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Jan
17
KDE 4.0 was released last week and all hell seemed to break loose. What I view as a solid first step in a very positive reaction was met with some applause, but generally scorn and complaints. I think some perspective is needed, and I humbly offer to try and provide some. I’d like to take issue with some things I see that are just plain wrong.
KDE 4 is Vista. Vista is an operating system. KDE 4 is a desktop environment. Right off the bat, on a basic level, this is wrong. If you only look at the DE aspects of Vista, it still doesn’t stand up. People complain about Kickoff, the new (possibly temporary) menu in KDE 4. Have you used the monstrosity that Vista provides? Plus, if you do not like Kickoff, you can drag the old style launcher to the taskbar and be happy. Vista offers nothing of the sort. KDE 4 runs very well on modest hardware. Vista is painful on modest to good hardware. I had a hardware failure on my main machine yesterday. It runs Linux. I’m stuck writing this from Vista on a 64 bit processor (AMD 3200+) with 3 gigs of RAM and it is unbearably slow. My desktop effects consist of some translucency and some crummy 3-D window switcher. With KDE 4 there are a lot more useful effects this early in. KDE 4 = Free Software. Vista = closed source. Complaints people have with KDE 4 are already being addressed. Some have been fixed. Get that kind of action from Microsoft. The Promised Land, KDE 4.1, is rumored to be released in about six months. The Promised Land for Vista, SP1, is still unreleased a year into its life (and the reports of the beta are less than glowing.) Maybe it kind of looks like Vista with the use of black, but that is about it.
KDE 4 is Gnome. This is usually meant as a swipe at Gnome as well as KDE, based in the belief that the Lords of Gnome sit in their ivory towers deciding how the peons can use their computers. The great Nautilus-Spatial-View Wars of 2004 saw a lot of bickering on this front. Since a lot of configurability that KDE is famous for just wasn’t ready for the 4.0 release people are assuming that it is just gone forever. It is coming; you can relax or file bug reports. If the configurability you are used to isn’t there in 4.1, then I’ll be right there with you. I believe the developers when they say it is coming. It isn’t like there is a lack of options in KDE 4; I’ve even read complaints that there are still too many. It is just that the most visible ones, like in the taskbar, just aren’t there yet. That is right in your face immediately.
This also feeds into the Holy War that Gnome and KDE are locked in. We have choices. Some people like Gnome, some KDE. There are plenty of other choices as well. Fans of gerbils can use XFCE. Enlightenment is cool. FVWM Crystal works nicely. Blackbox, Openbox or Fluxbox. Why so much energy is devoted to Gnome people attacking KDE people and vice versa confuses me, other than people love to have an enemy. In the words of convicted wife-beater Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?†When the negativity impacts development (my 10 things I hate about KDE 4 RC2 article was accused of stopping development for hours, weirdly) then things are getting out of hand. Some thicker skins might be in order as well.
KDE 4 is lacking in cowbell. The “needs more cowbell†joke stopped being funny about three days after you heard a co-worker say it for the first time. That was years ago! Enough already.
It was a mistake to release KDE 4.0. This has already been addressed nicely here, here and here. For the “tl;dr†crowd, the release has to get out into the real world and take a beating. I’m sure the complaints so far have been useful in some sense and will influence direction. This is a complicated issue that has been covered in more detail by people smarter than me; I just wanted to address it. I’m surprised to even see this, since “Release early, release often†is such an ingrained part of Open Source. Imagine if Duke Nukem Forever was Open Source and followed this philosophy.
