Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities [LWN.net]

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 8, 2013 22:03 UTC (Fri) by Del- (guest, #72641)
In reply to: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities by sorpigal
Parent article: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

> KDE3 didn't have problems that a regular user would care about which could not have been fixed by a good going-over to clean up and organize menus and control panels

I beg to differ. The transition to Qt4 combined with opening the path to platform independent libraries was alone enough to warrant or even necessitate a rewrite across the board. Deep ranging changes like plasma and (yes) the semantic desktop was also infrastructure that would be rather challenging to do by refactoring KDE3. I believe users do enjoy the improvements.

> At a time when Windows users were looking for alternatives out of a fear of Vista all they found from KDE was a buggy early 4.x instead of the stability that would have lead to more switching. A great opportunity to convert many users to a Free OS was lost because KDE was in a period of infrastructure churn that was not *necessary*, however nice the results.

I am afraid our perceptions are wildly differing on this issue. From my end of the universe Ubuntu was the only hope of getting users over from Vista. Ubuntu hedged all their bets on Gnome way before KDE4 became an issue. Moreover, our shot was through the netbooks. From my sources Canonical priced Ubuntu licensing way to high, pusing the likes of ASUS to ship Linpus and Xandros on netbooks. Users got a horrible experience. End of story. An all in effort on KDE3 would do shit about Vista, and only serve to keep KDE on a dead end Qt3 for several years. Whethet pushing Ubuntu on netbooks would have made any difference is also an open question. Personally I believe GNU/Linux is in a much better position today than back then, and I am afraid we need another couple of years before we really have a viable desktop alternative. With a focussed Canonical we could get there faster, but that is I am afraid not going to happen.

> So where is the key binding manager?

In system settings of course, you have always found all settings there. Gnome is finally copying it.

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Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 8, 2013 22:23 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

>I believe users do enjoy the improvements.
All three of them?

I haven't seen _anyone_ using the "Activities" feature yet. People generally continue to use KDE4 as a yet-another-classic-desktop (it works pretty well for this right now).

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 0:11 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

I actually use the "activities" feature, with mixed results for now (some tasks are costlier/more difficult/slower, others the opposite).

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 8:12 UTC (Sat) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> All three of them?

Now you are just being grumpy again. There are vastly more than three users, and vastly more than three improvements, both thoroughly documented in this thread already. Try upping the quality of your posts a couple of notches ;)

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 8, 2013 23:24 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (4 responses)

> The transition to Qt4 combined with opening the path to platform independent libraries was alone enough to warrant or even necessitate a rewrite across the board.

Are you listening to yourself? Users do *not* care about libraries. I'm sure the rewrite was justifiable if you are a developer.

> I believe users do enjoy the improvements.
Let's back up and look again. *Some* users probably like *some* of the features that were built atop the better infrastructure, but very little of it was unattainable with the old base (just not as pleasant) and none of it required a clean break.

> An all in effort on KDE3 would do shit about Vista,
It would have saved more user from the tyranny of closed software. Even one more would be worth it.

>and only serve to keep KDE on a dead end Qt3 for several years.

What toolkit does Windows use? How many generations have there been and how many times were applications totally rewritten because a new toolkit version was available?

The lesson here is that you don't have to throw it all out to improve it. No, *really*, you don't.

> Personally I believe GNU/Linux is in a much better position today than back then, and I am afraid we need another couple of years before we really have a viable desktop alternative.
"Another couple years" is where we've been since 1998 at least. I read it as code for "Never." If we have a thriving desktop in terms of popularty in two years feel free to hit me up for a traditional "I win" subscription to Playboy.

> In system settings of course, you have always found all settings there
I stand corrected, but it took many years to arrive.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 0:49 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> I stand corrected, but it took many years to arrive.

FTR, I remember it and I used KDE4 from 4.0.3 until 4.4 or so. So it has been here for years as well.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 8:14 UTC (Sat) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link]

>> In system settings of course, you have always found all settings there
>I stand corrected, but it took many years to arrive.

I've used KDE4 since 4.0.0 and I'm *know* that there's been a convenient GUI for making keyboard layout modifications since then (I swap Ctrl and Caps Lock and I've never had to muck around with xmodmap on a KDE system).

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 8:45 UTC (Sat) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> Users do *not* care about libraries. I'm sure the rewrite was justifiable if you are a developer.

