KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making 129
jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.
Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
Re: (Score:3)
99% of us have disabled that damned thing as soon as we installed. The rest should.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh fucking wonderful. Now the damn desktop is going to be doing its own thing on the net. Why can't the people who design these things just stop it with the stupid feature creep? If they've run out of sensible things to add perhaps thats a sign to Move On.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
It almost works every time a new release happens...
Re: (Score:2)
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
For me it is Akonadi + Postgres which sucks slightly less but it still sucks enormously.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Simple config
Is a mixture of usability and perception. A simplified configuration presents fewer choices and is therefore easier to understand. It also looks faster and more lightweight, because people equate visual simplicity with efficiency. This is incorrect, of course, but I'm not above exploiting this fallacy to give people what they want. For this aspect, we're providing an alternate set of System Settings metadata to give it a cut down tree. The full set remains available, if needed.
This could be his biggest contribution, and - if it's done well - mainline KDE should consider adopting it as an option. For all of KDE's configurability, the thing that would be nicest to configure is the configurability itself. Something like 'lock desktop configuration', where once you have the system set up the way you want it, you never see all those options again - unless you ask to.
Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Razor QT is a light, QT based DE.
KDE is also using QT, but is an entirely different DE. Razor is not KDE. You can't start plasma widgets on Razor. You don't have the KDE libs either.
KlyDE is actually compatible with large parts of KDE, specifically, plasma.
Re: (Score:2)
MATE would be more analogous to TDE, not RazorQT.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How about SGI's 4DWM [5dwm.org] or CDE? [sourceforge.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, so much for the "Common" Desktop.
This effort could be spent better! (Score:1, Flamebait)
While I applaud the programmer's efforts, I must say that it's efforts like these in the Open Source Community, that end up as wasted!
You see, everyone who is talented, ends up "doing their thing," resulting in duplication and waste. One wonders why the talent of this programmer doesn't get absorbed into the larger KDE project. What would the harm be?
Re:This effort could be spent better! (Score:5, Informative)
Will has been contributing to KDE for many, many years and was on the OpenSUSE KDE team until quite recently. There's a lot of work by Will in various KDE projects, and when this is ready for prime time I am sure it will also appear in some form in shipping product.
Re:This effort could be spent better! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not how it works.
You're making an assumption that a developer will devote the same amount of time and enthusiasm to any project, and therefore any "Me-too" development is a loss to an established project.
That's more or less how it works in commercial development - you have a developer working 8 hours a day on whatever project you give him. It's not how it works in FOSS, which is actually a selfish development model: you work on whatever you want, as much as you want.
It's better to have someone sit down & bang out a yet another variant of X than to have them not turn out anything at all. The new version of X might be enough of an improvement to attract other developers and get you a new killer product. Not doing anything will result in nothing.
He wants to build a lightweight KDE, so he goes off and writes some code and with any luck creates a working KLyDE WM. If he tried to do this within KDE itself, he'd hit a load of politics and entrenched views and spend all his time arguing. He'd get nothing done. Nobody wins.
What you see as duplication and waste is a vital and useful part of FOSS development. Your recommended alternative would result in stagnation as people stop working on what interests them to fight against each other to drive existing projects towards their vision.
That's what the harm would be.
Re: (Score:2)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=open+source+selfish [lmgtfy.com]
So . . . (Score:1)
So the Kool Ly Desktop Environment?
Makes no sense.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be a catchy name if he didn't mess around with the letter casing.
Re: (Score:2)
"Klyde."
It would be a catchy name if he didn't mess around with the letter casing.
I was actually making fun of the original meaning of the acronym. Yes, it was actually called the "Kool Desktop Environment" before the founder wised up.
Perhaps "kLYde" would better suggest the new name ?
Modularity (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a lot of garbage to throw out... (Score:1)
Well, It' very good idea to have KDE without Akonadi and Nepomuk. Only this can make KDE lightweight. :)) That are the parts I always turn off and I'd love to get rid of entirely. MySQL is another piece of shit that must be cleaned out. If some developer needs "select my,shit from config where other=shit and blahbalbal" to read simple app config, then it's clinic. I used Kmail for years and when it started to use mysql and Akonady I switched to Thinderbird because I do not need all this smartass stuff done
Re: (Score:2)
Again, a bad name. (Score:3)
No one will be able to spell your product name correctly if you use a weird combination of upper and lower case letters.
