Submitted by KDE has released a development snapshot of KDE 4, ironically named “Krash”. Nothing much to see for users, but should help kickstart porting and development.
First Development Snapshot of KDE4 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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KDE4 has always interested me. The process and style of thinking you see from developers and teaser-news stories on Solid/Plasma really reminds me of the rediscovery process Gnome went through. After people complained of Gnome’s bloat and lack of usability their developers went back to the drawing board and focused on the correct solution, not propping up the current one. This appears to be what the KDE developers have been doing, but on a much larger scale. I look forward to seeing KDE4 stabilize.
Better watch out Gnome devs, a new Krew is in town.
The difference between the GNOME 2.4/2.6 “reset” and the KDE4 development cycle is that the latter is much more ambitious. GNOME stripped out a lot of functionality in the process of cleaning up the platform and establishing the HIG. KDE4 wants to be a brand new platform with new functionality.
I think it will be great when it arrives, but somehow I doubt that “Vista timeframe” is a realistic goal for KDE4, even though this is very much a moving target…
If the KDE4 platform is so great that they can release a stable desktop by January/February 2007, then GNOME is in for a world of hurt.
A world of hurt? I am sorry to tell you this, but there are people like me who abslutely hate kde(hate is a very strong word, just trying to get the point across). I dont know why I dislike it so much, but gnome just feels like home, and kde feels chaotic(it just feels so disorganized, to me).
Likewise. I’ve got zero interest in switching over to KDE at this point.
I seriously doubt the major GNOME-centric OSes will be in a hurry to change direction either.
>> “I seriously doubt the major GNOME-centric OSes will be in a hurry to change direction either.”
If that is the case, and _if_ (it’s a big ‘if’) KDE4 turns out to be something really good, that will only prove they’re supporting Gnome for political reasons and to push their own agendas, not because they’re interested in their users and in quality software.
If that happens, I will be very disappointed. Maybe I’m just being naive, but I would expect things in the free software world to be better and more honest than that.
If that is the case, and _if_ (it’s a big ‘if’) KDE4 turns out to be something really good, that will only prove they’re supporting Gnome for political reasons and to push their own agendas, not because they’re interested in their users and in quality software.
Today, switching desktop platforms is like switching the OS, so you don’t just swap them out every few releases. Red Hat has been GNOME from the start, Ubuntu even was built around GNOME (but there is Kubuntu) and Novell most likely won’t do another 180 anytime soon. Besides, there is still the licensing (which might fall under “political reasons” if you want). Then again, if Qt wouldn’t be GPL and under tight control of Trolltech, Trolltech probably wouldn’t exist to spend all that money on the most important KDE library. KDE has Trolltech who put almost all their manpower into KDE related work and GNOME has companies like Red Hat, Novell and Sun each putting a small part of their manpower into GNOME related work. You can’t have everything.
If that is the case, and _if_ (it’s a big ‘if’) KDE4 turns out to be something really good, that will only prove they’re supporting Gnome for political reasons and to push their own agendas, not because they’re interested in their users and in quality software.
That’s a spin on it.
A more realistic view is that jumping to new software immediately on it’s release isn’t something that would sit well with their customer base at all.
If that is the case, and _if_ (it’s a big ‘if’) KDE4 turns out to be something really good, that will only prove they’re supporting Gnome for political reasons and to push their own agendas, not because they’re interested in their users and in quality software.
Ok, let’s keep things in perspective though.
There is not a single “Gnome-centric” distro out there that does not include KDE support. And Gnome will continue to be the desktop of choice for community distros, KDE will continue to be the choice for commercial distros.
Gnome offers distro packagers like Red Hat and Novell a couple of business advantages that KDE doesn’t: a) tighter control over the DE and the ability to customize it, witness Novell and Red Hat’s differing interpretations of the “Gnome Desktop” and b) A revenue stream from development support on GTK that isn’t available with Qt since commercial support is provided by Tt. Both companies offer annual developer support for Gtk that is more expensive than Tt charges for Qt, something to keep in mind.
Still, Red Hat has supported KDE for a long time now, whether it’s the default desktop is immaterial as long as customers receive the same support level from Red Hat as they would with Gnome. And they will.
