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Comments: 423 +- Technology: What's Coming In KDE 4.4 on Tuesday November 17, @09:38AM
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buzzboy writes "If you're wondering what the folks over at KDE have been cooking up for the next major release, KDE 4.4, well, quite a bit as it turns out. In a lengthy interview, KDE core developer and spokesperson for the project Sebastian Kugler details the myriad changes that are coming with the 4.4 release — the fifth major release since KDE 4.0 debuted to much criticism nearly two years ago. The project has closed about 18,000 bugs over the past six months and the pace of development is snowballing. The 'heavy-lifting' in libraries and frameworks for 4.0 is now starting to pay off. Perhaps the biggest change is in the development of a semantic desktop. According to Kugler, 'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?' There is also a picture gallery of KDE 4.4 (svn) screenshots so you can see what it will look like."
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Submission: What's coming up in KDE 4.4: the semantic desktop by Anonymous Coward
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Labelling. (Score:4, Insightful)
Had prior 4.X releases been 3.9X releases, with 4.0 coming soon, I suspect that the mood would have been largely positive.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.
I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?
Where KDE4 really fell flat for me was feature parity between the new core apps and their 3.5.x predecessors. My experience is that these crucial apps regressed or substantially changed in many ways. My work flow in photo image processing more or less died with the new Gwenview, which changed its feature set and behavior substantially, and I hear a lot of complaints from users of Amarok, which was a stellar music player in KDE 3.5. IMHO, the real "KDE is ready to use now" release (call it 4.0 or whatever) should have been the one where the core apps had at least 90% of their previous features, if not full feature parity.
Me, I'm still on KDE 3.5 and wondering where to go next. I love the new libraries and the overall look of the new desktop ... but that's the problem: it's a new desktop. Whether I leap to KDE4, Gnome, or something else, it's the same amount of work to me, and that's where the KDE project screwed up.
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Re:Labelling. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?
For one, because the distros didn't seem to hear or pass on those warnings. The KDE-centric distros pretty much all went "and now we're upgrading you to 4.0" as if it was the most natural upgrade path in the world. And I dare you to find any place in the release announcement [kde.org] that gave you any hint that's it's not for everyone. You hear "Wait for x.1" about every x.0 release, so you expect the general warnings of "this is a major new release, expect bugs" but still have certain expectations. They would have to come with much, much more explicit warnings that said "This is NOT what you normally expect from a x.0 release, it's much, much more incomplete and buggy than that. Maybe they did but it was a whisper compared to the fanfare it was introduced with.
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Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I felt like all the jokes about people who buy a MS OS prior to the first SP1 being the "paying beta testers" would have been appropriate for KDE4.0 and 4.1, at least if they charged.
4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.
My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros. So KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for prime time, too bad. So why the hell were certain distros inflicting it upon their users if it wasn't ready? Couldn't they have tested it, noticed that it wasn't ready, and waited before deploying it? I really don't know what they were thinking. My distro of choice (Arch Linux) waited til KDE4 was done before rolling it out, and Arch mainly aims to be on the bleeding edge most of the time. In fact I installed 4.0 anyway, because I wanted to try it out, but I really appreciated Arch's common sense in handling the matter. Not so for too many of the other distros though.
I don't think you need to be worrying about KDE 5.0 for a little while, but even if it does turn up sometime soon-ish, there's no reason why it needs to be as painful as 4.0. For example, the change from KDE 2 to KDE 3 was pretty smooth. Even if this hypothetical 5.0 release was a major change from the KDE 4 series, I would imagine that the KDE devs might learn from past mistakes (gasp!) and do things differently this time around.
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Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really a "distro" problem for me as I'm a FreeBSD user. I chose to install 3.x and 4.x simultaneously.
After putting a lot of effort into 4.0 for a week, I said "fuck it", and went back to 3. The same happened with 4.1.
I missed 4.2, and ended up with 4.3 on an Ubuntu Live CD I was experimenting with. My first thought was "Wow, they did some nice tweaks to this to make it play nice with Ubuntu. I wonder what it's like on FreeBSD?"
