Submitted by “KDE 4 is coming. It’s starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction as to what you should expect from the brand new KDE that is due out later this year.” Lots of screenshots too.
Well, it wasnt relly much in the article, mostly the looks of KDE and the new menu… nothing about plasma(other than brief mentioning of plasmoids) or phonon, from a technical POW.
I just switched to fluxbox today, from kde3, and Im really excited to se how kde4 will turn out, when released:)
If they have to steal a look for a theme i wished they would steal something tasteful, not the Vista look. I’m off to go wash my eyes out with acetone and pray that this won’t be the default theme.
You must be blind sir, or never used vista before. That looks *nothing* like it.
Really.
Black is beautiful, OS X has it aswell in iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom for instance. Inquisitor aswell.
I agree with you, black is beautiful compared to white.
People that says “black is like vista” are probably Windows haters, then if we choose white they will complain that it looks like Mac OS, people always complains.
I hope Oxygen will stay with Black and wont go with something else because the haters of Vista says “black is like vista”.
Edited 2007-10-15 02:02
Yeah, Apple has started using black in most of their apps, especially when they have to do things like transparent windows. Logic for example uses black transparent windows to showcase their plethora of plugins and third part AUs. It works rather well, it frames the necessary window and the black keeps everything readable and coherent. White is not a good color for transparent windows, imo. I have to admit that when I first used Vista I was suckered in by the pretty GUI. It sure is pretty on first glance, not so much when you use it everyday and see the glitches that should have been addressed before it was released, but its still nice nonetheless.
” It’s starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop.”
AND
“The taskbar, despite the fact it was on the bar, didn’t display processes and all the effort I made to add any applets or the pager was in vain, resulting with a complete crash of the bar: succession was only met with the placement the Kickoff menubar.”
These two statements just do not fit together.
That said, I am really looking forward to the final version.
Edited 2007-10-14 16:23
These two statements just do not fit together.
I don’t know. The two bugs he mentions aren’t really going to prevent you from getting work done. As long as you know they exist you can work around them. Now it is obviously unacceptable for a release product, but if you want to test KDE4 and are willing to put up with a few of these annoyances it is perfectly useable for day to day work for a user willing to test out an alpha project.
KDE 4 is looking more polished than ever, thanks for the hard work.
Whats with the “Desktop toolbox”? Is this going to be there in the final release?
Other than that it is starting to look good. Too bad KDE seem to be a second-class citizen in many of the large distros like Fedora and (K)Ubuntu.
“Whats with the “Desktop toolbox”? Is this going to be there in the final release?”
It was actually replaced very, very recently with a slightly less ugly semi-circle with an icon in it in the top-right corner of the desktop, although I hope a better solution will be found eventually. You can see a picture in one of Fred’s screenshots here.
http://files.fredemmott.co.uk/ss-20071014.jpg
“Too bad KDE seem to be a second-class citizen in many of the large distros like Fedora and (K)Ubuntu.”
Indeed
It’s a crazy world, but whaddya gonna do? 
“It was actually replaced very, very recently with a slightly less ugly semi-circle with an icon in it in the top-right corner of the desktop, although I hope a better solution will be found eventually. You can see a picture in one of Fred’s screenshots here.”
I would still prefer to not have it on the desktop at all, because in my opinion this feature should not be used very often. Perhaps on the context menu or something would be better. How often do you use this anyway? Once or twice to configure the look of your desktop and then never again?
IIRC, it’s there for debugging purposes, so you can easily test out the various plasmoids, and won’t be present (in anything like its current form) in the final version.
yes, there’s a little circle area. it’s still ugly, though, as i have done exactly nothing to style it. once it’s all working nicely it’ll have a nice translucent gradient (glassish) with a tasteful border edge for contrast.
first function (designed with style in mind, of course), and then style. finish carpentry is called that for a reason
But what are the reason for having it visible at all times? Will there be any way of making it transparent/invisible? I prefer to keep a clean and clear desktop with as little icons/functions as possible. That is why I am using Gnome at the moment. These are the kind of details that I care about (its weird but true).
Well, then, why do you want a desktop at all? Why not use a fullscreen picture, or even turn of your monitor??? Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler than that, right?
Was that really necessary? I think you understand why you are being unreasonable now if you think about it.
Not agreeing is fine, but ranting like that are really uncalled for.
I’m sorry, that was a bit rude. Yet – what exactly do you want from your desktop? You just want it to be there, being pretty? Why not try and make it useful – that’s what we’re trying to do here.
I would guess, at least regarding Ubuntu, that KDE is considered to “complex”, for their easy-to-use desktops for newcomers.
It actually has to do more with the licence of the widget kit – and the naive assumption that if they don’t have a ‘developer friendly licence’ such as the LGPL, no developer will write applications for their said operating system. Given that no commercial application vendor has yet come to *NIX, I don’t see the whole point of ‘shunning KDE’.
For me, I’m excited about KDE 4 appearing on Solaris. I love GNOME to pieces but I much rather prefer running KDE with Amarok, Kopete and hopefully KOffice 2.0 will appear as well. Its a huge step forward in the world of open source desktop applications.
Within a few years I hope that we’ll be saying, “Adobe who?” when it comes to applications – that open source applications will get to the point where people move to *NIX and don’t actually care if their ‘big names’ aren’t there, because the replacement applications are superior and at the right price – free
Edited 2007-10-14 17:15
Well, more “closed-source developer friendly”.
It’s a tragedy really. When will people realize that two toolkits is not the end of the world. I can run Nero or Adobe Acrobat just as well on KDE as on Gnome. There just needs to be some more effort put into projects like Portland to get some consistent UI elements like file chooser dialogs.
Exactly, for years everyone was longing for apps like Nero or Adobe Acrobat on Linux. They didn’t appear for ages, and now the free alternatives have surpassed them. Why would I use Acrobat when I have KPDF, which is much faster? (aside from the 1/500 odd time when I need to edit a form, and this reason will soon disappear with okular). Why would I pay for Nero now that K3B is so damn good? The proprietary apps are late to the party and they find that while they were delaying, the OSS alternatives leapfrogged them. The more these companies hold off, the more different types of OSS apps will surpass them.
