KDE Responds To Misconceptions About KDE 4 279
Jiilik Oiolosse writes "PJ at Groklaw speaks with a member of the KDE team about some of the common myths circulating about KDE 4. 'There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed.' Among the topics discussed are: 'Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake,' 'I cannot put files on my desktop,' and 'KDE should just have ported KDE 3.5 to Qt 4 and not add all that other experimental stuff right away.'"
I heard... (Score:5, Informative)
that if you install a mirror plasmoid and say "goatse" three times, RMS will appear and strangle you with his beard.
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(Score:5, Informative)
Only on slashdot...
Re:I heard... (Score:4, Informative)
(Score:5, Informative)
Only on slashdot...
Indeed...
Diverting the moderation process for some deep humor: priceless.
It IS informative! (Score:3, Funny)
He's informing us of what he heard.
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I'm not quite sure, I couldn't get it to work out. I did figure out that if the mirror plasmoid is running a terminal, and you run vrms [debian.org] while saying goatse three times, Stallman's laughing face appears in the plasmid, and it runs apt-get remove on all non-free software on your machine.
So far, it seems to be preventing me from reinstalling everything. So excuse me, I need to go rebuild my entire music collection in vorbis.
Happy to wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I see KDE 4.x as something to play with alongside my regular desktop. I'll jump onboard properly when things calm down, but in the meantime I have work to do.
Re:Happy to wait (Score:5, Insightful)
From this point on, our libraries will remain binary compatible until 5.0. Not releasing 4.0 at that point means holding back hundreds of application developers from porting and releasing their applications. Not releasing would hurt these applications - they wouldn't receive the attention to detail they deserved. We're talking about core applications like Dolphin [...]
Re:Happy to wait (Score:5, Informative)
To say that the first release of Dolphin will be binary compatible with all future releases of KDE 4.X (which is what the quote is implying) just doesn't seem right.
What's wrong with it? All it means is that nothing that's in the API in 4.0.0 will be removed or changed in an incompatible way for the lifetime of 4.x. Plenty of new features will be added, but they won't break any existing code. Programming languages like Perl, Python, and PHP (usually) do this all the time.
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Re:Happy to wait (Score:5, Informative)
You misread that quote. They are saying the libraries will remain stable until KDE 5.. That means kdelibs and such. Then they go on to say, since the libraries are stable, they should release to benefit the relatively complete applications that have built on these libraries (like Dolphin).
They're not saying Dolphin won't change. Just the underlying libraries.
Binary compatibility means nothing when talking about programs. You can only apply the term to libraries. (And even then it doesn't mean that the library "remains static", just that no features are removed or changed such that it would break existing programs that rely on them).
Vista (Score:3, Funny)
by the time I'm considering Vista it'll be lying in a shallow grave
Not too shallow, I hope - it already stinks.
KDE 4.0 as a beta (Score:5, Interesting)
However I firmly believe that KDE really messed up when it comes to mamaging user expectations.
Call something KDE 4.0 and people will believe it's fully functional ready to roll. And find themselves sorely disappointed. Call it "KDE 4.0 Developer Release" and people will understand what it is and is not.
One thing that irks me in KDE's reply though is that they give the impression that they clearly communicated what KDE 4.0 was and was not. I disagree. I visited kde.org a few times to find precisely that information, and it simply wasn't there.
That's why I was so happy with SuSE's honest and up-front statement about KDE 4.0 (see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=528652&cid=23135548 [slashdot.org] ) that told me everything KDE.org didn't. No amount of post-furor explanations will take that away.
I'm unhappy... (Score:5, Interesting)
But are they on the right path? From what I have seen in KDE4.0, it seems to me that everything they have done is a step backwards.
Basically, the problem is: if it's working fine, why change? For instance, I'm still using the KDE-classic icon set because I see no reason to get glossier icons, I recognize instantly the old icons and that's what matters.
The big point about KDE has always been its capability for personal configuration. I prefer to use just one desktop, so I don't have a desktop selector applet in my taskbar. I prefer not to put icons on my desktop, since the desktop is always covered by the windows I'm using, so I have my favorite apps icons in my taskbar and use konqueror in the file management mode to open documents. That's the way I prefer, other people think differently, but KDE3.5 lets everyone be happy with their choices.
