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KDE4 is better than I expected. I always ditched KDE when I reinstalled Slackware, never thought I would get much use out of it.
Boy, I was wrong. KDE4 is great, the sheer amount of customization is just amazing.
I disliked KDE intensely for many years, but as KDE4 matured I was gradually won over. As for KDE5, when it matures I think there will be no rival in either the Windows or Linux world to match it for power and customization. I still can't believe I'm admitting that but facts are facts: KDE is slowly but surely working out its kinks and is looking better and better too. It's just a shame that some of the best KDE software - k3b and krusader, for example - does not get the same attention notifications get. As for that ugly Calligra thing, I wish it would just slink into a Korner and die.
Last edited by Gerard Lally; 04-18-2016 at 08:48 PM.
1. Some of you are tired of following KDE's development from version 2 to 3, then 4, and now 5. While I share your opinion that a stable desktop is a value on its own, as it is an important basis for application development, we should bear in mind that KDE is based on Qt. So every time a Qt version is dropped by their maintainers a project like KDE has to decide to follow the development of the underlying toolkit or to stick with the old one. The latter would imply that there would either be no patches for security issues and bugs, or that the KDE developers would have to provide the fixes themselves. So either they would put their users on unknown risks or put effort into old technology.
Of course, the switch from KDE 3 to 4 should have been a lot smoother, and the first releases of KDE 4 were immature, to put it friendly. But looking at KDE 4 now the decision to follow the development of Qt was definitely a good one.
And as has been mentioned, Xfce is now more or less forced to make the transition to Gtk3, although quite a few of the developers heartily hate it, just because Gtk2 will be abandoned sooner or later by its developers.
The qt4 to 5 argument that says now we need to do everything new from scratch does not hold.
Working on a project, embedded gui (= minidesktop) base on Qt with quite some history I can tell you that I would love to use this argument to get rid of some legacy code, but project management will not got with. So the transition from 4.8 to 5.6 had to be planed and realized without breaking any things, using some 5.1 than 5.3 versions in between for development, and only implement changes in the parts where the uses have a clear advantage to 'see a new gui'.
This is for many Qt projects, and Qt knows this and does not require you to throw everything away.
You have now 5.6, changes in 5.7 are quite clear and you can for example start to make the transition to C++11 if you did not do it already, 3 years time.
Qt gives you a great basis for long time stable gui development. Unfortunately there is no excuse to throw everything away, even if a lot of developers would like to do so. It's up to the devs and the possibility if they do it or prefere to have more fun.
That Xfce is more in a maintenance mode, and developer and development fun seems to be missing makes it more painful to throw everything away than it is for the KDE project, so that's possible quite a different thing, we will see.
However, producing a super shiny desktop is art, being LTS is also art. the master art would be to have both together, and there KDE fails in doing the master art (like all others).
The qt4 to 5 argument that says now we need to do everything new from scratch does not hold.
[...]
This is for many Qt projects, and Qt knows this and does not require you to throw everything away.
[...]Unfortunately there is no excuse to throw everything away, even if a lot of developers would like to do so. It's up to the devs and the possibility if they do it or prefere to have more fun.
That Xfce is more in a maintenance mode, and developer and development fun seems to be missing makes it more painful to throw everything away than it is for the KDE project, so that's possible quite a different thing, we will see.
However, producing a super shiny desktop is art, being LTS is also art. the master art would be to have both together, and there KDE fails in doing the master art (like all others).
Sounds like a real-life real-world project, and I know situations like the one you describe quite well.
I certainly agree with you to a large extent.
However, I don't think the KDE devs made their decisions just based on their personal fun factor, although I'd not be surprised if this was one of their KPIs. I think it had a lot to do with resources and where to put them on. If they had had the resources to better support the Qt4 code basis for a while in parallel with the new Qt5 branch they probably would have done so.
Of course, it is not necessary to throw away everything every time immediately, when a new toolkit release is available. However, KDE devs didn't do that. They did this when they dropped KDE 3 in favour of KDE 4, but the transition from KDE 4 to 5 is a lot smoother so far. It's certainly not a lighthouse project regarding change management, for sure, but much better than last time, at least (from KDE 3 to 4). As a matter of fact, a lot of the applications shipped with Plasma 5 are still KDE 4 applications. On the other hand, for consistency I am looking forward to the day when all apps are finally migrated.
I disliked KDE intensely for many years, but as KDE4 matured I was gradually won over. As for KDE5, when it matures I think there will be no rival in either the Windows or Linux world to match it for power and customization. I still can't believe I'm admitting that but facts are facts: KDE is slowly but surely working out its kinks and is looking better and better too. It's just a shame that some of the best KDE software - k3b and krusader, for example - does not get the same attention notifications get. As for that ugly Calligra thing, I wish it would just slink into a Korner and die.
I agree for the most part, just not fully with the Calligra part. Calligra comprises a lot of applications that have reached different levels of usefulness and maturity. Some Calligra apps are very good, now, others are lagging behind, badly. For instance, I prefer Krita clearly over GIMP for RAW photo post processing. It is a bit slow at times, especially loading a pictures takes way too much time. But it has a very efficient GUI and recent version are very stable.
So it's not all bad with Calligra, but unfortunately there also other apps that have a long way to go, yet.
Please be patient. As we say: "tout vient à point pour qui sait attendre".
Already installed it from SBo. Version 0.8.6 is a bit buggy, but promising.
OT: I found out, how to increase the number of workspaces, but how do I switch between them...?
From what I know (I know only basics of Qt, have written some basic apps), it would be perfectly possible to keep look&feel of KDE3 while using Qt 5.x. So there is much more to what have happened with KDE 3 -> 4 -> 5, than only Qt being developed.
If I'm not wrong (and I never am ), Qt makes it rather easy to maintain look and feel when changing Qt versions. At least this is my feeling.
On Krusader:
The latest version of Krusader I was able to compile with KDE4 (on -current) is git_20150317_4a9805a. It has some bug fixes when compared to v2.4.0-beta3. Newer commits require KF5, so it is no go for me at moment. It would be nice to be able to install bits of KF5 required by Krusader, along the KDE4.
Well, maybe all I wrote is well known, but at least I had fun with git bisect for the first time
Distribution: Slackware64-current with "True Multilib" and KDE4Town.
Posts: 9,095
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by FTIO
....Krusader is maintained, unfortunately it's only maintained by one or two devs. The mailing list is active. It may n....ot have a whole lot of stuff going on in it, but if you ask a question, it gets answered by at least one person and quickly.
A new version of Krusader has been released for KDE-5.
I've probably already asked it, but if somebody knows if it's possible to install partial KDE-5, just enough to run Krusader, along KDE-4, I would be really interested. It could even make its way into SBo.
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