Of Straws and Camels

Story: KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It QuitsTotal Replies: 23
Author Content
helios

Jun 26, 2012
1:32 PM EDT
I am truly sorry to hear this but it's not surprising. Obviously KDE is going in directions that he is not comfortable with or can agree. It's a shame to see such talent walk away but I can't imagine the pressure he must be feeling as a lead developer with KDE. They took such a battering over the 4.0 release, I am surprised that exits like this did not take place sooner. It is probably more disheartning to other devs since KDE seems to be coming out of the fog of change and heading in the right direction...at least for many. I'd be curious to see if this draws any remarks from the other devs.

Not judging one way or another but it has to be damning when one of your main guys walks away, saying the DE just isn't usable for him.

That's gotta sting.
Scott_Ruecker

Jun 26, 2012
1:48 PM EDT
Quoting:I am surprised that exits like this did not take place sooner.


I have been expecting this for some time myself Helios. The amount of heat the KDE devs have been going through is not something i could handle for as long as they have..
tuxchick

Jun 26, 2012
2:20 PM EDT
KDE4 is pretty nice, and has been for the last few releases. Since he doesn't want to be specific, oh well. I get a distinct impression of "KDE is not Winderz or Mac", and my guess is he likes Mac and that's his main computer now. Hey, my wild guess is as good as anyone else's. If I wanted Mac or Winderz that's what I would use.
Fettoosh

Jun 26, 2012
4:19 PM EDT
That is really sad and unfortunate. Peter did an excellent job getting Dolphin to what it is now, which is one of the best file managers if not the best.

I too would like to know what were his reasons to give up like he did. I wish he would say exactly what is on his mind, but in the mean time, I think I have a good hunch.

Most probably, he doesn't agree with the direction KDE is going, and specifically doesn't agree with the desktop having Semantic Search and Activities Methodology. These two concepts make a file manager less relevant & used less. Consequently, it wouldn't be worth the time and effort to maintain, enhance, and expand.

I hope I am wrong about the reason, and I am sure many people aren't too enthusiastic about these two concepts and would still be using a file manager quite a bit.



gus3

Jun 26, 2012
4:43 PM EDT
Explanation here:

http://ppenz.blogspot.nl/2012/06/dolphin-21.html
jdixon

Jun 26, 2012
4:43 PM EDT
> I get a distinct impression of "KDE is not Winderz or Mac",

That was the impression I was getting too.
montezuma

Jun 26, 2012
5:50 PM EDT
Also sounds like he was reluctant to be more specific about his dissatisfaction as a *user* of KDE because he did not want to upset other developers with whom he had a personal relationship.
JaseP

Jun 26, 2012
6:48 PM EDT
I blame the focus on the Akonadi & Nepomuk and the social desktop stuff... I find if you disable that garbage, you get a nice, efficient desktop. If they want the Facebook integration garbage, it should be a feature you turn on,... not hunt to disable when you don't want it.
tuxchick

Jun 26, 2012
6:59 PM EDT
Akonadi & Nepomuk drive me nuts because they are hoggy, but they also have big potential. Try doing a search from inside Dolphin-- you might be surprised at how fast and thorough it is, and how flexible it is for a GUI thingy.
claudecat

Jun 26, 2012
7:04 PM EDT
This is a shame... dolphin really is a great file manager - one of the best aspects of KDE. My hope is that they keep it rather than moving on to something new, as they did in moving from konqueror to dolphin. I agree that the akonadi/nepomuk/social stuff should be opt-in.
helios

Jun 27, 2012
2:37 AM EDT
as they did in moving from konqueror to dolphin

It's the little things really.....

You know what drove me nuts about the new focus on Dolphin over Konq?

I spend an inordinate amount of time in my file manager. In Konq, there was one beautiful feature that I cherished. My basic mouse gestures worked in Konq. I have not worked in a KDE 4 environment in years so I don't know if they implemented it or not but what I did find mostly acceptable is that my side mouse buttons work for back and forward in history within Nautilus.

Yeah, it's a little, piddly thing but a thing that gives my poor, untreated carpal tunnel blessed relief. Again it's been years ago but when I mentioned this several times on the dolphin forums and IRC channel, I was either ignored or told that this wasn't a feature enough users demanded to justify the effort. And again, of straws and camels, it was an accumulation of disappointments like this that eventually brought me into the Gnome camp.

At the time, I remember thinking how spartan and bland Gnome was in comparison to KDE but I learned to appreciate its simplicity and ease of use.