Click here for Free Information Technology Resources!“My experience with KDE 4 is the One True Experience†There are so many odd combinations of hardware, distributions and preferences that everything becomes equally valid. The experience you have with KDE 4, for you, will set your ideas into stone. I’ve read there were numerous problems with the Kubuntu packages. People who used those are naturally going to be unhappy with 4.0 for good reason. OpenSUSE has done an outstanding job with their packages. I’ve used them and have a positive feeling about 4.0. Nvidia cards perform well with the proprietary driver and KWin’s composite. I’ve read ATI doesn’t work that well. For the ATI owners, composite will be horrible. Some people love Kickoff. Some people hate it more than anything else in the world, apparently. Who is right? People passionately hate Dolphin, others love it. Most people, for these reasons, are going to have very different experiences with KDE 4. If we could just cut each other some slack and recognize the validity of each person’s opinion I think the overall atmosphere will improve.
Things haven’t been perfect. It is too bad that KDEPIM wasn’t ready. From what I have seen and read, it will be worth the wait. Distros have had some trouble with packaging. Things are nowhere nearly as bad as you may read, either. Before my hardware failure, I had been using 4.0 as my main desktop for weeks. I’m starting to prefer it, warts and all.
Here is my somewhat lousy analogy for KDE 4. You’ve lived in a house (KDE 3) for years. You have everything set the way you want it to, have gotten used to the oddities of it and love it. Some major parts of it have fallen into disrepair (arts) and it is time to move. You decide to build a new house from the ground up (KDE 4). It reaches a point where you can move into it, or stay in the old one for a few more months. You decide to move. The old house had cable. The neighborhood for the new on is being wired for cable, but it isn’t available just yet. Is your old house better because it had cable? Is the new one a failure because cable isn’t ready yet? The new house has a different thermostat that is quite different from the old one, and you can’t set it the same way you could the old. The builder promises that in a couple of months you will have three thermostats to choose from that are a lot better than the old one, but at least the current one works. The builder also says that if you do move in, he’ll listen to things you don’t like and give you the opportunity to change things, instead of just giving you something set in stone. He even promises to continue to improve the house for years to come. You can either live in the old house for a while longer and watch the progress of the new one and stay comfortable; or jump into the new one and get used to it. Odds are you aren’t going to complain that you shouldn’t even have built a new house. Particularly because it is free and built at no cost to you. It could be worse; you could be in the luxury prison down the street, where the prisoners complain that the old one, while bad, was much better than the new one.
The KDE Release Event is today. I had hoped to go, but the complete lack of free flights complicated it. Congratulations again to everyone involved. You have a lot to be proud of, and a lot more work ahead.
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37 Responses to “Editorial: KDE 4.0, A Call for Perspective”
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Gnome and KDE users can hardly get along…. we’re just human
Imagine your favourite distro switching to the “other side”; …. e.g. SUSE switches permanently to Gnome (happening?) and Ubuntu permanently to KDE…. all hell breaks loose.
For those who likes to complain, flame, let them be. Like Linux, life is about choices. If they choose to waste their time complaining instead of enjoying their favourite distro, so be it
I think your analogy is way off here - kde 4 for me (mostly) is a house I wouldn’t build. I do like kde, I do think kde 4 is okay, but I think it is going in the wrong direction and since Linux is about choice I choose to not use it for a while. These are MY complaints, so it is not absolute: the taskbar is terrible, eats up precious space and is uncostomizable (kde uncostomizable? what?), the new start menu annoys me (more clicks to achieve same task), widgets are always covered by windows - I’m not a widget fan at all, dolphin is as dumb as nautilus or thunar etc… I can choose to use alternative solutions (like the old start menu), but to me these revolutionary changes are not just not revolutionary, but are also annoying.
I’m not sure what it is with the KDE and Gnome people, but we do like to fight. KDE is certainly a ton better, of course
But yes people need to settle down and realize that this is the first release in a long development period, over the next few years. It’s not just another release of the KDE3 series with a new skin.
Another fanboy wearing rose-colored glasses. Hey…they put it out in the state it’s in, so they better be ready for the much deserved criticism. The hype around KDE 4 was incredible, but the release was a letdown.