And Novell is still the biggest single contributor to KDE, in terms of developers and commitment. They underwrote the last KDE4 development meeting, for instance, and some of the changes being made to KDE for 10.2 are with an eye to KDE4. Novell’s even going to be implementing Kickstart, a KDE-native version of the Gnome slab from SLED, based on some of the discussions around upcoming changes in KDE4. I’ve heard rumblings that Novell is also interested in the portability of Qt/KDE4 to Windows and OS X as a cross-platform application and development framework, though with mono’s grip on Novell who knows.
And among other “Gnome-Centric” distros, Kubuntu is participating in KDE4 development as well.
So really, nothing will change. The Gnome distros will continue to offer and support KDE, and even most of the KDE distros offer Gnome as an option. There will be much bandwagon jumping from casual users in the Gnome camp who like shiny new things, just as there were bandwagon jumpers from KDE who got tired of waiting for the next new thing. I’m just happy to see that Novell will likely continue to offer one of the premiere KDE desktops, despite rumours to the otherwise.
While I agree with your post, there was one thing I wanted to address:
Gnome offers distro packagers like Red Hat and Novell a couple of business advantages that KDE doesn’t: a) tighter control over the DE and the ability to customize it, witness Novell and Red Hat’s differing interpretations of the “Gnome Desktop”
Actually KDE is a lot easier to configure than Gnome: most of it can be altered by editing configuration files, including menu structures and names, and then there configuration of the usual stuff such as the panel and the look and feel. The stuff in the KDE Control Centre is only the tip of the iceberg. What’s more, a lot of distributers will simply find themselves disabling existing functionality, instead of adding new functionality (this is what KUbuntu has done).
In comparison, most changes to Gnome require programming: even changing the colour-scheme for a theme requires a lot of work. So in that regard KDE is preferable.
Besides this there is one other reason why KDE should be appreciated by distributors: it has a clear and unambigous road-map. It is very hard to say where Gnome will be in 18 months; in comparison it is quite easy to see where KDE is going.
I don’t really care for it either. This is an excerpt from a post I wrote exactly a year ago today:
Using some KDE apps for the first time is like trying to interpret ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics: “uh, it’s a man pointing in both directions, and next to that there’s a magnifying glass with footprints around it, and then a really big down arrow… what does it mean?”
Ah, the memories…
A world of hurt? I am sorry to tell you this, but there are people like me who abslutely hate kde(hate is a very strong word, just trying to get the point across). I dont know why I dislike it so much, but gnome just feels like home, and kde feels chaotic(it just feels so disorganized, to me).
I am sorry to tell you this, but there are people like me who abslutely hate gnome(hate is a very strong word, just trying to get the point across). I dont know why I dislike it so much, but kde just feels like home, and gnome feels chaotic(it just feels so disorganized, to me).
This whole thing is pointless. Us kde people won’t easily get excited by gnome relase announcements, you gnome people are the same regarding kde. Still, when something is happening on side A, someone from side B always starts smacking side A down with some useless pretext. If someone raises an issue which he hates and that issue is something which the other side loves, that can lead only to beating.
well, you can’t argue with hate, simple. no matter how much more advanced KDE is and will be…
Kind of sad really… people use such strong emotions over something as trivial as a DE.
well, i can understand it in some ways. if YOU know something is far superior (wether that is true or not), it’s irritating to see others use something inferior and be happy…
Maybe that is due to the bad KDE support from RedHat.
I think Desktop Environments are irrelevant nowadays. They are good enough and just need consolidation. The future is a mix anyway. What annoys me a lot is the dirty plattform promotion of certain Gnome advocates.
egash, re redhat… I’ve known for a while now that redhat does not like kde (I also know some inside stories (take em for what you will) of rather dirty politicking on redhat’s part regarding their kde “support,” such as them intentionally breaking it in the past, not renewing the work visas of their former kde developpers (who were largely european) instead just firing them/laying them off), but trying the last fc5 release had me thinking “why don’t they just drop this”. it’s obvious they don’t care to put their polish on it like gnome, and really don’t want their users using it.
as a kde user, I obviously disagree, but totally dropping it, and letting it live in fedora extras under community control seems to really make more sense at this point.
Hrm, on the developer side I’d say its the exact opposite of what you described from my personal experience.
I’m sure they could manage a stable desktop, but would it be as cool, new, and usable as they’ve said on their ad websites? I doubt they can even figure out a cool design, much less figure it out, design it, and implement it within the next 7 months.
