Yikes. I could almost see the pom-pons
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dinotrac Apr 01, 2010 9:27 PM EDT |
as I read this piece. A couple of points: 1. Leadership, in and of itself is not a good thing. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were leaders, but so were Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler. 2. I am glad that the keepers of a great desktop are on the verge of, ummm, creating a new and different great desktop if that's true. Sounds like one can at least get something done with it now. 3. After ten years of eagerly installing beta releases and never,ever,ever waiting for x.0, I will give some thought to trying out KDE 4.5 when it arrives, although.. I'm not sure why. |
| Ridcully Apr 02, 2010 1:42 AM EDT |
With respect to KDE4.4, I reserve judgment until I have tried the openSUSE release due later this year. OpenSUSE has been stated to be one of the best supporters of the KDE4 series, so I can wait. Some time back, I said that I did not expect KDE4 to be really "useful" until it had reached KDE4.5 and so far I have seen nothing that changes my opinion. In the meantime, KDE3.5 still, still, does everything I could wish for. Finally, I am very, very, oh very wary of enthusiastic reporters.......Cynical ? Probably...but then that is what KDE4 has engendered in a lot of KDE3 users. |
| dinotrac Apr 02, 2010 2:00 AM EDT |
Rid - Appropriate outlook. KDE team has squandered a great deal of good will gained over ten years of great work. |
| helios Apr 02, 2010 10:05 AM EDT |
"Two years on, things are back on track. It's perhaps time to begin a campaign of telling people who left KDE, "it's safe to come back!". Hey Charlie Brown...wanna kick a football? As I meander and click around this environment, I am left to wonder why I am doing it? Seems to me that "features" such as the Akonadi Server and the Plasma Shell have done nothing but confuse the user and clutter the environment to the point of convolution. That doesn't take into consideration the Old Boss Konqueror retirement and the New Boss arrival of Dolphin. Most everyone here knows that I try to represent the New Linux User and I find KDE 4X just slightly short of being a hostile environment for them. Sure it's beautiful but so is the Desert 10 miles outside of Phoenix... In reading the most recent reviews on the new Gnome Shell, I'm not sure that the Gnome Devs are going to avoid the same quicksand. As KDE seems to have built their environment around "communication and development", I'm not encouraged that Mom or Dad are going to see the value of navigating that curve just to do the simplest of things. Surely not enough to take the time to learn how to stumble through the redundant system menus and horribly renamed applications. The people who claim that KDE 4X is "ready" need to clarify for whom it is ready. From a coding perspective, this is brilliant work. Just not sure those not already versed in the ways of Linux will appreciate or understand it. Who and whom...don't even get me started... h |
| jdixon Apr 02, 2010 10:22 AM EDT |
> 1. Leadership, in and of itself is not a good thing ... George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were leaders, but so were Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler. I know folks who would rephrase that to "George Washington was a leader, but so were Abraham Lincoln, Joe Stalin, and Adolph Hitler." The point being that even getting folks to agree on what good leadership is can be difficult. > Hey Charlie Brown...wanna kick a football? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? |
| bigg Apr 02, 2010 10:29 AM EDT |
> Hey Charlie Brown...wanna kick a football? It pretty much sums up the OOXML discussion as well. |
| ComputerBob Apr 02, 2010 10:39 AM EDT |
As a 3 1/2 year KDE user, I loved KDE 3.5.x. It easily and efficiently did everything that I needed and wanted it to do. But after my recent bad experience with Debian Squeeze KDE 4.3.4 --which I wrote about on ComputerBob.com if you're interested -- as well as my perception that KDE has now gone off in a style-over-substance direction in which I don't care to go, for the past couple of months, I've been very happily using Debian Squeeze with Xfce. I might be willing to try KDE again some time in the future, but only if I started seeing a lot of articles describing how its core functionality, efficiency and ease of use are better than KDE 3.5.10's core functionality, efficiency and ease of use. If future announcements and reviews continue the trend of saying "at least KDE 4.x.x functionality is much better than KDE 4.0' was..." and then go on and on about how great its plasmoids and glitz and social networking features are, then my suspicions about KDE4's direction will be confirmed and I won't even bother to try any new versions of KDE4. |
| TxtEdMacs Apr 02, 2010 10:50 AM EDT |
CB, What if Ken Hess writes that KDE 4.9.X has arrived and it's wonderful? Good enough for me, how about you? YBT |
| ComputerBob Apr 02, 2010 10:51 AM EDT |
Quoting:What if Ken Hess writes that KDE 4.9.X has arrived and it's wonderful?Ken who? |
