[clue-tech] KDE4 Anyone?

[Dennis J Perkins]

I never liked the appearance of KDE, but I admit I find KDE 4 appealing.
I tried an early 4.0 test distro, but the apps hadn't been converted
yet.  I might take a look at 4.1 and see what it is like now that the
apps are ready.

A lot of people bitched and groused when Gnome 2.0 came out, but it did
offer a lot of improvements.  Eventually most people came to terms with
the changes.  Those who didn't went to KDE, XFCE, or are still
complaining about 2.x.


On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 22:20 -0600, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> I haven't tried it yet, as I'm completely happy with 3.5, and some of
> what I've been reading doesn't have me exactly thrilled. Of course, I
> realize that I shouldn't judge KDE4 based on SJVN's bitching, but when I
> follow links from his blog posts over to places such as:
> 
>   http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
> 
> I cringe a bit.
> 
> Maybe I'm just behind the curve. I haven't "bought in" to the whole
> "semantic web" hype, though I do find the use of things such as keywords
> and tagging to be useful. But that sort of stuff isn't exactly bleeding
> edge, and knowledge taxonomies aren't anything new. Yeah, I know (or
> suspect?) that what's supposed to make this all so powerful is using
> whatever the latest web-based P2P, autodiscovery, SOAPY, RESTful,
> muti-linked, ultra-xreffed whatever tools and stuff to tie related things
> together in some way that theoretically makes following chains of
> semantically related data easy. Except that with over a trillion pages on
> the WWW, you just get a whole pile of stuff you aren't interested in that
> people tagged with terms that they think apply. And I'm sure that
> knowledge taxonomies are useful when applied within a controlled scope.
> 
> I just don't see the benefit for my window manager.
> 
> Granted, I'm not one of those people who has a root window full of icons
> representing directories, or links to stuff I use a lot. A lot of the
> time, I launch apps from the command line. I usually have 4 or more
> terminal sessions going at once, and I use the command line for a lot of
> the tasks that more GUI-minded folks would do in Konqueror, Dolphin,
> Nautilus, or whatever.
> 
> But I do recognize the utility of such applications, and do find them
> useful on some occasions. But do they really need to recapitulate
> phylogeny in order to do their jobs? (Sorry, dumb reference there to
> recapitulation theory there, which I couldn't resist.)
> 
> Don't get me wrong. If people want to write software that tries to do all
> this sort of stuff, hey, it's their time and they can do what they like.
> And nobody's forcing me to use it either. It just seems like overkill to
> me. I can fire up my various favorite applications and edit the files
> they operate upon just fine without needing an ontological / taxonomic
> unified semantic pile of managed knowledge. If, at the command line, I
> type 'gimp filename', The GIMP will either open the file successfully, or
> not.
> 
> And is anyone else kinda tired of icons (or other representations) that
> look like blobs, or are in some other way borrowing from Apple's Aqua
> theme?
> 
> Anyways, just curious what everyone else thinks about all this stuff. I'm
> trying to decide what the best way is for me to have a look at it in
> actual use. I fear my old computer will be too slow for it, but maybe
> running it in a VM would work. I just don't want to mess up my main
> machine with it (and maybe it's possible to do a clean uninstall of it
> after trying it out, but I really like my existing environment, and I'm
> loathe to do anything that might make my tweaks go away).
> 
> jed
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