On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 18:40:17 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Well that's good to hear. KDE4 went through the same path. After spending time with KDE4, I found it to be it a terrible blunder of an upgrade even after, several point releases in, people were saying it had finally been fixed. It still has some warts that annoy me (and some things I just gave in on), but it's finally won me back from my hiatus with XFCE/LXDE. Looking forward to v5 stabilizing further.

IIRC, KDE 4 really became properly usable around 4.2, and of course, around that time, kmail when to hell in a handbasket, because they added that akonadi trash to kdepim and switched to that for kmail's backend. *bleh*

kmail has a great UI, but its backend sucks big time, and since AFAIK, they've never acknowledged that it's a horrible design, they're probably never going to fix it... :(

Oh, well. On the whole, KDE 4 has been quite solid for quite a long time now, and nothing else even comes close to what I'm looking for. Fortunately, the transition to KDE 5 should be much smoother, because they don't have to redesign all of the guts this time. But still, I'd just as soon not jump on it very quickly.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 10/06/2015 02:53 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 18:40:17 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Well that's good to hear. KDE4 went through the same path. After
>> spending time with KDE4, I found it to be it a terrible blunder of an
>> upgrade even after, several point releases in, people were saying it
>> had finally been fixed. It still has some warts that annoy me (and
>> some things I just gave in on), but it's finally won me back from my
>> hiatus with XFCE/LXDE. Looking forward to v5 stabilizing further.
>
> IIRC, KDE 4 really became properly usable around 4.2

?!?

It must've been REALLY bad before that! I think I first tried it around v4.4-v4.6-ish and thus became an immediate fan of the TrinityDE project ;) At that point, KDE4 just felt to me very clumsy, unpolished, sluggish and borderline broken.

>, and of course,
> around that time, kmail when to hell in a handbasket, because they added
> that akonadi trash to kdepim and switched to that for kmail's backend.
> *bleh*
>
> kmail has a great UI, but its backend sucks big time, and since AFAIK,
> they've never acknowledged that it's a horrible design, they're probably
> never going to fix it... :(

One of the projects still on my bucket list (and will likely remain there indefinitely, the way things seem to go...) is a desktop GUI mail/ng client. It pains me that I've wound up settling for Thunderbird :(

Desktop mail clients pretty much evaporated once everyone jumped on the webmail bandwagons. And now everyone hates email because it's "such a pain", but...uhh...yea...if you're webmailing it, it's no freaking wonder!

>
> Oh, well. On the whole, KDE 4 has been quite solid for quite a long time
> now, and nothing else even comes close to what I'm looking for.
> Fortunately, the transition to KDE 5 should be much smoother, because
> they don't have to redesign all of the guts this time. But still, I'd
> just as soon not jump on it very quickly.
>

///ditto to all that ;)

On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 19:23:40 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 10/06/2015 02:53 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 18:40:17 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> Well that's good to hear. KDE4 went through the same path. After
>>> spending time with KDE4, I found it to be it a terrible blunder of an
>>> upgrade even after, several point releases in, people were saying it
>>> had finally been fixed. It still has some warts that annoy me (and
>>> some things I just gave in on), but it's finally won me back from my
>>> hiatus with XFCE/LXDE. Looking forward to v5 stabilizing further.
>>
>> IIRC, KDE 4 really became properly usable around 4.2
>
> ?!?
>
> It must've been REALLY bad before that! I think I first tried it around v4.4-v4.6-ish and thus became an immediate fan of the TrinityDE project ;) At that point, KDE4 just felt to me very clumsy, unpolished, sluggish and borderline broken.

LOL. Fedora was actually crazy enough to release KDE 4.0.1. I didn't use that on my home computer, but the computers at school did. It's one thing for someone to do it purposefully; it's quite another to release it as the normal version to use with the distro. Now, I _did_ purposefully install it on whatever distro I was using at the time (OpenSuSE IIRC), and it was truly bad. So, I guess that I was a glutton for punishment, but I _definitely_ grabbed ever update as soon as I could.

I don't really blame them for releasing it like that, because they were between a rock and a hard place (until they released it, most of the apps wouldn't be updated, and until the apps were updated, it was going to be trash), but for a distro to actually do a release with it was just crazy.

I definitely don't remember there being much in the way of problems with 4.4 and later, but I'd also dealt with the insanity of the really early stuff. It probably did need to be released like it was, but only the crazy folks like me who installed it purposefully should have been using it.

> One of the projects still on my bucket list (and will likely remain there indefinitely, the way things seem to go...) is a desktop GUI mail/ng client. It pains me that I've wound up settling for Thunderbird :(

LOL. That's also on my todo list, though the farthest I've gotten is a partially finished library implementing the RFC for the internet message format. I'll probably get back to it after I finish some more stuff for Phobos. But it's going to take a _very_ long time to finish all of the pieces, especially since I'd like to write pretty much all of it in D. :)

For now, I actually put up with kmail, but man do I hate akonadi. Worst thing to ever happen to KDE IMHO. How on earth could anyone think that it was a good idea to have a server for each of your e-mail accounts and treat the e-mail application like a client for each of those servers? I bet if someone forked KDE and put a real backend on it, a bunch of folks would jump on the fork. But if I'm going to go to that much work, I'd rather just write my own.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, 5 October 2015 at 16:35:39 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> As far as I am aware SWT is only used in Eclipse.

Eclipse can be used to create light-weight RCP apps which include SWT.

For example, at work we've used swt-xy-graph in some light-weight apps.  There is also a light-weight swtchart program that was easy to use.

https://code.google.com/p/swt-xy-graph/
http://www.swtchart.org/doc/index.html

The D Poseidon IDE app is a nice example of use of an early version of DWT.  Very light-weight, and looks a lot like earlier versions of eclipse (3.x'ish).

http://www.dsource.org/projects/poseidon

The current eclipse IDE gui provides a way to manipulate the window layout by modifying emf models of the IDE.