Aces in their places

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WorkingOnWise

Beginner

Posts: 5

Monday, January 8th 2007, 12:00am

Aces in their places

Hi Everyone,
I'm back into linux again after 4 years, and I'm Lovin todays Linux!! No Windows on my laptop at all, and everything works (no modem, but I don't use it antway). I didn't need to spend weeks learning shell commands, downloading and compiling libs and drivers, config files and all that fun stuff. I installed it (Ubuntu CE 6.1), manually set up my wifi card (took 30 minutes), downloaded everything I coule from the package repositories (took ever night...while i slept), fought a few hours with wine (haven't won yet, but those aps are secondary...they can wait), and I can use my laptop for anything I need...and it's WaaaaaYYYYYYYYYYY faster than it was on winxp. I tried linux again cuz I was fed up with windows taking every bit of cpu I gave it (AMD Sempron 2800) and dragggggg it down to nothing! Totally ridicules that any os should eat that much cpu just to browse the disk!
Linux, and the open source community as a whole, has really matured over the last few years!
Which finally brings me to my point. (Yup, I do have one!)
Why don't the development teams for KDE, as well as other large open source projects, focus on whet their core area is, and pass off the other stuff to development teams that are clearly doing a great job in their areas. Specifically I mean Evolution vs. Kontact, and Openoffice vs. Koffice. I don't mean to imly anything negative to the KDE team or theis work. It's just that Open Office rocks so much, it seem that you could help the open source community more by not developing koffice an more, and devote those resources to either helping the OO team, or working on other more core areas of KDE. Same thought with Kontat, although I am impressed with it's current state.
I just think that to delelop a program for the sake of having that area covered in a "suite" can be counterproductive. KDE isn't the only team I am wondering this about, It is jus my favorite desktop, so you guys are the ones I would like see take a lead role in better organization of efforts to move open source and linux development forward as fast and stable as possible.
My wife has also switched to linux, same distro as me, with kde also installed, for the simple reason that she was already a firefox and open office user in Windows, so switching to linux was just a matter of adjusting to a different gui. If she had still be using MS Office and IE, I would have had a much harder time getting her to leave Windows. She has Windows now only for her one game, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2.
She says windows is now as fast as linux, once she gutted all the stuff from windows!
I firmly believe that a desktop, be it KDE, Explorer, or Gnome, should first be there to provide a foundation for the work i need to do, and then it needs to look good doing it. KDE has that same mindset it seems. How much better, how much faster, could that get if you streamlined development as I have suggested? I would love to see some of these large commercial software giants fold from the pressure that they get from superior opensource competition! Because of the quality of the current linux community, my move to linux has cost them $1000 in the next 6 months in products that I will not be using! That money is going to the open source community instead!

Regardless of how you decide to use this post, I will still be committed to Open Source apps and KDE.

Thanks
Keith

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Rinse

Professional

Posts: 797

Monday, January 8th 2007, 12:40am

Quoted

Why don't the development teams for KDE, as well as other large open source projects, focus on whet their core area is, and pass off the other stuff to development teams that are clearly doing a great job in their areas.

For the most part, that is exactly what KDE does.

Quoted

Specifically I mean Evolution vs. Kontact, and Openoffice vs. Koffice.

Well, kontact, or at least the components of kontact, are a lot older then Evolution.
So, it's not like the kdepim developers are developing an alternative for evolution, i'ts the other way around

Same with openoffice: koffice is about 3 years older then openoffice (if you don't count the years of staroffice, the proprietary suite openoffice is based on).

Quoted

I don't mean to imly anything negative to the KDE team or theis work. It's just that Open Office rocks so much, it seem that you could help the open source community more by not developing koffice an more, and devote those resources to either helping the OO team, or working on other more core areas of KDE. Same thought with Kontat, although I am impressed with it's current state.

I think you should not consider KDE as being 1 development team that is creating software, like you would consider microsoft or apple as being 1 development team.

Think of KDE as a software platform that programmers can use to develop their applications upon, just like Windows and MacOS are platforms which developers can use to build applications for.

If you look at kde-apps.org, you wil find about 1000 projects that are creating software based on the kde platform. Allmost all of them being independent projects that are only connected to each other through using KDE as a development platform (just like evolution and kontact are connected because they are developed for unix systems, or MS Office and Norton Utilities are connected because they use windows).

The main benefit of developing for the kde platform (besides being easy

) is that your application will be consistent with the rest of the environment and will integrate very well with other applications on your desktop.

That was also the main goal of kde when the project started: to provide an easy to use and consistent user environment that could challenge similar desktops, like MS Windows (before KDE, every application was using its own platform, own toolkitt etc, all behaving differently, making it impossible to do even the most simple interactions like copy & paste text between two different applications).

Help mee om KDE 3.5.5 in het Nederlands te vertalen

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