KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released 249
dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."
KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Already I'm conused. (Score:2)
Re:Already I'm conused. (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't think it's quite that bad. It looks as though KDE 4.x basically approaches KDE4 for increasing values of x; in other words, KDE4 is the end goal for the entire KDE 4.x release series.
Re:Already I'm conused. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Funny)
Yes folks! Brought to you by the same guys who brought us USB "High Speed" and USB "Full Speed", as well as the single-core "Core2" chip, not to be confused with the "Core2 Duo" chip, which actually is dual-core. (It's obvious - you have to look for TWO words that mean two before you actually get TWO. Sort of a "2+2=2, for extremely low values of 2" kinda thang)
Given this scenario, most people would call it "KDE 4.0 Pre" or "KDE 4.0 alpha" or something like that... but that would make SENSE so let's not confuse the issue, shall we? This is KDE4, but it's NOT KDE 4.
Or something.
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Funny)
A tried and true system that makes sense to everyone!
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Funny)
KDE Super Professional Home Edition Supreme Service Pack Sqrt(-1) will do nicely.
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Cool Stuff Planned (Score:5, Informative)
Right now Konqueror still exists as the super-app for those who love it, but there is a better dedicated file viewer called Okular that renders all kinds of documents including PDFs, and does so amazingly fast. There is a dedicated new file manager that I believe both KDE and Gnome fanatics will love. Now if only they have a KHTML/QT fork of Firefox, I'd be happy as pie, but that isn't happening anytime soon.
You get a new series of icons, which some I really love, and others I don't care for. Honestly, I'm just going to replace them with another icon set anyway, but the default icons on the whole are much nicer. There was a new default widget/theme set called Oxygen as well that I thought looked incredible, but the code was poor and so was performance so it went out the window. The new Oxygen widget/theme looks a little to plain for my taste. And it doesn't look like an OS X clone, but it certainly seems to follow the same design philosophy. Given that many worship at the altar of OS X, I'm sure it will be popular, but right now I'm particular to the Domino widgets and a nice dark theme.
The new kwin today has composite technology, which is good and bad. It is good in that we get 3D eye-candy in the desktop without too much fuss since it is built right into KDE. It is bad in that with all the peace and love of Compiz and Beryl getting back together, we just split into two camps again, and the truly brilliant compiz-fusion project is no basically delegated to Gnome users for the most part. I was very disappointed that the KDE team decided to invent the wheel from scratch (and as far as I know they don't really have many effects or plugins right now, where as Compiz-Fusion has tons) rather than just extend support for what already exists.
KDE 4 already has some other great technologies like the semantic desktop project, and Sonnet is very promising, though unfinished. Solid, Phonon and Decibel might not be obvious to the end-user, but apparently are very important back-end technologies. I'm also a fan of Strigi, which is very much a reality today, but I'm not sure if it is being included by default in KDE 4 or not.
There are tons, and I mean tons of little new things, like "Get New Hot Stuff" which is a terrible name, but a neat concept. It is a simple seamless way to download new content into applications. It can already been seen in Amarok if you want to download plug-ins and such.
Plasma does exist, but it is just basically a new (easier) way to make widgets largely. The API and libraries are supposed to very useful, but the revolution in how we use our desktops doesn't exist, and I'm not sure anyone is working on it.
So on one hand, we do have plenty of new toys and great technology that is part of KDE 4. And at the same time it is fair to say that with the most visible project (Plasma) there were huge promises and little delivered. Take that as you will.
It should also be noted that Amarok and KOffice aren't tired directly into the KDE release schedule, but Amarok 2 and KOffice 2 are planned to be major versions and coincide with KDE 4, though they will likely release slightly later than KDE 4.
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And frankly, an api must exist, it just is a matter of how well it is documented. If the KDE team wanted to better understand it, and they felt the co
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Yeah, "Office" is such an obvious and related name for what it does. Too bad I want a software to use at home. Guess I'll get "Microsoft Home" for that. Oh, and I play videogames too, and I would like to excel, so I better get that "Microsoft Excel" thing. I mean, the name says it all, it makes you excel. And when I want to access my em
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
All they mean is that KDE 4.0 will not have all the features that later releases of KDE 4 will have.
The point is that this is *not* commercial software, where version x.0 contains all the features you're ever going to get, and x.1, x.2, etc... just contain bug fixes and possibly a bit more shiny clip-art. I don't know if "release early, release often" can be applied to a project that's been 2 years in the making already, but if they waited until they'd written everything they could possibly think of into KDE4 before they released it, they'd probably *never* release it!