| jacog Apr 02, 2010 11:15 AM EDT |
Plah... this nonsense again. People who find KDE4.x confusing are just easily confused - full stop. For those people I propose we make a desktop environment that will be to desktops what Tuxpaint is to graphics applications. |
| dinotrac Apr 02, 2010 12:09 PM EDT |
>People who find KDE4.x confusing are just easily confused And the others are KDE developers. |
| ComputerBob Apr 02, 2010 3:28 PM EDT |
Quoting:Plah... this nonsense again. People who find KDE4.x confusing are just easily confused - full stop.You must be referring to this story: http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2009/01/linus-torvalds-ditches... |
| jacog Apr 02, 2010 4:01 PM EDT |
Oh mah gad, the Messiah himself hates it, so it must be that bad. |
| tuxchick Apr 02, 2010 4:37 PM EDT |
About time you figured that out, jacog. /runs away fast |
| Ridcully Apr 03, 2010 6:37 AM EDT |
I didn't really intend to comment further on the KDE4 "mess" but looks like it's worth putting two cents into the brew. My perception is that the KDE team has very successfully divided its previously contented and united users into two strongly dissenting camps: those who cannot see anything except the "glories of KDE4.x" and those who want the stability, simplicity, speed and user friendliness of KDE3.5. Moreover, if you protest, for whatever reason, that KDE4 simply cannot cut it, you are instantly denigrated by the "KDE4 rah rah group" as stirrers, backwardly thinking, unable to cope with advances in software, just saying the same thing over again, etc. etc. etc. I think it is time both the "KDE4 rah rah group" and the KDE4 team itself take a look at what has happened. This is NOT a good thing fellows and girls (or girls and fellows....I don't want to take either side) .........Which do you prefer: a "happy forward looking united user group", or a split group and constant sniping and bickering. Besides, surely, (I keep saying) surely, the KDE4 team MUST be hearing this constant unhappiness ? No ?????? Sure, jacog can rejoice in KDE4 and so can developers......but I am not a developer. I am a KDE3.5 user who loves its simplicity, speed, stability and ease of use............Now.......Why is it so plain to me that all KDE4 has to do is the same, but this message seems to be lost in the translation at the KDE4 developer level. NO !! I do not want KDE4 to simply become KDE3.5; that's impossible. But I very definitely DO believe that the KDE4 team could put together a package that made KDE4 mimic KDE3.5's behaviour, menus and styles of operation. Just with the flick of a button......KDE 4.x becomes KDE3.5.........but running on the KDE4.x software. Why does that sound like common sense to me but not to the KDE4 team. In one blow, you would re-unite the entire KDE user group.........Sounds good to me. |
| dinotrac Apr 03, 2010 9:59 AM EDT |
Rid - Tis the way of the world these days, I'm afraid, especially in US politics. If you can't properly support your position, or answer criticism, the other side must be nothing but Troglodytes. To be wrong about anything is unacceptable to the narcissistic little creeps who seem to infest anything that matters these days. Sigh. |
| azerthoth Apr 03, 2010 12:31 PM EDT |
dino, interestingly enough this applies resoundingly to both sides of the debate in regards to KDE. |
| dinotrac Apr 03, 2010 12:58 PM EDT |
No, you Troglodyte, it applies only to your side. |
| TxtEdMacs Apr 03, 2010 1:15 PM EDT |
Quoting:No, you Troglodyte, [...]Smile when you say that, partner. YBT |
| dinotrac Apr 03, 2010 1:29 PM EDT |
Quoting:Smile when you say that, partner. ;0) Ooooooohhhhh!!! It hurts! It hurts! |
| helios Apr 03, 2010 2:06 PM EDT |
OK...here's what we're gonna do. in the coming two weeks, we're gonna sit 10 kids down, ages will probably be between 10 and 14. 5 of the computers will be a default gnome setting, 5 of them will be a default kde4.3x setting. We will have them do a number of simple tasks. Open a browser and navigate a website, download a small file and have them manually move it to a specified folder in the user directory, change the display setting,...I'll have to figure out what the most common tasks are. Will publish on boh when we get it done. h |
| ComputerBob Apr 03, 2010 4:01 PM EDT |
@helios Given the topic of this discussion, as well as my own personal experience, I would be much more interested in seeing the results of one group using a default KDE 4.x and the other group using a default KDE 3.5.10. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 03, 2010 4:23 PM EDT |
> I know folks who would rephrase that to "George Washington was a leader, but so were Abraham Lincoln, Joe Stalin, and Adolph Hitler." Darn, that's what I get for taking a day off. Missed my chance. G.W. was no Martin van Buren either. > The point being that even getting folks to agree on what good leadership is can be difficult. Good leadership is like good marksmanship. What matters is what people do with it. Helios, I'm looking forward to it. |