I've never adapted to Gnome, because the philosophy is different there, it seems to be about making it easier to do things, at the expense of configurability. Well, for me the easiest way to do things is to do them the way I find easier, not the way someone else prefers.
I can hear people telling me, "OK, if you don't like things as they are, just go ahead and change them, the source code is there". Well, I have neither the time nor the inclination to start developing the KDE user interface. I'm not complaining, they were under no obligation to develop KDE for me anyhow, but let's say I'm lamenting the way things are going.
Re:I'm unhappy... (Score:5, Interesting)
>> Basically, the problem is: if it's working fine, why change? For instance, I'm still using the KDE-classic icon set because I see no reason to get glossier icons, I recognize instantly the old icons and that's what matters.
Familiarity is nice to avoid retraining, but you won't be attracting any new users/devs with ugly interfaces. Sounds shallow but its a fact of life. Aesthetics matter.
>> The big point about KDE has always been its capability for personal configuration. I prefer to use just one desktop, so I don't have a desktop selector applet in my taskbar. I prefer not to put icons on my desktop, since the desktop is always covered by the windows I'm using, so I have my favorite apps icons in my taskbar and use konqueror in the file management mode to open documents.
All of those things are possible in KDE 4 (at least the version I'm using, perhaps even in 4.0.x).
I think the configuration culture hasn't gone, but there does have to be a better reason to add an option now. Some options are simply missing because they haven't been added back, but will be as soon as possible.
Quo Vadis KDE ? (Score:2)
KDE is built on top of Trolltech's QT framework, which I think is a good thing, and Trolltech just updated to QT 4.0.
So one way or another KDE will have to follow suit. This means a top-to-bottom rework anyway if you want to take advantage of all new QT4.0 features (w
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I'm a developer on a major Linux distribution. I can tell that everytime more people shows up on the official IRC channels with the "Feature X is b0rken, you suck!" attitude.
That's the price one pays for taking Linux mainstream.
Mainstream users do not care about opensourseness - they just want their system work and do what they want to do it. And with KDE4 at moment nothing works as people expect - if it works at all.
In Windows land it is different: there is nobody you can complain. Normally you have to call support or local technician or friend hoping that they can fix it for you. Linux at moment lacks such "local technician or friend" option. Also, people do not want t
Re:KDE 4.0 as a beta, not KDE fault (Score:4, Insightful)
> The problem was that the KDE team didn't want to miss the Ubuntu Long Term Support edition
I'm afraid this information is just plain wrong.
Re:Happy to wait (Score:5, Funny)
...by the time I'm considering Vista it'll be lying in a shallow grave from the sound of things.
Then you could probably install it by now.
Re:Happy to wait (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still waiting for the KDE User Network Tool...
KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple users (Score:5, Informative)
KDE 4 has great ideas, but kde 4.0 was not ready for use by the masses and was very buggy (I have a collegue using 4.0.5 and he's constantly having kwin crashes and other problematic behaviour especially with dual screens in either extend and clone mode).
While KDE 4.1 will be a lot better, again several important features have been moved to 4.2. For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself. These two "desktop icon types" have very different behaviour, which will be extremely different to understand to non-geeks. This will be really fixed in 4.2 where it will be possible to set the folderview as the desktop itself. The number of plasma widgets shipped by default in KDE 4.2 is still rather limited (no good RSS reader, weather applet, system monitor etc). Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life. All of this will probably be fixed for KDE 4.2.
I heard the administrator mode in systemsettings is not working and that a migration to policykit to make this work, is planned for kde 4.2. GNOME is using policykit already since a year if I'm not mistaken.
So while KDE 4.1 is a great release for advanced users (I'm typing this from KDE 4.1 RC1 with nice desktop effects!), you don't want to migrate your average non-geek family member friend or collegue to it.
It's unfortunate that KDE developers still try to deny or at least greatly minimize the impact of these kind of problems. A little bit more understanding from both sides (developers and users) and a bit less technology hyping, would be a nice thing.
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Informative)
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Informative)
That is pretty much it too. KDE 4 is changing everything about KDE's underlying structure with the hope of unifying things in ways that were literally hacks before. The concepts are great to the point of moving away from the "desktop" unfortunately they as you said finished up the libraries and hadn't finished up the front end.
