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O lawd. Put on your flamesuit.

Technologically, perhaps that is true. KDE is far ahead technologically, and KDE 4.0 will continue that trend, it seems.

However, as someone who used KDE for a non-trivial amount of time, and jumped ship to GNOME not too long ago, I have to say that the latter is just plain a less frustrating and less distracting environment to use. KDE has a tremendously long way to go before its as elegant and as usable as GNOME.

Arn't they following updated human interface guidelines for KDE 4.0? Perhaps KDE 4.0 will be more intuitive and elegent than it's predecessors.

While I agree than KDE 3.5 is loaded with features and options that can be confusing, I've gotten used to that and only use whats necessary for me.

Edited 2006-09-18 17:29

> Arn't they following updated human interface guidelines for KDE 4.0? Perhaps KDE 4.0 will be more intuitive and elegent than it's predecessors.

The KDE 4.0 HIG is still under development, but yes, it's going to be a huge improvement over what the project had in the 3.x days. The KDE Usability effort today is staffed by usability professionals with a track record in the industry, and tighly collaborates with the OpenUsability project. Strongly integrating usability engineering into the development process is a big part of the agenda for the next-gen, and that is, in many ways, more exciting than Plasma by itself, I find.

It's not just the features and options. It's the widget layout, the overabundance of toolbar buttons, giant right-click menu entries, underuse of asthetic spacing, etc.

> It's the widget layout, the overabundance of toolbar buttons, giant right-click menu entries, underuse of asthetic spacing, etc.

All of which are being worked on under the umbrella of the next-gen HIG. Dialog and toolbar layouts are big discussion points, for example.

If there is a commitment to following the new HIG, then that's great. However, HIG-ification is a long, drawn out process, and it'll be awhile before we can see what the results really are.

yep, and menus with dozens of items starting from the same word (Configure Foo, Configure Bar, Configure Baz) or letter (KThis, KThat, KSomethingElse).

I agree. But I find Xfce to be a better bet than gnome and kde put together. This window manager is developing quite nicely and will more sooner than not become the underdog of window managers.

... but still _only_ a window manager. KDE is much more than window manager. It's complete enviroment with shared libraries and components (smaller memory footprint), standarised communication between applications and so on ...

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/

Oh dear me, I really don't get this site sometimes.

Xaero_Vincent sticks in some (fairly inaccurate) flamebait about Gnome, and gets modded +5.

Rayiner says that actually, he prefers using Gnome, and is modded down for it.

I just don't understand.

EDIT: Just to add a little more, why does Gnome have to "combat" anything? It's really time this adversarial mentality stopped. KDE and Gnome are complimentary. Some people find Gnome's stripped-down approach patronising and restrictive, whereas other people find KDE's interface and array of options to be bewildering.

At the end of the day, whether somebody uses KDE or Gnome (or Xfce or Enlightenment or whatever), it's still a "win" for free software. And isn't that more important?

Edited 2006-09-18 18:57

You must be new around here.

"I just don't understand."

Ah, but you make the fatal misunderstanding of thinking that score somehow relates to the quality and accuracy of a post. You got it all wrong.
Score has everything to do with how many people agree with your opinion and very little, if any at all, to do with how well formulated or informed your post is.

You must be a gnome user, burn em at the stake!

I actually prefer KDE not becoming as elegant as Gnome.
For me KDE is the desktop to use while surfing the web, checking my mail, etc. because it's fun to use.
Gnome is the desktop I choose for serious work, it being elegant indeed, but also for the clean and non-distracting way it looks.
And then for my media pc I use Fluxbox, as it is lightweight, and simple to use and configure.

So you see, I think each desktop has it's own charm and prefered usage, which would be gone if they all started to look the same.

Yes, but look, most people work and have fun on the same computer... and they don't like to switch among DEs based on their activity. So the aim of a DE is to be the best at EVERY aspect, to be the ONLY DE ever needed. Of course it's impossible, but I think a good compromise can be reached with proper design.