I’d think that maybe they could have something this time next year if they really work fast, and certainly by Vista SP1 (which is when Enterprise will largely be willing to adopt Vista).
I’ve just switched off KDE 3 to Gnome (kwin picked the wrong day to crash, seriously, it just irritated me too much that day because of other bad programs crashing: Eclipse+CDT).
And I must say, after ignoring a few releases of Gnome it’s really gotten nice. I’d tried most of the releases, but not for more than a couple days. 2.14 is really noticeably more polished: Nautilus browser is usable, for the first time I’ve seen. Gedit, for example, works with Nautilus over ssh (and the UI for it is good, unlike KDE’s). Unfortunately, just about nothing other than Gedit works with Nautilus over ssh, and even Gedit only seems to work if you d&d.
It’s still missing some features, like dual head wallpaper control, but what is there is really nice. And I like that attitude. I’ve had feature packed and sometimes thrown together, and I think I’m liking feature-starved but rarely broken.
Anyway, I’m excited to see what the KDE devs come up with for interface changes in version 4. I hope they have something somewhat similar to e17’s idea of making every module independent, ie, no panel.
I doubt they can even figure out a cool design, much less figure it out, design it, and implement it within the next 7 months.
Thinking and working about and on kde4 is being done for a while, it’s not just starting today. Maybe they’ll not finish it in x months, still, at least they didn’t PR us with countless useless dates.
Er, I don’t know if this is the problem you were having, but on some slightly outdated versions of KDE, pressing Alt-Tab on an empty workspace when the “Show window list” option is checked will result in a crash.
This bug has been fixed in the current version of KDE. Even if you can’t upgrade, you can disable the “Show window list” option to avoid crashes. Yeah, it’s annoying, but at least it doesn’t crash.
On a side note, I think it’s interesting that you picked gedit and Nautilus of examples for how GNOME shines. Konqueror is an amazingly capable piece of software; basically, any kind of document that you can view with some KDE tool, you can view in Konqueror, and it also has a very fast HTML engine. (And it doesn’t matter whether you’re accessing that document locally, over the web, over FTP, over gopher… it works the same.)
kwrite, is as small, compact, and fast (if you have the KDE libraries loaded) as gedit, while also supporting over a hundred syntax highlighting modes, six different indenters (with an option to disable them all), and as much customization as any text editor short of vim/emacs. And the best part is, because the text editor is actually the Kate KPart, anywhere that you have a rich text editor in KDE, you have all those options.
While I agree with you that KDE interfaces can be cluttered sometimes, I think that most of the clutter can be minimized (for example, by enabling Mac OS-style menubars). And this is one of the main priorities for KDE4, so there’s nowhere to go but up.
I use KDE exclusively(and I love it) in my Suse 10.1 installation with KDE upgraded to 3.5.4. IMHO as a browser Konqueror is the worst. I get connection timed out as I browse many sites within 3-4 levels. It does lot of hiccups in mail.yahoo.com, http://www.hotmail.com.
All these sites work fine in FF, Opera 9, Flock .7 beta and SeaMonkey 1.01.
As a file manager it is good, but as a browser I just cannot imagine how this piece of software can be mentioned with the likes of Opera, FF and in Windows even IE.
I have used Konqui from version 3.4.3 in Suse 10 and 3.5.1 and 3.5.4 in Suse 10.1 and 3.5.3 in Mepis 6.0. In all the three of them issues remain.
I get connection timed out as I browse many sites within 3-4 levels. It does lot of hiccups in mail.yahoo.com, http://www.hotmail.com.
It’s mostlikely not a Konqueror problem at all, it sounds like a very common problem with IPv6. Somewhere along your network route, there is something not handling IPv6 very well. Try disabling IPv6, and you will get a noticeable improvement.
How do I disable IPv6?
How do I disable IPv6?
In KDE, simply by setting KDE_NO_IPV6 “Set this variable to disable IPv6 support / IPv6 DNS lookups.”
There are also more distro spesific ways to do it, try google for the solution fitting your distro.
GNOME stripped out a lot of functionality in the process of cleaning up the platform and establishing the HIG.
