Submitted by “After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I’m convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate.”
Yeah! Why not what for a while until the software has matured before starting to make forks and whatnot? Give it a chance to mature and give people a chance to adjust to a “new” environment for g*ds sake!
Is it KDE:s fault that some distros are shipping a version of their software that is not “complete”? It’s a “bleeding-edge” distro, and I guess the users of those are prepared to live with the hassle of it?
How many months did it take XGL to be forked into Beryl? Of course they wound up merging or un-forking later on…it wound up working out nicely.
None because XGL didn’t fork into Beryl — Compiz did. And that was mainly because David Reveman was trying to take a slow and steady approach to developing Compiz and some people wanted to make all this crazy stuff right off the bat without having a sound infrastructure.
XGL and AIGLX are the 3d compositing frameworks (more or less) that made Compiz/Beryl possible.
Nobody forces you to run bleeding edge while past releases are still getting updates.
if the new UI is truly that bad, it will die a short death. death in this case being no real users to speak of. the upside is the bickering on the list will die down.
if it doesn’t die and instead surpasses KDE 4 in user adoption, then i guess it answers the question of which one is preferrable to most.
Hello, this is OSS. You are free to do with it whatever you want to (exceptions in the GPL, blah, we know).
Even if some/most people think that a fork is unneeded, there are obviously some who want one. So, for crying out loud, let them just do it. What’s the problem with it? Doing it the way YOU want is one of the most important things about OSS.
Or is it that some users are just whining (aka BAWWW) and demanding things from the developers? In that case, this is just silly.
The way I see it is that KDE4 is not surpassing KDE3 in any way, yet, maybe in the future and is not granted, who is willing to waith a year for KDE4.2 since KDE 4.1 is going to be yet another incomplete and unstable release? And no, Im not trolling, I tried the latest build and you can call it a beta, but those are numerous bugs that wont be fixed in time.
I say fork KDE3 since KDE4 is just a bunch of broken promises, oh, but you can’t really say it because Aaron Seigo will do his number and close his blog, what an atention whore, I say close your blog and let your work speak for you, but not try to act like the god’s gift to linux users, Im so tired of his litle numbers “love me, love my vision, you don’t understand”, grow up already and take responsability for once.
Edited 2008-07-02 16:53 UTC
Well, Manuma — grow up then, and start working on the fork you desire. Join forces with Vaughan-Nichols and anyone else who wants something different.
You can choose — continue developing KDE3 against Qt3 — by the way, a KDE 3.5.10 release seems likely anyway.
Or you can start with the ported-but-not-yet refactored state of KDE4. Just pull it out of subversion. The only thing that you need to do is to find a few mates and start working. If you do this, you need to find a nice new name for your project, of course, but that’s just basic courtesy someone as grown-up as you is surely capable of.
One can always write straight Qt applications and move forward with the Qt4.5/4.6 with 64bit Qt Cocoa to have native OS X applications native Linux applications, not to mention native Windows applications.
There are options.
Yes, indeed. But with KDE 4.x you can write native applications for Windows, Mac OS X, BSD*, Linux etc too. You can use KDE frameworks like Decibel, Solid, Plasma, Nepomuk and Akonadi that greatly enhance and build on the excellent Qt4 libs foundation.
Since at work I have to use Windows and since my employer is too cheap to even buy enough licenses of Paintshop Pro, I am actually using Krita on Windows myself whenever I need to fix a logo, and icon or a splash screen. It works very well, whatever problems I have are my own fault for not having finished Krita 2.0 yet.
Correct, yet if I want to write Cocoa Qt applications I can and leverage Cocoa whereas KDE 4 doesn’t even have language bindings for ObjC, let alone ObjC2.0 and much more needed to leverage Cocoa within KDE4.
I will be able to do this with Qt 4.5/4.6.
“There are options.”
There are always options. But I bet Manuma isn’t going to avail himself of them, for all his bluster. Besides, writing a pure-Qt application doesn’t do anything for the desktop.
Where are these broken promises you speak of?, plasma is coming along very nicely in trunk, alot of bugs already fixed since beta2.
KDE4.x is very innovative, the problem is that people just dont understand it, possible just like round wheels would never work. i’d also say that Distro like Fedora and and Opensuse implemented their own plasma feature(icon/widget movement in the bar) so if it crashes out plasma it’s KDE’s fault then?
Change hurts people who dont want to but there is no need to speak about A.Seigo like what people have done. I’m pretty sure that them same people better have an apology ready for him when KDE4.x really starts to rock, 4.1 really does so you’d better have them ready.
Edit: Folking KDE because they can’t see the innovation is one of the stupid ideas I’ve heard.
Edited 2008-07-02 17:54 UTC
I’m pretty sure that them same people better have an apology ready for him when KDE4.x really starts to rock, 4.1 really does so you’d better have them ready.
First I want an apology for all the hype created previous the KDE4 realise, I wan’t an apology for all the not founded hype that was spreaded, then they will have mine by the year of 2015, when KDE4 really gets realised and not this bunch of alpha state crap.
And when KDE4.x gets to 4.5 like 3.5 is now where will mine be?
KDE4 means the whole series not 4.0, since when did 3.0 have all the innovation and features 3.5 has, so please point me to where it was said that KDE4.0 would have everything they planned to have in the 4.x series.
Edited 2008-07-02 18:19 UTC
Waaaaaaaaaahhhh
thats all I see from people like this
Waaaaaaaaahhhhhhh. Mommy didn’t wipe my ***.
sorry but you won’t get one.
have you paid money for that? no
somebody forced you to use it? no
don’t like it? there are plenty of other free software desktops out there.
want that fork? start it, nobody is stopping you. if you complain and wait somebody else to do it it won’t get done.
I’m not part of the KDE dev team, but I sincerely apologize for giving you years of hard work for free. No, really, I’m sure they’re returning your money right now. Wait… you didn’t pay anything.
Put your money where your mouth is and get designing and coding sir and quit bitching about something you’re not forced to use and didn’t cost you a dime.
The knife cuts both ways. The exposure and useage of KDE has exposed the developers to career opportunities for many corporations who pay handsomely for their hobby.
Both sides have a rather co-dependent relationship and from the outside each has their merits of position to defend, but equally have a defenseless position which results in the present series of rants.
No highly visible FOSS project is advanced and adopted by corporations without those developers benefiting in their careers.
I agree, and that’s OK. But having to apologize to some random whiner because he doesn’t like something he received for free is a little too much.
Except when those projects fails of course!
Will KDE4 fail? No, I don’t think so, there’s lot of interesting backend work in it.
But for the frontend, given the many complaints, I’m not so sure..