Yes, they've got a whole load more interesting ideas that will get added to future KDE 4 releases. New minor versions will have cool new functionality. They just haven't had time to do it all at once.
KDE 3.5 has a hell of a lot more stuff that KDE 3.0. But I'm glad they released KDE 3.0 in April 2002 instead of waiting until November 2005 to push it all out at once.
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We'll see - Qt 4.0 wasn't exactly a good example to follow, it was really buggy at first. They've rewritten a l
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Many of us in the open source community have expected that beta releases are damn-near finished. The KDE developers are using the terms alpha and b
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oh it's a rewritable disc, err no - but you can read it AND write to it...
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and yes i would expect that KDE 4.45.76fred would have more features than KDE 4.0
Big Question ADAM when is KDE 4 going to make it into Mandriva 2007.1 backports??
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ambitious (Score:5, Interesting)
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The KDE project is *very* ambitious, especially the feature set for KDE4. Hopefully this turns some heads over in the gnome camp. IMHO they have a LOT of catching up to do in everything from infrustructure to performance.
Gnome has to make a clear statement that "Mono" or "Silverlight" (whatever its port is called) will NEVER be part of it. It won't be required by ANY of system components and it won't do anything as "If you get Silverlight, your desktop will be prettier".
It is not about performance, it is about a person in development team doing everything to be called trojan of Microsoft in OSS community.
He also happens to be founder so.. that is the problem.
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I installed windows the other day (trying to fill up my hard disk.) I had to reboot after installing the drivers for internet, then my display card, then my harddrive (no my fucking sata harddrive is not a removable device,) and even my usb ports. Then after the 4th reboot for updating windows I gave up and booted back to linux and free up that space again.
Now, if I wasn't used to the "Linux" way, the windows way would have seemed norma
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sorry, i was suggesting Gnome needs to catch up.
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I sort of thought that Gnome was beginning to edge KDE out after a few years of KDE being somewhat superior.
Right now, Gnome is lean, mature, and stable, even on relatively old hardware. As an added bonus, Gnome's GUI is clean and consistent compared to KDE's (not to mention that they've resisted the temptation to add 80 million configuration options to the menus and toolbars of every single one of their apps).
My other usability pet peeve with KDE is its heavy reliance on toolbars with dozens of non
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Gnome just feels cleaner than KDE to me.
Re:ambitious (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, to what I wanted to say. Gnome between 1 and 2 took a steep dive to the worse.
The main problem I have with gnome is simply twofold.
The project started as a Win32 wannabe (typical Icszaza Project) and you still can see that left and right. The apis are 10 times harder to utilize and feel more like hodge podge as Windows does.
The concepts in 1.0 were windows alike, in 2.0 they started to move towards MacOS8 usabilitywise, but didnt make it, it actually felt way worse.
The approach the gnome project follows, if a user cannot understand something, then lets remove it without any possibility to get it back is simply wrong. Torvalds called this approach User Interface nazis.
Ok the mileage may vary, but I personally feel locked in if I use gnome, and many people, whom I know do the same, solution kick gnome switch to kde. While KDE is not perfect, they are in a way better direction from a long term usability standpoint. They are somewhat hodge podge in the user interface, but, they are in the long term process of cleaning everything up without reducing the functionalities loved by so many users.
Here is an example:
The old configuration view was a mess, they moved to a layered system which gave sane macro settings and then once you klicked onto the macro settings you got into the micro areas (which also were cleaned up) web like. Everthing was cleaned up but yet no functionality was cut down, they even left the option to switch to the old system.
The same happens now with Dolphin and konqueror, Konqueror still is there, but it is not the sane default anymore. I personally would miss konqueror to a huge degree, no other file manager on any system has its flexibility, its own fault simply was you had to learn to use it, because its user interface was not slick. But on the other hand, compared to Finder or Nautilus, Explorer or whatever you name it, the thing really deserved the title file manager.
On the other hand Nautilus while becoming faster took a huge nosedive in its usefulness when being moved from the old 1.0 naultilus (which was not more usable than the windows explorer and dreadfully slow) to the spatial 2.0, without any possibility to fall back at least on the 1.0 user interface!