You don't need to focus on the fact that it is a DE. In fact, you already decided that when you came up with a name, instead of an acronym. Make a choice: is it an acronym, or a proper name? You can't have both, it confuses.
Just name it "Klyde".
Re: (Score:1)
A desktop environment is not a product in the sense of packaged apples that needs branding to sell.
A DE is the product or result of someone's work, yes, but it's not a product like above. You're never going to walk into a shop looking for a DE to purchase. Since it doesn't need branding it just needs a name. KDE, Xfce, LXDE aso aren't good brands bur they're good (often descriptive) names. KlyDE is just another one.
KDE Low Fat Settings (Score:1)
Let me configure the toolbar colors/fonts (Score:2)
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:4)
FTA: "Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence. I think they can."
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Modern Linux doesn't run right on hardware that old (and I don't just mean GNOME/KDE). Just try and run Fedora (or Ubuntu, etc) on a Pentium III with Intel i845 graphics. Driver support is no longer existent. You could try on 12yo hardware with real graphics, but I still don't think it'll work right (I hate KMS drivers).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's listed as "supported" but unless something has changed recently the X.org driver is broken on i8xx series. Features that used to be supported (like say, hardware rendering) were broken when I last checked (last tried about a year ago). Gave the same performance as the vesa driver.
Re: (Score:2)
More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/i8xxUnsupported [ubuntu.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Just try and run Fedora (or Ubuntu, etc) on a Pentium III with Intel i845 graphics. Driver support is no longer existent.
Huh?
I have Linux Mint Debian running on exactly the machine you're saying has no driver support. I upgraded the original 512MB RAM to 2.5GB with salvaged parts, but that's all. It's still a nice useful machine.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Lightweight means small, sometimes fast (Score:2)
It's clear what lightweight means just from examining its two parts: "light" and "weight" both allude to there not being much there, little mass or volume. The words are of course a physical metaphor when applied to software.
When something has little physical mass and volume then it tends to move fast for any given force, and so as a consequence we tend to associate "lightweight" also with higher speed, but it's only a consequence, not the primary meaning.
In software, being lightweight and being fast are
Re: (Score:2)
And indeed, in the case of the much-maligned akonadi, of course, having a file based storage is faster, for the first hundred or so mails.
But when you accounts have tens of thousands, or hundred of thousands of mails, a database is a requirement. Either you are coding industrial-strength stuff, or you are building a toy :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any idea how many mails one can have? Indexed file based storage does not scale. Although to be fair, akonadi does not care what the underlying storage is, it simply acts as a cache.
A cache to access structured relational data. Lots of it.
A database.
People just _think_ databases are really heavy objects, but really, they are just faster than reading files :) I strongly suspect that if instead of saying "this is a separate app/utility" the kde pim people had just hidden the stuff inside of kontac
Re: (Score:2)
If you've got more than 4GB per file in a mailbox you are doing it wrong. Anything beyond date, subject, to and from is going to need a fairly global search anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Indexed file based storage does not scale.
Yes, because databases are never stored in files. Do you really use raw block access to store your e-mails?
Files generally do whatever you make them do. Perhaps you were making them do the wrong thing?
Re: (Score:3)
It's not the byte size. It's the number of objects. Also you forgot, senders. status (can be fairly complicated -- where is the data, for example), attachments. Threads. Lists.
Oh, and the full text should be indexed. We live in 2013 after all.
Basically, unless you are going to confine yourself to the performance and possibilities of pine, you have to do what the KDE guys did. And yes, it is harder and takes longer to debug.
Re: (Score:3)
The point is that the file-based indexing is the wrong thing. Of course everything ends up being stored in a file.
The key is not the storage, but the indexing. And that is where DBs are vastly superior to flat files.
