Distribution quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Oct 20, 2012 16:50 UTC (Sat) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

I'm still missing kprinter. I should not have to figure out which program is needed to open and separately print every file in a list of things to be printed, especially given that they do not all present the same print options; the print system itself should figure that out.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Oct 21, 2012 15:10 UTC (Sun) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Konqueror 3 at work (legacy company desktop) is decent and fast.

Sure, some fancy new web applications don’t work with it, but I consider that a feature. (That being said, my primary browser at home is Lynx.)

It could use some bugfixes, e.g. SIGSEGV on a Launchpad bugs page nowadays, but other than that, it’s fast, looks decent and is pretty usable.

KDE 4, on the other hand… *shudder* I’ve installed kdepim on my new work-laptop (running sid) because I must, but there’s a reason IceWM and evilwm exist, ya know.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Oct 25, 2012 12:36 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

FWIW, kde4's quite good once it's built with the semantic-desktop cycle and space-stealing malware turned off. On gentoo, that's a flip of a few USE flags and a rebuild.

Of course that means no akonadi, since it's semantic-desktop integrated, which means no kdepim (including kmail) of any sort, since even for stuff that doesn't (yet) require akonadi directly, the kdepim libs stuff pulls it in as a mandatory dependency, but being rid of that message disappearing-trick software was actually what triggered the whole OK, with that gone, I might as well turn off the whole semantic-desktop thing in the first place.

Now kde4's nice and lean and snappy, better than kde3 was. =:^)

Meanwhile, I too ran konqueror for years. Unfortunately, in kde4 it became quite apparent that the kde and konqueror devs themselves considered it little more than a toy. Because they insisted kde4, including konqueror, was ready for normal use, /years/ before it had a proper SSL/TLS certificate management GUI... this in an age when not only individual certs need deactivated, but whole certificate authorities! Similarly, there was the infamous double-form-submit bug of kde 4.6.x, introduced in the middle of a stable cycle, but worse than that, taking two monthly bugfix releases to fix.

So there's only two conclusions possible about the kde/konqueror devs. They either don't care about security at all, in which case the browser with its primary remote attack surface exposure is "just a toy", certainly NOT fit for "normal use" like online purchases and banking (double-form-submit, security cert management issues, both VERY bad problems to have there!). Or they care, but they specifically consider konqueror no more that a toy that nobody would use for "normal use" like online banking anyway, so much like say the comic-strip-plasmoid, it's just a toy, for non-serious entertainment purposes only.

But firefox with the noscript and request-policy extensions (plus perspectives and dnssec validator) is both higher security and higher compatibility, with the noscript and request-policy extensions in particular both much easier to work with than having to dig thru page code to figure out what to try enabling in konqueror to hopefully have a page working without google-analytics or the like. There's no way konqueror could keep up with noscript alone, without a much larger userbase to support it. So it was time to switch in any case.

I do wish kde's and firefox's bookmarks could be integrated, tho. That's the remaining frustration. I keep a classic-menu set to bookmarks on a panel, and with the appropriate kde setting they launch in firefox fine. But it's one-way-only. I have to launch kde's bookmark editor to save new bookmarks, and that's a huge pain compared to the integrated bookmark saving, updating both the bookmark plasmoid and the konqueor bookmarks themselves, that konqueror had. Oh, well...

Duncan