Kernel Cousin KDE #10 Released

Kernel Cousin KDE #10 has just been released, as usual it describes the latest discussions on the KDE development lists. Topics this week include a new busy cursor implementation, KSpread filter news and the code freeze for KDE 2.2 alpha2. You can find the latest issue here.

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Comments

by Craig (not verified)

This is off topic but www.pclinuxonline.com Has a poll on which window manager that you use. KDE is currently 72% and gnome 16%. I think that very cool.

Craig

by not me (not verified)

Looking at the news articles posted at that page, I'm not surprised. Half of them are about KDE and the other half are about Mandrake. No wonder no GNOME users go there!

I would be interested in a Slashdot poll about this, or a poll from some other linux-oriented but not desktop-biased site. That would give much more meaningful results.

by Craig (not verified)

Slash Dot? Neutral? Come on Slash dot is pretty gnome centric. a linux today poll would be better.

craig

by freedesktop (not verified)

Could you please explain to me why it is so "cool" to see the Linux community divided? The right word here is "sad" I am afraid...

by KDE User (not verified)

In fact, if you look closely, they are quite united... behind KDE.

by freedesktop (not verified)

I would believe that if the poll was taken from a generic mix of Linux people. Unfortunately for you, the poll is taken on a KDE coloured site, so _ofcourse_ KDE turns in the lead there.

Still, I am saddened by the fact that there are lots of 'users' out there (erhm, in here) who are chearing whenever X beats Y (fill in Gnome/KDE for X/Y in any order).

Unite, people, unite!

by Craig (not verified)

Hey there Marx chill out. Have you ever been a sports fan and rooted for your team? Actuallty the the kde articles are new. I've never seen so many kde articles. Its not a kde site theres just more kde news right now. Drop your unite crap it sounds stupid.

Craig

by Annoyed reader (not verified)

>Drop your unite crap it sounds stupid.

You, on the other hand, sound like a 10-year-old kid. Stop ruining my reading experience with your pathetic off-topic drivel.

by Craig (not verified)

sissy little girly boy.

by Annoyed reader (not verified)

It seems my guestimate of your age was about right.
Well, guess I just have to accept this as the inherent problem/law of creating an easy user interface: The better it becomes the more it gets moronic fans.
KDE would seem to lead Gnome in usability according to that law.

by Carbon (not verified)

Well, you have a definite point, Craig is acting rather like he has a bad case of shit-headiness. But he also has a point in that it's difficult to unite. In a way, gnome was sort of kind of a fork of kde, not in a source code way, such as bsd, but in a divided issue (this being qt's licensing). Now, of course, this has been fixed (despite grumbling on the part of rms), but these people have a quite good desktop enviroment and aren't just going to let it die. imho, though, there isn't any serious competition. Sure, we'd both like to see our personal desktops win, and we both complain endlessly (but not neccessarily seriously) about the other desktop on our respective irc channels. However, in an OSS world, there is nothing to be gained by a project dying. Only the really wacked truly feel that the 'opposing' project should die. It's just too bad that our respective toolkits are so different as to make a full merge nigh-impossible.

by Chris Boyle (not verified)

IMHO the flexibility to have multiple desktop environments to suit different people's needs is a Good Thing (tm), as is competition between them, it promotes improvement.

What is "cool" is that KDE _might_ at the moment be winning this little tug-of-war, depending on which stats you believe. As someone has already said, it is akin to supporting a sports team, just a bit of healthy competition.

by Eric Nichlson (not verified)

This schizm phenomena isn't necessarily an open source "problem". Large companies (I recently worked for Nortel) often have two or more groups duplicating a research effort in full without much intercommunication.

Splitting the Linux (hopefully someday multiplatform) interface into two "rival sanctions" allows for more variety (read robustness) and friendly competition in both products. Of course the developers feel close to there product and want to see it win, there's no money involved only pride of a job well done!

Celebrate competition! just don't use Microsoft's definition. I don't think any of us Linux types are going to make incompatible products for more market share anyway...

Sit back with an ice cold beer and a footlong and hope the Konqi's pummel those Ximians!

by dc (not verified)

Polls like that proves nothing.
If I put a poll on Gnotices then 85% will be using GNOME.

by Craig (not verified)

ITS NOT A KDE SITE THERES JUST MORE KDE NEWS RIGHT NOW.

by Pain-in-the-neck (not verified)

> ITS NOT A KDE SITE THERES JUST MORE KDE NEWS RIGHT NOW.

That's right. But I think we shouldn't overestimate the results of a poll from a KDE centered site. If you took the same poll on a Gnome site, you would have received a completely different result. ;-))

by Craig (not verified)

Its not a kde site its a mandrake site and it is posted on the gnome site as well. face it kde rocks.

Craig

by jj (not verified)

You really think that only 85% on Gnotices would vote for Gnome? Well, KDE must be more pupolar than I had thought ;-)

by Craig (not verified)

Actually the poll is posted on gnotices ae well its just that kde rocks!!1

Craig

by Otter (not verified)

7?? wondering is why a "PC Linux" site has graphics so obviously drawn from MacOS X.

Anyway, the window manager on my KDE desktop is WindowMaker so that's how I voted. The site's editors should have voted for the "What is a window manager?" option.

by Craig (not verified)

You need to check out the new style called aqua on the theme site.

Craig

by Otter (not verified)

What I'm wondering is why a "PC Linux" site has graphics so obviously drawn from MacOS X.

Anyway, the window manager on my KDE desktop is WindowMaker so that's how I voted. The site's editors should have voted for the "What is a window manager?" option.

by Craig (not verified)

Like i said otter it because its based of the aqua style for kde.
Craig

by ac (not verified)

pclinuxonline is very KDE centric, I'm sure you would get the result of GNOME at 72% on linuxpower.

by Craig (not verified)

Its not linux centric at all. In fact the top story was on pan. It looks like its down now. I notice the number of gnome votes jump 600 in acouple of minutes and then the site crashed. It probably was under attack by the friendly neiberhood gnome troll.

Craig

by KDE User (not verified)

I wish the link to http://tick.dhs.org/~deneen/kpart-header.png would work. I'm trying to understand what a konq_frame header is!

by Hoju (not verified)

ditto

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

yes, its somewhat hard to understand w/out actually seeing it in action.. but let me try anyways =) at the top of the sidebar in konqi there is now a "box" that says "header" and has a button with an 'x' in it, which of course closes the sidebar when clicked. these headers are now available for any part in konqi to use. attatched is a screen shot.

sorry!

I graduated from the university, and took my computer with me. :-)

I did not know that it was part of KK!

Tick

by Macka (not verified)

I'd just like to say thanks to Aaron for the work he puts into creating the KCK updates. They are a truely enjoyable read, and something I look forward to each week.

by Erik Severinghaus (not verified)

Here Here.
Great Job

by Kundan Kumar (not verified)

Can we expect to have mouse gestures in the Konqueror (and if possible in kde in general), as in opera 5.10. Its a very nice feature and makes browsing much faster and fun. Also the Konqueror starts reloading the page if it is asked to go back. How can I ask Konqueror to cahce the visited pages.

Thanks to all of the Kde developers. Great work!!

by Richard Moore (not verified)

You can try out mouse gestures with KGesture. Get it from http://www.slac.com/~mpilone/projects/ I don't think gestures are much use with a mouse personally (though they're nice with a pen), but I guess there's no accounting for taste. ;-)

Rich.

by HPV (not verified)

Mouse gesture are dominant in webbrowsers. In fact, the lack of gesture is the ONLY reason I won't use konq as my primary webbrowser.

What's even better than mouse gestures in my opinion is the functionality of opera that lets you go back by holding the right mouse button then pressing the left button and vice versa for going forward. It speeds up browsing a lot when you don't have to mouse your mouse to the toolbar all the time

by Anonymous (not verified)

You can set up Konqueror to go back by just pressing the right mouse button (without moving mouse during pressing).

by sune (not verified)

While the hourglass cursor under application start might
be a help for newbies, it seems a kneefall for certain
not-quite-multitasking systems like win and mac (pre-X)

It gives the user the impression that he should wait and not
continue work while the application starts up. Another, and
in my opinion better, solution would be to make the buttons
in the panel have a "launch only one at a time" option.
If this was selected for the given application,
clicking on the button while the application was running
would simply make it active (like clicking on the taskbar
does). If one fancy, a double click could overrule this
behavior and start a new instance of the application.

Of course being a "prochoice" desktop both features
should be optional.

by ed (not verified)

Terrific Idea. I like this solution best.

I still sometimes double-click on desktop icons and end up getting multiple Konqueror windows. Or sometimes I click and it takes a while to load so I click again and again.

I would love to be able to OPTIONALLY let only one application load at a time from desktop/panel invocation.

I am not so sure about the changing behavior, letting double clicks override the blocking behavior.

by Karl Garrison (not verified)

A couple of things:

1) The busy cursor could be made similar to Windows "working in the background" busy cursor, where you have both an arrow and an hourglass (though I'd perfer a Motif-style watch instead of an hourglass). thiw way, users would know the app is launching, but could still work on other things.

2) Although having an option to launch only one instance of an app is a good idea, having it on by default would be irritating, since there are many legitimate reasons a user might want to launch a second instance of an app. That user might think it's a bug if hitting the icon a second time didn't work.

If it was off by default, on the other hand, the same users that would think that nothing happened when they hit an icon might not look for this option in preferences.

-Karl

by Aubanel (not verified)

So, an interesting way would be the following :
When you launch an app, append to the icon text 'launching' ...
When the app is launched, remove it.
Yous still have the ability to run another instance of the app, but you are informed that the app is being launched. What do you think about it ?

by Øystein Heskestad (not verified)

No I think he means that you can only LAUNCH one instance of the same application at the same time. When it is launched, you can launch a new one. This is a really great idea, much better than global hourglasses.

by Aubanel (not verified)

I agree, but I think it can be irritating to block the launch of another instance. IMO, it's better to just append [or why not replace by]'launching...' to the menu entry instead of graying it.
You have all the advantages and no inconvenient :
you can still launch another app instance, but you are informed than an instance of this program is allready starting=>Only satisfied users !

by Chris Bordeman (not verified)

Ok, then how do you define 'launching?' The app would have to cooperate in some way.

Perhaps a better way is to check for 'double-click' and ignore the second click, like Windows does.

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

apparently there is much speculation going on as to the exact incarnation of this feature. i didn't put more detail on it into the KC since it isn't in final form yet. however, this is how it currently operates:

when you launch an app, a very small icon appears to the bottom right of the pointer (and it "throbs" right now, don't know if that will stay though). this leaves your pointer free to do what it would normally do and doesn't interfere with the "multitasking" feel of *nix IMO.

as for allowing apps to launch only once, this was actually discussed briefly on the mailing list but is only a partial (and potentially confusing) solution. additionally, since it seems people _want_ most apps to be able to be openned multiple times its wouldn't be very useful in general application. there is actually a KUniqueApplication class, which allow an app to only appear once at any given time no matter what. this is already used where it makes sense, and not used where it doesn't.

by sune (not verified)

I am aware of the KUniqueApplication, but I am more thinking
of the user experience than the technical side.
KUniqueApplication is really only useful for special
service-like things like starting demons as I understand it.
The idea I have is more on the UI side, some users really
dont want to have more than one mp3 player or kpacman
running at the same time. My kids sometime happens to click
intensively on a button to get an application started and end
up with several incantations.

I would never suggest the launch single app should be the
default setting, but it would be a nice feature to enable
on certain programs for certain users for making things
newbie proof.

If you are not convinced consider the following not to unrealistic
scenario:
Most distros ships with no upper limit on the number of
processors a user can start (and how many people go and
fiddle with /etc/security/limits.conf ?).
This can make quite an embarrising show when you have
told everyone how stable Linux is and the first thing they
do is trying to launch netscape by clicking away with the
result that the machine stalls. If you have patience you
might be able to switch to a console and do a killall
but still the impression they leave with is "Gosh! you have
to invoke a command line just to help Netscape from
chrashing..."

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

KUniqueApp is used in various apps in KDE where it makes sense, e.g. KMail. as for the issue of opening a million copies of a program, you can do that in any OS. the feedback cursor tells the person something is happening and hopefully the person is intelligent enough to wait. people know the cursor-based feedback from other systems, it is hard to miss, etc. if it really is an issue for you, you can set user process limits.

another difficulty with the "launch only once" concept is that things can be launched from many different places using many different means. it would be difficult to impossible to make it work perfectly. even just implementing it for kicker buttons/menus wouldn't be trivial.

by not me (not verified)

Why would you want a "launch only once" feature anyway? A "Launch only one at a time" feature would be better. As soon as the first one is done launching, another can be launched. This would solve the problem where people click 10 times on the Konqui icon because it hasn't come up yet, but it would still allow for multiple instances.

Also, the only place where this would be needed would be Kicker buttons and Desktop icons, because they are the only things that can be clicked multiple times very fast.

by Jonathan Brugge (not verified)

"Another, and
in my opinion better, solution would be to make the buttons
in the panel have a "launch only one at a time" option.
If this was selected for the given application,"

Isn't that what KUniqueApplication or whatever it's called in QT is supposed to do? I'm not actually programming C++/QT, but I've read something like that more than once.

Jonathan Brugge

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

Don't we have the technology to manipulate windows' *.cur and *.ani cursor files to be used in our KDE? Even if we prefer not to use them, we can create better Animated Mouse Pointers and Cursor Shapes than ugly windows ;)

I strongly feel that KDE should have:

1. White Mouse Pointers (with variable sizes)
2. Animated Mouse pointers (busy, etc. actions)

I feel that the black mouse pointer and that stupid looking clock is a blemish on our beautiful K Desktop Environment :) For beauty sake please, please create some Good Looking mouse pointers!

by Billy Nopants (not verified)

I agree. Something like the Win2000 3D cursor would be cool.