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Interestingly, when I wrote my two editorials on the future of GNOME and KDE, I already predicted that the KDE guys would never be able to release KDE 4.0 in 2007. I was almost crucified for saying it - by people here on OSNews, but also by people within the KDE community.

http://www4.osnews.com/story/16783/Has_the_Desktop_Linux_Bubble_Bur...
http://www4.osnews.com/story/16802/On_Favouritism_Apologies_and_Bla...

And look where we are now. It's not that I mind KDE 4.0 got delayed - seriously, I prefer delays over a crappy product. What bothers me is that people went all mental when I predicted these delays.

Anyway, Aaron, I know you read OSNews, so how about this [1] ? It's getting interesting now .

[1] http://www4.osnews.com/thread?249710

Edited 2007-08-31 20:16 UTC

i know, it's going to be a photo finish! =)

the tagging date has been tentatively moved back two weeks to dec 6, though, so we have a proper chance of it getting out in december.

whee!

whee!

LOL he's such a happy chap sometimes ;-)

hehe

Interestingly, when I wrote my two editorials on the future of GNOME and KDE, I already predicted that the KDE guys would never be able to release KDE 4.0 in 2007. I was almost crucified for saying it - by people here on OSNews, but also by people within the KDE community.
...
And look where we are now.

As I recall, you were predicting it would be 4Q 2008, with a decent chance of slipping into 2009, which is quite a bit later than the delayed Dec. 2007 launch. Still, your date is probably close to when 4.1 will come out and everything will be finished up, as it sounds like 4.0 is going to be without quite a bit of stuff.

KDE 4.0 will not be released until summer 2008.

And we should care about your predictions because...?


Me, I say that the two months delay is enought to get KDE 4.0.0 out. Making random guesses is free anyway!

Edited 2007-08-31 20:29

"""

"""

You shouldn't. It's mainly important to me. That's why I kept it short. ;-)

KDE 4.0 will not be released until summer 2008.

That's a losing bet. A better prediction would be whether or not a KDE4 release makes it into the spring 2008 distributions such as Kubuntu Hardy Heron or Fedora 9 by default.

> or not a KDE4 release makes it into the
> spring 2008 distributions such as
> Kubuntu Hardy Heron or Fedora 9 by default.

Kubuntu HH is a long term support release, so KDE 4 is not planned to be the default desktop on the grounds that it is not expected to be sufficiently mature. Kubuntu HH users will of course be able to get KDE 4 applications I'm sure.

"""
That's a losing bet.
"""

We'll see. It's just a feeling that I have. We can revisit the issue next June or whenever they actually release.

And you base that on what? A hunch? Well, then, wanna bet?

It's pretty unlikely we won't have a release until summer 2008, with the release event planning and all - that makes it pretty hard to delay beyond the new date. Actually, we can't and won't.

This is the only thread that anyone will post two for the next week. KDE4.0 is on every ones mind

Perhaps there merger of WebKit for Konqueror and more is actually going to be completed for KDE 4?

Do you think that they wanted to wait for KDE 5?
KDE 4.0.0 won't get new features – just more time to finish targeted features.

WebKit will come in KDE 4.1 or 4.2.

I agree... they have the whole world watching ... it's to big a thing to mess up. Take 4

Just because there's a lot of things under the hood that aren't immediately visible to the typical user from merely looking at the GUI doesn't mean that those under the hood things won't make a notable difference in how well that visible things work for the end user.

It'd be far better to delay some reasonable amount of time and get everything anchored down and working as intended than to have to issue constant errata, and/or keep on breaking applications that depend on those unseen bits to not change behavior over time, as that directly/indirectly affects the user-experience and how they judge using the system. Also, if you make something too iffy for developers to deal with and trust, that backfires horribly as well.

If the consensus amongst the developers is that it isn't ready, I'm going on the basis that they know what they're talking about, and if nothing else, I could see it as a bit of personal/professional pride to make the judgment "no software before its ready and sufficiently stable" and applaud them for that. Plus, on a professional level, once you release something that's bad enough, it's almost impossible to earn redemption in the marketplace, so it's just bad business to release something that you know isn't ready.

Certainly, and that's why I don't expect to KDE 4 to be stable and feature complete for the next 10 or 12 months. Patience is a virtue.

Why not?

It is not about the face, it is about the soul!!

Maybe KDE 4.0 will have the same UI than KDE 3.5.*; but it does not matter when the developers have been replacing the KDE's soul to be far better than the "soul" of previous versions:

A lot of new frameworks and infrastructure are being built as the KDE 4 foundation; these changes will be the base for a lot of new applications which will bring the user with a wonderful experience.

Maybe there are not applications that use the new stuff, but with the release of KDE 4.0; all the means to jump far far from its current status will be already there.

Good job KDE guys! My hat off to you.

Edited 2007-09-01 00:03

Mac OS X, just as Windows Vista, have ton of resources and many millions on cash to avoid delays. KDE has not. Delays in KDE are comprehensible.

