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 Rants, KDE | 89 comments
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 | 10 comments
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 | 33 comments
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, WebKit, Cambridge | 4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:02:00 GMT
Looks like Nokia are planning to release Qt under the LGPL licence. I wonder what impact this will have on the free software world?
Posted in KDE | 47 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:51:00 GMT
I’ve finally got round to booking my trip to Belgium this year to attend Akademy. I did seriously consider not going, but I’ve been all the other four so I figured it would be a tragedy not to go this year (and abuse sebas, obviously). I’ll only really be there for the main conference, so I’m leaving the UK on the 1835 Eurostar out of St Pancras, and returning on the 1759 Eurostar out of Bruxelles Midi.
Unfortunately I missed the deadline for hostel booking and so I’m having to shell out bags of money to stay in a hotel, so I’ll be in the NH Mechelen with the likes of Antonio Larossa and Pino Toscano.
Do let me know if you’re going to be on the same Eurostar or in the same hotel!
Posted in KDE | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:50:00 GMT
Looks like there might actually be one this year. I’ve now applied for KDE to have a booth, so is anyone up for joining me on the booth this year?
It’ll be the usual story.. sit on the booth for two days getting bored, laughing^Wsmiling at the neighbouring GNOMEs and demonstrating how unbelievably awesome our desktop environment is. Obviously in between lots of lunch breaks.
Maybe we should do what we did a couple of years ago and apply for a combined Freedesktop.org booth with the GNOME people to increase our booth area?
Posted in KDE | 6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:05:00 GMT
My exams finally finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vegetating (mainly in bed, on my bike or shooting) so I’ve not really been doing much in the way of work.
My roadmap for the summer is fairly packed; on Monday I move to Sweden to work for Cendio on their ThinLinc stuff then after three weeks out there I’m moving back to London to work from there for the rest of the summer.
Interspersed with ThinLinc work I’ll be doing lots of work on NX hopefully and working on my nxcl 2.x branch with my Summer of Code student, who is starting to make progress with his stuff now that his academic commitments are finally over!
I think this summer will be the best summer for open source NX work there has been; we now have a fairly mature server in the form of FreeNX, and my client is taking shape in the form of nxcl/qtnx, and the work on nxcl 2.x will be a much needed restructuring of the client code.
It would be great if anyone interested in NX at all could take a look at my nxcl 2.x roadmap and give me any feedback as to what they’d also like to see or see changed. I’ll also be working with Seb James on his GTK+ based frontend as well (nxlaunch) and hopefully we’ll see a fairly decent KDE and GNOME client come out of all this work.
Posted in KDE, NX | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:33:00 GMT
Congratulations to Gross David for successfully being selected to take part in the Summer of Code this year to work on NX support in krdc. Hopefully this will lead to some interesting changes ahead!
Posted in KDE, NX | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:39:00 GMT
Today I start working for DeFuturo Ltd on creating a cross platform NX client (GPL, of course) in Qt for their Desktop on Demand service. I must say I’m really happy to be working again on C++/Qt as GTK was starting to get to my head a bit!
The ultimate goal of this project is to create a cross-platform client which can execute directly after downloading without the need to install it anywhere. However, at the moment I’m simply working on getting an open source client working for Linux, OS X and Windows.
Yesterday I committed a version of QtNX that I’ve been hacking for the past couple of days which has now had its backend code updated to use Seb James’ nxcl client library instead of my ageing nxclientlib. I have confirmed that this works with nxproxy 3.1.0 and nxssh 3.1.0 for connecting to a NX 1.5.0 server, and I assume it works with NX 2.x and 3.x servers as well, but I don’t have access to any for testing at the moment. I will be working over the coming weeks on getting this to work with OS X and cygwin on Windows, as well as hopefully doing some code cleanups at the same time.
All in all, I’m very pleased with this work and this should lead to some very nice and exciting changes in the NX client world!
Posted in KDE, NX | 4 comments
