In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on WebKit integration, the ability to access Plasma data engines in Plasmoids rendered through WebKit, and a HDDtemp daemon data engine are added to Plasma, plus work on Plasmoid packaging and KRunner. Items can now be dragged from the Kickoff menu to the desktop or the panel. More work on syncing Akregator with online reader services. A GUI for declinations in Parley. Support for DGML tags in Marble. Genuine progress in the KTankBattle game. General improvements and the removal of the Helix engine in Amarok 2. A visual redesign of the KGet "Web Interface", with added translation capabilities. Continued work on KPresenter slide transitions, and KCron. Work on importing and exporting shortcut configurations in KControl. The "three stars per character" password mode returns to KDE 4 (from the KDE 3 series). Various speed optimisations across KDE applications. Ligature moves to "unmaintained" status. KDE 4.0.2 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
To keep things cool - after looking at 4.0.2, a 2nd maintainance release-version, i think there is much reason to
to be honestly in doubt about the stability and usability.
> You do realise that the architecture of Plasma will make it so much more configurable and flexible
> than KDE3 that it will make Kicker and the old K-Menu look pretty sad and rigid in comparison?
That really isn't _obviously_, looking at the current state.
> Why on earth would you fork KDE4 to add features that are *already planned* by the devs?
> Both Peter and David have stated on numerous occasions that ...
How should a user know that? A greater deal of the users and adopters don't ever read
those mailing-lists and digests. Do you seriously mean they have to, to are
allowed to judging a software?
> ... doing some research on KDE4, its current status, and its goals
I did, and probaly missed important things - but thats not the point. Even if i would be convinced,
i cannot expect that others are by reading announcements. In the end those will be judging by looking
at the current state of the subject matter. And here again goes the first sentence.
(maybe something went wrong with the release schedule?)
Nevertheless, good news, thanks for informations.
I think a lot of the goals and long term strategies can be found on techbase.kde.org which will help you get that research done so you know that certain currently missing features will get addressed and thus that you can plan on that.
"To keep things cool - after looking at 4.0.2, a 2nd maintainance release-version, i think there is much reason to
to be honestly in doubt about the stability and usability. "
Again, you're assuming you can predict what KDE4 will be like in several years based on the first *two months* of development after its initial release. This just doesn't make sense.
"That really isn't _obviously_, looking at the current state. How should a user know that? A greater deal of the users and adopters don't ever read
those mailing-lists and digests. Do you seriously mean they have to, to are
allowed to judging a software?"
You can judge KDE4 as it is right now by using it - that's absolutely fine. You can not judge what KDE4 will be like several years down the line without finding out some of its goals. Your comment that Konqueror will never have its KDE3 functionality back without a fork is a perfect example of this - your judgement was wrong or, at best, hugely premature.
"I did, and probaly missed important things - but thats not the point. Even if i would be convinced,
i cannot expect that others are by reading announcements. In the end those will be judging by looking
at the current state of the subject matter. And here again goes the first sentence.
(maybe something went wrong with the release schedule?)"
The release schedule lead to a very rough and unfinished release, just like all projects that made a major break from their existing codebase (KDE2.0, GNOME 2.0, Linux 2.6, Apache 2.0, etc). What's going wrong is, again, that people are judging the entire future of KDE4 based on its initial release. Put it this way: If you had made a decision of whether KDE would ever fit your needs based on the horrific KDE 2.0.0, you would probably never have recommended it, and your clients would never have used KDE3 which, based on what you have said, they are quite happy with.
"Nevertheless, good news, thanks for informations."
You are welcome :)
> How should a user know that? A greater deal of the users and adopters don't
> ever read those mailing-lists and digests. Do you seriously mean they have
> to, to are allowed to judging a software?
Sorry Mr. Steen but if you an IT integrator and are responsible for deployment of FL/OSS desktops, then you HAVE to read "those mailing lists and digests" (and blogs, and maybe even commit logs), because this is a source of inormation in the FL/OSS software. I'm sorry but it works this way. If you are used to different methods, stay with your current solution.
Your advice is welcome - though, once again - I did. At least to a certain degree -
I've hardly ever read commit logs. I thought that would be evident by posting here
quoting a year old blog. But never mind.
> How should a user know that?
A user does not have to know that. A user will not see KDE 4 until their distro packages it as the default KDE, and that will happen when KDE 4 is mature enough.
Wasn't the decision to release that early motivated by the expectation to get more users on it?
Btw. that would apply to all software. So what do you think are release schedules for? There would be no reason anymore to mark versions as alpha, beta aso. because ofcourse the distros will judge and handle the versions corretly.
