i've been running a full on kde4 session on my desktop for a while now. i'm using amarok2 to play my music even. the interface is still very unfinished in the new amarok as they are still in early days development wise, but already the shape of things coming can be seen and i have to say i'm pretty excited about it.
kwin composite is getting better and better, and the window management plugins rock, but it is still a bit too slow for me to deal with. at the recent rate of improvement, though, i hope that will be a different story in the near future =)
for everything else, i'm using kde3 apps with no problems whatsoever. they start up and run fast and well and ... it's all very unexciting. which is good news: this means that for apps not ready for 4.0 we can continue to use the kde3 versions.
oxygen is coming together very nicely these days, too. Girish @ TT fixed a stylesheet related bug that was plaguing lineedits, and the patch is already in qt-copy .. they look much better now. =) i'm not a fan of the red colour used for keyboard focus, but boy are things coming together day by day ... e.g. the tabs in konsole are looking whole again.
still bugs and performance issues around, but i'm very comfortable now in the kde4 session. this is great news given how close we are to a release =)
switching gears now:
Microsoft's bribery attempt in Nigeria has been headed off ... for now at least. that means 17,000 more KDE systems (with how many users per system, i wonder?) via Mandriva. and if Nigeria can keep Microsoft's money slut paws off of things, it looks like that will expand to 100k units with time.
another interesting point from that same article: two out of the three operating system Intel has certified on the classmate PC default to KDE. the third OS? Windows XP.
to Microsoft: our market share will continue to grow. your money and lack of ethics can't stop that. so maybe it's time you stop fighting and start cooperating? i know many of your more technical people think exactly that ... it's time to get your upper management on the new meds. as the saying goes, "to cross the river, do not fight the river".
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All the KDE4 stuff sounds great and I'm extremely excited to hear about the outcome of the whole Nigerian thing! That really got my blood boiling when I first heard about it!!
I'm also using a KDE 4 session now fulltime. Unfortunately there is some problem with building from SVN, which I don't have time to solve, so I'm just using the KDE4 packages in Debian sid. They are from the last beta, so somewhat out of date, but it is already of reasonable quality. With some care I can get all my work done.
For a while I was running Gnome+KDE4 apps (because installing KDE4 broke my KDE3 session), but I find even in the currently somewhat broken state, I prefer KDE :) Meta+Right click drag to resize windows is worth the switch on its own. No luck getting Kwin composite to work yet though. It just says my system is not supported, even though compiz fusion works just fine (Nvidia 7xxx or some such board with prop. drivers).
It's looking good!
I can't wait to get KDE 4 running from SVN, haven't managed it yet, because of an issue when checking out the files, but someday...
For now I'm stuck with the Beta 3 packages provided by the Kubuntu MOTU.
"to Microsoft: our market share will continue to grow. your money and lack of ethics can't stop that.
See, I can't say this is true. Sorry, I don't mean to cause trouble again, but Microsoft has got it right - they focus on the user, where KDE is more developer focused. Combine this with their every attempt at lock-in, an you have a good hold on the naive... The mass of users is too dumb to care. Only developers know to discriminate.
I think if we are to beat Microsoft, that we can negate the lock-in with openness, but that is only a factor they've come to appreciate AFTER they've decided. And even then they are guaranteed to switch.
It is better to win them over with the user experience. But we can't just equal it, we have to surpass it because users need a compelling reason to take on the task of learning something new. When you combine that with no lock-in then you have a very compelling platform. This is why I am worried that 4.0 is not all that it should be. Last time you cited me, you defended your actions with developer reasons for 4.0, not user reasons. As long as users remain in the back seat, over taking Microsoft will be hard. If you look at their decisions - they never had the best technology - but they've had the best presentation to the user, you will see why this company was able to get the market share it has - by focusing on user experience, even when it goes against technical perfection. This made a market that goes well beyond that which scientists and engineers could grab through technical design perfection. (Win vs [OS2|Linux|OSX] anyone?)
@Scorp1us:
"you defended your actions with developer reasons for 4.0, not user reasons."
you say that as if those are mutually exclusive actions. they aren't. to get to the user required result, we need to go through the developer required results. this is the part i'm really wishing more users would trust us on: open source is a different development methodology, but though the path is different the target can be the same.
this has nothing to do with the point in this blog entry, though, which is that we are gaining market share (undeniable) and that Microsoft can't swindle us out of it. they'll have to actually compete fairly. they lost doing that in Nigeria, so they attempted bribery, something which usually worked for them in the past when up against other companies.
"As long as users remain in the back seat,"
users aren't in the back seat. you have to stop making this false dichotomy of developer vs. user to understand how this gets put together.
"over taking Microsoft will be hard. If you look at their decisions - they never had the best technology - but they've had the best presentation to the user,"
which is why Apple is therefore the market leader... wait. they aren't.
"you will see why this company was able to get the market share it has - by focusing on user experience, even when it goes against technical perfection."
no, they have the market share they have through illegal monopolistic behaviour and predatory behaviour in the market that i would categorically summarize as unethical.
consider that Free software might represent an end run around this behaviour, and suddenly Microsoft is forced to actually compete on quality, price, performance, reliability, customer care and risk profile (e.g. single vendor vs multiple vendor; open standards vs closed; etc)
that's the crucial point here.
as for keeping the user first in mind, i invite you to examine the big movements we've made with kde4 and think about how many of them are relevant to the user experience.
you'll find we have a rather sharp focus on the market.
I agree completely that MS should "cross the river rather than fight it". However, I think that MS management are genetically incapable of doing that. Dodgy deals (e.g. a b-word that rhymes with "library") are hard-wired into their genome...
I think the free software movement combines in it what it takes to finally take over or at least snatch a large portion of market share.
We may not have the best technology in all areas but the speed of development is so fast that we will have eclipsed most proprietary competitors in 5-10 years. We are not a company spending millions on advertisement but we have an army of committed users spreading the word and getting friends and relatives to install GNU Linux/Free Software.
I think microsofts strategies worked against other companies but they are not effective against a community. I switched to Linux about 6-7 years ago. Looking back, I see enormous achievements made by the FOSS community within this rather short period of time.
There is a long way to go but we are getting somewhere. Just look at the signs. A few years ago there was no serios market for Linux Desktops. Now we have Dell, HP, Asus shipping Desktop PC's. We have the XO project and also the classmate shipping with Linux/KDE. One must be blind to not notice the progress.
"to Microsoft: our market share will continue to grow. your money and lack of ethics can't stop that. so maybe it's time you stop fighting and start cooperating"
So we can flame those you cooperate with...Like Novell, XandrosOS and Linspire :P. Really, when they cooperate the OSS-community think they have evil plans, if they don we assume they have evil plans. Not so much choice
Or did you mean something else?
* Yes, KDE4 is coming together. Now I am playing with it for more then 15 minutes. Have to do with openSUSE buildservice RPM's and Amarok does not have a collection yet.....but it is really nice allready :D *
"So we can flame those you cooperate with"
unfortunately these deals are only partly about cooperation. they are also about stabbing a knife into the back of those who enter into these agreements by maing statements about "intelectual property violation" boogey men.
It's great to hear that this issue has been resoveld in favour of kde. Being a nigerian and a kde addict i am very pleased that more of my country men will enjoy the wonderful experience of kde. I feel that africa cannot afford to waste its resources on microsoft. Open source is the way to go and it can only keep on getting
better (World domination one step @ a time). aseigo you are doing a marvelous job and i'll really like you to keep it up. We look to people like you as role models in the open source world.
way to go! Kde 4.
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