Comments for Fred's Place http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com My contribution to the blogosphere Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:06:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=MU Comment on KDE in troubled water by Fred http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/kde-in-troubled-water/#comment-14 Fred Sun, 25 May 2008 07:31:33 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=11#comment-14 @fred. Thanks for you're positive reply. Since the original post, a lot has changed. Lookes like KDE4.1 is in better change. Heck, we'll even have Wobbly Windows and a Cubed desktop, what else could one ask for :-) @fred. Thanks for you’re positive reply. Since the original post, a lot has changed. Lookes like KDE4.1 is in better change. Heck, we’ll even have Wobbly Windows and a Cubed desktop, what else could one ask for :-)

]]> Comment on KDE in troubled water by fred http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/kde-in-troubled-water/#comment-13 fred Sat, 24 May 2008 21:11:37 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=11#comment-13 1. From my experience, this is quite true 2. Absolutely, just go to doc.trolltech.com ;) 3. Can't agree more 4. If Qt has to be forked, there will be a lot more people willing to work on it, not only from KDE, since more people will use Qt if more permissive license is used. 5. True, but seems that despite of hard push from Linux vendors, KDE remains desktop of choice. KDE has won a lot of DE polls (even though Gnome also wins polling occasionally) 6. IIRC Kubuntu has one paid maintainer, Ubuntu has 2 paid maintainer. But Ubuntu has more volunteer I guess. 7. Yes, but we must see the future, how the new technology will serve us for quite long time before next restructuring is needed and why introducing new technology is better now. Also KDE 4.1 will be ready soon, we expect people start migrating from KDE 4.1. 8. They will ship a WebKit KPart with 4.1. And IMHO, web developers should try best to follow standard, not what kind of browser (maybe a bit too idealist, though). It is also very nice if KHTML remains alive so that we can have an alternative engine. 9. Somewhat true, but Gnome looks like ugly by default, only when distros customize the desktop things become better (and prettier) - But nonetheless I hate the Ubuntu brown theme and those huge buttons. 10. You don't need to logout actually, AFAIK the new settings will be applied to newly started applications :D About iPod, seems that you b0rked you configurations :D 11. KOffice 2.0 will be great, but surely will lack some features once it is released, it needs a lot of time because of major code restructuring - trust me, I'm working on KOffice ;). Also, like Anon has pointed out, KDE is in very active development and has a lively community, you can see from cia.vc or ohloh or from KDE dot news :D (I guess if the Linux users don't want KDE anymore, there will be a lot more Windows users who welcome KDE applications on their land :D - so I'm not afraid KDE will die) As for PyQt vs PyGTK, maybe you can research more on tutorials, write some simple code and decide yourself. IMO, programming in Qt is always much easier, but you stuck with GPL or commercial. (I personally prefer GPL than LGPL though) And hey, we have the same name :) 1. From my experience, this is quite true
2. Absolutely, just go to doc.trolltech.com ;)
3. Can’t agree more
4. If Qt has to be forked, there will be a lot more people willing to work on it, not only from KDE, since more people will use Qt if more permissive license is used.
5. True, but seems that despite of hard push from Linux vendors, KDE remains desktop of choice. KDE has won a lot of DE polls (even though Gnome also wins polling occasionally)
6. IIRC Kubuntu has one paid maintainer, Ubuntu has 2 paid maintainer. But Ubuntu has more volunteer I guess.
7. Yes, but we must see the future, how the new technology will serve us for quite long time before next restructuring is needed and why introducing new technology is better now. Also KDE 4.1 will be ready soon, we expect people start migrating from KDE 4.1.
8. They will ship a WebKit KPart with 4.1. And IMHO, web developers should try best to follow standard, not what kind of browser (maybe a bit too idealist, though). It is also very nice if KHTML remains alive so that we can have an alternative engine.
9. Somewhat true, but Gnome looks like ugly by default, only when distros customize the desktop things become better (and prettier) - But nonetheless I hate the Ubuntu brown theme and those huge buttons.
10. You don’t need to logout actually, AFAIK the new settings will be applied to newly started applications :D About iPod, seems that you b0rked you configurations :D
11. KOffice 2.0 will be great, but surely will lack some features once it is released, it needs a lot of time because of major code restructuring - trust me, I’m working on KOffice ;).

Also, like Anon has pointed out, KDE is in very active development and has a lively community, you can see from cia.vc or ohloh or from KDE dot news :D (I guess if the Linux users don’t want KDE anymore, there will be a lot more Windows users who welcome KDE applications on their land :D - so I’m not afraid KDE will die)

As for PyQt vs PyGTK, maybe you can research more on tutorials, write some simple code and decide yourself. IMO, programming in Qt is always much easier, but you stuck with GPL or commercial. (I personally prefer GPL than LGPL though)

And hey, we have the same name :)

