2009/10/26 RedShift

Allan McRae wrote:

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So you posted in both the forums and here...

Seriously, get a blog.

Yes I did, because I feel the more technical people roam the mailinglists and the more casual user the forums. I want to hear all the sides.

"I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind." If you're not talking technical details, why post to the list to get the thoughts of the "technical" people? I agree with Allan, this is definitely more suitable for a blog.

On 10/26/2009 07:35 AM, RedShift wrote:

* KDE still has better abstraction of file locations than windows or gnome

Yup, the KIO stuff rocks. In fact, even though I switched to Xfce, I'm still using Konqueror for the file manager, since it's awesome, and since Thunar doesn't support network file systems. DR

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:41:01 +0100 Stefan Erik Wilkens wrote:

2009/10/26 RedShift :

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This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided to post my story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind.

I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very sluggish and incomplete. I can't enable the desktop effects because that makes things even slower. I'm doing this on a fairly decent setup, an AMD Sempron 2 Ghz with an nVidia FX5500. My laptop suffers from this sluggishness as well. On top of that, lots of things annoy me in KDE 4.3, see the end of this post for my top annoyances. Yesterday I had to reboot to my Windows XP installation on this computer and I was shocked when I arrived in XP's userland. Everything was ridiculously fast. When returning to my linux desktop everything felt even more sluggish. That's when I decided to go back to KDE 3.5. I restored my old KDE 3.5 profile, installed the necessary packages and logged back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster. If Linux is that much better, why does the current Linux desktop (KDE 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system that's 8 years old?

Last week I also had the chance to check out Windows 7, and I was stumped. I was genuinly impressed by Windows 7's GUI. It feels fast, works fluently, it has nice effects which just work and work FAST. When browsing around it felt like a very solid desktop environment. I am jealous. I really am. The thought of using Windows 7 in favor of KDE 4.3 has occured to me much more than I like. And it's little things like dragging the windows to the top of the screen makes them maximized, dragging them to the left makes the take exactly 50% of the screen. How many times have you been manually resizing windows to fit next to each other? I have, too many times. These are things that really improve your productivity.

So when should we have started working at a better desktop environment for Linux?

When Mac OS X came out. When was that again? 2001. Yes, it really was that long ago. It already had awesome desktop effects that just work on (compared to these days) VERY modest hardware. And it worked fast as well. It was and still is a solid desktop environment. From that point on the Linux community should have recognized the threat Mac OS X was for the desktop environment. Unfortunately nobody did and we went on creating a big mess, fighting over implementations and technical details instead of attempting to create a solid desktop environment.

Yet we did have a second chance in 2007. Microsoft obviously screwed up with Windows Vista, we had the chance to win back alot of terrain here until the release of Windows 7. So what did we come up with? KDE 4. Yes, a big dissapointment. We still don't have something that's comparable.

So basically, where are we at? KDE 3.5 is Windows XP KDE 4.3 is Windows Vista ??? is Windows 7

When are we getting to the Windows 7 stage?

Microsoft didn't do a big advertising campaign for the launch of Windows 7, nevertheless they delivered a big slap in the face to the Linux desktop environments. The numbers speak for themselves, Windows 7 has already sold more copies in its first week than Windows Vista did in its first month. And with good riddance, Windows 7 really is better than Windows Vista. Microsoft recognized the problems with Windows Vista and dealt with them. And dealt with them swiftly if you ask me, doing it in less then 3 years.

Conclusion

We are losing ground. We are losing it fast. Our competitors recognize what the user wants and delivered.

If we are comparing enterprise desktops, there's no going around Red Hat. The current Red Hat desktop (5.4) ships with KDE 3.5, while its succesor RHEL 6 will be, if looking what Fedora brings now, shipped with KDE 4.2 or 4.3. That means KDE 4.2/4.3 will be the main desktop for enterprises for at least the next 3 years. A disgrace if you ask me. Users will be comparing desktop environments and they will find Windows 7 or Mac OS X to be better. After the damage RHEL 6 will have done to the reputation of the Linux desktop, it will take again as many years to rectify the damage done. Granted if we will have a solid desktop environment comparable to Windows 7 by the time RHEL 7 gets released. Which I can't help but doubt.

