On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 20:44:45 -0700
Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, September 14, 2013 22:00:02 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > And besides, KDE and GNOME have always been about giving a more Windows-like (or mac-like) feel to Linux, and in no small part for the sake of new Linux users. Plus, the latest ones, KDE4 and GNOME3 were largely about re-designing things in hopes of making them easier still. (At least that's been my understanding.)
> 
> KDE 4 was more about redesigning KDE's architecture. They went with a less cartoony look and feel by default than they had for KDE 3, but ultimately, KDE 4 is a _lot_ like KDE 3, only built in a much cleaner and modular manner underneat the hood. It's main problem was that the developers released it when it still wasn't really ready (because the app developers wouldn't port to it until they released, and KDE 4 wouldn't really be ready until the app developers had ported stuff to it and found bugs - a bit of a catch 22), so initially, KDE 4 had a _lot_ of problems, which gave it a bit of a bad rep. But at this point, it works as well as KDE 3 did, and most of the features are essentially the same. Some aspects of both KDE 3 and KDE 4 are quite Windows- like (albeit generally more feature-full than what Windows provides for the same thing), though I think that it's more a case of simply not redesigning things that didn't need redesigning rather than trying to emulate Windows.
> 

Hmm, maybe KDE4 really has finally been sorted out, but when I tried it it *wasn't* a particularly early version. I'm pretty sure it was around 4.5-ish, give or take a point release. By that point people were saying the issues had been ironed out. But it was still kinda buggy (ex: the desktop just plain didn't work approx ~60% or so of the times I booted - entirely by random AFAICS), a bit slow, things were inconsistent, lots of little "lack of polish" things, and I didn't like the whole notification system (which didn't seem very well-made anyway. Ex: there were sooo many times I thought a directory copy was finished and then several second later...Oh look, a giant interruption telling me, among several other oversized stacked up bits of info I don't care about, that *now* the file copy is done).

But I dunno, this was part of Kubuntu, and I understand Canonical tended to treat that as a second-class version, so maybe they'd messed it up somehow?


> Oh well. Unfortunately, DEs tend to end up being an almost religious argument. I'm a big fan of KDE, so that's what I tend to promote, and I really don't understand some of what the Unity and Gnome guys have been up to (or the Windows 8 guys for that matter),

I really need to at least give Unity a try. I've avoided it because I didn't like the goals/motivations/theories they had been giving for it, but I don't *actually* know how it works. I should at least fire up a new scratch VM with a Live Disc iso and find out.

Windows 8 is just plain insane. After using it, I could have easily mistaken it for a bad prank if I hadn't already known better. It seems to be a clear reflection of MS's famed lack of internal coherence. It's as if they're just flailing around randomly as part of some last-ditch pre-mortem spasms. That's the only way I can think to account for it.


> as I'm of the
> opinion that the basic UI paradigms that we've had since Win95 (if
> not before) really don't need to be redesigned. We've had plenty of
> incremental improvements over the years, which is great, but it seems
> like the UI guys just can't accept that you don't need to keep
> completely redesigning stuff. It's not like we redesign door knobs or
> pots all the time. We found basic designs for them which work, and
> we've stuck with them, and at most, new designs are variations on the
> same basic design rather than being completely new. Unfortunately, it
> seems like the UI guys just can't accept that UIs are the same.
> 

Agreed. I've seen a lot of fanboyism about "it's the future, just accept it" and how I'm horrible for not being interested in trying to adapt myself to it. I've already posted my feelings on it here:

https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/don-t-be-a-trend-chump

Put simply, you're absolutely right about gratuitous redesigns: It used to be people *understood* how "time-tested and battle-proven; tried and true" was a reason to *use* something, not compulsively abandon it out of some irrational fear of "passe".

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 07:04:25 +0200
Paulo Pinto <pjmlp@progtools.org> wrote:
> 
> As for virtualization, I have also became a big fan and no longer dual boot.
> 

Yea, I almost mentioned that actually: The real killer feature of VMs IMO is that they're a very simple, safe and incredibly convenient alternative to dual-booting. Even before I discovered VMs, I swore off dual-booting a long time ago - too much of a pain, too much danger, etc. But virtualization is just a total game-changer. Hell, I don't even feel a need for my separate physical Linux box anymore.