And I think that's exactly the hard part. Each DE has its own idea of what this compromise is.
You're right about switching DE's, I was just thinking how cool it'd be if we could switch from one DE to the next without having to close every application.
Maybe that's in line to be the next killer-app?

I use Gnome from time to time but I got one problem:
Gnome seems to be saying "You cannot do that. You do not need to." and my brain replies with a desperate
"WTF? Of course I need to! Get out of my f****** way and let me configure what I want to configure or I'll wipe you from my disk you piece of crap!"

I guess I just can't stand it if someone/something tells me what I need to do.

Strange enough I configure KDE to be as simple and maybe even Gnome-like as possible - but then it was my choice! Weird, eh? ;-)

KDE 4.0 looks cool but I tend to hate everything that uses too much sreen space which it seems to do...
What did I get my 19" for, after all?

In Plasma, the desktop is not condemned to obscurity by nailing it underneath the other windows. The desktop will be able to rise above and fall below on command.

Sigh... So much for concrete physical metaphors...

The desktop will be able to rise above and fall below on command.

Isn't that just a fancy wrapper around the 'show desktop' button?

> Isn't that just a fancy wrapper around the 'show desktop' button?

Yup, pretty much. But there's quite a bit of value in visual cues that inform users where something comes from and where it goes to, as Apple has proven time and time again. Imagine Expose without animation, for example.

Anyhow, the article is a bit hyperbolic, but you shouldn't really fault KDE too much for it - MadPenguin is in charge of their prose, not KDE. The KDE project is of course very excited about what it believes it can deliver with Plasma eventually, and does say so publically, but it has also stated that KDE 4's desktop shell will be an evolution, and won't throw out ten years of experience with what works.

Come on, seriously?

The idea that it rises and fall changes, however slight, how the user interacts with the components. Yes, it is possible to draw such a simple conclusion. But it certainly does not represent the full ideas of their aim.

Perhaps it mimics things that have been done before - but they're just trying to make the user experience better.

Good heavens.

I'm excited myself. What does it take to be "revolutionary" according to you? This is shaping up to be a very different environment, maybe for good or bad, but it certianly appears to be different? What more do you want? Near as I can figure the only thing "revolutionary" according to you would have to be a holographic interface.

> I couldnot set DPI for fonts for my screen resolution through KDE control center. It sets 1028x740....60 Mhz... but for DPI you have to edit xorg.conf why?

I believe I may be able to clear up that mystery. Technically, the X server is supposed to calculate an appropriate dpi for fonts based on the physical size of the display device and the resolution it is run at, and usually does a fine job. However, the Windows operating system uses fixed dpi values - the default being 96, for example - and a lot of web content is being designed by Windows-based designers in a poor fashion that makes their layouts rely on those fixed dpi values.

Faced with a decision between being technically correct and working for most users, the Gnome project bowed down, and their settings daemon will chose between two fixed dpi values (96 and 120, I think?) depending on a certain display size threshold. KDE, so far, has not done so, but will take some steps in that direction with the KDE 3.5.5 release (scheduled for mid-October) that will include a dpi setting in the Control Center font preferences, implementing your wish.

Edited 2006-09-18 17:26

There's a dpi setting on GNOME as well.

rakamaka, you have to be careful with these kinds of things because you assume this is a KDE issue when it can easily be a distro issue or a different dependent program issue.

Except for the DPI, which isn't something that should need to be changed and hence in the control panel, resolution you can, all the things you mentioned work without effort on my distro with KDE.

> If Plamsa is using the OpenUsability project does that mean that it will still be compatibly with previous KDE releases?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "compatible" :-). First off, don't think of Plasma as an isolated application; Plasma is the shell, the face of KDE 4.0. Technologically, it heavily draws upon the power of version 4.2 of the Qt toolkit that KDE is based on - KDE 3.x uses Qt 3.x. So no, Plasma won't run "on" KDE 3.x.

