Social Desktop Starts To Arrive In KDE 199
FrankKarlitschek writes
"At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost."
Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't want to flame, but *ubuntu is usually a pretty bloated install. I built KDE 4.2 from scratch on Debian installed on a P4 with 768 ram and an old Intel onboard, it ran perfect. *shrug*
IMO both KDE/Gnome meet their real potential if you take some time to customize them and work out what makes you, as an individual, happy. I don't think they're going to satisfy many people left just on default settings.
Mandriva 2009! for KDE, not the worthless Kubuntu (Score:2, Interesting)
Mandriva is a sane, stable distro that is tweaked for KDE and not Gnome. Kubuntu is garbage.
Seriously, Mandriva is really nice.
Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a memo: Since when has the number of opened bugs, certainly in an open bug tracking system, ever reflected the general quality of any software? How many of those bugs are actually relevant? How many of them are just arguments over functionality? Have they been triaged? Your argument is meaningless if what you've linked to hasn't been filtered. All it tells me is that people obviously care about what is going on in KDE 4.
Well, for an awful lot of people it hasn't been. If you want people to take notice of what you say then you'll have to qualify those claims further with specifics because I'm afraid just saying it doesn't make it true.
Wow. It's true is it? I didn't know ;-).
Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard it speculated that KDE is not a terribly high priority for Canonical, whereas the reverse is true with Suse. Don't know whether its true, but my experience definitely jibs with it.
Re:it's already here (Score:4, Interesting)
KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows.
Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting. And the people who owned CDE thought that because it was ahead of the competition, they could charge a premium for it. Meanwhile, in the PC market, companies were pushing out low-cost machines with crappy and cumbersome low-level GUI libraries by the millions.
KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.
Re:The Widget (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Widget (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is, isn't it? :-)
Forums are useful for the collaboration that precedes the creation of a wiki page, but they certainly do a lousy job trying to supplant one. If the initial post in a thread is consistently updated to reflect the best and latest collective wisdom of the discussion, it can almost take the place of a wiki, but in my experience that is rarely done, and even when done is even less rarely done well.
Wikis are indeed better storehouses of collective wisdom, but there aren't enough of them and they often don't rank as highly in search engines as the forum posts they should be superceding. That's perhaps what needs to be fixed: more, and more easily found.
Re:The Widget (Score:4, Interesting)
"I think it's called a wiki."
Sort of. A wiki is great for topic-based material. Not so great for time-based (blogs and calendars) or thread-based (comments/forums).
It seems like there should be a framework sitting midway between wiki, blog, forum and calendar: something which deals with chunks of text in a standard safe markup language (Textile/Markdown or the like), tagged with fields (date created, date modified, date due, creator) and then aggregated into views (blog post, blog comment, forum thread, forum comment, wiki page, wiki edit, wiki history).
Why don't we have this yet?
Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher (Score:2, Interesting)
You should try Mandriva where KDE is top priority (the default desktop environment). They have, in my opinion, the most polished and usable KDE4 available, they did it in the past with KDE3 they keep up with the latest KDE.