On GNOME there is the new Poppler library with Evince which supports the ability to fill out PDF forms and save them – something that would cost upwards of $80 for a copy of Adobe Acrobat to accomplish the same thing.
Nero was a great application at one stage, but if they really want to get my, they need to firstly port it to Solaris, and secondly, I want to see feature parity with Windows. If the ‘Windows ported products’ are merely a pathetic shadow of their Windows counterpart, it doesn’t provide me with much incentive to continuing to support their organisation once I move operating systems.
Poppler is what powers KDE’s okular, too. Like harfbuz, it’s a great example of collaboration in the free software world.
Poppler is a library with 2 backend : glib and Qt. So in KDE 4.0, you will can also fill out PDF forms.
Nero a great application? WTF? People bitched about KDE being too complex and having a poor UI, shit man…Nero is about the worse application I’ve ever used in both of these respects…
*shakes his head and walks away*…
Dave
Your last paragraph only makes sense with a few applications. There is still no major accounting package for the GNU/Linux platform – GNUCash is still not good enough. Office applications? OpenOffice is still not good enough. 3D manipulation/rendering? Blender is OK, but it still doesn’t compare to Maya Lightwave. There’s no decent CAM software for Linux. And The GIMP doesn’t come within cooee of Adobe Photoshop. I’m a photographer on the side, and let’s just say that the RAW applications for Linux are crap compared to the native RAW applications available for Windows and Mac platforms. Shall I keep going on?
I’m not going to even touch the games scenario, where Linux is, to be polite, crap imho.
I want Linux to succeed as much as the next geek, but it really does need the core and important applications to be ported before uptake will really occur. You can stay in your dream world if you want, and Linux won’t get much further than what it is already.
Dave
Maybe KMymoney can help you with the accounting, but yeah, there aren’t many great apps.
For RAW, you should really have a look at the KDE apps, as Krita, Digikam and Gwenview have no problems with RAW, even High-Definition 32 bit stuff.
(http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/2007/10/pigments-color-conversion…)
For RAW, you should really have a look at the KDE apps, as Krita, Digikam and Gwenview
No much help, the problem is not he application but the library, witch is libGPhoto.
Just curious, what does libGphoto have to to do with how well an app can handle raw photos? My understanding is that all gphoto does is pull the immage files off the camera in question. The processing of the images then is left to apps like dcraw, etc.
The I suppose I got the question wrong, try the apps. recomended for superstoned then.
I have, and they are far inferior to commercial RAW applications. I don’t need an inferior RAW application that introduces fringing, or noise as part of the conversion process. I’ll stick to Canon’s DPP and Phase One’s Capture One Pro, at least until they either run well under WINE, or CrossOver office, or run natively on the Linux platform.
Dave
Krita and Digikam add fringing and noise as part of the conversion process? I would ask you to file a bug if they hadn’t been working on KOffice 2.0 for 2 years, so now I’ll ask you to test KOffice 2 when it is out (by the end of this year, according to schedule)… I would be really surprised if it made a mess of your files, and even if it did, it would be fixed soon. I know the Krita developers are very much into HDR and RAW photography, and want their application to work. Same with digikam, btw.
From my experience, RAW in Linux just doesn’t look as good as RAW images under their native Windows environments (can’t say about OS X, I haven’t installed either DPP or Capture One Pro onto my mac).
Dave
The next version of krita should fix some colorspace issues that might have caused what you were talking about.
Read: http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/ for more info on that.
“3D manipulation/rendering? Blender is OK, but it still doesn’t compare to Maya Lightwave.”
Then go buy Maya for linux.
What the hell is Maya Lighwave? Do you mean Maya AND Lightwave, because those are two totally different application by two totally different companies.
Yes, you are correct, I meant Maya & Lightwave. Typo on my part, on dialup, doing lots of things on a slow connection can, and does lead to mistakes
Don’t get me wrong guys – Linux has some wonderful native applications (K3B being my fave), but it has a long way to go. I think history will prove me right in the long run – when 3rd party applications are ported to run natively on Linux (including games), then you’ll see a mass move to the Linux platform. Until then, it’ll be a 2nd rate operating system from most users point of view. I know Linux isn’t 2nd rate, but that’s how the majority of people out there (ordinary users) will see it.
Dave
It actually has to do more with the licence of the widget kit…
To be honest I think that just happens to be a convenient reason thrown around sometimes.
…and the naive assumption that if they don’t have a ‘developer friendly licence’ such as the LGPL, no developer will write applications for their said operating system.
Given that there are very, very few proprietary applications written with GTK when compared with even Qt, I have always failed to see the logic behind this reasoning. When you walk into any software vendor or organisation they will never tell you that their first priority is to find free development tools.
For me, I’m excited about KDE 4 appearing on Solaris. I love GNOME to pieces…
I would imagine that much will be made of Gnome being the default, but if experience is anything to go by, many people will just install alternatives regardless if they are good enough. Many people ditched CDE when something better came along.
There’s a lot of good abstraction stuff, like Solid, as well that should make running KDE on Solaris really rather seamless with fewer rough edges.
Within a few years I hope that we’ll be saying, “Adobe who?” when it comes to applications – that open source applications will get to the point where people move to *NIX and don’t actually care if their ‘big names’ aren’t there…
Indeed. You can’t really get easier than pre-installed. If a user double clicks a file and something opens it, they aren’t going to bother mucking about downloading Adobe PDF Reader or buying Nero.
Regarding GTK+ licensing, I guess we’ve discussed it before, but I’ll repeat that GTK+ allows creating moderately advanced GUI apps and selling them cheap and in low volume. Not so with Qt – with its hefty licensing fees, you’re either not cheap anymore or gotta sell much more copies to recoup the investment. And since the market for proprietary software is not very big in Linux, this is riskier.