Sounds like a serious bug to me
Seriously, this is what the whole discussion is about. Nobody doubts the innovation that went into KDE4. On the other hand, the user interface is simply not something people can work it.
Software simply needs to be compatible with the people that use it. This is important for both people unexperienced as people very experienced with computers.
Am I alone in actually liking KDE 4.1? I’ve been running the beta for several days and I actually like it. The theme could use some serious changing, and the menu maybe some enhancing, but I’ve found 4.1 much more usable than 4.0. Now, with that in mind the set of applications that are built with 4.x in mind are lacking for sure.
For background purposes, I was a GNOME user before GNOME 2.0 (before that WindowMaker), and moved to KDE after the whole “lets simplify/hide all the options of gnome”. But eventually moved back to GNOME, and then XFCE, and now finally KDE 4.1. I don’t really consider myself either a GTK or QT zealot.
What I find extremely odd is my machine uses a ton less resources with the beta of KDE 4.1 than GNOME 2.24. It seems like it is on the lower end of between XFCE and GNOME actually.
I really, really like KDE, and have since 3.0. The issues I have with 4 right now are UI related, like the silly boxes around the icons that cause apps to not launch because I don’t click them right, the lack of customization I am used to with my task bar, and things like that in general. Small things really, but enough to keep me from using it.
Aside from that, I find 4.0 a beautiful release and can’t help but really appreciate the time and effort that has been put into it.
KDE 3.5 does. KDE 4 in all, sucks. KDE 4 is the Windows Vista of the Linux world. Do I think KDE 4 will be good enough? yeah at version 4.5. For now, some people are happy with KDE 3.5, support for that will go away sooner than later so yeah a fork of KDE 3.5 will be necessary.
Thankyou for your kind words. I think what non-contributors to KDE don’t realise about kde developers is the high level of skill involved, and the willingness to take risks. So it is very gratifying to receive such high praise from someone who is clearly an expert at spotting innovative software development happening right under their nose.
You are right to point out how silly we are still carrying on with new releases of the KDE 3.x series. I don’t know what we can do about those loose cannons on the project who want to keep the old stuff going while working just as hard on those new shiny things.
Another cry baby at work here. Put up or shut up.
Nice, I’ve seen this comment copied and pasted all over the blogosphere, by this very same guy…lol
Ohhh God,
KDE certainly doesn’t need a fork. Anybody using 4.1 Beta 2 would be hard pressed to muster the desire to go back to the old Kicker, Kdesktop, and Kwin.
4.0.0 was OK, with lots of regressions in the desktop space, where the apps that shipped tended to be better than ever with the exception of (the high profile) Konqueror and KHTML. Oh, and bugs and vendor bugs.
KDE 4.1 ‘cures’ pretty much all of that.
With that being said, I have been (too loudly) critical of ‘the Cashew’ and it’s immutability. But that can changed by changing a hidden setting to switch desktop containment. (Albeit the alternatives are sub optimal ATM, and I’d argue that this will fragment the core desktop experience.) As of 4.2 this will get a GUI. It may be the solution to the wrong problem, but at least it’s a solution.
I have some other beefs with meta issues around Plasma. Like the decision to not let users tart up an ‘artists vision’ by colourizing plasma themes. But there’s Aya in KDE Plasmoids for that. It sacrifices user choice, but you don’t get everything, and even though I’d rather have a ‘tart up the vision’ checkbox, I’ll survive.
I think as of 4.1 KDE users will be pleasantly surprised. I actually hope that Suse and Fedora push 4.1 as an out of cycle update. That’d shut a lot of people up.
In the past, on this site, I listed criteria for KDE 4 success. I was too optimistic, but 4.1 actually leaves KDE in a really good spot going forward. Hopefully .my criteria for success’ will be met for 4.2. With the big 3rd party apps finally getting into shape, and the Plasma API stabilizing, things look good.
Edited 2008-07-02 18:23 UTC
I’m really getting tired with al those people complaining and bitching about KDE 4. If you don’t like it, just move on. This is the free world! But stop complaining about it and attacking guys like Aaron Seigo.
I for one are in the KDE camp. I *liked* the design of KDE 4 from the beginning, I like the idea of Plasma, and yes, I like Aaron Seigo and the vision he has on the desktop.
Harry
Except we’re not (all) just bitching. I love the idea of KDE 4, I think the underlying technology and libraries could be amazing. I hope KDE 4 turns out to be the revolution in Open Source desktops I think it has the potential to be. I just don’t think that the stuff I’m being shown is the best possible way to achieve that full potential.
The underlying framework of KDE 4 may be better than KDE3, but regarding wasting of screen estate, KDE4 outdoes KDE3. I am primarily a KDE user and my main gripes with KDE3 are big icons and unnecessary big window borders. On 10″-13″screens how can they be accomadated. And KDE4, instead of reducing their size, makes them really really big. I tried KDE4 on OpenSUSE11.0 for a month and for me it worked with no problems. Only if they reduce the size of EVERYTHING on KDE4, I will switch to it.
Just try another theme (plastique is a plastik clone, should do the trick for you)…
Why not fork? If there are people out there who think that they can take the basic KDE4 technology and use it to make a desktop that is basically a better KDE 3.5 I say more power to them. Either they’ll fail to make anything usable and the project will quietly die, be widely successful and become the defacto desktop based on KDE4 libraries or become reasonably successful and we’ll end up with two competing desktops based on the same core libraries.
As long as there is no forking of the underlying core libraries I fail to see what the problem is. Since the underlying libraries are the same then apps written against those libraries will integrate just as well against both desktops. XFCE doesn’t seem to have done much damage to GNOME after all (I know that XFCE isn’t a fork of GNOME)
I’ll admit that I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a light weight minimal DE based on Qt4 and the KDE4 libs. Now admittedly I’ll probably never get off my arse and actually do it, but if someone else did I would certainly be very interested to see their results.
Well call me baffled, but the Plasma technology allows you to do exactly what you want, without needing to fork.
Instead of the tired old ‘desktop folder with icons’ metaphor being hard wired into the desktop UI code, you have an easy to use construction set of widgets (applets), things inside other things (containments) and a very generic way of feeding data to these components (data engines).
You can write the code in C++, or in KDE 4.1, if you prefer, you can use other languages such as Ruby, Python, Javascript or C# and you will be able to throw together the desktop of you dreams in just a weekend or two. It might take even less time seeing as you will be able to collaborate with like minded friends over the internet. Scripting language based plasmoids can be easily packaged and will be installed from the net on the fly without needing to compile anything.
People are already experimenting with custom Plasma based UIs for small screened devices, or non-mouse based input schemes.
