One thing we have learned from KDE4 is that its not a good idea to make drastic change to a desktop environment that the users have been used to for a long time. Hopefully the Gnome developers will keep that in mind as they work on Gnome 3.0 release for next year. Gnome is known for making subtle incremental changes instead of doing major overhaul, but the changes they have planned for Gnome 3 is much bigger than we have come to expect from Gnome.
Replacing window manager and Gnome panel.
Gnome-shell gives a glimpse of what Gnome 3 will end up looking like. Even though its in the pre-alpha release state its surprisingly very stable. The Gnome panel is replaced by an “Activities” panel and “dock” on the sidebar which displays “Recent docs” and “Application” list minimizes the same way Wordpress 2.7 sidebar panel contracts and expands.
Suse users can download Gnome-shell packages from here, Ubuntu users will need to build from source.
Its refreshing to see developers taking new approach to the way users interact with desktop without making a total mess out of it or copying each other. I personally like this new way of desktop management even though it takes a little bit of getting used to it (all changes do). But I would like to see an option to switch back and forth from the old way to the new way of desktop management when they finally roll it out with Gnome 3.0. With Gnome 2.28 this will be an optional feature.
Only time will tell if users will embrace this changes or reject it like KDE4, but as a long time Gnome user I can only say that the future of Gnome looks promising.
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Comments:
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prisoner
05/19/2009I think the point is KDE4 just copied everything from vista and OSX and nothing more than a mashup of those two DE and it was ugly and bloated and buggy. What Gnome 3 is trying to do is truly unique in the ways people interact with desktop.
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Techmaster
05/20/2009Actually, KDE4 didn’t copy anything from OSX or Vista. Sure, it has composited graphics, which Vista and Leopard have, but Linux has been having that long before Mac or Windows even thought of it. KDE4 is extremely revolutionary on one main point: ALL of its graphics are vector graphics. That means it will look good, no matter what resolution you run it at, and no matter what size you scale the icons to. The fact that it can rasterize all of those vector images into something that can be displayed on your screen without any slowdown, is quite an achievement.
I actually know a few people who are pretty heavy into the development of KDE4 and Qt, and it was pretty much known from the start that KDE 4.0 was going to suck. They just wanted to do a feature freeze, fix the major bugs, and get it out the door as a proof of concept. Then, they knew 4.1 would be a bugfix edition, mainly focusing on all of the major bugs that were found in 4.0, and they knew there would be. However, they still knew that 4.1 was going to pretty much suck as well. Then, 4.2 they would work on the minor bug fixes and add polish to it. Long before 4.0 came out, it was pretty much agreed upon by most people that 4.2 would be the first decent version of KDE4, and from what I’ve seen of it so far, they are right. 4.2 seems rock solid, and 4.3 will bring even more polish to it.
But, you have to realize and understand, that KDE3 was not very good until 3.4 or perhaps even 3.5 came out. That’s just how KDE development has always been. Another good thing about KDE4, is it was written from scratch. They literally dumped the code from KDE3, started with the new Qt4 libraries, and wrote an entirely new DE with them. It is purely modern code, using modern libraries and code patterns. Don’t get me wrong, I personally prefer Gnome’s simplicity, but even Gnome could benefit from dumping its code and starting fresh. It’s really starting to become a bloated mess of code. Not to mention how hard it is to code for GPL. Qt4 is so much nicer for a programmer to code in. Qt4 development has really been starting to take off pretty quickly over the past year or two, and I have to hand it to them, they’ve built a nice library.
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Chole
05/20/2009Techmaster, KDE 3.2 was fine: feature-complete and devoid of major bugs. I don’t remember if I tried the earlier 3.x ones, but the plan for KDE 4 was drastically different than the plan for previous major versions of KDE. And it broke common de facto rules for versioning (that is, with respect to alpha-quality product). It didn’t really help that openSuSE used 4.0.x for their 11.0 distro release.
That said, KDE 4.2 is really awesome, if not entirely free of issues. I really like the modular, extensible feel, and several of the features have become must-have features for me, which is a shame, because there are still a few features from 3.x that are missing. I am torn between worlds! :P
New GNOME looks interesting. The new launcher looks like a drastic improvement from what it currently uses by default (the one where you have to click a button to open up a separate window that lists your applications — we tend to revert our installs to the older, menu-like GNOME launcher).