Which is why Qt is mostly used by companies that want to deliver on Windows and probably OS X as well.
Doing multiplatform right away is magnitudes cheaper than having different code bases for different platforms or, in the worst case, even having different development teams.
It’s interesting that despite the claim of prohibitive licencing costs, some companies use Qt even in such unfortunate situations for just the Linux/Unix “port”, e.g. Opera, Skype.
Which is why Qt is mostly used by companies that want to deliver on Windows and probably OS X as well.
Exactly!
It’s interesting that despite the claim of prohibitive licencing costs, some companies use Qt even in such unfortunate situations for just the Linux/Unix “port”, e.g. Opera, Skype.
Is it true that Opera and Skype uses Qt just for Linux and not for Windows? That would be strange, I thought otherwise. Can you cite some references? But at least regarding Opera – it was paid-for and not really cheap (for a browser, for Christ’s sake), which only supports my take on the problem.
If you already have healthy sales of your Qt software on Windows/OS X (or at least a promising market for it), adding Linux port is not a big additional investment, and neither is it a big risk per se.
Unfortunately not. I remember reading somewhere that Skype on Windows is a Delphi based product, but I don’t have any canonical references.
Exactly! Especially since it will not be a port at all, rather just a new deployment target.
Last-century-style porting is a huge effort because one usually has to work around all kind of platform differences instead of using the common (portable) way from the very beginning.
Correct. Opera uses its own cross platform UI library for most of the interface. Qt is only used for some things like printing and the menu (and only on Linux). Skype uses Qt only on Linux. The windows version is written in Delphi, and the Mac version in Carbon/Cocoa. That’s why there is such a big difference in features between the three platforms. I think it’s completely batshit crazy, but if that floats their boat….
Unfortunately I can’t find the references for the above at the moment, you’ll just have to take my word for it, but I assure you it is true. Somewhere there are two blog entries from Opera and Skype devs saying as much.
Interesting! Thanks for the info!
or you can simply use QT without paying any license fees at all?
Sure you can, but only if your app is FOSS. The point is that GTK+ is friendly to both FOSS and proprietary sides.
But what is wrong with Trolltech trying to earn some cash if someone else tries it aswell? Is it bad to want to get paid for your products? Should everyone work for free?
Also I guess it helps getting more people to consider the GPL for their work, and therefor MORE free software, isn’t that the reason why so many people likes GPL in the first place?
I’d prefer BSD but anyway.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. But their licensing policy, which they are free to choose, has certain consequences which I have outlined above.
Lets say for most proprietary use cases. It’s not as good if you want to statically link it because this requires you to ship relinkable object files for the proprietary parts.
i don’t think that’s true. I do some custom software development on the side, and I know that my last two project’s wouldn’t have been possible without Qt. Sure, I could have used GTK, but it would have taken far longer (all the advanced functionality I need is in Qt and not in GTK) and I would have to charge far more (since I’m charging per hour). I doubt if I could have made the sale had I quoted twice my price (these are small < $5000 contracts). For those, I used the open source version of Qt, because it really didn’t make a difference to me or my client. Now I’ve got a bigger contract, and I’m buying a license to Qt. As a small business, I only pay around $1100 for a Qt license. That’s about 20 hours of work, and I have saved probably 10 times that by going with Qt instead of a different toolkit. The GraphicsView framework, sqlite interface, network and xml functionalities in Qt have saved me countless hours already. It is easily worth it for me, and I really don’t make much money on software. For a real business, it will be even more worthwhile.
cool, can you point me to your website to see the products?
Edited 2007-10-15 22:33
Sorry no, this is custom software, developed specifically for one company. I do not sell the software generally, since it really would have no use outside the company it was designed for. One was an automatic data synchronization tool for USB sticks (sync data from a central server to usb sticks), and the other was a flowcharting tool for accident investigations (think really simple Visio).
Yeah, probably – what I primarily meant was shrinkwrap/shareware, not custom development of rather complex software with per-hour payment.
Um, no. I suggest you actuallu take the time to read up on why gnome is used in Fedora and Ubuntu and you will see that it has very little to do with the widgeting system used and more to do with the fact that gnome has a pretty consistent time table which KDE does not. Gnome gets released every six months and for distros such as Ubuntu and ferdora adhere to that time table pretty strictly. Please do some research before spouting 3 year complaints that have well been addressed by the KDE community and has been a non-issue for several years already. Distro makers are not”naive” they just want a consistent release with incremental changes instead of a huge shift in architecture which KDE seems to do with each major releae.
Um, no. I suggest you actuallu take the time to read up on why gnome is used in Fedora and Ubuntu and you will see that it has very little to do with the widgeting system used and more to do with the fact that gnome has a pretty consistent time table which KDE does not.
Really, because Gnome hasn’t always had the release mechanism it has now, and the toolkit license has been readily used as an argument in the past?
Distro makers are not”naive” they just want a consistent release with incremental changes instead of a huge shift in architecture which KDE seems to do with each major releae.
It’s just another in a long line of alternative arguments. That wasn’t the argument people were using when Gnome 2 happened.
wow sedetroll, even in KDE topics you can’t avoid to talk about GNOME.
Looks like you are not complete w/o GNOME.
wow sedetroll, even in KDE topics you can’t avoid to talk about GNOME.
Looks like you are not complete w/o GNOME.
Sweetheart – go back and have a look at where Gnome was brought up in this thread ;-). Whatever, I’ll take that to mean that you are incapable of discussing what you’re trolling about. You don’t like it? Touch luck.
This thread started off with someone talking about KDE, and talking about its supposed complexity as a reason why some distros make it their default. Someone else weighed and told as that the usual troll reason of licensing had been used in the past, and then someone else weighed in to tell us that licensing isn’t the issue now, and talked about Gnome and how supposedly Gnome has this miraculous six month release cycle, that KDE doesn’t, that makes everything perfect.