Btw. besides konqueror I only know one filemanager which comes close to its usefulness, Total Commander on windows, all others fall flat on their faces. But both have the problem, you really have to learn to use them
The same goes down on the API level, the KDE api is one of the cleanest I have ever seen, second to none, everything purely oo, everything purely component oriented highly flexible. Gnome on the other hand started as an approach to build a system on a win32 lookalike which is broken in itself, then they started to clone ole with bonobo, while ole never really was working bonobo also wasnt and it inherited the problems of ole, being way too complicated being not adopted out of exactly those reasons, trying to push corba down as a transport layer. 2-3 years before KDE kicked corba out of usability and performance reasons, well gnome repeated history, they than finally took the concepts kde implemented pushed it down on freedesktop and let kde reimplement them again so that both communication object layers become somewhat compatible, see the entire problem.
Anyway kudos to the KDE people for their hard work, they really push technology forward!
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App icons in KDE4 (Score:5, Informative)
Aside from the fact that I've never been "daunted" by a KDE app even when I was a newbie, you may like the way KDE4 is actually dealing with the issue. If you look for example at this screeshot of Okular [kde.org], you will notice that now icons will be presented by default with text. This means a much bigger overall icon area, which makes the icon much easier to hit and forces the developer to separate wheat from chaff when creating toolbars.
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Re:ambitious (Score:5, Funny)
Both.
KDE Four Live CD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:KDE Four Live CD (Score:5, Funny)
Re:KDE Four Live CD (Score:5, Informative)
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http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture31 ws4.png [imageshack.us]
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture35 ez0.png [imageshack.us]
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture32 hf5.png [imageshack.us]
http://img294.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture30 pf3.png [imageshack.us]
http://img295.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture36 pu6.png [imageshack.us]
http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture37 fs2.png [imageshack.us]
http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture38 ga0.png [imageshack.us]
http://img403 [imageshack.us]
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Keramic widgets/style + Desert Red color scheme + Crystal SVG icons + "contrast" bar at 1/3 is what I use.
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I can't wait for E17 to be finished.
Re:KDE Four Live CD (Score:5, Insightful)
- Release SOMETHING, even if it's incomplete, because if you try to be perfect you won't never have a product. Releasing "incomplete" products allows you to attract people and then have more programming resources. The KDE guys are not going to include some of the promises of KDE 4.0 until 4.1 which means that KDE 4.0 will be incomplete.....AND WHO CARES? E17 did beat Mac OS X and Vista in some fields before Vista was released, but since they don't release anything, now vista and mac os x have released infrastructure to do what E did before them, now E looks like they're catching up, and in some sense it's true.
- Realize that enlightenment only has sense if you aim to be a full desktop, not just a "desktop shell". I like enlightenment, but then those guys say that E17 "will not compete with GNOME or KD"E....so I keep using GNOME/KDE. They aren't so good in the graphic field as E, but since they are the ones that are desktops, it only has sense to improve and support those, not the one that is not aiming to bring good linux desktops to the masses. Technology itself is cool, but if you don't make it have real-world applications then I don't care.
Dolphin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dolphin (Score:4, Informative)
You misunderstand. The file manager capabilities in Konqueror aren't going away: it would be vandalism to do that!
I personally hate Dolphin: it's too GNOME-ey and dumbed down. I like the fact that I use Konqueror for everything from ripping CDs (audiocd:/) through managing my files and browsing the internet to reading documentation (man:/ and info:/).
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Re:Dolphin (Score:5, Insightful)
Because browsing to audiocd:/ and dragging the contents of the "MP3" virtual directory to your ~/Music is such a stupid GUI. You really have no clue about the power of ioslaves, do you?
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Personally I like a bit more control, which is why
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Then you'll have an extensibleFS.
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There's a KIO-FUSE [ground.cz] module that does exactly that. It allows you to mount the KDE ioslave hierarchy on a local directory, where it becomes accessible to non-KDE applications.
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I love konqueror too, but I hate how it mangles a lot of web pages. Slashdot in particular looks like shit (misrenders)
Works For Me (tm).
The reason it "mangles" webpages is because, unlike many browsers, it's actually standards-compliant. It passes ACID2 [webstandards.org] completely. Ergo, the problem is that the webpages suck, not that Konqueror is broken.
There are some known issues with Javascript, of course. *rolls eyes* But Slashdot works almost perfectly in Konqueror on my system (KDE 3.5.7).
Of course, once Webkit is fully merged back into KHTML, Konqueror will be using the same HTML rendering engine as every OS X box out the
Minor clarification (Score:5, Informative)
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I'll switch... (Score:4, Interesting)
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For the record, you know you can run software from either environment on the other, right? Switch to KDE and use your favorite Gnome DVD player, or stay where you are and start using Kaffeine. You'll miss a little bit of integration slickness by mixing and matching, but they'll still run well.
