KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look 224
dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."
4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:3, Interesting)
I've played around a bit with KDE 4.x (don't remember exact version) in Ubuntu 10.04, but I wasn't very impressed. It look very slick, gives a feeling of advanced tech under the hood, but:
After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.
I don't have time for this crap, a desktop environment is just one of many things you have to configure when customizing an OS, it shouldn't take a day to wander through its configuration. This wouldn't be a problem if defaults are chosen well enough that you're done with changing very few things from the default, but that's not the case. From what I understand, SuSE offers one of the best out-of-the-box KDE experiences, but hey I'm not changing distro's just to have nice defaults on the desktop environment.
To me, it comes across as a typical case of too much unnecessary complexity - users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time. And where they can easily find the most important settings. Beyond that, additional complexity just wasts memory, CPU cycles & developer time. Which is really a shame given all the effort that goes into a project like KDE. Disclaimer: that's just my current impression, maybe these things are much improved in later releases like the one reviewed here...
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:4, Insightful)
[..] users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time.
Users do not - but professionals do.
All the little things chip time very fast - the time I'd rather did something useful, instead of bunch of mousewavings, modern desktops tend to impose on me. That's where the hundreds/thousands little options come into play: they allow user to remove the road bumps from the daily workflow.
That's why highly customizable desktops like KDE/Flux/WM/IceWM/etc would remain popular: many who graduate from being an end-user find GNOME, after getting "familiar" with it, quite limiting.
Though sure if you spend 90% of time in Evolution and FireFox, then you pretty much do not care what desktop you run and the whole argument about the desktop environments becomes moot.
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Users do not - but professionals do.
Yeah... you know... I'm gonna have to call BS, here.
What *exactly* does KDE offer that a "professional" will find shaves *that* much time off their day-to-day lives?
Hell, the "professionals" I come across often want the exact *opposite* of KDE... things like xmonad, awesome, and so forth, are an attempt to get the DE the hell out of the way so we can just get on with our jobs, already.
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What *exactly* does KDE offer that a "professional" will find shaves *that* much time off their day-to-day lives?
Well, I count myself as professional, and one of the nicest features for me is that I can easily configure attributes for specific windows. I remember back in the 90's having to manually edit .fvwm2rc. Now, I can just put rules right-click title bar and pick "special window" or "special application" settings. My firefox always starts up on Desktop 2. My VirtualBox always on Desktop
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After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.
Can you give a few examples? Everything in KDE can be setup in the Settings. It's pretty stread forward and easy to do. But you really don't need to "fiddling" with it for hours. The KDE desktop is easy to use out of the box.
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I use Linux every day for everything. I demo it to customers. Most are awe inspired by it, by what it does, how it looks, and that it is free. I have used Linux in my business for the past 4 years as servers, diagnostic machines, workstations for myself and for customers. One thing I have noticed is that if I set someone down in front of Linux without telling them about it, even those who know little to nothing about computers, they'll begin using it as if it were Windows. So please don't get me wrong.
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Do you prefer KDE v3? I don't like v4 as well and prefer v3.5.10. People say the later v4.x releases are better and good as v3.x which I haven't seen. I am going to stay with the latest v3.x as long as I can until I can't use it anymore. :(
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I have 0 problems getting around / get work done on KDE (any version), and have regularly used KDE for day-to-day work years ago. My point was it just takes too much time to get to know it (well). Especially for ordinary users, who don't have the patience a power-user might have. With that as a given, anything that a n00b user (count me out) can't find quickly, is lost on that user. And you'll have to agree that non-power users are the vast majority of desktop users.
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's exactly what pisses me off in Gnome, there is so little to configure, except for a theme you more or less have to accept what the developers gave you.
But the people who's private computers I keep running are quite happy with the configurability of KDE, the standard set up is OK and some of them get quite adventurous once they understand the power of the right-click.
They have mainly older single processor machines with a max. of 1GB RAM and even then it is a beautiful and responsive desktop without the weaknesses of Windows.
