Follow-up on the “Happy Birthday KDE!” Post

16Oct/064

Follow-up on the “Happy Birthday KDE!” Post

I got my first mass digg!

My post "Happy Birthday KDE!" resulted in a digg which directed 10,728 hits to my blog, made my blog the hotest blog on Wordpress, and also the fastest growing! I was completely baffled, I never would have imagined that such a simple post would have such effects.

The Digg discussion that ensused turned into a classic KDE vs GNOME flamewar! I respect others opinions, but I only respect them if they are based on facts! Many comments on Digg where NOT based on facts, and were just trying to spread FUD against KDE. Although some diggers had some cogent points to bring up and I can only agree to them.

First the post by traherom

Personally, I dislike KDE because:
- The look and feel is really pretty goofy. ...

- Too much crap comes with it..you waste a few gigabytes on things you'll never use.
- KDE's C++ "signals and slots" sucks. It really is a good idea, but when you have to use special macros to do non-standard C++ crap and use an extra processor (qmake) just to test develop a simple program...

The first point the reader raises is hard to argue with since perception of art and hence the KDE themes is very subjective, I can only say that they appeal to me greatly, and GNOME looks a bit dull to me.

The second point the digger raises is poor FUD . "Too much crap comes with it", sorry but if you do not like some KDE software don't install it! KDE is very modular, no one is forcing you to install every software. I personally dislike KOffice, so I never install it, same with the graphics packages. I have a complete installation minus KOffice, and it takes 180MB, KOffice is 16 MB download, and probably takes some 40 MB more, so 220MB is the complete KDE size, as compared to "gigabytes" as claimed in the post.

I dont understand that third point, or how it's related to KDE, "signal and slots" was invented by Trolltech and implemented in Qt, KDE was developed on Qt. The fact that there are so many application on KDE, shows that "signal and slots" is a real world proven concept. If it doesnt suite your purpose dont use it!

Another post by entu:

My only real problem with KDE is the way that it tries to do EVERYTHING.

Office / productivity apps suck compared to open office
Konquerer sucks compared to Firefox
and the list goes on.

I much prefer the GNOME approach of focusing on building a great desktop, and not building every single application. Most of the KDE apps never get used because you wind up using superior alternatives.

Now, KDE does do some things well (KDevelop and Konquerer *as a file browser* being good examples). I just wish they'd focus on making separate products on not one giant bucket that attempts to do everything.

I really agree with this post, KDE is a HUGE desktop environment, it maybe overstretching it self, by providing KDE alternatives for everything on the planet. As I already said KOffice doesnt fit my purposes, in the original post I already mentioned that Konqueror has troubles with some AJAX functionality. But KDE does have some good software, which may beat other alternatives on alternate desktops.

A majority of the posts in the digging mentioned that KDE is too "bloated", I dont know what they precisely mean with bloat, but if they mean it comes with too much software, yes it does but you can customize. If they however mean that KDE takes too much resources, its true, it does take too much resources. Not long ago I used to run KDE on a machine with 256MB RAM, it used to work fine if you open a limited number of windows, but as soon as the number of opened applications increased portotionally the performance detoriated until it came to a point where nothing would work, and I would have t restart the X-server. But have a look around in the computing world, is software bloat only a KDE problem? I see it everywhere in MacOSX, Linux and on Windows, increasingly softwares demand more resources, but it doesnt make the software less useful!

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Kevin Krammer

Some clarification on the “signals and slots” part.

qmake is not a preprocessor, it is a makefile generator, like cmake or autoconf/automake. A developer can always use a different buildsystem or write Makefiles manually, just like with any other library.

What the person probably meant is MOC, which isn’t a preprocessor either, but a code generator. It generates C++ code based on markup in the code. Obviously a developer can write this code manually as well, but it is usually more convenient to concentrate on the domain specific problems and let tools handle the boring parts.
http://traherom.wordpress.com/ Ryan Morehart

@Krammer

Hm… I stand (mostly) corrected. Anyways, my point was I don’t like the signals and slots concept because it (esentially) extends C++. I’ve never done extremely in depth Qt programming so all I know/knew is that you have to run qmake before make.

Just defending my, and a lot of other people’s, view about the stuff which comes with KDE: (sorry, don’t want to start a flame war here, but I am quoted in the post. Right of reply and all that. ;>)

Yes, you can customize what exactly you get with it, but say you install KDE* from the Ubuntu repos (starting from an ubuntu, not kubuntu, base, obviously). It depends on a bazillion things, most of which I’ll never use. I could go through and individually select each package, but how do I know what’s important (such as the control panel) and what’s not (such as that silly “kwin” game**)?

Ryan Morehart, AKA traherom
(spell my last name backwards… there ya go)

* Let’s assume I don’t want to go the “apt-get install kubuntu” route because I don’t want to bork my entire install with a weird hybrid of the two.

** Yes, I am aware that’s the window manager. But is the fact that it is important blazingly obvious?
http://www.hosting-masters.org/ Helen

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. So always find people to share your joy, and they will be there in time to grief you.
http://apachesecrets.info/fullsitemap.php Apache Secrets

Obviously I\’m not alone here with regard to an interest in apache. What an interesting subject. Thanks for your thoughtful insights.