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I'm using openSUSE 10.2, and I had to recompile Kaffeine and install DeCSS to watch encrypted DVDs. Unfortunately, Novell compiles Kaffeine and libxine with encrypted DVD support disabled by default, but it's straightforward to recompile it using rpmbuild to include DVD support. 3rd party repositories out there, such as PackMan, also have
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Question from huge fan (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a huge fan of KDE, so please do not consider this a troll, flamebait, etc. I appreciate all of the componentization of KDE4, and frankly KDE3 does some things that are remarkable, like the way it handles file access to FTP volumes. But what I want to know is this: Why does it seem like the KDE screen widgets are "flimsy"? For some reason, everything seems thin and breakable. This seems to have perpetuated into KDE4. Am I the only one that notices this?
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Some graphical things are very difficult to implement and get broken too easily imo between even minor releases of QT.
But again, I'm a huge fan, and I'm not going to stop programming in QT ;) There are just a lot of chal
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It's not just you. I've felt this since the beginning as well. It's an interesting perception. KDE is clearly quite powerful and flexible, and I've certainly not experienced any significant instability (not at least relative to other software), but yet I definitely do get the impression that it is toyish. I can't q
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It's the main reason that I've stayed away from KDE. That, and the braindead menus, and the fact that I've never seen a theme for it that wasn't fugly, and its tendency to re-invent the wheel and/or put 500 functions in one app when I'd rather have 5 apps with 100 functions... OK, so the weird "feel" maybe isn't the main reason, but it is a reason.
It feels a bit like Enlightenment, in a way that I can't really describe. Also kind of like the QNX Neutrino GUI, oddly enough, t
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My trials usual only last long enough for me to say, "huh, this feels about as flakey as pre-OSX MacOS or WinME, even though I know it's not. Better change the theme to see if that helps", then to become flabbergasted and disgusted by the user-hostile configuration menu, at which point I usually quit and go back to Gnome. Sometimes I'll fire up Konqueror or Koffice to see if they still annoy me as much a
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Even when looking at screenshots, there's just something...jarring, i suppose, about the widgets
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I've tried to introduce myself to KDE several times over the past year (it seems nice, really). I want to like it, I want to be able to use it (or atleast Qt based apps alongsize GNOME), but every time I try, no matter what theme engine/colour scheme I try, I find myself constantly cringing at the appearance of the widgets. The closest I e
screenshot (Score:2, Interesting)
http://img247.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kde4fc1.
Plasma? (Score:2)
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kdolphin? (Score:5, Funny)
guess GI'll ghave gto gswitch gto gnome gnow.
Why list an Awards page? (Score:2)
http://www.kde.org/history/awards.php [kde.org]
I would think that would be embarrassing if you had a 2 year award drought.
KDE Integration (Score:5, Interesting)
Things like 'Solid', 'Plasma', and 'Phonon' sound great, and the idea of unifying for example sound and multimedia in Phonon is very nice - it will be wonderful for those developing KDE apps, and great for the user to have centralised control over multimedia settings. But then I thought about what KDE apps I actually use. Firefox, Thunderbird, Mplayer, Gimp, OpenOffice are probably the most commonly used, and they aren't KDE apps! So I find it a little annoying that most of the programs I use won't use these nice KDE features. It's for this reason I've switched to fluxbox recently - it seemed as though I was using KDE for the nice layout and desktop management, but not much else - and to be honest I can do without a Matrix screensaver and fancy titlebars when I can reclaim a load of space and performace (or course installing Amarok and k3b then pulls in a load of KDE libraries...). Don't get me wrong - I like eyecandy and so on, but I just don't seem to be using much else. The most useful part of KDE for me was Konqueror - there the tight integration really did shine, but it would be insulting to KDE to claim that's all it's useful for. This is of course the same for Gnome. Generally the idea of diversity is what makes Linux so strong, but I do sometimes wonder if a nice unified desktop that all works together (read: OS X) without seeming like lots of separate applications all using different libraries, all looking completely different, with some using OSS others ALSA (although admittedly this is no longer really an issue with current versions of ALSA) and only being able to use IO slaves and so on in the small number of KDE programs that I actually use, is just never going to be possible.
Of course this all comes down to the fact that Linux is about choice, which is great. But perhaps KDE and others are stretching themselves too wide - for example KOffice is nice, but OpenOffice has a great deal more functionality, so perhaps working to integrate existing solutions might be a better way to spend time. It's things like this that make you appreciate why standards exist... (you can have standards but still have choice)
I'm not really sure if what I've said is actually the case and maybe others have different experiences. I will definitely try out KDE4 when the final release is made. I've used it for years and I just hope that all the work to create a nice integrated environment will actually be something that will be used!