This isn’t Windows, nor is it Mac. This stuff is free for the taking. However, on a different level, they’re faced with the same criticism leveled at both Microsoft and Apple. This product simply wasn’t ready for the masses, and labeling it as a final release of KDE 4.0.0 just wasn’t a good way of going about it. Those of us that enjoy using KDE everyday hope and pray that they’ll get this sorted out by KDE 4.1, and it needs to come sooner than later.
Thanks everyone for commenting.
@Mitch:
Good points. I like nerdfights, so the wars are entertaining. I’ve just heard that there has been some demoralization of the KDE devs because of it.
@deadcabbit:
The things you mention aren’t the revolutionary changes. The revolutionary stuff is more backend, like Phonon, Decibel, etc… The customization you are used to isn’t gone forever, it is coming from everything I read.
@lefty.crupps:
Nice to see you again. I agree completely.
@RSmith:
I’m no fanboy. The first thing I wrote about KDE 4 was a list of complaints. I use all the DE’s, they all have their good points and bad.
I completely understand where you are coming from. I just also understand the points they made about why they released it:
-to get the distros used to packaging it
-to get real world usage. Now that it is released, it isn’t some theoretical thing the developers talk about. They now know clearly that most people hate kickoff. As of last week there were 2067 commits since tagging. There really is no easy answer, and you are right, the incredible hype didn’t help matters. I’m confident they will get things sorted by 4.1.
Thanks again everyone,
Rich
The fundemental problem is not just KDE 4.0, It’s KDE as a whole, and GNOME as a whole, and pretty much any desktop manifestation for free Unix in general.
The problem: Rather than stop and think about what’s actually good to do, and not good to do, the emphasis is placed on imitating whatever happens to be the “latest and greatest”. They have systematically failed at practically every step of the way to ignore the peanut gallery that complains “it doesn’t work liek teh Windows!”, or “it doesn’t work liek teh OS X!!”. These complaints are fundementally invalid, simply due to the fact that there’s some sort of magical implicit rule of computing that states that whatever Microsoft is doing with their GUI must, by default, be correct — And whatever Apple happens to be doing must also be correct. Surprise! They aren’t.
As a result, Linux, at least viewed within the scope of an everyman’s desktop operating system, offers nothing unique. All it has offered over the past 10 years is a flea-market knockoff of an already poor offering. The good news is, that can change.
How to change it: Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop doing what everyone else is doing, take charge, and do what’s right to do. The peanut gallery that complains that it looks like Windows is the same crowd that complained 6 months ago that Vista didnt’ look like XP, and that XP didn’t look like 98, and 98 didn’t look like 95. The fact of the matter is, this crowd will ultimately favor whatever’s put infront of them, no matter how poorly concieved or designed it is. They have no merit, only complaint about their discomfort level.
Given the trash thats out there in terms of GUI design, anything even remotely approaching good and sane design WILL BE incredibly uncomfortable at first. Hell, if anything use that as a benchmark of your success.
Blaze your own path. Try out ideas. But for God’s sake, stop imitating! The culture of imitation among Linux desktop GUI designers has reached such a level of insanity that even the _discussion_ of new ideas is balked at. There simply is no room for debate–The Windows way is the way to do it — The OS X way is the way to do it — Therefore, our Linux desktops should be an amalgam of the two. It’s false reasoning elevated to cult status, and it needs to fucking stop, else piss another 10 years away in obscurity.
I like kde and I like gnome. I use both. Why not? I love Amarok, Ktorrent, k3b. I love the gnome applets too. I use both. All energy must be directed to integrate both, not to fight each other. I would like to have a button to switch from one to another and vice-versa.