I went back and installed it on FreeBSD and it was just as nice as it was on Ubuntu.
I went back and found some 4.2 releases, and they didn't seem so bad either. My old 4.1 release still wasn't pleasant though.
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Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.
I *hate* it. At least the 3D stuff can be turned off now, but there's still a noticeable lag with keyboard input randomly. I mean, seriously. I have a 2x2,4 GHz processor and you tell me you can't display the key I pressed under 0,1 seconds?
Oh, and please don't try to find and animate every possible program on the run dialog until I actually finished typing the relevant part.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Informative)
Compiz effects in kwin were ALWAYS optional, and were not turned on by default unless your hardware supported it. They could always be turned off with a single keystroke (Ctrl-F12? Can't remember) as well as within System Settings. That has been there since the very first beta releases I tested.
I've never seen an input lag, even running on an 8 year old crappy laptop. I do turn off Strigi/Nepomuk to cut down on HDD access. I'm curious what distro you were running.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.
My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?
I called it some time ago
4.4 = all 1st party tools pretty much finished, 3rd party tools there but not polished
4.5 = 3rd party tools good to go
then somebody will release dbus/kross/plasma malware and they will realise that the whole DE has to be redone from a security perspective! ....
5.0 = an entire re-write with some concept of security and threading (kross for example runs in the same thread as the parent app)
5.1
6.0 = port to qt 5?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if 4.4 is going to be finally stable, or will it be 4.5 or 4.9.
4.3.3 is still broken in multiple ways.
Plasma crashes sometimes and still has troubles properly resizing and drawing its widgets.
Akonadi fails to start even on a pristine configuration, and its sophisticated "why can't I start" diagnosis fails to identify the problem. (I googled out that I had to comment out a line in its config file.)
Phonon works worse in 4.3 than it did in 4.2 for me. Its xine backend suddenly can't open my soundcard,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Question: Are you using Kubuntu? I tried it a bit on a friend's Ubuntu install, and it was utter garbage. Debian's KDE is infinitely better. I can't remember having Kopete or Akregator crash on me, and I use those all the time. KWin might crash when using compositing with poor drivers, but X.org is currently in a state of flux -- it was stable until my latest update.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former user of Kubuntu and KDE, I agree with what you say: Kubuntu IMHO sucks.
I believe that that is big problem for KDE. Ubuntu has become the standard "easy and ready to use" Linux desktop. It is not perfect, it has a large share of problems but it has become the standard. As most new users will try out KDE through Kubuntu, and have a bad experience.
Add to that the KDE4 fiasco, and you get as a result KDE's popularity nowdays, a mere shadow of what it was years ago (when it was the preferred choice of more than 2/3 of the folks voting at LinuxJournal yearly poll).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the problem with posts like yours - all the evidence is anecdotal. Although I had the occasional (still, quite ra
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they need to get away from the 4.x series, it's a great desktop now, but a lot of people still have a bad taste in their mouth from only having tried 4.0. Similarly to how Vista SP3 is called "Windows 7," KDE should abandon 4.x and jump on the 7 bandwagon (Windows 7, Intel i7) and release 4.4 as KDE7; possibly KDE8 just for good measure.
Disclaimer: I am aware that Vista SP3 is distinct from Windows 7.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.
Oh please. The new gnome-shell is already usable and mostly stable. Just because the KDE team made their transition into a new release a massive trainwreck doesn't mean every software project will follow in their footsteps.
Gnome hasn't stagnated, it's a mature and stable desktop environment. Because of this, Gnome is often the preferred choice for enterprise desktops. KDE is obsessed with shiny objects and web 2.0 garbage, which is why it has taken so very long for the 4.X series to be merely usable.
Re:Labelling. (Score:4, Funny)
It's the choice of enterprise desktops because it fits with the mantra of locking down the user and preventing them from doing anything useful. With Windows you need bigbrotherware to do it. With GNOME, the functionality has simply been removed in the name of usability as part of Havoc Pennington's reign of terror.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.
Ubuntu crowd would disagree. Project can only be declared dead if it has no users.
Slow release cycles are fine - as long as software delivers what users do expect. Though I'm personally Gnome hater, some folks are pretty happy about Ubuntu and its default UI.
On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.
"Much richer" in what way? And how do you define "useful desktop environment?"
Those are silly questions to ask of "desktop environment" whose sole purpose in life is to allow its user to browse for a file and to start application. Applications a
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shuttleworth has made several comments about wanting to see a future Gnome built in Qt, and said a few times that he felt the real innovation was happening in KDE-land. I often wonder if he regrets hitching his wagon to Gnome.
I think Ubuntu is the primary reason that Gnome is still being pushed along as much as it is. However, GTK+ was not designed initially to power a desktop. Given that Qt ships out of the box with a Clearlooks engine, and that Qt is a better multi-platform framework, I don't know why there hasn't been some serious discussion to perhaps move a future Gnome to Qt.
You gain all the benefits of a modern Qt framework, yet you can still design with the concepts that Gnome is supposed to be based on (sane, simple desktop). You can follow Gnome conventions and perhaps just deliver a BETTER Gnome experience.
Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.
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Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Interesting)
GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.
Are you seriously making your argument from a version number? I wonder what you'd say about Emacs, then...
(By the way, just to remind everyone, GNOME uses the oldschool versioning scheme with even numbers for stable releases, and odd ones for betas; so 2.28 is the 14th stable release of 2.x branch, not 28th).
In any case, the claim that GNOME "has stagnated" and "is barely maintained" is trivially debunked by looking at overview of changes for every release. There are definitely fewer of them than there used to be, but there are still quite a few; and, on the whole, I find GNOME desktop today to be much more thought out and polished compared to either version of KDE, without looking dated. I would imagine that developers similarly appreciate API stability.
Ultimately, you've got to wonder why most distros today, especially "enterprise" commercialized ones, go with GNOME, and have been doing that for several years now.
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Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry, they are already slashdotted. That's what you get for requiring multiple requests to read a single article.
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Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Manually semantic != semantic (Score:5, Informative)
I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.
Other people may be better at this than I am, but I can't even be bothered to tag my e-mails, let alone each and every file. Granted, this system does some 'auto-tagging' but to call it a semantic desktop because of that is a bit rich. YMMV and I like to be persuaded to look again.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In my (admittedly lay) opinion, what makes "semantic desktop" 'desktop' is the fact that there is some considerat
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe we should devise a method to attach arbitrary metadata directly to a file in a way that requires little to no m
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Don't you need manual before you can go automatic
I think that's right. Many efforts at semantic "stuff" (on the web, on the desktop, ...) don't gain traction because of "chicken and egg" problems. No one wants to tag because it's useless; but it won't be useful until many things are tagged, so that a search returns useful results, and relationships between objects can be automatically discovered.
In this case, I agree that manual tagging is a necessary precursor to more automated tagging. Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of softwar
Already slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
I couldn't find a version on google cache. So here's the full text:
The final release of KDE 4.4 is due in early 2010, and not since the arrival of KDE 4.0 two years ago has an open source desktop environment been so highly anticipated by the free desktop community. Unlike the anti-climax that was the first KDE 4 release, however, KDE 4.4's developers say this new version will actually deliver on many of the original promises of this next-generation desktop environment -- and then some.
If maturity is the measure of a desktop environment then KDE 4.4 will have a lot to live up to, as it represents the fourth major release of the KDE 4 series.
Many small things that make the user's life easier have been done. . . Those changes might not be significant on their own, but they add up to a system that feels really well rounded
-- Sebastian Kugler, KDE spokesperson
With the feature freeze for KDE 4.4 looming in November 2009 -- after which no new features will be added and only bugs will be fixed -- we decided to take a look at what KDE has in store to lift the free desktop to a new paradigm.
Features, updates and bug fixes
Like any major version increase, KDE 4.4 will include numerous feature enhancements, updates and bug fixes.
