In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: More work on runners, bindings into WebKit, and the beginnings of better composite manager support in Plasma, with support for multiple feed sources in the RSS Plasmoid. The addition of a "BBall", "Show Desktop", "KMLDonkey", and "IM Presence" (using Decibel) Plasma applets. An alternative alt+tab window switcher (similar to Compiz Fusion's "Cover Switch" effect). SuperKaramba gets support for Qt 4.4 "widgets-on-canvas". A long-overdue "major" rewrite of KCron is undertaken. Undo support in the KShortcutsEditor dialog. New plugins in Digikam and Krita. Various improvements in KTorrent and Amarok 2.0. Interface work and MusicBrainz integration in KsCD (student project). Lots of work on page transition effects in KPresenter. The start of work on integrating online reader support into Akregator. Kubrick, a Rubik's Cube game, is imported into playground/games. KDiamond moves from playground/games to kdereview, Kollision from kdereview to kdegames for KDE 4.1. kdebase (trunk, KDE 4.1) now requires Qt 4.4. Akonalendar (a small app to demonstrate Akonadi KCal models), and the Quasar graphics library are imported into KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
"making KDE dependant on a large company is out of the question. Google being evil or not, it's just very stupid and against pretty much all KDE stands for."
Good thing KDE isn't dependent on TrollTech, and thusly Nokia, who has been repeatedly anti-OSS and anti-open-standards.
Good thing KDE doesn't have a financial board (oh wait, they do!), nor do they court companies to attain "Patron of KDE" status (oh wait, they do!)
"you don't understand how KDE works"
Pot, kettle, black.
You're somewhat mistaken here. While I agree with your concern on dependence on TT, it's important to point out that KDE e.V. is NOT KDE, and has no role in development. Hence, KDE does not have a financial board, only KDE e.V. does. Though the "patron of KDE" label is indeed inaccurate then.
Unlike Mozilla, whose development was originally Netscape-centric, KDE has a strong tradition of volunteer run development, with only a few paid developers in its history. Hence, there wouldn't be an easy way of setting up partnership...
As for your specific examples... IMHO, it's against everything KDE stands for: a well integrated desktop that gives you control over data, using open data interchange standards. You'd be replacing high-quality, high-integration, standards-following apps like KMail, using IMAP/POP3/SMTP; KOffice using OpenDocument, with web apps using proprietary technologies, with unclear privacy implications to boot.
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9885248-16.html
Please, while I understand fanatical worshipping of Foss. Please some pragmatism here.
Or at the very least, please come to terms with reality.
KDE is a joint effort. And there is nothing wrong with commercial support.
I swear sometimes I think open source zealots are the hippies of this decade.
Open source cannot and should not exist in a vacuum without Big commercial companies. Some open source programmers like to get paid, believe it or not.
Thanks for the always wonderful commit digest Danny! For anyone who hasn't yet heard about KDE on Ubuntu Brainstorm, please vote the following idea up. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/478/ . I know I already submitted this as a comment on the dot elsewhere, but I'd really like to see it get voted up. The more distros out there that treat KDE like a first class citizen, the better off KDE will be. Thanks for your vote in advance!
I already voted.
Totally agree with your statement. Even non Kubuntu people will benefit from this. :)
Please vote.
It's at 324 votes for KDE.
We still have a long way to go until it's in the 4-digits.
-M
I just checked the votes again.
Our current count is 374. Thanks people for voting. We still have a long way to go though.
-M
376 :)
It's slowly going up. Gnomies keep voting it down. :(
We're getting there... 401 votes111
Me too. Please Vote!
I voted for KDE. Did you?
I voted: now 339. We have a LONG way to go.
i voted, err.. 338! :( lets go everyone! go over there and place your vote
I disagree. The way Ubuntu treats Debian is bad, and the way Kubuntu will treat KDE will be bad too. I prefer other company based distributions (SuSE, Mandriva, etc.) to Kubuntu. If just they were dpkg and apt based...
Why does Canonical treat Debian bad?
That might be true, but votes still help. The more distro's work on KDE, the more exposure KDE gets. So it's important to vote, even if you're not a Kubuntu fan.
why will kubuntu treat KDE badly? and in what way?
I can't think of any other quality dpkg distro's. I think suse is much better quality than kubuntu but yast is a pile of turd. I think that there is a distinct lack of options in KDE distros. They also tend to be more broken in general than gnome based...still prefer kde even if things are more buggy.
All this is sad but true..
That's why we need to vote.
I'd like to thank Martin Gräßlin for being one of the few third-parties to be contributing to the KWin effects (and I'd pre-emptively invite those of you who'd dismiss his efforts as "pointless eye-candy" to stick a sock in it, thankyou :)) - I for one hope to see more of this from you!
There's a youtube video here - as usual, I suspect the standard disclaimers of "it's faster when you're not running recording software" apply:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=sjNKZVKgXP8
Not to reduce his achievements, but this fairly rich effect, with complex motion, fading, 3D stuff, onscreen text etc, is achieved in a scant 818 lines, much of which is comments and general boilerplate:
http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kwin/effect...
I wonder if the reason more people aren't stepping up to help with this is that they feel it must be much harder than it really is?
Beautiful! How much code in compiz for a similar effect I wonder?
I wonder why there are Youtube video's showing the KDE effects ported to Compiz ;-)
I thought Compiz already had every effect under the sun (after all, they've been around for a while), yet apparently the KDE ppl still managed to come up with some cool and must-have effects Compiz wanted and even showcases on Youtube...