Re: (Score:3)
That's what the "from" is supposed to indicate. I wish people would read before they reply :(
The stupid fad of doing everything with a database is one reason why I was running a print server for a vector graphics format on a 40MHz SparcStation 10 until 2010 when it was getting better performance than a 2GHz linux box running an updated version of the software - about two minutes per plot versus three and a half (for 42 inches by about ten feet). I've since, thanks to a few tweaks,
Re: (Score:2)
I love how Slashdot is supposed to be a place for IT experts, but its members have about the same knowledge of computers as AOL users, as shown by this post. Do you Slashdot morons not even understand databases?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what database Akonadi/Kmail is using underneath, nor what schema nor any other implementation details, so I can't comment on whether that particular design is sensible or not. I'm just responding to the previous poster who implies that databases aren't even necessary since they store their data in files in a filesystem, showing a complete lack of understanding of what databases are and why you'd use them in many systems.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd also like to add that it's highly unlikely the KDE team is using an "undocumented" database; logically, they'd be using an existing FOSS database like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or most likely SQLite. Also, the idea that an email system "doesn't need" a database is just ridiculous; what do you think Google uses for Gmail? You don't get search performance like that in an inbox with tens of thousands of emails with emails stored in individual files a la maildir.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I love how Slashdot is supposed to be a place for IT experts, but its members have about the same knowledge of computers as AOL users, as shown by this post. Do you Slashdot morons not even understand databases?
Are you referring to your own post? Or do you have in mind something specific that is very hard to divine from it?
Re: (Score:2)
If they weren't rolling their own I wouldn't have bitched about them not using something already shown to work (eg. mysql and a very long list of others)
What are you talking about? According to this LWN thread [lwn.net], Kmail2/Akonadi does in fact use MySQL as the default backend database, though it can also use SQLite or Postgres.
Last thing is it's not really the "KDE team" doing it but instead a side project.
Akonadi is one of the main components of KDE4; its developers definitely qualify as part of the "KDE team
Re: (Score:2)
Lxde is terrible IMO. The menus just don't feel like they work right. I had similar issues with black box.
xfce though is fantastic, buy I wouldn't want to run it with 2001 ram levels (though I can't think of any apps I use that'd I'd want to do that with).
Re: (Score:1)
openbox is faster.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lightweight is no longer about size... cheap systems are coming with 8GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM these days.
What's important is speed on relatively (400MHz) slow/weak low power processor cores.
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The time X space trade-off is one of the basic concepts of optmization theory.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If your desktop software performance depends on cache optimisation, you are either doing heavy-duty multimedia editing, or doing something spectacularly wrong.
Also rant: cache sizes have been going down to make place for more processors. I personally do numerical calculations, and I find this trend to be a disaster. At this point, my only hope is that eventually, with thousands of cores on chips, we'll be back to something which looks like a vector processor.
Re: (Score:3)
If your desktop software performance depends on cache optimisation, you are either doing heavy-duty multimedia editing, or doing something spectacularly wrong.
Or perhaps he's doing graph algorithms [sourceforge.net]. You know, most things profit from good memory access patterns these days. Your CPU can execute something like 2000 instructions in the time needed for a single random read from the main memory!
Re: (Score:2)
'cause that is clearly a desktop-oriented application...
Re: (Score:2)
'cause that is clearly a desktop-oriented application...
Well, granted, if you're only using simple applications, a ten year old machine will do the job anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Also rant: cache sizes have been going down to make place for more processors. I personally do numerical calculations, and I find this trend to be a disaster. At this point, my only hope is that eventually, with thousands of cores on chips, we'll be back to something which looks like a vector processor.
Instead of using a CPU to do these calculations, maybe you should use a vector processor instead. Every computer these days has one, it's called a "GPU". Google for "GPGPU".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Isn't this where the APUs shine? Or at least are trying to?
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
Except for kmail/akonadi, an unmitigated disaster.
Re: (Score:2)
I actually works well for me and has for a while. It used to be that first-time-loading of IMAP folder was slow, but now, even very large folder load just fine on my netbook.
It's not perfect, though: replied/attachment state of emails stored on an MS exchange IMAP server gets lost. Oh, well, they are aware, and it will get fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
Try to receive 500 mails a day with it. This used to be no problem. Try to do anything with a large folder. Thunderbird is at least ten times faster, somethings 100 or 1000 times faster, and infinitely less buggy.