According to KDE's developers, 4.4 will have an immediate advantage over previous versions by leveraging the latest Qt 4.6 toolkit, which brings a new layout mechanism in QGraphicsView and improved performance, among many other additions. In fact, KDE 4.4.0 was delayed by two weeks until February 2010 to make it possible to release on top of Qt 4.6.
General enhancements include improved desktop search, better privilege escalation, remote controllable Plasma widgets and more polish to the existing code base.
KDE developer and spokesperson for the project, Sebastian Kugler, says it's difficult to determine exact numbers of features, but for 4.4 it would be a very high number.
"4.4 is a significant release that brings many new features. We have new applications, for example Blogilo, a local applications for writing blogs, allowing for offline editing of articles," Kugler says. "There's is a new network manager (living in the notification area right now, a plasmoid for it is planned for later). Also applications that are not directly shipped with KDE are maturing now. Amarok, Digikam, Konversation and all those applications that are well known from their KDE 3 version are now available in a KDE 4 version."
The desktop look-and-feel has also received a makeover. The new Air theme for the Plasma desktop shell is more polished and has added subtle animations to improve the user experience.
"Many small things that make the user's life easier have been done, sometimes something as small as giving feedback from the buttons in the quick launch area of the panel," Kugler says. "Those changes might not be significant on their own, but they add up to a system that feels really well rounded and well done."
A more visible development in Plasma is the new netbook interface, which will also debut as part of KDE 4.4. Plasma-Netbook will sport a mobile computer form-factor for desktop Plasma widgets.
Kugler says there are plenty of interesting changes behind the interface, too. KDE 4.4 will ship an authorization framework based on PolicyKit, so applications and the desktop can elevate privileges safely, and administrators can specify exactly what a specific user is allowed to do.
KDE's developers have also made the desktop more social and "connected". There is a Plasma applet that shows answers to questions from the KDE knowledge base, with the aim of making it easier for new users to find help.
KDE 4.4 will also make it possible to drag content from Web sites onto the desktop. For example, a picture can be dragged it from the Web browser onto the desktop and a Plasma applet showing this picture is added to the desktop where the file was dropped. The wallpaper can also be set this way or from any remote URL.
I
Kugler? (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus Christ, even the developers' names...
Re:Kugler? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you mean to say Jesus Khrist?
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System Activity feedback (Score:5, Interesting)
I work on the "System Activity" thing (pops up if you press ctrl-esc. Like Task Manager). It's hard to get feedback about it.
So if you're a KDE user and use this, let me know what you think, how you find it, suggest any improvements/features etc. UI designers, code documenters etc also welcome to give feedback :-)
I often see people posting about how KDE/Gnome never listen to UI designers, Usability people, etc. But I've personally never had any feedback or bug reports about that sort of thing, ever. So do feel free to file such bugs - us developers are listening.
KDE is really heading in the right direction but (Score:3, Interesting)
Last piece (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the semantic desktop concept is shaping up nicely. I was weary of enabling nepomuksearch with strigi, because in the early 4.x releases they were extremely buggy. Then I went ahead with 4.3.3 (on Arch), and now strigi seem to work fine. It uses minimal resources, indexing is automatically switched off when you switch to powersaving mode (useful on a laptop), otherwise CPU usage is barely noticable. It still uses a shitload of memory, but with KDE 4.x you have plenty to spare. I have 2 Gb in my laptop, and without nepomuk/strigi memory usage after startup is 15%. That includes all the daemons necessary for a modern desktop (including cups), 2 desktops with different wallpapers and widgets, wicd. After running it for days without reboot, memory usage stabilized around 30% including ktorrent running in the background. After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does. Which reminds me, nepomuk (on my setting at least) works in dolphin (just start typing in the searchbar), not in the normal Find files option accessible from KMenu.
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After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does.
What on earth can it be doing such that 400MB of RAM is justified? AFAICT, it's nothing more than a glorified metadata database. Sounds like the precise opposite of "lean" to me...
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I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.