This is awesome. We're finally ahead of compiz on something... :)
They're copying us!@!!!
Third-parties? He's got an SVN account :).
He probably meant 'anyone who isn't named Lubos Lunak' ;-)
There is a better vid here with reflection and smoother motion:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=sjNKZVKgXP8
Ooops I meant here:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=dv1Nu4425g8
Really cool :)
More effects???
Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!
I would like to say a big thanks to him too. I just can't imagine computing without eye-candies anymore. As for those who consider them as useless, well they don't have to use them.
Same here...
If it wasn't for eye candies I wouldn't have switched to Linux. Totally true!!
Thanks for listening and thanks for making more eye candy!!
Can't wait to see the video.
I love those effects to but I must admit that some things like the selection effect in dolphin, in open/save dialog box... (fade in...) are a little too much :-/
Thanks Martin Gräßlin!
It's great to see more people are coding cool eye candy. Can't wait to see what you come up with next. I'm on the edge of my seat.
16124 Open Bugs. That's quite a lot for a open source project. Are there any plans to close them in the near future?
What - you mean, just literally *close* them, without fixing them?
You have to realize just how big KDE is and how long its been around.
Lots of these bugs may not even be valid anymore, which is why they hold a bug squashing event ever so often.
Personally I think it'd be nice if I could flag a bug as invalid or cannot reproduce so the admins could close it. But thats a feature request for bugzilla not kde devs.
if you are looking to do bug triage, just let us know and we can give your bugzilla account the permissions to do so. best place to hunt us down for this is on irc in #kde-devel
I think this huge amount could be reduced rapidly with something like 'Bug Reproducing Weekends', so in a few months, people just start to reproduce bugs (in weekends).I think Many of bugs will go away.
I like this.
Maybe make the bug reporting easier accessible from the desktop with a reminder for bug reporting weekends. :)
(not trying to emulate aseigo, shift key not working. damn ms wireless kb)
i might be modded a troll here, but this is a legit question: i thought one of the goals of plasma was to get rid of all these disjointed pieces of software that composed kde. and from what i'm seeing, plasma is indeed integrating sk's functionality, already. so why is superkaramba still being worked on?
(and, no, this is not flamebait)
Compatibility. The Plasma devs want as many kinds of Widget (Dashboard, Superkaramba, Opera etc) to be supported as possible.
Does this mean that SuperKaramba is Plasma-based? Or is a different codebase? I was wondering more or less the same than the original poster.
No, Plasma is something completely new. However, it has been designed to easily add support for other widget types. As most widget systems are based on HTML engines (Dashboard -> Webkit, Superkaramba -> KHTML, Opera -> Presto) and use normal web technologies such as Javascript and CSS it is quite easy to support them in Plasma without any legacy code.
I just copied a link that shows SuperKaramba widgets being added to the Plasma Desktop http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3305
Has anyone here got it working and could you please explain how it's to be done?
I would be happy to get Liquid Weather working.
Thanks.
I don't know if it is my fault but since KDE 4.0.0 rating and comment files in Dolphin don't work, only tags are remembered.
I remember that this used to work for me prior 4.0.0 release, and it was a handy feature.
Is this only happening to me?
I'm using current 4.0 svn branch with soprano 2.0.2.
There was an issue in KDE 4.0.0 that the rating has not been remembered, but commenting files always worked AFAIK. The rating issue has been fixed for KDE 4.1 by Sebastian Trüg, but has not been backported yet. I'll check with Sebastian whether backporting this bugfix is possible.
Works for me on 4.0.2.
I must admit that I was, in the beginning, rather sceptical of the new look of KDE4. But I use it now for weeks, and I like it. It's great, it's the right way to go, and I see the potential, and I like it. I have to say this in advance, because in day-to-day usage, the shortcomings are still obvious. All the new features mentioned in the commit digest don't help here...
However, despite everything, despite all new features, is there anybody working at thing like speed and stability?? KDE4 (openSUSE, snapshot always updated) keeps to suck for me in this respects :(.
Examples:
"Show desktop" icon: Takes seconds
"Log off": When "darkening" the desktop for the log off window, I can in fact see the deskopt redrawn line by line. Haven't had that since my early Amiga times.
"Desktop effects": unusable because of speed, bugs, and stability since the beginning of KDE4
"Settings": .kde4-directory has to be erased every couple of days
and so on... everything feels sluggish. I can't pinpoint anything, it's just that Windows XP on the same machine runs like hell, and KDE feels like having lost 1 Ghz or something like that.
The machine is a AMD dual core with an GeForce 6. The proprietary NVidia driver should have been correctly set up.
However, I don't really see why me as a user should have to fiddle with settings for the festest way to do desktop effects and stuff, and doing "NVIDA_HACK" environment variables and stuff like that... but that's another point. Even in the most basic settings KDE4 is still way behing of Windows in terms of "catchiness" and "stability" on this machine, and this I don't like..
Definitely a video driver problem. The drawing performance is so poor that it makes everything appear sluggish. I haven't had any problems with my geforce but lots of other people have. I also sometimes see it on the EeePC. Sometimes it will be fast, then other times it will be glacially slow.
So you have the proprietary drivers set up? (it shows the nvidia logo when X starts). Might be worth a try with the nv driver. Might actually be faster if you don't use opengl stuff.