My top KDE 4.3 annoyances: * Slooooowwww. Logging in takes a multifold of times it did under KDE 3.5, repainting windows takes up a lot of time * The battery status applet is buggy, it only shows the actual percentage after you've hovered it with the mouse, even when you've set it to always display. The scale it uses is also difficult to interpret. These bugs have been reported a long time ago and are still not fixed. * The run dialog is useless. The reason is the history function. It can't display a full history when you start typing, you have to type alot more. Having a pull down menu and using the arrow keys to select the entry you want is alot faster. Even Microsoft knows they shouldn't touch that dialog, it still works like a charm in windows 7. * Double clicking the system icon in the titlebar doesn't always work to close an application (the system icon is the left-most icon in the titlebar). This bug has also been reported a long time ago and still not fixed. * I get a full 10 minutes of extra runtime on my laptop when I switched back to 3.5 * Power management is buggy in KDE 4.3 and sometimes powerdevil just loses its settings * Some settings KDE 3.5 used to have aren't there anymore in KDE 4.3. * Where's my "home" icon!!!??? :-(

A general rule in life is that nothing is ever free. Perhaps a bold remark to use in an open-source mailing list, but cost doesn't have to be defined by money.

We simply pay for using Linux by coping with slightly lower performance in some (certainly not all) areas of the desktop experience, furthermore by dealing with a lack of certain features and compatabillity with the rest of the world (office and other indistry standard applications not being available to us, the open source counterparts not being up to par with the standard due to closed-source or licencing).

Though we try to stay on par, I think determining that we have lost implies that we must outperform other operating systems in every way to be considered a real alternative.

KDE 4.x is in active developement, GNOME is renewing the desktop experience (albeit slowly). Things are moving along in the open source desktop world. Thankfully, linux != just desktop

Am I happy to hear that. I say this because I'm under the impression that people see only two kinds of linux uses: 1) The traditional server 2) The Desktop You can, at this time, still do both, but everything in between is getting more and more difficult. The problem is that the Desktop Environments, GNOME and KDE, in their quest for "integrated desktop experience" push more and more stuff that's really only useful to those DEs deeper and deeper into the system. If you as a user need or want it or not, you get it. I'd like to provide an example. I'm using an oldish PC and like to pick the apps I use myself, therefor the DE's so-called 'integration' is just unnecessary and rather hindering in the background. I also like configuration. Those are the main reasons I don't use DEs. Recently I tried to figure out what console-kit is actually good for. Here's an excerpt of the manual that I especially like: Defining the Problem To be written. http://www.freedesktop.org/software/ConsoleKit/doc/ConsoleKit.html#id312255 I figured out that it's only useful for something called 'fast user switching', something I definitely don't need. When trying to remove it I figured that HAL requires it. HAL also requires something called policy-kit, yet another thing I don't know what it does. I recompiled HAL without either, and the system still works as before. Somewhere during the research I figured that HAL is supposed to be replaced by something called device-kit. HAL isn't really needed says the author in an email, pretty much all the work is done by udev etc.. So I figured, hey, why not just remove HAL, this way the kits won't come back with the next update, and all I use HAL for is mounting usb drives, something that can be done with udev rules as well. Well, trying to do this I found five apps requiring it, the most surprising: xorg-server Conclusion: Yeah, great, install xorg for a minimal graphical desktop, what you get is console-kit, for a minor feature in a monster DE. When will "Desktop" people start to see that they are being intrusive? They live in their own small bubble called GNOME or KDE and can't ever imagine anyone not wanting to use this. Sorry for this "slightly" off topic rant, but it annoys me on a regular basis when I see applications depend on gnome or kde, mostly for some stupid reason called 'integration' which really isn't of much use in the specific DE they integrate with and a hindrance to everyone who's not running exactly that DE. So please, next time you call something integration, think beyond the bubble. In our little Linux world with limited developer time we need real integration, real solutions and still freedom of choice. Philipp

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:33:12 +0100 Arvid Picciani wrote:

hollunder@gmx.at wrote:

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The problem is that the Desktop Environments, GNOME and KDE, in their quest for "integrated desktop experience" push more and more stuff that's really only useful to those DEs deeper and deeper into the system. If you as a user need or want it or not, you get it.

