KDE Project releases KDE 1
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I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.
I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled.
On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.
https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KioFuse
Never tried it myself, so I don't know how well it works.
The key problem I have with KIO is that it's doing something that should be done at a lower level so that every application can benefit.
As I see it, there are three classes of apps on Linux when it comes to file handling:
* Apps that can open remote files using one set of protocols (KIO-enabled apps).
* Apps that can open remote files using a different set of protocols (things that reinvent this wheel, like emacs in your example).
* Apps that can only work on local files.
So we get a situation where I can open a file on an SMB server using Kate, but I can't open the same file in Sublime Text. It makes for a terrible user experience.
The Mac makes it easy to mount filesystems, but it's kludgey compared to using UNC paths in Windows. This is the one feature that I really miss from Windows.
All I was saying originally was that KDE was the first Linux environment I used which came close to the level of broad support and integration you get from something like Windows, and in some cases it went beyond.
The real win would be the Plan 9 filesystem protocols which had the same feature but at the file system protocol level.
After that, I moved to OS X for various reasons, until recently when the latest OS X 10.11 and 10.12 drifted so far away from the original OS X concept as to turn me away.
As a newly returned Linux user, I tried Gnome Shell in Ubuntu, but recycled its bytes in a couple of days. Then I tried the latest KDE 5, which was even worse, an ungodly monstrosity. I briefly toyed with the idea of using a supposedly modern fork of KDE 3 (http://www.trinitydesktop.org) but then settled for Cinnamon on Mint.
Still, KDE 3 was definitely some sort of pinnacle in desktop computing. Maybe the Trinity guys are not entirely crazy!
I seriously prefer Unity over both of them in their current incarnations and that's something I never thought I would have said when Unity first came out.
Many people also use them every day and love them. I'm one of them.
It's largely fragmented I guess...
So, if they are crazy, they're a kind of crazy I dearly love :)
(The components do, for what it's worth to anyone out there considering using some of Trinity, play nicely with others. I stopped using KDE/Trinity as the actual desktop in favor of i3, but still use a ton of the KDE/Trinity applications.)
I remember having my friends over for parties and when they saw Amarok - instantly wanted to try Linux. It was, imo, the killer app of Linux.
When I switched to Windows 7 - tried to customize foobar2000 to make it feel like Amarok, but it wasn't the same. :/
It is partly my fault because I wasn't careful what I was doing. But I never thought a media player would do such extensive reorganization on file level.
So really, if you're an Apple user, you have no business even joining discussions like this about non-Apple software or anything that runs on a non-Apple platform. You're basically trolling.
Gotta say KDE was pretty cool then. Back then I kinda hoped Gnome would just give up and the developers focus on working on KDE instead .. but no, that's not the Linux way of things :)
And yeah KDE was awesome. First time I ever saw an OSS app doing UI right (before Firefox)
KDE 1 might not look modern, but at least the design is well thought out, consistent and not full of strangely balanced UI elements with either too much or too little whitespace.
Not that Unity or Gnome is much better.
When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured.
I've been using Cinnamon as my DE for about a year now and I absolutely love it. The biggest thing that made me switch is the fact that it just works. GNOME would shit the bed every time I docked my computer into its docking station, Cinnamon handles it just fine and can even remember my monitor configurations.
You might find LXDE to be a good choice, it is quite lightweight and I have had success with it for both of these. Extending the desktop across multiple monitors was a bit tricky though, but this was about 3 years ago so that may have improved.
[1] I'm not sure the last time I opened Finder. It's easier to manage files from the terminal.
Looking at [1], [2], [3], [4] I would be curious to hear why do you think that they look worse than what i.e. macOS has to offer?
1 - http://i.imgur.com/KIUkPBU.png 2 - http://i.imgur.com/T5AMpdG.png 3 - https://i.imgur.com/duA9HpA.png 4 - https://i.imgur.com/c6epiwe.png
https://imgur.com/T5AMpdG is a good example of bad design. White space is all over the place. Distance between icon and icon description is too short. Distance between search box and icon grid is too long compared to distance of menu bar. I could go on...
I'm probably not a good person to consult on these things, because I actually think the default fvwm was pretty good.
