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KDE GUI

The Future of KDE 301

Posted by Hemos from the more-fun-with-desktops dept.
Samawi writes "linux.com has just published an interview with core KDE developer Daniel M. Duley. Topics covered include the upcoming KDE 2.0 (including links to screenshots!), Corba & TinyMico, the advanced widget theme designer, the new high-color icons for the very-soon-to-be-released KDE 1.1.2, influence of Gnome, etc. "
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The Future of KDE More

The Future of KDE

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  • What are you talking about Linux is the kernel. It is possible to make a linux distro with absolutely no command line. You can say at the heart of windows 9x is the GUI but it built off of MS-DOS. Hmmm... Commandlines or GUIs are the user interfaces which are part of the OSs not the OS. I think Microsoft has brainwashed you!!
  • If they were really calling them "wizzards", then they would probably be infringing on Rincewind's copyright...
  • I mean, I could swear I saw a post just like this one when RHAD labs opened (what was it, a year ago?)

    I suppose either your definition of "no time" is different from mine, or your subtle irony just passed over my head.

    BTW: if you wanna count how many people work full time in KDE , you need to count some places besides MandrakeSoft (which anyways accounts for about 1/3rd of RHAD labs already anyhow?)
  • Perhaps, but I would wager that is because C++ automatically puts you in an OOP mindset (because if you aren't going to use OOP, why use C++? Oh yeah, inline functions and const variables).

    I think C++ does encourage bad OO design in many ways, unless you are wise to them. Operator overloading, multiple inheritence are things that must be handled with extreme care. Overuse of any kind of inheritence is bad. Sure, C can discourage good OO design, from where I see it mostly by making the programming constructs more unwieldy. That, and by not complaining when you access members of a struct that you shouldn't. For that, I have to go with some philosophy from Perl - you shouldn't touch something because you aren't supposed to, not because the compiler won't let you.

    My point is that both C++ and C require you to have a solid understanding of OO design, and that neither stop you from doing it right.

    C++ makes it a smoother process, easier on the programmer, for sure. Sometimes I think that's a really a hinderance, though.
  • Zurk - it is clear that you don't know a thing about either C or C++ ...

    There are many subjects here on /. that would probably fit you well, but do not comment on the stuff you completely don't understand - it makes you look stupid, you know ...
  • If you're going to spend money, you might as well spend it on something that's enterprise ready. If you're not going to spend money, then use Linux/BSD. Don't waste it on NT.
  • So the whole point is to deprecate MS Office "standards"... Corel's come back from the brink more times than I can count, anyway. I'm sure they'll be okay.
  • I only know gtk (for coding) because of the license issues at the time (when I decided to play w/ toolkits) However, I recently switched over to kde (1.1.1) mixed w/ debian (slink) and it is entirely too slick (in a good way) Its definitely the system to impress your friends in a functional kind of way. (in the complementary way that enlightenment was the one to impress your acid dropping friends :)) The best examples are if your SO is a mac addict, make her theme MacOS2 (okay unfortunately this one has been removed from themes.org but its still available), put the menubar at the top of the screen and it looks and acts like a mac to the T! Try doing that on a windows box!
    (Its a fantastic way of converting your skeptical gf's who make fun of you for calling latex a wordprocessor :)) It also seems that kde (and i'm sure the gnome kids are doing this as well) have realized we don't need 10zillion versions of minesweep and samegame (what on earth is that thing? :! ) and have started to put a lot of really nice utility programs.. kppp is really sweet, runs in usermode, hangs up properly runs scripts before and after.. (like setting up ddns crap) i found it much easier to set up than pon/poff (which on hanging i'd have to manually kill -9 and zap the modem on and off), kvirc is entirely too sweet w/ built in servers lists, buttons out of control, korn,kexpress are finally starting to look like newsreaders (yes I realize trn is the be all and end all of all newsreaders but!), kxicq lets you register icq (which was the first time i ever messed w/ icq) of course that was pretty much the last time :)...,kdvi is *so* much better than xdvi. But I really recommend keeping a versions of kde (and its friends) along w/ your installation just to see how it is progressing (its my default windowmanager at home now)..


    Oh and kfm is simply the best! Not so much for the filemanager (which I suppose is cool too) but it really is a superfast easy to run web-browser that is utterly responsive , its not completely as functional as netscape but it gets the job done w/out waiting for the 20 seconds for netscape to pop up in that cludgy kind of way that is so annoying! Oh yea and the back button takes you to where you were on the previous page (not further up the page like netscape (or at least every version of netscape i've come across)) for slashdot threading alone its worth it :) (No menudropdown thingies tho :( ).

