"True innovation would be to provide a script-based approach to most of the GUI stuff, e.g. nodejs/browser API .. and then provide native code layer"

We started working on exactly that ~5 years ago and the result is QML2 and Plasma (two separate things, but they work wonderfully together). As the node.js project founder said when he saw QML for the first time: "Wow, it's HTML5 done right."

So KDE is truly innovative, you're just too uninformed to have known and ~5 years too late to the suggestion table. (I'm not entirely sure how the /. smarminess works, but I gave it my best try with that last sentence .. did I succeed? ;)

No, translation "we've been working very hard on this device, and will be releasing them at shipping time". We've put the Open Hardware Logo on the feature board and everyone who has participated in this project has licensed their contributions under the GPL. We're not about to start our first product by violating each other's licenses. Please, give us a bit more credit than that. Most of the people involved have been releasing things far more valuable and work intensive than this as Free software/hardware over the years, after all.

" Of course if you believe this thing will appear on time, work and ever see another module which is compatible with it I have a nice bridge here to sell you"

So, it works. How do we know? We already have finished pieces in hand and use them.

Other modules: are alread add-ons such as VGA connectors and keyboard kits in prototyping; I've already seen two more feature boards; as for other CPU cards, those are further away but on the roadmap.

Who peed in your cereal?

I know it's easier to be cynical than to be helpful, but if you support projects like this they actually do go further.

There is HDMI out, which is digital.

This is an engineering board, not a smartphone. If you look around what is available for prototyping and developing projects, you'll find that single core ARM is actually the common case. This is a significant amount of hardware for the market category. This is also considerably more powerful than what smartphones were shipping with 3 years ago, though today's high end phones do come with more cores.

What makes you think this is a tablet? It isn't. It's an engineering board.

They are similar in hardware capacity, except that Improv is modular (not everything is hardwired on one board) and is not a sold-and-forgotten piece of hardware but has an active Free software and hardware devel community around it.

> How is this thing compared (hardware wise) to Raspberry Pi ?

RPi is a single core 7o0 MHz ARM11 with 512 MB RAM and no on-board storage; Improv is a dual core 1Ghz Cortex-A7 with 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND flash and a more powerful GPU. Improv is also modular so you can swap out the CPU card as well get feature boards with additional features in future. So Improv is several times more powerful and quite a bit more flexible. You also get things like SATA with the Improv.

As for software, anything that runs on the RPi run on Improv, while the reverse is not true. Some ARM Linux OSes require hard float, such as Ubuntu, which RPi does not provide but Improv does

The announcement and website clearly state that the feature board which the EOMA68 docks to is open hardware; yes the A20 is not open hardware, and that was never stated otherwise.

That's like saying you fear Qt becoming dependent on BlueZ because some applications need some bluetooth specific features and use libbluez. Which is to say: your fear makes zero sense. Which is good, as that means you can stop being worried.

> hiding the cursor when it's over a text field that's being typed in

This works perfectly here.

> allowing for pure alphabetical sorting in file dialogs (not by-inode-type, then alphabetical)

Click on the configure menu (wrench icon), go to sorting, deselect "Fodlers First".

And if someone thinks of complaining that that should be the default: it's what people are used to. At least it is configurable to your liking.

You're welcome :)

It's not either/or, but both/and. Bugs are fixed, usability is improved .. AND work is ongoing at making necessary infrastructural improvements.

If what you got from this article was "new colors! new shapes!" you have somehow misunderstood what you were seeing. The colors and shapes are completely secondary to the work being done to modularize the existing libraries and have support for hardware accelerated rendering for the entire desktop shell. The colors and shapes are parts of a test framework designed to, well, test the underlying framework; they are not a user-facing product.

Perhaps /. isn't the best place for topics that aren't about cosmetics.

As Sebastian has noted clearly time and again, the effects shown in the demo are what are used to test the framework. They are not the default effects that will be part of the actually released product. It is not unusual for framework test applications to look odd or even plain out ugly as their job is to push the framework and test the various capabilities.

So, no .. this isn't about wobbling things. It's about having a working hardware accelerated canvas that can be extended in several ways, one of which includes OpenGL shaders...