Thats silly man!
I think the expectation was to get more of the technically interested power users try to use KDE 4. It was said many times that it is not aimed at regular end users as a replacement of KDE 3 yet.
"KDE4 will never fit our needs"
It does not fit now. How do you know that it never will?
You can switch to the traditional start menu, switch the widget style back to plastik/windows/whatever. AFAIK better desktop icon handling is planned for 4.1 as well as the old kicker functionality in Plasma, so these problems are likely to be solved as of 4.1 or in the worst case 4.2.
Why do defaults matter so much? In a large deployment you can set the user defaults anyway and make those the default settings for every user on every computer.
Thats an eligible question.
In (not only) my opinion, those changes to the defaults (the default applications (konqeror, kicker, kcontrol are good examples)
but also seemingly little usability-related things like widget- icon- or border-sizes and handling) were not made randomly.
So we arrived at the conclusion, that KDE's target audience had changed. That in companion with the (ok, got it - currently)
unsatisfying stability led us to that 'never' - Of course i hope we have to reconsider that ;-)
You're not the only one.
I find the fact that any work at all is being done on eye candy before the thing is fully feature complete and stable quite disturbing.
I think the natural inclination for a lot of people is to think that
Luckily, debian Lenny is scheduled to release with 3.5 and support it for three more years so I'm not too worried.
I expect slackware to keep it around well into the next decade as well.
As annoyed as I am that KDE chose to use its own definitions for alpha, beta, and release candidate, it's the distros that are planning on depreciating KDE3 before KDE4 is feature equivalent that are really running full speed off a cliff here. Those of us who use our computers to do work and don't give a damn about bling will switch to whatever distro still supports 3.5 (or buy macs).
finishing this thought...
I think the natural inclination for a lot of people is to think that
if work is being done on silly stuff like and icons and desktop effects, the important parts must be finished. You don't paint your house until you've got all the siding on it. Unless you're KDE. Then you do.
It really makes me worry about the priorities of the KDE project. And yes, if the target audience is people who care more about what their desktop looks like than how functional it is, I'm done with it.
I really think there wouldn't be nearly as many complaints about missing functionality right now if there had not been as much effort to make KDE4 outwardly look like a finished product.
maybe the people who do the artwork are not the ones who (can) do the programming
Oh so true. Besides, we do NOT paint the walls until the building is done. Plasma has only 1 theme, which is very basic and doesn't even look so great. The panel lost it's temporary (horrible) artwork only a few weeks before the final release of 4.0. So what's all the eyecandy work? The parent might think the artwork is a lot of work, but he's wrong - it's not. Plasma does good looks by default, so if you just work, it will look decent. In other words, the dev's DON'T spend much time on eyecandy - it's just looking good cuz the candy is almost free in KDE 4. Not entirely, true, but almost :D
In that case, please consider my complaint as a compliment.
Well, I'm a bit in the same situation as I have 6 desktops running with fully loaded KDE and Konqu as filemanager and browser in a business here. It's just not wise to switch to KDE4 anytime soon (as much as I would like to). It needs to mature at least until 4.1 (better 4.2). What I'm particularly disappointed about is that the PIM apps won't be back until 4.1 (and probably even 4.2). Still, this is like 6 months - 1 year time from now, which is sad, because I'd really like to use Konqueror (Browser) from the 4 series now.
As everybody uses icons on the desktop for temporary files (like opening files from emails for editing), it's even sad to see, that it's simply not usable in KDE4 (and it's still not working in trunk).
The icons can't be dragged from the desktop to a dolphin view. It's not an icon, it's a Plasmoid which can be rescaled and rotated, but the file operations are not possible anymore. (And users often drag pictures/photos from the desktop to OO.draw for quick printout with the company logo on the page. This is not working anymore!) It's supposed to be a completely new way of using the desktop, but the downside is that it removes a fair amount of funtionality everybody got used to....!
I can use the PIM apps from 3.5.9 with 4.0.2 but that still does not solve the problem with the desktop icons... Damn, me needs to wait some 1/2 year more to upgrade the desktops...
i second this. But i'm not worried. Adding the files features to those plasmoids should be easy i think. The most important that has to be done is to remove the right click menu of the icon plasmoid, and replace it with the normal file right click menu.
Huh? usability, work flow? come on dude, now you can instead rotate every single
desktop-icon! and every single desktop icon even got its own neat tool-bar
*** i'm dreaming of an icon's menu-bar ***
Seconded. The current 4.0.2 desktop is unusable for many professional users, and disappointing to many long-time KDE3 users. Unfortunate, but true to many of us.
