Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 9th Aug 2009 18:33 UTC
We had a remarkably short week this past week, so this will probably be the shortest Week in Review yet. We talked about Apple's hardware design, GNOME's decision to drop icons from menus and buttons, KDE 4.3 was released, and more.
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RE[7]: Finally high activity on KDE thread
by sbergman27 on Wed 12th Aug 2009 22:38
in reply to "RE[6]: Finally high activity on KDE thread"
Member since:2005-07-24
With the exception that I prefer a system with more than two "major" providers, I'm pretty much in agreement with you here.
The precise numbers are arbitrary. I think that it should be a number which is manageable by application providers who want to play in our OSS ecosystem. I would not object to a slightly higher number. I place it, conservatively, at 2. The churning cauldron is, however, a critical requirement.
Regarding my requirements for tier 1... well, I do prize efficiency. Even outside of what I need for my work. (My car gets 52 mpg on the highway, at a steady 65mph.) However, if the benefits were significant enough, I would go as high as, perhaps, 768MB per user. Given the huge benefits which shared memory affords upon a Linux XDMCP server (which, sadly, owners of single-user Linux PCs never get to see or appreciate) 768MB per desktop is quite a huge amount.
*But* I would have to perceive that my users would get enough back in functionality to justify that move. And at this time, a move to any other desktop than the one we use would, I believe, result in a net *loss* of functionality.
Edited 2009-08-12 22:39 UTC
RE[8]: Finally high activity on KDE thread
by setec_astronomy on Thu 13th Aug 2009 07:56
in reply to "RE[7]: Finally high activity on KDE thread"
Member since:2007-11-17
The precise numbers are arbitrary. I think that it should be a number which is manageable by application providers who want to play in our OSS ecosystem. I would not object to a slightly higher number. I place it, conservatively, at 2. The churning cauldron is, however, a critical requirement.
The reason why I prefer situations with three or more significant players is, that it fosters in the long haul a better discipline wrt open standards. The recent messy state of freedesktop.org
is imho directly correlated to the fact that the two largest contributers were able to declare "standards" unilaterally, without necessarily reaching consensus and pretty much without consequences outside of the relevant mailing lists, simply because having only two major providers of roughly comparable size imposes not the same penalty for failing to develop and adhere to cross-desktop standards as a system with three or more significant players. (Regarding xdg, there have been, fortunately, some promising signs of activity recently, but the initiative was started by one of the two major projects and not by the churning cauldron below).
My car gets 52 mpg on the highway, at a steady 65mph
(Fires up KRunner to do some conversions: hm 4.5 liters / 100km is about the same amount my car uses. It is not a particular unusual mileage for highway/motorway travels, but given that we Europeans still believe by large that every citizen of the USA drives a small assault tank, it is pretty good :-) )
Regarding the rest of your comment:
Given you recently stated on lwn.net that you manage to keep within 50-100 MByte per user in a shared setup for GNOME 2.x, 768 MByte per session can be considered indeed to be a huge jump.
It will be interesting to see how GNOME 2.30 / 3.0 pans out, because, at least in theory, it should be a lot smoother than the KDE 3.5 -> 4.0 process, because
a.) GNOME gives no guarantees wrt to binary compability and is therefore in the position to move their infrastructure forward in a piecemeal fashion
b.) (related to a.) ) the pressure to have the infrastructure ready before applications are ported seems to be smaller, because the GNOME counterparts to amarok, koffice, kaffeine and k3b are already more or less in sync with the "main" schedule
c.) after years of incremental, bi-anual releases, the schedule is deeply entrenched in the development process
d.)They had ample opportunity to learn from the experiences of the KDE 4 release
A year ago, I would have added that less problems are to be expected because the graphics stack should be in a better state, in part thanks to KDE 4 exposing bugs and inefficiences also in the Xorg server related parts of our infrastructure, but the recent major regressions in the performance department during the 1.5 -> 1.6 xserver transition (esp. in combination with intel cards) and similar experiences (NVIDIA taking ages to fix the memory relocation problem for their binary drivers, etc.) have started me worrying about the short- to midterm stability and quality of our infrastructure.
Edited 2009-08-13 08:01 UTC
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Member since:
2007-11-17
With the exception that I prefer a system with more than two "major" providers, I'm pretty much in agreement with you here. Of course, given your background and your use cases, anything that needs more than 50 - 100 MByte per shared desktop without providing in return really convincing benefits for your buisness oriented desktop customers is probably no longer eligible for "tier 1" membership, while my requirements for recomending and deploying software is less constrained and - perhaps, errenously - more forgiving to shortcomings and errors. It would probably be interesting to discuss when GNOME 2.x became tier 1 worthy by your definition, but since it is evident that we have somewhat different and entrenched positions regarding that particular transition, this is probably not the right thread for discussing this.
As somebody who is guilty of tolerating the fanboys on my side of the argumentative fence (and probably of being a vocal and anoying fanboy myself) I would like to point out that you seem to have less problems with fanboism in favour of projects you value. This may be one reason why people, including yours truly, perceive your behaviour on KDE4 threads as surprisingly emotional and not on par with the usual quality of your other contributions to discussions. (I will stop the smoozing in a minute, promised).
I know you attribute this to "everybody that cared and didn't drank the kool-aid-written-with-k has already moved on", but most reviews of KDE 4.3 and 4.2 - including from such outspoken critics like SJVN (who is imnsho a windbag, but this is besides the point) seem to be pretty positive. It probably is a wrong impression, but your reaction towards all developments in KDE 4.x seems to be "it sucked, it still sucks and as long as they don't perform the dustiest kowtow in the history of software development, it won't stop sucking".
It would be great to discuss the shortcomings of a project that definitly has a lot of room for improvement like KDE4 with a knowledgeable critic without falling into the repetative patterns we currently have.
Edited 2009-08-12 14:59 UTC