George Wright's Blog

Why I won't use KDE 4

Posted by George Wright Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Warning: rant follows.

So today at the ‘release party’ in Toronto (I use this term in the loosest possible sense), certain KDE developers decided to have a go at me for my refusal to use KDE 4 in favour of KDE 3. Admittedly one of them was particularly drunk after only a couple of pints, so I won’t take his input too seriously, but it did raise some concerns with the mentality I’m now (more often) seeing within the KDE community that I never used to see.

For me, KDE always stood for being free to do whatever you want. Surely that’s the philosophy of free software as a whole? If I want to use my machine to herd cats in my garden whilst terrorising them with a giant torch? Sure [0]. If I want to make my desktop look like other, well down, proprietary desktop environments - why not? You get my point.

However, today my objections to KDE 4 were met with an unbelievable barrier of closed-mindedness. For example; I use bitmap fonts with my terminal. Why? Because at small font sizes (read: 6px high) I’d rather have my supremely readable bitmap font that I’ve been using for aeons than some scaled one. But Konsole4 I’ve found does not like to play nicely with bitmap fonts (admittedly this may be fixed by now). The unanimous answer from the KDE developers present? “You’re an idiot for using small fonts - it’s totally pointless”. Wow, way to go for the whole “free to do what you want” thing. I’ve also just done a quick benchmark and found its scrolling speed to be significantly slower than Konsole3’s. [1]

Second gratuitous example; I do not like desktop effects. They annoy me. I do not enable composite. I’m entitled to this opinion. Furthermore, it seems that enabling desktop effects increases power consumption. I spend a lot of time away from power (for example: at shooting ranges), and wish to maximise my battery life accordingly. Again, I was greeted with comments such as “why do you need to have good battery life?”, “it’s a ridiculous use case because you’re never away from a power socket for that long” and “you’re a corner case” (referring to the rifle range example) [2]. Nice to know that apparently wishing to minimise power consumption is a corner case now.

I was also greeted with a barrage of what I can only describe as sheer stupidity when I explained that I do 99% of my work in a terminal. This is also, apparently, frowned upon now.

Has KDE now become a desktop environment only useful to people whose usage patterns fit with what KDE prescribes as acceptable? Is there some sort of judge now in KDE who is able to decree whether someone’s usage pattern is “acceptable” or not? I do hope not. [3]

Very disappointed. [4]

[0] - OK I don’t actually do that, for a number of reasons really.

[1] - http://lwn.net/Articles/88249/; Konsole3 on my machine whacked out the whole thing in about 30s. Konsole4 (SVN trunk from a few months ago) took nearly 2 minutes. Both used the same font.

[2] - A fine example of deliberately missing the point to try and win an argument; the case of “wishing to extend battery life” is not a corner case. Mine is simply a specialisation of that.

[3] - To be fair, I am unfairly extrapolating the views of some KDE developers to the entire community, which I know does not as a whole think like this. But other people may not be so understanding. Fix it.

[4] - I don’t actually care all that much about KDE 4 as I’ve assessed it for my needs and have concluded it does not fit my requirements as well as KDE 3 does. I’m sure it’s fine for a lot of people. However, as stated at the beginning of this rant, I am somewhat dismayed with the direction the mentality of an increasing number of developers is taking. Just accept that I don’t like it, and sod off.

Edit: due to popular demand, comments are now enabled. Flame away.

Posted in KDE, Rants | 64 comments

Alive and kicking

Posted by George Wright Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:10:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything. The main reason for this is that my server decided to throw a hissy fit back in November or so. We took the opportunity to replace the disk drives at the same time, and now one of the new disks is playing up. But after failing the disk in the RAID it all seems to be working fine, and I’ve finally had time to migrate my data over…

The past few months has been great; I’ve been playing FAR too much Wii (especially the New Super Mario Bros game, that’s addictive); doing lots of work at RIM; moving office so I’m no longer a 10 minute walk from work (but rather a 10 minute subway journey, bah) amongst countless other things including my health finally getting back on track after 5 months of coughing/being ill/etc. Hurrah!

So 2010. I saw 2009 off in style by flying down to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins in Washington DC. I even met up with Roey Katz (a KDE groupie) whilst I was there! Hoping to fly to the US a lot more now that I live next door - next stop, New York City!