More than once visitors who saw some of the options I showed them (especially in Dolphin) asked how to enable them in Windows 7 :)
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More than once visitors who saw some of the options I showed them (especially in Dolphin) asked how to enable them in Windows 7 :)
Hope you told them that all they had to do was to install KDE?
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Exactly. It is a PEBCAK thing. KDE does not required any fiddling for the average user and is very usable out-of-the box, even those versions distros have tried to "personalize". I run only kde straight from source and even there for the newb it does not require any fiddling about at all.
Ah, denial. It's so wonderful to explain why you're running the second most popular DE of a OS with 1% desktop market share. Why would anyone bother to complain when all you'll be met is with is "LALALALA PEBCAK" and if you go "screw this" the answer is "well good riddance we don't need n00bs like that, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out". Do you know what the difference between you and Steve Jobs is? His reality destortion field affects everyone, your only affect yourself...
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:5, Insightful)
PEBCAK. KDE is useful in its default settings. As a rank n00b, you probably should try to get to know it before fiddling with settings you don't understand.
Really? This is the attitude you chose to go with?
What we have here is an OP who gave an honest and accurate critique of his/her experience with KDE. Simple as that. They thought it was too complicated, and that the complexity wasn't valuable. It didn't work in a manner that they desired, and that resulted in them disliking the software. This is exactly the kind of feedback the KDE team wants. All of the OP's problems should not exist - that's one of the KDE team's design goals. The OP's impressions, experiences, and feedback could, if funneled down to the right people, result in a superior desktop experience for everyone.
Instead you are quick to dismiss and blame the OP as incompetent and useless. This valuable feedback, while dismaying in the sense that it depicts a KDE team failure, is extremely useful for both parties. The user seems open and interested in thoroughly using the product, and the design team wants to create a product the user wishes to use. A person with the slightest (a) intuition, or (b) training in psychology and human-computer interfaces would tell you that this type of cooperation between developer and end-user is priceless. But here we have you, whose attitude is one of the stronger cancers on the open-source community.
Not every product is for everyone, but mainstream desktop environments and window managers are the exception. Creating a central piece of software as complex and feature-rich as KDE is extremely challenging. For any given use-case scenario, KDE has to provide a direct and obvious path to an end-goal while ensuring that every other feature keeps a low profile. This is hard stuff, and KDE is groundbreaking in their approach. Their team has developers, artists, engineers, managers, and designers all striving for this goal. The OP is a critical piece in that puzzle.
And as a disclaimer, I do, and probably always will, love KDE. KDE4 started out weak (by design) and is building towards an amazing desktop environment. Every subsequent release provides marked progress towards that ideal. I hope we get an entire gamut of feedback from every possible class of user, because that gives the KDE developers the kind of information they need to make good design decisions towards an ideal desktop environment.
Assholes like you really need to stop getting in the way of that ideal.
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Well said that man. Way too many arrogant wankers in the OS community. PEBKAC would more appropriately apply to the dick you've so comprehensively put down.
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:5, Insightful)
My two points are:
* KDE isn't complicated in general use.
* The user chose the option to delve into the system and fiddle with things. That's the PEBCAK part. Not incompetence as much as misguided geekiness. It's your own fault if you spend hours tweaking instead of simply using a tool the way it's designed.
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Well I have to coach novices to Ubuntu when I make a decision to "go around MS" for clients. I gotta tell you: KDE 4.x is a nightmare to coach people on. Its very, very intimidating as its constantly throwing (useless) visual cues at the user such as control panels that always slide out of windows when you mouse over them. KDE defaults are too confusing and I quickly found out that people won't put up with it.
Windows-like chrome does not make a UI as sensible to use as Windows.
As for myself, I now use OS X
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Exactly. I was a KDE4 early adopter (Score:3, Informative)
because I was a longtime Fedora (since Fedora 1) and KDE (since KDE 1.0 Beta 3) user. When Fedora 9 (I believe) shipped with KDE4, I installed and determinedly used it for about a month and a half before it became clear that it was a time sink, unstable, poorly integrated, lacking in features and documentation and so on. It was, frankly, in my way.
