einar wrote:It didn't function well at all from a code perspective. It's like having a nice front for a house and behind it a mess of randomly-attached pieces.

I don't doubt the back-end code needed tidying up. But the house didn't need its façade demolished while what was behind it was being fixed. They had a perfectly nice-looking interface, so there was no need to redesign it just because they could. Leaving it alone would have been the best option.

Hi.

I updated KDE to 4.2.4 form 4.2.3 yesterday and ind the last few Minutes gave Amarok2 a new chance, since I read the palylist was improved over 2.0.

First of all: How do I properly remove that big, centered area where I should put applets/widgets/whateverthesethingsarecalled? If I just make it "slim", the collapsing and expanding of the left column doesn't work.. the space isn't freed up correctly.

Then the funcitionality: I don't get any sound.
Aparently Amarok 2 relies on phonon, which thinks the front-channel-output of my soundcard does not work.. it is grayed out. Impressive.

And to phonon itself: What is phonon? What does it do for me? Why would I want it?
Who would want his computer to beep or make silly noises when logging in or receiving mail anyways?
I just don't get it.

And once again it's "emerge -C amarok && emerge amarok:0" for me.

Sorry for using this forum to release my anger, but I don't wanna yell at my poor CRT.. it's old, innocent and doesn't deserve to be yelled at.

Phonon is simply a wrapper that provides a sound API, regardless of the sound system used. There are several backends for it, Xine, Gstreamer (which I immediately remove), and others in development. It was made to avoid the mess that was arts in the 3.5.x days, so that even if the underlying sound systems change, it's a matter of only providing a backend, rather than rewriting everything.

Hello All,

it's nice to see a thread about what goes "behind the scenes" in the KDE development.

I've been a KDE user since I don't remember when. I think the new KDE4 has some really nice features. It looks really good, especially when I use the "Evening Lilal" colors that gave me incredibly sharp fornts I've never seen before. I even like those plasma stuff (forgive me my ignorance) and widgets. I can understand some people have lost features that were in KDE3, which I will miss too a little bit. But in general I think we must understand KDE4 is new and I hope the changes are related to programmig efficiency. I think KDE4 looks good and it will become mature shortly.

Of course Amarok is the only mp3 player I use and it's got a lot of things missing too, so I hope the new releases will bring back the features we used to have, like the Equalizer, which oddly some people regard as usesless, which I would not agree with.
But Amarok is not KDE, so I'll leave this subject.

As for me I am now on KDE4.2.4 on Sabayon-Gentoo. I think it's peforming well on my new x86_64 AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor and a dedicated graphics card. The real test will be on my old P4 laptop. KDE3 was really slugish, but that could have been the Sabayon distro itself.

I would though like to ask a question about file managers. We now have Dolphin that has a nice feature to recognize and mount my USB media and it nicely mounts and goes to my second Windows Vista drive I have (but don't use Vista :-P). Will this be available with Konqueror?

Konqueror for many years was my choice as for file management. I always used the Image View (integrated with GWenview) to browse through my picture folders. In fact Konquerror in KDE3 was brilliant. I would configure the toolbars, which I also can with Dolhpin.
Will Konqueror eventually die as a file manager? If so, is that Image View feature going to be available (as an example)? Is it not present because work on Dolphin has just begun and new features will be available later?

Best regards,
Richard.