On Sunday, September 15, 2013 02:36:33 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Hmm, maybe KDE4 really has finally been sorted out, but when I tried it it *wasn't* a particularly early version. I'm pretty sure it was around 4.5-ish, give or take a point release. By that point people were saying the issues had been ironed out. But it was still kinda buggy (ex: the desktop just plain didn't work approx ~60% or so of the times I booted - entirely by random AFAICS), a bit slow, things were inconsistent, lots of little "lack of polish" things, and I didn't like the whole notification system (which didn't seem very well-made anyway. Ex: there were sooo many times I thought a directory copy was finished and then several second later...Oh look, a giant interruption telling me, among several other oversized stacked up bits of info I don't care about, that *now* the file copy is done).

You can customize KDE quite a bit, including what notifications you get. So, you should be able to get rid of all of the notifications that you don't want by tweaking the settings in whatever program is sending the notification. For the most part, I have no problem with them though. They generally pop up on the task bar and then disappear a few seconds later.

But as to whether, KDE will work well enough for you or suit your tastes at this point, I have no idea. Overall, KDE 4 has improved quite a lot over time and bugs get fixed every release, but new bugs get introduced sometimes as well, so how much you're going to be annoyed by bugs is going to depend a lot on what you're doing I suspect.

I think that almost all of the bugs that I've dealt with in KDE for quite a while now have been in kmail (their move to akonadi for the backend has been an unmitigated disaster IMHO - the whole semantic desktop thing that they're trying to do with kdepim has been horribly implemented and we would have been much better off without it). Unfortunately, I don't like the UIs of any of the mail readers that I've tried anywhere near as much. They're all missing features that I really like in kmail. I'll probably just have to write my own mail reader one of these days to get one that both has the features I want and doesn't have any serious problems.

> But I dunno, this was part of Kubuntu, and I understand Canonical tended to treat that as a second-class version, so maybe they'd messed it up somehow?

>From what I've heard, Kubuntu is one of the worst KDE distros out there, but I
haven't done much with it, and I've never done much with debian-based distros in general. These days, I use Arch.

- Jonathan M Davis

Am 15.09.2013 09:50, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> ...
>>From what I've heard, Kubuntu is one of the worst KDE distros out there, but I
> haven't done much with it, and I've never done much with debian-based distros
> in general. These days, I use Arch.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

Mandrake and SuSE were the best ones for KDE.

Mandrake is now gone. Mandriva does not count.

SuSE screwed themselves by making patent agreements with Microsoft, thus moving the community away from them.

So nowadays I think even with its second class treatment, Kubuntu still tends to be the best option for most KDE users that want proper mainstream hardware support on their distributions.

--
Paulo

On Sunday, September 15, 2013 10:22:13 Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 15.09.2013 09:50, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> > ...
> > 
> >>From what I've heard, Kubuntu is one of the worst KDE distros out there, but I>>
> > haven't done much with it, and I've never done much with debian-based distros in general. These days, I use Arch.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> Mandrake and SuSE were the best ones for KDE.
> 
> Mandrake is now gone. Mandriva does not count.
> 
> SuSE screwed themselves by making patent agreements with Microsoft, thus moving the community away from them.
> 
> So nowadays I think even with its second class treatment, Kubuntu still tends to be the best option for most KDE users that want proper mainstream hardware support on their distributions.

As I understand it, a large portion of OpenSuSE users are KDE users rather than gnome users, and I've almost never heard anyone say anything good about Kubuntu as far as KDE goes. Almost everyone who talks about it seems to talk about how poor a KDE distro it is. I used to use OpenSuSE, and I really have no complaints about their support of KDE. They actually seem to really go the extra mile to make sure that everything is well integrated and works. And while there were certainly complaints about their patent agreements with Microsoft, I'm not aware of much negative actually coming from that. I'm not even sure that any of those are still in effect, particularly since SuSE was sold. I'm quite surprised to see someone claiming that Kubuntu is better than OpenSuSE with regards to KDE.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 2013-09-14 23:53, Peter Alexander wrote:

> Sorry, thought you meant that you had to run a Python script for every
> package, my bad.