Edited 2007-10-15 21:01
First of all stop being an ass. I didn’t say that the 6 month release cycle was the end all be all. In fact learn how to read as I clearly was responding to the fact that someone was wondering why distros such as Fedora and Ubuntu didn’t use KDe as defautyl or focused more attention on gnome. Someone idiot said the it was just based on the toolkit license, then another one said that it had to do with preference. They were clearly wrong on both Fedora’s and especially Ubuntu’s case. I said it had more to do with the release cycle. I proved it by doing a 2 minute google search and getting a direct quote from the Ubuntu project leader and here someone is still feeling salty.
Edited 2007-10-16 01:03
pot / kettle there, guy =) you mentioned doing some research, so …
… kde has had nearly 7 years of consistent releases with incremental improvements. outside of massive arch changes, we set out timelines with schedules that are not feature driven and tend to hit those deadlines. we have undertaken exactly 2 re-archs in the last 11 years. both were announced well in advance and both were understood to be needed.
let’s not continue the “huge shifts every release” crud; we don’t even do it with every major release (look at the changes in kde 3.0, they were incremental; the version bump was about binary compat, not architecture changes)
the “6 month cycle to mesh with distros” is a pretty rubbish idea as well. it may make things nice for distros (though not enough to really make a difference, btw) but it pretty much screws the users, the upstream project and other platforms with different concepts of release schedules.
I think you are the one that should do some “research”. Yes KDE has incremental releases that are on their own time table but its not consistent enough or frequent enough to satisfy distro makers. Yes, this argument might be rubish but the fact that Ubuntu and Fedora use gnome and generally adhere to gnome’s time table as their own release cycle might tell you something. In-fact on of the major reasons why Mark Shuttlesworth went with Gnome was because he specifically stated that KDE did not have frequent enough releases to satisfy their needs. Regardless of this being a good reason or not, its their reason and they aren’t going to change anytime soon.
When I say huge shifts, I’m not talking about the actual functionality of the desktop but the toolkit, their is usually incompatibilities when qt gets updated, the KDE project has to change their architecture to adapt to the new features available. You can’t really be serious and tell me that KDE2 and KDE3 have anything in common other than looks, because the underlying technology is definitely different, the point is that gnome does very little to the toolkit that would prevent older apps from running straight out of the box. This may be good or bad depending on your point of view.
And in the end isn’t the Distros makers your target audience, aren’t they the ones who get your product to the masses, it sure isn’t gnome and KDE that people go to when they want a linux install, or a freebsd install. If the distro makers won’t package your DE or give it the same attention or add the necessary polish to make it usable, then what is the point. Distro makers like 6 month releases, one it sets a goal for each project, basically ensuring that things that have to get done get done promptly, it ensures two releases per year, which is good imo. I really don’t see your argument against it. I think at this point its excuses if you don’t want to adhere to 6 month releases. it works for gnome and they are the better for it. Would KDE benefit form this I don’t know, I’m not a KDE dev, and I’ve long since stopped being a user so I don’t actually care, the point is that every six months I upgrade Ubuntu and get something new and fresh but familiar.
My post was more an answer to that stupid thing about the toolkits which hasn’t been true for years now. It was not a jab at KDE.
Oh, he can. Everyone who was working on KDE at that time can.
While the change from KDE1 to KDE2 included bug architectural changes (most changing from single applications to services and components), KDE2 to KDE3 was basically just a version bump due to the new Qt version and a couple of incremental improvements.
Unlike the change from Qt1 to Qt2 or now from Qt3 to Qt4, Qt2 to Qt3 was even largely source compatible.
I don’t see any difference. Applications which use GTK1 can not link against GTK2 since they are not binary compatible.
Of course they can be used in a GTK2 based environment if GTK1 is present as well, but so do QT or KDE applications.
Applications linking against the same major version but an older minor version can obviously be used directly, unless we are talking about a library which does change binary interfaces almost randomly, e.g. OpenSSL
That’s a problem with Linux, and with Linux only. If they’d ever get out of the “upgrade the whole distro to upgrade the apps” mentality, then this would not be an issue.
The BSDs let you upgrade your KDE and GNOME without upgrading the entire OS (or even any of the OS), so there’s no need for a 6-month release cycle.
Same with Solaris.
And not all the Linux distros have or follow a 6-month release cycle. Fedora and Ubuntu are about the only ones that do. Mandriva, Debian, Slackware, all the LiveCDs like Knoppix/Kanotix/Sidux, SuSE, OpenSuSE, Linspire, RedHat/CentOS, etc all have non-6-month release cycles.
If a distro wants to release every 6 months, then so be it. But they should not dictate to other app devs how to release their apps.
funny then that the QT license issue (that got gnome started in the first place) is now a non-issue as QT is dual-licensed. want to develop open source software? GPL. want to develop closed source? QT’s own license.
Are you kidding? Unix has been around since long before KDE and Gnome. Plenty of companies have paid big bucks for Unix workstations. Do you think it was just to play Solitaire?
Granted, much (but not all) of the well-known home-user commercial software is not released for *nix. But there’s a huge market of professional commercial applications. And companies like Red Hat, Novell, and Sun care about these markets.
I would guess, at least regarding Ubuntu, that KDE is considered to “complex”, for their easy-to-use desktops for newcomers.
I would still dearly love to know who these users are, and who these supposed newcomers are.
Very simple. Everyone with average intelligence who uses a computer 2 hours a week or less should use Gnome. The rest can benefit from the added power and efficiency KDE offers. They will get used to it in a few weeks, and be more productive.
Of course, I’m exaggerating. A little.
Everyone with average intelligence who uses a computer 2 hours a week or less should use Gnome. The rest can benefit from the added power and efficiency KDE offers. They will get used to it in a few weeks, and be more productive.
I don’t understand why you say that, I use Ubuntu with GNOME 5 hours a day.
But of course, you are just trolling.
I’m only saying you could be more productive if the environment would implement features to ‘shortcut’ tasks – even if they sometimes could make things harder. You’ll get used to it if you use your pc a lot, so a bit more complexity won’t matter. (a BIT, not a lot, it should be as easy as possible – but no easier).