I warned about that 2 years ago, and no one would listen. Thankfully we are at a point were it gets so undenyable that the anger about the problem is gaining momentum. I'm lurking in my corner waiting for the day that the crowd is big enough to form a community (maybe even a distro)

Until then, here are some steps to punch some sanity into your (arch)linux destop:

1) http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS_-_The_Arch_Build_System

2) IgnorePkg = dbus dbus-core gconf hal

3) foreach in {xorg,emacs,qt,webkit,..}

3.1) find and remove --enable-dbus, --enable-gconf , --enable-hal, --with-hal, --other-shite

3.2) makepgk && sudo pacman -U

4) foreach in {iron,chromium,cups,...}

4.1) take a random library, rename it to libdbus, libgconf, libwhatever, and LD_PRELOAD it.

4.2) notice that that the software will gracefully handle the missing symbols, despite it "needs" them

5) foreach in $unfixable_software

5.1) pacman -R $unfixable_software

6) pacman -R dbus-core dbus gconf

7) remove shit from /etc/cron.d/

8) Happy face

great mail. I don't see what's so bad with dbus though. Dieter

Aaron Griffin wrote:

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:01 AM, wrote:

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Conclusion: Yeah, great, install xorg for a minimal graphical desktop, what you get is console-kit, for a minor feature in a monster DE. When will "Desktop" people start to see that they are being intrusive? They live in their own small bubble called GNOME or KDE and can't ever imagine anyone not wanting to use this. Sorry for this "slightly" off topic rant, but it annoys me on a regular basis when I see applications depend on gnome or kde, mostly for some stupid reason called 'integration' which really isn't of much use in the specific DE they integrate with and a hindrance to everyone who's not running exactly that DE.

So please, next time you call something integration, think beyond the bubble. In our little Linux world with limited developer time we need real integration, real solutions and still freedom of choice.

You read my mind. I was debating adding a little rant here about the necessity of hal, consolekit, policykit, devicekit, whatever-the-hellkit to do the stupidest things. It's real counter-intuitive. And don't even get me started about linux audio - apparently the core market for linux audio developers are people doing live, realtime, studio recordings with a line-in jack on a laptop[1] - not the people who just want their machine to beep at them.

I absolutely positively hate that all this shit is getting integrated into the lower level portions of the operating environment. The xorg/hal coupling is gross and disgusting if you don't want or need hal. Soon enough, I'll bet udev and devicekit are going to require each other. When this starts to happen, it's time to stop using this crap

1: Paraphrasing cactus here

I like where this is going, although I think d-bus, hal, etc... are good initiatives they are missing transparency and maybe their implementation is just bad. I don't see thing stopping to work not having d-bus run in the background. Definately not liking the fact that I have to configure my keyboard in some obscure XML file now. As a sidenote, I have always wondered why I have 64 threads of console-kit-daemon doing nothing. Is there a way to limit this amount? Glenn

On 26.10.2009 18:07, Piyush P Kurur wrote:

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 10:40:44AM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:01 AM, wrote:

[snip]

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So please, next time you call something integration, think beyond the bubble. In our little Linux world with limited developer time we need real integration, real solutions and still freedom of choice.

You read my mind.

Mine too. I got burnt when after one of the xorg updates few months ago, the mouse and keyboard stopped working. The culprit, xorg unloading the mouse and keyboard drivers and waiting for hal to send some signals to load the appropriate drivers. This I think was ridiculous. Many a time I use X without any windomanager whatsoever mainly for display boards and such stuff. I dont need any PnP here.

Regards

ppk

In this particular case though, you can just disable hotplugging (see http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_input_hotplugging). Please realize that PnP can be a very nice feature for many users. HAL is getting deprecated as has already been stated in this thread. Udev is slowly taking over more and more tasks from HAL and at some point, HAL will only be a wrapper for Udev calls for applications that still use the old HAL calls. At least so I hope. -- Sven-Hendrik

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 06:09:49PM +0100, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

On 26.10.2009 18:07, Piyush P Kurur wrote:

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On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 10:40:44AM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:

In this particular case though, you can just disable hotplugging (see http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_input_hotplugging). Please realize that PnP can be a very nice feature for many users.

