KDE-Forum.org

without seeing dolphin in its final state, it is hard to decide whether dolphin should become the default for kde4, or that konqueror should stay as default.

I've checked Dolphin out a bit. And I've just installed it. I like it.

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Sorry for the off topic question / observation, but:

This forum is so quiet. There are never more than 4 people online at the same time and the questions I've asked on the PIM board 3 days ago only have around 10 *views*. Is this not the 'official' KDE forum? I'd have expected it to be a lot busier, since KDE is about the most popular desktop environment for Linux available.

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Is this not the 'official' KDE forum?

Indeed, it's not an official kde website.

KDE does not have enough man power to fix all the Konqueror bugs, so starting a whole new project that does nothing but duplicate a little bit of existing functionality is a total waste.

Fix Konqueror bugs, make it more flexible, take care of all the profile management mess once and for all by separating web browsing from file management, change all the eye candy you want, let the user choose whether to have the Up button, etc. etc.

There is plenty of work to do. How about fixing file selection using keyboard for example? It is obvious no Konqueror developer ever tried to select files in it using keyboard. Konqueror is the only file manager in existence that has totally broken and useless keyboard selection and navigation. Do we have man power to fix that? It seems we don't. (And I beg you please *please* don't come with the usual crap like "have you opened a bug?". Just try to use it and you'll see how badly it's broken and has been forever.)

So if we have people who don't care to improve an existing program that is already the best of all but needs work to make it better, that's fine, let them work on a new project or do whatever else they want or just leave, KDE doesn't need you. KDE needs people who can finish a good work that was started ten years ago, that is what we all need.

So my vote is Konqueror. Thanks for reading my rant of the week.

I think there's something to be said for a fresh start. I admit I haven't looked at the Konqueror source code, but source code tends to get larger and larger. It's difficult to effectively refactor code when you're with such a large group. So taking what you've learned and starting anew can create an effective, small and fast application, using all the new libraries and incorporating all the new wishes.

And I think that file managers and browsers are two different things. And putting both in the same application is a bit silly. The two only have a handful of features in common. And all the other features only mean anything to the one or the other. So in that regard I also like the idea of a separate file manager.

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And I beg you please *please* don't come with the usual crap like "have you opened a bug?"

Why is that crap? If the developers never use the keyboard to browse files in Konquerer (I know I don't), how could they know about the flaw without someone filing a bug-report?

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Originally posted by ipspeB
KDE does not have enough man power to fix all the Konqueror bugs, so starting a whole new project that does nothing but duplicate a little bit of existing functionality is a total waste.

You can't tell FOSS volunteers "hey, do this project instead of that". These people work on what they're interested in, on areas they know about, on projects they like. That Konqueror is not as maintained as other apps is indeed a tragedy. But the only tragedy here is that there are enough volunteers who could work on it.

Here comes someone who wants to do a simple KDE file manager, focused only on being a file manager, one that still used KDE technologies like KIO. Dolphin was born. Dolphin was a 3rd-party KDE app for some time. Some KDE developers saw it and got interested. They believed it offered a solution. So they helped in improving Dolphin, to the point that it has the potential become the default KDE file manager for KDE 4.x.

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Fix Konqueror bugs, make it more flexible, take care of all the profile management mess once and for all by separating web browsing from file management, change all the eye candy you want, let the user choose whether to have the Up button, etc. etc.

There is plenty of work to do. How about fixing file selection using keyboard for example? It is obvious no Konqueror developer ever tried to select files in it using keyboard. Konqueror is the only file manager in existence that has totally broken and useless keyboard selection and navigation. Do we have man power to fix that? It seems we don't. (And I beg you please *please* don't come with the usual crap like "have you opened a bug?". Just try to use it and you'll see how badly it's broken and has been forever.)[/quote]

Yes excellent plan of action. Now next question: who's going to do these? There already is a lack of people to work on Konqueror It's not like a whole team is working on Dolphin either. I would be surprised if there were more than 4 or 5 from KDE working on Dolphin directly.