So really Plasma enables ‘forks for all’ with minimal effort if you want to look at it that way.
Which was kind of my point. Take the core libs and use them to build your own desktop. As long as you don’t start forking the underlying libs all should be good. Either write a custom plasmid that behaves the way you want or skip it and try to come up with something different, replace the panel and start menu with something you fell is better. Remove stuff you feel is unnecessary. Perhaps write a new config app for setting up your desktop environment etc. etc. Call it something cool and off you go. Fork the UI not the core libs and all should be good.
“As long as there is no forking of the underlying core libraries I fail to see what the problem is.”
The way I look at it, Plasma is *explicitly designed* to have a new “desktop” built on its technologies: the “desktop” background is designed to be replaceable; the panels are designed to be replaceable; core components like the taskbar, menu etc are designed to be replaceable; etc. As the scripting support and other core technologies mature, these items will eventually be able to be replaced simply by browsing with Hot New Stuff and seeing what pre-made desktops are available.
I’d look on a clone of OS X’s dock – or indeed, of KDE3’s kicker and kdesktop – written with libplasma as as much of a “fork” of Plasma as a new Firefox theme and an extension that grants it extra functionality is a “fork” of Firefox.
Edit:
Damnit, should’ve refreshed: Richard said everything I wanted to say already.
Edited 2008-07-02 18:48 UTC
I’d like to see more the equivalent of Flock ( http://flock.com ) than simply a new theme. Basically someone took the Firefox render engine and codebase and wrote a browser trying something new and different on top of it. Take the seriously cool stuff underlying the KDE 4 project and see what you make it do by trying to build something different from the official desktop with it.
being tired of the one-true-way-of-doing-things in kde3 (e.g. icons on the desktop, “the” k menu, and *always* a panel!) with no recourse other than a complete rewrite of things, i started designing plasma.
so i would love to see what you describe above to happen as it is one of the motivations behind the project: make it easy to make new stuff with no assumptions forced upon you.
this is why there are something like 6 different application launchers (aka “application menus”) in development in different places. diversify, experiment, realize that confining people to one way of doing things is Bad(tm) (even though you need to provide a default experience).
it seemed quite in line with the ideas of freedom otherwise embodied in our software.
Edited 2008-07-02 19:26 UTC
When one consider that KDE 3.5 still are maintained and bugfixes continue to go into the SVN repository. Where distributors are free to pick up them up, which several does. There are even plans for a 3.5.10 release soon, the second release since KDE 4.0 at that. Afterall KDE has millions of users, and some like enterprise users, are conservative and will not update anytime soon regardless of KDE 4s status. It should be unnecessary to point out that the KDE developers are fully aware of this.
And the pace in which KDE 4 continue to improve, both with new functionality and increased quality. The amount of work done each week are a clear indication of the talent and the not insignificant numbers of developers.
The call for forking makes perfect sense, since no one of the people doing the calling say they are going to do it. Not surprising since they mostly seem like non developers, or people not inclined to contribute to the KDE project in the first place. Others, including existing KDE developers seem to have a inclination of how huge an effort like this would be, and know it’s more efficient and makes much more sense to use the resources improving KDE 4.
As I said in comment to SJVN’s original blog posting:
If you wish to start working on your own vision of the desktop, be that a fork of KDE4 or a porting of KDE3 to Qt4 or a new desktop UI on top of libplasma or something from scratch or whatever, just let us know and I’ll make sure you get svn accounts so you can do your work in KDE’s svn if you so wish.
It’s really that simple.
And yes, Plasma makes this ridiculously simple to do, if one decides to go that route.
Unfortunately, I expect to see no actual effort ever emerge. =/ That would be so much more useful than talking about it since we could each then just compare results side by side.
I’d be more impressed with the sentiments when the Konqueror teams just uses WebKit, works with the rest of that community, including Trolltech, and just makes us Web Developers confident that coding to Standards that WebKit have stableized means I will have sites look clean on Konqueror, Safari, Epiphany, OmniWeb, Shiira, not to mention the other WebKit based browsers leaving us to only really care about how Gecko is working with our code.
I left IE out intentionally as the less we support it the more willing they are to move to supporting the W3C standards.
But as you mentioned, we could create a parallel UI paradigm approach to the Kdelibs/Kdebase foundation but then again one can always synch up KDE Trunk with a fork and eventually bring it out as alpha, beta and gamma releases.
I think you’re rightly concerned that doing such will create two separate communities and give the KDE community two subcommunities leaving the KDE Devs in far less control of their vision thus crippling the point of KDE 4.
it’s actually not the “konqueror team” that makes this decision. once there is a working WebKit kpart out there (slow progress being made on it) then the market can make this decision very easily.
and this topic has nothing to do with the khtml/webkit stuff.
oh, wait it does: we use webkit in plasma. there! on topic again!
one could create a parallel UI paradigm inside of the kdeplasmoids package for all i care =) there’s really no need to even branch things.
i don’t think i ever said that. please don’t put words in my mouth or thoughts in my head =)
so .. it could create subcommunities, but i don’t think that would be a bad thing at all. diversity is fine.
One of the worst things you can do in software design is push new paradigms to peoples throat. Many people are happy with KDE 3.5. They don’t want new paradigms.
If you have visions for new paradigms, you can design it. Provide it alongside the old one. If it is really better, users will switch.
So, what needs to be done here is a port of the old UI (kwin/kicker/kdesktop) to KDE4. The KDE people then have all time, without any pressure to improve the new Plasma stuff. As soon as people like it, most people will use it and the old stuff dies.
The current situation is really awkward, people won’t switch to KDE4 until the new interface can do everything the old interface can do (which is a lot of features), which makes that developers need to add features like crazy now to make KDE4.1 do everything 3.5 can. It is not doable to implement years of KDE2/3 work in a few months into KDE4.
KDE4.1 won’t satisfy KDE3.5 users. Nor will KDE4.2, if it continous the current approach. Simply port and provide the old user interface, so people can switch when they are ready. This makes it possible to abandon KDE3, which is the best for both users and developers.
Edited 2008-07-02 19:31 UTC
Exactly. End users are simple people who want to carry on with their daily work. They can accept evolution, not revolution.
How would you like it if one day you went to your office and found everything totally changed?
Developers shouldn’t follow their own dreams, they should always keep their users in mind,
I am sorry, I know I won’t be popular, but this reminds me too much of Vista. A few hours after trying to use it, people bring their computer to the nearest shop begging the engineer to install XP (personal experience).
I have one more reason to respect Apple: Leopard was quite innovative, but by no means a shock. The interface was still the old, familiar OS X. Changes should be under the hood.