But what does the next year hold in store for me? Well, I’ll be working on honing my shooting skills (I’m trying to get onto a national team at the moment, so we’ll see how that goes). Work will, as ever, play an important role and we’re doing some very cool stuff at the moment involving open source and other gubbins. I will (hopefully) be flying around the world a lot and trying to live life a bit fuller - on the itinerary for this year are (in no particular order): Bologna, London, Vancouver, Fort Collins, New York, Washington DC, Ottawa and perhaps San Francisco. Whew! Going to be a busy year!

Unfortunately, it looks like I won’t have enough time, therefore, to be able to attend KDE conferences anymore, or at least not for the full time - I may be able to whistle by for a weekend. I’m simply using up all my spare time either shooting or randomly globetrotting! I will, however, try to keep in touch with as many KDEers through the intertubes (Troy - I’m looking at you), and continue to host random KDE gatherings in my apartment (anyone is welcome, really! except maybe Troy). I’ve now hosted… three random gatherings I think. Go KDE Toronto!

So in that vein, 4.4 release party anyone? I think Troy wants to host one in the fake London, but I think the KDE Toronto massive are pushing for one closer to the second centre of the universe (the first being the Real London, or wherever I am). On a side note, I’m far too old and set in my ways to start using this newfangled “KDE SC” terminology, so I will continue to use the old style here, not least because it makes it more interesting for you to guess which of the 80 possible meanings of “KDE” I’m referring to.

So for me at least, 2010 is looking like a hopeful year, and I hope it is for a lot of you as well! Have a good one!

Posted in Misc | no comments

New iMac

Posted by George Wright Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:57:00 GMT

Well yesterday I rejoined the ranks of Apple users and bought an iMac 27”.

Why, I hear a thousand of you screaming at once. Well, when I left the UK I had to reluctantly sell my 30” Dell monitor - quite simply one of the most astounding pieces of kit I’ve ever used. The only downside with it was that it was really, really stupidly expensive.

Anyway, I bought the iMac to replace it. The screen on it is absolutely fantastic (I’m ignoring that it’s glossy for the minute…) and has the ridiculous resolution of 2560x1440 - pretty much a higher DPI 16:9 variant of the 30” monitors currently on the market. I view it more as a monitor with a desktop computer slapped on the back than the other way around.

So far I’ve been pretty impressed. Aside from a few screen flickering issues I’ve seen at the moment (which I’m hoping are driver issues and not hardware, as the next unreleased OS X update has “Fix screen flickering issues” in its changelog) it seems like a fairly solid system. Mac OS X has really matured since I last used it (I think I was using 10.3 on a PowerBook G4) to the extent that the Terminal application actually has tabs now! I’m even installing Ubuntu inside VirtualBox. Will be installing Debian natively soon hopefully.

All in all, pretty pleased with it. Even if it is a Mac.

Posted in Computing | 10 comments

Life on the other side

Posted by George Wright Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:19:00 GMT

Well I guess it’s been a pretty interesting three months in Canada so far.

I’ve settled down in my new home; the company I worked for was bought out by RIM; I’ve done no open source work; I hosted Troy over the weekend when he came to Toronto for the Ontario Linux Fest; I’ve played a lot of Super Mario World on my new Wii; I’ve seen Niagara Falls and finally I’ve been bloody ill for the past 11 weeks which culminated in 3 trips to the doctor, two courses of antibiotics and almost every weekend indoors sleeping.

What a great way to start life in a new country! Thankfully it looks like I’m finally on the mend and I’m feeling better than I have done ever since arriving in Toronto. I reckon it’ll be another week or two before I’m healthy again - just in time for Hallowe’en!

Maybe I’ll be able to go out on the bike at last.

Posted in Misc | 2 comments

New beginnings

Posted by George Wright Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:03:00 GMT

Three weeks ago I moved to Toronto to start my new job at Torch Mobile, and so far it’s been an amazing experience.

With the exception of the in-flight entertainment being broken for the first 3 hours of the flight, the move went fairly smoothly, and I managed to get all my sporting kit (bike, target rifle, etc) over without any trouble - I’m surprised at how easy the whole process was.

So far the job’s been a steep learning curve; it’s been a while since I’ve done much coding, so I’m a little rusty, but it’s nice to get back behind a keyboard and work with the guys I’ve known for half my life. At the moment I’m just doing various bits of random WebKit work so nothing too exciting.

