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."
Difficult work being done well but... (Score:1, Insightful)
...the article doesn't make it as clear as KDE's website that this "is experimental state" (sic).
Given KDE's recent experiences people should be more careful about opening themselves or others to accusations of punting Alpha quality software as Beta or Beta as production.
Apparently even Kate doesn't work? I'm not knocking their work as this is a very important bridge for moving people from Windows to *N!X or at least moving Open Source software from *N!X to Windows and clearly something that takes great care, planning and skill in execution. However we don't want people's first expirience of Open Source to be buggy unresponsive software with empty error message boxes!
Re:Difficult work being done well but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty much any software can be described as much-criticized, especially when it's popular and then undergoes a rewrite or significant changes. Hear the cries of "it doesn't do x, it used to do x like so" for [Gnome|KDE|MS Office|Vista|Python|Finder|fill in blank]. Regardless of whether many people are happy with the changes, you'll find a group that is very vocal in its discontent.
On the other hand, not all software can be described as popular, which KDE certainly is (in the OSS world).
Re:Kike Development Environment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:4, Insightful)
Has it really not crossed your mind that perhaps your experience is unique? Maybe you have a bad font or font handling library somewhere that is incorrectly reporting size that is atypical.
Maybe some other obscure combination of things that a tiny few people have causes this, and everyone that has experienced it is just assuming _everybody_ does and that _clearly_ nobody is paying attention. Screw a bug report, obviously everyone can see this issue and it's just been ignored.
Get over yourself. The KDE devs are the most responsive people I've ever dealt with including companies that are paid 5 figures a month for enterprise class support, but they cannot respond if they are not notified. They do not have huge farms of systems sporting every possible combination of hardware and software. They rely on proper reporting and triaging.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, to run KOffice on Windows. Or Amarok2.
Also, given that QT is soon going to be LGPL - I feel very interested in contributing to KDE and using parts of KDE in my proprietary programs.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Fallacy. If we had one look at the OP's desktop then we would have seen it. Unfortunately, the users who test KDE cannot possibly test every permutation of hardware that exists that supports KDE. It's simply impossible. However, I'm willing to bet that the machines they did test on did not exhibit this problem. Hence, they never knew a problem existed.
He asked only that the OP tell him where the bug report was, nothing else, and then he would help fix it. Instead, you criticized him, implying that all KDE developers should magically know about every bug before the users find it, regardless of the users' hardware.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a KDE zealot. Actually, I'm a much bigger fan of GNOME for completely separate reasons. However, going around arguing that KDE developers are a "cabal" and implying that they should have some superhuman (unpaid) testing team is ridiculous.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:1, Insightful)
I use Kde 4.1.x from Kubuntu, I am right now seeing the date line very clearly, nothing is cut off.
So apparently the bug isn't very obvious and might have to do with his specific settings.
Think about it this way: Writing the bug report would take about as much time as bitching about it on slashdot, the difference being that writing a bug report might actually get it fixed.
Re:The offensive post (Score:1, Insightful)
You're just encouraging them by responding *at all*. This *what they want*. The one thing they don't want is to be modded to -1 and then completely ignored. Any response or discussion beyond that will be seen as a small victory for them. (And yes, I realize I'm now contributing to such as discussion but it's too late in this case).
You also didn't change the title in your reply so you've now further propagated the offensive title of the offensive post. Well done.
Re:Editors: Can we remove the first troll comment (Score:2, Insightful)
The post incites racial hatred. They would be arrested in any public place for saying such things, if they weren't beaten to death by the black community first.
This has got to be the dumbest fucking thing I've read on slashdot in a while (about 15 minutes...) Who is going to read that post, and think, "Holy cow! I've been wrong all this time, I really do hate black people!" The person and their ilk who cut and pasted that drivel did so to get a rise out of you and your ilk, and it worked, superbly.
Get a grip, you wiener.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:3, Insightful)
> So... the bug report will be marked "Cannot reproduce". Then a couple other suckers that were so annoyed by it that they took the time to create an account in the bug system will post "Still reproducible on 4.4", but it'll never get fixed. And even if it does get fixed, the bug report will never be changed from "Cannot reproduce" to "Fixed" since it's lost in the morass
I've filed a lot of bugs against KDE4. A *lot*. My experience is that (surprise, surprise, I guess), the KDE4 developers are like any other sample of human beings. Some bugs get responded to almost immediately (within minutes or hours). Some are acknowledged and are worked on over the course of days or weeks. And some indeed languish and one thinks "why did I bother? Doesn't anyone care that this is a REALLY ANNOYING BUG?" Maybe the poster just had a bad experience with one of the last kinds of bugs. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes. But hey, it's still on average hugely better than filing bugs with a big company.
Try filing a report to MS. Or Google -- or Seagate in the current mess. I've never even received a sane acknowledgement.
So bugs.kde.org sure isn't perfect; and neither are the developers. And even though I agree with most posters that the current state of KDE4 is that it frankly sucks, the best way to help is to file reports. It sure isn't going to get better if we don't.
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares about KDE 4.2 on winblows!
I want to know if it is ready for Linux/BSD.
When it has features == to KDE 3.5.10 and is usable, then post some sensational headline to the effect.
Until then somebody needs to stay in the kitchen and keep cooking
Re:Sounds Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Linux daily and very heavily. I administer and use it on a 300-core compute cluster, I develop applications on it, I maintain packages for a Linux distribution. I guess I have a lot of use for the environment.
I also need my OS/DE/the whole stack to support my hardware well without spending days tweaking it and to provide me with a GUI that doesn't suck. It does so perfectly on the cluster/server, but is pathetic at it on my laptop (it's a Thinkpad, so the specs are pretty open and the drivers are almost all there; it's the userland support that's absent). KDE 4.1 fails at it. Gnome fails at it less miserably. KDE 4.2 still fails at it. I don't know how long it will take KDE to recover, but I'm not waiting.
I don't like not having the true Linux environment at my fingertips but Cygwin does most of it passably and most of the time I'm connected to a server anyway. Yes, Putty is an ssh client, but Puttycyg is a terminal emulator, and the best one there is for Windows. And it still sucks.
Konsole running Cygwin on Windows will be a nice improvement and as close as one can get to a good platform on Windows so far.
Re:Fixed it for you (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds like EXACTLY what would happen if I reported a Windows bug to Microsoft. Actually, no, that's not true; instead, I'd spend three hours on the phone being bumped from incompetent tech support staff in India to incompetent tech support managers in India to incompetent tech support staff in the U.S.... before finally giving up. Microsoft most certainly would not release a patch that fixed my problem if it only occurred on my particular machine. At least KDE developers wouldn't dick me around about it.
Not only is rude to assume that the developers are so incompetent that they will by default just leave the bug in purgatory forever, it's also not what I have experienced with most open source projects. Every bug report I have ever submitted to a substantial open source project (including GNOME, Ubuntu, GIMP) has been addressed in a relatively timely manner. I have never submitted a bug to KDE, but I know that they are not somehow dumber than the rest of the open source community.
Mod his posting as Dung (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is about freedom of speech, alternate points of view and exchange of ideas. Well, this pin-head got my dander up. His perspective is so backward and cretinous that he does not deserve to be modded as a Troll. Rather that going on about it at length, may I propose that slanderous items of this nature should have a further, lower category: Dung. If a posting gets modded Dung, it should not appear on any basic search - unless a user specifically requests to look at the Dung Heap.