Quite recently the old familiar OS X was the new and totally alien OS X. Lots of people hated it, lots of people tried to make it behave like the old familiar OS 9 and lots of people where reluctant to upgrade. But Apple pushed on and eventually people got used to it. Now people even refer to it as the “old, familiar” interface
When all is said and done the jump from XP to Vista was much smaller than the jump from OS 9 to OS X, and people eventually got used to OS X. While I’m certainly not fan of the Vista interface and I’m not quite sure what I think of the new KDE4 interface I thinks it’s far to early to call either one a failure.
I didn’t say the new KDE UI is a failure. It’s just not a good idea to put the old paradigm into it (as the KDE developers are being forced to do now: i.e. KDE4 needs to provide an old style desktop).
The KDE developers need to work on their vision, improve it. If it’s good they will succeed. In the meantimem, if they want KDE3.5 users to be of service, they need to provide the old interface and try not give them a “fixed” KDE4 one. Simply because people *want* the old UI.
Apple did not provide users the service of an old UI. They didn’t need to, because OS X was so leaps and bounds better, that staying with OS 9 was not an option. KDE users do have the option to continue using KDE 3.5 and they are doing this en masse. As it is free software, people will even be maintaining it. The KDE developers need to convince the users to upgrade. They are not going to succeed with their current approach.
Edited 2008-07-02 20:36 UTC
That’s not how I recall it. OS X 10.0 was certainly not leaps and bounds better than the latest OS 9, and lots of stuff didn’t quite work. I recall lots of people clinging to OS 9 for as long as they could. It really wasn’t before 10.2 that I feel you could really say that OS X was “leaps and bounds” better OS 9. Apple simply banked on the fact that their customer base would rather put up with the short term ‘pain’ of the transition than move to Windows.
I think we don’t disagree at all
That’s a bit of a revisionist view, but the comparison to OSX vs OS9 does make an interesting parallel.
When Aqua was released, it was cheered and hated. Surf through google for some of the original reviews. There were comments that Apple was stripping features. They didn’t like the dock. They wanted drives mounting on the desktop. The colors were too flashy and the focus was on bling. The icons were too big. It didn’t look professional. It was going to drive Mac users back to Windows. And so on. And these were comments from existing Mac users. The underlying message from the naysayers was that while Apple brought in considerable functionality under the hood with OSX, they had made the interface less useable and were going to drive long-term Mac users away.
OSX hardly took off immediately. There were compatibility issues with software, there was the whole deal of having to virtualize OS9 or whatever the workaround was, there were quirks Apple still had to address in the interface etc.
But of course, once people started using OSX, particularly 10.1+, change didn’t seem so scary. Does anybody think that Apple should have held off on OSX 10.0 without replicating the OS9 interface, or held off on releasing it until it was as developed as it is now? The transition to OSX was probably the boldest move Apple had made to that point, and despite the initial criticism and complaints from their user-faithful, it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. In fact, people always seem to point to OSX as the guidepost for interface design.
History has a way of always repeating itself…
Mac OS X 10.0 was so bad that Apple wound up giving out the 10.1 update to its users for free if I remember correctly and many felt the upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2 should have been free as well. Mac OS X 10.2 was the first really stable and fully functional version of Mac OS X and its only gotten better from there thanks to the additional polish in each release.
I think if the KDE devs really wanted to just get something like the UI in KDE 3.5.x out there quick and dirty they could do so very quickly but it wouldn’t be future-proofed. They are designing Plasma in such a way that it won’t require a complete redesign for later versions of KDE. Part of the reason for the new UI layer is that the old one was going to be very difficult to port over and wouldn’t provide the flexibility that A. Seigo and others are seeking. If I understand the Plasma team’s aims then you will be able to design an user interface that mimics anything from Win 3.1 or XP or Vista or KDE 3.5 or GNOME or OS X and its dock. Plasma looks to be the most flexible user interface ever-designed for a computer and building a proper foundation for such a system will take time. I wouldn’t be surprised if people didn’t feel that Plasma is “Enterprise-Ready” until version 4.3 at its current rate of development and schedule which would place its release in July 2009 which will also be when the first round of point updates for KDE’s ported third party applications should be released such as KOffice 2.1 and Amarok 2.2.
It’s taking more time than most people thought it would to port over all the old applications into the new frameworks and paradigms. Remember a lot of the rewrite is not just to make use of a new toolkit but also to make the apps fully cross-platform and be able to run on Windows and OS X. Laying the foundations for such things takes time but it will pay off over the next 5 years.
You add features over time not add them like crazy just so people can switch to KDE4. People will then moan the features are not stable. This is not Vista you know where Microsoft are pushing users to switch, stay with KDE3.x until your satisfied then, plasma features and dev is going fast and I think your wrong. 4.1 has many features over 4.0 already and at the current rate it’s looking very good.
Such a policy will lead exactly to a fork. If you add those features over time, that time will span years. The KDE3.5 users (almost the full KDE userbase) are not going to sit back and relax with the current 3.5.9, they will start to improve it.
given the delta between 4.1 and 4.0, i’d have to disagree.
this is provably false by looking at past releases which were not 1:1 feature wise (including feature replacements or removals).
and you’re rather overestimating the difference in interface. there are differences, but they are hardly as ghastly as you seem to think.
there’s also all those other people who never used kde because of kde3’s interface.
i’m fine with providing a classic ui alongside where we’re going now, and in fact with some elements that’s what we already do (e.g. the application menu).
but hiding the new behind the old is very .. backwards.
Note that this is new code, duplicating old functionality. This is of course fine from a user perspective as long as it can do everything the old code can.
One feature in 3.5 I really enjoy is the MacOS-style menu bar. Nothing (regarding UI) is wrong with normal menu’s, it’s just that it saves so much desktop space that I can’t refuse it. It’s not in 4.1, so 4.1 will not be the release that makes me drop 3.5. I have no idea when someone will take the time to implement it: 4.2? 4.3? It’s just an example. There’ll be silly kicker, kdesktop features that people love a lot.
You know, I still get e-mails from people that they can’t use Free Pascal because we haven’t implemented compiling to memory yet. Yep, the very fact that there is disk activity makes them refuse the ultra-state-of-the-art Free Pascal compiler above the 16 years old Turbo Pascal compiler. Silly feature, very difficult to implement portably for me, but people care about those silly little features, wether I like it or not.