I have read the wiki and actually changed the xorg.conf to have the "AutoAddDevice" off. I am not against PnP, it helps. But I think this is not the business of xorg. It should be the business of KDE/GNOME or what not (although I am not sure whether the window manager has control over such issues). One of the (if not the) reason I like Arch and BSDs over say Debian is the simplicity. The Arch developers have really done a great job here. I dont want a X server that is overly complicated and kills the joy of Arch. Regards ppk

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:43 PM, wrote:

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:40:44 -0500 Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:01 AM,   wrote:

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Conclusion: Yeah, great, install xorg for a minimal graphical desktop, what you get is console-kit, for a minor feature in a monster DE. When will "Desktop" people start to see that they are being intrusive? They live in their own small bubble called GNOME or KDE and can't ever imagine anyone not wanting to use this. Sorry for this "slightly" off topic rant, but it annoys me on a regular basis when I see applications depend on gnome or kde, mostly for some stupid reason called 'integration' which really isn't of much use in the specific DE they integrate with and a hindrance to everyone who's not running exactly that DE.

So please, next time you call something integration, think beyond the bubble. In our little Linux world with limited developer time we need real integration, real solutions and still freedom of choice.

You read my mind. I was debating adding a little rant here about the necessity of hal, consolekit, policykit, devicekit, whatever-the-hellkit to do the stupidest things. It's real counter-intuitive. And don't even get me started about linux audio - apparently the core market for linux audio developers are people doing live, realtime, studio recordings with a line-in jack on a laptop[1] - not the people who just want their machine to beep at them.

I absolutely positively hate that all this shit is getting integrated into the lower level portions of the operating environment. The xorg/hal coupling is gross and disgusting if you don't want or need hal. Soon enough, I'll bet udev and devicekit are going to require each other. When this starts to happen, it's time to stop using this crap

1: Paraphrasing cactus here

As it happens I'm involved in Linux Audio, and I think you're right, most developers are working on applications for what is often called "Pro Audio", basically audio production in contrast to consumption. Those on the consumption side always seem to work on yet another itunes clone.

It's really two worlds. I've been involved in this for years, mostly as user/tester, and don't even know how to set anything up an .asoundrc, I don't even have one. The production world 'speaks' almost exclusively JACK, which uses alsa and oss (and drivers for firewire devices) to talk to hardware. It's great at what it does, but it's not a general purpose soundserver.

I'm not quite sure to what part of the mess you're referring to, so I'll just give you my view of things.

On the lowest level, talking to hardware, is alsa and oss, whereas oss has few users (Arch Linux seems to be an exception). The main benefit of oss seems to be that it's easier to program to, but it's not quite as powerful and supports less hardware. Alsa seems to be hard to program to, lacking documentation, etc.. I often read recommendations to not write for alsa directly, it seems to be hard to get it right.

To make it easy for programmers to output the "klick" they want when clicking a button, abstractions were invented. Lots of them. Everyone can name a few, esd, artsd, whatever. The problem with abstraction is that it's rarely perfect (btw., I love this article about abstraction, I see those problems everywhere: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html). If you have a problem the fault can now be the abstraction layer or alsa (in addition to anything below or above). It's basically added complexity through imperfect abstraction. And a zillion different soundservers.

And what comes to the rescue? PulseAudio. Yet another soundserver that tries to abstract away the difference between the zillion soundservers and applications talking to alsa/oss and then talks to the hardware through alsa. It's right in the middle of everything (redhat people seem to like that). Unfortunately it seems to also rely on consolekit, hal, policykit, ... you name it (because redhat people like that too). I experienced it when I was still on ubuntu, which was an (too) early adopter. The experience was quite bad, but I heard it got better since then.

But honestly, I can see the mess, and from what I know I'd say the problem stems from alsa being too difficult to use. The alsa developers hide (from a bombardment of user questions) and no one feels up to the task of really resolving the mess.

I feel more cranky about the plethora of options and the fact that they all work differently with no real choice. You install app foo that uses JACK, great now you need jack installed and running, but your other app, bar, uses raw alsa, so now you have to fiddle with settings in multiple places. It's just so tedious and confusing. Perhaps you are right that this whole thing comes down to alsa sucking.

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:08:00 +0100 wrote:

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:52:28 -0500 Aaron Griffin wrote:

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But honestly, I can see the mess, and from what I know I'd say the problem stems from alsa being too difficult to use. The alsa developers hide (from a bombardment of user questions) and no one feels up to the task of really resolving the mess.