Of course, there are others, like myself who disagree.
I have long forsworn using the desktop as a junk pile for files. Instead, I keep files organized in folders like ~/tmp or ~/Documents/Downloads. I don't know what qualifies as a "professional user" in your mind, but I don't find using the Desktop as a file directory very professional.
I agree with the KDE 4 idea of the desktop as a place to present information. I currently use SuperKaramba on my KDE 3 desktop to display post-it-note reminders, current weather conditions, and what processes are currently running.
In fact, I have an old blog entry in which I rant about the problems with the Desktop paradigm (http://kwilliam.blogspot.com/2007/06/thing-about-desktops.html). I pride myself for being rather visionary with that post; I almost predicted Plasma.
Also, anybody know why I can't use HTML in this post? The only option I get is "Plain Text". :-/
Sure, it's all nice and cool if you don't like using the desktop as a temporary file space (many hobby users even use it as a storage place), but most people do, and they do so on all OS and desktop enviroments. And you can't change them, it's simply the way we work with computers since many many years.
Sure, you should be allowed not to use the desktop as a temporary storage place, but you should also be allowed to do so.
replied to for truth. It's a perfect holding bin for things I need to get done. It annoys me to see them there so I do them. /tmp just isn't the same.
Overall I'm just hugely underwhelmed with plasma. Each commit digest we here stuff like "now we can drag from the desktop to the panel." "Now we can drag from the menu to the desktop!" It's like each possible combo of source and destination has to be coded separately. For all that, it's hard to believe it's running in a single process. I look forward to future changes that will allow me to drag from the menu to the panel, or from the old kmenu style menu to the desktop or the desktop to the second panel or whatever.
I know that Plasma still isn't anywhere near useful. That's no reason to give up on it though. See if can get some of those companies or municipal authorities to give back to the project which software they are using and DONATE!!!
Think about the money you saved, divide it in 1/2 and donate that to the KDE project. Then they can hire more full time programmers and make KDE better and more like what you want.
Also Plasma is the best thing that happened to KDE. I wouldn't want to give that up. There is no equivalent to Plasma anywhere else in the open source, or closed source world. With enough momentum and critical mass tons of things are possible with Plasma.
The huge borders and screen real estate wasting is unfortunately "in style" and "hip" now. Bugs the crap out of me. Look at Vista as an example. Their reasoning was that it's "easier for beginners to grab the borders of windows to resize them". I'm not making this up, that really was their reasoning. Same reason Apple decided to make the icons in the "quicklaunch" so huge. They figured it's easier to click and see them for beginners.
Unfortunatelly just because our monitors got bigger over the last few years, people decided to waste the "newly gained land". So now it takes a 22" widescreen to get the same "computing power" that was possible decades ago with a 14" 4:3 monitor. I wish it wasn't so. Unfortunatelly I'm the only one it seems that want's to "SAVE DESKTOP REAL ESTATE".
"KEEP DESKTOP REAL ESTATE FROM BECOMING AN EXTINCT SPECIES. DONATE NOW!!!".
"SUPPORT SCREEN REAL ESTATE, OR YOUR KIDS WON'T HAVE ANY WHEN THEY GROW UP".*
_____
* Yes, this is a bit cynical, but I'm trying to drive home a point!! Stop making all icons, Windows, Titlebars, Taskbars, Window borders so damn huge. Pleeeeaaassee!!!
Please don't fork KDE. That would be the worst thing to happen to the KDE environment.
We're already so fragmented against Gnome and others. I'm not even speaking about the mass appeal of OS-X and Windows. We need to gain critical mass, and that can only happen if KDE stays united.
It's built to be modular enough already. No need to fork it.
And stop with the Konqueror worshipping. Those are old times. Konqueror was in the past. It's still there for legacy reasons. Dolphin is the future.
We have to support it, or we won't have a core for KDE. It will get better. But only if people will use it.
If you need to use a webbrowser use Firefox, or similar. They are much better than Konqueror ever was at "just working" with fancy features anyways. :)
If I wanted nautilus I'd use Gnome.
For that matter, If I wanted to drink any of the Havoc Pennington koolaid I'd use gnome. Right now the biggest threat to the open source desktop is the cult of self-styled usability "experts" who haven't taken a single HCI class.
To make that clear. Breaking apart the browser and the file-manager part isn't the point. The point is, that the latter now lacks some important capabilities. It was often argued, that konquerors old source-code wasn't to maintain anymore.
Sure - the code of a less capable tool always (mostly :-)) is cleaner. But it matters how it looks after the tool is comparable feature-wise (if it ever will...)
Often implementations of last and apparently small features make the difference in code-beauty.
Btw. i think this applys also to a lot of other "programs" that were abandoned in favor of easier to maintain ones besides konqueror/dolphin. I would be rather curious how the traditional kicker-, menu-, applets-framework relate to their plasma-successors compared by 'code-cleanliness' and 'maintainability' when the latter will be as usable, stable and configurable as the first are. Of course, you could always raise such objections, but there are oviously some particular reasons to do it here now. Was it back in 2005 when i first heard of the plasma-desktop-revolution? And when i look at it now in 2008 -
Btw. konqui still is my preferred webrowser (khtml isn`t bad at all), and dolphin? Youre kidding right? But some posters above proved me that konqui as file-manager isnt only "... still there for legacy reasons". So dont spread those nonsens.
Please go back to older digest and other dot article about konqueror and dolphin
Please read those articles
Firefox in Linux is terribly *slow* and a PITA, Konqueror/KHTML is much faster and I use Firefox only for some stubborn websites out there. Viva Konqueror/KHTML!
Please don't for KDE.
Development is already all over the place as it is.
I wish more development was consolidated and not divided among a million projects.
Instead of working on Konqueror. Just add more features to dolphin. It does all I need a file manager to do.
Don't get rid of Plasma either. It's what makes KDE 4 so much fun.
I can't wait for more desktop effects and more Plasma eye candy.
From what I gather Plasma also allows for easy cross platform applications that can run right on the desktop. I like that feature.
so why the hell not stay with the concept of having both (at least...) filemanagers in KDE?
do you really mean adding features to dragon player and get rid of kmplayer, Kaffeine... would be the right way?
## It does all I need a file manager to do. ##
if the simpler versions fit your needs - okay, use it. but you have to accept that there are use-cases completely
different from yours and that it is a legal interest to use a desktop for a daily work with requirements unlike yours.
What the hell do you think I use KDE for? Games? *lol* At least not until major game developers acknowledge Linux's existence.
It's purely used as a work machine.
maybe you wont believe it, but let me asure you - even jobs can have completely different requirements. - must have, considering your posts ;-)
guess what? thanks to the magic of kparts, developers can add features to both dolphin and konqueror at the *same* *time*. they share code. everyone can be happy regardless of which program they use - just give the developers some time to bring back the lost features. there are only so many hours in a day, and most of us aren't even getting paid for this :P
Why not?
Khtml was forked and it was the best thing to happen to KDE.
Maybe plasma (or the desktop) should be forked for the same reason. Developers that are not cooperative will eventually go away. Then all will be well.
Derek
Huh?
You are trying to push the plasma devs away?
It was told many times that the feature set of Dolphin is supposed to be a proper subset of Konqueror's for better usability but Dolphin is not a replacement of Konqueror as a file manager as it is not supposed to have important features of Konqueror. So dropping Konqueror would be a huge feature-loss for KDE for many KDE users, and things like that would be definitely the things that would mostly fragment the community and cause forks. However, the problem about which h.steen wrote was that Dolphin (and Dolphin part in Konqueror) missess some features of the Konqueror 3 file management views. But Dolphin those missing Dolphin features are coming. And what is great in Konqueror: Konqueror develops because Dolphin develops, without any special work on Konqueror, because it uses the same file manager views.
There is no such thing like "better" (comparing Firefox and Konqueror as a web browser), just better for you, or me, or somebody. For you, FF is better, OK. For me, and some other peolpe Konqueror is better. I would hate to use a non-KDE application for such a daily task when I only use KDE applications otherwise. As it is non-KDE, besides looking different, it starts slower, consumes more memory, it cannot use kio slaves, it cannot include kparts, it cannot store passwords in kwallet, it doesn't open files with KDE's file associations etc.
[quote]And stop with the Konqueror worshipping. Those are old times. Konqueror was in the past. It's still there for legacy reasons. Dolphin is the future.[/quote]
Is this the part where we all stand up and sing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", like the Hitler Youth from Cabaret?
The deal with Konqueror is that capabilities that were redundant in KDE made it an awesome addition to a window manager like fluxbox or fvwm. The tragedy is that to really understand Konqueror, you have to use it seperate from KDE. So, naturally, with KDE 4, Konqueror has become devalued, diluted, and disabled.
Dolphin is actually quite wonderful. When I say it looks and feels like a really good microsoft application, that's not intended as an insult. It's a beautifully thought-out response to a specific set of tasks. Konqueror, as it used to be, is a completely different concept: a versatile and powerful, comprehensive application that challeges the user to invent new uses and applications. Dolphin is so brilliantly user-friendly, it runs itself. There is no creative input. It's easy, but in my opinion, it's no fun.