    Seriously kde really is starting to look like a desktop that most kids think of when they think of gui apps and 'modern' computers (for better or worse)! As far as stability, I was actually having some weirdness w/ kde and 1.1 (this was a 'contrib' type debian package unofficial, not something compiled on my own).. Its definitely the one to give your nongeek friends *imho*

    -avi
  • Now that egcs is the official compiler and KDE only compiles with gcc-2.8, this presents a slight problem.
  • Reminder, this is alpha quality software -- it's likely to change. I think they designed the device manger to be as similar as possible to the Windows device manger (while not messing up the interface like Microsoft), so that new users that have never used UNIX for an extended time can easily use device manger -- although name the serial ports after their Windows equvalants is just plain tacky...

    The current KDE 2.0 user manger is much like the one in 1.x.x, it's quite a bit different then the Wndows version, in features and in the way it works... and it works pretty good.

    KDE is an open-source, open-minded project, they don't mind reusing interface ideas from other platforms, and adding radically new ones, and tossing out several bad ones (MDI / parent child windows comes to mind).

    Remember if you can write a better version of KUser or the device manger in Qt 2.0/KDE 2.0 feel free to submit it ftp://ftp.kde.org/incomming/
  • I was waiting for someone to mention this. Me too. My heart just sort of dropped when I saw "Device Manager." I'll keep on recommending my non-geek friends use KDE, but man, if I never see a "Device Manager" again in my life it'll be too soon.

    I'm so glad I'm not forced to use it! :-)

  • Click on a Link, hold mouse button down for 2 seconds, will get you the contextual menu in either Internet Exploiter or Netscape Navigator 4.x.
  • Or rather like 0.8333 years, as there was slightly less than a 10 month gap, from October 16 1996 to sometime in early August 1997.

  • If you can write something like the machine generated C from CFront, you are not human.

    Also, you are factually wrong: the generated C didn't implement private members, for example. Simply, the translator refused to generate the C to access the member that was supposed to be private, and spews an error *before* trying to implement it in C.

    So, private members are feasible in C... as long as that means "I am a C programmer who can remember not to access that member!"
  • Yes, Mosfet is not only busy working on themes / look and feel of KDE 2.0, he is also one of the core developers of KImageshop, a flexable corba-based image editing program.

    It is similar to the GIMP -- and is compatible with all GIMP plugins, making a powerful, KDE/Corbra aware Imaging program, with an interface that doesn't totally bite (although GIMP 1.1.x is getting better -- part of the GIMP are just strangely designed -- and rely on right clicking way to much!)

    A good user interface is obvious to new users -- the GIMP takes experience to figure it out.

    Having Mosfet working full time on these key issues is important, users like an interface that is flexable, and yet doesn't required a degree in CS to understand how to use it.
  • I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Will KDE 2.0 allow users to change the default behavior from "single-click to open/execute..." to "double-click to open/execute"? I've heard that single-click is better and easier, but it just doesn't seem that way to me. Besides, all the machines at work are NT, configured "double-click" and moving from home to work is always good for Stupid Mouse Errors at least twice...

    Another thing that really might be good to improve is the Minicli (the mini-command-line KDE gives when you press Alt-F2.) When it works, it works nicely, but I quit using it for anything serious because... nothing happens when the command you execute is misspelled or something. I'm thinking that they could pop up a small xterm-window that contained all text sent to stderr the first time anything sends to stderr when you exec something with minicli. (Would this be a Wretched Hack, a Good Idea, or some disgusting hybrid? Just curious.)

    I'm still learning C++, otherwise I'd have done these things already. If KDE had been coded in C, I'd have "fixed" these by now :-).

    Finally: Sure, the desktop screenshots are cool. But who ever has time to look at the desktop? With a GIMP window here, X11amp there, kvt there, and assorted other delights, at least 3 of the virtual desktops are completely covered, and I pay much more attention to the contents of the application windows than what's behind them. Yeah, I'm weird, but I think "themes" are the spawn of the devil and an animated Pink Panther cursor is akin to a bow tie with embedded blinking Christmas lights... cute, but you get sick of it really quickly.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • KDE 2.0 is coming along nicely. Those screenshots look pretty cool. Few guys around the office can't wait to have a crack at 2.0
  • Think for a moment and you'll realize there's two machines involved here.

    The original server ("www") is one we've been having problems with lately anyway. We simply weren't prepared. It's just a members web server.

    Had we been aware of the article we would have moved Donald's site to the server that is now the mirror sooner. It's now on the commercial web server ("halley" or "www2" if you don't have a cached entry), and it's not even blinking at the load:

    3:22PM up 83 days, 21:50, 2 users, load averages: 0.05, 0.07, 0.04

  • Thanks for the tip. I'll try since I am forced to use a Mac in the lab.
    But this calls into question how intuitive Mac UI really is, given that
    I couldn't find a way to do it despite looking hard.
  • I don't want a desktop because it looks good. I want a desktop that will help me work faster and easier. I also don't want my desktop to get in the way. Do you ever notice how much screen space some of this buttons take up? How much cpu it takes to render the whole screen with bitmapped buttons. It's sick.

    Granted, many of the things they are doing is helpful, application interoperability, ease of use, etc. But until they get on the track of making a better desktop, people will be sticking to windows desktops.