I feel more cranky about the plethora of options and the fact that they all work differently with no real choice. You install app foo that uses JACK, great now you need jack installed and running, but your other app, bar, uses raw alsa, so now you have to fiddle with settings in multiple places. It's just so tedious and confusing.

Perhaps you are right that this whole thing comes down to alsa sucking.

Jack is kind of an exception here, so not the best example (it uses the device exclusively, although I heard it's possible to use it together with PA).

Note that jack doesn't talk to hardware directly. it's up to drivers (alsa, ffado, ..) to do that

Pa tries to solve that problem, but I'm not sure it can. I think there's at least also alsa below and possibly one of the earlier abstraction layers above. I sure understand that problem, and the only solution I see is reducing layers. But PA might help a bit, because it tries to get developers to use PA directly instead of what they used before. This of course doesn't help with legacy applications and there's still PA itself, but it could be the beginning of some sort of unification.

Maybe someone will write PA without those stupid requirements, or maybe it can be stripped down, who knows.

Note that both paul davis (jack author) and lennart poettering (PA) agree that both products are good stuff but serve a different purpose. on the long term, they both wish a single audio/midi server which a unified api which works for pro-audio (lowlatency) and desktop (low powerconsumption). (think coreaudio but better) on lwn.net there was an article about that recently. see also http://www.cio.com.au/article/320807/open_source_identity_pulseaudio_creator... I met Lennart 2 weeks ago and he told that right now you can have a desktop system with PA, when you start jack, PA will detect that and change it's stuff to give jack access to the hardware and PA will talk to jack. he also had a very strong and negative opinion about OSS. he said the design goals are fundamentally flawed, trying to do way too much things in kernel space (such as floating point calcs etc) and oh yeah, he likes stuff like dbus and such. Dieter

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 3:01 PM, wrote:

[snip] When will "Desktop" people start to see that they are being intrusive? They live in their own small bubble called GNOME or KDE and can't ever imagine anyone not wanting to use this. Sorry for this "slightly" off topic rant, but it annoys me on a regular basis when I see applications depend on gnome or kde, mostly for some stupid reason called 'integration' which really isn't of much use in the specific DE they integrate with and a hindrance to everyone who's not running exactly that DE.

Being a Xfce user I wholeheartedly agree. I left Xubuntu for Arch a few years ago looking for minimal dependencies on applications and a way to recompile offending applications if needed. I have found what I needed. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer applications are "desktop-agnostic" these days. To install a gtk2 application I am usually asked to download half of GNOME or at least libgnomeui and gconf. Gconf is my personal favourite. Xfce already uses xfconf (btw I love its description in the repository:"xfconf.. thingie" -- looks like not only I am confused), why am I supposed to use two different configuration databases? Why can't people agree on one? Why not just save configuration in plain files, it has worked before... I have been filing feature requests on bugtrackers for alternative configuration systems, maintaining biased AUR packages and bugging Arch devs about sudden additions of dependencies. But I feel I am losing. We are destined to live in a convoluted mass of redundant dependencies. Regards, JM

Am Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:58:49 +0100 schrieb :

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Unfortunately, fewer and fewer applications are "desktop-agnostic" these days. To install a gtk2 application I am usually asked to download half of GNOME or at least libgnomeui and gconf. Gconf is my personal favourite. Xfce already uses xfconf (btw I love its description in the repository:"xfconf.. thingie" -- looks like not only I am confused), why am I supposed to use two different configuration databases? Why can't people agree on one? Why not just save configuration in plain files, it has worked before...

Well, I guess they try to 'integrate' again, all config in one place, but again only for their bubble.