Let me give an example.
You want to save a file. There is another file with the same name there, but you don’t want to overwrite it.
With KDE, you select it, right mouseclick -> properties -> change name.
With Gnome, you have to start Nautilus, navigate to that location, rename (and close it again).
It would be even more efficient if F2 would just work, but either way KDE would be faster.
Let’s cut to the chase: This stuff adds up over a day (week, month, year), so use KDE and save time. If features and improvements like the above didn’t matter, we’d all be using DOS 1.0 or Windows 1.0 or whatever.
I installed Gedit to test this, btw – how horrible. You have to click a button to get a locationbar, and there is no auto-complete! Boy, am I spoiled, with autocompletion(dropdownlist + automatic) in all text input fields… And why doesn’t a doubleclick on empty tabbar not open a new document? Now on the other hand, firefox shows suggestions when doing spellcheck right here, Konqi can’t do that. And Kwrite doesn’t have tabs – those in Kate suck. Nothing is perfect, and if you like your Gnome, enjoy it.
superstoned:
the tabs in kate have been improved in kde4. you still have to go through the options to turn them on though.
Very simple. Everyone with average intelligence who uses a computer 2 hours a week or less should use Gnome. The rest can benefit from the added power and efficiency KDE offers. They will get used to it in a few weeks, and be more productive.
Does that then mean I’m not of average intelligence? I use my laptop on daily basis, and usually throughout most of the day even and I find GNOME to be very good for me. I just tried KDE for a few days with the Sabayon livedvd and although it was pretty and I could do more or less the same stuff I do under GNOME I still just hated it. I didn’t find any features there that would make me “more productive” than under GNOME. To me KDE just didn’t cut it. I have not a single compelling reason to switch over to KDE but I have several good ones to stay under GNOME. Though, I gotta note that it was some KDE 3.whatevertheyhaveinSabayon.
Well, I’m sure it takes some getting used to. And I exaggerated, maybe more than a little. But I’ve answered this to the person above, might make a point for you too:
I’m only saying you could be more productive if the environment would implement features to ‘shortcut’ tasks – even if they sometimes could make things harder. You’ll get used to it if you use your pc a lot, so a bit more complexity won’t matter. (a BIT, not a lot, it should be as easy as possible – but no easier).
Let me give an example.
You want to save a file. There is another file with the same name there, but you don’t want to overwrite it.
With KDE, you select it, right mouseclick -> properties -> change name.
With Gnome, you have to start Nautilus, navigate to that location, rename (and close it again).
It would be even more efficient if F2 would just work, but either way KDE would be faster.
Let’s cut to the chase: This stuff adds up over a day (week, month, year), so use KDE and save time. If features and improvements like the above didn’t matter, we’d all be using DOS 1.0 or Windows 1.0 or whatever.
I installed Gedit to test this, btw – how horrible. You have to click a button to get a locationbar, and there is no auto-complete! Boy, am I spoiled, with autocompletion(dropdownlist + automatic) in all text input fields… And why doesn’t a doubleclick on empty tabbar not open a new document? Now on the other hand, firefox shows suggestions when doing spellcheck right here, Konqi can’t do that. And Kwrite doesn’t have tabs – those in Kate suck. Nothing is perfect, and if you like your Gnome, enjoy it.
Sure, I agree that the open/save file dialog should be a bit more functional. Atleast renaming files and creating a new folder would be handy to a lot of people. But looking at the past arguments it seems likely the devs will just stubbornly ignore that. And anyway, that's not really that important to me. I have the directory structure already in place and I don’t reuse old filenames so..Only on a rare occasion I wanna save the file(s) to a non-existing folder and it’s not that big a deal then to open Nautilus for that.
You have to click a button to get a locationbar, and there is no auto-complete! Boy, am I spoiled, with autocompletion(dropdownlist + automatic) in all text input fields
I like the default behaviour of not having the locationbar visible. If I want it I’ll just use ctrl+l and type away. And, tab does autocomplete just the same way it does in the terminal
Sure, it would be a bit faster if it was autocompleted while typing but I’m actually against the idea of adding dropdownlists and such bells and whistles.
But well, I have been using GNOME for years so I am well accustomed to it, I prefer clean and sleek looks without everything possible imaginable added, and I use some GTK+/GNOME apps for which there just isn’t a Qt substitute (f.ex. aMSN. I need/want it because it has webcam support. Don’t atleast know of any Qt messenger which does support webcam) so I just don’t see any good reason to switch over. And no, I refuse to mix the toolkits. I absolutely hate it when an app looks and feels completely out-of-place.
True, you will never find any one feature in KDE where the lack of it is a huge inconvenience. But all those little inconveniences really add up for me. Eventually I ask myself, why do I have to put up with all this? This isn’t windows!
Amsn is written in TCL/TK, and has nothing to do with either Gnome or GTK (or Qt/KDE for that matter).
Kopete supports webcam in msn, but it’s not as good as aMSN.
Heh, of course, you’re doing exactly that with aMSN. Better ditch it for Pidgin to preserve your “purity”. While you’re at it, don’t use Openoffice, since it doesn’t use GTK (just has a thin GTK/Gnome (and Qt/KDE) wrapper for better integration), and ditch Firefox, since it’s mostly XUL (with some GTK widgets thrown in on Linux). Mixing toolkits isn’t really that bad at all.
Amsn is written in TCL/TK, and has nothing to do with either Gnome or GTK (or Qt/KDE for that matter).
Humm. Well, true. aMSN was a bad choice
But IMHO it still fits in better within GNOME rather than KDE. Though that’s more likely a matter of tastes..
Better ditch it for Pidgin to preserve your “purity”. While you’re at it, don’t use Openoffice, since it doesn’t use GTK (just has a thin GTK/Gnome (and Qt/KDE) wrapper for better integration), and ditch Firefox, since it’s mostly XUL (with some GTK widgets thrown in on Linux).