  • > I can't write Ada programs for KDE

    True

    > I can't write graphical perl programs for KDE

    You will. The PerlQt port is lagging behind right now.. but that doesn't mean that it won't catch up again.

    > I can't write python applications for KDE

    Why not? Last I looked (yesterday), the python binding for KDE were quite complete.

    > I can't write C applications for KDE

    Would you even if there was a binding?

    I think that this entire line of argument is a red herring. I hear this mostly from people who inherently don't like KDE and want to find something to pick on (now that the license issue is mostly a moot point, let's attack the lack of language support!)

    The fact is that for all the talk, whenever language bindings *are* created, nobody uses them. You say you want to use perl with KDE. Okay.. a binding was created... but it fell behind since nobody used it! You say you want to use C. Fine enough. Why is it that when there *was* a C binding that nobody used it?

    What it comes down to is this: if people really wanted to use other languages with KDE, then that binding would happen (e.g., python)!
  • A fact of life, is as software become more advanced and powerful, you are eventually going to need faster hardware. Yes, forward compatiblity exists to an extent, but running Quicktime 4 on an 68020 or running a modern Linux version + X + full featured desktop + network services demands more then a i386.

    UNIX is inheritably bigger, not because it's bloated -- but because it's designed to be more flexable -- since traditional UNIX hardware makes PC's look like toys -- so you do need some RAM and speed to use a modern UNIX setup completely with advanced desktop configuration.

    We will try to support old machines as much as possible -- but it's not always pratical -- you can always yourself hack the code to preform better on your machine.

    In the days of 450-600 mhz processor machines, with 128 megs of RAM, and the majority of users using machines around 200mhz with 32-64 megs of RAM, the OS is going to be more optimized for this hardware -- and not as much for a 16 mhz or 33 mhz machine.
  • yeah...but do you have to reboot everytime you make a change :)

    I think in the long run one of the benefits of Linux is going to be that the user will have a CHOICE of what desktop / WM to use. I've played with KDE and Gnome and I enjoyed both of them for different reasons. I have been using KDE for the past couple months just because I grew tired of cleaning up core dumps every day with Gnome, but I plan on trying it again with the next release.

    When the level of the "average" computer user grows they will want more than what "The Man" tells them is good, they will want to make that decision for themselves. Long kive Freedom of Choice !!!!!

  • TinyMico? (Score:3)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Thursday August 19, 1999 @11:34AM (#1736969) Homepage Journal
    It's just like Mico, but 1/8th its size. They should call it....

    Mini-Mico!

    (bows, then runs :)
  • They're also COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY OPTIONAL!

    You can go with a stripped-down non-pixmap theme if you want to - or get the fanciest desktop out there. It's your choice.
  • Inheritance is a struct(the child) that has the same data and methods as some other struct(the parent), plus some new stuff. For polymporphism, a vtable would be necessary, yes. That's just an array of function pointers, or better a function pointer member of the struct, one for each function. The 'constructor' function for the struct can set that up as needed. No big deal, and _still_ all you need to do is pass the struct pointer to a function and it will use that struct's vtable. I mean, in this sense, that's not really any more difficult than in C++.

    Private, protected, and public interfaces are usefull only if you don't trust people using your class. I have go with the Perl philosophy on this one -- programmers shouldn't touch class internals because they aren't supposed to, not because they aren't allowed to. Not that declaring something 'private' will keep anyone from accessing the private members if they want to. Yes, C can't do it at all, I just don't think it's an important part of good OO design.

    C macros cause code bloat, but templates don't?! Sorry, but that is just craziness. Just like macros, templates generate source code, one set of it for each instantiation of the template.

    Exception handling is a whole different ball of wax, not really related to OOP except that it is a feature of C++ (and a relatively new one at that), which is an OO language. setjmp/longjmp are evil, and certainly not a replacement. Exceptions could be done well in C, with way too much work on the part of the coder. This is one area where C++ wins... except that I've had so much trouble with compilers that I never use them. They are a new feature, after all, and compilers are still trying to handle the ANSI standard (which is itself not very old).

    I like templates. I (guardedly) like exceptions. I like inline functions over macros, const instead of #define, and other C++ features. But OO is still very doable in C, and it isn't markedly more cumbersome.

    If you really want to see how this is all done in C, then browse the gtk+ source tree.

  • Jesus christ!!@$ what the hell is the matter with you people? "it looks too much like windows, therefore it sucks." 1) what the hell do you want it too look like? some futuristic GUI from 2067?
    2) GTK is the most customizable GUI. it can be made to look like win9x, or nothing like it. quit it with the flames. it seems more than half of people using linux (or whatever) use it for the sole reason its not windows, which is pathetic. why not use something 1) because you like it 2) and helps you work better. quit worrying about what your friends think when they find out you use redhat..............AND KDE*(^*(&*( OH NO^^&*^^%$.

    ----------
    Have FreeBSD questions?