Between Fedora 9 and Fedora 12 I used GNOME and logged into KDE periodically to see whether things had improved.
Throughout it all I submitted multiple bug reports
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It's anything but honest and accurate. KDE4 works quite well with little to no customization.
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That purple theme has to go. I was looking at an older version of a default install of Mac OSX and I can see where they got the idea.
Arch Linux had already (Score:2, Informative)
It is nice to hear that openSUSE got now packages as Arch Linux had packages ready in [kde-unstable] repository since the files were tagged.
I believe Mandriva has in few days (if not already).
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When is Arch not the one to have fresh packages in the repository first? Isn't that one of the major reasons of using it in the first place?
I have not liked KDE for quite a while (Score:2, Interesting)
I stayed away from the 4.x serious in particular. not least because of all the Akondai stuff. I think a DE should be as minimal as possible...provide a shell, file browser, and maybe some basic applications. KDE seems to want to manage everything, and there is so much stuff running in the background that I have no idea what is needed and what is not. I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey.
I should note that I am arguing from ignorance here about my knowledge of th
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I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey.
Yea and Microsoft should stop naming things like Windows DVD Maker, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Media Center.
Wait.. whats your point again?
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Sure, Because as far as names go Kontakt oozes professionalism and reliability just like Windows Live Mail. Wait, what?
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That's disingenuous. Most KDE apps are selected from the menu and have descriptive names. The executable may be obscure yet when you look at the executables from Microsoft's product they too use obscure naming.
Virtually everything under Gnome and KDE is presented with descriptive names, because they too are just links to the executable (just like Windows).
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Here's what's going on:
1. Akonadi - makes sense now that most people have big address books, have to sync calendar & contact data with multiple cloud based services and have multiple email addresses. The idea is much like an SQL server: let MySQL do the storage and retrieval work, and let the client application focus on logic. It's a great idea, but it's taken some time to get the implementation right. One of the real reasons that there are only a few viable desktop PIM applications is that you have an
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The desktop is rock solid now.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201620 [kde.org]
is the bug for your taste. Filed on July 27, 2009 and until now without activities from the side of KDE, but close to 20 duplicates, because everyone is running into it all the time.
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You are absolutely right. Akonadi should be tested thoroughly for at least a year with no changes other than bugfixes before being put into a stable release.
Re:I have not liked KDE for quite a while (Score:5, Funny)
I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey.
FWIW this trend has been going away with the 4.x series. The default file manager is Dolphin, image viewer Gwenview and so on. And FFS, they're just names, it's not like many gnome programs don't start with a G, and iM iSure iOther iExamples iExist.
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"I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey."
And then Apple copied them with the letter i, and I've never heard anyone describe that as childish.
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And then Apple copied them with the letter i, and I've never heard anyone describe that as childish.
Um, dude, that's cuz names like "iChat" and "iWork" make some sense.
Think about it. Prepending a 'K' or 'Gn' onto most names does little to help a user identify with them.
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That's all...? (Score:2)
Wow, after such a long delay since 4.5 I expected...something else. 4.5 was a specially troubling release for me, and I see no indication of the introduced misbehaviors being fixed...I'll go cry in a corner.
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But the bugs and annoyances in effect exist since 4.5 beta. It's really annoying.
Stuff like gtk icons vanishing at *random* from the systray, odd focus issues (many apps never focus text input by default, making a quick "open program and search" take more steps than it should) and annoyances with the notification system, and plasma can randomly eat a lot of RAM for no apparent reason, even without using any plasmoid.
Kwin's effects aiming for usability (such as zoom and present windows) still haven't had a s
Year of Quanta4? (Score:2)
Is this the year they finally port Quanta to KDE4?
Still using KDE 3.5.X... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still using KDE 3.5.X... (Score:4, Informative)
Just OOC, have you tried using freenx, instead? If the goal is to run a full DE over a low-bandwidth connection, NX is a *far FAR* superior solution.