I don’t use OpenOffice anyway
And I would use Pidgin if they just got their act together and added webcam support.. I don’t use FireFox either, I use epiphany. Though, I gotta admit that the submit buttons and such don’t look like they should.
That problem should be solved when epiphany-webkit gets stable..
That problem should be solved when epiphany-webkit gets stable..
I can’t wait for that as well. But this particular problem will be solved by gecko 1.9 first.
Seems to me your intelligence has took a turn for the worse or were you drunk when coming up with these comments?
Going by what you said, people who use minimal DE’s are total morons drooling from the mouth.
Going by what you said, people who use minimal DE’s are total morons drooling from the mouth.
No – but the developers who go around proclaiming minimal DEs as the answer to everyone’s productivity prayers might be ;-).
I’m not aware that the word minimal has been re-defined recently.
No, I just meant to say a more powerful desktop environment makes one more productive. Like Windows Vista with all it’s modern software is probably more productive than Windows 1.0 (even though I should probably compare KDE 1.0 with 3.5 and Gnome 1.0 with 2.22).
And I’ve just quoted myself already, so here again:
I’m only saying you could be more productive if the environment would implement features to ‘shortcut’ tasks – even if they sometimes could make things harder. You’ll get used to it if you use your pc a lot, so a bit more complexity won’t matter. (a BIT, not a lot, it should be as easy as possible – but no easier).
Let me give an example.
You want to save a file. There is another file with the same name there, but you don’t want to overwrite it.
With KDE, you select it, right mouseclick -> properties -> change name.
With Gnome, you have to start Nautilus, navigate to that location, rename (and close it again).
It would be even more efficient if F2 would just work, but either way KDE would be faster.
Let’s cut to the chase: This stuff adds up over a day (week, month, year), so use KDE and save time. If features and improvements like the above didn’t matter, we’d all be using DOS 1.0 or Windows 1.0 or whatever.
I installed Gedit to test this, btw – how horrible. You have to click a button to get a locationbar, and there is no auto-complete! Boy, am I spoiled, with autocompletion(dropdownlist + automatic) in all text input fields… And why doesn’t a doubleclick on empty tabbar not open a new document? Now on the other hand, firefox shows suggestions when doing spellcheck right here, Konqi can’t do that. And Kwrite doesn’t have tabs – those in Kate suck. Nothing is perfect, and if you like your Gnome, enjoy it.
My experience and the experience of the people I help with computers is that they feel at home in ubuntu(with gnome). In kubuntu they feel confused within 1 minute. Too much toolbars, configuration options, buttons… KDE just doesn’t work logical for these people(and me).
I am very happy that Ubuntu uses gnome and that OpenSuSE and Mandriva have a nice gnome desktop too. KDE is the reason not to use PCLINUXOS or MEPIS.
“In kubuntu they feel confused within 1 minute”
Lucky for you and your friends that gnome was designed for people with an attention span of less than 1 minute.
I’m sure that giving them the option to copy or move a file when dragging it in the file manager confused them no end.
I’m sure that giving them the option to copy or move a file when dragging it in the file manager confused them no end.
But that’s possible in GNOME too so what’s your point? A lame attempt at trying to flame GNOME users?
Possible? It is if you shut down file manager and open Nautilus. And its not flaming. Flaming is jumping onto every KDE thread you can find and posting crap like “kde is just too cluttered” or “kde confuses me and my friends”. If Gnomes useability was so great, everyone would be using it and the anti clutter brigade wouldn’t feel the need to seek agreement from KDE users to justify their choice.
Other than that it is starting to look good. Too bad KDE seem to be a second-class citizen in many of the large distros like Fedora and (K)Ubuntu.
Ubuntu defaults to GNOME simply because it was created by people who prefer GNOME, and had the goal to create an operating system with the GNOME user interface.
Similar for Kubuntu; it was created by people who prefer KDE, so it defaults to KDE.
A lot of Fedora developers are not only GNOME users but GNOME developers as well, which is why you might get the impression that it favors it instead of KDE.
Another example is Debian. GNOME is installed by default simply because it’s the most popular environment among its users, but GNOME and KDE related packages get all the attention their respective developers are willing to give them.
This comment generated a few theories, and some trolls even already chimed in, which is too bad. The answer is quite simply IMO, and has nothing to do with licenses or release management.
Considering Mark has said that it had to do with release management, and has called for a release timetable similar to gnomes from the Kde devs, I’d say you are dead wrong.
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovory/mark-shuttleworth?page=1
Read the fourth and fifth questions and his answers after that. I think that says it all.
Edited 2007-10-15 02:43
“Another example is Debian. GNOME is installed by default simply because it’s the most popular environment among its users”
Umm, did you just pull that out of the air?
Gnome:
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=gn…
KDE:
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=kd…
Probably just a sarcastic remark about that particular bug in the Etch installer, where its desktop “task” (what used to be tasksel choice) didn’t properly ask for the desktop to install.
Umm, did you just pull that out of the air?
No, I know it for a fact.
Try comparing gnome-session to kdebase.
“No, I know it for a fact.
Try comparing gnome-session to kdebase.”
Actually, I just tried kwin to metacity– fair enough.
(That was the most apples to apples thing I could think of.) But it’s still not like Debian tries very hard to ram one DE down your throat. (That’s one of the big reasons why I use Debian.)
I’m a Gnome enthusiast and all I can say is WOW!!!
Finally, KDE without clutter. If they will follow the same simplicity and well thought design across all applications, they got me. I especially like well thought distances between window controls.
Hopefully file manager and control center, won’t resemble konqueror and kcontrol. Most of my annoyance with KDE were too much of everything, without a single second put in placement.
But start is more than great.
The file manager is now Dolphin and has a much more well thought out UI without losing the power of konqueror (although the screenshot of Dolphin in that article looks awful, since they opened every possible panel).