| Ridcully Apr 03, 2010 4:29 PM EDT |
Sounds like a plan helios.......Will watch and wait with a great deal of interest. My only hesitation is you are not comparing the two KDE's, but no doubt there will be reasons explained for this ~ otherwise it's comparing apples and oranges. Also azerthoth, apart from the satirical comments above, I have rarely (if ever) seen supporters of KDE3.5 denigrating the supporters of KDE4.x ~ what would be the point anyway ? The focus of the comments from KDE3.5 supporters has always been about the intractable and unpleasant "feel" and generally confusing operation of KDE4.x usually followed up by exasperation with the fact that the KDE4 development team is not listening to these problems/complaints. Conversely, on any forum where the merits of KDE4.x vs those of KDE3.5 are being debated, insulting remarks and "put downs" about the reluctance of the KDE3.5 supporters to move into the future (or their lack of computer skills to recognise, use or understand a superb piece of software, etc. etc.) very quickly flow from the KDE4.x supporters. And please don't say it doesn't happen; I have watched it now too many times and been the object of the insults myself. Nope, I am not taking my teddy bear and going home to mudder, just telling it like it is. These KDE debates get very nasty at times..........and again I refer you to my note above and the dividing effect KDE4 has had. People vote with their feet and unfortunately, I think it is already happening with KDE3.5 users moving to other window managers in utter exasperation, although I have little data on that. I believe that KDE4.x is and always has been a developers' window manager. That is how it was put together by developers for developers ~ and dare I say it, for developer satisfaction rather than user satisfaction. No one in the general user world needs the "cashew" or the ability to write plasmoid applets because they are not developers, yet it is thrust down our faces as wonderful. Well, it very well might be, but not to the general user who cannot write applets anyhow. Why do we need the complexity of the various "views" such as the default blank desktop (apart from the menu bar) and the folder view and the etc. etc. ? What is wrong with a single view as in KDE3.5 ? Surely added complexity in KDE4.x slows down the software and adds to instability ? I note that the KDE4.x rejection moves I have seen are always to simpler and faster desktops such as Xfce and Gnome. Hence, probably, Helios's comparison.........enough........The KDE4 team won't listen and there really isn't much point any more. I will test KDE4.4 later this year.....but I expect to be walking away myself. |
| helios Apr 03, 2010 4:30 PM EDT |
@ CB I thought about that but since 3.5x is ending it's lifespan, I didn't think it relevant since it's getting harder to find up-to-date distros that default to KDE 3.5x. Truth be told, I may not be presenting any real relevant info due to the small number of participants, the lack of "scientific" measure and not considering the Gnome 3.0 environment...even though it's not out yet. My empirical data shows that the new user is confused by KDE 4x...not saying it's not perfectly functional within its confines...it simply isn't the wisest choice for new LInux Users in my opinion. Specifically when new users base their decision to stay or leave Linux based on that initial experience. h |
| Ridcully Apr 03, 2010 4:36 PM EDT |
Helios, openSUSE 11.1 still supports KDE3.5 and that is a comparatively very recent release.........Cheers and hope you can run the trials. |
| dinotrac Apr 03, 2010 4:39 PM EDT |
Hmmmm... I can almost see the scandalous expose sometime in the not-too-distant future, the story of how Microsoft managed to beat off a plucky and energetic band of volunteers... "It was all misdirection. First we made nice with one of their rising star developers -- that De Icaza guy. Got him all excited about .Net. He goes and starts that mono project, and we play coy. We make nice in some deals and drop hints about patents. The whole free software world gets up in arms. It was so money -- you literally could see them frothing at the mouth. We shake the patent sabre and they froth more. Meanwhile, we get together a small group of our most loyal developers and have them write the software that will bring home any and all users forever more. We called it KDE 4..." |
| tracyanne Apr 03, 2010 6:06 PM EDT |
I'm in the process of installing Mint's KDE desktop version, and it struck me when looking at the KDE desktop that Visually the design elements seem to say stop, don't go there. |
| caitlyn Apr 05, 2010 1:14 PM EDT |
I've actually liked KDE 4.x implementations in Pardus. It works well and I think people make a lot of fuss about, well... not much. To me it's all a matter of personal taste. |
| Koriel Apr 05, 2010 4:34 PM EDT |