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Look I'm not knocking the guy's efforts. But who are ya gonna believe? Me or some random Slashdot article?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wow, I am so informed by this insightful and thoughtful comment.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3)
KDE 1.x ran fine on my Pentium I 120MHz with 48MB RAM, 1MB Cirrus Logic graphics and a 1GB HDD.
Re:KDE and lightweight. (Score:5, Informative)
Already been several mini-distros (the whole system is under 100 MB) that do use KDE. Things like Nimblex come to mind, though that's been a few years ago now. Admittedly not sure they kept Plasma though ...
But as KDE is supposed to be able to run on phones now, it should be easy enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Plasma is not a problem. The trick about KDE on low end hardware is to know if you should run KWin effects using XRender, OpenGL or disabled. I would usually bet on disabled, but XRender can be surprisingly well optimized on old GPUs.
Give me functional over flashy/lightweight/simple (Score:3)
A handful of years ago I ended up switching from a custom window manager / desktop setup (WindowMaker based, if you care) to Gnome2. The driver for this was simply effort required to get something useful running in a short amount of time. As a developer I'm not getting paid to faff around with getting a desktop environment up and running. Gnome served me well, and even convinced me to switch away from xterm/uxterm. On a fresh Ubuntu install, all I needed was a few tweaks to the terminal config, a keyboard s
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I've installed wheezy + lxde on a laptop that was little more than dying noisy slow crap, not long before. Laptop saved. But I had to install OSSv4 instead of ALSA, and lightdm is ugly (was ugly at first and now shows a backgrounds that looks like graphical corruption. It sucks. I miss lxdm, which is available in Ubuntu 12.04 and comes with some blue background picture!)
For the parent I'd say Linux Mint 13 Mate is where it's at. Just Mate configured in a working state, with even the gnome2 applets (sadly mi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
...Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!
I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.
Just a wild ass guess here, but it sounds like you were hacking on a Debian-based system as if it was Slackware. This [debian.org] may be helpful if you decide to give it another chance.
P.S. Switching to a different theme is a good and fast way to wipe all the flashiness off KDE (and especially Plasma) in short order. I must admit though, it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
Re: (Score:2)
it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
The window shadow is a giant blue glow.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that can be irritating at first, indeed. :(
Luckily, you can turn it off at System Settings > Workspace appearance > Configure Decoration > Shadows tab.
Re: (Score:1)
What this means is for someone who listens to music and does everything in a browser a system with 512 MB will run just fine, assuming a decent process
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the MS astroturfers are all over this as usual.
It's impossible to have a sensible discussion about an interesting FOSS project without them squirting Ballmer-bile over the whole story.
The thought of ballmer juice squirting onto anything is enough to make me sick.
Re: (Score:1)
the astroturfers can't get enough of it... they just grovel at his feet jerking him off all day so they can get a taste of his googoo juice
it's sick and pathetic, but only to everyone else
maybe they need some "obamacare"
Funny thing is that since 1998 (Score:2)
Thus I don't think your suggested complaint is the reason for your post - it looks instead that you are trying unsuccessfully to find a means to fit your goal of a bit of bashing.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, Enlightenment is one of the best Desktops for Linux. If it only had the more developer support, it would be my desktop of choice. If just one Linux DE had the polish of a OS X or Win7, I wouldn't care. Until then, I see this fork as just diluting an already over stretched pool of developers.
By consistency I meant disign consistency. I was thinking of annoyances like the app menu bars in Unity.
Re: (Score:2)
I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
Well you'll need to give up on Windows then, thanks to Win8. Your argument had merit about 2 years ago, with Windows UIs being quite stable all the way back to Win95, but that's all out the window now, pardon the pun. Now we just have to wait to see if Apple jumps on the "let's royally fuck up stable UIs!" bandwagon
Re: (Score:1)
If OS X was free and open source (at least to the amount my linux system at the moment is) I'd *begin* to consider it.
To use the same "matter of fact" tone you are:
The goal was to develop an open system that meets my needs. Linux has won.
Re: (Score:1)