*goes off to install ratpoison again, just to be different*
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Jeff little
05/20/2009>That means it will look good, no matter what resolution you run it at,
You mean they look like shit no matter what rez your in
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Shane Gowan
05/20/2009It’s Poag’s Curse. The Linux desktop will never succeed if all they do is copy other desktops. (paraphrasing)
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fred
05/20/2009“One thing we have learned from KDE4 is that its not a good idea to make drastic change..”
No, things we have learned from KDE4 are:
* Distro should not replace a stable DE release with a DE release which had been declared as “can eat your baby”.
* Linux world is now full of noobs, that never RTFA(nnouncement) which stated that KDE 4.0 was meant for developers, 4.1 was for early adopters, and 4.2 intended for casual users. The demographic is just different from 8years ago when Linux was bunch of enthusiastic geeks. -
bertoldic
05/20/2009Architecture, community, art and qt are quite better than Gnome’s one. However, distributions continue to use it due to the fact that it’s more stable and easier to use.
I think that Gnome 3 will be: different, easy to use and with some good improvements.
However, it will be based on a worse graphic library than qt thata it’s very well supported and, if possibile an even worse art. I hope I’m wrong cause we need a strong DE -
Ross
05/20/2009@Fred
You make it sound as if linux is being adopted by a bunch of casual users as a bad thing.
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Dread Knight
05/20/2009In that future I’m going to switch to KDE for good.
Gnome-shell just throws away the freedom of customization out the window.
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Deamon
05/20/2009Um yeah. So as soon a Microsoft product gains a feature, any competing product that had the same feature long before it did is said to have retroactively copied Microsoft. That’s an interesting way to look at things. First it was 3D Desktop (Xgl/Compiz), then ‘gadgets’ (Plasma launched in 2005), then Start Menu (SuSe showed off its finished Kickoff in 2006), who here wants to bet once Microsoft gets off its ass and implements social semantic desktop, these same people will claim KDE/GNOME copied Microsoft again? (www.semanticdesktop.org)
Leaving that aside on a separate note, I am thinking about this “Poag’s Curse” thing mentioned in a comment.
The idea that any software Desktop would not succeed merely by ‘copying’ other Desktops is itself nonsense, unprovable and not even empirically substantiated.
What defines ’success’ in the software industry is primarily two things: marketing and adoption by the industry. Then industries essentially push their technology on end users who then accept it with at most a minimal revolt. Whether a software product is 1) a mere copy of existing technology; and 2) better or worse than existing technology, is nearly 100% absolutely irrelevant (though being ‘better’ at least grants somewhat higher probability for adoption if there are ‘worse’ usable alternatives).
What matters in this industry is how the technology will beneficially affect companies’ own success. These companies with competing and/or similar interests decide what to adopt and why based on self interest and their marketing dollars are put behind pushing this technology into further adoption by the larger industry. The technology itself is secondary. Innovation helps, but it’s certainly not necessary for ’success’ in this regard (but since Linux community as a whole innovates extremely well, it’s not even a matter of concern with respect to the Desktop).
I posit that if there was a 100% clone of Windows out in the marketplace that could pass patent and copyright infringement tests, its degree of success would be most strongly correlated with the degree of marketing and industry adoption by Microsoft competitors, not by it’s 100% lack of uniqueness. Indeed the entire reason companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc protect their non-trademark software IP so strongly is because of the strength of competitive threat that *similar/identical* technology has. Think of how much easier it would be to migrate end users from a Windows software platform to a non-Micorosoft identical clone platform vs migrating instead to a new Desktop platform where the end user must relearn the fundamentals of how to use their computer. Which has greater probability of ’success’ in terms of end user adoption, all else being equal?
So back to this “Poag’s Curse” thing. The ‘Linux Desktop’ by its very nature is one that is patent-free and IP unconstrained. Let’s pretend hypothetically, that tomorrow various Linux Desktop leaders unveil as a group the most amazing new feature implementation that anyone has ever seen – it completely revolutionizes the Desktop, so much so it promises to overturn any competing Desktop software solutions business, no matter how big. It’s the most innovated feature ever in the history of the Desktop. Guess which Desktop monopoly is scared to high heaven that it could be extinguished forever?