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, to be fair, calling it KDE 4.0 suggests it's relatively bug-free (else it would have been 4.0-beta), and feature-complete (else it would have been 4.0-alpha).
From what I've read it was neither of those...
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on gentoo. Kde-4.0 is hard masked which means it's not officially in the tree. You can unmask it if you really want to play with it but in order to do so you have to edit some config files which makes sure you know what you're doing. Kde-4.1 will eventually go into unstable (there you also find gnome-2.22, firefox-3, openoffice-4 etc).
Did other distros directly push kde-4.0 to stable?
Firing up ditrowatch I get 8 distributions with kde-4 and around 400 with kde-3. Among the 8 are Ubuntu, openSUSE, Feodora and PC-BSD.
Hmm, looking into the Ubuntu package database, I see kde4 is an extra package (no automatic update?) in Universe which has (I quote) no guarantee of security fixes and support.
It seems to be in Feodora-9, though. Is there a stable/unstable or whatsoever?
And it is in the just released openSUSE-11. Same here. Is it really in the default install?
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Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, exactly, is it surprising that, when the product is announced to be "out of beta and released", it will be pushed out to end users?
If it's not "objectively ready", then it's not even beta, it's alpha. If the libs are ready but not the desktop itself, then release "kdelibs-4.0", and keep the version of the desktop itself at alpha until that part is finished.
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Yeah. If Canonical can look at KDE4 and say "no, this isn't ready, we're sticking with KDE3, but here's an alternative distro if you *really* like pain", why can't the other distros at least see that they should keep KDE3 at least until the following release?
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Informative)
This isnÂt true.
If you went to kde.org after KDE 4.0 was released, looked in the "download" section and selected the current stable release, you got KDE 4.0. The old 3.5.* was called legacy or something. If the developers didnÂt expect distributions to start pushing it out, they shouldnÂt have said it was the current stable release.
I notice its changed now.
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So in other words seasoned developers somehow didn't know what an X.0 release signified?
BULLSHIT.
Define a word for it. (Score:2)
"Egotards"
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:5, Interesting)
Problems with what? You're running around like a geek trying to run a piece of software that hasn't been out for even a few months and you're complaining it has shortcomings and some things missing? Stop press, news at 11.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth people are still using KDE 3.5.x, they will probably use successive versions of it as well, and when the general consensus is that KDE 4.x looks OK then you'll start to see a natural move to it. That's what naturally tends to happen with these things. You just......................stop worrying. If you're an early adopter then that's exactly what you are. I hear that people actually pay for licenses for that privilege, and they complain less than the furore we've had with KDE 4. Go figure.
Re:KDE4.1 great for geeks, not ready for simple us (Score:2)
The thing to do with the new version may be just to identify the bits that misbehave on you and use something else in their place.
Things aren't r
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>> For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself.
No. Support for icons on the background has been removed. Icons can only live in the folderview widget.
>> Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life.
Really? Can you point me towards a test? This is the first I've heard of this issue.
OS X vs. KDE and others (Score:4, Interesting)
The OSS community have managed to build a better browser than IE, but how come they haven't been able to duplicate the Apple GUI experience? Is it just a case of OSS lagging behind commercial companies etc., and soon Linux will be on par with OS X. Or is there more to it than that, such as difference philosophies or lack of people with good a understanding of user psychology and graphic design principles?
Re:OS X vs. KDE and others (Score:5, Interesting)
I have both mac os/x and linux here and I *far* prefer KDE (3) over os/x, I just can't seem to get used to the main menu switching all the time depending on what has focus. I prefer 'stateless' designs over state any time.
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Re:OS X vs. KDE and others (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Debian's experimental KDE 4.1 alpha/beta packages for a few weeks now, and my impression is that it's still KDE, and still too buggy to recommend to other users. Debian is probably several weeks after SVN, though.
My main problem right now is that most of the hotkeys have disappeared (a bug, not a design decision, I assume), and that I can't move plasmoids in the panel (supposed to be fixed by now, but not in Debian's packages). I don't miss the desktop-as-folder paradigm, but I do miss good information on how to create one's own plasmoids. Also, Kmail/Kontact crashes a lot.
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3.5.10 is going to be released in August. How does that equate to disappearing?
