KDE Celebrates 10 Years of Existence

Rob Kaper wrote in to tell us about KDE's 10th anniversary. From the article: "Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software." Rob adds this thought: "We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"

Where can you improve ?

[Anonymous Coward]

how about memory usage ? be nice to run KDE on older hardware to replace those soon-to-be-defunct Win98 boxes

Congratulations!

[reldruH]

I'd just like to say congratulations and thank you for making such a great desktop. Keep up the good work for KDE 4. Just in case anyone is interested in getting involved, here's the link to the Support KDE [kde.org] page. There's info there on how to donate money, time, code, etc.

Improve?

[shadow42]

Not that KDE's a bad window manager, but it seems too... childish. Brightly colored icons that bounce up and down whenever I click something don't generally appeal to me. Let's kill the bouncing.

No flame please

[bookstack]

It would be annoyed to see another flame between KDE, GNOME, XFCE, *box, FVWM, E17, WM, ... Shall we just focus on KDE, buddies ?

Re:Where can you improve ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> be nice to run KDE on older hardware.

I read that at the end of the Akademy they made the kde window manager OpenGL aware (without needing GLX). That would mean that the each window can be cached on the graphics card and switching between windows will be very fast in KDE 4 even on a slow cpu, the cpu will have more time to spend on other tasks, making KDE faster and feeling significantly faster.

Presents?

[nutshell42]

Couldn't /. celebrate the birthday by finally replacing the old (as in 10 years old) logo with the new (as in 5 years old) one?

Look at Vista for inspiration?

[Futil3]

As I tried out Vista a couple of months ago I became rather fond of some of the (for windows) new features. I would love to see some of them implemented in Gnome/KDE/Ubuntu/linux in general;

Instant searches and dynamic stacking of files. A constantly indexed system *cough*spotlight*cough* that lets you create dynamic stacks. Stacks behave like folders - you can browse a stack for instance - but have no physical location on your drive. This combined with instant searches from anywhere in the OS, gives you the ability to generate "directories" sorted on basically any kind of index. If you create a stack of every file in the system created since a given date it would stay updated in real time!

Searches that include the entire system. Search for "resolution" and you'll not only get files, but also info on how to set the desktop resolution, and links to the settings page.

Per-network settings. The system remembers networks you connect to, and lets you define custom settings for each network. You want your firewall disabled when connecting at home, but back on when you connect from school? No probs.

Quick swapping of pre-defined (configurable) power settings will let you avoid your laptop going to sleep in the middle of a presentation. I would like a built-in application for power control that allows me to set not only the standard options of HDD spindown and screensaver - but also a detailed control over advanced settings like core and memory voltages, CPU clocks, WLAN output effect and so on.

Re:Where to improve?

[andersa]

I. Don't. Wan't. To. Use. A. CLI. That's why I use KDE.

Re:KDE problems, fixed

[bogaboga]

I think a I mentioned that KDE should be a pleasure to look at by default. I wonder whether its default look satisfies anyone. Do you know?

Re:Presents?

[MarkRose]

I propose a new tag. If everyone were to tag this article and others with 'oldicon' as needed, perhaps the editors will get around to updating old icons.

Re:KDE problems, fixed

[Overly Critical Guy]

Users shouldn't have to fix someone else's broken interface. Telling someone to go to "Control Center --> Appearance & Themes --> Fonts --> Tick 'Use anti-aliasing for fonts'" or tear off all the toolbars to get them out of the way is just stupid.

Re:A few thoughts

[.com b4 .storm]

Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.

I'd like to offer a rebuttal to that. Mac OS has always been about the general interface and styling being consistent across apps, and this is still true with OS X. Some rogue apps (looking at you, Microsoft) sometimes use retarded, non-standard shortcuts, but even in Microsoft's case this is not as bad as the majority of Windows or Linux apps I've encountered. Toolbars, buttons, dialogs, menus, and the majority of keyboard shortcuts work the same across all OS X apps. The only common exceptions are poorly-written little utilities, which I'm sure even KDE is susceptible to.

As for the spell check engine, password management, etc. your assertion that OS X does not do that is just downright false. The standard text widgets support the system-wide spell checker, and any app can easily take advantage of the system Address Book, Keychain database for passwords, Spotlight for searching, etc. Any app worth using will support all of these things if they are at all applicable to the program.

So, yes, I resent the "not anywhere close" remark. Windows is a lost cause, but I would say that OS X is at least on par, if not far beyond in some areas (e.g. the ability to AppleScript any virtually application, even if it was not coded with that in mind... or the combination of Expose with drag-and-drop wizardry to make it easy to move chunks of data around).

Re:KDE problems, fixed

[Blakey Rat]

I guess you missed the part where he said "by default."

The offense is even worse if KDE is technically capable of better, and yet is set to look crummy by default. What are the developers thinking?

Re:Presents?

[Anonymous Coward]

I propose a tag: "tagssuck". Honestly, they've done basically nothing with them, and I'm so sick of seeing every story tagged "yes,no,maybe,fud,notfud"

You still can't search stories for a tag. This is not hard to do. It just requires some motivation, someone in the paid slashdot staff to actually care about slashdot.