That is strange. I am running KDE 4.3 on Debian Squeeze, and that option is there. I use it printing documents from Okular all the time. The printing does have many other issues though. It doesn't have even/odd page option so I can do manual duplexing, and setting page margins has me completely befuddled. When I print a document from Kwrite it doesn't have any margin settings of it's own - and the margin settings for the printer (which I am told are really there to define the unprintable areas for the print
Please: No More Vertical Text (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear KDE devs,
Please rethink the vertical text [tinypic.com] that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.
Thanks.
Re:Please: No More Vertical Text (Score:5, Interesting)
And, the loveley vertical text makes options easy to see and not space consuming. The only thing I wish is that gnome would get their act together and make something as complete as kate so I could have everything looking gtk.
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Video thumbnails in dolphin/konqueror? (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time it is thousands of bugs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Since KDE 4.2, they claim that "now" it is ready for general consumption, but at each new version they still claim to have fixed thousands of bugs.
If that 18000 number is to believed, doesn't that imply that 4.3 was a horribly buggy release?
Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs... (Score:4, Informative)
As for 4.x is good for general consumption, each time they said that, at least in release notes, there was a phrase along the lines of 'unless you need X feature.' For 4.3 it was ready for general use, unless you used multiple monitors as that support, while there, had not fully been exposed.
I found 4.2 too be too much of a pain to use, mainly coxing it to run on 2 monitors, but 4.3 hasn't given me any problems
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KDE for Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Drop the semantic garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
Specifically the "semantic desktop" I've used kde for years and never used it. Why the hell would I waste time tagging all my files? I have a sensible directory hierarchy which works just fine. I never find myself spending hours searching for stuff on my computer, because I know where all the things I need are, because I use them all the time. If I didn't know where something was that would imply I never use it, in which case, why am I spending time to tag things I never use? Just in case I might need it?
What I do need is for firefox to pick up on my application preferences (what opens up a zip, etc), for drag and drop to be snappy and accurate and always work, for ark to not suck so hard, for my folderviews on my desktop to always be up to date, look good, not pile up icons in weird ways, etc, etc.
I like that kde is very forward thinking in their features, but sometimes I'd like them to live a little more in the present. If you had an awesome super-intelligent automatic tagger that would let me search with vague queries and get exactly what I want, that'd be great, but spending your time on a dressed up database that tracks all kinds of stuff I have to put in by hand is a waste of everybody's time.
Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l (Score:3, Insightful)
Apart from modding offtopic, is there anything else we can do?
And no I won't read at a higher threshold because of moronic moderators who bury other people's opinions with troll and flamebait mods.
Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, read at a higher threshold.
So what you're saying is you want to look in the muck for pearls, but are offended by the muck? Tough. If this post can be deleted, then those pearls you're looking for will be deleted in just the same way.
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Re:Hint for choosing default colors (Score:4, Insightful)
The non-interactive elements need to blend in, so yes they have to look "boring" and grey is a neutral color. The widgets, on the other hand, should pop up a bit (not Fisher-Price, plastic toys Windows XP-style pop though), so they should have some color to it.
I can't see the screenshots, the website is already slashdotted.
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Re:Sure (Score:4, Informative)
Oh yes, here's another one: the inability to make two rows of taskbar at the bottom.
Actually, I think this is possible now. Although, I agree that the rest of KDE4 makes me not want to use it either so I can't confirm at the moment. I do go back to it every now and again to check it out and see what's new. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with remote desktop programs like vnc or freenx so I can't confirm that multi-row taskbar at the moment.
Wait, here [ubuntuforums.org] we go:
When you configure your panel ( Right Click on the Panel bar-->Arrangement->Size-->"Custom" ) so that the size is less than 34 pixels, it will display as a single row.
When it is more than 34 pixels but less than 52 pixels, it will display as a double row. When it is greater than 52 pixels, it will display as a triple row.
(You can also choose "Tiny" or "Small" and it will be a single row, whereas "Normal" will display as a double row, and "Large" will display as a triple row.)
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