such, because they felt people might want this and in the end could make the OEM more money.
Then when Windows 95 came along Microsoft completely forbade OEMs from bundling alternative interfaces, or anything that displaced their "desktop".
Sure, the Win95 interface was vastly improved over Win3.1 so there was less need to, but OEMs still wanted to do it. For a time there were even some clever hacks that tried to display extra stuff under the task bar, outside of the "desktop" as Microsoft defined it.
Microsoft very well may still be forbidding or discouraging OEMs from bundling alternative desktops, in which case the EU should force MS to let OEMs bundle other desktops IF they want.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:3, Informative)
I can do this all day.
Please do. But not on slashdot. Do it here:
https://bugs.kde.org/wizard.cgi [kde.org]
Clock bug appears to be fixed in 4.1.96 (ie RC1) (Score:3, Informative)
I had the same bug.
From my few brief experiences KDE developers _seem_ to have an attitude of "if it affects me I'll fix it" which is fine, they're mostly working for free. But that does kinda make me not bother reporting bugs + if I was reporting all my bugs/crashes I wouldn't have time to read Slashdot.*
The bug in question sounds like the effect I was getting which appears to have been fixed in 4.1.96 (RC1) but was present in 4.1.80.
KDE teams appear to have known about it: ... etc ...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166883 [kde.org]
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157537 [kde.org]
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158762 [kde.org]
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163870 [kde.org]
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178840 [kde.org]
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178859 [kde.org]
This was not, as other posters in the thread appear to want to claim, due to that users incompetence. His comments weren't totally unreasonable.
KDE has had major problems with font support on the desktop until recently; incidentally there are currently no settings to alter the size of the date text. The date and time font sizes are set by the height of the panel - clearly this is a sensible and neat feature, but it was broken. I hesitated to say "horribly broken" but the clock is one of the main visible elements in most peoples kicker/panel/application bar and as such is one of those "first impressions" features that are really important to get right if you want your interface to appear professional. Changing the font used by KDE seemed to help before.
For those just looking at the RC it's like the [relatively] massive numbers used in the clocks pop-up calendar widget ( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178588 [kde.org] ).
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* FWIW I focus on a couple of non-KDE projects and do my best to report bugs and provide user support for them.