Listen, I'm running KDE 4.0 on Kubuntu (alongside 3.5) and I don't think there's anything seriously wrong with it. That was surprising to me given all the "unusable FUD" I've been reading about the last 6 months.
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And yet I'm using KDE3 with the OS X-style menus enabled and the window buttons moved to the left side of the title bar. No, I don't like OS X as a whole at all (especially the widget style) - but I like those two ideas, so I've copied them to my desktop. Believe it or not, on a 12" screen and a tracpoint, the "infinite-height" menus are extremely handy. You see, it's all a matter of preference.
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I use OS X and KDE3, also. I don't mind the menus. I like the reminder about what OS I am in, though, so I don't mimic that in KDE. The menu also has another purpose: It hints of what program you've currently got in focus. To the right of the apple, there should always be the name of the active program. Most X11 window managers don't actually make things that clear.
What I'd like to have is a file browser as nice as Konqueror or Dolphin in OS X by default. Finder is just too simplistic. Even Windows Explorer
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I've been seriously considering sticking linux on the mac just for that reason (the nice hardware) :)
Another (not so nice) reason is that it will freak out the occasional mac fan that visits...
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KDE 3.5.9 does have kinfocenter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinfocenter [wikipedia.org]
It will tell you the specs for your system.
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Graphic design principle are important (as are typographic principles, and so on), but...
Apple has kept the same keyboard shortcuts for EVER. Apple-C defined the 'copy' operation with the Lisa, in the early 80s. Apple-X is cut, Apple-P is paste. The symbols on the keyboard aren't the same anymore, but the keys are.
Don't think I'm accusing MS (or anyone else) of anything -- they have been consistent too. But KDE broke their consistent streak with KDE 4. That can be a good thing, when a project has a use
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>> But KDE broke their consistent streak with KDE 4.
Whaa? Your example was about keyboard shortcuts. Well those sure haven't changed in KDE4. Some other stuff changed, but I don't think any KDE3 user would have trouble navigating in KDE4 (minus the buggyness of 4.0, I'm talking about the design).
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Severe lack of understanding. xmonad != kde
Kwin can be compared to xmonad. You can use xmonad with KDE.
Duplicating Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
how come they haven't been able to duplicate the Apple GUI experience?
Because they're trying to duplicate the Windows GUI experience, complete with periodically pissing off half the user base by changing the entire interface for oddball reasons.
They say "the desktop hasn't had a radical redesign in X years!" So what? The command line hasn't had a radical redesign since the Bourne shell, unless you're using Plan 9, and that was about 30 years ago. You don't *need* a radical redesign of things that work well. You don't *need* to break applications and force people to upgrade to a new API, either. Yes I'm looking at YOU, Trolltech... what's the point of using an OO programming language if you don't take advantage of the fact that you can have multiple methods with the same name, so you don't HAVE to remove the old calls when you change the calling sequence?
That's like when Microsoft declared "all new code will be in .NET" and had people hanging on to Visual Studio 6 for years because that was the only way to stay backwards compatible.
(and, no, I don't think Apple's going to get everyone to dump Carbon either)
Yes, you occasionally have to break stuff, but unless you're doing it because of security problems you do it after a transition period, and I don't think (for one random example) "directory.exists(name, TRUE)" counts as a security hole.
Or is there more to it than that, such as difference philosophies or lack of people with good a understanding of user psychology and graphic design principles?
All of the above. Not that Apple's user interface is perfect (god knows it isn't), but it's proof that you don't have to blindly clone everything Microsoft does to produce a great user experience.
Re:OS X vs. KDE and others (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance:
o The Alt+Tab vs. Alt+Tilde thing - I understand the technical difference between switching applications and multiple "documents". Still I often have the case where I have 2 Terminals and 1 Firefox open and need to constantly switch between them. Here I don't want to think about if it's another application or document I want to switch between. I just want to do it and I can with KDE, Gnome, Windows, OS/2 but not OS X. Ok there is an extra tool (forgot the name), but that one didn't work flawless eather.
o Virtual Desktops - Well that something a lot of Nerds seemed to miss, something which the OSS community had in their products for years. Not having it can result in considerable clutter on the screen which is exactly how my OS X screen looks like. Great to see that Apple finally came around and introduced it in it's latest version.
