Submitted by “After a short delay due to a heavy dosage of ‘Real Life’, I return to bring you more on the technologies behind KDE 4. This week I am featuring Strigi, an information extraction subsystem that is being fully deployed for KDE 4.0. KDE has previously had the ability to extract information about files of various types, and has used them in a variety of functional contexts, such as the Properties Dialog. Strigi promises many improvements over the existing versions.”
I find KDE one of the best Desktop Enviroments already, from some points of view even better than OS X.
Version 4 could be what it makes it the most popular DE overall.
Edited 2007-04-12 19:08
Personally I’m a Gnome User, but I’m also a Power User and I have to admit that KDE 4 looks most appealing to me
KDE 4 has all the potential to be a Gnome Power User’s wet dream :p
“KDE 4 has all the potential to be a Gnome Power User’s wet dream :p”
Good one
KDE 4 has all the potential to be a Gnome Power User’s wet dream
The common sentiment is that KDE has always been the power user’s DE of choice for Linux/BSD. KDE4 brings the power to the masses by using their state of the art development platform to represent complex tasks with simple and elegant interfaces.
OSS developers love writing backend code because the best implementation is often clever and elegant. In the past, many OSS developers were hesitant to dive into GUI programming because the best interface was often represented by expansive stretches of ugly and boring code. Not something a developer would readily take pride in.
But with Qt4 and the KDE4 libraries, GUI code is more concise and elegant than ever. The libraries are a pleasure to work with, and great interfaces take less time and effort to build. Users like usable interfaces. Developers like usable libraries. KDE4 provides both.
KDE4 will be a developer’s wet dream.
Ever since I heard about QT4 and it’s effects on the future version of KDE, specifically with respect to being 20-30% faster and 10% smaller, could this make KDE smaller and faster than XFCE?(if not a couple of the other smaller/faster DE’s)
… To be honest, like time I tried GNOME (2.16), KDE (3.56) and XFCE (4.4) on my PiI366/256MB laptop, I found it very hard to distinguish (memory consumption size) between the different DE.
– Gilboa
In some usecases (esp if you run a lot apps) KDE already consumes less memory than XFCE… Due to KDE apps sharing much functionality, starting 1 KDE apps is pretty heavy on the memory, but all subsequent apps you start consume less memory compared to GTK and other competitors. Esp firefox and OO.o are of course wasting a lot of memory.
(OO.o’s codebase is larger than the combined whole KDE + Koffice codebases… Efficiency isn’t really OO.o’s game)
That’s actually incorrect. This recent study shows that the memory consumption of GNOME and KDE are identical to within a few megabytes, and XFCE beats the other two:
http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html
KDE isn’t the only desktop to share much functionality between applications. 🙂
The author clearly states following:
‘ll sign off with the caveat that errors in my method might show up, so be careful citing this article as some sort of authority.
You seem to be using his results opposite his wishes. And using free for measuring memory consumption isn’t too smart. I’d recommend exmap. OTOH I don’t doubt he is right. I just have the same misgivings about the methodology as the author has.
well, it’s true other desktop’s share functionality, but KDE has gone further in this regard than most others.
The numbers there are very different from a few made a bit earlier by a KDE dev, guess part of that is due to what they tested. Still, you’ll see the diff between KDE and Gnome grow with the amount of applications, and data you load in them. Office isn’t in this comparison, I see, also he compares kontact and evolution with thunderbird… guess the truth lies in the middle, so the diff might not be 100 mb but is still substantial.
Not true. GNOME and KDE are basically doing the same thing.
No, that isn’t supported by the facts, and data loaded in the applications will only show application differences — not framework differences.
> Not true. GNOME and KDE are basically doing the same thing.
Yes, basically the same thing, just like Windows and Mac OS X do. What I said was that KDE goes FURTHER in this regard.
>data loaded in the applications will only show application differences — not framework differences.
Hmm, yes, that’s true… Though that’s also interesting 😉