Another KDE person who’s just moved here is Jakob Petsovits who is a great guy if a little crazy (but aren’t we all!). Other KDE people in Toronto who I’ve met so far are Eugene Trounev and Shawn Starr, not to forget George Staikos. We held an impromptu KDE 4.3 release party at my place, but it ended up just being a pizza + wii party which didn’t turn out so bad. Mario Kart is such an addictive game…

Last week I shot in the Ontario Rifle Association’s annual provincial championships meeting, and somehow managed to come off in third place (out of 80+) in the main competition I entered - here’s hoping I can continue shooting this straight! All the shooters here have been wonderfully helpful and I can’t thank them enough for all the effort they expended in making sure I was able to shoot that meeting. One guy (an Olympic/Commonwealth games shooter and all-round legend) even made all my ammo for me for the meeting, and that stuff shot like a laser beam.. If it didn’t go in the middle, it was my fault!

As for now, I’m quite ill with a really, really bad cough (no, Jakob - it’s not swine ‘flu) so I’ve spent most of today sleeping to try and fight it off (it’s been 3 weeks now.. hurry up and go) so that next weekend I can do some more sightseeing with Jakob, not to mention getting back into the saddle and seeing Ontario from my bike!

Speaking of new beginnings, my parents have decided to move back to Australia and are now leaving the UK; what with me here in Toronto, my parents in Sydney and my brother in Beijing it seems we’re a truly international family (again)!

Posted in KDE, Computing, Misc | 9 comments

QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again...

Posted by George Wright Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:00:00 GMT

After reading Will’s latest post, I feel I have to chip in.

I am a long time user and huge fan of KHTML. I still use KDE 3, and my day-to-day browser is still Konqueror from KDE 3, using an old version of KHTML. For 99% of websites that I visit, this is sufficient. Notable exceptions are YouTube and Facebook, both of which are very AJAX-heavy, and I keep a separate Firefox (well, Iceweasel) window open for them on a permanent basis.

Why do I keep both browser windows open? Well, for general Googling, random surfing, wikipedia, etc, I love the sheer speed of Konqueror, and its configurable web shortcuts (such as gg:, wp: etc) are insanely useful. Scrolling is blisteringly fast on just about any webpage and everything happens instantly. This is one of the major reasons why I don’t use KDE 4 yet - Konqueror 4 just doesn’t seem that fast anymore. I realise this is all very subjective, but things don’t quite feel so fast anymore.

However, this is a very suboptimal solution. As Will says, KDE needs a good web browser that can integrate with the rest of the desktop, and people shouldn’t need to resort to alternatives like Gecko. Personally, I hate Gecko. It’s got a massive memory footprint and it’s not as fast as I would like.

I’m not going to be flavour of the month for suggesting this (am I ever?), but I’d say the best thing to do at this point is for the developers to forget about KHTML, and start working upstream on WebKit, as well as work on integrating WebKit with Konqueror. Yes, there are probably some very good reasons as to why this is not great for KDE, but are they good enough to justify hindering the entire project’s success? WebKit Qt isn’t perfect yet (it can’t handle Facebook Chat particularly well, for example), but it’s still a lot better than KHTML at the moment. There’s a KPart being developed to allow WebKit to render inside Konqueror, and all it needs is a bit of polish before we can maybe start using it full time. In fact, now that I have time and I’m going to be working on WebKit as part of my job, I’ll look seriously into getting into core Konqueror development.

Call me crazy, but back in ‘02 Konqueror was the browser to have - it was fast, it worked on every website (back then), it was slick and it was KDE. I’d like to be able to go back to that, but fast forwarded 7 years!

Posted in KDE, WebKit | 29 comments

Graduation and return to open source!

Posted by George Wright Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:58:00 GMT

So I’ve finally finished my university degree, and I graduated on Thursday with a BA. It’s been a particularly trying year, so I’m glad it’s all over now. I’ll always remember that we were one short for graduation - wish you could have been there dude.

Now I’m back at home and likely to be doing not very much for the next couple of weeks, except that I’m hoping to shoehorn myself back into the free software community as I realised the other day that I’ve fallen out of the loop pretty sharply in the last few years!

In just under 5 weeks I’m flying out to Toronto to start my new job as ~~pmax’s dishwasher~~ a software developer which should be particularly exciting. Before then, I’m spending a few weeks at home, then a couple of weeks down at Bisley shooting the Imperial Meeting which is a series of international competitions, representing Cambridge University and Cambridgeshire for the last time!

In short - I’m back!

Posted in KDE, Cambridge, WebKit | 4 comments