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From what I have seen and read, I have this personal fear that KDE4 is going to turn out to be yet another piece of worthless eye candy just like compiz et al.

 

As I sit at my desk here I am surrounded by 5 hardware items that don't work, either properly, or at all, with Linux (any version) and I am using a laptop that will either shut down 1 time out of 6 (Mandriva) or will not shut down at all (any other distro) and yet I have this awful feeling that vast amounts of human resources are going to be ploughed into plasmoids (whatever the hell they are) and the rest, whilst such utter basics as I have just described, have gone, or will go, unaddressed for ever.

 

If Linux is to gain the credibility it deserves then it needs people to continue to improve on the basics, not to go off on wild and useless flights of fancy in some daft effort to emulate Windows (that is all that compiz was anyhow).

 

For the sake of Linux I really do hope that I am proved wrong in this and KDE4 does turn out to contain something useful, but widgets and kicker menus don't do it for me, and as a personal preference, Krusader is so vastly superior to any other file manager on offer there is very little point in trying to compete with it, just install it by default.

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First, eye-candy is eye-candy, not trying to "emulate windows." Many people do not like eye-candy. But it seems more do.

 

Second, judging from the fabulous performance of Vista, it seems that getting it to just work is not any issue unique to Linux.

 

Third, kde is one desktop. Unlike windows, there are many choices for a desktop. If kde fails, Linux does not. Unlike windows. ;)

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i agree and disagree simultaneously.

 

coming from someone who programs (not GUIs) for a living, i see that sometimes momentary setbacks result in a longterm gain. I'm still on KDE3.5.8.whatever weird smaller release number bc of it's stability. if you're looking for stability KDE 4.0.x is not a good idea. but they're probably doing something that is very worthwhile at the momentary sacrifice of a fanbase.

 

i think i do believe that eye-candy is worthwhile. it's an attraction. people stare at sexy stars because they're an attraction (crude example, i know). but the logic isn't unsound in place with KDE. the problem is that once you get people there, you've got to be able to hold on to them. so your software has got to be stable. you do need to be able to boot and shutdown your laptop. that's a must. Windows has it figured out. someone needs to put similar efforts into Linux for somewhat of the same levels of functionality (in a Linuxy way).

 

if you think something needs improving...contribute. that's what makes Linux awesome. even filing a bug report is a help.

 

(edit: i'm a doofus)

Edited by JonEberger
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From what I have seen and read, I have this personal fear that KDE4 is going to turn out to be yet another piece of worthless eye candy just like compiz et al.

You call compiz worthless?

Why?

 

It's not, you know.

 

Some effects make my desktop much more usable.

Some effects make my desktop more fun to use.

It motivates many people to give Linux a try.

It stopped people from saying that Linux looks crappy.

Etc...

 

 

As I sit at my desk here I am surrounded by 5 hardware items that don't work, either properly, or at all, with Linux (any version)

Did you contact the device manufacturers?

Will you avoid those manufacturers who don't support Linux?

Will you recommend Linux friendly manufacturers to your friends, family and colleagues?

 

If you don't, why would you expect your situation ever to improve?

 

and I am using a laptop that will either shut down 1 time out of 6 (Mandriva) or will not shut down at all (any other distro) and yet I have this awful feeling that vast amounts of human resources are going to be ploughed into plasmoids (whatever the hell they are) and the rest, whilst such utter basics as I have just described, have gone, or will go, unaddressed for ever.

What makes you think the people working on Plasmoids would be working on making your devices work better with Linux if they weren't working on Plasmoids?

What makes you think the people working on Linux (the kernel and modules) are not putting in all required efforts to make things work just like that, as best they can?

 

I believe they do, and any mildly popular hardware today that has been on the market for over a year and doesn't have proper Linux drivers/compatibility, lacks those drivers/ compatibility due to shortcomings on the side of the manufacturers.

 

Vote with your dollar/euro/pound/rupiah/whatever.

 

If Linux is to gain the credibility it deserves then it needs people to continue to improve on the basics, not to go off on wild and useless flights of fancy in some daft effort to emulate Windows (that is all that compiz was anyhow).

First, Linux has lots and lots of credibility, second, compiz is no effort to emulate windows (perhaps the windows that will come after windows 7, but ah well), and thirdly, apparently compiz-like eyecandy is coming to a mobile phone near you very soon, if the MWC in Barcelona is anything to go by.

You don't like *bling*? Well, others do, and it sells (or at least, manufacturers think so).

 

For the sake of Linux I really do hope that I am proved wrong in this and KDE4 does turn out to contain something useful, but widgets and kicker menus don't do it for me, and as a personal preference, Krusader is so vastly superior to any other file manager on offer there is very little point in trying to compete with it, just install it by default.

 

Merely being SVG based is good enough for me. Check the screenies in my mdv 2008 review of kde4. Awesome.

 

That being said, I had a look at current kde4 and yeah, it's not really there yet, from a user point of view.

As I understood long ago, kde 4.0 would be the point where all developers of kde based software should join the fun, and 4.1 where users should join in. Patience.