And you're correct. It's only being kept around for legacy purposes. The awesomest desktop application ever is being gelded and put out to pasture, because the new KDE is all about a planned, managed desktop experience. That's all well and good, but KDE is no longer the place for Konqueror. Konqueror is about creativity, and writing your own ticket. To see Konqueror play a supporting role to Dolphin is like watching the Sex Pistols open for the Jonas Brothers.
This will not stand. As God is witness, this will not stand.
> huge borders
change your theme then. there are two plasma svg themes i know of that have no borders to speak of.
Offering a KDE4 port of the KDE3 DeskTop (hopefully with some of the major bugs fixed) would not be a fork. With perfect hindsight, it appears that this might have been a good idea. However, now, we would have to consider how long this would take and how long it will take till Plasma starts to be usable.
PLEASE DO FORK!
The Problem in KDE 4.x is not the features or the readynes, but the mere ugliness. Why in the world kick something so beautiful as KDE 3.5 for that Vista clone?
Why are nerds so eager to have everything fotorealistic, like in an Egoshooter. I dont like the glas, water, whatever real light and shadow look, its just like the ugly new cases PC's have. They look shiny but cheap, basta!
I like the more organic looking things an on an completly artificial thing like a desktop that would be the more comic like look of kde 3.5 (used with primary, or mono icons and the warm ubuntu colors ist just cosy).
KDE 4.x looks cold, clinical and cheap!!!
Not to mention that a lot of good and configurable apps have been changed to pseudostylish crap.
A fork is the only way to protect Kde for me and I thing a lot of other people. And Gnome ist just like looking back in time on older KDE Versions.
truly, i`m not up to offend someone personally, but to me it appears, that the KDE4-GUI (Plasma) approach
was made by web designers or at least with the very same intentions web designers probably have.
The site may look nice, maybe fancy flash animations make you wow!, but as soon as you want/have to use
it more than once, you'll find out, that navigating around takes you more clicks than actually needed,
find a specific content is needless circuitous and so on. In the end using it gets soon boring :-/
For a website that may be sometimes bearable as a playground, you don't have to drop by if you don't want to,
but apparently it was forgotten that a Desktop isn't for _occasional_ use. Simply just the _exact_opposite_ is true.
i've definitely disagree to this. designers wouldn't do that. because it's ugly too!
>> space-wasting borders, icon-handling on the desktop
I really hope that will change soon! I'm running the latest trunk at there is still so much white space around everything! Oxygen is just a waste of space and I hope that this will change as soon as possible so that everything else can adopt these changes.
An the icons on desktop need changes too. I saw that they know about it (black background, borders) but they didn't have time to change that yet.
I've been saying this for months. Amazingly enough, today's Oxygen is much better than it used to be, and there is still quite a bit of wasted space.
I do agree in some level to the criticism.
I was even thinking that a pure-qt desktop would be a good idea (no more kdelibs).
KDE 4.0.2 is very buggy (drag and drop on dolphin crashes it) and incomplete (double click in desktop icons does not work).
But I foresee that KDE 4.2 (a little) and 4.2 (mostly) will fix those problems. So the real thing resumes to what most people says: 4.0 should had been named 3.9 or 4.0-dev. 4.1 would be a nice 4.0 and then things would be really good at .1 release.
I hope KDE developers start accepting that they made a mistake at some point, because just saying "we had to release to bring more developers" is not working anymore :-P
Probably.
Either way. It's done now. Hoefully they'll get it done in time for 4.1 to come out. It's only a few months away and I'm getting nervous. There is still so much to do.
I said it before. I'll say it again:
Please add projects to Google Summer of Code.
Than please tell everybody you know about it. The deadline is approaching... FAST.
If you want changes to KDE, GSoC is a really good way to do it.
"Hoefully they'll get it done in time for 4.1 to come out. It's only a few months away and I'm getting nervous. There is still so much to do."
If you're expecting 4.1 to solve every issue with 4.0, you're in for a disappointment.
Hm, plasma itself is one of the "underlying changes" ... but nevertheless i feel with you, actually i would also like we get rid of this 'plasmaism' as soon as possible. But like every other "...ism", you can count on it's instinct of self preservation
Perhaps that "all-the-desktop-stuff-belongs-to-plasma-or-depends-on-it"-mantra isn't just the unix way to solve tasks with collection of *seperate* and *independent* tools. seems me there is some evidence that at least stability would benefit from such independence - thats why former kde versions were much more stable, even their early versions. buggy yes i remember, but not like now.
(sorry for my bad english)