Well, it's not as bad as any of the delays Microsoft has given us. A two months delay is what we in Denmark call "planned delay" or "expected delay".

If KDE4 becomes as delayed as Vista then we can talk about poor management. A 2 months delay is pretty well done for a project this size. Better than 4 years late

yeah I agree. A project that took this long doesn't surprise me at all they decided to delay a couple of months. I mean they did plan the announcement for January in the first place. So it sounded like someone was planning for a delay in the first place.

How delayed was Vista, exactly? They promised a 2 year release and they hit a 2.5 year release if you consider that work was started in early 2005. You don't remember some other OSes released in that timeframe, like 2003 SP1/XP x64 (with a lot of work to support a new architecture)? You don't remember XP SP2, which was a pretty extensive modification that came out in that time frame?

Let's leave this thread to die because it's far more important to consider the good work done by the KDE devs who seem to be defining a clean and extensible architecture for the future of the linux desktop. Marketing and release-planning foibles of Microsoft are simply not pertinent to this discussion.

How delayed was Vista, exactly? They promised a 2 year release and they hit a 2.5 year release if you consider that work was started in early 2005.

Dude. We had technology previews of Longhorn in 2003, and Microsoft was talking about the thing for four years.

However, I'd prefer to leave this to die because that's what I'd call hype.

I have never taken a position to defend Microsoft, but don't compare an entire Operating System to a Desktop Environment.

When KDE has to also build a Kernel then you have a gripe.

How many official release dates did they announce? What were they?

I took them over five years since their 2001 XP release. They have said before that release they wanted to get something out every 3 years. Do the math.

But when did they announce any official release dates? I think they did twice.

official, official... who cares. KDE has an official delay of 2 months. Yet we've been talking 2 years ago of a much quicker release, 1.5 years or something, so I consider the delay more like 6 months.

"Don't tell me u are comparing a window manager to the whole operating system.... "

Because, you know, KDE is just a window manager. It is in no way an entire framework for a desktop environment. No. That's just what they want you to beleive. kwin, that's all there is.

"way to go dude, u kick some major ass"

Dude, where's my car?

"don't they have mental institutes for guys like u in Denmark???? "

Institutes? Don't you mean institutions? Duuuuuude.

It kind of worries me that up until recently it was expected they could meet the October deadline given how much work still had to be done and how big of a project it is. That's poor project management.

I take it you're new to open source development then? It's little a thing called iterative improvement. It's Microsoft and Apple that have big-bang, hard and fast ship dates on their wallcharts - and they missed them by miles.

So when FOSS does it, it's iterative improvement, but when a corporation does it, it's missing their ship dates by miles.

K, got it.

So when FOSS does it, it's iterative improvement, but when a corporation does it, it's missing their ship dates by miles.

Their development models are like night and day. Do you see every single internal alpha, beta and nightly build at Microsoft and Apple? No, because they're private. KDE and other open source projects do their development in public, with public point releases.

K, got it.

------------> Concept










------------> You

You do see OS X alphas if you're in the inner list and are a large developer who has paid to see them. You won't see the nightly builds, but you'll definitely see monthly or sooner.

No they are not. Their software licensing models are, but I doubt their actual development processes are really all that different.
Microsoft's and Apple's development models differ only from FOSS in that development happens behind closed doors - behind the scenes, people are frantically writing code, testing code and brainstorming ideas in much the same way. Microsoft actually did release quite a number of public beta versions of Vista, and criticising MS for missing a shipping date but not KDE using the same criteria seems a little biased to me.

In either case, shipping a product that isn't ready is worse than shipping a finished one a bit late. I have no problem with either MS or KDE or anyone else taking a bit more time to make sure the product is OK before releasing it. End users should not be treated as beta testers on shipped versions (one reason why it could be argued that MS should have waited a little it longer still on Vista).

No they are not. Their software licensing models are, but I doubt their actual development processes are really all that different.
Microsoft's and Apple's development models differ only from FOSS in that development happens behind closed doors - behind the scenes, people are frantically writing code, testing code and brainstorming ideas in much the same way.

Free Software is not just about licenses, it is a different way of working. There is much more public peer review and early testing involved in projects like the Linux kernel and KDE. In Windows big decisions are mostly made by managers subject to marketing and artificial deadline pressures, whereas in Free Software big decisions are made via public discussion amongst peers. The Free Software process is much more likely to deliver the 'right thing' as opposed to the 'expedient thing'.

The most revolutionary thing about KDE4 is not the software itself, but it is the way the community has built up to be capable of delivering such a complex design in a reasonable timescale. In fact, the KDE the community is the actual 'deliverable', and the software is only a side effect of that community building effort. You can tell if the community is in good shape by the quality of the software it produces, but the primary purpose of KDE is not to deliver software, it is to build a community.

Edited 2007-09-01 22:43

Microsoft never ships within 2 months of promised delivery. Microsoft kept pushing the release date of Vista until few months before release. And at that time Vista was four years late.

KDE4 is not four years late. It looks like it will be two months late which is way better than anything Microsoft so far has managed to do. They are never less than 6 months late, and often years late.