  • Was my message not plain enough? I suggested a couple of changes to the way the Gnome and KDE interface work. Those suggestions are valid. My note was to let people know that simply copying Microsoft is not good enough. Try to make a UI that is better than Windows. If the goal is to only be as "good" as windows, then mediocrity wins again! At the current state, Gnome and KDE are simply ripoffs of a poorly designed UI from Redmond. Why would anyone copy such a design?

    As I said before both Gnome and KDE suck! They could have set the bar up a bit higher, but they settled for the same crappy interface.
  • > See topic.

    Topic seen. You: see doctor.
  • What the hell are you talking about?

    I compiled KDE1.0-pre1, KDE-1.0, KDE-1.1, and KDE-1.1.1 all with egcs with pgcc patches thrown in for good measure. All compiled out of the box without modification or problems.

    KDE and egcs work extremely well together.
  • One mouse button? This is the thing that most annoys me about a mac, too.

    Question: Is it possible to buy a three button mouse for a mac? Or a wheel mouse?

    Question2: IF it is possible, do any programs take advantage of enhanced mice?

    Question3: Why doesn't apple abandon its only-one-button-for-everybody mouse strategy. After all, they've dropped a lot of the cruft from the original mac (M68k, black and white only, no internal expansion)...
  • Remember if you can write a better version of KUser or the device manger in Qt 2.0/KDE 2.0 feel free to submit it ftp://ftp.kde.org/incomming/

    I think the kde developers want it to look like windows since the help system also looks similar (it has the same icons) and the tree in the file manager is the same as explorer
  • Thanks alot.
  • Actually, the issue of KDE-GNOME interoperability is being addressed. Eventually, one should be able to do something like embed a Gnumeric spreadsheet into Kword. That's probably not something that were going to see for quite a while, maybe in the next couple years.
  • DNS was working fine. Just made some address and TTL changes that didn't propogate rapidly enough.

    And it's FreeBSD anyway.
  • >

    the point is, that it is all done by the compiler, not you, if you would try to implement good inheritance (multiple, public/private etc.) it would not be all that easy and not that easy to use (if you want polymorphism).

    >

    it's not about trust. you want to make it known, which functions/members are internal and which are for general use. objects have internal mechanizms (change with time) and external interfaces (should not change in time). you want to differentiate between these.

    >

    they generate one function for each different value of template parameters, the macros are simple peices of code inserted everywhere where the macro is called.

    ----------------------------------------

    you seem to be missing that all the programming languages generally do the same, everything that you can implement in one of them, can be implemented in machine code. yet we have different languages for different purposes. the computer languages are for people. OO is much easier to do if the language supports it (like C++) or even mandates it (like Smalltalk).

    erik
  • 1) All of your arguments apply to Linux and the GPL. (Can't produce a shareware version of Linux, can't develop hybrid license version of Linux, can't distribute freeware (no source) version of linux). The difference with QT is you can buy a license to develop proprietary software.

    2) If you are going to make money by selling proprietary software what is wrong with the idea of having to give back some of that money to troll tech? (How much you can argue about but surely there is nothing wrong with giving something back!).

    3)KDE symbolizes a Marxist approach to software development
    KDE development has no political or religious affinity. Each project can choose their own development model. Different projects contribute code under different licenses. Core development tends to be done on an anarchy/meritocracy basis.

    Basically KDE development encourages Open Source development but allows proprietary development at a cost.
  • Microsoft will have a real run for its money if RedHat, Mandrake, Caldera, Suse and Corel ship this as the main desktop environment. Like it or not, but this will win over many newbies.
  • Actually neither should win.

    This is wrong also. The correct answer is both should win. What we need to get away from is the idea that there has to be just one winner and everything else is a loser. If both KDE and Gnome develop into excellent desktop environments (and both show potential to do so), then they will both be winners. Users will be the winners if they continue to have more than one viable choice. The only losers will be those who feel they have to control everything (like Microsoft) or those who are deathly paralyzed by fear that they might have to make a decision, even if there is really no wrong choice.

  • Why should be trust someone who uses "your" instead of "you're"? That makes everything else you write look less reliable and professional.

  • double clicks: Torben said yes, if my memory serves me. So...

    running an xterm from minicli: that would suck :-)
    The whole point of minicli is that you *don't* load another program, so it's faster and memory slim :-(

    1. Get the KOffice project and the various GNOME oriented office projects using the same canvas, based on libArt.
    2. Either get ONE single CORBA ORB, or get some way for the various ORBS to share objects efficiently -- i.e. no IIOP.
    3. Make all the core stuff toolkit agnostic. In KDE's case -- get Qt into separable parts -- such that using the UI doesn't mnandate using the rest of the framework, and using the STL where appropriate rather than the Qt built in classes.

    John
  • We did. FreeBSD. It wasn't an OS issue anyway.
  • Templates are instantiated once, not once for each use, like macros are.
  • find / -name "kcmdevmgr*" -exec rm {} \;

    should do.
  • Steve Jobs had a bad experience in childhood when he pushed the wrong button on a mouse, and it has tainted him for life.