Sure, join the Trinity crew then and see how far Qt3 will bring you. Qt4 enables technology that users do care about. The development speed of Rekonq given it was a one developer hobby for a long time is a good example. Yes that is an application, but it equally goes for the desktop infrastructure as well. Qt has made great strides the last years. Users do care about platform independence too. I love the fact that VLC is available on Android, and I look forward to getting Kontact on touch screens. Yes many of us would like to see plasma on devices now, so it does related to the desktop too.

Most of it was not attainable on Qt3 in any sane manner.

> It would have saved more user from the tyranny of closed software. Even one more would be worth it.

I think it is fair to conclude that I have much higher hopes for GNU/Linux, and disagree strongly that a few more users would warrant staying on Qt3. I don't even see why this is an issue. Debian stayed with KDE3 until 2011, Red Hat did too. The only reason for average Joe to jump on KDE4 was because some nerd told him it would be better. I am afraid I cannot make any sense out of what you are saying.

> What toolkit does Windows use?

You should ask Microsoft that, it is closed source so I don't care. However, you cannot seriously believe that they handled the destkop issue better? Both Vista and Win8 have been catastrophes. What saves them is billions of dollars in revenue with vast resources of full time programmers. KDE has nothing even remotely comparable.

> how many times were applications totally rewritten

Quite a few actually, the (forced) transition from Visual Basic to .Net springs to mind. Almost killed some software companies in my vicinity.

> "Another couple years" is where we've been since 1998 at least.

Not close. I would say the first time I felt it was with Ubuntu 7.04, even more strongly with Ubuntu 10.04. So I installed it on computers for several of my acquaintances that were not computer savvy. I quickly concluded that the statement was false, but it has nothing to do with the KDE4 ordeal.

To give you a hint, we just about now starts to have solid wireless drivers, stable suspend/hibernate (a necessity for productive use of Activities, did you get that Cyberaxe?). We see much better support for critical third party apps (think Spotify, Skype), we have just started on providing gaming (Valve will need at least one more year before Steam is a viable alternative on linux). Graphics drivers will still need a couple of years. No, Nvidia doesn't cut it, Linus was right in giving them the finger. Optimus alone was enough to keep linux away from the desktop the last two years. Now you may understand why linux never before really was an option on the desktop for the masses. For us nerds it became an alternative with ubuntu 7.04, before that it was just painful. You may brand me a masochist.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 11:51 UTC (Sat) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

> Are you listening to yourself? Users do *not* care about libraries.

This is only partially true.

While users of course do not care about libraries themselves, they care a lot about what applications developers can deliver given those libraries.

This is especially true for applications created by KDE developers because of KDE's wide range of libraries which provide a significant part of what users perceive to be application features.

Improvements in libraries can both yield direct improvements in applications and free up application developer resources for domain specific work. Both things that users care about, independent of whether they are about libraries as program building blocks themselves.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 9, 2013 11:41 UTC (Sat) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

> or even necessitate a rewrite across the board.

Since the thread uses very vague terms it is hard to judge and conflicting statements make it even worse.

"rewrite" would indicate that the item in question is KDE's desktop shell, which was rewritten using Plasma technologies.

"across the board", on the other hand, sounds more like referring to KDE's wide range of products, which, contradictingly, have mostly not been rewritten, just simply ported.

Since the comment you are replying to sounds like it is addressing the first option (desktop), I think a more accurate assessment would be that the rewrite was necessary because of the old code base having reached an unmaintainable state.

While the comment asserts that regular users would have not run into any problems, reality looked very different back then.

Given the option of rewriting the same thing again or trying something new, the developers option for the latter.

It is debatable whether that second choice was the best possible or whether rewriting KDesktop and Kicker from scratch would have yielded better results.

But I think it is important to understand that the rewrite itself of at least some of the involved desktop components was inevitable unless one wanted to face dropping the desktop shell product completely after a couple of months of increasingly painful maintenance work.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 13, 2013 20:26 UTC (Wed) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

> From my sources Canonical priced Ubuntu licensing way to high, pusing the likes of ASUS to ship Linpus and Xandros on netbooks.

What do you mean "priced Ubuntu licensing"? It's free, not licensed, isn't it?

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 13, 2013 21:45 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

For users who are ok with doing their own support, not for oem's like Asus who wants somebody to provide them with a ready made image and handle issues that arises. Why do you think they all went with custom made versions of xandros and linpus for the netbooks? They paid, and it was probably cheap. Why do you think Red Hat has paying customers when centos is free?