Peace
Altino
pardon — s/complains that it looks like Windows/complains that it doesn’t look like Windows/g
I found the article insightful, and fair. I’m a relative Linux newb, but I’ve managed to get ALL the hardware on my laptop except the TV tuner working, with Google and forums. I use openSUSE, and have v10.3, with the kde4 preview, freshly installed last night, as I got 2 new hard drives (I love Toshiba qosmios). I am going to get the kde4 final packages and try them myself. But I know what to expect know. I’ve dabbled with gnome, xfce, and kde3, and I like them all, although I use gnome for my fingerprint reader (no kde support). I prefer kde3, but I’ve managed to customize gnome to an acceptable usage. Anyways, /rambles, I like open source because of the choice, I’ve used it on windows for a long while, and jumped to linux with ubuntu, then fedora, and now suse. I’ve hit rough patches, software that “doesn’t seem ready.” I expect that. I leave feedback. I help to improve it. I hope to do this with kde4. I’m no programmer, but I like to think my bug reports and suggestions help. As such, I think kde4, from all I’ve read, is going to be great, but it will take some growing pains. I’ve read reviews, feature lists, and criticisms. Hello, vista? lol
Not that they’re the same, they’re NOT, just similar situations on launch. But kde doesn’t have the resources M$ had, so I expect this. M$ is disappointing, kde devs are trying to get it out, get it ready for mainstream, and most importantly get FEEDBACK to make it GREAT. It kinda saddens me to see people so critical. So, test it, submit suggestions, and bug reports. HELP MAKE IT GREAT, and for the love of god, STOP BITCHING. It’s open source. The philosophy is basically what I’ve written above. Abide by it and things will work out. Development takes time, and effort, so cut the critical shit and be constructive in your feedback, or nobody is going to want to code for you.
I’ve been up for 24+ hours and am full of caffeine, so I’m sorry if this rambles and seems incoherent, but I hope it gets across.
Peace and o/
A newb for a better Open Source World!
I second Bowie’s opinion.
I feel KDE4 is the worst offender so far. Adding toolsets from every OS is only slowing the end user experience.
A good first step for both projects, both GNOME and KDE, would be to establish a skunk-works-style project that could work independently, and ahead of the main development focus of the desktop. Ideas that were proven useful within the skunk-works could then be moved into the main development effort, piece by piece.
The task bar is by far the single worst GUI development to have emerged in the past 15 years, worse even than Clippy. The whole notion of individual “tasks” from an ergonomic standpoint is absolutely useless. The natural inclination of work is to utilize multiple tools together; to bring the tool to the work, rather than bring the work to the tool. In almost every single facet, it’s design is poor; Even to the point of itemizing contents horizontally. When’s the last time you ever wrote out a shopping list on a 7′ wide piece of toilet paper? You don’t. You do so vertically, itemizing things top to bottom. You put it infront of you when you need it, and discard it when you’re done shopping–You don’t carry it around with you, front and center, every day of the week.
“But Bowie! You can reorient the taskbar to the side!! You can auto-hide it!!” .. You’re missing the point. The fact that your combination potato-peeler-TV-remote can be held upright or lengthwise doesn’t override the fact that the invention is useless, and ties together disparate ideas into a single, awkward device.
There are better ways to do it.
Think about it — Did the concept of multiple windows on a desktop predate Windows 95? Of course. By decades. How did they handle the task? Very simply — A veritcal drop-down list. A simple, coherent vertical dropdown where individual windows can be described, differentiated, managed, and selected. And yet, nobody wants to talk about it. Why?
“But but but dehh, it doesn’t look like teh Windoowes!!!!”
It’s always funny to hear the geeks howl when a new version of anything comes out. It’s like they all forget in a day what they’ve known for years - JUST WAIT. I hardly doubt KDE 4.0 is the final incarnation of the KDE desktop enviornment. Yet so many people treat it as such and suddenly its the end of the world?
Here’s some advice - Have a beer, sit back down, and chill out.
Some geeks kids man - sheesh.
Please, Please, Please !!!! If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Period.
Again, It’s not that KDE4 is stillborn. It’s the fact that the KDE team is yet again contuining with a tradition that has failed over and over and over and over again — The immaculate imitation of crap.