    Witness the original NeXT machine, which had a two-button mouse: but they acted the same! And this same-acting was not in the toolkit or at any software level, it was in the window server, so that it was *impossible* for a program to differentiate the buttons no matter how much it wanted to (you could send a command to the window server but that would split the buttons for all the apps).

  • Charging $1500 is Marxist?

    Um, maybe I have my philosophers mixed up. Which one was the communist, Ayn Rand?

  • Windows already does everything KDE currently does, will do, and will ever do.

    I have tried multiple virtual desktop managers for Windows NT. I have yet to find one that works in the presence of Visual C++ in debug mode. KDE handles multiple desktops quite nicely.
  • Hehe... Doing that is the easiet thing of all in Linux. In Linux, just click the middle mouse button on a link, and presto! You have it open in another window :)
  • Vatos locos for life esse!
    Windows for life too, esse?
  • let me expand what you said a little bit. QT themes are faster than GTK (what you meant, even if you don't know it) "Pixmap" themes. GTK theme engines work in the same way as KDE themes, and are equally fast. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing a QT pixmap theme like the one GTK has, but it would be equally slow (Someone may very well have written it by now). The reason most GTK themes are Pixmap themes is because its several orders of magnitude easier to make than an engine.

    Now that the facts are out of the way, stop spreading FUD.
  • All of the so called "window managers" for Win32 are nasty hacks; they install a global handler for WM_NC* messages and handle them before the normal code sees them. This breaks other apps that customize their titlebar.
  • Well well, who said Microsofties don't hang out at SlashDot. Worried about your stock options are you? Just think, if KDE 2.0 makes it out before the 'official' release of WinNT2K, MS will have even more egg on its face.
  • It would not surprise me at all if they trademarked 'Wizard' in that context, since I seem to remember competing programs having parts with identical functions but somewhat different names (not an unusual event: remember Borland's DAD vs. MS's MOM? That's as silly as Unix naming traditions...).

    So call 'em Assistants, Advisors, Aides... or if you want to tweak MS at the cost of obscurity, Conjurors.

    I'm actually a tad surprised they never went after StarDivision, given that StarOffice (at least early versions... 3.0-ish) looked very, *very* similar to MS Office in many, many details.
  • Actually, what most annoying me about the Mac isn't the single mouse button. That's like #2 on my list.

    Things that most annoying me about the Mac:
    1) The shared menubar! (I CAN'T STAND IT)
    2) The one-button mouse. (It's like using a computer after being in a disfiguring accident)
    3) Everything else. (When using a Mac, I feel like I want to smash it in raging fury. It won't actually let me just get stuff done.)

  • A-ha!!! You *ARE* a microserf!! I knew it!! Admit it, you're in the marketing department, aren't you? You're the one spamming /. with OT replies (err... not like my off topic replies *cough*)! FUD at it's best!!

    For a while, you had me going. I suspected a fellow linux weenie trying to make MS marketing seem worse than it is. Glad I was wrong...

    (um.... sorry 'bout that. I'll stop now :)

  • I think the point is that it is much easier to write object-oriented code in C++ than it is in C. I've been exposed briefly to both languages, and from what I can tell, C++ provides higher-level language structures, such as classes, which allow one to write object-oriented programs relatively straightforwardly, while C is by nature a procedural language, so that one who wishes to write object-oriented code in C must find a way to force C's language constructs into an object-oriented mold. In other words, AFAIK, if you're talking about objects and classes, it's easier to say what you mean in C++ than it is in C. This could very well make the difference between code that is easy to debug and code that isn't.

    I could be wrong here, and all you real programmers out there are free to correct me.
  • Yeah, the same people who complain that X is trying to copy activeX and other ideas, are the same people who complain linux is lacking the functionality of Windows. You can't win! :


  • >Remember the benchmarks from Mindcraft, ahh you forgot about those >didn't you?

    And you forgot about the Windows 2000 farce,er challege haven't you?

    Microcrap products just can't hack it in the *Real World* it seems only in unrealistic benchmark testing....
  • Perhaps if your text is 3 or 4 pages long, but using an intellimouse to scroll down 90 pages would, in a word, SUCK.
  • Damn. Beat me to it!!!
  • I agree completely. I am after all a KDE developer and not impartial at all ;-)

    I was just replying (perhaps too subtly) to the claim that KDE had been in development for "years" before GNOME.
  • In my senior year of high school, I had to fill a dual-enrollment block at the local community college. (great way to drop high-school periods.) Since there wasn't much to take, I took "Programming in VB" for the heck of it. I thought it would be easy and potentially useful to learn. I entered the class with an open mind.

    I now hate VB. Coming from a background in real languages (Pascal, C, C++, etc.) I found VB frustrating. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. But getting VB to do it is another story. VB makes the really easy stuff easier, and makes everything else a pain in the ass.