Lets see, I tried KDE 4 at 4.0 it was awful and I removed it, sorry folks it should never have been released in that state not even as a .0 release it left a very bad impression. Tried it again at 4.3.3, more usable but dolphin crashed on a very regular basis, plus various unexplained 100% cpu usage would occur even with the desktop candy turned off so i removed it yet again, it had improved but I still really didnt consider it release quality or usable, as a developer i crave stability nothing worse than losing work because of a desktop crash even if its only 10 mins worth of work. And now the good news, im running KDE 4.4 with all desktop loveliness turned on and its rock solid, the feature level and available apps are certainly enough for me that I dont have to have KDE 3.5 around any longer, Kde4.4 is now my regular desktop, im also suprised at how snappy and responsive it is although this could be down to the distro (PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 2). In short KDE 4.4 should of been the 4.0 release and the devs should of waited or at least stuck an Alpha or Beta tag to 4.0. As for the way Kde 4 does things in the usability field it took me all of an afternoon to get used to things and re-learn how to configure stuff and you know i think at least on this score the kde developers got it right I feel the whole experience is a lot smoother, I know its just a feeling and their is nothing i can really pin down but kde4 seems to make my dual screen desktop setup seem very natural where as in kde 3.5 and even more so in windows the dual screen setup never felt right. Awaiting KDE 4.5 with glee :) |
| dinotrac Apr 05, 2010 5:10 PM EDT |
Koriel -- How much oomph does your hardware have? I have an OK desktop, 3-core phenom and 4 Gig memory, but a very pedestrian nvidia card (I don't do 3d gaming, care more about 2D for video). If I can shake my distrust of KDE developers, I might be tempted to try 4.5, maybe even 4.4. OTOH, I don't have that many annoyances with XFCE... |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 05, 2010 5:45 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, welcome back. Hope it was fun. |
| caitlyn Apr 05, 2010 5:50 PM EDT |
@Bob: Read the comments of this week's DistroWatch Weekly, comment #49, and you'll get an idea of what I've been doing in my "free" time. I've learned a new definition of insanity: developing a Linux distro. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 05, 2010 7:15 PM EDT |
> I've learned a new definition of insanity Twice I've picked up Linux from Scratch, and put it right back down! I just don't have the chutspa. Without even reading the comments yet, let me tell you that I Am Impressed. Edit: Yep, impressed. Under the hood, indeed. Unix in Hebrew, counting the seconds since 4,000 BC. :^) Anyway, enough thread hijacking. Welcome back. |
| caitlyn Apr 05, 2010 7:56 PM EDT |
I suspect more people could do what I did with that hdate-applet package than give themselves credit. It took no more than a knowledge of shell scripting, a basic understanding of a configure file, and security of knowing that I couldn't actually break anything by tinkering. :) Back to the topic at hand... I think how much people like or dislike KDE4 depends on when they first tried it and formed an impression and which distro they used. Some distros (Pardus is my favorite example) do KDE very nicely and some (like Kubuntu) do not. Anything before KDE 4.2.4 was likely to leave the user unhappy regardless of distro. |
| jacog Apr 06, 2010 4:11 AM EDT |
I love Pardus. But for some reason all the package repos are terribly slow to access from here. So for now I am using Mint-KDE. The desktop setup on that is fine, but it's just not as fast and responsive as Pardus. |
| Koriel Apr 06, 2010 5:05 PM EDT |
@Dinotrac
My hardware isnt special, dual core 4Ghz Athlon 64 with 1 GB of ram running on a pretty bog standard nforce4 based motherboard and an old geforce 6800 graphics card, kde4 runs great im now putting together a multimedia based kde4 machine for my hdtv with the same hardware spec as my dev machine only problem with that is i have a massive flash tearing problem but that isnt kde's fault its adobes. With your spec dino, which is way better than mine (did i mention im poor, GPL sofware will never make you rich) it will run KDE4 nicely, I dont know if its just me but i would swear kde4 appears to run or at least resopnd faster than kde 3.5 although i cant prove it, its just a feeling maybe they have used a lot of tricks under the hood or maybe PCLinuxOS 2010 has some awesome scheduling. Im going to be posting some screenshots of my new kde4 desktop soon over at my blog in the next few days http://www.caledoniacomputers.com/?page_id=550 I am making all my current software projects themeable on Linux for better desktop integration with kde4 and gnome its looking pretty good already on kde4 they still look naff on windows but thats windows for ya. |
| dinotrac Apr 06, 2010 6:02 PM EDT |