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I know what you mean, though. I'm finding myself migrating back to a large collection of (gasp) console apps. Last night I caught myself using Screen to switch between irssi, mutt, wyrd, vim, and ncmpc. After spending a few years working with Macs and being a KDE zealot, I feel a little dirty
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I don't know what you use for IM, but I'm quite happy with Kopete. I'm a FreeBSD user so maybe I miss out on some voice chat integration that's totally awesome on one distro somewhere, but I don't really care.
I used XFCE4 for a while, but at the time the taskbar apps were single threaded and just being offline made the weather applet, which was otherwise excellent, unusable.
I've used Windowmaker and Gnome.
KDE just feels less patchy for me.
But I have to say t
Re:KDE Integration (Score:4, Insightful)
I would much rather see Konqueror and KOffice improve to surpass Firefox/Openoffice than have those projects given up. If you've ever seen the Mozilla codebase (or even worse, the Openoffice one) you wouldn't want anyone to be forced to work on that mess. Open source projects need to place the utmost importance on code quality to attract new developers. There aren't a lot of people willing to contribute to an open source project purely in their free time in the first place, and making the codebase hostile is a great way of scaring off those precious few. Without the commercial backing of Sun and the Mozilla foundation, neither Openoffice or Firefox would be even remotely close to where they are today. While all the grunt work has made them both into nice products, I don't like betting the farm on something that is essentially reliant on a constant influx of cash to keep going.
Have they fixed the memory leaks? (Score:3, Insightful)
It usually takes about two weeks to a month of nominal use, but still. I run my desktop continually, and it's an annoyance. I lose time-dependent web pages, SSL web pages, and all my SSH terminals.
IMO, something shouldn't be released out of alpha until "valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes [app]" doesn't show any lost blocks more than a few hundred bytes.
KDE is great (Score:2)
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I don't know - I thought it was pretty unixy. After all, it had one basic job description: asking one backend to fetch some information from various and sundry sources, then asking another to render it appropriately. It wrapped a whole lot of functionality, but Konqueror itself didn't do much more than pass data from one KPart to another and provide bookmarks.
Re:Fuck yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that one of the most revolutionary end-user paradigm shifts that Microsoft ever did was to compiler Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer into one.
Think about it. The Internet, a seamless extension of your desktop. Why shift between the two? When broadband first came out, everything clicked into place, and I understood the eloquence of having IE and Explorer as one. Pick a window, type a website, get my data. Hit back. On my hard drive again.
Konqueror accomplishes this to even a greater extent. KDE has horrible UI in so many places, but they got one thing (more or less) right. Konqueror goes out of its way to integrate all the various file management techniques into one.
SFTP, ick, under Windows, have to load up some separate program to manage it.[1] In KDE, nope. It is just an extension of my computer. Not even an extension, except for the latency, it IS my computer. Files and web sites sharing tabs, why not?
I also loved having tabbed file browsing. I (just) missed out on the Dual Pane file manager craze, but tabbed file managers are a good substitute.
KDE sucks in a thousand other small (medium sized, and large) ways. Heck in of itself Konqueror has at least half a dozen UI issues that can be spotted within the first 5 minutes of using it. But do not claim that it is not very "Unix" like.
It is very Unix like. Files are files, a file is a file is a file. Does it really matter where it resides?
[1]Actually 2 commerical programs exist that allow the user to mount SFTP and SCP connections as drives. They still suck compared to FISH though.
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integrated but not logical (Score:4, Insightful)
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I can understand integrating File Manager and FTP - that makes perfect sense. But why the web browser should be a p
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On a more serious note, that big "paradigm shift" ended up giving the world one of the most insecure systems in the computer age.
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making something pretty is ok.. making something that looks pretty and actually increases my productivity is priceless
if you prefer slimmed down run a really light WM like blackbox or xfce
the revolution is all about choice
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So there
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I didn't see the simplest improvement in konsole listed:
rm konsole && cp xterm konsole
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Reasons why xterm is superior to konsole
I'd like to be an elitist Unix Purist, but in reality I'm just a Unix Luddite. Bu
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'the "current" situation'
Riiight. These are completely different.
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For fonts - KDE Control Center : Appearances : Fonts : Antialiasing
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Oh dear. The look is dependant on the theme being used. Don't like it blocky? Choose a different theme! Just like GTK isn't ugly even though it appears so in these [lysator.liu.se] screenshots [sourceforge.net]. There are obviously good and bad themes for both toolkits.
Oh, and why do the fonts i