I really can’t use Gnome apps because of MIG based file open/close dialog- yes M stands for Mutant. And KDE got some bashing from me also: Replace that damn menueditor with something useful- this piece of s*** is broken almost a year and noone is working on it! And please, don’t use hardcoded config options in KDE- sometimes changing some option is PITA- you newer know where these config options is stored (I referring to ugly “default” serif fonts conf- replace them with DejaVu or something). KsCD don’t know how to use digital audio extraction- who the hell in these days use audiocable anymore?! This Noatun thingy- what is it- show me ONE person who use it? Some harsh words about Kmail: most annoying, buggy mail klient I ever used im my entire life (30)- worse than opera built in mail. I lost more mail-s with it than is tolerable. But I use it and file bugreports until this damn thing is working fine. It can’t render css correctly, imap implementation sucks, why the hell I have to configure my sent mail manually to stored in correct folder with imap- is it sooooo hard to store it in current sent folder of current account? It is impossible to use any anti-spam tools without killing valid mails- I mark mail likes “not spam”- but it got marked as spam again after couple of seconds and moved to spam folder…. KDE developers use their software or what- never had those obvious bugs in Mozilla Suite and SeaMonkey. Better FIX BUGS and then start working on KDE4 mockups.
These things irritates me most and make me wanna use Mac OS X but I still use KDE because it got potential and make me feel at home with operating system- my default desktops are all PC-BSD based.
I really can’t use Gnome apps because of MIG based file open/close dialog- yes M stands for Mutant.
I think it’s funny that I hear a lot of complaints about the GTK file selector dialogs not once have I heard something about OS X, and the two are basically the same. What’s even funnier is to read that you want to use OS X.
Anyway, the dialogs in GTK 2.10 are slightly different, making the Ctrl+L feature discoverable. Give it a try if you can.
These things irritates me most and make me wanna use Mac OS X but I still use KDE[..]
I believe that’s called masochism.
…well all I really want is those great-looking Oxygen icons.
No artwork preview, just backend, so you will not be able to see an Oxygen preview.
I look forward to KDE 4.0. If anything, it is going to be really interesting considering that KDE 4.0 is built using Qt 4.0 library
Yeah, it’s always great when desktop projects release a desktop that was actually built with the development platform it ships with. You’d think that would be obvious, but then again there’s Vista…
No, it is built using Qt 4.2, not 4.0.
I look forward to KDE 4.0. If anything, it is going to be really interesting considering that KDE 4.0 is built using Qt 4.0 library
True, there is some amazing stuff in Qt4 and it will be interesting to see what the KDE developers do with it.
But to me as a user, KDE 4 is not yet that interesting really. Given the quality and stability of KDE 3.5 series, and it’s still increasing according to svn::talk pages. Lots of small fixes still going inn. And more important are the amount of high quality 3rd party applications for KDE3, which is still developed at a amazing rate. Improvements and new releases comming in a steady stream. Some upcoming highlights are new releases of applications like digiKam, K3b, BasKet Note Pads, Filelight and not to forget the KOffice suite.
With the KDE bundled applications and others like KBarcode, KTorrent, Tellico, Kdissert, KMyMoney, TaskJuggler, Rosegarden, k9copy, Eric3, kdar, KoverArtist and KTechlab to mention a few. And not forgetting all the stuff done with Kommander, KDE3 is still a exiting platform with a incredible amount of great tools.
You forgot LMMS
Which makes me wonder, will applications developed using Qt 3.x work in KDE 4.0 ? I mean is Qt backward compatible?
Which makes me wonder, will applications developed using Qt 3.x work in KDE 4.0 ? I mean is Qt backward compatible?
From my understanding, Qt isn’t entirely backward compatible, but Qt3 and Qt4 can exist on the same system so there shouldn’t be an issue.
there is a qt3support thing in Qt4 which will support Qt3 apps. and not sure about this, but afaik there is also a KDE3support layer which will support kde3 apps.
qt3support and kde3support are intended to help you porting code from 3 to 4 by providing classes/widgets/… that were removed between 3 and 4 to ease the burden of porting. That’s said building a Qt3(/KDE3) with Qt4(/KDE4) still need some work, and is only usefull if you needed the new features provided by the new plateform.
That’s said, Qt3 applications can run alongside Qt4 ones, and there is some work done in KDE4 to ensure that KDE3 application still work nicely inside a KDE4 environment.
That’s up to your distributor. For backwords compatibility they just have to have qt3 and kdelibs3 installed alongside qt4 and kdelibs4. They shouldn’t have any problems doing this, as they did exactly that when KDE 2 was first released, and again when KDE 3 was released.