Never ships within 2 months.. never? Strong words.

This isn't about Vista though. This is about KDE. Just because Microsoft has some management layer issues, that doesn't make it OK for KDE because "at least they're not Microsoft".

A planned two-months release is not exactly poor management. Few companies can deliver with less than two months of delay.

Of course, one could claim that most companies don't have the manpower that KDE has.

A two-months delay is - unfortunately - nothing in the world of software development. Or anywhere really. Ever increasing delays seem to be the norm, no matter the management.

It was planned? Why was it not announced earlier then?

It's not the delays I'm worried about. It's knowing when something is off-schedule earlier and making that clear earlier.

Aaah... so it's not so much about management in relation to development as it is about management in relation to communication?

Now, that I can believe. Communication tend to be the Achilles heel in most projects. When packages.gentoo.org went down it took a week before anybody told us internally why it was down. And it took another week for the announcement to be official and then another week for a placeholder page to be active... now that's _bad_.

Indeed, 2 months is nothing. Did you know over 80% of the ICT projects in companies (often largely involving writing software) becomes a failure...

You show me a size of this magnitude, complexity, diversity that has a perfect schedule.

A revolution of sorts. A complete rewrite. A diverse worldwide group of developers from all over the globe. Many working for free in their spare time.

You're simply asking far too much. Period. Vista was delayed how much? Granted, this is not an OS it's a DE...But there's a fraction of the resources allocated to this project vs Vista.

So...yeah...quit being so judgemental.

Excuse me for being worried that they didn't see this coming earlier or refused to.

Hold on. If KDE also developed Qt and the entire frameworks that it entails then you have an even greater footing to stand upon.

Novell and other corporations are helping KDE succeed. This isn't just a bunch of bachelor to ph.d computer scientists writing a desktop environment.

They aren't writing and develop Xorg or the Linux Kernel or the Qt Frameworks, etc.

They are augmenting Qt with their own Frameworks, leveraging Xorg and any Kernel that currently it runs atop and much more.

There definitely are quite a few developers contributing to KDE.

There are definitely quite a few developers contributing to Gnome.

From the Dot KDE Digest latest:

3095 by 244 developers, 7218 lines modified, 1544 new files.

Hell: If you want to know how fractional NeXT Software Inc., had in developers I'd be glad to tell you.

Let's just say they had no more than 50 for an entire Operating System, Development Suites (Openstep Tools and WebObjects combined) to accomplish Openstep and KDE has 244 developers just for the Desktop Environment.

Either NeXT had nothing but the worlds finest developers with an incredible ability for design and implement or KDE has a shitload more resources.

Don't get me wrong: KDE is excellent, but definitely not Revolutionary. Shit even OS X has devolved to satisfy the Mac faithful in quite a few areas. It's taken 10 years to shed that waste to finally start seeing a direction that one can be excited about.

Too bad a lot of talented Cocoa developers left Apple during the transition because they couldn't stomach waiting a decade for the transition to be completed when we were told it would be a few years.

In short: Promise less and deliver more.

The difference is, the Next developers were full-time, and almost all KDE developers do their work in the evenings, after their day job. That makes an enormous difference.

The difference is, the Next developers were full-time, and almost all KDE developers do their work in the evenings, after their day job. That makes an enormous difference.

Both projects show that small numbers of people with talent can do amazing things. And that with all the money and people in the world, Microsoft can still deliver a real, expensive late dog of a desktop environment with Vista.

A more interesting comparison might be how Apple compares with NeXT, now that many times more engineers work on Mac OS X than ever worked on OpenStep. For instance, I don't find the Apple Finder/Dock is more usable than the NeXT workspace manager (I think it's worse), and all the extra Apple people don't seem to have done much innovation in that area.

I like KDE4's Dolphin with column view browsing, split views, integration with the semantic desktop etc. Maybe that will end up being more usable and powerful than the Mac OS X Finder.

Granted, this is not an OS it's a DE...But there's a fraction of the resources allocated to this project vs Vista.

Why the hell are you still comparing it to Vista then? Hell, why is anybody on this thread?

KDE has enough money in the coffers to keep it going (from Trolltech, obviously), so does GNOME. Apple/MS's problems are worlds apart from GNOME, KDE, and every other desktop environment. Apple has to make and sell a whole OS, Microsoft has to make and sell a whole OS.

Meanwhile, KDE and GNOME, simple desktop environments, just have to be coded by their respective projects; other companies (Novell, Red Hat) have to sell the OSes that use these desktop environments.

So does MS have an excuse for having delayed Vista? Hell yes, they're managing a whole OS. Does Apple have an excuse for having delayed Leopard? Different reasons, but they're perfectly legit (they're managing an entire computing system).

Does KDE have an excuse for having delayed KDE4? Yes, but far, far less in quantity than Microsoft or Apple.

So just stop with the comparisons between Vista/Leopard and KDE/GNOME, all of you. All comparisons are illegitimate and useless to the discussion at hand.

Apple and MS only code for a single platform i.e. their own, so they have control of their destiny
KDE/Gnome are multi-platform.