o Zoom vs. Maximize - One IMHO really strange thing in OS X is the Maximize button which actually is a Zoom button. The window size gets proportionally increased until it reaches the horizontal or vertical limits - whatever comes first. It's not possible to really maximize a window to cover the entire screen. Exception to that being that applications can alter this behavior and e.g. Aparature is doing so - showing the same behavior as this botton does in KDE, Gnome, Windows, OS/2,...
o Resizing a Window - To resize a window you have to drag the lower right corner and only the lower right corner. Why can't I use the left side border of the window if I choose to? Also something that's possible nearly everywhere else.
o Focus follows mouse -
o Rename a file - You can do tons of things (like copy, move to trash,...) within the context menu of a file. But still you can't rename it. Instead you have to click on it once and then again on the name below the icon. I find this quite inconsequent and also not very intuitive - actually I had to google it.
o Consistent UI appearance - It's true that Qt, GTK etc. based applications look different. But so do OS X applications where you have the white style, this brushed metal style and another one which escapes me right now.
So don't get me wrong, I didn't want to rant about OS X. It's my favorite UI from a design and "looking at" point of view. But if it's about daily work with it, then points like the mentioned above are really in my way. With KDE it's vice versa for me. It doesn't look that good, but I lets me do the job and it's more consistent with what you would expect coming from other UI's.
Consistent UI appearance (Score:3, Informative)
That's [bla.st] true [arstechnica.com].
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"Still I often have the case where I have 2 Terminals and 1 Firefox open and need to constantly switch between them"
What I want is something like this:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121349 [kde.org]
Summary: you do alt+1, alt+2, alt+3 and so on till alt 9 for the 9 different apps/windows in a "stack" of windows. You press alt+0 to "renumber the stack" by most recently used windows - 1=most recent, 2=next etc.
I don't really care what keystrokes are used as long as it's not too difficult. I don't want to do stupid
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I use it quite often, but found the key combination "Ctrl + A then 0-9" a bit unergonomic. Also I kind of forget if it's screen 4 or 5, so I have to cycle through them with Ctrl + A 4, Ctrl + A 5,...". So I think it is faster to do the same thing multiple time ("Alt tab tab tab") than doing different keyboard combinations. It IMHO is just faster to repeat the same thing over and over again than thinking
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I'd say it'll be much faster than the "tab tab" stuff - hold down alt, and just roll across 1234 to find the screen you want (assuming a fast enough computer). If you're in a particular "context" 1 could be code, 2 = spec, 3 = logs, 4= google, 5= man page. And I assume that many people would be able to remember all of that after a few minutes.
Alt tab is fine if you are switching between just two wind
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haven't been able to duplicate the Apple GUI experience
Waiting for clones. That is precisely why OSS has *always* been behind.
lack of people with good a understanding of user psychology and graphic design principles
Yes. They are in high demand. Apple hired all of them.
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I very strongly agree with this sentiment. So much effort in OSS has been to try and pull in a userbase by mimicking what the user is already used to, and in many cases dissappointing down the road by the simple fact that the product is not microsoft/apple.
With no (or anyhow little) risk of lost revenue, one would think that all kinds of fantastical innovations would be spilling out of the open source movement in areas of desktop, input and output, etc. It's all gotten so incestuous that any small change se
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On reason is that great design means fewer options, and OSS inherently favors control and flexibility because all the apps are written to and by superusers. So there are these goals that oppose each other, and cutting through it all is difficult when your programmers owe you nothing. It takes a clear vision to achieve the elegance Apple pulls off.
Well that, and Apple's gigantic wad of money they spend on human interface research :)
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Because the Enlightenment guys got a nasty letter from Apple about that theme.
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See I think the Windows 3.11 with the Norton Desktop was one of the best UIs of all time. Most things were allways accessable at the top of the sceen. Your desktop was for running but iconifed applications so you could actually find a minimizes app by site if you happen to have more then a few running, no of this ever shrinking task bar crap. ( I actally had to write my own app for manageing minimized windows on XP becase the start bar is that usless if you have lots of stuff going ) NDW's drive icons w
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Winbatch? That thing was/is brilliant. It's still available for modern Windowses, and it runs quite well under wine. I stayed with Win3.11 for many many years, in part because of Winbatch, and then finally switched to linux in 2000.
