Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Peter Nuttall on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @19:15

>Just being curious|

>What do participants dub THE single most impressive new thingie they took back >from aKademy?

I wasn't there, but I think it will be etheir the new multimedia stuff or metadata and searching though same. Both of these seem to be quite big and have had a lot of talking about them, both online and off.

>To outsiders they event seems confusing. There was a lot going on and >all....yadda-yadda-yadda....

I think it was confusing for those who were there too. From reading the blogs and the comments above it seems to me that because it is the only time all the devs can get together, there is a need to get lots of talking done really quickly. I think about a month or two from now, we will see large amounts of the vaquorus ideas floating around in the blogs, websites, mailing lists and dev's heads take solid form in code.

>But reading all the different weblogs and reports, it looks like KDE has >entirely lost focus. Are their developers in any way still motivated to hunt >behind GNOMEs advances? Do they still have vision? Do they still follow a plan? >Do they have a strategy?

First of all, I have never seen KDE with a plan, a strategy or even focus. Such a thing is against the way kde works.

On the "can kde keep up with gnome" question, I would say that in some areas kde is ahead and in other areas gnome is ahead. I also like to remember what both were like when I started using linux, about 2 years ago:

Back then, kde had just released 3.0 and gnome had just released 2.0. I started off playing with 2.2 and 1.4 but soon upgraded to the new versions. I settled on kde for a bunch of reasons that I wil try and explain:

Back then, kde 2.2 was slow, but the speed improvement from 2.2 to 3.0 was amazing, at least twice as fast. nothing gave me more confidence in a project than it's ability to fix its biggest problem so quickly. gnome, on the other hand, was faster to begin with, but didn't show such a massive improvement in speed between 1.4 and 2.0 (maybe there was a speed improvement, it just wasn't as big as the kde improvement)

Back then, kde apps sucked. there wasn't anything like kopete, appollon, juk or amarok, quanta was a shadow of it's present self, kofffice was crash happy, and so on. There was no kde-apps.org, instead there was apps.kde.org, a money making site that could have given lessons in bad interface design to anyone you care to name. It was common pratice to criticise the kde devs for writing their own html rendering engine and window manager. I mean, gecko was very good back then, and there seemed to be no need for a second open source html renderer.

At the same time however gnome used the best-of-breed open source apps. Mozilla and Galon were wonderful web browsers, kmail couldn't (back then) hold a candle to Evolution, noatan sucked when compared to xmms, the gnome office apps like abiword and gnumeric kicked koffice's butt, and even things like the games were much better.

But the difference between kde apps and gnome apps was that kde apps looked and felt the same. They used the same dialog boxes and icons, they all had the same menu options in the same places. gnome apps, on the other hand, seemed to me if the gnome devs had gone out onto the internet, found the best apps, and bundled them with gnome. I didn't like that much. I wanted all my apps to look and feel the same.

Because the desktop showed so much promise, and the apps all felt the same, I whent with kde. not long after I made this choice, I ended up talking to a couple of gnome users, both with years of linux useage under their belts. They stated that they used gnome because:

1) it is faster than kde and uses less resources (remember, two years ago)

2) the best apps are bundled with gnome

3) it is written in C, a standard language with good compliers for linux. kde, on the other hand, is written in C++, which was, at the time, non-standard and less well supported under linux

4) gnome was very confgurable, for example you could use one of three window managers with it

Lets think about the sitution now.

1) kde apps rock now, quanta is the best web dev environment for linux, juk is the best itunes style music player, kdevelop is a great heavy weight IDE, kate is a wonderful text editor, kmail is very good, there have been some great dev tools such as valgrind invented, and so on.

2) kde is faster than gnome now.

3) kde has way more config options now.

4) kde seems to be getting along fine with C++, while gnome is looking for a new language to use (C#, python)

on the other hand, gnome is beating kde on the look and feel issue and the intergration issue, also, gnome is using khtml.

so in the two years I have been using linux, the two desktop environments have changed their positions completely. If I was a newbie again, I would pick gnome. wierd.

