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 to improve?

[Travoltus]

That's easily said and not so easily done.

How about this one...

All "official" KDE apps get restructured to be command line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) front ends to shared object libraries. In every KDE app you can find an entry in the "about" function that shows you how the CLI would do various tasks, including the last task you did. You can even make it optional as a compile-time option in source code. (Power users would rather not have that function bloat up their code, no doubt.)

In a flash, any GUI using novice with a hunger to know more about Linux, can look right there and see how it's done.

In no time you'll have tons of people speeding up their KDE by doing everything on the command line and perhaps even using less memory (as far as CLI vs GUI memory usage is concerned).

A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

"We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"

• Speed. KDE (and Gnome) need better speed optimizations. It feels very sluggish compared to either Windows or even Windows apps under Wine.
  
• Memory usage. The memory requirements of KDE and and Gnome are ridiculous. They make Windows seem memory efficient, which is not good. Just try running Blackbox or even XFCE for a few days and notice the massive decrease in memory.
• Clutter. The KDE dialogs and windows make Windows apps seem organized and lean. As of Gnome 2.12, they finally got it right. Previous Gnome releases where, IMHO, too crippled to be useful which is why I stuck with KDE for so long (8 years). KDE needs to make serious progress in this area.
• Consistency. This really needs to become a focus. It makes Vista seem consistent.

Misc GUI improvements

[VanessaE]

I've been a KDE user for a while (now using 3.5.4), and have run into a few things here and there that I think really *do* need an improvement. Off the top of my head:

• One of our machines has a TV for it's second head, but the TV is almost always turned off or displaying a movie from our DVD player. Since the TV is never used for anything but movies, KDE should be able to ignore the presence of it entirely when a new window is opened, but still let me drag an already-open window over to it if I want to.
• From the point of view of an advanced user, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for the Dock-Apps panel to exist. Why can't I just dock my WM/AS apps into a regular panel instead?
• As one other user pointed out, there are a few sluggish spots here and there that shouldn't happen on a fast box like mine (AMD64x2 3800+ with 1GB RAM and Nvidia 6600). These seem to concentrate on Konqueror when it's used for file management.
• When the Control Center can't load a settings module, it should display a warning message and tell me what to do to fix the problem, instead of just saying "Loading..." and then returning to the 'main' start screen after a couple of seconds.

Other than these, KDE seems to do pretty well for my husband and I. I've tried several other environments (Gnome, E, Windowmaker, Afterstep, FVWM, XFCE) and KDE just had the best round-up of features for my needs and preferences.

This is my take on KDE

[bogaboga]

"We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"

For me, it's the two major sub-items covered under one big one: Beauty.

• The fonts are ugly. What does it take to make KDE display beautiful fonts. I am particularily impressed by this Kdevelop image. http://kdevelop.org/graphics/screenshots/3.0/full_ ide.png [kdevelop.org]. If a product is touted as significantly better technologically, it should also be a pleasure to look at.

• The interface by default, is full of huge buttons wasting screen real estate. Why won't these two toolbars be merged? There is so much space wasted above the lower toolbar. Just have a look at this image. http://kde.org/screenshots/images/3.5/02-systeminf o.png [kde.org]

• They (KDE) should look at hiring a beautification expert. Xandros and Linspire should provide a hint. The point here is that KDE should be a pleasure to look at by default. Thank you.

Re:KDE problems, fixed

[zsau]

It's funny how most of KDE's critics just have no idea what they're talking about, and haven't even used KDE long enough to know how to fix any of the "problems" they have with it.

That basically is my problem with KDE. There's so many ways to fix just about every problem with it that to work it out, you have to spend ages searching. But some problems which I haven't yet worked out the solution to:

1. OK/Apply/Cancel. Having used GTK and OS X based apps for so long, I forget to do this. I won't ever use a desktop environment that doesn't automatically apply preference changes. Can I do that in KDE?
2. Open folder in new/same window. I like to browse the filesystem with new folders opened in new windows most of the time, but occasionally I want them opened in the same window. Just about every other file manager I've used lets you do this by Button-1 for new window and Button-2 for same/replace window. But KDE uses Button-2 for a new tab.
3. Too many menus! Like the problem with preferences, there's just too many menus. My view is that if you have so many menu items you can't fit them all comfortably on a right-click menu, you've probably got too many. One program should do one thing, well.
4. Customising shortcut keys. It's possible to customise shortcut keys from some central control panel, but with GTK+ you can customise them just by hovering over the relevant menu option in the window and press the key you want. This is an incredibly useful feature, and I'm sure KDE has it, I just don't know how to enable it.
5. The open & save dialogs. Big and ugly. At least they don't try to be a file manager like Windows ones, but they're missing important features from the ones I like. Like existing at all (my favorite ones just let me use drag-and-drop and that's about it), or letting me drag a file into the Save As/Open dialog box and then switching to the containing folder so that if I can quickly save a file into a folder I'm already looking in--why should I have to browse to the same place twice? (or frequently more, if you're regularly using a save as dialog that keeps defaulting to the wrong place). Actually, if it had this feature, then the fact that they're 'big and ugly' wouldn't bother me at all, it'd just provide a bigger drop target :)
6. Complexity. You have to spend 'long enough to know how to fix any of the "problems" they have with it'

I have other issues I think, but aside from Konqueror, I haven't used KDE recently.

In any case, I'm really happy with my current DE and I'm not really thinking of using KDE. But considering your comments to your PP, I thought I'd see what your opinion was on some of my problems.