    Back in my day, we used AppleSoft Basic. It had line numbers, and "?SYNTAX ERROR" messages on perfect code! It didn't even have an editor. Any we liked it!!!!
    You go on about your fancy shmancy "structured programming". Back in my day, we had so many GOTO's we could hardly figure out what we wrote!


    Basic is a wonderful language for teaching little kids how to program. It should never have progressed further than maybe QBASIC. VB was an attempt to take an old language that isn't good enough for real programming, wrap it in point 'n crash garbage, and get people to use it. Once you learn a real language, you'll never touch VB.
  • First of all, let me clarify that I love KDE and it is what I use.
    Re-arranging widgets is definitely nice. But I was trying to re-arrange the window widgets (program menu, sticky, maximize, minimize, close) and discovered that you can rearrange them a little, but not much from where they're expected to be.
    Do you want to put minimize to the right of maximize? You're out of luck.
    Do you want the program menu on the right side of the window? Sorry. You can click the button there but the menu still opens up on the LEFT side.
    And then there's the completely arbitrary restriction that you can't have more than 3 widgets on each side of the window. I wanted to put EVERYTHING on the right side, because of the way I often lose the upper left corner of a window behind the top-left taskbar. Sorry, only 3 per side, and of course the program menu has to be on the left. But I dealt with it by getting rid of maximize, which I never use.

    Anyway, I realize I'm complaining about TINY little things, but I hope that KDE 2.0 fixes these arbitrary restrictions.
    --

  • Winning (Score:1)

    by MrEd ( 60684 )
    What I see in the GNOME vs. KDE is a lack of co-operation between developers. It seems that the resources of both projects are going off in two different directions, leaving us with applications that will not function reliably in both desktop environments. Hey, that's Open Source, right?

    I can't help but think that if there were 'bosses' of GNOME + KDE who could make a deal (and force their programmers to accept it), we could get some co-ordination between the two projects. But if that were the case all the time, we wouldn't have Linux, there'd just be Windows.

  • It's FreeBSD, and it's still up.
  • It's amazing how much Al Fasoldt has changed. I'm a regular reader of his column (though after getting Linux I stopped for a bit), and before a few months ago the column was entirely Windows-centric. I remember him getting excited about Windows 95, and before that about Windows 3.11, and even trying to print a batch file in the newspaper once. (It didn't work - the typesetting had no backslash glyph).
    And several months ago, he was lamenting about how unstable Windows was, but how we had no choice, and he added in parentheses: "(Well, there's Linux, but only the weird kid next door uses that.)"

    But Al has finally seen the light - he now runs many columns about Linux. Contrary to the pessimists who say Microsoft has a monopoly over our minds, this is a victory. It was pretty much his job to give advice on Windows, but he's converted to Linux anyway.
    --

  • Almost there:

    1) Writing theme engines (called styles there) for Qt is a whole lot easier than doing it for GTK.

    Why? OO design. You can *inherit* the, say, platinum style, and hack the widget that annoys you the most. On GTK the closest equivalent starts with "copy the sources for the GTKStep engine to that other directory".

    2) Qt's user (non programmer) definable styles (the equivalent of GTK pixmap themes) are faster. One of the most used elements of those styles are gradients. In GTK you do them by stretching pixmaps, while in Qt you do them programatically (and actually, you do it from mosfet's cute designer), and they get rendered using optimized code instead of a general purpose pixmap routine.

    Of course, if I am wrong, I invite anyone to correct me.
  • The reason that Linux isn't ready for the masses is that there aren't enough GUI applications that work together.

    The great thing about UNIX is how you can get commands that process data streams and pipe them together. The problem is that there isn't a similar widely adopted standard for GUI programs on Unix. The analagous capabilities are inter app cut and paste, and object sharing (as in OLE or OpenDoc).

    KDE and Gnome are addressing this issue. When you can build the functional equivalent of Office 2K (in terms of functionality, not quality) with free software, and can work easily with third party apps w/ no special rigamarole, then you have a Windows killer. It seems to me that KDE is further down this path.
  • Now let me start off by saying that I love KDE, I use it on my Linux box, and I previously used it on my sparc (but I have to support CDE now and it's much easier to do so when actually running it). Bugs and all (like consistently losing all but two of my desktops) I still like it.

    But the screenshots of the device manager and user manager really made me wince. These are identical copies of the windows equivalents. Know what immediate impression I get? Microsoft leads, KDE copies. This is not a reputation we deserve to get.
  • Fine! Good for you! Use what you like - nobody's stopping you.

    I happen to like using an integrated Desktop Environment - it's very convenient for me to have an integrated file manager, web browser (although I don't use it very much, I prefer Netscape), mail checker, ICQ program, MP3 player, and soon word processor. I've used WindowMaker and liked it; used E and liked it; used AfterStep and liked it; used GNOME and liked it, and used a few others and didn't like them.