As regards source compatibility, KDE and Qt have some special compatibility wrappers to help people porting software, but in general it’s better to go completely 4.0: there are significant benefits in terms of code cleaniness to be had by the switch.
> KDE 4.0 is built using Qt 4.0 library
Actually, it’s currently built against the QT 4.1 library and will be delivered most likely with QT 4.2.
Seconds out; round 328!
In the blue corner, weighing in at 205 pounds – GNOME! He’s certainly the more agile of the two, with considerably greater speed. There have been doubts about whether he has enough tools and power to stay competitive with his opponent, though. He is certainly the promoters favourite, however, and has consequently attracted more in the way of sponsorship. The main power brokers in the business are certainly getting behind this one. Preferred taunt of opponent: ‘Bloaty Man’.
In the red corner, the crowd favourite, weighing in at 325 pounds – KDE! He clearly has the weight advantage, but of course he isn’t the speediest in the ring and may get caught wrong-footed if he’s not careful. He also has more tricks up his sleeve than his opponent – but how many of them are really useful and how many are just for showing off? Many have remarked on his resemblance to the former champion from Redmond (who was sadly stripped of his title for match-fixing), but he claims to be no relation. A lot of the old hands in the business say he is the one to beat. Preferred taunt of opponent: ‘Pretty Boy’.
Well, it’s certainly been a tedious and in many ways pointless fight! Just when it seemed that someone was gaining the upper hand, the other fought back and it still seems to be pretty much level overall. It may have to be decided on points, but there has been much controversy over the alleged bias of the judges, with both fighters’ supporters accusing them of siding with their opponent.
Well, it’s time to cut to a commercial break, but don’t worry as there is no doubt that this fight is going to run and run..
Edited 2006-08-19 04:26
GNOME with considerably greater speed than KDE? Which GNOME version is that, GNOME 1.4?
GNOME with considerably greater speed than KDE? Which GNOME version is that, GNOME 1.4?
I don’t really see much difference in terms of speed or memory usage when I run KDE 3.x or GNOME 2.x, so I agree with you on this one.
… I’m a KDE user (and minor packager) but on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 7000 with 256MB) GNOME runs just fine (though a bit low) and KDE swaps like crazy making it unusable.
-However-, the more memory the machine has, (especially when you pass the 1GB mark) KDE becomes much faster then GNOME.
You’ll be amazed at how fast KDE runs when your workstation has four cores and 8GB of memory
Edited 2006-08-19 14:35
You’ll be amazed at how fast KDE runs when your workstation has four cores and 8GB of memory
I know you were saying this as a joke, but I really find the “memory/hard drive/processors are so cheap, why bother with efficient code” mentality to be worrisome. For many people, computers are becoming a disposible item. Part of this is fueled by the companies like Dell who will sell you a crappy computer for $299. This computer will quickly be outdated, but you can always get another one for next to nothing. Corporations lease computers for their employees so that upgrading is a much more hassle free process, etc.
Part of this “disposible consumption” of computers can be attributed to software designers. On opensuse 10.0, Open Office was a 250 meg install – I remember when MS Office fit on a few floppies. Most of these added features are worthless crap, but coders added them because people had the extra memeory/processor cycles/hard drive space. When I spend over $1,000 on my laptop, I want it to last. For me, a computer has value because it allows me to get work done. Ever increasing software requirements slowly reduce my computer’s ability to get work done.
This is where KDE 4 is important. Supposedly, KDE 4 will have reworked, full featured desktop that has less requirements than the 3.5 series. Now, this remains to be seen; but if this is true, then this is a most welcome advancement. Of course, there are other things I can do while waiting for KDE 4: one of these days, I’ll get around to trying out XFCE or Fluxbox; there are also distros like CentOS or Ubuntu LTS which will allow to get all the security updates without having to install a more bloated version of the software in question.
“I know you were saying this as a joke, but I really find the “memory/hard drive/processors are so cheap, why bother with efficient code” mentality to be worrisome. For many people, computers are becoming a disposible item. Part of this is fueled by the companies like Dell who will sell you a crappy computer for $299. This computer will quickly be outdated, but you can always get another one for next to nothing. Corporations lease computers for their employees so that upgrading is a much more hassle free process, etc. “
Actually, I was kidding.