I had to run a Python script once, to install the package manager.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2013-09-14 21:46, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> Ugh, I've been convinced for some time that Skype needs to be a
> *service*, not a "service plus god awful proprietary application".
>
> Maybe they already do, but they *really* need to allow other people to
> write Skype clients. Because they're clearly incompetent at it, and
> while their *service* is great (well, aside from willfully handing all
> your correspondence over to the government without any due process
> whatsoever) their own client applications are by far the biggest
> liability to their own business (aside from the Google-like lack of
> respect for user privacy...but almost nobody cares about that anyway,
> so it's less of a threat to them than their own broken client
> applications are.)

I'm using Adium as a Skype client. But unfortunately the standard Skupe client needs to run as well, which sucks.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Am Sat, 14 Sep 2013 21:52:52 +0200
schrieb Artur Skawina <art.08.09@gmail.com>:

> On 09/14/13 21:15, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> > So much work when one could just call the debugger from running code,
> > 
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f408b4et.aspx
> > 
> > at least on Windows. :)
> 
>    // version (x86|x86_64)
>    enum __debugbreak = q{asm { "int $3"; }};
> 
>    void main() {
>       import std.stdio;
>       auto a = 42;
>       writeln(a);
>       mixin (__debugbreak);
>       writeln(a);
>    }
> 
> 
> $ gdc -O3 -g explbp.d -o explbp
> $ gdb ./explbp
> (gdb) run
> 42

version(GNU)
{
    import gcc.builtins;
    __builtin_trap();
}

Portable, but you can't continue the program as with int 3. GCC really needs a __builtin_break.

There's also
version(Posix)
{
    import core.sys.posix.signal;
    raise(SIGTRAP);
}

which allows to continue the program. The breakpoint is in the C
raise function in libpthread however and not in main as with your mixin.

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:50:18 -0700
Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> But as to whether, KDE will work well enough for you or suit your tastes at this point, I have no idea. Overall, KDE 4 has improved quite a lot over time and bugs get fixed every release, but new bugs get introduced sometimes as well, so how much you're going to be annoyed by bugs is going to depend a lot on what you're doing I suspect.
> 

It probably is worth at least another try. Looks like there have been a considerable number of releases since I last tried (not surprised, it was a few years ago).

> I think that almost all of the bugs that I've dealt with in KDE for quite a while now have been in kmail (their move to akonadi for the backend has been an unmitigated disaster IMHO - the whole semantic desktop thing that they're trying to do with kdepim has been horribly implemented and we would have been much better off without it). Unfortunately, I don't like the UIs of any of the mail readers that I've tried anywhere near as much. They're all missing features that I really like in kmail. I'll probably just have to write my own mail reader one of these days to get one that both has the features I want and doesn't have any serious problems.
> 

Heh, we may have to collaborate. I've been using Claws Mail, just to finally get off Outlook Express, but it's terribly buggy (at least on Windows). And yet it's *still* my favorite out of everything I've tried, even over Thunderbird :/

> > But I dunno, this was part of Kubuntu, and I understand Canonical tended to treat that as a second-class version, so maybe they'd messed it up somehow?
> 
> >From what I've heard, Kubuntu is one of the worst KDE distros out there, but I
> haven't done much with it, and I've never done much with debian-based distros in general. These days, I use Arch.
> 

Yea, I don't know if they even still make Kubuntu. Arch is something I've been meaning to keep an eye on, but I'm not ready to leave Debian just yet. It's familiar. And gets the job done. And I don't really have any big complaints about it (aside from the unordered Toy Story naming system! But that's minor.) And I've got other things to do besides try out distros ;)

On 2013-09-14 10:23, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:56:14 -0400
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:
>>
>> I guess that it's a matter of perspective. Personally, I find the
>> Windows/DOS shell to be completely unusable and use git-bash when I'm
>> forced to use Windows. Windows definitely has some things going for
>> it (e.g. its graphics engine creams the horror that is X.org IMHO),
>> but on the whole, I find that Linux is just way better for a power
>> user like myself. Windows doesn't even come close to cutting it.
>>
>
> While I definitely prefer bash to the windows prompt overall, there are
> some places where I think windows makes the linux cmdline look bad.
> Like launching a GUI program instead of a CLI:
>
> Windows (nice):
> % program-cli file.txt
> % program-gui file.txt
>
> Linux (wtf?!):
> % program-cli file.txt
> % program-gui file.txt >/dev/null 2>%1 &

On Mac OS X I usually use "open" command to open a file in the default application.

$ open file.txt

Or I can explicitly specify the application:

open -a /Applications/TextEdit.app foo.txt

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg