Good article
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Grishnakh Aug 23, 2011 6:57 PM EDT |
As usual, Bruce delivers a well-written and accurately reported article. But personally, I'd rather see Gnome die. Its developers obviously are off in their own world, and don't care about their users, but instead about their vaunted usability studies. As another poster on another forum said, they're like architecture students who design a house where you can't easily open the door to go outside, but instead have to flip a light switch three times and knock on a certain spot on the wall. It'd be better for the community if the distros simply stopped packaging Gnome3 and let the project fade into obscurity. Maybe some of the devs could join other projects and contribute usefully that way (though they obviously couldn't be given any input into design). Then the Linux distros could concentrate on other, better desktop environments that better serve the users. Also, Bruce is absolutely right in the differences between KDE4 and Gnome3, despite their obvious parallels. The problems with KDE4 were that it was buggy and unstable and was missing a lot of features, compared to KDE3, and a lot of the changes were "under the hood". Unfortunately, not all this has been fixed, though much has. A lot of things still don't work as well as they used to (like Amarok) over 3 years ago, and I still read a lot of complaints about problems with nepomuk and other such things. It seems like in their quest to bring questionable new features that few care about, like desktop search and indexing, they're putting off fixing the more fundamental problems that still exist. |
| herzeleid Aug 23, 2011 7:16 PM EDT |
He says that kde recovered? when did that happen? Last I checked (not too long ago) they were still trying to get 4.x to the same point of functionality enjoyed by users of kde 3.5. It appears that kde 4 remains a niche player with a small following - it's not like it was in the heyday of kde 3.5 when it was overwhelmingly the most popular linux desktop year after year. |
| flufferbeer Aug 23, 2011 9:35 PM EDT |
@Grishnahk, It seems to me that part of the problem with KDE4 as you sorta said is it's having to deal with its bloatware. Do any of you remember the same thing happening in the 1990's with all that new gotta-have-it shrinkwrap software for M$-windoze 9x?? When I HAD to use such bloatware, I CRINGED at having to always check the installation diskspace+memory requirements (also, always having to justify the EXPENSIVE upgrade costs, ugghhhh!) KDE4 might not have all its featuritis all worked out as KDE3 did, and KDE4 then _could_ drag down the whole KDE kit-and-kaboodle. My 2c |
| Fettoosh Aug 23, 2011 10:00 PM EDT |
Quoting:He says that kde recovered? when did that happen? Last I checked (not too long ago) they were still trying to get 4.x to the same point of functionality enjoyed by users of kde 3.5. I believe the quoted statement above would get more credibility if you cite some cases. As it stands now, KDE 4.7 has all the feature KDE 3.5.10 had plus a lot more. Quoting:It appears that kde 4 remains a niche player with a small following Purely subjective and no real evidence or proof. |
| herzeleid Aug 23, 2011 10:51 PM EDT |
Quoting:I believe the quoted statement above would get more credibility if you cite some cases. As it stands now, KDE 4.7 has all the feature KDE 3.5.10 had plus a lot moreSorry, I have no time to spoon feed you. This is generally known - you can ask any kde 3.5 user what they think of 4.x - Quoting:Purely subjective and no real evidence or proof.Again, whether you've been living under a rock or just pretending not to know anything, I have no time to spoon feed you. I can only reiterate that linux user surveys in the mid-2000s showed that kde was the most popular DE with gnome a fairly distant second. After kde 4.0 was released, gnome became the favorite in desktop user surveys and kde has never again come near the popularity it once enjoyed. For a gentle heads-up, let me just say that google is your friend here. |
| Fettoosh Aug 23, 2011 11:18 PM EDT |
Quoting:Sorry, I have no time to spoon feed you. This is generally known - This is nothing but a cop out. Quoting:you can ask any kde 3.5 user what they think of 4.x - I was a KDE 3.5 user and for a long time. I moved on to KDE 4.0 and now to 4.7. I would never go back to KDE 3.5. I am sure many others have done the same. |
| lcafiero Aug 24, 2011 12:45 AM EDT |
I'm not what you would call a dyed-in-the-wool KDE user, but I use it often enough on various machines in my lab (which now doubles as my living room, but I digress). In any case, while herzeleid is right about KDE taking a knock in number of users with 4.0, I think the moral of the story here is that they've righted their ship with later upgrades in the 4.x series. Are they the top DE? Not anymore, but maybe soon . . . . I've used 3.5 and 4.x, and until recently I was using 4.7 on Fedora 15 until I changed to Xfce to save resources -- yes, it's bloated, but in an era of 4GB RAM and 250GB HDs in laptops, that may not be an issue unless you have, like me, an old ThinkPad with 512MB RAM. So I'm with Fettoosh here: I can see where those who once used 3.5 would be OK, or better, with the latest versions of KDE because it works great |
| tuxchick Aug 24, 2011 2:40 AM EDT |
You younguns may not remember what Gnome was like before Ubuntu. It was all over the place; the painful migration from 1.4 to 2.x with wholesale feature removal and no backwards compatibility, Eazel, Ximian, and the early horrid incarnations of Nautilus. The Ximian Desktop was super-nice, all polished and flexible, and included the excellent Red Carpet package manager, Evolution and other nice stuff I forget now. Yes, that was when Miguel de Icaza was a hero for inventing all this cool Ximian stuff. Then Novell bought Ximian, and I don't remember what that did to it because I was liking KDE, IceWM and Enlightenment better. Libranet, Galeon...stuff comes, stuff goes. Gnome 2 didn't get good until Ubuntu came along. The Ubuntu team brought order out of chaos, and streamlined and organized it in a very nice way. Fedora and Debian packaged vanilla Gnome and it was quite different from Ubuntu, messier and no nice font smoothing and all full of GTK jaggedies. Red Hat put a lot into Gnome, but it took Ubuntu to make it sleek and popular. I've been torture-testing KDE 4.6.2 on Mint for a couple weeks and it's not bad. All full of endless configuration options just like old KDE, which is what I liked about it. It's still too many clicks to do some operations, and it's a resource hog, and sliders are for phones and tablets, not PCs, but it does a lot. Stay tuned for a review that digs into gnarly stuff like wtf are Nepomuk and Akonadi, and Activities. |
| Ridcully Aug 24, 2011 4:23 AM EDT |
Tuxchick........I'll be very interested to see your findings on KDE4.6.2.......Sooner or later, I will have to upgrade but I'll wait until the next edition of openSUSE comes out with that particular version of KDE.......Since I know my way around openSUSE quite well, it means that any glitches that occur have got to be either my frantically florid fingers fanatically flagellating false footprints in the software......or something in KDE that I don't know about. :-) |
| tuxchick Aug 24, 2011 6:36 AM EDT |
Quoting: frantically florid fingers fanatically flagellating false footprints I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s mate, And I’m only plucking pheasants ’cause the pheasant plucker’s late. I've been waiting a long time for an excuse to say that :D |
| Ridcully Aug 24, 2011 8:42 AM EDT |
I positively refuse to say that one aloud.......possibly because my lamentably lethargic lips loudly lucidating libidinous language as typified by the words quoted above would totally destroy my pristine and snowy white character..... :-) |
| nikkels Aug 24, 2011 11:05 AM EDT |
Kde4 is so darn good, that I just last week re-installed kde3 ( Pardus kurumsal2 ) Now I can do some real work I am actually refering more to Konqueror than the rest of the OS Oh, and I know my way around KDE4, don't worry about that. |
| Steven_Rosenber Aug 24, 2011 4:41 PM EDT |
Not to get all "way back when" on you, but tuxchick's musings on GNOME in Ubuntu made me think back to good ol' Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which to me was a great example of GNOME on the desktop. At the time, and for quite a bit of time thereafter, I considered it the best way to run GNOME. Ubuntu was very much committed to GNOME at the time. |
| Ridcully Aug 24, 2011 5:42 PM EDT |
Has anyone seriously used Trinity KDE as an alternative to either Gnome3 or KDE4 ? I'd very much like to see their comments. |
| helios Aug 24, 2011 11:33 PM EDT |
@ Ridcully Mark Van Kingsley has remastered a KDE3.5.11 version for HeliOS. It is the Trinity version. Download link follows: Be warned...it's a big-un. http://www.sidneyopensource.com/data_pages/helios/van71.iso |
| nikkels Aug 25, 2011 12:37 AM EDT |
Has anyone seriously used Trinity KDE as an alternative to either Gnome3 or KDE4 ? I'd very much like to see their comments. Ridcully Yes, I had the kubuntu-trinity kde 3.5.12 version on my computer for a few months. I was actually " shocked " to see how well it worked. However Pardus was installed and configured for what I wanted to do with it at that time , and I needed nothing more of KDE, so I eventually replaced it with some other distro ( to play with on a rainy day. ) But I am very much tempted to install it again on a spare partition and have another good look again |
| Ridcully Aug 25, 2011 5:14 AM EDT |
For Helios..........thanks muchly...........I have now downloaded your iso file (3.1Gbytes) and will be very interested in trialling the software......This is gonna be interesting..... I loved KDE3.5, but essentially, I work with KDE4.3.........there is a subtle difference. Again, my very deep thanks. |
| nikkels Aug 25, 2011 8:02 AM EDT |
Helios I am downloading as well. Just curious what's the difference or what is special about it |
| ComputerBob Aug 25, 2011 10:30 AM EDT |
Quoting:Helios I am downloading as well. Just curious what's the difference or what is special about itThat might have been a good question to ask BEFORE downloading its 3.1 GB iso. |
| helios Aug 25, 2011 11:09 AM EDT |
it is geared to kids with a good number of games and apps. Many of the kids we install for do not or will not have internet for quite a while. The program selection gives them stuff to do without Internet. It also has all the prop stuff like flash and java already in there with the other "no-no" codecs and stuff. |
| nikkels Aug 25, 2011 7:45 PM EDT |
hat might have been a good question to ask BEFORE downloading its 3.1 GB iso. On a way yes, but,I have the time, I have the space, I have unlimited dowload, and I suspected it was kids orientated. And with Kids I deal a lot.Got 14 under 12's in the family. But a good remark anyway @Helios Thanks. It completed during the night. Will try tomorrow |
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