Kcontrol is replaced with System Settings, which… I’m not really a fan of, but it looks simpler in any case.
i’m not satsified with system settings right now either. but it’s a good starting point. hopefully i’ll have some time post 4.0 to spend time with it (assuming nobody beats me to it; it would make a great little project for someone to take under their wing) to implement some of the more obviously needed things.
it still already tests better than kcontrol did, though.
After the total rip of Aqua with GNOME, here is the total rip of Vista with KDE.
OSS, the source of innovation …
Why they put the search field in the start menu on the top and not the bottom is beyond me. They did a lot on the usability front in KDE so why do they have it there? I just need to move my mouse further to reach it
You don’t need to move your mouse at all, the search field is focused when the menu is opened.
exactly; when you click on the menu button, the search box has focus so you can just start typing. in fact, you can just do alt-f1 or the win menu or whatever your key binding is and start typing.
just like how you can hit alt-f2 (or for me, the context menu button) and you get the krunner window and start typing.
i hate using the mouse more than necessary.
in any case, as to WHY it is placed at the top, it has everything to do with common reading patterns (top to bottom, think about it: where do the search results appear?) and was settled on after using testing.
btw, the menu in those shots is at least a few days old and looks much worse than it does now in svn. i spent a whole day last week just cleaning up various usability and visual issues in the menu.
i’m particularly fond of the new animations =)
i hate using the mouse more than necessary.
And that sentence right there is why I still prefer KDE. And why I like the Vista UI– They’re slowly catching up with KDE.
> in any case, as to WHY it is placed at the top, it has > everything to do with common reading patterns (top to
> bottom, think about it: where do the search results
> appear?) and was settled on after using testing.
Well I am not familiar with the KDE UI-Guidlines but usally you prefer to put important controls on the edge of the screen (top, left, right, bottom) while information (such as the results of the query) should be put in the middle. Controls on the screen-corner are easier to focus (I speak of eye-focus here not keyboard-focus). I read an interesting article about UI Design that referred to this problem. Have to google it up
That would be fitt’s law, and has no effect on the placement of the search box, since it doesn’t need to be clicked on (has focus by default). In any case, neither the placement above or below the box is on the screen edge (merely near it).
That seems to contradict the results of reading order (top to bottom). But if you have a reference, by all means…
If you put the panel at the top of the screen, with an external taskbar at the bottom, then the menu works just perfect, with the search field right there underneath the mouse.
Not if you use your keyboard shorcut
Here is blog real author this review, and more kde 4 pics :
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-4-rev-723381.so
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-4-rev-712779.so
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/oxygen-style-mock-up.so
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-4-rev-705212.so
will KDE 4 be like pinheiro’s mock? right now the taskbar looks like a taskbar and not exactly like the taskbar/dock pinheiro made on his mocks, are developers following the artist concepts? take a look at the pinheiro’s mock to see what i mean:
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image219.png
and also, what happened with the krunner implementation from david, will all this stuff be implemented? im refering to this krunner btw:
http://davigno.oxygen-icons.org/i/runner-1.jpg
sorry for the impatience
Edited 2007-10-14 18:42
While the mockup looks good, there is no proof or even explanation for how it would actually work (ie, for maximized windows). So yes, devs are trying to follow the artists’ concepts, but it is much harder to make something pretty and useable, instead of just pretty.
Well krunner is scheduled to look different. Aaron recently made reference to “cosmetic surgery” that is planned for it. Not sure if that means it will look exactly like that mockup though.
” Aaron recently made reference to “cosmetic surgery” that is planned for it. Not sure if that means it will look exactly like that mockup though.”
it’ll be pretty damn close =) we’re using the svg used to make that mockup, so we should get very near. a couple of coders were trying to make it happen but ran into some issues of their own making, so we’re having to (unfortunately) start over mostly.
thankfully it’s “just” look ‘n feel stuff; that tends to be easier to do-over at this point in the game than core functionality
I’m sure the Oxygen team will get as close as they possibly can, although, as with all projects, some aspects of the mockups may be found to be infeasible from a technical (or even, occasionally, an artistic) point of view. For example, I’m not sure whether the transparent border around the *panel* is possible without relying on X hardware-compositing (not available on everyone’s system) or the cheap trick of taking a static snapshot of whatever is behind the panel and blending that (would look terrible if the panel is placed over a window with moving elements, or even a moving window)[1]. The border around Plasmoids on the desktop itself seem to pose no problem, however.
And as with many parts of KDE4, much will only be achieved post-4.0. For example, the Oxygen style coders have a list of known bugs and whether they will be 4.0 showstoppers or not:
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen/StyleWinDec#Known_Bugs
Quite a lot are marked as “Releasable”, and so will likely only be tackled later on.
The taskbar, IIRC, was hacked up quickly by Robert Knight (Konsole, kickoff-kde4-rewrite) purely so people would have a taskbar to use, and was intended from the outset to be temporary, but whether someone will have the time to make a nicer one before 4.0 is unknowable.
In short – for KDE4.0, expect roughness and “programmer-art”; post that, we’ll hopefully see it getting closer to the mockups.
[1] – note that I don’t know much about how the panel is implemented, and so could be wildly wrong on all this.
the transparent borders doesn’t really require X-hardware compositing, it can be done with using SVG’s alpha channel, like others plasmoids actually do, i think.
oops but i don’t know if this will made possible to see the other apps if you want to move windows behind this panel/plasmoid :S
Edited 2007-10-14 19:36
or does the kickoff menu look almost exactly like lite version of SUSE gnome menu?
also that IS vista coloring tough its not VERY close to vista but very familiar.
Seems like KDE4 wont be enough to convince me to leave Gnome 2.20
that’s kickoff, and raptor will be different
Yes, both menus where developed by Suse.
Can someone upload only the flower wallpaper? Please?
Too many people want to see KDE4, the site is down right now…!!!