Isn't there already an OS with such a terrible, bloated and cryptical all config in one place database called registry? And wasn't there a principle in Unix/Linux: "Everything is a file."? Both were two of many reasons why I completely switched from Windows to Linux years ago. I really don't understand why now also on Linux configs have to be saved in such gconf (still text files) or even worse sqlite databases, which make those software nearly unmaintainable and slow. Why not just stay with the good old text files which can simply be edited with a console text editor? I, too, don't like those dbus, hal, console-kit stuff. I even don't like udev with its many, quite complicated udev rules. In the past I could simply create a device node for a device and it worked and I and the system knew how to access a specific hardware. I of course see that udev has some advantages but the way it is designed makes the system (the device naming) pretty inconsistent. I don't see the advantages of hal and console-kit - I even don't know what they are for. Usually hardware can easily accessed by the device files in /dev, infos about the hardware can be obtained by lspci and lsusb, through /proc etc.. What is console-kit for? I usually have a console and can login without such an additional daemon which in my opinion only takes system ressources. Not so good on slow computers and also not the best on fast computers. But regarding the KDE/Gnome dependencies there are some applications which don't use these libraries and which are built against pure Qt or GTK. See e.g. the Xfce and LXDE applications. They are unfortunately not yet perfect but I have the impression that there will be more and more such software like Xfburn, Thunar, Mousepad etc. and that those developers are open-minded for feature requests. So I guess there's a little hope. Heiko

Well, I guess they try to 'integrate' again, all config in one place, but again only for their bubble.

Isn't there already an OS with such a terrible, bloated and cryptical all config in one place database called registry? And wasn't there a principle in Unix/Linux: "Everything is a file."? Both were two of many reasons why I completely switched from Windows to Linux years ago. I really don't understand why now also on Linux configs have to be saved in such gconf (still text files) or even worse sqlite databases, which make those software nearly unmaintainable and slow. Why not just stay with the good old text files which can simply be edited with a console text editor? GConf still uses text files. Unfortunately, they are in XML. On the other hand, you can use gconf-editor to change settings via scripts without doing checks to make sure you are changing the right thing. Too bad GNOME programs don't access GConf to give you access to all of the settings, so you don't need to use GConf directly. Hmm. The glass is half full or half empty. I, too, don't like those dbus, hal, console-kit stuff. I even don't like udev with its many, quite complicated udev rules. In the past I could simply create a device node for a device and it worked and I and the system knew how to access a specific hardware. I of course see that udev has some advantages but the way it is designed makes the system (the device naming) pretty inconsistent. I don't see the advantages of hal and console-kit - I even don't know what they are for. Usually hardware can easily accessed by the device files in /dev, infos about the hardware can be obtained by lspci and lsusb, through /proc etc.. What is console-kit for? I usually have a console and can login without such an additional daemon which in my opinion only takes system ressources. Not so good on slow computers and also not the best on fast computers. I like HAL and Dbus, although I heard that HAL will disappear. I like having my thumb drive automatically mounted when I stick it in or my camera being recognized. Or X.org configuring itself automatically without my intervention (at least when it works). On the other hand, I would prefer that Dbus not have any DE dependencies like GNOME. It should be treated like a low-level interface only. I can live with glib dependencies because it is basically a set of useful tools like lists, strings, etc., for C.

On 26 Oct 2009 at 12:46, Rafa Griman wrote:

My guess is that there's something wrongly configured or installed in your KDE 4 installation. Check this: - deactivate nepomuk and Akonadi - delete /tmp/k* /var/tmp/k* - delete your .kde4 and .kde and .local dirs (you can also choose creating a new account and see if it's "faster")

What's the way of deactivating nepomuk and Akonadi? -- O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 were we *EVER* in a war ? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkrlnhgACgkQEX4dV4KnKneMeQCg8RxNQYR1LW8Pp56vyRVjnVFv zDMAoJxJWyZeNMAn5XRTer1SEjX4LkYv =SmMM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

if the problem is only the grafical interface, gnome can be changed to the limit. you can make him far better than any win using compiz, some apps for cairo and others. 2009/10/26 ppk

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:57:59AM +0100, RedShift wrote:

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This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided to post my story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind.

...

I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very sluggish and incomplete.

[snip]

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back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster. If Linux is that much better, why does the current Linux desktop (KDE 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system that's 8 years old?

windows can open software faster because all programs uses the same group os basics libraries and all that is already on ram. Linux do not have that. But everyone here already know that

Here are my two paises (Indian cents). You bring out a point that I regularly see:

* Oh my graphics card does not work. Conclusion Linux is not for desktops. This was say in 1997 when I started on linux. Surely this was a problem. But even then things were not bad compared to windows.

* Oh my printer does not work with GNU/Linux. Conclusion Linux is not for office use. Yes it is true that some esoteric printers do not work but then a careful netsearch will give you what to buy. If you dont want to search a product then your vendor will sell you snakeoil any way. I bought a Samsung printer (ML something) for my office and it works like charm.