And what about not opening a bug report? What's wrong with it? See, here's the problem. There are very few people already working on this or that project. But users don't seem to be interested to do their share of the load. This is an free/open source software project. Everybody, from developers right down to the users, have a stake in the project. They have a contribution to make. Filing bugs, in order to be able to tell developers what's wrong, is one of the major contributions of a user. Developer are neither omniscient nor perfect. They definitely cannot know all possible use cases, hardware combinations, problems, etc. That's where us users come in to help. (P.S. You may or may not be the type of user I'm referring to. I'm not ranting at/bashing you. Just giving a common example.)

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So if we have people who don't care to improve an existing program that is already the best of all but needs work to make it better, that's fine, let them work on a new project or do whatever else they want or just leave, KDE doesn't need you. KDE needs people who can finish a good work that was started ten years ago, that is what we all need.

Leave? KDE doesn't need them? Who decides what KDE does or doesn't need? Who decides who can stay or leave? Look at kde-apps.org. There are a lot of duplicate projects there, some which probably duplicate some KDE apps. Should they leave, too?

Bottom line is, no one can really force people to work on something. Not in KDE, not in any FOSS project. You can only do that if the person(s) is in your payroll.

Btw, I voted for Konqueror.

So my vote is Konqueror. Thanks for reading my rant of the week.[/quote]

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Originally posted by ipspeB
So my vote is Konqueror. Thanks for reading my rant of the week.

Thanks for writing it, it made me decide to vote for Dolphin

I'd say specialise Konqueror as a browser and use *dolphin* (not having seen it, I'm not totally sure) as a filemanager.

If dolphin comes as default filemanager for KDE4. Then we may have a problem if konqueror cant be used as filemanager, like now on KDE3.5.x series. But, like devs have told on blog, konqueror will remain as powerusers application... i just hope they fix that profile mess... It's not a must for KDE 4.0 but 4.0.5 or other version it would be nice...

Dolphine just dont have those options what i like, like multiple and different views from same directory, simple GUI (no, dolphine has more buttons than my konqueror filemanager view) and nice support to have many KIO services in one window, like webpage, FTP window, localwindow and preview by Kword... all in one window...

I voted for Konqueror but i dont have anything against dolphine... i hope they can just fix that ugly graphic what is when having paths like nautilus... :-)

I really enjoy having both a browser and file manager all in one. It seems alot easier to download something and easily open your home directory in the same app where you downloaded it. If they do specialize konqueror as a browser, then I hope they don't completely get rid of its file managing capabilities -- that would be annoying, besides with the kpart technology, couldn't you use dolphin inside of konqueror anyways?

Konqueror should get rid of khtml and start with gecko and make it use kparts and stuff. No web developers care about weather or not things look good in konqueror -- so they pick either firefox or internet explorer, and if we use firefox's engine, then its more likely konqueror would work the way web developers built their site to work.

If they need to change the engine go for Apples Webkit, I don't thing Gecko is the way to go... I'm still waiting for Firefox to run KHTML :p

No serious... I don't think Gecko would be a solution for Konqueror, but maybe there will be other people that would like a Kfirefox, in stead of the GTK one. (Including me) but I'd like that as a separate/new browser.

Why don't we push Microsoft to replace IE-core with KHTML? that would make webdevelopment definitely more easy.

in the past, there have been attempts to create a qt version of firefox.
But to get a good working version, developers need cooperation from mozilla. And until today, mozilla seems not interested.

Gnome uses gecko as default in their webbrowser. I have read several gnome blogs that speak of searching for a good replacement of gecko, because it does not integrate with gnome at all.
there is a small chance that they will switch to a good maintained khtml derative as replacement for gtkhtml (wich is actually a khtml derative as well, but badly maintained..)

Personally, I like a more specialized file manager. Of course, I am not all that happy with Konqueror, to tell you the truth, as its rendering of HTML is sufficiently non-standard that I use Firefox (and sometimes Opera) for that purpose. That said, I have found Konqueror's file manipulation to be sufficiently unlike other file managers I've used that it presents a bit of a learning curve that I have never been willing to spend simply to gain the functionality that I already have elsewhere.

Therefore, I like the idea of Dolphin as a lighter-weight file manager. It saves me from downloading and running another one, instead...