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The Windows GUI is not the holy golden standard for how all GUIs should be, yet, the KDE team sees it as such. That needs to change. Somebody needs to beat them about the head with the flea-market Frankenstein “Lettuce Patch Kid” they continue to pump work into, day after day after day, all in an effort to emulate a shit design spec from Redmond.
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I love free Unix as much as the next geek, but, it’s hard to reconcile these people who claim Windows sucks, yet, devote endless amounts of energy to imitating it.
I’ve messed with KDE in the past and I see nothing seriously wrong with using it over Gnome. But I do prefer to use Gnome for the following reasons:
- I’d rather focus on the applications on my system and what they can do for me, rather than how cute my taskbar looks.
- I’ve never cared for this whole ‘K’ naming convention for all of the applications that seem to be native to KDE. Seems very much like something kids would create.
- Many of the free/open source programs that I use in the Windows environment are now available for Linux (Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, etc) and I want them installed rather than the ‘native’ applications that seem to be associated with KDE. Not that Gnome doesn’t have it’s own herd to contend with, but it seems like Gnome-oriented distros are aware that this is what many people migrating from Windows want, and they’re giving it to them by default.
Anyway, my view on the topic, take it or lump it.
@Bowie:
Plasma is supposed to do away with what you hate. From what I’ve read they used Plasma to make a standard looking desktop initially, but that isn’t the purpose of Plasma. By 4.1, if I understand correctly, all of that becomes optional. My guess is that the team would agree with your statements.
Thanks everyone for commenting,
Rich
Vista is unbearably slow on a AMD 3200, with 3 gigs of RAM? That’s a load of bullshit. But hey, keep living on your wishful thinking based fantasy world. That’s the main reason Linux is nowhere on the desktop after all these years.
@Admin:
Hey. Plasma is a good start as a technology. What i’m afraid of is precisely what i’ve seen KDE do with it — Use it as a foundation for continuing to build frankenware ontop of. Giving Plasma to the KDE folks (as a whole) is like giving a palace to a homeless guy–He’ll build a bonfire in the living room and sleep in the corner.
I talked to Aaron Seigo about the direction KDE is headed, recently..he’s absolutely terrified of the peanut gallery. The people who complain when something doesn’t look like Windows, or look like OS X.. Until he realizes that he’s effectively letting a group of people who don’t have the sense to see the picture from 50,000 feet dictate the course of KDE’s look and feel, the cycle is going to continue, each more embarassing than the next. KDE4 is just the last iteration of it.
I’ll PayPal $10 to the first person that draws up a side by side comparrison of KDE and Windows from 1998 onward. It speaks volumes as to how unwilling the whole project has been to stake out new territory. It’s one sad imitation of a shitty product after another, year after year after year.
The sad fact of it is, 10 years on, Linux still doesn’t have a face. I wish that were different, and I tried. Believe me. But that’s the fact of it, and it’s wise for us to get over it and get used to it. Linux It offers nothing to the desktop user that distinguishes it from what’s already out there, and what is already hugely more visible. What’s the draw? Nothing. That needs to be fixed before anyone spends another damn minute wasting time, filing bug reports or fixing calls in the clock widget, or making sure the icons look as close to Vista as possible without incurring the wrath of copyright lawyers. It all becomes unnecessary the instant you place one single toe over the line into doing it your own way, and start the process of forging what the “Linux way” is.
Why is it that after 10 years of Linux desktop development, we’re still arguing about this? Could it be, that ((*gasp!*)) …the way things have always been done (the immaculate imitation of crap) _isn’t working_?
@Gordon:
As I say in the article, my main machine is down due to hardware failure. I am using the Vista box as I type this. It is no bullshit, it is sloooow. I’m not even a Vista hater, I prefer it to XP. I’m no zealot. Maybe it is because it is the 64 bit version of Vista, maybe it is the DDR 1 ram (2 gigs are dual-channel, btw) but it moves very slowly. I wasn’t even very negative about Vista. Don’t accuse me of living in a fantasy world when I am just reporting my experience.