I also don't get this why material design and flat look is so popular. I want my icons and UI elements to be visible not blend together in a awful mess and cartoonish colors. No one says that we should go back to the 90s designs but its a terrible fad, specially in the linux themes.
And to this day Gnome has the worst "Settings Panel" I've seen. Windows 95 included. It's just.. horrible.
Gtk on the other hand I can't really handle. Both Gnome and Unity look not that different on a basic level, but aren't nearly as usable to me as KDE (personally I find many design features in both of them also more ugly).
Other DEs just look worse.
I recently tried Qubes (3.2) on a laptop and was amazed how ugly it is. There are literally dozens of window decorations in Xfce, and all of them look like shit. Practically nothing changed there since half a decade ago when I last used Xfce. Even some obvious graphical bugs persisted!
Color scheme support is also universally bad in Linux land (or maybe generally? Windows is poor here, too. OSX I don't know). Wrong combinations of colors (dark grey text on slightly darker background? A pleasure!), apps just not using the color scheme, inverted colors in some apps/places etc.
Some "DEs" don't try and just admit design failure. Eg. i3 which I'm using on some laptops since a couple years. It doesn't even have any design to speak of. I only use it, because it works extraordinarily well for me.
</rant>
Don't even get me started on font rendering. I know it's an utterly difficult topic, and that a lot of work went into it to improve it (and some of this is fairly recent). Still, the font rendering quality is often still rather underwhelming. And in past times, or on older or misconfigured distros (F23 on Qubes for example) the quality is just heinous.
Here's an example: switch the desktop theme to oxygen. Suddenly, something as mundane as switching airplane mode on and off with the default panels becomes crazy difficult because you can't see the images next to the check box (oh and for some reason all check boxes look like square radio buttons now).
I'm sure KDE works great for the people who have used it for years but they don't have newcomers complaining about usability or they don't listen to newcomers complaining about usability.
Then was 4.0 and everything was destroyed. It was extremely unstable, missed so many features, gots ugly and everything new felt only wrong :-(
I left the club at 4.3 or so and bought my first mac where i am still caged. Tried 5.8 some weeks ago and still can't live with it, so sad... :-(
This makes me fairly certain that whoever did this never used it.
Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/HkmkKwk.png
Note how:
- The battery is actually at 30 % in this shot (how'd you know?)
- The black box next to the battery is actually the netvm nm-applet (edit: actually it's the tray of the Qubes VM Manager; looks like nm-applet vanished - again)
- The drowned-in-white-box speaker symbol is the pulseaudio applet
- These are the "neatest" window decorations I could find
Now while trying Qubes I have that twitching in my typing hand to just make i3 work better with QVM, because seriously - xfce is... not nice to use.
This makes it what people normally call ugly, unpolished. Nonetheless it works very well. While doing that it doesn't look very well though.
IOW: I don't see it as big problem, because that absence of design / uglyness is a nameplate feature of it. Like a command line interface - it's ugly, but works.
In fact, looking at xfce right now again, I'm inclined to say that the simplicity of i3 would look better - design-wise - than what xfce offers.
Someone's heaven is someone else's hell. That goes both ways.
Desktop environments have been desperately trying to look like a phone interface ever since.
And yet, nearly 10 years later, I'm still writing this on a desktop PC with three large monitors and a very typical keyboard and mouse...
Not the first time I've read this on HN, so I will quote my last answer to that[0]
"I doubt the plausibility of that timeline - the original iPhone was announced in January 2007, KDE 4.0Alpha1 was released in May 2007[1]."
The iPhone only got released in June of 2007, so KDE4 preceded the iPhone, unless you are suggesting the KDE devs were inspired by the iPhone announcement.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555866
1. https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php
Gnome3 came out quite some time after the iPhone, and was definitely part of the trend to tabletize all UIs.
Also, it wasn't just KDE that eschewed this new trend; most of the smaller Linux ones did too, plus the Gnome2 derivatives MATE & Cinnamon which have only been trying to look like Gnome2.
The problem, which both gnome and kde tried to tackle, is to end up with a consistent vision for all apps. If one looks at BeOS, Amiga OS or maybe even QNX - they all have a more consistent gui experience than probably any Linux gui.