A couple of months delay is not a problem for any system. MS and Apple get into flames because they commercially hype their systems to try and stop people moving to the competitor. Its not surprised they get hoisted on their own petard and quite right too

MS and Apple get into flames because they commercially hype their systems to try and stop people moving to the competitor.

Apple doesn't have a competitor, since they sell an entire desktop computing system (hardware+software, not either-or). Their closest competitors are Dell+Windows, HP+Windows, Lenovo+Windows, etc., not Dell by itself nor Windows by itself.

Microsoft's competitors are Novell, Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriva, Canonical, Linspire, etc., and their commercial offerings of Linux-based systems. Being companies that are all out to sell operating systems to the public, isn't it their job to hype their own products against the competitor anyway?

And what does the commercial hype of either company have to do with this topic anyway?

Edited 2007-09-01 21:29

1. afaik, no.

2. I think there will be easy video players for 4.0, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone will write some after the release, as I guess that would relatively easy with Phonon and all...

I'm not a KDE fan either, but that's an easy comment to answer. The KDE community doesn't speak with one voice. Some want KDE to be released soon, even if it's unfinished (so that it can possibly get into distros, especially long term support distros) while others don't want this until it's ready (it would divert attention from the 3.x branch which works for them and may give KDE bad press if the 4.x is a big yawn or too spartan).

KDE 4 would never make into any real LTS release. It would need extensive testing for quite some time. I want KDe to succeed, because if ut succeeds then that means gnome has to bring its A game to compete. Competition is great. There is alredy talk among developers to revamp gtk and I think that for the most part this is due to the recent developments in the qt and KDE scene. The gtk devs got toolkit envy.

Sadly, I don't think GNOME devs can compete with the likes of KDE...they both seem to have different views...For instance, KDE aims to be extremely customizable with an abundance of options..GNOME not so much. They like to keep it simple. In either case, it's a matter of choice on behalf of the end user.

Just remember though, increasing the number of options, features and choice increases the complexity, development time and likelihood of shipping with major bugs, and choices for end users should be balanced against the needs of the majority of users. It is better to split a project up into a number of projects target at specific groups of users than to create one gigantic project that tries to be everything to everyone and eventually collapses under its own weight.

Keeping it simple is a good principle - I think a lot of features have been added to KDE without any real consideration of the need for that feature to be there, the percentage of users who would take advantage of it, and how they would be affected if it wasn't there.

Gnome has taken a considered look at their broad userbase, and followed sensible design principles, whereas KDE sets out to be the Swiss Army knife of DEs, and risks being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Choice usually involves a trade-off - if you choose KDE, you are trading off simplicity for control, which means you are trading off reliability and stability because complex software is inherently harder to test and develop than simple software.

Aside from aesthetics and usability, I've always found Gnome to be more stable and less buggy than KDE.

But if KDE floats your boat, go for it. This is just my opinion after all.

"""

"""

Yes. That's a valid point. On the occasions on which I have given KDE a try, I've ended up with a plethora of annoying messages about how Konqueror has crashed, and asking me if I'd like to help out with their development efforts.

Yes. That's a valid point. On the occasions on which I have given KDE a try, I've ended up with a plethora of annoying messages about how Konqueror has crashed...

Is it?

I've never had Konqueror crash on me at all, and the only problem I've had is when I'm running Konqueor as root (something Gnome doesn't do) when sometimes kdeinit has a problem and I have to restart X. On the other hand I've seen gconf throw a fit on some Red Hat systems on numerous occasions, but there you go.

Sorry, but your supposed personal experiences count for very little.

and asking me if I'd like to help out with their development efforts.

Cute.

"""

"""

Yeah, right. I believe you.

Hey guys! This guy says his browser has never crashed on him. Ever! ;-)

KDE being buggy may have been true in the past, but I think it's really unfair to say that it is much worse than GNOME these days. I have noticed that KTorrent seems to be a little buggy but other than that I haven't had any problems. Overall, I think both desktops do a pretty good job with stability.

I've been reading for years here things like: 'app x never crashed on me', 'app x crashed a zillion times on me so now I'm using (here you put whatever desktop you want), 'X desktop is faster and way more stable than desktop Y', 'no it's not'...

OSNews is crippled with that kind of things. I have no doubt people are telling the truth. However it might be time to understand apps, desktop and distros do NOT perform the same way on every computer.

Therefore I don't see the point telling 'my experience counts for something, yours doesn't'. They both weight the same in my humble opinion.

I'm a kde user (kubuntu and kde 3.5.7). I'm more or less satisfied but I do have some crashes here and there from different apps and most of my apps are too slow to start in my opinion (noticably slower than any app on Windows XP for example). My linux system is pretty good (dual core AMD, 2 Gb Dual channel DDR, 6600 GT PCIE, HDD SATA, SATA DVD and DVD Burner). Despite all that, I'm not sure it would be right to say kde is not stable, is slow and crashes all the time. Why ? Because it's my system and I know some other people reported kde works fine on their system. A conclusion that kde is good or bad, slow or fast etc. based on my only experience is pointless.