KDE4 is a work in progress, and is the start of some new, cool things. But it DID take a step backwards in many important and very basic areas.
The menu, CAN be replaced by an “old style” menu, but you cannot drag icons off the menu to you desktop or taskbar like before. I personally will apt-get a new app and if I like it I honor it with a spot on my task bar. Its quick and easy, in 3.5, 4.0 its hard.
The File IO slaves or at least the file dialogs that use them have also regressed.
The problem w/ KDE4 is that some of the most basic tasks and tools that we all use and TOOK FOR GRANTED, have changed, and LOST functionality.
While I assume that some of those functions will return, it is hard to something that makes me much less productive and has less features and flexibility an improvement.
I like the direction things are going in terms of speed and using less resources, those were clearly the priorities for this release, hopefully we’ll be able to have our cake and eat it too with 4.1
@Admin: So, to summarize, you prefer stepping in solidified dogshit to the freshly shat variety?
I’ll take a gamble and say the point the guy above was making is that you have no basis to complain about Vista when KDE4 is just as as bad, performance-wise. That’s the fantasy world being referring to, that you think KDE4 is superior to Vista. Thats what you get with a culture of Microsoft imitation, and no, you can’t borrow my nose plugs. Solid or squishy, it’s still came out of the back end of a dog.
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I think rather than see KDE 4.1, i’d rather see the KDE team go back and do KDE 1.0 with a decade of lessons learned.
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Somehow, I doubt that’ll ever happen. After all, it’s not as easy as the “Draw Tippy the Turtle and get an Art degree!” school of GUI design.
Honestly if your vista installation with 3ghz + cpu and 3gb of ram is slow… you are incompetent. period!
@Seer,
Yep, I must be. I’ll go to computer college so my vista installation will run faster.
Maybe Vista is fast and my perceptions are slow.
Maybe since I’m so ghetto and not running a QUAD CORE EXTREME in combination with my incompetence with turning on a computer is what the problem is.
PS-the 3200 is 2.2 GHz.
If you delete the panel, how do you get it back? I accidentally removed mine.
[...] Editorial:KDE 4.0, A Call for Perspective | Linux Tech Daily some thoughts on the recently released KDE 4.0 (tags: desktop linux kde 4.0 perspective opensource) [...]
gnome sucks, KDE4 rulez
@Bowie:
If by “Linux still doesn’t have a face” you mean what I think you do, then I agree completely. I believe “The Faceless Linux” thing is definitely it’s huge draw back. Linux will never have a face as long as there are multiple large distros, DEs, advanced desktop effects managers, etc . With Windows or OSX, a quick glance, you will know exactly what it is. Linux doesn’t have this simplicity.
xgl and aiglx. What are they? No clue. I know is I need them to run Compiz, and I know I can’t get either of them to work. From what I can tell, they are 2 different ways to do the same thing; you set one of them up and forget about it. One works better with nvidia, the other with ati? Has anyone ever considered, maybe, if there were only one of them, they could make it easy to install (or bundled) and have it work on all systems?
As a noob, I can’t begin to describe the frustration this represents. I understand where choice is a good thing, but when it interferes with usability it becomes pointless. How many competing programs are out there, where Program A half works, and the other half of Program B works.
There are somethings that should be standard (GUI underpinnings, network utils, package management) and other things where this doesn’t matter (media player, IM client, etc.) Linux won’t ever hit the mainstream if this doesn’t happen. We as the community have to decide what is more important, having 7 thousand different package managing systems or getting the majority market share. They really are mutually exclusive, and neither is entirely bad/good.
I could go on all day, but I won’t lol. This is just my 2cents. Feel free to flame me, ignore me, help me get compiz working, wtv!
Then maybe you should have just told about your experience on your machine and refrained from making bold statements such as “Vista is painful on modest to good hardware.” based on that particular experience.
BTW, Vista’s Aero does not have a lot of fancy effects but it’s a production ready desktop compositing manager. It’s finished, it’s polished, it works smoothly, and I’ve never seen it fail. Not once. KDE’s compositing manager is a joke compared to Aero, and even Compiz is far from being production ready.
@Bowie
You say that KDE is just copying Windows, I use KDE and I can see quite a few windowish traits about it, however I would say that while they, to an extent, are imiting Window’s style, they’re competent while the real Windows isn’t.
We could debate how Windows like KDE3, and KDE4 are but its undeniable that KDE is of a much higher quality than Windows. I’ve never had a BSOD on KDE, never has a virus on KDE, KDE applications are much better than Microsoft’s eqivilent, right down to the text editor, (witch syntax highlights dozens of diffrent programming languages, hint, not notepad).
I don’t really see why people say KDE is like Windows as though it was a bad thing, there isn’t anything really wrong with Widnows style desktops, a lot of people myself included like them. If you don’t like Widnows style desktops use Enlightenment, a tiling window manager or one of the super minimalist WMs. If you do like the Windows style, then use KDE because it dose a brilliant job of it.
However there is a more important point, KDE makes a great desktop (if you like its style), KDE applications like K3B, Amarok and Kontact are at the top of their field, but where KDE is truely brilliant is at makeing frameworks, (So’s Trolltech for that matter, QT is very good). KParts, KIO, Solid, Phonon, Decibel, Anakondi, DCop (the insperation for DBus). These frameworks may not be visible to the end user but they’re what truely sets it apart from the compertition. I don’t know how easy it is on OSX and Widnows, but nothing on Linux was able to let applications play media with 4 lines of C++ until phonon came along, and those 4 lines work across multiple operating systems and even on Widnows and OSX! Framework updates are probobly the biggest “feature” of KDE4.
I don’t care what anybody says - Vista is NOT an operating sytem. Vista has a “kernel” and take away the GUI and you it will still be the “kernel”. The same thing is done with the MacIntosh and could be done with Linux. If you “string” your kernel with GUI stuff and put in lines of code that prohibit the “kernel” from running - so what! The ties between the GUI and the Kernel does NOT an OS make. Bill Gates just wanted to keep people from creating GUI’s for the Windows kernel back when and I remember when that was being done. There were 3 very good GUI systems like GeoWindows that Microsoft tried desparately to kill. Since he couldn’t drive them out - he blocked them by intertwining the Windows GUI with the kernel. Linux can be done like that also when and if someone finally takes the mindset to get it done. If I were the KDE or GNOME developers that’s where I’d be heading. Put everything into a virtual space like Windows and run everything there. That’s how and why M$ developers are able to see what Mac and Linux does and instantly morph something into what they’ve seen. Mac does the same thing and I think it’s time for Linux kernel to be intertwined with GNOME or KDE along with Sabayon and locked up just like Microsoft locks Windows. Of course - it could be unlocked by developers - but, for the average user - they don’t want to or even need to. So Vista is not the OS anymore than Windows was when it ran on top of DOS. If that is the case and it is - then GNOME and KDE are OS’s also. But, since we all know they are not - it’s not hard to understand that Vista GUI is not anymore an OS than back in the DOS days.
The kernel is always going to be the kernel and the driver modules written around it are always going to be the base of an operating system and the GUI’s written to interface with the the driver modules are always going to be GUI’s. Together they make up an Operating System. Therefore - KDE is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel and driver modules between the GUI interface and the kernel. If this isn’t correct - then why did Microsoft creat PowerShell to let you completely program and commandline in Windows just like Linux does with BASH? You can get rid of the GUI’s of both OS’s and run straight from the Commandline.
the guy below me is absolutely correct , linux is about chance.:)
@Violet:
I’m sure your fleamarket knock-off Lettuce Patch Kid brought you much comfort. After all, it’s cute pudgy cheeks, yarn hair and bright adorable eyes made it just as appealing to you as a Cabbage Patch Kid’s cute pudgy cheeks, yarn hair, and bright adorable eyes. I’m sure it even came with it’s own adoption papers, too.