No one. All Microsoft has to do is co-opt the feature, implement its own, take what is good, improve what is bad. No patent or IP problems. It has done so before even when there were such problems (just look at the list of lawsuits against it in its history). Apple could do the same (and when they do, legions of people will be announcing on random internet forums their false belief how It All Began At Microsoft/Apple/wherever). So where again is the supposed promise of success in ‘Poag’s Curse’ in this type of situation?
It doesn’t exist. Don’t fool yourself.
Innovation is good. Uniqueness is good. They help drive success. But just as other areas in software where Twitter wasn’t the first software service to do what Twitter does and MySpace wasn’t the first software service to do what MySpace does, and Digg wasn’t the first software service to do what Digg does, the biggest driver of ’success’ in software industry is not innovation in a vacuum, but the coming together of competing/cooperating interests of industry players of the time and their associated funding/marketing dollars. And here, ‘copying’ is not just a means of success in its own right, but as in the hypothetical above as it relates specifically to the Linux Desktop, it can also be a means of sustainability.
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xxx
05/20/2009The problem with KDE4 was that distributions didn’t listed to KDE devs. KDE devs stated “do not ship KDE4.0 as default KDE desktop!” manu times. Distributions didn’t listened, openSUSE just shiped KDE4.0… nightmare.
But this is a falt of blind distributions which wanted to be “cutting edge and funky” instead of focusing on stable desktop.
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lefty.crupps
05/20/2009> One thing we have learned from KDE4
Maybe we didn’t learn anything, since they said the code freeze for 4.0 was NOT meant for most people, yet everyone tried it and was surprised that it had issues. Get over it already, KDE 4.2 is incredible. -
Deamon
05/20/2009As much as I like KDE, I agree that KDE 4 should not have been released as a 4.0 (as opposed to 4.0RC, 4.0beta, 4.0alpha, etc) if it was meant only for developers, or as an incomplete product, especially if it’s a full jump from 3.x to 4.x with much fanfare and anticipation for the redesign release.
If anyone actually believes that was not a bad idea to do it, I must seriously question their grasp of software production industry. Nobody would have realistically seriously scolded KDE for adding a beta or something to the end of its version and it would have stood to benefit.
My belief is that 4.0 was beginning to get seriously behind schedule and the team opted to push it out unfinished and patch it later. Maybe that sounds Microsoft-ish I don’t know, whatever. But we should stop making excuses for KDE 4.0 in this way. The 4.0 connotes a final product and KDE paid the price for what it did. In terms of versioning and user expectations it is nobody but KDE’s fault. Unless distributors otherwise crippled it they have nothing to do with 4.0 problems, and no, users should not do anything other than expect a .0 final release to be a .0 release. Period.
Anyway, that is what is learned from KDE 4.0, not that it was a “drastic change” that jolts users. If the big change had gone over more smoothly initially (as in, feature parity with 3.5 branch), I have absolutely no doubt it would have been almost entirely accepted by the 3.5 user base with little problem at all. So what, they have to call the panel plasma instead of kicker? As an average user, exclude the desktop plasmoids and it’s pretty much the same damn thing. Likewise with GNOME 3.0, I have little doubt they won’t get rid of the top panel and as long as you don’t click the Activities button, you’ll probably not notice a damn difference.
The real lesson is of course, if you have a final release version, expect users to expect a final release. Then acclimatizing them to certain new features and design needn’t end up as shocking as it was for KDE 3.5 to 4.0.
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Yonah
05/20/2009Flat out damn lies. KDE4 does indeed copy Vista, just as the KDE has always copied parts from other systems. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the fanboys with selective amnesia who blatently lie about it. KDE didn’t wait until Vista was released before they started to cop the look, they started with early release candidates and betas. Zealots love to claim otherwise, but that’s the problem when people put pride before fact. SUSE Kickoff? Again, Microsoft had this design BEFORE Suse did. Look at the 2005 beta screenshots. You better damn well believe several Linux developers looked over them good and picked what features they wanted to replicate.
Composited graphics? Please. Wake me when it doesn’t crash, or require me to disable it to run a 3D application in a window. I love how it doesn’t update the entire screen when viewing a picture fullscreen on a wide screen monitor. But hey, at least I can have a window fold up like a paper airplane when I close it. Been craving that since 97.
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joeymac
05/20/2009As a long time KDE user, I can confidently assert that it is difficult to improve the KDE UI as far as functionality and intuitiveness goes. And KDE4 doesn’t, even when it’s working right.