I’m not saying you should care about all those corner features (I’m giving those die hard Turbo Pascal users the finger as well), but things are definately more complicated than just providing a similar UI.
well , i didnt make this , so i dont know if its the real thing or not.
but see this , i guess you will be imensly happy
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/kde+4+beta+2?content=84404
notice the bar on top , and the lack of menu on the kde4 windows
if you go to bugs.kde.org and search through the reports (admittedly, bugzilla’s searching is about as fun as poking one’s self with a needle) you’ll find reports on these kinds of issues.
in this case, there’s a plasmoid in playground which is pretty well there, and with a little polishing will be in 4.2.
Well, for the long time I didn’t like aseigo idea. But recently I tried to use kde4 and it looks really nice. Unfortunately plasma still misses many things from old kicker+kdesktop+kmenu combo and many core applications lost some nuances which made use of them pure pleasure (eg. key navigation in autocompletion).
I like the idea of KDE4, but the reality is that it just doesn’t work ‘as advertised’.
The situation reminds me a lot of E17 – a product with lots of nifty features, but in perpetual beta and lacking the ‘meat and potatoes’ stuff that users need to get work done.
And thats fine – obviously the KDE devs are free to spend their time how they like, but I don’t see KDE4 competing with KDE3.5 as a professional desktop environment anytime soon.
The eye candy has been thrown in seemingly with no regard for functionality – For example, it doesn’t matter how pretty a panel looks if you can’t move the applets it contains. That issue has been mostly fixed now, but it’s indicative of the thinking and priorities behind KDE4.
Maybe the people with the KDE4 ‘vision’ are actually way out of touch with their users? It’s possible, but they’re the best we have got at the moment.
But if you think you know better, don’t just talk about a fork, hurry up and do it. The OS world is full of armchair programmers who are full of complaints but can’t bring themselves to contribute.
Personally, i’m willing to wait and see how KDE4 evolves – its not like you don’t have other choices.
remember that statement.
the priorities in this case were: make the low level things work first, then work our way up the stack. your suggested approach would have advocated “apply a hack on top of it now!”. not only does this waste effort in the long run, it risks the quality of the codebase signficantly.
moreover, downstreams came up with a patch for that just fine in the meantime, without hobbling upstream development.
so we traded 6 months of no applet moving on the panel for years of solid usage in the future.
i don’t like short term thinking.
i probably know more about kde’s users than you ever will. not only am i user of kde, but over the years i’ve met and talked with literally 1000s of them. i’ve also participated in or digested the results of various studies done with our user base.
describes most of humanity in most endeavors, it seems.
“i probably know more about kde’s users than you ever will. not only am i user of kde, but over the years i’ve met and talked with literally 1000s of them. i’ve also participated in or digested the results of various studies done with our user base.”
Mr Seigo, the users you meet or the one who take part in studies are most likely the “geeky” ones.
But have you done “the granny test”?
Seriously now, talking about “ordinary” users: my sister found herself immediately at ease with KDE3 (July 2004).
When she comes here I’ll ask her if she feels at ease with KDE4.
I can also ask friends, most Windows users recently converted to Ubuntu.
Or people who have never seen Linux before, that is IMO the best test.
just “Aaron” please. formality is unnecessary (and for me, unwanted) here.
elementary school children, office workers, government workers, first time home users … no, i’m not quite so myopic to make the classic, and elementary, mistake of building profiles on any one group of users. i do meet a lot of geek users, too; they are an important segment of the user base. they are hardly the only significant group i meet with, talk with or study, however.
Thanks, I find your reply quite satisfactory.
Well, you just keep doing what youre doing – Denying theres a problem, insisting the long term goals outweigh the short term needs of the users, that everything will be fine.
That 6+ months of a complete lack of basic, and hugely visible functionality is somehow not an issue.
That you know better than everyone else, and that nobody elses opinion means sh*t.
Whatever, just keep doing what youre doing. You’ve made KDE4 a great success so far.
If the current release (or even any future release for that matter) does not offer functionality that you consider vital either don’t use the software that release, find other software/systems that do what you want, or help advance the project through coding (as it is open source) or in other ways even if you can’t code such as writing docs, doing language translations, or even news releases.
I feel bad for people who update their distro and don’t realize it using KDE 4.x and it does not have the functionality they desire in that release but normally such things are only problems for bleeding edge distros in which case you should know what you are getting yourself into. Ubuntu made a bad choice, IMO, in choosing KDE 4.0.x for Kubuntu because KDE 4 is not yet ready for the average user (but it will by July for many and will be ready for everyone by next July 09). If your distro makes poor decisions for your usage patterns then perhaps you should consider another more conservative distro such as CENT OS or RHEL or Novell’s Enterprise offerings. It would surprise me if they made the move before KDE 4.2 or even 4.3 due to their particular emphasis on stability and instead stick with the older 3.5.x series. Who knows when Debian will move over their stable release to KDE 4.x or even testing for that matter?
KDE 3.5 is still quite usable. I mean I run Windows XP at home on a 6-year old computer (although the XP install is newer) and it works fine for me despite its age of 7 years after initial release and 4 or 5 since the last major update (SP2).
People forget that KDE 4 is one of the most ambitious software projects, open or closed source. This is the first major rewrite of KDE since 2.0 and many people did not upgrade to it until 2.2 and then many held out the upgrade to KDE 3 until 3.2. It’s fine to wait it out a little. Also the KDE devs made clear that this release was primarily for developers and advanced users. Perhaps they should have put a warning label on it labeling it for “developers and advanced users only.”
I’ll admit I was one of the ones highly critical of the decision to release KDE 4.0 in January but frankly it was the KDE devs decision as it is their software project and I’m just an occasional user (until I get my new computer then my current one will be running a KDE 4 desktop). I look forward to what the KDE 4 series will bring us.
Offer constructive criticism, and you’ll get constructive feedback. All you’ve done is falsely assumed that your personal opinion applies to the general userbase, as opposed to being polarized with the powerusers that tend to post on online forums, or blogs, or whatnot, and are personalizing the situation.
Hell, I’ve gotten so sick of this KDE4-is-so-bad discussion, that I spent two days at work cajolling some of my non-linux experienced co-workers to use my laptop for 20 minutes, poking at Konqueror or whatnot, just to see if there was something I was blatantly missing. They were quite impressed with it, in that they expected it to be something like a text-based DOS. Of course, I didn’t give them 3.5.9 or Gnome to compare it to, but that’s kind of the point. Without a frame of reference (other than Windows), they weren’t biased, and these are the same people that may very likely wind up running Amarok or kmahjjongg on their Windows systems at home.
You brought up the example of E17, and while I don’t agree with the context in which you used it, I think it’s a perfect of example of how a project goes stale when people, whether developers or users, have some pre-determined measure of total perfection before it can be released. At some point you have to let it leave the nest and live in the real world.