It has always annoyed me that linux has noth
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Misconceptions? (Score:4, Insightful)
If KDE4 is not finished, why announcing it as a deliverable product?
What everyone expects from a new major release is no less features and stability than the older ones.
Whenever this is not the case, a flop is waiting at the corner (as a lot of people learned from Vista).
Re:Misconceptions? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. The work was not finished, and calling it 4.0 creates expectations. In the article, the kde devs say they communicated it was not to be taken as finished. But their most potent statement, the version number, says something different.
It continues to make that statement. Big distributions as kubuntu and opensuse offer kde4.0 as a default choice. Not because they don't understand 4.0 isn't ready, but because the demand is there. People will pass if the latest version is not available. If the goal is to make a successful desktop, communication like a major version number should be aimed at the end users, not at the developers.
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Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that this is clearly the fault of the distributions.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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What distribution ships with KDE4 as the desktop by default? I'm not aware of any.
Uhm, Fedora 9, OpenSUSE 11.0 ?
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OpenSUSE does [opensuse.org].
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I didn't expect a feature complete KDE4.0, but that is because I actually read the announcements by the KDE team.
Aye, there's the rub.
Everybody sees the version number, but only those that read the KDE announcement understood that "4.0" really meant "not at all finished yet".
In the rest of the world "x.0" means ready for end-users, but somehow the KDE team still fails to understand that and gets all "Dude, we said it in the release announcement. Ain't our fault that people think x.0 means finished product even if that's how the rest of the world does it. Really, it is the world that is at fault for not reading the ann
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This seems familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks nice but.. (Score:2)
I've tried various distro's with live CD's which use KDE4, don't want to mess a working system. It looks nice, I like the idea of the applications being put on the desktop like you can with Karamba, but with less CPU usage.
One main gripe for me is the file manager, it looks average, but is less useful. Not being able to open multiple tabs of different directories, ergo making drag / drop copying harder is a pain. It's like the developers wanted to regress to the shitty Windows way of it's file manager works
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Dolphin in KDE 4.1 Beta 2 supports tabs. CTRL-SHIFT-N.
I don't think you can copy from the current tab onto another tab, but that may be coming.
Eh... (Score:2, Insightful)
People really need to cut the KDE developers some slack. The devs specifically said that the first releases will be lacking, it's a major rewrite after all. Keeping that in mind, they're doing a wonderful job. Would you rather the release schedule looked like e17's?
Also, lots of the people flaming KDE4 sound like the KDE team owed them something... that's really so embarrassing for the open source community.
Version number intentions and perceptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people uphold OSX or Vista as the pinnacles of desktop beauty, and in the case of Mac, usability and user experience, yet the beauty possible on modern Linuxen desktops is not only equal to that of the Big Two, but in fact far surpassing them. Yes, I am talking a lot about "beauty" and "aesthetics", terms that programmers and techheads usually spurn or dismiss as irrelevant or superfluous. However, because it is not in the front of many geeks' minds does not mean it is irrelevant (especially considered I being a programmer myself) - beauty is important! In KDE, in particular KDE4, and especially coupled with technologies such as Compiz-Fusion and/or Metisse, the Linux desktop is far ahead any competition in presentation aesthetics, a fact seldom recognised.
That said, I am not using it on my production system and will not until release 4.2.
The problem as I see it, and the mistake made by the KDE dev team, lies in using a version numbering system that makes great sense for them but has little relation to how it will be interpreted and understood outside the development circles. For the devs, according to TFA, the "4.0" in KDE 4.0 means
For most of the world, the release of a new major version means both something new and exiting, which KDE4.0 certainly delivers, but also a finished and usable system that will be refined, embellished and updated. The KDE devs, on the other hand, means it as a platform on which a functioning system can and will be built. Their mistake lies in not realising that public perception of "4.0" would differ from their intention.
That said, this is a very common mistake in all human communication. Seldom indeed does intention transmit perfectly into perception.
Unprofessionalism at its finest. (Score:4, Insightful)
If anyone was wondering why KDE 4 was so user unfriendly, then this article pretty much says it all. None of the answers are user friendly. They are all argumentative and poor excuses at best.
KDE 4.0 is the starting line, not the finishing line.