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kyosan
05/20/2009KDE 4.2 takes a lot more RAM than KDE 3.5 and the responce times are slower. I’m more productive using KDE 3.5. KDE’s new menu sucks big time. You can replace it with an old style menu but it still doesn’t have the functionality of the KDE 3.5 menu. For instance you can’t right click on an item and add it to the panel. After KDE 3.5 is no longer supported I’ll probably use Gnome all the time unless I find something I like better.
So PLEASE Gnome developers don’t make changes unless they actually are improvements. I think it’s much better to make changes in smaller steps.
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kyosan
05/20/2009I’d like to add that when I measured the RAM usage I was comparing apples to apples. I used a minimal KDE 4.2 install with no compositing. It’s hard to estimate exactly but I’d say that a KDE 4.2 minimal install takes at least twice as much RAM as a KDE 3,5 minimal install and it also takes way more than a Gnome minimal install. Please think about all the people with older computers and all the people with lower power netbook computers. Thanks.
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fanbois
05/21/2009Your all a bunch of fanbois.
“KDE looks like shit”
“KDE looks awesome”
“Oh, noes! you copied others!”
“Don’t release too early!”
“Released on time!”
“don’t break stuff”
“modern code, bleh”The only thing you have in common is the Linux kernel. Beyond that you couldn’t come together for anything. Freedesktop.org was put together to help bridge the gap between the two major DE’s. They started making major headway and then Ubuntu became rather popular creating even more fanbois then ever.
It has always been the Gnome camp bitching about KDE. QT isn’t free, oh now QT isn’t LGPL, Its ugly, its gay, its whatever I don’t like.
I’ve used both desktops quite a bit and I have to say I’ve never seen crap like that from KDE users on the same level as GNOME users push it out. Yeah, there are some KDE users who like to say “oh, teh qt iz mah fav”. But Gnome users take the cake and dish it up like the Red Cross responding to a tragedy.
The reason Linux isn’t on more desktops is because of shit like this. Instead of presenting your favorite DE’s features and letting them stand on their own you have to tear down the other. Gnome has enough merit to shine all by itself. There is no need to say you think KDE looks like shit or it copied someone else or it is terrible or you hate svg graphics. Those are all narcissistic arguments designed to take away the PERSONAL CHOICE that Linux affords.
QT is technically superior to GNU’s Graphical Tool Kit. It is better documented and according to some devs, much easier to create apps with. With that I have to hand it to the Gnome devs. They have put together a great desktop without a huge predetermined framework. That tells me they must be damn good coders.
Just present Gnome 3.0 for what it is going to be. Stop being a bunch of flaming faggot fanbois and let Gnome 3.0 speak for itself. When it comes down to it Gnome will speak loads louder and more clear than you ever could.
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Ernie
05/21/2009The devs behind KDE did what they had to do. Long term gain with the short term pain.
Yes KDE 3.5 was solid, dependable and loved. That was fine for now, but the world does not stay still. They recognised for KDE to be relevant in 5 to 10 years a change in technical base was required. Of course with change comes resistance (and bugs). The KDE 4.0 release bordered on a disaster, but they got the wider usage they needed, which lead to an improved though not perfect 4.1. It has taken an extra year to get to 4.2 and a really usable product, but now the future for KDE looks very good indeed.GNOME will need to go through some pain to move forward. Maybe they will manage it better, but expect some GNOME to KDE migration while it sorts itself out.
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kyosan
05/21/2009Ernie;
How is changing the software so that it consumes more RAM and is slower and less user friendly moving forward? It’s moving backwards in my book. KDE did the same thing that Microsoft did with Vista. They made it bloated and slow though they didn’t go as far as Microsoft did.Now notebooks and low power consumption computers seem to be the trend and developers need to think more about resources and writing efficient and fast code and not bloating the software.