I write Linux/BSD/Windows network drivers/services in C for a living and I’ve been known to spend weeks writing some obscene __ASM code just because it’s 15% faster then comparable C code
I too, find it obscene that I can use a 100$ SBC machine based around a 5 y/o P3 to multiple GbE links worth of raw network traffic, but the same machine will die on the spot if I try running OpenOffice (or Microsoft Office for that matter) on it.
Heck, I’m old enough to remember running full blown applications of a cassette recorder
Having said all that, KDE 3.5 is indeed faster and lighter on resources then KDE 3.4 and the same goes for GNOME 2.4.14/16. Hopefully, this trend will continue.
Gilboa
This is where KDE 4 is important. Supposedly, KDE 4 will have reworked, full featured desktop that has less requirements than the 3.5 series.
Qt4 basically does was Qt3 did faster and with less code; the devs saw significant performance improvements when using Qt4, all other things being equal. Maybe it’s semantics, but I don’t know that I would go as far as to say the requirements will be lower, however I do expect users will see a noticeable performance boost and lower resource useage, particularly on less-powerful machines. That’s pretty significant.
In the red corner, the crowd favourite, weighing in at 325 pounds – KDE! He clearly has the weight advantage, but of course he isn’t the speediest in the ring …
… hold on, amazing … he has a lot more speed than tonight’s opponent after all … must have been on a secret training camp
I am very much looking forward to native ports of my favourite KDE apps on Windows & OSX.
I am forced to use these platforms at work but if I can get some of my favourite userland KDE tools working regardless of platform that will definitely leverage the platform.
Come to think of it, when these apps become available for any platform it could help Linux too. Once users become familiar with these tools it could entice them to convert when they are up for a wkstn renewel.
Can we stop with the KDE is too slow, too bloated, doesn’t feel feel right to me crap. Its not stable, come on, for 95% of the people using it is just as stable if not more than any other DE. Maybe you’ve screwed it up! Why all the FUD??
We get it. You use Gnome, you don’t like KDE.
So what does you post contribute? You haven’t even seen/tried the 4.0 series and so many feel the need to post how Gnome is better than the current 3.5 KDE.
Get a life Gnome users, you are sounding more and more like Windows users.
You have a DE you like so what’s the problem?
Get a life Gnome users
Write a sentence like “Better watch out KDE devs, a new Grew is in town” as the first comment in a GNOME news and see what happens. Meta-flaming isn’t any better.
How pathetic!
“Get a life Gnome users, you are sounding more and more like Windows users. ”
now that’s an offense lol.
one thing i can’t understand, i mean, ok, /me windows user, but i’ve used ubuntu kubuntu and opensuse(with kde) for more than a month(i had the time so i kept jumping from distro to distro, my work was subversioned), and i felt KDE was much faster and useful than gnome, the ‘start menu’, ‘autoplay’, customization options, file explorer, konkeror is far superior to nautilus, the tabs, sidebars, powerful context menus, drag and drop.
Yet, many people hate KDE despite the obvious superiority(imho), is it because it is tagged as a windows-user preferencial DE?
btw, have you ever booted an ubuntu live cd on a PIII 733, 128RAM, TNT2? it is quite funny.
Edited 2006-08-19 13:57
Yet, many people hate KDE despite the obvious superiority(imho), is it because it is tagged as a windows-user preferencial DE?
No, that was a couple of years ago. Before that it was the licensing dogma. Nowadays most of the hate centers around the superiority of Gnome’s HIG. Now that KDE is addressing user interface for KDE4, they’ll find something else the zealously ostracize.
KDE’s interface isn’t perfect, the default settings are pretty clunky. Still, even as it is, thanks to the Kiosk framework it’s fairly easy to create saner defaults, you can reduce toolbar options and menu settings. Kubuntu did something similar in an effort to create a cleaner interface.
The sad thing is that most of the actual “hate” against KDE comes from people that have never actually used it for more than a few minutes. Complaints about bloat and complexity generally indicate they never took the time to actually understand the power and advantages of the underlying platform. When you scan through the dev blogs or mailing lists, it’s always impressive to find someone programming for KDE for the first time and how amazed they are at discovering how powerful the framework is and how quickly they can put together powerful applications without having to re-invent the wheel for common requirements. That’s a good thing for us as users, since it leads to better applications.
