Introduction, questions

Wed Feb 23 21:45:51 CST 2005

I really don't want to turn this into a long flame fest, just a few
personal notes. I really don't see a problem with KDE using a different
toolkit. There are some excellent KDE applications out there. I
currently prefer Gnome, but I tend to keep both installed. I also always
make sure to install fvwm, since I have nothing but pure love for it.

What I would wish for is closer integration at application level. For
instance it would be nice to see Evolution and Kontact work together,
since I prefer to work with "native" apps for each desktop. I know, I
can export/import, but it doesn't always work as well as you may hope
(Note: I haven't tried recently, things may have changed). Also, it's a
pain to always have to import. It would be nice if there was an
application to sync the two.

On the other hand, sometimes we get integration that I don't like. Like
when I see 100,000 KDE applications in my Gnome menu. As I said, I
prefer to use KDE apps when I'm in KDE and Gnome apps when I'm in Gnome.
But this is just my personal opinion, and I have spoken to several
people who disagree with me on this, so the menu integration is making
some people happy. Now, isn't that a good thing?

As for the fact that KDE is a memory hog, the KDE developers are well
aware and doing their best to rectify the situation. Gnome too, has its
performance issues at times. But I think both desktop environments are
really good.

If you don't like KDE you are free to not install it. Imagine if you
didn't have that choice..

Just my 200 Cedis..
Lorenzo

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 21:52 -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
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>Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski wrote:
>> John Richard Moser wrote:
>> 
>>> Hundreds of people work on GNOME, thousands of people use GNOME.
>> 
>> 
>>  Same things go for KDE. Should Jonathan or Andreas post ,,Die GTK,
>> die'' here? Are you aware of Code of Conduct?
>> 
>
>*shrug* I've had to deal with KDE users that are like that.  Doesn't
>really bother me.
>
>I actually liked KDE because it was flashy; then about 3 months into
>using KDE 3.2 I started becoming physically ill due to a bad
>psychological reaction to the bubbly keramik theme.  So out went that.
>Recovery was followed by noticing that I was using 500M of physcial ram
>(out of 768; the rest was disk cache) and something like 600-700 megs of
>swap.  So I closed all running programs and stayed in KDE, and freed
>about 100 megs of memory in total.  Logging out and logging back in
>fixed it but eh, 3 days of uptime later. . .
>
>I couldn't support KDE on less than 2 gigs of physical RAM, and couldn't
>stand the lack of integration with the other 99% of GUI apps, so I
>ditched it.  The experience gave me two major insights:
>
>1.  KDE has problems that can be fixed, such as poor UI rules, ugly
>themes, and memory leaks/excessive memory usage.
>2.  KDE has problems that can't be fixed easily, mainly that it uses a
>different toolkit and thus visually integrates poorly with the vast
>majority of Linux GUI applications
>
>(1) can be fixed.  (2) would require a LOT of work; and people
>occasionally rewrite applications (gnomemeeting threatened to do this,
>no idea if they actually did) for Qt or ever KDE.  Running KDE apps in
>something NOT KDE brings up several copies of kdeinit; running Qt apps
>just results in something with a UI that doesn't integrate well,
>including dialogs that look vastly different from the other programs.
>
>While I can handle this, it annoys me.  I recognize that this can
>potentially cause less experienced users problems, because they'll
>suddenly get something different and wonder wtf is going on.  Thus, as
>KDE is different and diversity is a bad thing on this field, I dislike
>it and recognize its existence as a legitimate threat to progress.
>
>>  Ubuntu is not only about a toolkit and DE. It's about different aproach
>> to the Linux community and software development, at least in my eyes.
>> That is why I like it. You *can* change your DE anytime with apt-get,
>> you can't change community.
>> 
>>  And community should have a good example from *above*, from
>> *developers*. Developers should avoid sensless flames about other people
>> work.
>> 
>
>I'm not an ubuntu developer, nor am I hijacking the Ubuntu community and
>forcing them to align to my opinions.  My opinions are my own, and part
>of a properly functioning community is the recognition that some
>peoples' beliefs are different from your own.
>
>I could have tried to be "nicer" and said that KDE is just "different"
>and there are "considerations," but what does this accomplished?  Should
>we censor anything that says that something may in fact be "bad" and
>something else may be "good," even if it happens to be true, just
>because some people don't want to hear it?  (for the record, as I said
>above, KDE itself isn't inherantly bad; it's the split it causes between
>the UI of various programs).
>
>It may look like a small issue to you.  Consider if you will teaching a
>user how to use Linux where various toolkits are used in a diversified
>environment of Qt, GTK+, Gnome 1.2 dialogs, Gnome 2.4 dialogs, Gnome 2.8
>dialogs, etc.  Consider perhaps the following:
>
>"In Qt2 programs, the file selection dialogs look a lot like Windows 95
>dialogs.  In Qt3 and KDE 3.2, there was the addition of specific
>locations.  Gnome 2.2 dialogs list folders in one pane and files in the
>other; whereas Gnome 2.4 dialogs add a few buttons to access / and
>$HOME.  Gnome 2.6 dialogs are more common these days and allow multiple
>locations to be specified and added to the left for shortcuts.  Gnome
>2.8 dialogs supply a minimal amount of information to the user for quick
>access to $HOME when saving and quick and easy advanced browsing when
>saving and loading."
>
><User> . . . buh?
>
>A mixed UI environment is in general bad.  Don't get me wrong, I also
>don't like how Gnome2 progresses through varied dialogs and the
>programmers sometimes have to recode for them; the dialogs should use
>the same ABI whenever possible so that the UI automatically conforms to
>the new model (and there should be a configuration option to change the
>UI mode so that i.e. I can have Gnome 2.4 style dialogs).
>
>This is easier to deal with though; stepping up through Qt versions and
>KDE versions is impossible binarily (you need a recompile); and
>cross-executing (executing with GTK+ or Qt in the same program) or
>cross-porting will always require more work programmer side.
>
>Anyway, thus is my rant.
>
>>  I'm sorry for this rant. Hope I don't get banned from #ubuntu-love. :-)
>> 
>
>- --
>All content of all messages exchanged herein are left in the
>Public Domain, unless otherwise explicitly stated.
>
>    Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be
>    wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating
>    new problems waiting out there.
>                                                 -- Eric Steven Raymond
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