Partly that is because, like windows, every Linux distribution will need to support apps that are made for the "wrong" de - no one project manage to reinvent all applications.
And non-trivial gui applications really need to be reinvented to work well in a new ux paradigm. I'm talking about apps like gimp, blender, krita - and probably all the office packages and smaller apps like abiword.
I'm guessing that the goal has too often landed on a consistent look rather than on a consistent experience - and so one has never taken full-fledged, best-of-breed apps and adapted them to a strong vision, but rather taken a handful of "ok apps" and then written the rest from scratch. Obviously not being able to invest the ~decades of work many apps already have.
It's not all doom and gloom - for example we have chrome and modern safari as sane browsers thanks to this hubris-or-bust mindset (that led to the webkit browser engine).
I'm curious, what is your favorite desktop ever? What does KDE5 do wrong, and could it be fixed with a theme?
But I have very fond memories of KDE 1. It seemed very similar to CDE on UNIX boxes. Really simple, and no needless bells or whistles.
I am tempted to install this again and use it on my RPi3 if source is available. That'll beat using WindowMaker or Blackbox on it like I do currently.
Really good to see.
Many things were weird too me though, Kppp for example didn't support ISDN4Linux. Also connection on demand was not perfect, it would connect without the need. But that is another topic for another time.
Man, ISDN was a pain. But it was nice to be able to see a log of incoming (including missed) calls in the log file. ;-)
(By comparison, Wifi via NetworkManager has pretty much "justed worked" for me.)
Before ISDN, I had a 14.4kbit modem, so even single-channel ISDN at 64kbit was amazingly fast back then, to me. Dialing was faster with ISDN, but you did not get those cool sounds modems made. I still get nostalgia when I have to deal with fax devices and hear them screech. ;-)
Funny thing. You can run GNOME 1 over KDE 1
It also came with WordPerfect 8 but I don't know if I actually used it.
for a while Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) was working for Red Hat and Gnome used Enlightenment as their WM.
But there came to a disagreement between Rasterman and the Gnome devs about where things were going, and he left Red Hat and started working on turning Enlightenment into a full DE.
Not long after i think we started seeing various WMs being bundled with Gnome, culminating in some that used composition and OpenGL to render the desktops as sides of a cube.
After that it seems that everyone involved with the major DEs got hooked on eyecandy.
These days I use tiling WMs (mostly XMonad), but if I were to go back to stacked then I'd probably end up with E16 after a while :)
I'm still using an $ECONFDIR that was initially created in ~1997 for exactly that reason. Everything else is either missing features (windowmaker) or slow (everything else).
KDE is by far my favorite Desktop Environment (i3 to me is not a DE) and I find the macOS being my least favorite. KDE unfortunately had a license issue with Qt at first and was the reason why GNOME was actually founded. Then KDE became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0 (That was pushed out by Distributions due to community excitement) KDE 4.8+ has been a great DE but people would still say it was bloated even though in reality it was the same size if not smaller then Gnome 2.x.
I still use some KDE apps on Windows (Kate (now VS Code has taken over) digiKam and Okular (PDF viewer). The KDE on Windows also provides for Kritia (My favorite painting program) Here is a blog on the active project http://kfunk.org/2016/06/18/kde-on-windows-update/.
As for i3, yeah. It's actually a really nice system: you can do almost anything by keyboard although you only need to know five shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+h, $mod+v, $mod+shift+q, and $mod+shift+e respectively), and there are a few other handy ones ($mod+enter, $mod+<number>). it's a really clean, and it just feels good to use.
But it's really confusing to those who don't know it. I had a friend who tried to use my computer once... that was fun to watch.
I'm a long-time KDE user and I actually like the plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 should never have been a public release -it was not ready, but KDE got through it. I'm not embarrassed to admit I felt some schadenfreude towards the Gnome 3 struggles
Even something as simple as volume buttons needed to be configured manually in i3wm, and after battling compositing for so long, I ended up just giving up and using GNOME.
Set up i3 and I haven't looked back. I love how fast switching windows is, and I like the fact I can nicely organise everything I want quickly.
I have to use Windows at work and often find myself pressing Win + 1 to switch to my browser heh.
http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-su...