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I honestly think if more people knew about NX they would never use VNC unless it was absolutely the only solution available, period. VNC just blows chunks way too bad, and NX makes things so easy when bandwidth is important. Anyone who has not tried NX and uses VNC should seriously give it a try because the difference is night and day.
facets are the in thing (Score:2)
I'm so looking forward to when speech to text actually comes to the desktops. It would be nice to be able to talk to my computer like I talk to my phone (my android actually does pretty good speech recognition).
Argh. KDE 4.x still has alpha-level software. (Score:2)
KDE should be approaching around version 4.3 now, not 4.6. Why? It still has alpha-level software in full releases. Example: yesterday I filed a bug on Nepomuk because it fails to follow moved files (files moved in Dolphin, no less), and it loses the assigned tags and ratings. It's completely undependable, and therefore completely useless. I might as well put the tags and ratings in the filename. Nepomuk is missing basic functionality--it should be considered alpha-level software--yet it's presented t
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I'm a long-time KDE lover, but I have to use gnome at work and I do not dislike it too much.
At the moment I do think it is lagging behind, but I know that Gnome 3.0 is on the way and it may be the revolution and modernization it needs. We will see.
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Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Interesting)
They seem to be planning changes. But I don't like their plans:
http://www.deansas.org/blog/2009/09/24/first-impressions-of-gnome-shell/ [deansas.org]
One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity "overlay" and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn't really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.
Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I'm not likely to forget the name of an application I've started.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00030.html [gnome.org]
Just wanted to share a personal experience with GNOME Shell. One of its new and unique attributes is not having the window list or any sort of persistent widget that shows running apps or opened windows. This has benefits, in theory, like helping the user focus on the foreground task.
It's just worth noting that one of its potential downsides is it violates the user's mental model, which makes it undesirable, even if it *may* help increase productivity. With a window list, it's clear to the user where the window goes when it's minimized and how to show it again. In GNOME Shell, the only clear way to tell if a window is minimized is to check if it can't be seen in the workspace, but it's shown in the Overview or Window Switcher (alt+tab). Teling which windows are minimized or not may not have real benefits, but it may be too disorienting for users.
Personally I think they've lost their marbles. How does that help productivity at all? Especially in the cases where you need to use more than one window to do your work?
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand your point. ...
But that's exactly what I have been trying for the last half year: I set my KDE to 'no panel', even 'no border'. And - loving it!
This is not to talk up KDE (which is very lousy in places) or talk down Gnome. It is the paradigm that took me some time to get used to. But now you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers
Only if someone is interested: I have the Dashboard on a mouse edge, which now takes in principle the task of the panel, except that it is 2-dimensional instead of a line (== more space, no doubt).
Another mouse edge does the 'Desktop Grid', so that I can move to another desktop, while yet another one presents all windows of the current desktop. And it is just beautiful to have all real estate 100% for the applications; with a 'panel' (desktop==dashboard) directly underneath; instead of invading the screen.
I have no clue if this will accepted by the majority (I think not); but something will need to be done against those ugly, overloaded, panels. From where one needs to drop sub-panels with sub-menus, because the total, primary, real estate is just the screen width.
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Comparing GNOME 3 to KDE 4 is a great way to see the difference between the projects.
On one hand, the KDE devs managed to perform almost a complete rewrite for KDE 4. Qt 4 was radically different from Qt 3, and KDE 4 included a huge number of architectural changes, as well. Although it was an absolutely huge amount of work to do, but the KDE community managed to get it done within a couple of years, they got KDE 4.0 released, and it has provided them an excellent platform to build off of.
The changes for GNO
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I just tried Opensuse 11.3 with KDE, and it was really shiny, but haven't seen anything that boosts productivity (and the SuSE folks even removed keyboard layout switcher widget, so overall, it was worse than my gnome-Ubuntu desktop).
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Interesting)
The killer feature for me -- seriously, the reason I use KDE rather than Gnome -- is the ability to make the panel vertical. It's the only reasonable way to work on a widescreen netbook.
