Yes, the Dolphin application was never intended to be a replacement for the Konqueror application.

And it was replaced, dispite it was loudly promised that Dolphin will not replace Konq.

Dolphin was intended to be a file manager, while konqueror was intended to be just about everything at once.

Dolphin does not have even the basic functions of file manager.

So what are the specific problems with how the kpart behaves in konqueror?

I did not use it, but from appearance it looks ugly, large distances between icons, those ugly "pluses" when you hover over an icon etc.

File dialogs are also very unattractive, with that slider that changes the scale if icons, what is it intended for? What's the purpose? To demonstrate that vector-based icons can be arbitrary scaled? To exclude out any non-SVG icon themes?

Kicker was ported to Qt 4, and that port was then broken up and placed in various parts of plasma.

Completely not true. Plasma was written from scratch. And Kicker was thrown away.

Anixx wrote:

Yes, the Dolphin application was never intended to be a replacement for the Konqueror application.

And it was replaced, dispite it was loudly promised that Dolphin will not replace Konq.

Konqueror is still around. It is no longer the default, but it is still the jack-of-all-trades application it has always been. What was promised was that konqueror would not be discontinued, and it hasn't been.

Anixx wrote:

Dolphin was intended to be a file manager, while konqueror was intended to be just about everything at once.

Dolphin does not have even the basic functions of file manager.

Besides spatial file managing, what functions does it lack?

Anixx wrote:

So what are the specific problems with how the kpart behaves in konqueror?

I did not use it, but from appearance it looks ugly, large distances between icons, those ugly "pluses" when you hover over an icon etc.

By default, the space can be reduced and the plus symbols can be turned off.

Anixx wrote:File dialogs are also very unattractive, with that slider that changes the scale if icons, what is it intended for? What's the purpose? To demonstrate that vector-based icons can be arbitrary scaled? To exclude out any non-SVG icon themes?

The purpose appears to primarily be for when previews are enabled, so you can make the previews larger or smaller.

Anixx wrote:

Kicker was ported to Qt 4, and that port was then broken up and placed in various parts of plasma.

Completely not true. Plasma was written from scratch. And Kicker was thrown away.

Did you read the link I provided?

Konqueror is still around. It is no longer the default, but it is still the jack-of-all-trades application it has always been.

But as default it was replaced with a program which never was intended to be replacement.

Besides spatial file managing, what functions does it lack?

It basically lacks any modes, except navigational. For example, multi-panel mode, command line area, last time I saw it it also lacked normal tree view.

The purpose appears to primarily be for when previews are enabled, so you can make the previews larger or smaller.

What's purpose of this if
- There is preview area
- You can setup the size of thumbnails in the settings (separately from other icons, so you have not to see gears and folders magnified).

Did you read the link I provided?

Yes. Probably they used some elements of libkicker in the backend, but the UI part was rewritten. Kicker was then thrown away. This all was done already after kicker was ported to Qt4, so these changes cannot be justifyed by just saying that the rewrite was inevitable because of move to Qt4.

Anixx wrote:

Konqueror is still around. It is no longer the default, but it is still the jack-of-all-trades application it has always been.

But as default it was replaced with a program which never was intended to be replacement.

It was never intended to replace konqueror functionality, which it doesn't. Whether it is the default or not has no bearing on this. You interpret the talk of "replacement" as "changing the default", but can you provide any evidence that this is how it was intended by the developers? "Replace" and "change default" are usually not interchangeable in my experience, replace implies removing something entirely, which is not the case here (and no, the kpart does not count, unless you can provide some evidence that they intended the replacement bit to also apply to the kpart).

And whatever the original plan of the person who first developed dolphin had when making it initially is irrelevant anyway, plans change in light of new information, new needs, and new constraints.

Anixx wrote:

Besides spatial file managing, what functions does it lack?

It basically lacks any modes, except navigational. For example, multi-panel mode, command line area, last time I saw it it also lacked normal tree view.

It has all of those and has for a long time now. Further, besides tree view, none are "basic functions", very few file managers besides konqueror and dolphin have any of these.

Anixx wrote:

The purpose appears to primarily be for when previews are enabled, so you can make the previews larger or smaller.

What's purpose of this if
- There is preview area

You can only see on file in the preview area at a time, making picking files by preview very time-consuming. Further, the preview area takes up extra space.

Anixx wrote:- You can setup the size of thumbnails in the settings (separately from other icons, so you have not to see gears and folders multiplied).

Because it lets you change it quickly in different situations. In some folders, the files may be very different, so a small thumbnail is sufficient to tell them apart. In others, the files are very similar so you need to zoom in to tell them apart. Going into the settings module just to change the icon size is extremely slow and tedius.

Further, changing the size also changes the amount of space allocated to text, making it easier to read long file names (although details view is better for this).

Anixx wrote:

Did you read the link I provided?

Yes. Probably they used some elements of libkicker in the backend, but the UI part was rewritten. Kicker was then thrown away. This all was done already after kicker was ported to Qt4, so these changes cannot be justifyed by just saying that the rewrite was inevitable because of move to Qt4.

