KDE - Now on a Tablet Near You | Hacker News Reader

KDE - Now on a Tablet Near You

pcworld.com

29 pointsEwanG14 comments

This looks really awesome. I could see this being immensely useful on something like the Asus Transformer--if you don't have the keyboard, it's a great touch UI; if you do, you can fire up Emacs and be instantly productive.

How is the C++ binary interoperability between different gcc versions, or other compilers?

I'm bit afraid, that if C++ is used more and more on the system level (BeOS, OSX drivers) you won't be able safely any other compiler, than the one being provided, and that one might be a bit behind.

Then again, probably nothing to worry about...

gcc implements the C++ ABI Intel specified for IA64 (perhaps the best thing to come out of the Itanium era) for a bunch of years now, which is generally viewed as sane and also followed by other modern C++ compilers, e.g. clang.

And IA64 brings what to x86 or x64?

For example on the Microsoft front there are problems, if one targets MSVCRT.DLL (then one has to link with a specific object, found in the WDK, that hanles 4 or 5 different exception schemes that went into the different MSVC compilers over the time).

And then mangling of the filenames is totally different, but at least gcc can keep on reusing it (or does it)?

gcc uses the ABI on x86 and x86_64.

msvc doesn't use the IA64 ABI.

Is there some kind of how to that'd say 'buy this single device (that is actually widely available at retail for a reasonable price), install it in this way and you will have something to play with'?

Speaking as a long time KDE user, having "the one true path" really isn't their style...

But they do have compatible devices:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Devices

and installation instructions for a variety of builds:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation

Only Intel Atom devices? No ARM? Mips?

Various people have Active in use on Tegra2 and other ARM kit (see YouTube for demos), but I'm not sure about ready-made images for them.

'Semantic Desktop' Technology - WTF? Also got confused by the name Plasma and the Zii Plaszma (with z) for Zii EGG and others (man, that device sucked balls)

One of the tech pillars of KDE Platform 4.x is Nepomuk, a framework to store and query (via SPARQL) RDF triplets organized in standardized ontologies. This is used as the backend for Spotlight-like file metadata indexing, but also user-generated file metadata (comments, ratings), PIM data (people, messages) and various other relationship-y stuff. It's dev-accessible on the app level and seeing increased usage there over time, e.g. the Bangarang mediaplayer uses it for its media library.

As time goes on it will increasingly unify the notion apps have of "people" and associated data (conversations with them, content authored by them, etc.) across the desktop, among many other use cases for a generic metadata and relationships store.

Plasma Active allows you to set up "activities", which are separate workspaces with associated widgets, apps, documents, etc. and Nepomuk is used to store those associations, generate recommendations, and so on.

So no, it's not buzzword bingo. We've barely scratched the surface yet, though; the future is wide open.

It learns what I like, oh perfect, that is exactly what I need.

What about a traditional desktop on my tablet that actually works?

I mean if you want to bring us fancy features fantastic but what about the basic first?:

1-Could it rotate the screen? I fear it does not.

2-Coult it use the accelerometer-gyroscope-GPS of the tablet. I fear it does not.

3-Could it use multitouch web browsing? It seems is not working.

4-Could it switch off the power of the computer so battery last more than an hour?

5-Could we actually use the fantastic linux software that actually exist for pc on tablets on some way?

It seems Windows 8 and mac(I believe the retina display tablet is going to be more professional, more expensive and use macOSX to compete with Windows) will provide some way of doing on tablets what you can do in pcs so linux is getting late(again).

FWIW, KDE today offers three workspaces built on Plasma, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active. These offer increasing levels of touch-friendlyness, but even Plasma Desktop, though built largely around mouse control, is quite alright on a tablet - it tries to be touch-friendly where it can without compromising mouse control, with things like finger-friendly panel controllers, widget drag handles and minimizing reliance on right-click in primary shell components.

Re GPS, KDE has a wonderful mapping and routing (including follow mode) app called Marble with GPS support which also has a mobile version, Marble Touch.

Re multitouch, I think there is actually some level of support, but I'm not sure. In any case, multitouch on X just recently got properly standardized with the merge of the official implemention in X upstream this month, and Qt 5 should support that when it lands next year, I believe.

Run Linux apps: Of course you can run whatever apps you desire in Active.

Considering Windows 8 isn't really out and the iPad is nothing like a laptop, I think Linux is actually ahead of the ball.

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