]]> Comment on KDE in troubled water by Fred http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/kde-in-troubled-water/#comment-6 Fred Wed, 14 May 2008 19:24:33 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=11#comment-6 Thanks for you're reply Anon! You mentioned some posts on the Net I haven't read before and it does give some more insight. It looks like Nokia tried GTK and didn't like it. So they aquired Trolltech to have a solid (mobile) platform. Nokia's concurrents using Qt will probably abandon it, because else they would have a dependency with Nokia. So the knife cut's on both ends. As a bonus, Nokia is able to develop closed source Qt based progs without having to pay any license costs, they would be paying themselves :-). As mentioned in a previous post, I choose KDE years ago in favor of Gnome. It's just that while KDE is in this major shift, Gnome based Ubuntu is very polished. Bad timing, but unavoidable I guess. I won't start the why-did-you-release-KDE-4.0-in-this-state discussion again. I will wait and see how KDE 4.1 works out. It sure looks very promising. Until then, I give it the benefits of the doubt and will keep on learning the Python / Qt4 combo, and I will keep on bug hunting on KDE4 based distro's. Thanks for you’re reply Anon! You mentioned some posts on the Net I haven’t read before and it does give some more insight. It looks like Nokia tried GTK and didn’t like it. So they aquired Trolltech to have a solid (mobile) platform. Nokia’s concurrents using Qt will probably abandon it, because else they would have a dependency with Nokia. So the knife cut’s on both ends. As a bonus, Nokia is able to develop closed source Qt based progs without having to pay any license costs, they would be paying themselves :-).

As mentioned in a previous post, I choose KDE years ago in favor of Gnome. It’s just that while KDE is in this major shift, Gnome based Ubuntu is very polished. Bad timing, but unavoidable I guess. I won’t start the why-did-you-release-KDE-4.0-in-this-state discussion again.

I will wait and see how KDE 4.1 works out. It sure looks very promising. Until then, I give it the benefits of the doubt and will keep on learning the Python / Qt4 combo, and I will keep on bug hunting on KDE4 based distro’s.

]]> Comment on KDE in troubled water by Anon http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/kde-in-troubled-water/#comment-5 Anon Wed, 14 May 2008 17:51:20 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=11#comment-5 *sigh* - yet more "sky is falling"-ism about the KDE project - I'm getting quite weary of people predicting its demise :) Anyway: 5. You're positing an absolute worst case scenario with nothing to back it up. Nokia killing off Qt after acquiring it would just be shooting themselves in the foot - see e.g. http://www4.osnews.com/story/18444/Nokia_Pushes_for_GTK+_3.0 for a hint as to why Nokia wanted Qt - basically, GTK just isn't cutting it and isn't likely to in the future. Again, killing off Qt is not at all in Nokia's best interests. We may as well running around panicking about what would happen if the GNOME community all suddenly retired to a desert island to live as hermits! :) 6. This is really nothing new, so I don't see the sudden cause for concern. 7. Yes, it is a mess, as these kind of major changes always are, but it's a temporary mess. GNOME 2.0 had a similarly rough release (see Erunno's comments here for interesting parallels: http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/thread?304220 ) as did Linux 2.6.0, Apache 2.0, Mac OS X 10.0 etc and it has done absolutely no lasting damage to any of these projects. 8. The architecture of KDE makes this a non-issue: someone just needs to finish off the work on the QtWebKit KPart and this can be switched-in to Konqueror on-the-fly (even when Konqueror is still running) by distros if need be. They don't even need to patch the source code! 9. This is a purely cosmetic issue, and a fairly unimportant one, to be honest. 10. This is one I agree with, at least for KDE3 - Keramik, in particular, was horrific, and must have put people off in droves. KDE4 looks much, much better to me, though, although GNOME definitely seem to manage to attract a larger community of artists/ usability experts. 11. Cherry-picking. "The time it takes within the GNOME project to get out something as simple as restore from trash is unbelieveable". " If I change my font settings or mouse pointers of whatever in Gnome, it changes immediately. In KDE I have to logout/login." Font settings, colour schemes, widget styles etc all change instantly in KDE for me, and have for as long as I can remember. The mouse-pointer thing was fixed recently and was a few lines of code, IIRC - I don't think I've ever heard anyone actually complain about this, so I guess that's why it took so long :) "When I plugin a iPod in Gnome, it’s connected and ready to use in the sound app of Gnome. In KDE (Amarok) is needs to get configured, and then “connected”. Why?" This I don't know about. -- The health of an open source project depends on its developer community (although having several tens of millions of new users coming up soon is not to be sneezed at :) : http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/04/deploying-kde-to-52-million-young.html ) and you only need a cursory glance at some of the stats to show that KDE is a picture of health. cia.cv and ohloh.net are good sources of information. Note that cia.cv's GNOME stats also include GTK, whereas KDE's do not include Qt, which is good for (by all accounts) at least another 1500 commits per month. "If it doesn play out well, it will be the death of the KDE project. Right now Gnome is in much better shape." These statements are, at best, debatable. Even in terms of functionality, many will claim that bleeding-edge GNOME hasn't even caught up with KDE3, despite the latter being effectively on life-support for almost 3 years. KDE4 is developing at a frantic pace, and it won't be too long before it has feature-parity with KDE3 (many of its apps have arguably surpassed their KDE4 counterparts already) and after that, given the very vigorous developer community and the quality of kdelibs and Qt which allows them to accomplish more with less, it's all cake after that :) I find it hard to conceive of something killing a project that gets on average 300 commits per day and which even seems to be accelerating. *sigh* - yet more “sky is falling”-ism about the KDE project - I’m getting quite weary of people predicting its demise :)