Isn't that the precise definition of BETA software? They released KDE 4.0 Beta as the finished product, and are now ARGUING that it is not finished, but a "new beginning." Well, thanks for telling us beforehand, which btw would have been as simple as adding "beta" to the name. If 4 is so backward compatible and "user friendly" then why have so many users failed to "make use" of KDE 4? If they listen to their users, then why do they feel they haven't been heard? If you disagree with them then fine, but you cannot argue with them and expect to win anyone over and claim that that is listening.
Ah, the language barrier... (Score:5, Funny)
Please extend some tolerance to these people - they're clearly making a credible effort to emulate the commercial software sector by communicating in marketing bullspeak (which is especially difficult for native speakers of Ancient Geek) - so the occasional misunderstanding is inevitable.
E.g. when the TFA says:
Many of the official release announcements posted on kde.org contained the following text: "The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want."
What they are trying to say is "KDE 4.0 doesn't have all the user features in it yet - we're only releasing it so that developers can start working with the new libraries - users should stick with 3.5 for a while yet".
However, due to their inexperience with the subtleties of Bullspeak they've inadvertently used the "future speculative masturbatory" tense (by conjoining the word "innovation" with hyperbolic capitalization of "Free Desktop") thus indicating that the entire paragraph is intended to be glossed over and treated as a general endorsement - so its unsurprising that people have gone ahead and used 4.0 in user-facing systems.
The KDE developers should be praised for their attempt to attain synergy with the wider enterprise by leveraging the didactic techniques of content-neutral intercourse, and the community should exhibit greater empathy when this initiative leads to non-positive communication outcomes.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for putting in humorous terms what was going through my mind as I read that entire Groklaw article: it sounds like guilty fast-talk, but really just needs an editor.
Now, my patience had already worn thin by the time I got to the end of the intro — "Some people asked for the images to be links to larger images because I shrank them for dialup but omigod I didn't know how to make them go like that but then someone told me how to make them like that so now if you click? The image? You get li
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that the precise definition of BETA software?
No, it is definition of version numbering!
KDE 3 > New idea of KDE4 > Alpha > Beta > 4.0.x > 4.1.x > 4.2.x
1.0 (or 4.0) does not mean it is finished or ready. Then we woudn't have any other version numbers than alpha > beta > 1.0.
What is 1.1 or 1.0.0.1 then if not better software?
It is all about self-defined goals, is not it? (Score:4, Interesting)
This particular line is especially pathetic — even if truthful. Yes, according to others, we royally screwed up, but, fortunately, we had our own definitions of the goals.
To see this guys try to wriggle out of this shame is as unpleasant as trying to use their software. They've "redefined" an alpha pre-release as a "4.0". They've followed up with several minor post-releases (it is at 4.0.4 right now, is not it?) — which continue to be both feature-incomplete and buggy. But, I guess, if none of that was among their "clearly stated goals", things are dandy...
To call release of Plasma — the "new development from the ground up" — a "success" by any definition is a bad joke. The software screws itself up every once in a while so badly, the Internet-forums are already full of of advises, like this [fedoraforum.org] "just delete .kde/share/config/plasmarc".
KDE appears to have grown a serious marketing department some time ago — I noticed this during their pre-release "tension build-up", which was not unlike that of a new X-Box or iPhone. Heck, their "release party" was Google-sponsored [kde.org]! Except the new X-Box and iPhone work (save, maybe, for a few glitches). KDE4, on the other hand, does not — by anybody's definition, except, maybe, their own.
This most recent "gracious" response is just another marketing spin-attempt...
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What the hell?
If I say "I'm going to to A, B, and C" for this next release, and don't implement D, I've failed. At least thats by your words above. No, it means I did exactly what I was intending to do. Just because it's not what YOU wanted, doesn't mean it wasn't a success.
As far as your gripe about Plasma... well, it's new jackass! New software has bugs. If people reported them right and provided useful data, instead of just knee-jerk repairing the damage, it would get fixed.
These people have done a hell
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Yes, you have, if the missing D is what any sane software user and developer would expect from anything called release. If you bought a car without the wheels, would not you be upset, even if the absence of wheels were outlined in fine-print somewhere in the purchase agreement? (Where would we be without car-analogies!)