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about Microsoft
05/21/2009I seen few replys about what kde took from mac and microsoft. I hate to tell you but I have programmed since 83 from Vic-20 up and been in field and read ever article from there to know. Microsoft did not create windows. when I was in college in texas Amiga which I am sure hardly any of you have heard of made a windows installed desktop computer that you could mail order. On theses computers was first fully windows environment start button, panel bar at bottom. menu….recycle bend and(what windows 95 was based off of). years later windows 95 produced almost the exact replica of this machine with exception with more drivers to run on all systems. everthing that has made microsoft what it is today is from other developers not associated with microsoft. microsoft started out with 13 guys most looking like hill billys working on MS-DOS the competition at that time was IBM with PC-DOS. Microsoft purchased PC-DOS and windowized off other developers ideals with patient laws and took away the tools PC and MS dos offered. First spread sheet was did by 17 and 18 year old boys going to devry called visacalc. Microsoft offer a buy on this spreadsheet which the 2 declined and made there own and patient it and push there 2 ideals out of the picture. You can read all books you wish about the history of Computers and How they come about. But you only find fake names with smart marketing and changing the facts at the headlines.
So seeing the words written that Linux takes ideals from microsoft is about the most uneducated assumption I have ever seen.
When I hear someone Say “Microsoft made windows” I done know they read a book or do not have a clue about where Windows design accually came from. (If your speaking of the graphical representation of the operating system your using today and its ideal concepts.
here is some old info for some you young guys. 8086 was not the first processer in line of 286 386 486 and so on. It was a 8088. I attended a state university yesturday that is teaching in there lit books that a 8086 was the very first micro computer processor chip marketed In that bit parry.
I give a Fact not a prediction here. 3-5 years Linux will be the code all systems not just desktop that computers and electronics run on. The Kernel from Linux will be the core dev of it all with different reference names.
and Microsoft will be forced to sell at 5 bucks or less a copy for there dying system.
“Competition is only thing that makes free and good market.”
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drag
05/21/2009Something like that.
Microsoft got it’s start making small time software. Their first operating system was not, in fact, MS-DOS.
Microsoft got their start with operating systems by marketting low-cost Unix systems that ran on x86 processors. They licensed it and paid other companies to develop it for them, mainly Santa Cruz Operations.
(SCO from then isn’t the same SCO from today. SCO sold their Unix biz to Caldera Linux and started a company developing Java and Web-based application development environments and was eventually bought out by Sun Microsystems. Caldera Linux changed their name to the SCO group and that was the company that sued IBM for infringing on Unix’s IP by working on Linux)
That OS was called Xenix. It was popular among places like Pizza Hut or Blockbuster, which used it to manage their POS (point of sale) terminals. If you went into a place in the 1980’s and possibly early 90’s and wondered what was running on those terminals… they were probably serial terminals connected to a Unix box running Xenix.
In fact Microsoft used Unix systems for development all the way up to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. All the DOS stuff and early versions of Windows were all made on Unix systems. With Windows 3.11 Microsoft finally made the conversion over to using their own OSes internally.
Early on Bill Gates himself said the future was that everybody would have at least one Unix system in their house running everything.
Yes Yes. The guy is a EU-funded Linux-hater, but he definately knows what he is talking about.
Except his ideas about a ‘Orthodox File Manager’ which are just retarded.
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Deamon
05/21/2009Yonah I will grant you only a few things from your entire comment, that is about Vista beta “screenshots” coming out around the time or befoe SuSe began its start menu usability testing which eventually led to Kickoff. Yet even we were pretend your fantasy is true, you act as though KDE implemented the menu made by SuSe (which is independent of KDE) only because it was somehow a “copy” of Vista’s beta and did so I guess so it could fulfill it’s long term mission of “always cop[ying]” other systems. Well, as “about Microsoft” commented, common knowledge, and an actual reading of history of operating systems all suggest, if you want to find who “always copied other systems”, then your black pot is looking for Microsoft not the KDE kettle. But we needn’t even get into that.
Of course, you’ll blindly claim I myself am a KDE zealot for not retroactively applying feature creativity to Microsoft, even though I criticized KDE 4.0 in my second comment, for release as final release if it wasn’t meant as a final release, also pleading that people stop making excuses for KDE 4.0 in this regard.
Compositing, the only problem from your list I can say to regularly experience is refreshless widescreen with video sometimes which is either so relatively irregular (or painless to workaround) it’s not the end of the world, yet otherwise if the only productive use you are creative enough to find for compositing in general is to have a paper airplane, general compositing isn’t really for you anyway. Granted, experiences are always better without such problems.