Anyway:

5. You’re positing an absolute worst case scenario with nothing to back it up. Nokia killing off Qt after acquiring it would just be shooting themselves in the foot - see e.g.

http://www4.osnews.com/story/18444/Nokia_Pushes_for_GTK+_3.0

for a hint as to why Nokia wanted Qt - basically, GTK just isn’t cutting it and isn’t likely to in the future. Again, killing off Qt is not at all in Nokia’s best interests. We may as well running around panicking about what would happen if the GNOME community all suddenly retired to a desert island to live as hermits! :)

6. This is really nothing new, so I don’t see the sudden cause for concern.

7. Yes, it is a mess, as these kind of major changes always are, but it’s a temporary mess. GNOME 2.0 had a similarly rough release (see Erunno’s comments here for interesting parallels:

http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/thread?304220 ) as did Linux 2.6.0, Apache 2.0, Mac OS X 10.0 etc and it has done absolutely no lasting damage to any of these projects.

8. The architecture of KDE makes this a non-issue: someone just needs to finish off the work on the QtWebKit KPart and this can be switched-in to Konqueror on-the-fly (even when Konqueror is still running) by distros if need be. They don’t even need to patch the source code!

9. This is a purely cosmetic issue, and a fairly unimportant one, to be honest.

10. This is one I agree with, at least for KDE3 - Keramik, in particular, was horrific, and must have put people off in droves. KDE4 looks much, much better to me, though, although GNOME definitely seem to manage to attract a larger community of artists/ usability experts.

11. Cherry-picking. “The time it takes within the GNOME project to get out something as simple as restore from trash is unbelieveable”.

” If I change my font settings or mouse pointers of whatever in Gnome, it changes immediately. In KDE I have to logout/login.”

Font settings, colour schemes, widget styles etc all change instantly in KDE for me, and have for as long as I can remember. The mouse-pointer thing was fixed recently and was a few lines of code, IIRC - I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually complain about this, so I guess that’s why it took so long :)

“When I plugin a iPod in Gnome, it’s connected and ready to use in the sound app of Gnome. In KDE (Amarok) is needs to get configured, and then “connected”. Why?”

This I don’t know about.

–

The health of an open source project depends on its developer community (although having several tens of millions of new users coming up soon is not to be sneezed at :) :

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/04/deploying-kde-to-52-million-young.html

) and you only need a cursory glance at some of the stats to show that KDE is a picture of health. cia.cv and ohloh.net are good sources of information. Note that cia.cv’s GNOME stats also include GTK, whereas KDE’s do not include Qt, which is good for (by all accounts) at least another 1500 commits per month.

“If it doesn play out well, it will be the death of the KDE project. Right now Gnome is in much better shape.”

These statements are, at best, debatable. Even in terms of functionality, many will claim that bleeding-edge GNOME hasn’t even caught up with KDE3, despite the latter being effectively on life-support for almost 3 years. KDE4 is developing at a frantic pace, and it won’t be too long before it has feature-parity with KDE3 (many of its apps have arguably surpassed their KDE4 counterparts already) and after that, given the very vigorous developer community and the quality of kdelibs and Qt which allows them to accomplish more with less, it’s all cake after that :) I find it hard to conceive of something killing a project that gets on average 300 commits per day and which even seems to be accelerating.

]]> Comment on My ideal development environment by Fred http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/my-ideal-development-environment/#comment-4 Fred Wed, 14 May 2008 04:48:43 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=9#comment-4 Well, this wasn't a post about KDE, but I do agree with you to a certain point. KDE4 is a developers release. Expect it to advance considerably. Well, this wasn’t a post about KDE, but I do agree with you to a certain point. KDE4 is a developers release. Expect it to advance considerably.

]]> Comment on My ideal development environment by Hameedullah Khan http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/my-ideal-development-environment/#comment-3 Hameedullah Khan Fri, 09 May 2008 15:22:21 +0000 http://fredvanzwieten.wordpress.com/?p=9#comment-3 No doubt! KDE looks good and everything. But its a bit slow. I don't know if its only for me, but if I compare it with the Gnome desktop it feels slow and that is what always stops me from using KDE. I haven't tried Kubuntu 8.04 yet, but thats what I have planned todo later in next week. Let see if it will work for me or I will be sticking to Gnome. No doubt! KDE looks good and everything. But its a bit slow. I don’t know if its only for me, but if I compare it with the Gnome desktop it feels slow and that is what always stops me from using KDE.

I haven’t tried Kubuntu 8.04 yet, but thats what I have planned todo later in next week. Let see if it will work for me or I will be sticking to Gnome.

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