Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 6, 2013 6:10 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities by rsidd
Parent article: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

> KDE4, GNOME3, Unity were all developed in the Steve Jobs mode of "users don't know what they want."

KDE4 had problems with being too buggy (especially in earlier versions) and performance regressions on older hardware, but it did not make major changes to the user interface like the others have done.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 6, 2013 6:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

It actually did, but they were optional. You can still just ignore most of the plasma desktop.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 6, 2013 7:32 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> they were optional

Disabled by default, too — run Plasma Desktop for the first time in a new user's home directory, and the default desktop configuration that appears will be similar in appearance to that of KDE3.

Plus, it seems to me that Activities are basically just a variation on the theme of "virtual desktops", and similarly Plasmoids are (at least in the context of Plasma Desktop rather than Plasma Active) basically KDE's implementation of the "panel applets / desktop applets" concept; so, the main user-visible features that are new to KDE4 don't really seem like huge changes from the user's perspective.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 6, 2013 17:58 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

I started using "Activities" recently, before I also wondered why I should need them, if I have virtual desktops.

They add another layer of separation, at least. In the meantime I find it very useful to have an activity for work and an activity for private stuff, so this is nicely separated.
Ideally this should be supported by all applications, so that e.g. in the "work" text editor you get a different list of recent files than in the "private" text editor, etc.