I don't know, it seems to me that apple thrives as it's status as the indie computers that cool kids use. They're also raking in an ungodly amount of money right along Microsoft..

Anyways back on topic, I like KDE 4.5.4. It's been pretty darn stable for me using it as my every day desktop. Some of the desktop widgets and fancy features are genuinely helpful (The mouse to screen edge then tiling all windows effect is handy). That said, it is still pretty heavy on the old ram. I've just booted my computer, running SeaMonkey and Amarok, and conky is reporting 907 MB's in use. 300 of those are SeaMonkey's apparently, and strigi claims to be indexing 487 MB's.

Now, that is a lot.. but I have 4 gig of ram, so it's not that big a deal. I wouldn't put KDE on my EEEpc, xfce does a great job there, but on my brand new custom desktop, KDE fits in pretty nicely.

As that part of my post was merely one example of how the best product does not always win out, it was not at all meant to imply that I am a fan of Apple. In fact the exact analogy was to show that while it may be important to innovate, it is also essential not to leap too far ahead because although people buy the whole "new and improved" sales pitch they also are resistant to change. Our first instincts are to generally want everything we had as well as more and better.

In order to address more ram and break the segment barrier it also meant breaking with the past where programs written for x86 would not run on Lisa's CPU and chipset. Billy, poker playing pimp that he was, appealed to baser things, the Status Quo, and yes, price. I strongly suspect that had Lisa been cheaper it still would have failed simply because it wouldn't run legacy software like Visi-Calc. Whatever else, Billy knows how to sell orders of magnitude better than Apple and IBM. It has been said that if IBM bought a Sushi company they would market it as "raw,dead fish". I bring that up because OS/2 Warp 3 was light years ahead of Windows 95 and Warp 4 was better, almost as good as XP when Win98 was just coming out. Yet they failed even though better and similarly priced.

This is similar to what KDE is now doing with v.4. It is a big leap and one that leaves considerable legacy behind so it engendered considerable negative response. Not that this thread on this section of this forum can have any large impact, but it would just be one more crying shame for us all if we lost out on what is becoming a truly superior product just because it reached too far for most. It took me awhile but I now see where they are headed and it is really smart and is getting nicely refined with every new release. It remains to be seen how this will all fair with this major change coming where HAL is no more and udev must take up the slack. If that transition goes well KDE will have deserved not only accolades but real success. There is good reason why the Slackware Team dropped Gnome and made KDE the default DE. Their confidence seems well founded.

Am I dreaming? If it must be a nightmare.

Could you explain a little?

Let me explain for you...

/ignore Igadoter

@enorbet
Your post justifies all my worries about Linux. Have a look at my thread.

Look, if you like XFCE, that is good, and Slackware includes it. Then again, there are lots of other people who like KDE4. Nothing wrong with that either. Choice enough for everyone. I encourage you to join the team that tries to keep KDE 3.5 alive if you rather use that version. This is the power of free software, you make it happen. Whining about KDE4 is not going to make it go away. Instead, you could adopt a habit of embracing change instead of puking on it.

I like KDE4 a lot (call me fanboi, I don't care). I recognized its potential from the start and I applaud the KDE developers for not cowardly trying to maintain backwards compatibility and instead building on a vision of the future. Yes, that was the cause of a bumpy road, and that is why Pat built a set of KDE 3.5.10 packages for Slackware 13.0 after that was released. Remember that Slackware did not dunp KDE3 until KDE4 was sufficiently useable and even then using the kde3-compat packages you could install enough of KDE3 to make you feel good again.

KDE3 was declared dead and unmaintained at some point, and Slackware was "doomed" to switch to KDE4 when that became clear. You can not seriously keep a big pile of software like that in a distro when it starts exposing vulnerabilities without having people to plug those holes! I made the decision not to touch KDE3 and instead focus on KDE4 when I started working on a 64-bit Slackware release and that nbasically determined the moment when KDE3 was dropped from Slackware (shortly before releasing the first public version of slackware64). I never regretted that decision.

And I do run with Akonadi, Strigi and Nepomuk enabled. Even my lowly Asus netbook does not suffer from that.

Eric

2 members found this post helpful.

To be honest, the only application that I miss from KDE3 is KDevelop3 (and Amarok but I have Clementine). Why God, why have they dropped support for Automake?

Note to myself: in the future, must to write an Automake plugin for KDevelop4.

Money? Is that awful thing we are talking about? Here in Poland they say: "If you don't know what it's about it's about money".
And this is very true.

I have no idea what you mean by that. Who mentioned money?

Eric

@Igadoter: do you ever do anything but b#$ch?

@Alien_Bob: I wish that I'd had the foresight to see the potential in KDE 4.x, but at first i thought it was a complete piece of crap. To be fair to myself and others, it has to be said that the roll-out was handled very badly... KDE 4.0 should never have gotten out of trunk, and KDE 4.1 should have been the first beta.

Maybe better you should ask about superior product. Do really they produce a superior product? Linux better but not so expensive as W$?

Since it's been stated now that you use Xfce I think I understand. I'm not certain where this compulsion comes from for 1337 minimalism, but it has always been around and lately I hear it a lot lately from Arch and Gentoo fans where they throw around "bloat" as some kind of buzzword like homeopathic shucksters throw around "toxins" and "mucous". Even Windows doesn't suffer from bloat as badly as it used to (although the Registry is still vulnerable) but Linux doesn't at all if one administers properly. All bloat means in Linux is hard drive space in most cases.

I have already shown that KDE v4 (especially after 4.5 came out) can have 300 running processes with only a 10-15% increase over v3 running 190 processes. That surely looks like improvement to me especially when I can turn off services and get back down to <200 processes at a considerably smaller footprint than v3.

However that begs the question, "Why would I do that?" The only reason I can come up with is to brag to my friends. However if I actually wish to do work it's going to take processes and resources just like a big block V8 is gping to eat gas but get me down the road REALLY fast.

You probably missed it so I will post a direct link, Let me see you do anything even approaching this in Xfce. This is a display of what is on all 4 desktops at once.

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/8821/kwin.png

That is productive in my book. I mean I respect Dragsters and Dune Buggys but I am not about to drive 3000 miles in one nor move all my belongings to a new city in one. That pic is of some heavy lifting, or don't you agree?.

Igadoter is using Ubuntu, not Slackware. Anything he has to say should be seen in that brown light.

His comments are also getting increasingly asinine.

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

Honestly, I don't use search functions much when I'm working as a regular user (which is the only way I use a graphical file manager). I keep my files very neatly organized into a logical set of directories, and I know what's in them. Anyway, it doesn't matter... as long as Nepomuk/Strigi only works with the Nasty Aquatic Mammal I'll never use it. Dolphin sucks.

Yes, Krusader is set up as the default file manager on my machine right now. Before that it was Konqueror... never Dolphin. My wife likes Dolphin, but I don't understand why.