KDE4 needs to grow if it is going to thrive, and in order to grow, it needs to live. It can’t sit in SVN for an indefinite amount of time until the posters on the dot and other places are in some sort of unanimous consensus that it is ready, because that point will never happen.
And as for Aaron’s opinions, at least he articulates them. Agree with them or disagree with them, but at least he explains them. Which is more that can be said for the majority of the comments against. Plasma was outlined something like two or three years ago. It’s well on track to becoming what was visualized. There was ample time for discussion and whatnot.
And frankly, as someone that has been following KDE4 development since then, I’m too excited by the future possibilities to want to see the devs waste time in hacking and porting hairy code that was poorly maintained simply to present the facade of the DE I was hoping to move from. I’m happy to see kdesktop and kicker die, in as much as the phoneix needs to burn in a pyre before it can be reborn as something greater.
Anybody that talks about “users” in the context of KDE4 failings is generally not counting my opinion, or others like me. Just selectively exerting their own.
Whole-heartedly agree.
Edited 2008-07-03 05:22 UTC
sorry, the last 6 months have seen *insane* amounts of progress.
no, not everyone else’s opinions, just your opinion (and those like it). why? because it’s uninformed and delivered in the most uncivil manner possible. if you want me to take your opinion into consideration, then make it a well researched one and then speak to me like you would a person deserving of common respect.
imagine going to a friend, a manager, a professor, etc. and delivering an uninformed opinion with words such as the above. i doubt they’d receive it well, and you wouldn’t deserve more.
What I find really annoying about this whole thing is that everyone expects stability and feature completeness “yesterday” …right…because kde 3.5 came out overnight.
Kde 3.5 extends all the way back to kde 2 series. An interesting exercise would be to get all those whining 3.5 users and then force them to use kde2.0 or even 3. If they are then happy with the experience I will simply call them fossils and then concede the point that kde4.1 is bad. Otherwise they are just fools, with very little foresight, and I’ll still call them fossils.
There are numerous examples of backlash against initial revisions of innovative new frameworks (eg Osx, gnome2 etc). The same people who said “OSX sucks” in those initial years should feel very foolish today. Unfortunately people never learn from history…
OS X did ‘suck’ in those early days (well I never thought it sucked, but I can see the argument of those who did). The only people who should feel foolish are those who said “OS X will never amount to anything and apple should go back to OS 9” and I can’t recall many people saying that. Saying 10.0 sucks for me and I’m sticking with OS 9 until Apple make OS X stop sucking was both a common and reasonable position to hold back then.
I can recall (fuzzily) people saying things along the lines that wasn’t ever going to amount to much…
Gnome2 however I remember quite well, with a forks attempting to fix the “broken” gnome 2.
Why can’t people just keep a wait and see approach? Sure, they’re passionate, but nobody is forcing them to upgrade plus with kdelibs installed they can run most kde4 apps from within kde3.5, so they don’t lose out in that aspect. If plasma isn’t doing it for them now, and they won’t do anything about it then perhaps they should wait until some kind soul does it for them…
But that does not mean that a fork would not serve a purpose at least for the time being. The Suse version of KDE4.1 is a fork in that it does not reflect the current 4.1 branch, this does not make it harmful. KDE 4.1 is coming along nicely but there are a number of attributes that are unpopular with a large number of users.
The most obvious being the cashew. I patch and recompile the cashew out of existence with each update. KDE is still in too much flux though to make a permanent change outside of the KDE development team themselves.
The menu is another example. The inability to hide a panel and bind to a corner. The inability to open a menu on desktop right click. There are any number of other design choices that combined could make a fork that would make the KDE4 environment more pleasant for a group of users.
I think KDE4.x has some great stuff and its speed is fantastic. I am excited by the possibilities. that said features that I consider very important to my workflow are gone and other elements that are detrimental have been added. so for me KDE4.1 is a curiosity, but not terribly useful. Hopefully eventually that will change. If in the 4.2-4.4 range KDE4 still has inequities to use for a group of users then perhaps the idea of a creative fork should be considered though.
you mean the menu you can replace with a single right click?
these two are not design decisions, but features yet to implement. both are on the 4.2 roadmap. so instead of forking, how about contributing those features upstream?
(adding features already stated to be added has got to be the lamest reason for forking rather than getting involved i’ve ever heard =)
Off-topic: I never understood what developers see in these so called “smart” menu’s. Now most UI’s allow for a plain, stupid, start menu, but it often takes quite some searching through settings to get it.
Yes the menu which with a single click still does not provide all functionality of the previous (such as easy access to key bindings). Semantics and smart quips do not change the fact that the default menu option is an important choice and a branch or release that changes the default is a fork, however minor of one.
As I am well aware. However given your penchant for marking bugs that you do not agree with as “Won’t Fix” I mention them as inequities of the current release?
EDIT: and they most definitely are design decisions. Priorities and ordering features to implement are design decisions. Software is mutable, but a decision to include or exclude a feature from a release is a design decision and it does impact the usability for some.
My main contention is the cashew, I fixed that in my own code since you refuse to accept it as a bug (which if I am not mistaken would be in the top 20 if not marked won’t fix). For that matter I am working on allowing menu to be right click in my spare time. Right now though futzing with KDE4 is not overly interesting since I find it pretty much unusable on my laptop at 1024×768.
And thank you so much for being selective in what you comment on. I would hate for you to acknowledge that waiting till 4.2-4.4 was part of the very comment you are being derisive of.
If a feature is not in the current release and a branch is made with distinct features (in the same repository or independently) it is a fork. If things go well the fork (or selective parts of it) will merge back into the main branch.
It is minor features like this that makes forks valuable and I am sorry you are not of the mind to agree with me on that. I am not suggesting a coup from the KDE developers. I am merely suggesting if, once KDE4 development stabilizes, the features that are important to a group of people are not addressed a fork could be made to try these features and determine if they can not be put into KDE4 in a way that does not offend your sensibilities.