I am sure this Dev decided not to chunk stones at other KDE Devs out of courtesy and friendship. I've held my tongue on several issues for the same reason. Sometimes being right dwindles in importance when being so loses you friends and associates.
nikkels

Jun 27, 2012
2:38 AM EDT
claudecat "" as they did in moving from konqueror to dolphin"" They didn't move from...to... Both were available, and I personally haven't used Dolphin once in the last 2 years, and probably won't anytime soon.

each to his own
claudecat

Jun 27, 2012
2:54 AM EDT
I guess I was late to the party... by the time I became a KDE user dolphin was the default file manager and I never used konqueror much aside from occasionally as a web browser. I've just gotten used to it - along with mc, and it does things that I depend on that I haven't found elsewhere. Konqueror looks pretty flexible though. I'll have to explore it more fully.
tuxchick

Jun 27, 2012
3:43 AM EDT
Quoting: I am sure this Dev decided not to chunk stones at other KDE Devs out of courtesy and friendship. I've held my tongue on several issues for the same reason. Sometimes being right dwindles in importance when being so loses you friends and associates.


Oh great, now I'm wondering what I said and when you're going to quit being so darn saintly about it.
helios

Jun 27, 2012
3:54 AM EDT
LOL Carla....you are the LAST person that should worry about that. Besides....I have buckets of "saintly" in reserve.
tracyanne

Jun 27, 2012
3:57 AM EDT
Whew, for a moment there I thought it was something I said.

This is sad, especially as how he won't be specific.
JaseP

Jun 27, 2012
10:52 AM EDT
Quoting: Akonadi & Nepomuk drive me nuts because they are hoggy, but they also have big potential. Try doing a search from inside Dolphin-- you might be surprised at how fast and thorough it is, and how flexible it is for a GUI thingy.


True, they've got potential,... But, they have completely failed to realize that any daemons or services need to be lightweight, if they are residing in the background. The fact that these things re-index on their own, start hogging CPU and disk I/O while a user is working on the system, etc. is totally unacceptable. They've abandoned one of the cardinal tenants in open source software,... that the user is in control. The bottom line is that these things should be disabled by default, and when something needs them, the user should be prompted to configure them at that time, so that they can make sure they are only doing as much as the user wants.
tuxchick

Jun 27, 2012
11:06 AM EDT
It's not that bad, JaseP-- there is an icon in the panel to turn it on and off, and a control panel in System Settings. It's easy.
JaseP

Jun 27, 2012
11:30 AM EDT
The control panel stuff doesn't shut it down completely. For that, you have to edit the configs. Personally, I'd like a user space blacklist with its own config file. Maybe one exists, and I never learned about it...
gus3

Jun 27, 2012
12:42 PM EDT
chmod -x cures many ills.
Fettoosh

Jun 27, 2012
1:20 PM EDT
Quoting:They've abandoned one of the cardinal tenants in open source software,... that the user is in control. ... The control panel stuff doesn't shut it down completely.


The user has always been in control with KDE, but the user has to know what needs to be done and how to do it.

KDE doesn't dictate to Distro packagers how to configure the applications, I wouldn't put all the blame on KDE.

All what you said is currently being done. Services are turned off by default and if not, stopping them services from within System Settings does in fact turn off everything and remain turned off even after upgrades. I never needed any editing done to turn them off.



Koriel

Jun 27, 2012
3:15 PM EDT
Its a sad day but im going to agree with Fettoosh on this one, I have been trying out various distro's lately about 6 of the major ones so far as part of my testing regime and all of them now disable Akonadi & Nepomuk by default. Mageia 2 has been the best so far with a consumption of 0.19GB at startup once I got rid of the Telepathy crap which impressed me a lot, ROSA came in at 0.24GB these figures are all far better than I was getting 6-8 months ago which were at 0.35GB +

The only thing I can fault them on, is though they turned off Akonadi & Nepomuk I still get desktop notifications telling me they are turned off especially in the case of Nepomuk im sure their is a way to turn them off in the Notification settings though I just haven't been bothered to look.

To be honest I don't believe this should be left to the distro makers it should be KDE who should default to off and let users or distro makers turn it on if it is required.

My tuppence worth.
tuxchick

Jun 27, 2012
5:56 PM EDT
Now you hit my hot button-- notifications. This I say to notifications: STFU.
gus3

Jun 27, 2012
6:22 PM EDT
I can only wish I had a notification that my 19G partition was 40M from full...

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