Hmmm. Qt 4 was supposed to offer notable performance improvements over Qt 3, but early KDE 4, from what I've gleaned, didn't deliver -- maybe because of Compiz, whatever. BtW -- I run my myth box on a dual core 45 W athlon with 2G of ram, and an nvidia 6200. Works quite nicely. Full screen flash is a problem on Linux, something that's been known for a looong time. What works for me is to drop the quality setting to low. That determines how much anti-aliasing the flash player does, and you hate to lose it, but 480dpi full motion viewed at the kind of distance we tend to watch TV from looks pretty good. Better still, many digital TVs (not to mention the nvidia driver) throw in a little anit-aliasing of their own, so the loss may not be a problem for you. |
| Koriel Apr 06, 2010 6:21 PM EDT |
Yep, Ive tried all the tricks to get fullscreen flash to run without tearing, including the quality lowering option, running the latest nvidia driver and also tried the Flash 10.1 beta still no joy. I wrote a program so that I can watch the BBC,ITV,STV, Channel 4 & 5 here in the USA (they are normally geolocation blocked, my program helps to get around the blocking) but it only works with firefox and relies heavily on foxyproxy for url redirection so using something like myth, xbmc or boxee at the moment isnt possible. Myself and the wife simply cant live without access to british tv, i know sad isnt it, so for the moment we are stuck with flash on windows as it works fine without tearing on that platform all the way upto 1920x1080, why adobe after god knows how many years they have had cant get it working on linux defies all logic. All i can say is welcome to our new HTML5 overlords and bring it on! |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 06, 2010 7:54 PM EDT |
@Koriel: Can't you simply get british TV from your local cable company? I'm in The Netherlands and I get BBC 1-4 and BBC World/Entertainment. |
| Koriel Apr 06, 2010 8:20 PM EDT |
No cable where i am, and im poor so all i have apart from a lovely family is a 3 Meg DSL from cr@ppy Fairpoint so we make do with online streaming hence the need for Flash. I did discover something though that Flash doesnt seem to tear under compiz with vsynch enabled but does under kde4_kwin compositing with vsynch enabled so it looks as if either flash is not detecting the kde4 compositing manager or that the kde4 compositing manager has a bug. Unfortunately flash becomes JerkoVision(tm) under compiz so kinda rules it out as a halfway solution. For those who like KDE4 i have a simple themeing howto over at my blog http://www.caledoniacomputers.com/?page_id=550 |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 07, 2010 6:18 AM EDT |
And how about downloading them? There are several plugins for Firefox that allow you to download flash videos. Can you make them work with your proxy modifications? Than way you could simply download them and watch them with VLC or any other kind of media player. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 07, 2010 1:37 PM EDT |
Koriel, threatening to derail the thread again, what's your online viewer? My wife does Chinese TV that way, with an application called PP-Live. What a bandwidth hog! I've noticed that NetFlix streaming player doesn't buffer, very likely so it cannot be intercepted and saved. Damned Silverlight. Full screen flash works for me, but I'm throwing a 4-core 3GHz Phenom2 at it. Bloat hasn't made that obsolete yet. |
| ComputerBob Apr 07, 2010 1:51 PM EDT |
Quoting:My hardware isnt special, dual core 4Ghz Athlon 64 with 1 GB of ram running on a pretty bog standard nforce4 based motherboard and an old geforce 6800 graphics card... im now putting together a multimedia based kde4 machine for my hdtv with the same hardware spec as my dev machine... Quoting:No cable where i am, and im poor so all i have apart from a lovely family is a 3 Meg DSL...I wish I was poor like you. |
| Koriel Apr 07, 2010 5:04 PM EDT |
@Bod
I just use firefox+flash, foxyproxy, Tor and my own program SelekTOR which is a front end for Tor that allows you to easily select & monitor exitnodes in whatever country you like by doing this im able to get around the geolocation blocks various media websites impose on their streaming.
It all works very well on Windows but i would like it to all work well on Linux and KDE4 but flash is a major stumbling block. I can now say im in love with KDE4 after a very very rocky start see my first post, and would like to reduce the number of Windows based machines in my house to 1 (wifes laptop) with the other 3 running PCLinuxOS, Slackware using a KDE4 desktop and XFCE in the case of the Slack server, but flash is stopping me from converting the media PC to Linux and to say the least its seriously beginning to p*ss me off. I dont like downloading the videos prefer to just stream them so i dont use any additional plugins other than adblock, foxyproxy and flashget |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 07, 2010 5:15 PM EDT |
> I just use firefox+flash, foxyproxy, Tor and my own program SelekTOR which is a front end for Tor that allows you to easily select & monitor exitnodes in whatever country you like by doing this im able to get around the geolocation blocks various media websites impose on their streaming. That is just plain cool. Thanks. |
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