* Oh my foo bar effect on KDE 4.x/GNOME x.x does not work. Conclusion Linux is not for desktop usage. What you say might be true. I dont know because I use xmonad and that beats all other WM in my opinion. But to conclude we have lost the ``war'' (which war I dont know) of desktops might be premature.

Really many of us do not care. GNU/Linux and *BSDs give us excellent servers, desktops, development environments, document creation tools (TeX/LaTeX) which together is hard to beat. Plus it is hackable and I have choice of what to use (xmonad for desktop for eg). So as far as I am concerned the war is over. Opensource won.

Just to illustrate, for a talk I carried my presentation as a pdf file created using latex beamer on an Arch linux and some one from Microsoft research carried a ppt (for ``security'' reasons we were not supposed to connect our laptops on to their projectors vga port). Both of us were given a windows machine to project the presentations and yes you guessed it right the ppt fonts were all garbled where as my pdf file was just fine. In fact the only other presentation that worked without any problem was also created via beamer on GNU/Linux.

KDE/GNOME/XFCE or whichever is your favorite WM will continue to produce high quality software and you may also contribute. My suggestion is forget about the war and have fun. Let the people in Redmond suffer hypertension by attempting world domination. Meanwhile try out xmonad even if you do not want to use it.

agreed!! hahaha just have fun!!

Regards

ppk

-- http://id.liquuid.net

On Monday 26 October 2009 19:25:09 Lars Tennstedt wrote:

I suggest the opposite in the facts of speed. My work's computer runs with Windows XP and the hardware is faster than mine at home. But Windows XP often stands still without a reason and takes ages to do something. KDE 4.3 on my Arch Linux installation runs very well and fast. I guess that it depends on the hardware you use.

But I would say that the enterprise linux distributions should use KDE 3.5 and GNOME 2.28 in the nearly future. In such an area with installations on many machines things just have to work and Plasma and GNOME Shell are too new. If KDE is too slow for you, use Xfce or LXDE. I do not miss anything under Xfce. And if you want to use Windows 7, use it. At the moment linux has little percentage on the desktop market.

I am writing this for sole reason that silence of a satisfied linux user should not be taken as absence of one. I am a happy arch and KDE user and use windows XP only as much forced by the work. I don't know about vista. Rarely seen it in action. These are my opinions and not conclusions. Just adding a data point here. - KDE is hugely productive. Multiple desktop(it already had for ages but mentioned for comparison with XP), plethora of applets(plasma widgets lately), kopete, kmail, akregator, knews, kate, konsole, k3b and konqueror. It is so much ahead of windows that its not even the same race. Not to mention, each of these apps have innovation on its own that are hard to rival. - I was happy with KDE 3.5.x(on slack and arch) and upgraded to KDE4 just along the way. KDE4.1/4.2 were not upto the par but KDE4.3 is on par with KDE3.5.x for me. - I don't need any eye-candy on KDE and I have turned it off. Even though I have functioning nvidia drivers, I want my desktop fast, not animating and I am happy with that speed. Frankly I have not found any plasma widget worth keeping on desktop(I don't get to see the desktop anyways. Its always covered with some app). But I am a konsole geek. I could go alone with kate/konsole except email/IM/webbrowsing needs. - I couldn't change to GNOME. I hate it. File open dialog is lame compared to KDE. I don't know what virtues peole see in it. That is only one reason another is button order(third is GTK. C for desktop? Not for me and no mono please.). I could stand a half working KDE but not GNOME. - To people advocating lightweight options, Don't you lose what *KDE* offers? Instead of putting together a solution yourself, isn't it much better to use a solution that is put together already? Use xfce, throw in firefox and openoffice and its hardly any different from KDE+openoffice. Throw in thunderbird and pidgin and one begins to wonder whats the point? Is the dekstop really that lean now? Besides, throw in one KDE app. because its irresistible(kmail, kopete, k3b?) and again, one might as well run KDE. - Huge win for KDE is consistency. Whatever speed KDE desktop loads today, it will load with same speed 3 months down the line and 3 years down the line(I can attest that. My home directory has remains of mandrake 7 till date. Upgraded and moved from machine to machine). Windows will not. - I don't like nepomuk/strigi/akonadi and its off on my desktop. Thats more to do with hatred of mysql than these technologies itself. I won't let my desktop depend on mysql. Period. Come postgresql support and I will give it a go. Besides I don't have time to tag 10s of thousand of photos that I already have and every download from digital camera is at least 150 photos. - on point of desktop war, KDE is not fighting with windows but windows ecosystem. What does vanilla windows offer compared to KDE anyways? freecell and solitaire? Where is google messenger? where is an up to date browser? where is yahoo messenger? where is a good console? where are tons of utilities? Again, KDE is not fighting with windows. Its fighting with an echo- system. - for browser, I dabbled with lot of them and here is simple conclusion. The web is too fluid. There is no single app that can render it well, now and in future. And the whole web2.0 is a non-sense, at least functionally. So I have konqueror for regular browsing(no serious site breaks in it for me.) and firefox for occasions when its needed. Usually if it does not render well in konqueror, I bypass the site and not the browser. - use windows and you have to format/reinstall to upgrade. You realize how much productivity hit that is? It is impossible to get back all the small tweaks that one has accumulated over the period of time. Besides isn't that like last century? With arch we upgrade every month, if not more and don't have any problems. I am happy with linux desktop for long time, since 2001 and haven't had windows since then. The war is over. Neo won :) -- Shridhar

