cies' blog

Labels: kubuntu 9.10 kde desktop

i read some of the many writings on the strange positions some of gnomes prominent members seem to take. to me it boils down to: the relation of corporations and FLOSS projects.

as FLOSS grows (and grows, and grows) it becomes more and more important/interesting/dangerous for corporations. so they will try to influence particular projects. as FLOSS projects are very different from businesses (thank god), the means of influence corporations have are also very different. for instance, they cannot just buy them out.

when i look at how gnome is influenced by corporations the last years, i see a lot of resistance from its community on this influence: simplifying the interface, going mono, and the recent positions of some of its prominent members. all with a lot of resistance from the gnome community. i feel that the way corporations push gnome is not the way its community would like to go.

on the other had there is the kde project and trolltech as kde's the biggest corporate influence. it is in kde's case trolltechs influence is (for all i know) always welcomed... why? i think because trolltech simply pushes kde in the direction that the kde community is already going. it only facilitates.

look at the phonon news from today, isnt that beautiful?

i think that the relationship between kde and trolltech -- that was once regarded as evil and thereby spawned gnome -- is one of the most beautiful examples of a relation between a FLOSS project and a corporation that satisfies both parties. thank you trolltech!

Okay MS is worried of the GPL3... Now we need at least some of the 'heavy weight' projects (thank you SAMBA for being quick) to convert to GPL3 minimum. But many code bases, like KDE, have individual owners.

I think Sun and some other more 'commercial' projects (Qt?) could right now strike MS a hard blow, as their code bases have usually no individual owners. (Sun; you got them to your knees) The GPL3 code base has to be too large and fast moving for MS-deal-ridden-distribution to either fork or ignore.

I don't know how KDE contributers are generally feeling about the GPLv3, but they have my vote on '3 minimum'.

i like funny initiatives, sure, i like FLOSS... but car racing? isn't that a really proprietary business? the 180DEG contrary of our 'open innovation' movement? why would linux need a medium like that, so elite, so money burning, so commercial...

$350000, gosh that is a lot. that is 2000 $175 costing 100-dollar-laptops. that is... forget it.

maybe i just don't get the point of car racing in general.

i went to suse when they where in their 8.x or 9.x releases. i loved it, i came from gentoo, suse just helped me to get the work done. strangely suse also felt a lot snappier than my tweaked-n-tuned on-the-edge gentoo install.

but since the 10.x releases suse had lost me bit by bit. they sure made everything look more sexy: their latest boot splash it just gorgeous. but they didn't do those two things right that keep my hooked on linux and freesoftware in general:

1) package management
2) transperancy


package management

YAST sucks more with every release. i once loved it so much, but it seems like it is never improved. calculating dependencies, adding sources, retrieving updates -- it all takes way too long, give me bad feedback of what it is doing and is not really untuitive. at some point i was waiting for over 15 minutes to get a simple (<1MB) package installed! i know there is something like SMART and apt4rpm, but i think package management is what a distro is basically all about: if it can't do that right out of the box, i'm not using it.


transperancy

to be honest i did not understand what my openSUSE 10.2 was doing anymore! sometimes my PC was just busy doing something, and when i run 'top' (on the command line), it showed process names i never heard about. maybe i'm getting old. i disabled beagle (seems to slow down everyting), but it seemed to still be running.

i also found another package installer, some updater-thingy. i made my system slow as a brick sometimes. why do i need that thingy?


resolution

so i go for kubuntu, here is what i noticed:

installing:
i like:
- browsing while installing
- installing for a live cd (i can figure somethings out during the install)
- installing a basic system and using the package manager later to finish of my installation
i dislike:
- partitioning; slow and gives bad indication of what it is doing (from an install to a laptop that i did

so kubuntu seems to do the installing process quite to my likings, simplicity rules again. after the system is installed i can go on configuring, i never saw the reason for configuring allmost everything at install time.


using:
i like:
- simple and fast
- adept is nice, aptitude is nice, all so fast compared to YAST! (maybe rpm just sucks?)
- it beeing KDE centric
i dislike:
- the pink color in the default theme looks horrible (tip: go dark blue)
- the bootsplash hides my startup info and i can not unhide it

so basically all i dislike is 'cosmetics' that i can easily change to suit my likings.

conclusion

i don't want to draw a conclusion like "suse is bad". i liked suse a lot. they where clearly a desktop leader for some years -- they pushed the envelope of what a free desktop can do. now i just seem to like kubuntu more.

after reading some things, and seeing some movies, i got totally obsessed by the idea of "free energy". for the uninformed: some say that energy is freely available in large quantities all around us -- i'm right now one of them. the same people usually also say that we (the people) are kept under-informed by some powers, and that the current electro magnetics branch of physics is flawed.
to condense it down for you, my main break-throughs where:

1. fully understanding the principle of a MEG, an overunity device (seemingly outputs more that you put in), by reading this simple explaination and applying my dusty high-school level physics (my dad, an electro techinical engeneer by education, and sceptic by heart, also understood it)
   
2. seeing that a German company is actually selling EMM (electro magnetic motor) powered generaters -- devices that use the zero-point energy field to generate power
3. an last but not least: that this stuff is around for at least more than a decade! more than 10 years of wasted oil!
   

in this post i come up with some "just ideas" that cross my mind for KDE4. i have not thorrowly investigated anything, and i may have not the time to implement at least one of these. yet i do want to share them.

so, here i go:

• try to minimize the use of small modeless dialogs. like the find and replace dialogs, like "connection problem X" dialogs, like some password dialogs, like download dialogs. most of the time the interaction they request, or the information they provide, can be done from the main window of the app (like the firefox searchbar), and dont need to steal you attention so bluntly by hanging over your workspace
  

• change the current modules stucture of KDE (again: just an idea)

• only groups of apps that share their specific libs should have a module (kde-pim, koffice)
• ofcourse we need kde-libs and kde-base
• the rest could be in app repositories that show the state and/or level of inclusion into kde (something like: kde-apps, kde-apps-testing, kde-apps-unstable, kde-apps-unmaintained and the same for contibuted-apps-*)
  

• name (at least) the KDE4 release (i like Roberto's "Kaleidos", so it will be "KDE Kaleidos") -- we can always name KDE5 something else... this way KDE becomes the 'brand' name, Kaleidos the central product.
  

• i once (on the 2004 aKademy) saw a CIG (corporate identity guide) about the use of colors and logo's... i really liked the ideas in there, i loved the colour pallet.
  

• KDE4 should do notifications well, all notification must run though a notification manager (maybe a part of plasma) that can decide based on user preferences how a notification should be handled (probably using notification categories)

• co-create (probably together with the gnome team, through freedesktop.org) and comply with unified DBUS interfaces for some desktop services like: the notifications handler, the wallet, the system tray, ... (more ideas anyone?) the portland/DAPI looks like strong force in that desktop service infrastructure direction.
  

• do something to unify KIO-slaves and gnome-VFS, probably using "fuse", see my last post.

• kwin4: master of eyecandy (maybe rename it to something hip), i have good feelings that KDE can bring the eyecandy we've all seen with beryl/compriz to defacto userland; usable, configurable, sensible, with good defaults and a fall-back mode.
  

• do mimetype-application associations good (using a minimum of popups). i have never liked they way assosiations are handled in KDE, i dont know why but it somehow always annoys me -- maybe it is just my inability to set it up properly.
  

please note that i have by no means the skills nor the time to implement these proposals. i also didnt discus these ideas with anyone. so basically it is just dumping some ideas. feel free to comment!