I haven’t used KDE in years but I think I’ll try KDE4 just out of curiosity. From the screenshots it seems to have improved a lot, it looks good and so on. But I very much dislike the Kickoff menu. Though, atleast they’re trying to create something new unlike in GNOME all I get is a plain menu. Really wish they’d atleast _try_ something new every once in a century! And Dolphin…Well, it seems A LOT more functional and usable than Nautilus
Nautilus doesn’t show any details about the file you’ve selected in the sidepane even if you select the “Details” menuitem. It shows very few details about the folder you’re browsing which, quite frankly, is useless. If I select a file I’d expect the sidepane to show details about the selected one… Oh well. I am a die-hard GNOME fan but some areas really need a lot of work and it seems like KDE4 is starting to be quite a lot ahead in several areas..
I totally agree with you about the kickoff menu, it’s horrible. I’ve used it on Suse, and it’s bad there too. I’m curious about what is behind the swiss army-ization of the application menu, WinXP, Vista do this too. Gnome kind of does this with SLAB, but at least that flows pretty well. It’s still kind of annoying, but better.
Dolphin is a great step up. Konq is the reason I stayed away from KDE for so long; I hate that as much as one person can hate a piece of software. Nautilus is slightly better, but Thunar is still the best.
KDE has a great software ecosystem. Gnome is nice and there are lots of GTK apps, Firefox being the big one, but the KDE community focuses their energies very effectively.
KDE’s release history is somewhat inconsistant:
1.0 – 1.1 – 9 mo.
1.1 – 2.0 – 19 mo.
2.0 – 2.1 – 4 mo.
2.1 – 2.2 – 6 mo.
2.2 – 3.0 – 7 mo.
3.0 – 3.1 – 9 mo.
3.1 – 3.2 – 11 mo.
3.2 – 3.3 – 7 mo.
3.3 – 3.4 – 7 mo.
3.4 – 3.5 – 9 mo.
3.5 – 4.0 – ~25 mo. (Assuming a Dec. 07 release)
Only twice was a release completed inside 6 mo, with 7-9 mo. releases more common. Basically, over the past history, if a major distro (pretty much everyone outside of Debian?) wants to stick to a steady April/Octrober release schedule, it’s been a tough proposition to get the latest KDE release ready to ship in time for the whole distro’s release.
Now I’m a big fan of KDE, but I really have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind not wanting to go with a release schedule that meets the needs of most of the major distro’s. The distros are the primary means of getting the software to users, and thus are a major marketing vehicle that shouldn’t be easily blown off.
So a quite reliable 9 month cycle, sometimes even a bit faster.
Would be good enough according to Mark Shuttleworth.
At least that’s what he said at aKademy 2007.
Very few of the major Linux distros have 6-month release schedules. The majority of them have 9-18 month schedules. And the non-Linux OSes supported by KDE also have longer than 6-month release schedules.
Release things when they’re ready, not when some arbitrary date passes on the calendar.
http://files.fredemmott.co.uk/ss-20071014.jpg
Reminds me of OS X. Just not as polished.
http://safecomputing.osu.edu/images/Picture_2.png
i am testing 7.10 but i cannot find kde4.why?
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)
you must install it first
8.10 will be the first to have KDE 4 (4.1) by default. Until then – patience, or use the KDE 4 packages which are provided.
“Right after running the latest KDE, you can tell at once that the new wallpaper is far more beautiful than the old grey one”
Great, how useful.
Well, you missed a lot, as he obviously talked about more than the background…
I agree functionality is important but I sure hope they find a way to polish KDE4 to this level… this looks like a modern KDE it’s very clean and easy on the eye’s but I have a feeling that there won’t be this much attention to detail in the first KDE4 release.
http://kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/60475-1.jpg
Ok that was by far the prettiest KDE4 (or any other DE for that matter) shot I have ever seen. Is that just a mockup or an actual theme? If I can ever get my KDE to look that polished and clean I will drop Gnome at once :p
Edited 2007-10-15 15:06
This is a mockup made by Everaldo of Crystal fame and KDE 4 will probably never look like this by default.
If it doesn’t look like this by default its not a problem. However, will it ever be possible to download a theme making it look like this? It was so beautiful.
yeah, if someone makes such a theme…
Actually Dolphin looks pretty much exactly like that screenshot. The panel isn’t there yet, but it’s coming.
Well it is starting to get close but that screen shot is very polished and Dolphin is not that polished yet or KDE4 from what I’ve seen so far… plus that screen shot looks like KDE
http://kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/60475-1.jpg
http://polishlinux.org/reviews/kde4/dolphin.png
I do like how KDE4 is turning out but I hope someday the look of the OS will take in this photo realistic detail.
Edited 2007-10-16 00:20
Yes it’s not exactly the same, but have a close look at that mockup you love so much. The “clean” look is achieved by cutting out features or visible panels. The mockup version of dolphin doesn’t have:
– Moveable toolbars (you can get rid of the stippled mover grip in dolphin by locking the toolbar)
– a column view
– a folders panel
– a visible scroll bar
– a visible terminal pane
These mockups are all the same. They look good because their content is doctored to be symmetrical and simple. A real app will never be quite as beautiful because for real uses you have more visual elements on the screen just to make it usable.
I think KDE 4 looks pretty amazing for free software. When stable enough, might show it to the school
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde+%2C+gnome
I prefer KDE over gnome in many ways.
But it’s also funny to notice that:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde++4%2C+gnome+2.20&ctab=0&geo=…
This doesn’t mean that kde has more users or not but it’s a unpolished measurement.
Even though I don’t fall for this “widget-fever” that every company is up to now, KDE 4 looks AMAZING. Dolphin is making Nautilus to eat dust.
Already waiting for Kubuntu with it.
Edited 2007-10-15 19:29 UTC
KDE always had much less marketing than Gnome, that’s what you see in these trends. KDE 4 vs 2.22 is rather unfair, 2.22 is 6 months worth of work, KDE 4 is 2 years…
Actually I was measuring Gnome 2.20.
sorry. Yet the argument stands – they’ve been talking about that release for approx. 6 months, we’ve been talking about KDE 4 for over 2 years.