Anyway, I see people talking about memory usage and such. Look I don’t know if that’s a valid complaint, maybe it is maybe it isn’t. But the Desktop shouldn’t stagnate. The hardware industry won’t. If there are usable, good features that require more memory, I’d rather be with them than without, if optional, then even better. If it’s added resource with little benefit that’s bad sure…
All I know is you guys are really going to hate when Nepomuk matures – it is a memory hog.. or you’re really going like it because of what it offers..
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Bobby
05/21/2009KDE and Gnome flame wars again. People, why can’t you all grow up. If you are on the war path then there is a real oponent that needs beating and it’s call Windows 7 so save you strength for that one.
I am a KDE lover but I also try to be objective. KDE 4 has been making mind boggling progress since the release of 4.0. People can say what they want but the devs did tell us what to espect of 4.0. Anyway KDE 4 has come along so wonderfully that 4.0 seems to have been ages ago.
Gnome can play catch up but that doesn’t mean that it can’t overtake KDE. It also doesn’t mean that Gnome is bad. Gnome is fast and I do hope that the KDE devs will eventually copy that speed from Gnome – we need more speed for KDE, that’s the fact.Gnome is not pretty and I do hope that the Gnome devs will take a good look at KDE 4 before they start real development of Gnome 3 because KDE 4 shows what a DE can and should look like.
In any case both are there as a strong part of the Linux and Unix world and none of them will go away because Linux is about choice. What we do hope is that they will continue to push each other’s development through compitition and that’s why i wish that Gnome 3 will have a better start than KDE 4 did. -
blasta
05/21/2009Although, even if fanboys are childish, sentences like: “Only time will tell if users will embrace this changes or reject it like KDE4″ makes one understand that nobody uses kde and the whole kde is now buried somewhere underneath the earth, so maybe we should also think about not feeding the wars by not being childish at writing articles in the first place.
And given that I switched from Gnome when 4.0 came out, I’d say that that sentence is completely out of place.
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Joao Carvalhinho
05/21/2009This is just like footbal or soccer…
There are many teams to choose from, but the ones with the heavier budgets almost always win… They win because can afford better players, better brands, better moneymaking scheemes, touch more viewers, get inside more heads that spread the word.
So when Ubuntu bet on gnome for its main DE, it worked like a major league club, providing a path for the many followers that indeed followed.
KDE chose to renew all its team, and as in every competition were caught on the timetable… they made the choice to go and play, even knowing that the team lacked coesion… It was a wise choice, but somehow the “press” didn’t care to notice the technical team warning that it was a work in progress… and many followers didn’t want to know, until the time they wanted the results… that got many followers disgruntled.
Now I wonder what a new teamplayer like Intel could bring to this “competition”.
They just showed off it’s new GUI for netbooks (in Moblin), and I wonder if it was implemented on a “reallife” desktop where it could grow, what it could accomplish.
I usually don’t tend to fancy to GUI’s for the sake of GUI’s but for the first time in a really long time, this “totally” new thing got me wanting a netbook just to fiddle around.
As someone said before, Success is a measure of “how much” the users adopt the technology, and the push by some heavy dolars from a major league player shure help.
Sorry for my bad english… and hello from Portugal!
JPCarvalhinho
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Chunkey Munkey
05/22/2009KDE 4 is a failure so far, not because of innovation or lack thereof, but rather because of its wretched bugginess and instability. I can’t use a desktop that is constantly crashing, and that’s that.
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Kerberos
05/22/2009With regards to who-copied-who, and the above posters who claim that Microsoft and Apple copy Linux, simply because the Linux developers copy pre-release software and rush it out the door, here is a good article about who copies who…
http://piestar.net/2009/03/25/compiz-microsoft-and-originality/
Especially fun is the demo video of Longhorn from 2003 showing full screen compositing and the much touted wobbly windows effect.
If you think about it the bulk of Linux is just a clean-room recode of UNIX. At least Microsoft actually designed the system themselves.
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Deamon
05/22/2009You’re right Kerberos, after many long years of hard work, Novell finally completed its mission of meticulously ‘copying’ the wobbly window effect from Microsoft after surreptitiously studying Microsoft’s WinHEC floor demos from years before. It was only partly a success, however, as it soon proved too difficult to copy the ‘randomly rotating window’ effect, the second most coveted feature in the industry at the time.