(Yeah, Gnome kinda has vertical panels as long as you don't mind them looking horrible and lots of things breaking. No, I do not want to read sideways text, Gnome. And when I looked at some "make vertical panels work properly" bugs, the basic message from Gnome devs was "we don't use vertical panels, go fuck yourself".)
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Pardon me? I write this from Opensuse 11.3 and layout switcher is right here in tray. You configure it in settings manager and it works fine.
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The only place I could set the keyboard layout was from Yast, and it only allowed one layout. (I used KDE with the default Plasma shell (KDE), and there was no widget called keyboard-layout-switcher.)
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You set the KDE keyboard layout in systemsettings under Country and Language settings (don't know how it is exactly called in English locale).
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Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end all I want is something that places the programs somewhere on my screen.
Which programs? Where? On which screen? How do you move them? How do you find and launch the programs you want? How well do all of your programs integrate? How do you find specific files?
What you say is true, but misses the point. There is a huge amount that can be done to make your workflow more efficient than an environment which just requires you to manage everything yourself. I view KDE as something of an ongoing research project in this space, which is also fairly usable. There are some really cool and useful ideas in KDE right now... things like activities which, when fully completed, will allow you to define a set of applications and tools that you use together in particular ways. When you activate an activity, all of the relevant components are started and placed on-screen in the way that you want.
A simpler feature that KDE has long provided -- and which GNOME still doesn't and I don't believe Enlightenment, WindowMaker or XFCE provide -- is the ability to define per-application window settings that affect placement, sizing, etc., so that those apps always act in the defined ways. I use this to make my multiple desktops more efficient. Each of my virtual desktops holds a particular type of application, and each application is assigned to always come up on the appropriate desktop. So I never have to try to figure out which desktop a given app is on.
Comprehensive desktop search to make finding files easy, a good, efficient way to launch programs, seamless integration between applications, both local and on-line -- these are all things that a more sophisticated DE can provide. Oh, and yeah there's also eye candy, some of which has utility, and some of which is just pretty, and I do think aesthetic value is real value as well.
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In the end all I want is something that places the programs somewhere on my screen.
Sounds to me like you should be using something like Xmonad. All it does is place programs on the screen, and it does it exceptionally well. And it also happens to have *fantastic* multi-monitor support.
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I am lured to productivity and for file management and application integration, KDE outshines them all by a wide margin. It has the standard fare: multiple desktops, Expose, etc. But it also has features like combining several pplications into one window as tabs, push to back and max horz/vert. Rename is smart, copying is smart, titlebars and dialog boxes are nice and small too. They also are the only desktop to get single clicking right (bye bye carpal tunnel windows).
I use Gnome on the Laptop, LXDE or XFC
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It's time to abandon GNOME. It was useful for a short while during the 1990s, when Qt's licensing was problematic, but that's no longer an issue. GNOME has stagnated, and is of little value these days. KDE is offers more features, better performance, greater reliability, and just an overall better experience in every way.
You're obviously trolling, but you raise a valid point. However, the problem with KDE is, the desktop experience just sucks, for some people. These people, me included, start to get annoyed with KDE as soon as they try to use it. Give us an alternative desktop experience, something GNOME-like, and I'm sure KDE would have tons of converts.
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But why? GNOME exists for you. Use it. What is the point of inventing a jet engine, if you really just want to go to the grocer's store two blocks away?
Some of us use the advanced features, the directory view plasmoid, the integrated search, the file dialogue and its remote capabilities, the tabbed window managing and so on. Different users have different needs.
Progress, technology and infrastructure are not pick-and choose propositions. You get the whole package, good and bad, or nothing. If you want no ch
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Progress, technology and infrastructure are not pick-and choose propositions. You get the whole package, good and bad, or nothing. If you want no change, you get no change, and soon enough, no improvement either. This is fine, but then don't get envious of those that took the leap.
Uh... Open source is very much about being able to pick-and-choose.
Anyway, I'm hoping either Meego or Ubuntu Unity will bring something new, that's actually usable for my tastes.
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Oh, you can pick and choose, in the sense that you are free of your choices. However, your choices stay constrained by what is technologically possible: ontology based content searching cannot work without file indexing and SPARQL-like access to information. To display your mails/news/contacts across devices requires a consistent, more generic backend -- which is not so useful when you only use a stand-alone mailer on the desktop.
If you want to get "the file attached by X on one of his last week's email" --
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GNOME has stagnated, and is of little value these days. KDE is offers more features, better performance, greater reliability, and just an overall better experience in every way.
What is the point in relentless chase for more features? I am pleased with spartan Gnome, and to me it offers better experience. People have different tastes, and beauty of Linux is that you can choose different desktop without being forced to use something you don't like. In my opinion it would be better if more energy was spent on adding features and polishing various applications instead of desktop environments.
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They are both GAY
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This is coming from a Ubuntu (Gnome) user, so please blast away:
KDE needs to be heavily customized to make it usable for the Joe Public end users. Which is fine. That's what distributions do. The thing is, each distribution does it different, so the user experience with KDE can vary greatly depending on which distro he installs.
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KDE needs to be heavily customized to make it usable for the Joe Public end users.
Completely false, and obviously a troll.
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Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: ... then why so few distro's use it as their default DE?
A: Because there was a time, 10 years ago when Gnome was created to address a licensing problem with the library that powers KDE called QT. Gnome was built using GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit), which was GPL. KDE's QT was under a permissive commercial license that was not 100% GPL compatible. So most distributions that cared about free went the Gnome route, despite it consistently lacking features vs. KDE. At this point, KDE's QT is GPL licensed, and has been for some time and KDE has advanced significantly in capability over the past two years to the point that it's really not even close, so far as features, flexibility and technology under the hood go.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5. So far as performance goes, if your GPUs drivers are decent, KDE4 will run rings around Gnome (especially if you turn on OpenGL rendering for QT which effectively uses your GPU for rendering everything).
Really when it comes down to it, it's GREAT that there is a choice for users between KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Evolution and GNUstep. Giving users a real choice in how they interact with their computer is a really good thing because new and better ideas come from competition and exchange of ideas. It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war, because the holy part of the war died when QT was released under the GPL.
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"Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4"
that's funny. The release of 4.4 marked the day I stopped using it altogether. They decided that having 3 RDBMS (one for Amarok, one for Akonadi and one for strigi) is better than having one. They decided that Plasma and Kwin effects should come before memory leaks fixes (i.e.: Amarok) and so on.
KDE is more advanced technically but it's constantly lacking a certain amount of refinement that would make the project far better than competing DEs.
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You, sir, are ignorant.
"They" did not decide anything. Because "they" are different groups of developers working along in the same community, but doing completely different stuff. You clearly have no idea how open source works (in fact how software development works: I don't think the guys responsible for MS Office consult much with the guys responsible for the media player component of windows...) And you hide your fundamental ignorance under the usage of technical-sounding acronyms.
As for the 3 DBs...
1) y
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, he's not ignorant. His observations are spot-on from an end-user's point-of-view. This illustrates how the KDE devs are scratching their own itches. That's expected in open-source development, but KDE is a huge project, and it's released to end-users with the expectation that they will use it day-in, day-out. It's delusional to expect end-users to put up with segfaults and utter failures in software after five major iterations. But that seems to be the expectation of many KDE devs--or, at least, the sum of all their uncoordinated expectations.
What KDE needs is an overriding commitment to quality: it should be job #1. Bugs first, features (and ripping-out-and-replacing huge chunks) second.
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Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5).
Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.
Regardless, I can't stand KDE4. As mentioned all over, the interface is incredibly cluttered. While I don't like Gnome for not including more easily accessible advanced options which could be simply hidden/buried one level down, until the KDE developers learn to keep things simple and bury their options hardly anyone uses, and basically actuall
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As the interface of KDE4 is far more streamlined than the interface of KDE3, I call bullshit on your "I can't stand KDE4". In reality, you can't stand KDE in general -- but you probably thought it more effective to bash the 4 version.
As for design and workflow... Let us just say some of us use our desktops [1], and some of us either are clueless or use only their xterms anyway. In the second case, they should switch to using konsole over gterm -- but as WM, they probably use ratpoison.
[1] the faceted search
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Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.
Or distros should stop trying to include everything that came out last week, and do what Slackware does
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war
That almost couldn't be helped, since Gnome was explicitly created to try to kill off KDE (if you think that choice of words is harsh, you should read what some of the Gnome founders said back in the day). Gnome was created with a negative goal, and I think that underlying fact prevented them from excelling.
I now use Gnome only because distros tend to write their system settings UIs for Gnome first and then forget to write some of them for the KDE flavor.
The main problem KDE has is one of "sensible defaults", or lack thereof. A lot of buttons and functions that should be optional and looked-for by advanced users is pushed right in your face by default. Trying to coach new users on KDE (4.x especially) has been exasperating. The default KDE configuration should be nearly as simple as Gnome; Neither DE is trying to find a good balance in that regard.
Another problem is that people coming to a Linux distro have to be aware of things like "DE" apart from what their OS is. I usually find people understand when I first explain, but forget basic details and start to feel confused on the subject a couple of months later. Its one of the things that makes them reject "Linux" in the end.
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Toggle menu to a plain menu duh. Disabling graphical effects could help too I guess.
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Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5.
Funny, because 4.0 was released as being usable. Then when 4.1 came out they said "4.0 wasn't usable, now it's great with 4.1". Then 4.2 came out, and the official line was "4.0 and 4.1 weren't usable, now it's great with 4.2". This has continued for every single point release of the 4 series so far, and each time they've hyped up the current release so that people who have tried it have been on the whole rather disappointed. Making the mature and familiar 3.5 releases impossible to use before the 4 series became (becomes) usable was a major mistake, because people have got used to Gnome during the wait.
Agreed. Now 4.0 through 4.3 was the development releases? That's a solid two years of development, that people now in all seriousness say it should tell you how far away 4.0 was from being ready for the public. Seriously, read the fscking release anonuncement [kde.org]. There's not one word in it that could reasonably suggest it's not a normal end user release. Yes, it's a big x.0 release but normal end user software does have x.0 releases, they don't start at version x.4. All the "we told you so" comments are referr
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For a long time QT was closed source. Then they opensourced it, but only under the GPL license. That pretty much forced comercial distros to ship the only viable toolkit with a sane license (but insane internal architecture) - Glib/GTK. Using Gnome instead of KDE was reasonable for them I suppose. QT was relicensed to LGPL very recently, so I will take a lot of time to change the status quo - if that ever happens.
Strong Opinion != Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
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I get crashes in system settings sometimes, and I have a friend who gets crashes in konq frequently. There are a few parts of KDE that are very crash prone and daily users learn to avoid them without thinking about it.
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Wait, this is scary! An app (VLC) that twists my Mac's bluetooth audio into catatonic spasms is being used as an audio back end??
Yikes...
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LOL! Yeah "probably"
It just so happens that VLC mangles audio on both platforms, but the Linux version is the one that matters and is totally unrelated to the Mac version. :^D
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Sad but true. (Score:2)
Sad but true. Even in 4.5.1 I still get segfaults from Dolphin and plasma-desktop from time to time. Shouldn't those have been ironed out by, oh, I don't know, 4.2, at least?
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He has done no such thing. You, however, I am not so sure about ;-)
Hint: The post, even if made by a troll, is not a troll post when indistinguishable from a non-troll post. Why? Thought provoking intelligent discussion is not an artifact of a troll post.
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For those following along at home, Compiz is another example of a Window Manager, but Gnome and KDE are definitely Desktop Environments, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong [wikipedia.org] about that particular detail.
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When you see the icons on the Windows desktop change to generic and then slowly back to their icon that's the windows desktop manager crashing and reloading.
KDE doesn't crash on me. Yes, programs can and do crash, but to say that KDE crashes all the time indicates you have something wrong with your system.
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Maybe is an issue with proprietary nvidia drivers? [kde.org]
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So what does work nice enough for video editing on Linux to not be a waste a money?...