"developers do what they like" and "praise the developers as they work for free" is hobby, not business.

well, to be honest, it is not a hobby, it is Open Source. That's how it works since it exists.

samhain wrote:"developers do what they like" and "praise the developers as they work for free" is hobby, not business.

A couple of points:

1. Since when is commercial/business project a synonym of higher quality? It sometimes (and maybe even often) is, but there's no guarantee.

2. I fail to see how "forcing" a programmer, whether paid or not, to work in area where he or she has no interest in working would increase the quality of his or her work. I'd argue that it's more likely to be the opposite. I can only vouch for myself here (and it's in no way KDE-related but as a comparison it works): I produce far better results when I work on something I enjoy doing in my line of work rather than when it's something that must be done. IMO, the best way to solve that is, while not always doable, to find someone that likes what the other one(s) finds a chore.

3. I also fail to see why there's a need for a split between business and hobby. They can go hand in hand, and if it wasn't for hobby-users we wouldn't even have KDE today - never mind Linux. But if business is what you want...Mandriva is paying to get the KDE4 version of K3B up to par. Nokia finances Qt-development. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Intel, IBM to name but a few also finances some Linux development (not necessarily directly tied to KDE but things that KDE can utilize nonetheless).

4. Some people can hack on Kwin/khtml/whatever user X thinks should have a higher priority. Not everyone can. If someone who can't instead wants to contribute in another area, and do it well, it would be really stupid to tell him or her not to bother. Whatever that other area may be, if he's told not to bother that area will (until/if someone else steps in) be left unattended. It won't help khtml, kwin, or whatever in the slightest. It only means that we've lost one developer that could have helped in ways we can't anticipate beforehand.

In short, the division between a hobby project and a commercial one is _really_ blurry and a line that, when drawn, does not help anyone.

That is not consistent: on one hand you tell people "fake transparency wont happen", even as a developer has a working patch. On the other hand you say "we cannot tell them what to do". Do you want to say there is no "masterplan" to what KDE4 should be developed?

There are design decisions, and those are made on technical terms. Deciding to work on X rather than Y is another matter entirely.

cwizard wrote:

Kryten2X4B wrote:

cwizard wrote:Throw in the evil triplets, Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk, and the whole thing (4.xx) is starting to smell like that bloatware from kids at mickeysoft.

If you think those are so bad (at least for now), don't use them. They're easy enough to turn off and not essential.

Interesing that you should bring that up, because I did just that several days ago. Then yesterday afternoon I booted up the computer, signed on, entered "startx" and the splash screen came up and froze. No hard disk activity and no icons in the panel in the center of the screen. I left it that way to get back to the football game and came back 20 minutes later to find nothing had changed.
I killed X with Ctrl, Alt, Backspace and tried "startx" again.
This time KDE (4.3.1) came up, but within seconds, in the lower right hand corner of the screen a window popped saying something about Nepomuk and that Strigi was indexing the files on the system.
So the question becomes, how does it turn itself on when I had purposedly turned it OFF???!!!!
As I've said before, this whole KDE 4 thing is starting to smell entirely too much like winblows and if that is the case I might as well runs winblows..........
Ugh!
These comments are not made lightly. I guess over the years I gotten tried of being a unwitting "beta tester."

I can understand why it was natural to assume that the problem was KDE4, but, I had something similar happen to me repeatedly with Slackware 13, and I tried it with both KDE4 and KDE3. I don't know what it is, but the weird thing is that the same thing happened about the same time after I upgraded a Sidux installation. (Yes, I am a bit of a distro hopper.)

The lockup of your system likely corrupted the configuration files used by Nepomuk / Strigi so therefore they safely fell back to their defaults, which is to index your system if a suitable backend is available.

cwizard wrote:Then, perhaps, something made by "volunteers" shouldn't be touted as a stable desktop useable by businesses and individuals?

The OP has a point. KDE 4.xx has been forced down the throats of the users
supposedly because it is the "latest and greatest" yet it is so riddled with flaws as to make it, up to 4.3.1, un-useable as a stable desktop environment and even 4.3.1 is having it problems. Throw in the evil triplets, Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk, and the whole thing (4.xx) is starting to smell like that bloatware from the kids at mickeysoft. If the goal is to make KDE like winblows, then we might as well use winblows and get it over with....