Edited 2008-07-03 00:17 UTC
it does in 4.1.
then every distro release made of kde or gnome ever is a fork. in which case, i’m unconcerned and this shouldn’t be a matter for a rash of public news.
because some of the reports are, well, not going to be addressed. compare to the number of reports that are. the reports that get marked with WONTFIX by me are less probably than 1% of the reports that are either accepted or fixed.
if i implemented every single request without exception, things would be an awful mess.
if you continue to harass me about things that have already been fixed, however, it won’t be very impressive. if you say, “but we need $FOO” and i say “$FOO is in 4.1, coming out next month” and then you say “but we don’t have $FOO” again, what do you think?
to me these are logistical decisions: which features to implement in which order. they follow from design, but are hardly strategic decisions.
i refuse to accept the request as requested. and i’ve explained why: the design as put forth in that bug report is quite simply wrong. i’ve noted in the report (and elsewhere) repeatedly how the design of plasma *actually* works.
if you stop fighting the design and start flowing with it, you’ll find you get everything you want, including no cashew.
but i’m not going to let those who are not cognizant of the design screw it up. or do you expect the kernel developers, rdbms developers, apache developers, etc, etc to all implement the algorithms you pitch them for things you evidently aren’t familiar with? it’s exactly the same thing.
if you communicate with the project (panel-devel at kde dot org) your work could benefit others. up to you, of course, it’s your time and patches =)
ok, so let me address the 4.2-4.4 issue directly: if you fork things and take it off in that direction, you’re pretty much wasting your effort. had the Suse guys written their panel moving patch in a way that made sense for upstream inclusion, 4.0 would have it. replicate this for every feature you want that we have on our roadmap.
and yes, i explained to them what would make sense for upstream inclusion. instead i ended up writing it from scratch for 4.1. that seems like a waste of their effort and unfortunate for everyone who had to wait an extra 4 months to see it in 4.1.
this is a rather strict definition of “fork”, and generally not what is implied by the term.
we do this all the time, yes.
i have no issue with feature branches. but again, this is not what the word “fork” usually refers to.
you do realize that that’s what the term “fork” means in f/oss, right? hm.
great. so here’s some suggestions on how to do that: work in kde’s svn where we can all see what’s going on and make it easy to move patches around (e.g. into trunk/). communicate with the project so that we can attempt to work together. there’s probably over a dozen active developers working on plasma on a nearly daily basis, so this communication would serve a lot of people.
if you are interested in working in this fashion, then get on panel-devel, we’ll hook you up with an svn account and we can get down to hacking.
http://plasma.kde.org/
Aaron have you thought about updating the website for Plasma. I mean I think putting all the information that you post about this all over the internet into one central place would save you and others a lot of time. If you don’t have time to update the website is there someone else who does have the time to update the website with sections such as the ultimate goal, look and feel for Plasma and then a section for Plasma in its current condition?
I would do it but I barely know HTML much less anything more advanced like CSS or JavaScript.
Have you thought about removing the Plasma website which is out-of-date by your own admission and just have it link to the Techbase site instead? I think it would help you in the conversations that you have with people.
No need for a wholesale fork of KDE for that. All those things can be done by Plasma applets/containments. Either you can write one from scratch, or use one or more of the ones already included in KDE as a base. It’s the same way several of the windowdecorations was created. And it’s waht Plasma is designed for.
Why not use them too?
Why wait, since you are not bound by the feature freeze of KDEs release cycle it’s quite possible to add features/change Plasmoids from the KDE base packages and release it. If you hurry you may be able to release at the same time as KDE 4.1 or shortly after. And not to mention all the time to make releases until 4.2 are released.
Because I have a fulltime job. I work and look at code 50-60 hours a week already. I could indeed work on custom Plasmoids and what have you, and I do upon occasion. However over time doing code for work and as a hobby burns me out. I read the forums, fence, and bicycle because these are the few things I have found that I do not think of code while I am doing them.
that seems very reasonable. ppl just need to be reasonable with the kde devels, plamas devs, and aaron.
they have lives outside kde too. they made a hell of alot of progress in 6 months. and i’m sure they will make a hell of alot more in another 6 months. but they have lives outside kde too.
You realize that many of the KDE developers do, as well, right? While some are paid to work on KDE, many have non-KDE related jobs, families, kids, lives etc. Why is your free-time somehow more valuable than theirs, in that you feel a sense of entitlement as opposed to the sacrifice they make from their personal time?
WTF are you on? Someone asked why I did not write it myself and I said why. And before that I simply gave examples of where I find the current KDE4 lacking. I am not screaming that they have to do it or demanding features.
I hate to break it to you but stating that there are features missing from KDE4 does not mean that I am saying that my free time is more valuable than theirs. I make neither demands on their time nor assumptions that my time is more valuable than theirs. If the features I need to make use of KDE4 are not added in the goodness of time I will either have to learn to live with it or I will add them myself.
Look at KDE releases from past. They have been always innovative. Look at the level of change from KDE1 to KDE 2, KDE2 to KDE3 and now KDE3 to KDE4 it is simply getting better.
Its not the XP vs Vista stuff. People should see the product with open mind and then make decisions
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I really like KDE because it has nice looks and powerful interaction (makes me feel in control).
But the actual functionality is lot less impressive and is what should be the focus instead of more bling.
In the end more cooperation will only benefit “the” free desktop, and less fragmentation can result to that.
With KDE marginalizing itself and Ubuntu becoming ever more popular, the clear emerging winner is GNOME.
GNOME is usable and functional, and most of 3rd party apps itegrate well with it (they use Gtk).
I just wish the best features of KDE could be added to GNOME and then the killer Linux desktop would be born.
it’s an interesting theory, but the market numbers disagree with you.
at the current rate of expansion, KDE will likely be approaching 100 million users within the next 24 months. no, i’m not kidding.
one school deployment in Brazil will end up reaching 50 million students by then (it’s only about 70% complete atm), and there are others in that same country at universities that have seat counts (not users, but computer seats) that are 80,000+. of the ~1 million retail units being sold a year with KDE on them in Brazil, some 70%+ keep KDE on them (up from ~25% 3 years ago!). and that’s just one (admittedly large and KDE friendly) country.
we could survey Spain, Germany, Russia and China to see similarly impressive numbers. KDE e.V.’s legal council in Germany coincidentally uses KDE on the desktop in their offices (not why we hired their firm, we found out after the fact actually =), so the reach is big and getting bigger.
we also have working relationships with people like ASUS who put out devices like the EEE PC. more such working relationships are forming as well.
but here’s the really exciting part: *and* GNOME is also doing well. it’s not either/or.
if we could drop such either/or thinking for a while, we might actually allow ourselves to see the successes we are *all* achieving. and that might translate into something that really makes people take notice.
in any case, i agree with the issue of cooperation, though, and i’ve put my efforts and at times my own money where my mouth is over the last several years in an attempt to help make that cooperation happen.
did you know that next year we’ll be co-hosting Akademy and GUADEC?
really exciting stuff.
we actually focus on both, and that’s pretty apparent in the improvements made in the last 5 years along both tracks.
like Skype or Google Earth or NX or Scribus? no, wait, those use Qt… to name a few.
Somehow when I decide to try KDE for a time I always end up using all Gtk apps, the only exception last time was VirtualBox.
All the good apps, which is very subjective, seem to use Gtk.