@ aseigo: please, do not reuse the 3.5 HIG (or a slightly modified version) for 4.x, rework it entirely.

I've never had Konqueror crash on me at all

I won't call you a liar (how would I know?) but I can say your expecience certainly doesn't match mine. Konqueror crashes on me occasionally, as do other random KDE apps (and core services) bringing up that aforementioned dialog asking for dev help.

Is it Debian's packaging? Perhaps. It isn't enough to keep me away: I am a fulltime KDE user, but I have a hard time believing that Konqueror never crashes.

Easiest way was to use Kaffeine < 0.7, watch a video embedded in a webpage then right click a picture and select save. This has been fixed in Kaffeine, but why could a plugin take Konqueror down so easily? A forum I used to visit ofter (boards.jp) would crash Konqueror immediately if I didn't turn off javascript. Occasionally it dies on random sites, and since it lacks session recovery it's especially galling.

Anyway, my point would be that "Sorry, but your supposed personal experiences count for very little." goes both ways Anecdotes FTL (irony, given the contents of my post)

Gnome has taken a considered look at their broad userbase, and followed sensible design principles

I'd love to know what design principles they have followed. All I can see that they've done is to take a chainsaw to features that are consistently filed for by many people in Bugzilla, and are consistently turned down on the basis that 'ordinary users' would find them too difficult.

Can you define an 'ordinary user' for me, because I can't find a definition anywhere on Gnome's web site, or in their HIG?

Additionally, cutting features is not good usability practice and you will find it nowhere in any mainstream usability book. Organisation, however, is.

KDE4 is doing just that, look at Dolphin, look at how the control centre is in KDE4, simplified. Please stop making the case that KDE is perfect on every level and defending it to death.

Some of you KDE people are so in denial, here's a test, Dolphin is nothing like Nautilus right?

"Additionally, cutting features is not good usability practice and you will find it nowhere in any mainstream usability book. Organisation, however, is."

"KDE4 is doing just that, look at Dolphin, look at how the control centre is in KDE4, simplified."

In providing Dolphin as the default File Manager but retaining Konqueror, what features have been removed, exactly?

Kubuntu provides the simplified System Settings app, but you can also install KControl which wraps the full set of kcmshell elements, rather than a reduced set like System Settings. Nothing has been removed, or even particularly well hidden - just replace one app with another, and you'll have the full power of KDE3 in KDE4.

"Some of you KDE people are so in denial, here's a test, Dolphin is nothing like Nautilus right?"

What difference does that make? A scant few months ago, Dolphin didn't have a tree view, meta-data display/ editing, or an embeddable terminal, but now it does. Dolphin is simply a much, much younger project than Nautilus (Nautilus v1.0 was released in 2001), so comparing them at this stage of development is non-sensical - who knows how much more powerful it will become?

KDE4 is doing just that, look at Dolphin, look at how the control centre is in KDE4, simplified.

KDE 4 is not doing that. You will find all the powerful file management features you had in Konqueror, just in one application called Dolphin because it's based on the same components. There is an awful lot more in Konqueror and Dolphin's file management capabilities than Nautilus has, or ever had.

Which part of that are you just not getting, eh?

Some of you KDE people are so in denial, here's a test, Dolphin is nothing like Nautilus right?

A test? No, Dolphin is nothing like Nautilus, and the reason you don't know that is because you haven't used it. You've looked at screenshots and thought "Oh, it looks ever so slightly more like Nautilus than Konqueror".

I love this defensive "Oh, KDE 4 is just like Gnome" crap people come out with, because it just isn't true. With KDE 4 they are working towards better usability and better organisation, without killing all the features people actually find useful. I don't call simply doing the latter a 'design philosophy'.

I know that might be difficult for some people to take.

Edited 2007-09-02 11:05

What features have the Gnome devs "taken a chainsaw to" that you or others would like, and how do you justify the need for those features against the time required to program, test and support them?
Can you site a mainstream usability book to support your claim?

An ordinary users is someone with basic computer literacy (i.e., a non-power user, non-geek, non-programmer, non-sys-admin) who uses their computer to get work done, rather than endlessly change their window decorator (my definition).

Most people I know don't customise their systems much beyond changing their desktop wallpaper. Instead, they adapt quite comfortably to the interface as it comes out of the box. On the other hand, some people waste countless hours fiddling with inconsequential details instead of getting actual work done with their computer.

Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_featurism) is rampant in KDE*. Adding features imposes a severe cost in terms of development time, testing and support, and the value of any feature has to be balanced against that cost.

You can't just add features willy-nilly because a vocal minority has winged about having them. If the feature in question adds significantly to the usability of the overall system for the majority of users and is not too difficult to implement, then by all means add it. If the feature makes a minor, seldom performed task marginally easier for a small number of users, but adds significantly to the complexity, and testing and support costs, then adding it is not a good idea.

Features that power users find useful but confuse less technically aware users can increase support costs enormously, and must be very carefully considered.

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there." — Gordon Bell

*Actually, it is more a case of adding to many advanced features in the DE, but leaving their Office Suite utterly bereft of features.

I wouldn't call myself a 'beginner' but I never have customised the desktop - heck, I had 2 Macs in a space of 5 years and and never once changed the default background or avatar, I was happy with the status quo.

For a large number of people, it has nothing to do with whether or not they can do it but the fact that its just a computer, not some sort of extension of ones personal inner being. As long as the default colours aren't revolting, I tend to focus on what I use my computer for rather than admiring 'teh pretty' and 'teh shiney'.

How can you be so sure of this when Kubuntu 8.04's development hasn't even started yet?

Edited 2007-09-01 00:16

Oops. I meant Kubuntu 7.10.
My mistake.

The delay isn't that big. Suse 10.3 wouldn't have had it anyway, Fedora 8 will have a RC instead of a final (with updates every week or something) and Ubuntu 8.04 wouldn't have had it anyway either.

I know the are/is thing, but fewer/less - that's more difficult for me. hey, I'm dutch, sorry!

Not anal as such, maybe a tad misguided: your targets are in many cases non-native English speakers, so a bit of grammar-mangling is forgiveable. I'm told it is one of the hardest foreign languages to learn

But while we're on the subject, I'd also like to point out that "automagically" is not a word. But as this appears in a number of GNU manpages, I fear that battle was lost a long time ago.

(And yes, I'm aware that my habit of starting sentences with conjunctions is ungrammatical also. Oops, did it again...)

Hihihi Yeah, "automagically" appears nowadays in way too many places and it always pisses me off There is no such thing as "automagic"..

I'm told it is one of the hardest foreign languages to learn

Hmm, I've heard quite the contrary I read somewhere some time ago that finnish (along with any relative languages) is among the toughest ones..And me being a finn I can assure you that for a foreigner finnish is a true nightmare to learn

I quite believe you about Finnish, having studied it for a week (from assorted linguistic angles rather than actually learning the lingo) -- quite long enough for me! Hungarian (most closely related to Finnish IIRC) is a bit of a nightmare too.

English is probably the most commonly adopted language, and I think it's fair to say that it's easy to get by in, but to really master all its silly little exceptions-to-the-rule and be truly 100% fluent (if such a concept is really valid) is something that few native speakers can claim these days

/slow death of English teaching blog

"""
But while we're on the subject, I'd also like to point out that "automagically" is not a word. But as this appears in a number of GNU manpages, I fear that battle was lost a long time ago.
"""

All hope is not lost. Though the only solution, at this point, is slightly on the extreme side, and not for the faint of heart. People who use that "word" must be *shot* on sight.

"""
And yes, I'm aware that my habit of starting sentences with conjunctions is ungrammatical also.
"""

Is it? I'd never heard that. Some grammatical rules, like the prohibition against ending sentences with prepositions, are silly, and actually reduce the clarity of one's speech and writing, and should be ignored.

Edited 2007-09-01 15:28

Actually "automagically" _is_ a word. So is lumbsterdumpster, wobbedoohah, zxytlismutz and a gazillion other letter combinations. A word doesn't have to be accepted into a dictionary in order to be a word.

"Automagic" is something that happens automatically and appears to be magic because one cannot see what is going on. It happens "automagically".

Who makes the decision when a word is a word and who decides when a word is not a word?

"""
Who makes the decision when a word is a word and who decides when a word is not a word?
"""

Well, Duh!

The Word Fairy, of course. :-)

Hey, chill out a bit Remember, not everyone has been exposed to the english language for most of their lives. In some countries english just isn't used much if at all so IMHO it's quite understandable to make such small mistakes. You have to admit that complaining about using "less" and "fewer" in the wrong places is nit-picking.. Actually, I too do use the word "less" in places where you wouldn't like to see it being used. But to please you I shall try to remember to use "less" less

Though yes, one should learn the difference between "is" and "are"

PS. I generally dislike it when some people here start making fun of others who aren't too versed in the english language..There's so many different reasons for why one might not have mastered it so well yet. For some people just learning a language is a tough task whereas for others it's very easy and doesn't even require much (if at all) studying and so on.. So, to anyone who reads this comment: if someone makes some mistakes and it annoys you then why not try to politely tell them how to write it properly instead of making fun of them (and an ass of yourself)..

Another incredibly common and completely wrong phrasing is using "is" instead of "are." Don't people understand that is should not be used for plural!? "There's several things you need to understand..."

This error is not at all a stupid error to make. Completely off-topic, but let me explain why (I study these matters ). Anyway, there are two reasons why one would make such a mistake.

The first reason: in Dutch (for instance), "a few things are" could be translated as "een aantal dingen is" - where "is" is the 2nd person singular form of "zijn" (to be). This may seem weird at first glance, but it actually isn't - "aantal" is a singular word, and following Dutch grammar rules, it gets a singular form of the verb. We Dutch look at the grammatical structure of the subject, and deduct the correct verb conjugation from that - disregarding the fact that "aantal" has a plural meaning.

In English, you do not look at the grammatical structure of the subject - you look at its meaning.

So, when you say "don't people realise that "is" is used for singular?!", they most certainly do. It's just that there are actually two ways to determine number - the grammatical structure of a word, or its actual meaning.

I agree, though, that this first reason ought not to be an excuse for native speakers of English. Coincidentally, many, many, many of my fellow countrymen make the same error in Dutch - just the other way around.

The second reason has to do with the fact that the sentence you quoted has a contraction in it. People like to use contractions because it makes stuff easier to pronounce. Now, try to make a proper contraction of "there are" - there're is in essence not an incorrect contraction, but hell, it's difficult to pronounce, and therefore defeats the purpose of the contraction.

That's why many people simply decide to say "there's". When this happens, you should not look at the apostrophe-s as "is" with en elided 'i' in it - just think of it as a contracted "are".

Sure, it isn't grammatically correct English, but hey, contractions aren't grammatically correct in the first place. And to make matters worse - English has no official language institute like many other languages have, so who are you to say it's wrong? .

"""

"""

Thom,

I've probably posted about this before. But I had an experience a while back that woke me up to something... in that way that little things that are really no big deal sometimes can.

An article in a magazine published (in English) out of India kept using the words like "loosing" and "loosed" when what (I thought) they meant was "losing" and "lost". I sent a polite email to the editor. He replied, very politely, expressing his amusement on the matter. You see, in India, according to the editor, "loosing" and "loosed" are the proper English terms. And from a phonetic standpoint, it's hard to argue that he was less correct than was I.

We Americans are very insular. We make up 4% of the population of the Earth, but we like to think that the whole world revolves around us. The rest of the world standardizing on English makes the illusion nearly perfect. (One of my more advanced users commented to me a while back that he couldn't believe that the Gnome weather applet defaulted to metric rather than miles, inches of mercury, and degrees Fahrenheit!)

But the fact that the world has adopted English also means that it is not *our* language anymore. (Apologies to Great Britain for putting it that way.) English, like FOSS, is now the property of the world. Everyone can share in it. And if the people of India think that some of our conventions are stupid, counterintuitive, and they choose not to follow them... who am I to say they are wrong? Especially when their usage actually makes more sense when viewed objectively.

--

As an off-topic addendum, I do respect you, Thom. I know that I have made comments to the effect that I don't like you. (Perhaps I should not have.) And I do sometimes disagree with what I consider to be a heavy-handed moderation style mixed with a bit of territorialism. But I do appreciate the work that you do. There have been times that I have been irritated enough to look for another site to call home. But OSNews is a tough act to follow.

Edited 2007-09-01 19:27

It should be pointed out that languages change over time. The verb "to be" is the last word in the English language to retain grammatical number and person. Gradually, these distinctions are (or is that "is" now?) being lost, as newer speakers of the language dispense with it.

Try reading a book written in Old English, and you can see how much the English language has changed over the centuries. I would hazard a guess that English in a few hundred years will be unintelligible to the speakers of today.

While you expand your knowledge of C and C++, you can always help with documentation, bug triaging, translation, web site maintenance, or even marketing.

It's great to see people with a can-do attitude around.

Unless you're learning C for academic reasons, you can successfully learn C++ without learning C first... I did

Actually I've heard a bit otherwise for G, they don't really attract many new developers. Not since they went for a 6 month release schedule. True, they have a lot more money and corporate backing, but that mostly means the community has less influence - not really helping either... But I can't prove that, so I guess it might very well be wrong. Love to see some numbers on that, btw - # of developers and all..

If that is true, it just makes me want to scratch my head and ask why?

Edited 2007-09-04 16:10

As an aside, it seems that Gnome seems to be attracting more developers of late, which helps with faster releases and I suspect that this is due to the Gnome desktop environment being the corporate favourite, as well as corporate funding.

Well, I can't verify whether that's true, but if they are attracting more developers then it's only helping them to tread water. There's no GTK 3 on the horizon, nothing like Plasma happening and nothing going on with Gnome's lower level libraries. Things like the Dashboard stuff of a few years ago all seem to have disappeared.

I'm not sure whether the time-based six month release cycle has helped, because yes, you will get a release out on time, but will it actually have any new features of note? People have been hailing time-based releases as the way to go, but anyone can get a new version out. It depends on what new features it has in it, and whether there is a long-term plan to phase new changes and features in. I don't see one.

Additionally, I think the corporate influence has hurt them. Gnome really does need something like the Mono framework or Java classpath to work with so programmers have a general purpose programming library to work with. However, there just doesn't seem as if there will ever be consensus on such issues because you've got a lot of push and pull between interests.

I'm not sure I'd put that much importance on it. KDE4 will be an exciting release. There's no doubt about that. I'm curious whether they are really taking usability seriously or just paying (mostly) lip service.

But let's not over-hype *this* release. The future will reveal what is reaped from the seeds that they have sown.

Edited 2007-09-01 06:41

On one hand, I agree - we shouldn't overhype this one. But it IS the release which (hopefully) starts the new trend - Linux on the Desktop ;-)

I don't see how anyone can compare a 2 month delay by KDE to a 3 year delay by MS over Vista, but apparently lots of people are. Still, whenever you hype up a product as much as they've been doing for KDE4 there is bound to be some backlash by other people hoping to see it fail. Just like there is a vocal anti-Firefox group now that it has become popular. Schadenfreude.

Edited 2007-09-03 07:11

Ha yes, exactly!

Kind of ironic to know that "Pillars of KDE" and similar series were launched in response to criticism that there was too FEW information about KDE4 development (people screaming "Vaporware"! etc.).

You just cannot please some people...

SlackerJack, I'm not sure if you just aren't able to comprehend what we're saying or if you're deliberately ignoring us to troll. Regardless, it's become pretty clear that our conversation isn't going anywhere. I'm going to consider the matter closed unless you can tell me the point of your posts or ask me something about what I've said.

BTW, I can link to pictures as well.
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-08-26/files/dolphin_panels.png
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-08-26/files/dolphin_column_vie...
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-08-26/files/dolphin_split.png

Edited 2007-09-03 19:48

Did you even look at what I did?, see the comparisons, Dolphin is as simple as nautilus and uses practically the same layout and features.

Nautilus has actions by the way so you can do lots of things. Whats it now then, deny the evidence in front of you and question the out come?, thats typical denial tactics.

I did. You can make Nautilus look like the pictures I posted? I'd like to see that...

Yet again, you've failed to tell me what your point is. I'm beginning to suspect you don't even have one.

So your saying now that I made Dolphin look like nautilus?, your quiet a moving target aren't you.


Read the threads what started me off then, it's not my fault you dont follow.

I did, and it was my impression that you were trying to show that Dolphin was a clone of Nautilus. You said that wasn't the case, but never did tell me what you were trying to say.

I've said again and again that the reason Dolphin is better is that it has a lot more features. I've now shown them, and you say I'm simply denying reality.

I guess I simply don't understand what you're trying to prove here. That you can make Dolphin look similar to Nautilus? Yes, you can. But you can also do a lot of other stuff that Nautilus can't.

Making something look like something if it's totally different is a contradiction, segedunum claims this and I have shown that Dolphin has features and a default layout that looks just like nautilus, He denies this.

If Dolphin is as different to nautilus as day and night as claimed how can I post a simple picture showing otherwise, no its not because you can make Dolphin look like it. The only thing thats not default in that shot is the information bar(to be picky the text under the buttons are off), the rest shows the widgets are practically in the same order and layout. The information bar is exactly the same as nautilus, file count and disk space readouts are at the bottom same as nautilus, actions in the same position, the information bar is named the same.

A "Clone", copy or sharing ideas call it what you will but Dolphin IS one of them when compared to nautilus which certain people deny, I have shown otherwise so point made.

Edited 2007-09-03 20:48

Making something look like something if it's totally different is a contradiction

Of course they aren't totally different, they're both dedicated file managers. They're both created for the same purpose, is it any great shock that they share certain design features? I can make the KDE desktop look nearly identical to Windows XP or OSX, but I'm not going to then claim that all 3 desktops are exactly the same.

The only thing thats not default in that shot is the information bar

Default as of when? The KDE4 version is still under heavy development, and as far as I know the final default view hasn't been established yet.

I'm not going to argue for segedunum, but I think KDE4 Dolphin is closer to Konqueror than it is to Nautilus, just because of all the different stuff you can do with it that you can't in Nautilus. The UI is certainly closer to Nautilus, but a lot of that is just all the non-file management stuff stripped out, plus a few good ideas "stolen" from Nautilus.

Edit: And I still don't understand what point you're trying to make. That Dolphin stole a few ideas from Nautilus? That it's a blatant copy? That there's no reason to use it when you can use Nautilus instead? That they've finally got the UI right? Just that segedunum is stupid? None of the above?

Edited 2007-09-03 21:15

Making something look like something if it's totally different is a contradiction

What is this supposed to mean in English?

segedunum claims this

Since the above doesn't actually mean anything, I'm claiming what, exactly?

If Dolphin is as different to nautilus as day and night as claimed how can I post a simple picture showing otherwise...

All it proves is that you can show that file managers look like each other. Look everyone. Water is actually wet!

What it doesn't prove, as you are haplessly trying to claim, is that Dolphin has copied verbatim from Nautilus. Do the same comparison with Windows Explorer and Apple's Finder to show the stupidity of your argument ;-). Breadcrumb links? Big deal. They have them. Dolphin also has drop-down URLs that Nautilus doesn't have.

Does Nautilus look, or do anything like, this?

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/08/11880/

Can Nautilus do anything like that? The answer is no.

Smitty's links also prove that the current screenshots of Dolphin look absolutely nothing like what you've posted.

You just cannot seem to understand for the life of you that all you're arguing is that file managers, including Dolphin, have a similarity to each other. It proves absolutely nothing else.

Edited 2007-09-04 08:43