Seems like I spend most of my time trying to get KDE/Linux to do what does work in winblows. Scanning is horrible in XSane/Linux, so I installed VirtualBox so I could run the HP scanning software in XP, on the KDE desktop. Ditto Faxing. Powerpoint presentations do not run correctly in OpenOffice Impress and there is no sound. It goes on and on. If I didn't dislike mickeysoft so much because of the their complete lack of business ethics, I would just run winblows and get it over with, but I won't use their products on principle. Unfortunately, the experience with KDE 4.xx over the last 1 1/2 years since its release and that many of the major Linux distributions that have forced it on the end users, it doesn't appear many in the OpenSource community are any better than the gang in Redmond.

I have a business to run and need a rock solid system that doesn't take an inordinate amount of time to run and maintain. I thought we had that in KDE 3.5.10, but 4.xx has been, overall, the WORST experience since installing my first computer 22 years ago.

Next time, we'll all be smarter. In my opinion, KDE4 is an important project with a great future, but it's taking a lot longer to mature than it took for everybody to get carried away about it. Canonical and Novell wanted to get out in front of everybody else, and everybody else followed. Also, like Vista, hardware makes a big difference. It works great for people with really good hardware, and developers probably tend to have really good hardware. Some of them might be surprised if they could see it on my P4.

And then there's the rumor about how KDE4 uses "40 per cent less resources." I did some googling, and that appears to be based on a single study from late 2007. It was found to to be flawed, and to their credit it was KDE devs who exposed the error, but the story got way more play than the correction, and it persists to this day. It turns out that a community of developers and users is vulnerable to the same negative influences that plague everybody on the net: misinformation, and flame wars.

I found a way (Slax) to keep using KDE3, and I'm betting that so can anyone else who needs to. Nobody's forcing anybody to use KDE4, so if you fell for the hype, just take responsibility and resolve to learn from it. I still believe that, in the end, KDE4 will turn out to be worth all the aggravation.

blackbelt_jones wrote:Next time, we'll all be smarter. In my opinion, KDE4 is an important project with a great future, but it's taking a lot longer to mature than it took for everybody to get carried away about it. Canonical and Novell wanted to get out in front of everybody else, and everybody else followed. Also, like Vista, hardware makes a big difference. It works great for people with really good hardware, and developers probably tend to have really good hardware. Some of them might be surprised if they could see it on my P4.

Just a short note to add, my machine has a rather outdated nvidia card(Gforce fx 5200), and uses an also outdated cpu (amd athlon xp, 1200 mhz), but it is running fine, even with composition (though there are hickups when i run dvbt over kaffeine-kde3).

About business integration of KDE 4, there is a lot of issues with encoding that don't be solved, Thiago Macieira confirm this point in bugs.kde.org with a clear "I don't care", and, outside of english languaje, usage is very difficult for not skilled users, the most common people.

The problem is very serious because KDE 4 don't support legacy encoding so, files with wrong encoding can't be handled with KDE 4. Just imagine a company with thousands of workstations, hundreds of old files with ñáéíóú characters in file names and even old file servers with Windows or Netware. A nightmare for sysadmins because if they convert all the files some applications could be damaged.

An the problem is live even in KDE 4. For example, the last version of Parley export files with broken encoding if you use áéíóú characters in lesson name.

Thiago said that only UTF-8 is supported. It's another matter: and in 2009, not having Unicode support in a OS is really too much.

No, it's not too much, it's just reality. most small companies outsiede IT mainstream (e.g.: layers) run old servers that export samba shares as e.g. ISO8859-15. Changing that is asking for trouble.

samhain wrote:No, it's not too much, it's just reality. most small companies outsiede IT mainstream (e.g.: layers) run old servers that export samba shares as e.g. ISO8859-15. Changing that is asking for trouble.

Then why not pay the developers to find a solution for their problems?

Because the problem does not exist. They simply won't use KDE4.

Zayed wrote:

samhain wrote:No, it's not too much, it's just reality. most small companies outsiede IT mainstream (e.g.: layers) run old servers that export samba shares as e.g. ISO8859-15. Changing that is asking for trouble.

Then why not pay the developers to find a solution for their problems?

There is no problem outside KDE 4, KDE 3 supports it so there is no reason to solve a problem created with KDE 4, the less expensive solution is not use KDE 4. Well, the problem really was in a bad design decision in Qt4 encoding system and not in KDE.

Think in another situation as I explain to Thiago. You buy a new car but you can only drive in cities and highways but not in roads, seems really stupid because there is a lot of roads everywhere. Don't you think? While there is roads out there, your car must support it.

Thiago thinks that five years is enough to all computers and programs was updated and supports unicode and, well, I really scared that something in his position thinks something like these. Or he is very young, or has not contact with reallity or lives in a different planet Earth .

The funniest thing is, as writed before, that at least one KDE 4 application, Parley, create files with broken encoding that KDE 4 can't handle .