Plus the other thing that is often overlooked is addressing a poor user interface is a much easier problem to solve than addressing a missing underlying framework for true application integration.
Anyways, I don’t care if people don’t like KDE. Gnome is certainly a powerful desktop in it’s own right, and though I don’t choose to use it, I am interested in following it’s development, and I think a strong Gnome and a strong KDE is vital for the success of desktop linux because I believe whole-heartedly that choice is the thing.
What I don’t like is when people from either camp seem to slag the other desktop automatically whenever it is mentioned. You don’t have to like it, but at least don’t criticize it unless you’ve truly used it. Because only at that point is the criticism valid. Anything else is just noise. It’s fairly safe to tune out anyone calling KDE bloated the way you can tune out anyone calling Gnome simplistic, since in both cases it demonstrates a lack of understanding.
I do think productive competition and introspection between the two sides is good, I think zealotry gets nobody anywhere.
Just my 2c…
You know, when KDE 4 is released I just wonder what reasons some people are going to come up with for saying something negative about it? A mess of options? It’s not ‘clean’? ‘Clean’ is a word I’ve heard a lot of from many people, but I’m still not certain what it means.
They’ll probably tell us that it is irrelevant how good KDE 4 is because the ‘big distributors’ who are *cough* selling *cough* their ‘enterprise distributions’ are all using Gnome.
I’ve experienced Gnome’s HIG first hand in Ubuntu for the past few months, and I have to say I’m shocked. In KDE or Windows when I change my theme I am used to having an application of sufficient functionality so I can see the preview of a theme should I customise it, with the colours, style and window decoration I use. Do I get that with Gnome? No I don’t. All I get are a few checkboxes on a handful of very small applet windows. There’s countless examples of many Gnome applications that don’t follow their own HIG, quite clearly.
You know why Gnome is so clean and straightforward for ‘ordinary users’? Because it simply doesn’t do anything, that’s why. For someone used to KDE, or Windows or even the Mac (which is supposed to be Gnome’s role model) it is seriously lacking in functionality.
I hate to bring this up under an article about KDE, but it wouldn’t be so bad if any of these points that are continually brought up had a purpose or were actually true. They’re so not it’s just laughable.
Edited 2006-08-19 21:06
I use KDE exclusively but I’m not so sure I’m as hyped about KDE 4 anymore. I just haven’t heard a word about stuff like Solid and Tenor lately (and very little about Plasma, though that’s the one of the three I can imagine coming together). All the progress so far seems to be in porting to Qt4. That’s important of course, but when that’s all there seems to be so far, with the high concept Tenors and Solids acting vapourish, it isn’t that compelling.
Maybe that’s just a reflection of how satisfied I am with 3.5. If KDE 4 manages to be even better, I guess that’s cool.
At least if there’s a preview out, we can guess the porting is starting to finish up and maybe now they can focus on some of the higher concepts that have been so hyped. Or maybe they already are, in which case please, let us know more about it!
Until then, I’ll be happy with 3.5 and the constant refinements thereto.
I just haven’t heard a word about stuff like Solid and Tenor lately (and very little about Plasma, though that’s the one of the three I can imagine coming together). All the progress so far seems to be in porting to Qt4.
Porting to Qt4 is finished in the sense that everything compiles and links with Qt4.
There will still be some changes one could name porting in the sense that Qt4 includes new possibilites, soemthimes things KDE3 had extensions for, which can now be used in favor over KDE specific code.
Subprojects which focus on new technology an frameworks like Solid or Phonon, are progresing alongside the general porting efforts since their “all new” status allows them to code more or less independently from everything other than the absolut core libraries.
The weekly commit digest posted on dot.kde.org usually contains an overview of the work done at those frontiers and people specifically interested in some of them can watch the respective mailinglists, which are usually very low traffic but give the lurker a very close view on the implementation progress
“Mad about KDE4”, the situation i see now. Probaby all comments like “KDE4 will rock! I can’t wait for it!” gets 5 points in OSAlert lightning-fast
KDE-look.org started new KDE brainstorm category for mockups and ideas. Everybody just adores that nonexistant product 
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looking forward to KDE4
nice to see Novell is still providing so much support to KDE
interesting to hear about Kickstart; the KDE version of the Gnome ‘Slab’.
i suppose it is too much to hope for KDE4 in SUSE 10.2?
New version of KDE, hmm, and a native windows port, sounds great for me.