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You’re missing the point.
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Who the hell cares if KDE or GNOME behaves slightly better than Windows? Do you even realize that all you’re doing is comparing a bad product with another bad product?
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Wouldn’t you rather have a desktop that was so completely and clearly superior to Windows as to make our whole discussion completely null and void? Why did KDE even allow these sorts of apples-to-apples comparrisons to take place, and continue to take place, when they could have just built an orange?
Pissing and moaning and farting and fussing and whining about the pluses and minuses of KDE versus Windows is p.o.i.n.t.l.e.s.s. You’re arguing about which turd smells better. Stop it. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. STOP!
Put that energy into something that defeats the whole damn argument. Why not build a desktop, distinct in it’s own right, one that makes such adventures in comparisons worthless?
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No one wants to, because that requires balls, or at least enough ball-like determination to tell the peanut gallery to shut up, and go back to watching Teletubbies. No one wants to earn a real degree, because you can just as easilly draw Tippy the Turtle and get a degree in the mail in 4-6 weeks.
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I tried. I tried in 1998, and have continued to try for 10 years to point this problem out to people, that imitation will ALWAYS produce an inferior product, and ALWAYS relegate a project to perpetual 2nd Place status. Nobody wanted to listen, and here we are.
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You can explain the problem in laborious detail. You can diagram it. You can PowerPoint it. You can debate it endlessly in IRC and however many mailing lists you want. You can show it to them metrically. You can show it to them empirically. You can show it to them on multiple levels that what they’re doing doesn’t make any f?@king sense. At the end of the day, the people who are so entrenched in the culture of imitation for imitation’s sake are going to look at you with a blank stare and go, “……..but this one goes to eleven.”
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That, sadly enough, is probably going to be the legacy of Linux on the desktop.
“… Plus, if you do not like Kickoff, you can drag the old style launcher to the taskbar and be happy. Vista offers nothing of the sort. …”
Um sorry, but the sheer fact you wrote this put me off reading any further.
BTW to do what you say Vista doesn’t allow you to do, do the following :
Right Click START
Click the START MENU Tab
Click CLASSIC START MENU
KDE 4.0 isn’t ready for general user adoption … PERIOD
Man, I am not used to this much attention. Thanks for commenting, I’ll attempt to get to some of these.
@Gordon: Fair enough, I’ll even make the edit so it isn’t a generalization. Specifically, Vista runs slow on this machine. The Linux distros I have ran haven’t. I don’t consider KDE 4.0’s compositing to be “a joke”, but I will grant you your point.
@ande: You got me. I’ll make the correction.
@Violet: Thanks for the comment.
@Anonymous: You sound an awful lot like another commenter. I’m always down with someone telling it like they see it. What steps can be done to make your vision happen? You make solid points. Is it in any way doable?
Thanks everyone else for the comments.
Hi, sorry, forgot to fill in the Name field. Anon=Bowie.
I’ll follow up in an email with you, if you’re serious about rattling some chains. You should be prepared to have many a peanut lob snarky VH1-style comments at them, and you, but for the sake of an experiment, I suggest you ignore them fully. That was my fatal mistake 10 years ago. I tried to placate the peanuts for the sake of trying to keep the group together, when I should have just left them in their gallery where they wanted to be, and kept moving.
[...] Linux Tech Daily [...]
@Shane: I understand why you might want a “face” for Linux, but that is the thing that I most fear. Right now, Linux is the best OS for one reason: choice. Personally, I consider KDE (all versions) to be the DE-embodiment of pure evil. Others love it. With Linux, we get to choose what we use. I can have Xfce, others can have GNOME or KDE, and still others can use the various *boxes, or even no GUI at all! If Linux were to have one unifying look… I would have to switch to BSD
***The competition between DE’s/distros is what gives us progress!***