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.
The big news this week was the release of KDE 4.3. We already discussed this new release in quite some detail when I wrote an article about the release candidate, so there was little to add to the actual news item – still, that didn’t stop everyone from discussing KDE 4.3 and KDE in general into great detail. On top of that, we also debated whether or not KDE should become the default on OpenSUSE.
While we’re on the subject of X desktop environments, the GNOME team has decided to ditch the practice of putting icons on menu items and dialog box buttons, a decision which should decrease widget size and make the overall desktop look a little cleaner. A very heavily contested decision, that’s for sure.
Apple also got quite some headlines this week, especially with the story about Apple trying to silence a family from discussing their exploding iPod Touch. I mused about Apple’s past hardware designs, and debated whether or not Apple has lost its magical touch when it comes to designing unique and interesting hardware.
For the rest, the week wasn’t particularly eventful. We did have interesting discussions about OpenOffice.org’s UI ideas, the release of MorphOS 2.3, and Microsoft Office 2010 getting a file format ballot.
Looks like KDE 4.3 is really good. I see lot of discussion (162) and most of it is positive. Also I see lot of comments where they say they are coming back to KDE after they left during 4.0.
Kudos to KDE team for sticking to the plan and most importantly delivering what they set out to do. Now all I can say is KDE 4.4 will be stunning…
Yeah. KDE4.x+1 is always “good”.
There’s always a lot of “discussion”.
It’s always “mostly positive”.
Of those who are still watching, after the droves left, would you mind counting the number who say they are coming back?
Yes. Doggedness is next to Godliness.
Yes. I’m sure that KDE 4.x+1 will be stunning.
Edited 2009-08-10 04:43 UTC
Trollish as your post may come across, you’re mostly right on the money. Plasma’s still a huge stability problem, and Dolphin’s got all sorts of problems with large files, along with a dodgy UI. Sure, 4.3 looks a lot better than the buggier stuff they put out in years past, but it’s not ‘ready’ if what you want is a stable desktop.
Dude, I like your style but this hating on KDE is getting a bit tired, almost as tired as the irrational Ubuntu-hate by others.
I don’t hate KDE.
Could have fooled me.
Well then you were just wrong, weren’t you? 😉
Seriously, though, I was using and cheering on KDE way back in the pre 1.0 days. (0.9 something)
If you have paid attention to my views on competition in the OSS world (which is not to imply that I particularly think that everyone *should* be looking to me for guidance) it should be clear that I believe in 2 major competitors battling it our in the top tier, with a churning cauldron below, out of which might spring surprising new competitors. IMO, the KDE guys dropped the ball with KDE4. And nothing has sprung from the bubbling cauldron to replace KDE in tier 1. Which leaves us with a very non-optimal situation in the OSS desktop world. This troubles me.
I’m not sure that one can accurately characterize that as “KDE Hate”. I am, however, annoyed by fanboyism of any sort. Even, and perhaps especially, in my own camp.
Edited 2009-08-12 13:31 UTC
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
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
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).
(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
Well, you’ve been a bit “insistingly negative” on all KDE4 topics lately. Suffice to say, I do not agree with your views on KDE4 but lets leave it at that.
I consider myself a KDE fan, I don’t use it cuz I’m usually stuck in windows world or staring at BASH, that said I do load up a VM every time there’s a KDE release to check out what’s new. You can hate KDE all you want, but the vision of where it’s going can’t be ignored. Eventually (4.4, 4.5, 4.6, hopefully soon) the environment will reach maturity.
People will still hate it, due to personal preference or some undying devotion to some other DE.