Thanks, love you too, fellow Slash
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Not a big fan so far (Score:2)
I had been playing around with a couple different linux/BSD combos on a client's machine. Everytime I always installed KDE 3.5 or the distro loaded KDE 3.5 by default (PC-BSD, etc..)
The client took OpenSuSE 11 and installed it with KDE 4, thinking "Hey 4.0 is greater than 3.5".
My gut reaction was to cringe and he asked me why. And I told them that KDE 4.0 had issues and the other part of it was it was too new. It hadn't been out long enough in my book to switch.
And there have been some odd things happen
This continued PR effort... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just shows that KDE made the wrong decision. Not technically mind you, just the wrong release decision.
When you have to go back and justify your actions, that means you did something wrong in the eyes of the consumer. If you continually find yourself doing this, you're going to have an uphill battle.
While plasma is nascent technology, I think everyone sees it as cool.
I think starting with a port of KDE to Qt4 would have been the best idea. It would have provided a crucial step between designs and shown off Qt4's improvements over Qt3. Then with everything ported release 4.0. Then in 4.0 deliver a beta of Plasma and/or a release of Plasma in 4.1. There was absolutely no need to ever include plasma. Plasma is based off the QGraphicsView class. At the time Plasma was started and even up until the 1st release, you could not put a widget in the GraphicsView. This should have been a show stopper, or at least a "wait for" feature before Plasma was forced on people. That one feature should have made it clear - port to Qt4 and release as 4.0. But that's not what happened.
Still we have KDE saying "no, we're right" despite the various criticisms. If KDE really listed to their users they'd say "we're changing our release policy to a user-centric one"
Disclaimer: KDE is my favorite desktop, I only have interest in it succeeding, and that is why I am critical of it. But I realize that the user, not the code is the most important factor.
The bolt-on technology should have come second. It is completely optional. It should have been separated out like Aero is from Vista.
Why complain? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've never tried kde 4, but after reading here, I just don't understand what there is to complain about, if you are using a major distro.
kubuntu - has always been unstable.
fedora- ment to be experimental.
suse- warned their users before.
freebsd- hasn't included kde 4 yet.
debian- hasn't included kde 4 yet.
gentoo- a typical gentoo user is used to this.
and so on
This looks like a lot of noise over nothing. Those complaining are probably gnome users who never used kde. I just cant understand that end users have b
Re:Everybody RTFA? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, 7 minutes after the article was posted, and STILL no postings! Could this be my first FP? COULD IT???
You're entering a realm which is, unusual, the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location.......
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Re:Everybody RTFA? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Everybody RTFA? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm in Europe, you insensitive clod!
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"Many of the problems in KDE 4.0 can and will be fixed by the KDE hackers."
It's nice to see when organizations view hacking in a positive light. Its like the old gun control argument. Hackers don't hose your system, script kiddies do.
Re:Next time call it "KDE 4.0 Developer Release" (Score:4, Insightful)
Why, yes I know. Don't feed the trolls... I just can't resist here.
That would have helped so tremedously! It would have made clear to trolls and dumb people that it is not for them and real FOSS lovers would have still tested it and filed bug reports and feature request.
So I'm dumb or a troll for feeling let down when a stable release (which a 4.0.X release should be) of a major open source project tends to crash on me constantly? In the FLOSS community, release management has a lot to do with honesty.
If your 4.0 branch has scathing architectural deficiencies that make it unusable for production environments, call it 3.9, if you already had that, call it 3.10. Now KDE has their own gnome 2.0.0. Anyone who remembers that one awful experience?
Naming convention for the future:
*Insert big FOSS project X.0 ( X > 1 )* "Developer Release"
Otherwise all the dumb users will think it is Photoshop CS4 or something.
IMHO that is the path to happiness!
BTW KDE4.1 ROCKS!
If it's not 4.0 don't call it 4.0 -- it's that simple.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That is just silly.
The reason for the major version number to change is to indicate breaks in compatibility with earlier versions. A version like 3.X indicates that everything written with 3.Y (Y <= X) will still work with 3.X.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah? Well the G in GNOME stands for Goatse!
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Re:Just in time for K Pride Week... (Score:5, Funny)
No, the O in gnome stands for goatse !
I will never be able to look at the word GNOME again.