KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Released

[BlackStar]

In two years we'll all be running iPads on OS X.

Or gPads with Chrome OS. Now, that's a thought...

[kraftman]

The whole thing reminds me of an old blonde joke.

How many KDE4 installs does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. It simply holds the light bulb above its head and waits for the world to revolve around it.

Not world, but some drivers. It runs very good on Open Source Radeon driver.

Why not use a more widely supported mechanic (or at least provide the option to) until better support for the newer mechanic materializes. I certainly don't have a lot of faith in ATI, for example, to adapt to KDE in a timely manner.

What I found KDE 4 depends heavily on X RENDER extension and some drivers had serious problems with this - like nVidia. Gtk is here since ages and it's still slow on my card, so I don't know what could be more widely supported mechanic Maybe if they wouldn't made it depend on mentioned X RENDER there wouldn't be such problems, but maybe nobody expected them? If problems are in drivers those aren't KDE problems and if someone bashes KDE, because of graphic driver problems it's bad in my opinion :>

[kraftman]

Personally, I just wanted to see how long would it take for someone to mention Gnome once I bashed KDE4 (without mentioning Gnome at all). Think of it as an insipid social experiment on the mechanics of trolling.

This experiment is biased, because of obvious reason ;>

[val-gaav]

Good, good, things are rolling now, keep it up!
I find it hilarious that KDE fanboys regularly bash distrowatch.com as biased when it shows that Gnome-centric distros dominate, yet at the same time can refer to linuxquestions.org as if it was an unbiased source.

You really don't know how many users of those "gnome centric" distros use KDE instead.

BTW From current top 10 distros on distrowatch :

Gnome as default : Ubuntu , Fedora, Mint, Debian
KDE as default : OpenSUSE , Mandriva, PCLinuxOS
no default environment: Sabayon, Arch
JWM based : Puppy

Yeah it's so clear that Gnome-centric distros dominate...

[Joe Sixpack]

Why not use a more widely supported mechanic (or at least provide the option to) until better support for the newer mechanic materializes.

Umm... they do, and that mechanic is QT. QT is superior to GTK+ in every_single_way, including ease of use for developers and Windows integration. If it wasn't for all that GNU fanatical bullshit or that LGPL is tainted foolishness GTK+ would have died out a long time ago. Now we're stuck with it because so many apps use it.

Don't blame QT for Nvidia's and ATI's mistakes.

[yotambien]

KDE has been always the most used DE.

Yeah, on the other hand, what else could we expect from somebody whose nick is KDesk.

What I found KDE 4 depends heavily on X RENDER extension and some drivers had serious problems with this - like nVidia. Gtk is here since ages and it's still slow on my card, so I don't know what could be more widely supported mechanic Maybe if they wouldn't made it depend on mentioned X RENDER there wouldn't be such problems, but maybe nobody expected them? If problems are in drivers those aren't KDE problems and if someone bashes KDE, because of graphic driver problems it's bad in my opinion :>

I don't know where I took this from--perhaps I dreamed it or I'm just making it up--but I also think that the X render extension is related to this. For sure, that's what causes VNC sessions to KDE4 applications to appear all messed up. I'm a bit with Jimmy and a bit with Kraftman, though. See, the response some KDE developer gave to a bug reporter about the VNC issue was around the lines of "get a real VNC server". I can tell you the options were not that many (the only one that worked for me was x11vnc, but that requires you to have an already running 'real' X11 session so it's totally pointless). The KDE people probably knew this, as they probably knew that relying on something that wasn't optimised in the drivers would cause problems. Bu then, of course, if at some point you don't go for it you risk stagnation...tricky one.

[BlackStar]

You really don't know how many users of those "gnome centric" distros use KDE instead.

BTW From current top 10 distros on distrowatch :

Gnome as default : Ubuntu , Fedora, Mint, Debian
KDE as default : OpenSUSE , Mandriva, PCLinuxOS
no default environment: Sabayon, Arch
JWM based : Puppy

Yeah it's so clear that Gnome-centric distros dominate...

sizeof(Ubuntu + Fedora + Mint + Debian) = 2 * sizeof(openSUSE + Mandriva + PCLinuxOS)

Even more importantly, Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/Debian are all increasing in popularity, whereas openSUSE is decreasing and PCLinuxOS is static.

So yes, according to distrowatch Gnome-centric distros dominate.

[L33F3R]

KDE has been always the most used DE.

Some polls from LinuxQuestions.org:

you just shot yourself in the foot with the 2009 poll .

kde used to be FAR more used. I remember it being my very first actually.

[BlackStar]

Google trends shows that KDE and Gnome have roughly the same search volume, with Gnome slightly ahead. Interestingly, the search volume for both projects seems to be going down. (source)

Regarding distros, Google trends shows a veritable explosion in Ubuntu and a gradual decline in Debian and Fedora (which happen to be uncannily close in terms of volume). OpenSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS don't even register in comparison. (source)

As always, these statistics are not definitive, are affected by regional google usage variation and a host of other factors. I won't attempt to draw conclusions from the data, but I think the image is telling enough: Ubuntu alone generates more searches than every other linux distro combined. Moreover, every distro outside Ubuntu seems to be in decline as far as search volume is concerned.

[leidola]

QT is superior to GTK+ in every_single_way, including ease of use for developers and Windows integration.

I don't agree with you. There is at least one thing you can't do using Qt I wanted to do in my application:

I created a viewer/analyse tool for simulation data I generate using a monte carlo simulation, which runs on a headless cluster. This tool also generates some nice graphics in batch mode. Using cairo this is quiet easy: you create your PDF/eps drawing context and just draw to it. This works without X11. You can create the same images with Qt using the QPainter class (which is in turn used by QPrinter) to create a pdf/eps file. BUT you need an instance of QApplication, which in turn needs a working DISPLAY variable -- and this is simply not available on a headless number cruncher. I know that there are ways to resolve this (fake X server etc.) but this is not my point.

GTK+ seems to follow more the good old Unix spirit of having one good tool for a special usage and combining multiple tools for doing a special task. GTK+ uses a good drawing library (cairo) for drawing stuff and a very nice C library (glib) for strings, memory etc. But all the components which are uses by GTK+ function on their own. You can even use cairo in SDL for drawing stuff. The integration of Qt is not always good. That's why they split it in later versions. But maybe they didn't think that a console application might want to print something .

I programmed using both toolkits, GTK+ (using the plain good old C interface, gtkmm any python) and Qt (using C++ and python) and like them both. But the gtkmm and python interface of GTK seem to me more polished than Qt's counterparts though Qt seems more complete (feature-wise).