On the other hand these days the trend is toward web apps. I don’t know the numbers but I never ever used Skype – every one of my contacts preferred Google Talk (the web/Flash based version).
Also, Google Maps can do everything Earth can, except for the 3D, which is unusably slow on Linux anyway.
Scribus is horrible but I digress…
I am guessing that the deployment in Brazilian schools is Mandriva/Conetiva, right?
I happened to go to a school which was equipped with 286s acting as X terminals and running KDE 1 on Debian. Welcome to the end of the 20th century in eastern Europe. The other half of the machines were Macs with OS 8 I think from the pile that Steve Jobs overstocked and could only sell or give as a gift to governments.
So actually KDE was the second GUI I was exposed to, but this didn’t stop me from seeking alternatives. I borrowed a Linux CD and installed it at home. And on someone’s suggestion I tried WindowMaker. What a relief! Seemingly vital parts of the desktop no longer randomly disappeared (I later learnt it’s called a crash). (BTW I also tried Win95 at the time and it seemed worse than KDE.) The situation didn’t change much in these approx. 10 years:
While scrolling with the mouse wheel in Konqueror, the cursor flickers. In fact Plasma makes the whole screen flicker. Plasma or the KDE 3 panel still crash on a daily basis. Not to mention that most sites don’t work in the futuristic Konqueror complete with aquatic scrollbar effect. Most documents don’t open in KOffice. And so on.
I know the technology is in there. WebKit will put KDE ahead probably in the browser area, or at least on par with epiphany. What matters is the really small details, and stability, and also leveraging others’ work instead of writing the own version of everything.
And currently GNOME is comfortable to use and I fear that students in Brazil will choose GNOME too when installing their free copy of Linux at home. At least those who care about such things. Others might dismiss the whole idea of computers if they are unreliable and don’t function as common sense would dictate.
That is what a lot of my classmates did after their exposure to KDE back then.
Basically the morale is: A good UI can only be made as a result of a process of continual enhancement. Evolution and not revolution.
And KDE 4 is revolutionary. In part it is because KDE doesn’t control Qt, and so the rug has been pulled from under it, so to speak.
After playing with KDE 4.1 Beta 2, I have come to the conclusion that it is a big step forward from KDE 4.0. Thanks to all the devs for their hard work. It is still not perfect though. My problem with it isn’t the desktop icons (I don’t really care one way or the other there), or even the dreaded cashew (though it is a bit ugly IMHO), but, call me shallow, it’s the overall look of the thing.
I actually like more brightly colored, eye-popping themes, and am one of the ten people in the world who actually prefers Keramik to Plastik, though I like both. I much prefer even Plastik to Oxygen though. I know, I can change the theme, and you can get a decent Plastik in KDE4 at least, with the Keramik window borders even. Can somebody please port the Keramik controls though (or at least give a link on how to do so)? And make a way to have a less dark, heavy grey in the bottom toolbar? Perhaps even just see-though. Really the toolbar is the only complaint I have about the look of KDE4 that is not changeable AFAIK, aside from the cashew which isn’t as big a deal to me.
Apple has top-notch graphics artists, and can manage to make a grey theme look somewhat elegant and visually pleasing. Microsoft does not, and I don’t particularly like their dark toolbar approach in Vista either. KDE4’s default theme (grey everywhere) just looks dreary and a poor imitator of Mac OS X’s brushed metal. Not a huge deal and all IMHO, but that’s why more configuration of the look would be greatly appreciated even if the default look sucks.
you should check kde-look plasma themes.
in my opinion , the “glaze” theme is just awesome !
it has the best clock i have ever seen.
also , i too like more bright colors, so i changed the kde colors from the dark gray to some very whity colors.
these are all details, that the solution my appear any day at kde-look.org. there are already alot of themes there.
about the style, you may like the bespin kde4 style. if not, i am sure that once kde4.1 and or 4.2 arrive, there will be tons of plasma themes, plasmoids and styles over at kde-look.org
Plasma themes? Why are there plasma themes and Styles? The default Plasma theme is black and style is gray by default. This makes KDE4 visually inconsistent.
This comes from an over hype of Plasma in relation to standard apps. Plasma should be a framework for panels and screenlets but is sharing the paradigm with the conventional desktop leading to confusion.
At kde-look.org there are only four entries under Themes/Styles-KDE4.0 in 2008 but there are dozens under Plasma Themes. Is Plasma more important then the standard desktop? Well now even the basic file management function is becoming a plasmoid. The paradigm is a desktop cluttered with useless gadgets like a puzzle game that is supposed to be an application.
Besides the inconsistency that the over utilization of Plasma brings the whole KDE4 experience. They preserve the ugliest aspects of KDE3 that is hard to address with themes like BIG icons, bold fonts and this obsession with clocks.
i am not a kde developer , so i am not the most qualified person to asnwer.
but to my understanding :
plasma and windows are diferent things. it may seem that you are asking for a desktop with only plasma, or with only windows. actually , there is work in progress so you can embed windows in plasma.
just because there are more plasma themes than style themes doesnt make one more important than the other. i guess plasma themes are easier to make.
this is just my opinion , but icons in a desktop arent a basic file management function. the desktop shouldnt be just another storage folder in the disk. it should be the other way around. the desktop should show folders from the disk, not a folder from the disk show a desktop.
if you dont like folderview , than i just have to come out and say it that i think its a 20 year problem solved finally. if you are uncertain of its usefullness , just wait and see. to me its already much usefull, and i really cant see any good in wanting a directory to be my desktop.
if the gadgets are useless , just dont use them. you use the gadgets that are usefull. over the time i guess that will appear lots of usefull ones, and you can always use other gadgets in the future , like google widgets.
the over utilization of the plasma is really up to you. you decide what to use.
i didnt really understand the last paragrath, but the big icons are a plus , i guess they just want to show you that icons now dont have a specified size : they are svg, and can be the size that you want, or the size you can have. if you are mentioning the icons on the taskbar, just make the panel smaller. with the fonts , i have no problems with it, but then again , i changed the whole fonts. if there is one thing i like from MS, its the fonts. of course dejavu and libertion fonts are also nice.
about the clocks ,i love clocks and i guess they use them as a testing ground. i mean they have to test them with something , why not clocks ? i personally think that the “gaze” theme clock is just wonderfull, never saw such a great clock.
i understand that you would want windows to look like plasma. i mean , transparent, could be scaled , could be rotated , etc. please fully address that problem against Xorg developers. from what i read in the internet and blogs, just making a toolkit with good transparency is problematic for Xorg.
please read this with a bit of salt , i am not affiliated or a kde developer in any way !