Source please. Your description of the events directly contradicts the documents describing the process.

Konqueror has a inbuilt terminal, tree view and split panes...
http://simplest-image-hosting.net/jpg-0 ... ktopu31392

Source please. Your description of the events directly contradicts the documents describing the process.

It follows from the link you provided. They said that kicker should be ported to Qt4 for now, but should be thrown away before 4.0.

Nevermind. Ivan cleared it up.

First of all, if this continues to be a "nobody listens to anybody" type of discussion, it will be locked.

1. Kicker vs Plasma - some history

Kicker was ported to Qt4. It was buggy as hell for quite a few reasons
1) it was buggy in 3.x and a lot of stuff had to be done so that some wrong design decisions don't swim out to the surface
2) most of the workarounds from the above didn't work in Qt4
3) It Qt4, some things behaved quite differently inducing more bugs

Kicker-qt4 was present in alpha releases because we had no other panel, and since we like to (to quote Aaron) "eat our own dog food" it had to be there so that we could have a usable development environments.

Since the development of Plasma started, kicker and kdesktop were never meant to stay in KDE4.


2. Dolphin and Konqueror

Dolphin, since the time it was conceived, was planned to be the default file manager. Not a replacement for Konqueror, but only a file manager.

1) it was buggy in 3.x

How about 2.x? Was kicker already buggy in 2.2.2?

What are the bugs do you mean?

I asking because from my experience kickier in 2.2 and even in 3.0 worked better than in 3.5. For example, the 3D buttons on the taskbar were actually pushed (this was broken around 3.3). The menu worked better etc.

and a lot of stuff had to be done so that some wrong design decisions don't swim out to the surface

So do you presume Plasma is a good design decision? Probably it is even more reliable?

Dolphin, since the time it was conceived, was planned to be the default file manager. Not a replacement for Konqueror, but only a file manager.

...without the basic file management functions. And with mesleading description that said it will never replace Konqueror.

Tell me is there a single one advantage that Dolphin has over Konqueror? Even if someone uses only navigational mode?

Anixx wrote:I asking because from my experience kickier in 2.2 and even in 3.0 worked better than in 3.5. For example, the 3D buttons on the taskbar were actually pushed (this was broken around 3.3). The menu worked better etc.

One of the most fun bugs that was inherent in the design was a potential infinite loop when resizing the panel (that is, resize plugins in it - clock was a nice example for the bug).

Anixx wrote:So do you presume Plasma is a good design decision? Probably it is even more reliable?

Well, kicker's design wasn't good even for kicker. Plasma now provides a firm pillar for various *very* different applications - plasma-desktop, amarok, lancelot, plasma-netbook, plasma-mobile, skrooge dashboard, etc.

So, yes, it is.

Anixx wrote:...without the basic file management functions. And with mesleading description that said it will never replace Konqueror.

You've already got an answer for this. The fact that you couldn't find something in D, doesn't mean it isn't there...

One of the most fun bugs that was inherent in the design was a potential infinite loop when resizing the panel (that is, resize plugins in it - clock was a nice example for the bug).

I never experienced this. How can I trigger this bug?

So, yes, it is.

So you claim Plasma is more reliable than kicker? This is not a typo, yes?

The fact that you couldn't find something in D, doesn't mean it isn't there...

I personally cannot find spatial mode. Interesting to hear that it is already there but invisible.

But can you tell me is there a sole function in Dolphin which was not there in Kicker?

I'm not going to argue, I'm here to help, but I don't really have any time to waste.

Anixx wrote:But can you tell me is there a sole function in Dolphin which was not there in Kicker?

Guess this was a typo.

As for Dolphin vs Konq - one feature - breadcrumb bar.

Over and out.

TheBlackCat wrote:What specific features from KDE 3.5 are you missing?

Still playing divide and conquer with unbelievers?

niahmas wrote:

TheBlackCat wrote:What specific features from KDE 3.5 are you missing?

Still playing divide and conquer with unbelievers?

Still not able to give any valuable input to a discussion?

TheBlackCat wrote:What specific features from KDE 3.5 are you missing?

Here's a list of features that are missing and reported for long time and yet nobody fixed them (and looks like nobody is going to):

Next/previous buttons absent from Gwenview KPart
Konqueror can't abort frozen JS
Konqueror searches in wrong frame
Konqueror crashes when calling context menu
Konqueror pops up transfer dialog for images
Coloring of unread feeds removed from Akregator
SSL client certificates' support is missing from Konqueror

These bugs render Konqueror much less usable than its KDE3 counterpart. Last one completely prevents usage of certain sites.

Unreported stuff: overall, KDE4 feels much slower than KDE3 and this ain't no easy bug to fix. Using Konqueror 4 on 1.8Ghz Atom for browsing JScrap-rich sites is quite a pain, and fact that it's consuming times more memory than Konqueror 3 isn't helping either. And I'm not even using Flash, with Konq4 it's a total disaster.