 

(BTW Krusader? I'll have bash any day, but for graphical file management, konq does fine.)

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From what I have seen and read, I have this personal fear that KDE4 is going to turn out to be yet another piece of worthless eye candy just like compiz et al.

Guess you have not looked at KDE4 at all. Have you seen the work into the underlying foundations? KDE4 is an impressive piece of work that will allow some amazing sofware. Time will prove this as people learn to exploit the capabilities of KDE4. It's not just some desktop environment, it's a whole foundation of libraries to develop on. Phonon, Solid, ThreadWeaver, Decibel, etc. At first sight, they're impressive.

 

As I sit at my desk here I am surrounded by 5 hardware items that don't work, either properly, or at all, with Linux (any version) and I am using a laptop that will either shut down 1 time out of 6 (Mandriva) or will not shut down at all (any other distro) and yet I have this awful feeling that vast amounts of human resources are going to be ploughed into plasmoids (whatever the hell they are) and the rest, whilst such utter basics as I have just described, have gone, or will go, unaddressed for ever.

Please tell me what these hardware items are. I'm _really_ curious. I betcha at least some of them will work.

 

If Linux is to gain the credibility it deserves then it needs people to continue to improve on the basics, not to go off on wild and useless flights of fancy in some daft effort to emulate Windows (that is all that compiz was anyhow).

There's no central body. People work on what they want to work on. Nobody can marshall people and say "stop working on compiz, the kernel needs work". Nobody can redirect or move those human resources, they're working of their own will.

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Besides, computer science is a broad subject, and hardly any programmer can be good at kernel programming, audio/video programming (or even those two together), office programming, etc... at the same time. I wish I was, but... no.

 

Yves.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I guess I owe an apology for not responding to the answers to my post earlier. Here is my excuse. Lately I have been mostly lurking on Ubuntu forums, and there if you start or reply to a post you are automatically subscribed to it and receive email notifications of replies. I naively assumed that Mandrivausers was the same and therefore that I had received no replies. I was obviously wrong.

 

So here I am posting this from a KDE4 desktop so at the very least nobody can accuse me of not being open minded.

 

At the moment I cannot say that the changes I see are at all for the better, but it is in an early stage of development and I might change my mind later, but not now. For example, my most used application on any linux system -krusader root mode- is missing from the start menu. If I switch to 3.5.9 it is there, but not in 4.0. That is not the problem though, the problem is that as far as I can tell there is no way to actually put it there. I can easily put useless stuff like moon phases or comic strips there, but anything useful that I might actually want to put there is impossible (as far as I can tell).

 

This just goes to reinforce my point about eyecandy and bling. OK some people are impressed with it but it doesn't make anything work better in fact at the moment it is worse. You could impress people by including naked pictures of Britney Spears as desktop wallpaper, but it wont help launch the application that you want to launch from where you want to launch it.

 

I thoroughly accept the point that people coding KDE4 or compiz or anything else for that matter may not have the ability or the will to code for anything else. I have never written a single line of code in my whole life and almost certainly never will, but if I did then I would want to work on what I consider to be useful and if that happens to be wobbly windows then so be it.These are very valuable individuals and have an absolute right to work on what they choose to work on but from my selfish point of view I don't see this as being much of a contribution to Linux as a whole, but I grant you it is a lot bigger contribution than mine.

 

Anyway if anybody can tell me how to add Krusader root mode to my KDE4 start menu or my desktop or my taskbar, I would love to know.

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AFAIK krusader 1.80 does not work at all under qt4/kde4.

For that, you need the new 2.0 version, which isn't available everywhere.

Build instructions are here if you want to try compiling it.

 

That is not quite right scarecrow, Krusader 1.8 works perfectly on kde4 (at least it does on my computer) the only problem I have is that the 'root mode' does not appear anywhere in the menu and I can find no way to add it. The normal (ie non root mode) appears in the menu, and if you launch that then you can successfully launch the root mode from within it. The difference is that in kde 3.5.9 'root mode' has its own entry in the start menu and in 4.0 it doesn't.

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I'd rather say that Fluxbox sucks, compared to FVWM. You see- choices! :P

BTW ATM I'm very happy with XFCE4, which is my main desktop (complete, simple enough even for stupid people, very fast), but I'm toying a bit with a personal mod of FVWM-Crystal. It might not come up to something useful, but it's quite a lot of fun!

Oh, and I do toy a bit with KDE4- it's flawed for sure, but darn interesting. By comparison, KDE 3.5.9 is rather too perfect for my taste.

Edited by scarecrow
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  • 1 month later...

Can anybody tell me how I can completely rid my 2008.1 installation of KDE4? I first tried deleting the meta package but that did nothing, I then went through the 'installed' packages and deleted everything with 'kde4' in the title but still, every time I try to update my system I am presented with a whole bunch of KDE4 updates and I just cant get rid of them. If I were at home I wouldn't bother, I would update them and forget about it, but I am away from home and have a limited bandwidth available and I can't afford to waste it on useless updates for a program I have no intention of using.

 

Any ideas?

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