I just had a look at the Windows 7 features and didn't see anything that suggests the Linux world has lost the UI war. It is probably true that the eye candy looks more polished on OS X/Vista/7 than on anything the Linux world has to offer. (In fact, this is what lured me into the Mac world for a while.) That also shouldn't be surprising because this is how commercial OS producers lure the gullible to buy their product. For example, it seems cool that I can wiggle a window in Windows 7 to hide all the others or that I can drag a window to the edge to make it use up half the screen. But the reality of efficient computer use looks different. I can't see a good use for the first feature in every-day use, and if I want windows side by side, chances are I don't want an even split and I want more than two windows tiled on my screen. What I'm looking for in my desktop environment isn't eye candy but efficiency. Above all, this means that I want to be able to customize my desktop for a workflow that suits me. In more concrete terms, the three major things I appreciate in my linux desktop and which Windows cannot give me are: * Tiling window management and customized keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything I can dream of. I don't want to touch the mouse unless I deal with a graphics program. * Command line for almost everything. Nobody can convince me that cp fileA dirB/dirC/dirD is less efficient than opening dirB/dirC/dirD in an explorer window and dragging fileA there. * Scripting for all the recurring tasks. This is extremely easy using shell scripts/perl/ruby/python/... I could try that under Windows, too, but the DOS command prompt simply feels like something that was never really meant to be used. I realize that this will not convince the computer-illiterate average user to prefer linux over windows, but I sure am glad that Linux gives me the choice to use an eye-candy-free desktop that works the way I think a computer should work, on modest hardware. I know that this is easy to be interpreted as another windows-vs-linux flame, and I admit that I am certainly very biased on this subject. However, it simply irks me that almost every time Apple/Microsoft come out with the newest eye candy, we weep that we don't have it instead of focusing on the advantages our linux boxes give us. Cheers, Norbert

On 10/26/2009 01:30 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:

I think the biggest problem that kde4 will have to overcome is the stain on kde's reputation caused when a few major distros pushed kde4 out the door as a "New Desktop" when it was barely beta (kde 4.04 was released by SuSE as the desktop for 11.0 in June 2008) kde4.04 as a desktop -- gimme a break!

... which was caused by the KDE devs' bad decision to release it as 4.0, which set everyone's expectations that it was production-ready software. Had they labeled the whole 4.0 series (and possibly even the 4.1's) as beta software, that wouldn't have happened. DR

Hi! In data lunedì 26 ottobre 2009 18:30:25, David C. Rankin ha scritto:

I didn't do windows 7 beta, so I can't comment there, but I have used every windows since windows 286 (what '88? when I moved from DOS 4.04) and all were "usable".

Well, when I stepped from dos 6.22 to Windows 95 on my 486, the latter was really slow and bloated... This was the same reason that prevented me from switching windows 98 with XP, some years later, and made me jump the barricade. Surely I never had an up-to-date machine, nor I have now, still KDE runs fine even if not excellent. But I get a good feel of speed with kde apps and fluxbox. ciao! Dario Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale! http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com