The best part of your silly post is this “at least Microsoft actually designed the system themselves”, going back to Windows 1.0 Microsoft stole designs from Apple who stole from Xerox. Multiple people present wrote their accounts of a famous Apple-Microsoft meeting involving Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Jobs confronting Gate about stealing from Apple, and Gates responding along the lines:
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
And no, Microsoft hasn’t changed.
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John
05/22/2009I have used KDE for a very long time and really liked it. What I did not like from KDE is all the hype they did about how great KDE 4 would be and then all of a sudden when it is released they say it is not for every day use. I agree they should have gone down the beta state and not released it before it was ready. I do like some things like folder view but like others it is still buggy but getting better. I never really liked Gnome more because of the menu structure but like these screen shots and might try it out when version 3 is released. I think that they will do things differently after they have seen the backlash that KDE got.
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aikiwolfie
05/25/2009Interesting concept. Looks very much like the Clutter UI seen in Moblin 2. It certainly looks light yeas a head of where Gnome currently is. But reminiscent of the way many users organise their desktops anyway be it Linux or Windows.
A lot of users seem to prefer the side bar effect to the top or bottom menu panels. It saves them vertical space which cuts down on vertical scrolling in web pages. Particularly on devices with smaller screens.
I might just set up a virtual machine and try this out.
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Scott
05/26/2009KDE4.0 was over a year ago. Complaining about a release in the past right now is sort of…. strange. Let’s gripe about XP sp1 while we’re at it! Grr!
The current KDE4.2.x and upcoming 4.3 are rock solid.
KDE4 was a COMPLETE RE-WRITE of all kde code. It took over two years. You do not understand what a task this was. KDE4 apps are no longer dependent on X, and can run natively in any OS. Completely portable.
KDE4.0 was the starting point, as the developers said. Not the finish line.
Please read about KDE4 on wikipedia for more information…
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Deamon
05/26/2009Scott don’t get too caught up in hyperbole. Current KDE is not ‘rock solid’ (particularly 4.3 in development – not by a longshot). Not only that but the “complete rewrite” has a lot of pre-4.0 code in it today, going back to KDE1. You can even just grep the code now and see all the Qt3 compatibility classes in the code that were just straight ported without refactoring. Aside from that though nobody is arguing it wasn’t a big change codewise; I assure you we do understand what a task it was. That by itself doesn’t excuse the end result.
The 4.0 talk now is to attempt to ensure either GNOME or KDE learn from KDE 4.0 mistakes.
Yes, mistakes.
Releasing 4.0 as a final release when it clearly didn’t live up to a final release standard quality, and otherwise wasn’t meant as a typical standard release but a ‘developer release’ or some such, I think, reasonably warrants criticism simply going by industry software production standards. But of course 4.0 wasn’t a “finishing line”. It maybe have been a starting point, but it sure wasn’t a starting point for end users. KDE developers want to create their own nonstandard nomenclature for software releases? Fine. Then pay the price for it.
I and others have no problem “moving on” from 4.0 but when confronted by people who believe there wasn’t a problem with 4.0 (as a release as it was) likely haven’t learned from the problem and may even end up repeating it. So we will continue to push back against bad history and those who continue to apologize for it.
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tomthump
06/04/2009Well ,I thought Kde-4.3 is very stable and should be employed in next mars expedition by NASA for the astronauts =) .Although I disagree with the article with a taste of bashing kde.kde is serving another set of GNU/Linux users who prefers more customization and more eyecandy(as of now).while We,Gnome users are always satisfied with the simplistic approach.No Jihad with Kde and Qt.Let all Co-exist.
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Peter Guirguis
07/18/2009Kde 4.0 was A BIG MISTAKE
those talking about it as a not typical standard let me tell u something, My first ever linux experience was with kde 4.0
it was fedora 9 and I was confused what image to download.The fedora site stated that kde was for windows migrants and it was kde 4.0.
I just fired it up, two minutes trying to find my way out and it was really shit.thanks god i didn’t and tried gnome and fall in love with linux.
sry for my bad english and the long post
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05/19/2009
I think that KDE screwed up with branch 4 not because it was unintuitive but because 4.0 was SUPER buggy. 4.1 was not polished and did not have half of the features that 3.5.10 had.
with 4.2 they were getting on the right track.
Kde branch 4 is shaping up to be super awesome.
but it needed time to “cook” and was released way before it was really ready for end-users.