My old Pentium 200 classic (64MB RAM from memory) barely had a working dialup connection, and it seemed to take ages to download the tarballs and build them.
I remember building 3.2 (ish?) again years later on a much much faster machine and it still seemed to take about the same about of time though :)
The heady days of early Linux GUIs. When Tk was king and nobody thought that somebody would do something like Xt again...
KDE was suddenly a modern UI on Linux!
That being said, it may be impractical to browse the modern web with KHTML 1.0 (from which webkit was forked by Apple, hence it being a remote ancestor also for current Safari and Chrome!).
[0] http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powerma...
Or do you feel life should be all work and no play? I think stuff like this gives people the energy to work on current stuff.
Edit:
To add on to this, I think what frustrates me most is the lack of collective self-reflection or appreciation of privilege in the tech industry. I'm not trying to deny the existence of real problems in the tech industry but every time I (as a non-tech industry worker) hear my friends or see some article about how underpaid tech workers are (at 3 to 4 times my salary) I have to clench my bowels and try not to have an aneurysm. I would love to see articles regularly hit the top of Hacker News titled "Look at how good we have it" (including some recognition about how bad the economy is for everyone else) but I don't think I've ever seen that.
My university physics curriculum was pretty much all around in the 1940s (classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, special and general relativity, etc.)
I'm currently in a computer science department where the curriculum includes a bunch of stuff like Cassandra, Mongo, Javascript, Unity, etc.
I think it would be good for those of us in computing to take more notice of our field's past (even by the 1940s we had lambda calculus, combinatory logic, etc.)
I've invested a lot of my personal time in creating the fastest befunge implementations I know of. I intend to spend even more time eventually when I get to having it JIT to assembly. I find it fun, I don't get paid for it, & I have a modest salary (under 40k/yr)
It _did_ end up having positive outcomes, where I was JITing befunge code to python bytecode, & it got me thinking about the bytecode's performance, so to optimize my befunge implementation I went a level deeper & optimized the python implementation to wordcode instead of bytecode, giving anyone who uses Python 3.6 a 1% improvement
But maybe working on improving the performance of Python by 1% is frivolous, since Python's just some big codebase whose only use is in silly things like my befunge interpreter..
That said, I agree with you somewhat on that tech industry rant. I mention my salary's modest, but it was less while I was working as general labor in flooring, which was way more than when I was vending icecream off a bike (which was much more than when they'd have me put together coolant packs for 25$ in a 6 hour day)
You're directing it at the wrong thing. Writing a blog about some hobby project isn't what's wrong with the world
Your Python example is undeniably progress because Python is still in wide use, a better example would be if you improved the performance of Dylan (or some other language that has long since fallen out of use). For your flooring example, imagine if you were contracted to work on someone's house and went, "Instead of using fresh floorboards, we decided to install floorboards that have been sitting out in the rain for 40 years because we enjoyed the challenge!"
I've seen enough people make comments on how contributing to free software is a fight for the future of political and social freedom, since those who control technology will have a disproportionate impact on the systems of power and I find that hard to square with the attitude that free software no big deal and we should just have fun.
If it seems that way, it's because a given online discussion isn't a random sample of people's beliefs. For example, to someone reading Reddit or Slashdot (or HN sometimes, unfortunately), it's easy to jump to the conclusion that everything sucks and everyone hates everything. Post an article about Python, and all the comments will be about how Python is terrible and everyone should use Ruby (or whatever). Post an article about Ruby, and all the comments will be about how Ruby is terrible and everyone should use Python (or whatever). Read the same site for long enough and it will start to look like a mass of contradictions- "wait, everyone here said Python sucked before and I should use Ruby, but now they're all saying Ruby sucks and I should use Python?!?" But really it's just different people showing up to disparage whatever the topic of discussion is. I think it's just the nature of the medium that makes it really hard to gauge consensus within a community.
Well, here's Stephen Granades' awesome video where he explains how the luminiferous aether works, and how it transports light, and even (helps) perform an experiment to demonstrate it. It's got real science in it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4
So, while I get your point, I'm still slightly on the 'that actually sounds quite cool' camp...
But telling other people what to do with their life time is highly immoral.