    It all boils down to personal choice. As long as you can still use other things, what's the problem? Stop complaining and do something USEFUL!
  • They're moving it towards making it more customizable. So it will be easy for people who package distributions geared towards beginners to make slick, simple desktops. And more advanced distributions can provide more power. And of course, as an end user, you can change it to be however you like.

    --

  • Why not? A license that read "Feel free to make as many copies as you want and give them to who ever you want for what ever price you feel like charging, as long as you don't change in any way" would be freely redistributable. GPL gives you those rights.
  • Windows already does everything KDE currently does, will do, and will ever do.

    Your kidding right? Please tell me you are kidding? You mean your third party hacks are better than things KDE and GNOME do inherently. Try configuring hardware with out the control panel? The customizeability of *nix and KDE blows windows out of the water! Do you think people are moving to linux because linux and windows are the same? KDE and Windows are not the same thing, if you would use *nix software before making baseless comparisons you probably would not have posted that silly comment.
  • The point is still valid, right? Having been around longer, it would make since that it would be farther ahead. More obvious than it being more oop.
  • Gotta love it.

    >> you have to use dos to do everything

    >> linix will go bankrupt

    Beautiful. And you fooled the moderators, too. Y'oughta get bonus points for that.

    But hotgrrl67532 is mine; stay away from her or else I'll send you the Good Times virus.
  • I think that's entirely possible. I tried it out from CVS.

    It's pretty good, though somewhat buggy. Konqueror (which just might convert a old nc/mc guy like myself, quite a feat) looks great but is pretty unstable right now. It works though. Just needs some bugs fixed.

    I'm confident it'll be very useable very soon. I'm currently doing a reinstall, and I'm going to try it out again.

    I also tried out XFree86 3.9.15. Pretty damn slick. I only had to add *one line* to my XF86Config file: Driver "MGA". I also changed the X symlink to point to XFree86 rather than XF86_SVGA.

    My only problem was that it "broke" kdm/xdm. Now it only goes into twm no matter what I select. I glanced through some documentation and went through a load of config files trying to find out what's running twm. I found some and changed twm to startkde and it's still doing it.
    Ho hum, I'll figure it out.
  • For those old enough to remember, Doesn't the current KDE vs. GNOME debate sound a lot like the Linux vs. 386BSD one?

    386BSD was always a step behind, had a very "vocal" leader (Jolitz vs. Miguil?), and eventually failed to accomplish its goals, splintered, and pretty much no one rememebrs 386BSD now.

    Just a thought.

  • Gnome 2.0 will have a lot more things then you think. First of all the dependancies on imlib will be replaced with a libart and gdk-pixbuff which are already currently implemented. The panel will have a lot more features such as better resizing. The file manager will be replaced with a new a better one. the pager should get some improvemets also. I think that justifies a 2.0 version.
    Eat that
  • Because ActiveX is the ripoff of CORBA/COM. It's essentially an after the fact subset, much like Gnome.
  • Or if you have a two button mouse (like myself), simply click both buttons on the link.

    I find it makes Slashdot reading much less annoying in Netscape. If you click a link regularly, it's really slow coming back, and it won't be displaying the right part of the document.
  • I am not sure that a little bit of competition at this point is really such a bad thing. While I would agree that at some point, some cooperation would be a good thing, I also think that it may not be that bad to have two projects going in two different ways. If we end up with two projects that are essentially the same, why did we bother? On the other hand, if we eventually end up with two projects that each solve the needs of different people, or the needs of the same people in different ways, that means we get more choice.

    Personally I haven't run into that many problems getting Gnome and KDE to coexist. For example, on my laptop I am using SuSE, which sets up KDE by default, however, I have Gnome installed also and I can use both at the same time. I have also been doing GTK+ development on that machine without any problems.

    One of the cool things about open source right now is that we have enough developers that we can afford to support two similar projects.

    Personally, I think eventually we will see cooperation between at least parts of the two groups, and probably also some borrowing back and forth of code, but I don't really see any reason to rush things at this time. Once both KDE and Gnome fully integrate support for CORBA, I think that may help bridge some of the gaps between them.

  • Because Windows crashed one time too many for me. I will never again buy another Microsoft product. I simply do not trust them any more. I much prefer a system where I can fix it if I have the knowhow - not a completely closed system where things never get fixed.

    In addition to that, I fancy myself a programmer, and I'm not exactly rolling in cash - I'd much prefer to spend my money on something useful (like hardware) than on things I can get for free.
  • *smack*smack*smack*

    Things for you to do:

    Get a life
    Learn how to code
    Get your head out of your ass
    Stop dragging your knuckles.
  • I only use 3 of the buttons, all on the right side (which makes sense to me since that's where your scroll bar is, usually). I only have minimize, maximize, and close. For program menu, I simply right click on the titlebar, and the meu pops up wherever I click (IIRC, X is not running right now so I can't check it, and I rarely need that menu).
  • I am not going to address the reason for the slow or fast development of GNOME. Since I am not part of the GNOME project, I don't have enough knowledge.

    However, I still remember an email from Miguel. Around september 1997? That said something like "we already have the gimp, mc which has a graphical version almost ready, VFS (and so on)".

    So, at least on his eyes, KDE did *not* have a large lead at the time of GNOME creation.
  • WordPerfect called them Coaches, and had equally tracky icons to go along with it. Wizard is a generic enough term I doubt that MS could sue "KDE" if they wanted. After all, who would they sue? If they went after individual developers they'd most likely have to take it to a German court. *grin*
  • Perhaps they learned their lesson early on that look and feel lawsuits won't hold up. Or perhaps it's because they'd have to sue a German company. Or is it the DoJ case currently pending. By not suing SO they look like they have competition.
  • NOTE: This is not flamebait -- it's my opinion on KDE's functionality

    Okay, I'd been using KDE way back before the 1.0 releases, and I liked it. Then I got side-tracked trying to get gnome to compile (over and over and over). Finally GNOME is relatively stable, and... yeah, I've got cool themes and capplets out the wazoo.

    ... anyway, the other day I installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2, and all I can say is that I was very impressed, and that's not something I say often. I would probably recommend a KDE-based desktop to a non-unix guru over GNOME at the moment for the following reasons:

    1 - KDE doesn't suffer from the Desktop Environment / Windowmanager duality that GNOME does. -- yes, I know you can run differnt WM's with kde, too, but most people don't. Fact is that KDE is just plain a more cohesive desktop environemt - much similar to a newbie-friendly MacOS or Windows9X (which is what new linux users are familiar with...)

    2 - while developers may still remember the stigma of the old qt license, end users don't care, and they probably don't know what a widget is, or what the difference between c++ and c is. So... for once, we finally get down to "which environment makes me more productive?". While I like gnome and use it at work on Solaris and linux, it does have a lot of funky bells and whistles, and it's arguably much slower than KDE

    3 - stability. maybe it's just me, but living on the cutting edge of gnome development hurts. People tend to break fundamental pieces quite often (witness gnome-print - try getting it to work on Solaris or non-redhat 6.0) panel sometimes craps out, and combined with development versions of E, my dual xeon linux box sometimes hangs for a second or two. That's not good. My experience with the KDE cutting edge has been much more cross-platform friendly, and it seems to be a more focused and coordinated effort. Nobody comes out of left-field with a new method that only works on the latest RedHat, or worse yet, only compiles on their system.

    I still use gnome at work, I prefer gtk toolkit for development projects, I prefer c to c++, and my gnome/e desktop looks really cool, but if I were setting up linux for my mom or sister, I'd probably give them a KDE desktop.
  • I think it's more a benhmark on developers, not languages. Dallheimer, Ettrich, and let's not forget the Trolls who made the toolkit and ported mozilla to Qt inside a week.

    All that said, I wish Qt would use the signal/slot mechanism of Gtk--. Moc is a nasty little boondoggle I could do without.
  • Then don't use it. You have plenty of other choices.
  • lets face it, the
    biggest thing stopping windows sheep from using Linux is the lack of a robust, fully functional GUI.

    Actually it's lack of MS applications (Office), sure we have WP/Applix/Staroffice, but these types of people "don't want to learn a new application

  • I tried Gnome and my initial impression was, Wow! Look at all of the cool things that you can do to your desktop. Then I tied to do real work with it, and it just really gets in the way, I can't really explain why, just that the initial "cool" features quickly become very annoying.

    I worry that KDE will try to be too much like Gnome and become as unusable.
  • I've tried Litestep, the NeXTstep desktop for Win32. It's still got too many Win32isms in it, it's just not the same as Afterstep/Window Maker
  • Sorry folks. Had to increase mbufs.

    Mirror is up at http://www2.jorsm.com/~mosfet/screens hots.htm [jorsm.com].

    JORSM Admin
  • >(Please pardon my sarcasm, the Redmond trolls have been out in full force today and I simply couldn't resist. I'm starting to suspect that the "Anti-Linux" group that Micros~1 was forming a while ago was just a bunch of script-kiddies they hired to post as AC's on Slashdot.)

    I noticed that too, if that is the best they can do, we have nothing to worry about.

    Hell, I would welcome alternative viewpoints if they were presented with intelligent arguments - either there are no intelligent arguments for pro-windows, or those making the comments are a bunch of vacuum-cranium doodz with nothing better to do than show their stupidity.
  • KDE folk are hardly going the wrong direction. Mosfet (to my knowledge) is about the only guy that's been working on theme support and pretty buttons. Everyone else is working hard on core application features and/or KOffice.

    Besides, I remember a common argument about KDE 1.0. "Sure it has a lot of features but it's so ugly!" I wish you people would make up your mind!

    Finally, since he's the theme developer, his screenshots are oriented at what he's working on of course. Go check out the rest of the screenshots on www.kde.org and koffice.kde.org and, more importantly, read some of the mailing lists. That way you can make an informed decision instead of basing your comments on a short interview with only one of the KDE developers.

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