OpenUsability is a project and platform that brings together professional usability experts and open source projects. KDE has been a part of that community more or less since its inception.

That makes sense, KDE keeps advancing and really is getting so refined for a desktop manager. To me this desktop environment has an easy user interface with a lot of functionality.

Kind of off topic but Konquerer web browser had more plug-ins and more functionlity it would be my choice for a web-browser over FireFox.

I'm pretty sure you can get Plasma from SVN if you want. There is a significant amount of work already done for Solid and Phonon (in fact the necessary code to port Amarok to Phonon has already been committed). Likewise an enormous number of icons have already been created by the Oxygen project. However most of this is still in progress, which is why the very first developer preview did not include it.

If you read Aaron's blog, you know he's doing work on Plasma (in-between blogging about it ;-)). I'm pretty sure the roadmap calls for an alpha release some time before the end of this year: you should be able to get an idea of what it's all like then.

Indeed, this lack of concrete information is KDE's way of getting more vocal: it's from the Apple school of PR: let only little bits dribble out, so that people get worked out trying to find out more. As an example, think of how many Plasma articles you have seen, compared to articles on how great, e.g., kicker or kdesktop are. They've built up a lot of buzz about KDE 4 this way: now they just have to meet everyone's expectations.

Edited 2006-09-18 18:59

I believe the problem is not that the project needs to be more vocal, but that it was way too vocal about this in the first place. For years KDE did just fine with the strategy of "build it and they will come". They concentrated on great technology, and relied on word of mouth to get users. Judging by the results of most user polls putting KDE as the most popular DE, that worked quite well.

Then someone had the brilliant idea that the project needed more hype. Now I'm all for promoting features that may be hard to discover otherwise, but hyping up some hyptothetical feature that doesn't even exist, and may never exist is counterproductive. Plasma is an example of this, so is Tenor (the desktop search/desktop linkage engine that was supposed to debut in KDE4). Both of those were very poorly defined, in terms of what they would actually do, and both received way too much hype.

No matter how good these projects may still turn out (and it doesn't look too promising so far), I don't think they could live up to the hype. The main developer behind Tenor says he has little time to work on the project, and it may or may not ever finish, and there are little signs of Plasma.

I still think KDE4 is going to rock, and I am going to love it even more than I love KDE3, but hyping up imaginary features years in advance was a big mistake. That's a Microsoft tactic, and people are frustrated by it.

PS. @tristan: Xaero_Vincent's post was very informative and on-topic, that's why he got modded to +5. Unfortunately he ruined it by adding a jab at Gnome, but the rest of his post is still good. Raynier, on the other hand, said something off-topic (plasma, remember?) and also highly subjective, and thus got modded down.

"*Right now*, KDE4 Plasma stands roughly where Long Horn/Vista's AERO stood a couple years ago: emphatically described, but non-existent."

Sure. And I bet it will wind up something like Vista - everybody will doubt it until a few months before release, then start being wowed. Seriously, there's a huge amount of framework that has to be done before the cool stuff can be built on top of it.

FWIW, probably the primary reason for certain delays in the implementation of Plasma is that Qt 4.0 and Qt 4.1 did not include an equivalent of the QCanvas class from Qt 3.3, a graphics canvas. However, ever since a Qt 4.2 snapshot with the new QGraphicsView was released a few weeks ago, implementation has begun in earnest.

The decision was made to wait for QGraphicsView as not to duplicate work (Trolltech is well aware of KDE's needs, obviously - Plasma's chief developer being funded by them), and as there was a lot of other stuff to do: Switch the build system to CMake (done), replace DCOP with DBus (mostly done), next-gen XMLGUI called LiveUI (work in progress), and other huge improvements and restructurings in the libraries. Better and more stable libaries make developing Plasma a lot easier too, after all.

Edited 2006-09-18 19:57

Those are not screenshots, but merely mockups, and they were not produced by the development team of Plasma.