I think that these things go in cycles, I think that kde will sit down and tame the mass of options in the control centre, write it's own HIG, and get involved in HAL and DBUS. And I think that gnome will start bringing in more options, start using some new language and speed things up again. After all it is a win-win for the users and it lets the devs say things like, if you want (kde/gnome) you know where to find it

Pete

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Official News
·   Also by Peter Nuttall
·   Contact author

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by anon on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @20:01

> I think that these things go in cycles.

Interesting post. Yeah, I think GNOME is headed towards KDE. and KDE is headed towards GNOME. Perhaps KDE 5/GNOME 4 will see that reversed.

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Anonymous on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @23:02

> instead there was apps.kde.org, a money making site

There was never a apps.kde.org, you mean apps.kde.com.

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Peter Nuttall on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @23:37

>> instead there was apps.kde.org, a money making site

> There was never a apps.kde.org, you mean apps.kde.com.

That would be it, thanks

pete

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by cm on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @23:17

> gnome apps, on the other hand, seemed to me if the gnome devs had gone
> out onto the internet, found the best apps, and bundled them with gnome.

It did not only seem to be like that, that's exactly what had happened. XMMS, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are often seen as being under the umbrella of the GNOME project, but the only real connection to GNOME was the common use of the gtk toolkit, where the "g" does *not* stand for GNOME but for gimp.

Bundling is the correct term.

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Debian User on Saturday 04/Sep/2004, @02:42

the G actually stands for GNU, not?

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Anonymous on Saturday 04/Sep/2004, @02:46

The "G" in GIMP yes, but not the "G" in Gtk+. :-)

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by vm on Saturday 04/Sep/2004, @06:02

I thought that openoffice has its own toolkit and thats why its slow. Mozilla prior to 1.5 also did that, didn't it ?

Most gtk apps load very quickly - why then do OO & mozilla load so slowly even today ?

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by TomL on Saturday 04/Sep/2004, @10:11

>on the other hand, gnome is beating kde on the look and feel issue and the >intergration issue, also, gnome is using khtml.

Interesting that you should see it that way. I had to use gnome for 3 weeks in August, and I believe that for me KDE has better looks, better integration and is easier to use. The *only* thing I see gnome doing better at is vision: dbus, hal, etc. For *many* things I see in gnome 2.8, it seems like kde has had for a while.

Gnome's use of mozilla/firefox/open office I see as a HUGE negative, since they are so poorly integrated. Ximian apparently has made an effort to better integrate open office, which is appreciated.

But I have to say that those 3 weeks were pure torture to me.

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by KDE user on Saturday 04/Sep/2004, @14:05

IMO KDE looks much more polished than GNOME.
GNOME looks like a kiddies desktop - too primary & flat.
KDE is very easy on the eye.
Just my opinion - but also that of my few Linux aware colleagues.

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Re: THE single most impressive new thing from aKad
by Otis Wildflower on Sunday 05/Sep/2004, @09:11

<em>on the other hand, gnome is beating kde on the look and feel issue and the intergration issue, also, gnome is using khtml.

so in the two years I have been using linux, the two desktop environments have changed their positions completely. If I was a newbie again, I would pick gnome. wierd.</em>

?

If anything, KDE remains more consistent in the look and feel game IMHO, at least as far as reusability (KParts) and integration (DCOP). OpenOffice is still too different from Mozilla which is too different from XMMS. Each GNOME app can be themed differently, while with KDE you pick one great theme (Baghira in my case) and everything renders all the widgets and chrome for you instead of trying to find all the disparate themes in all the disparate apps. Plus, thanks to GTK-QT, my GNOME2 apps that behave properly look pretty good too, particularly Firefox and GIMP2. However, you still have laggards like OOo that are _ugly_, though I haven't source-built it in awhile.

Kopete, Apollon, Juk are individually damn fine apps, but with integration into KDE they're synergistically superior. Also, KDE is stealing some really great ideas from OS X (KWallet, KAddressBook), so when the Xorg lower-level stuff improves to the OS X display quality level, KDE is closest IMHO to approaching OS X in usability.

OTOH, KOffice still freezes in 100% cpu when I try to read in a Word2k file.

I continue to stick with KDE, even with some of the political annoyances.

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