Troy Unrau: a Gearhead's Blog

1:48pm: Potentially Rhetorical Question: Does KDE 4 have fewer options?
So, a question that stems from my previous post: There seems to be a perception that KDE 4 has less options than KDE 3. Where does this perception come from, and can examples be provided either way? I provide some possible answers from my own experiences, but please feel free to append this list in the comments.

Possible source 1: Kcontrol->system settings migration: by removing the tree view, less things are exposed simultaneous, thereby presenting the appearance of having less configuration options.

Possible source 2: Kickoff style menu: by only allowing the user to see one level of the menu at a time, there appears to be less items to choose from.

Possible source 3: Plasma: options for display are given directly in the user interface rather than in the standard KDE config dialogs, which produces fewer overcrowded dialogs when compared to kicker/kdesktop.

Possible source 4: Konqueror -> Konqueror + Dolphin: by splitting the file management out, at least by default, the apps appear to have less imposing configuration dialogs.

Possible source 5: Application porting delays: not all apps are ported yet, so inter-app integration is missing in places. For example, Amarok 2 lacks integration with k3b while k3b is being ported.

Possible source 6: The defaults for KDE are such that users don't feel the need to configure things as much.

Possible source 7: KDE 4 actually has less to configure! (Is this even possible?)

So, my friends, I'd like to know the opinions of PlanetKDE readers. The public perception that KDE 4 has less configuration to do that KDE 3 had to originate somewhere, but the question is, "Where?".

11:21pm: KDE Media Pulse

So, I'm getting my Marketing hat back, Wade promised...

I'm a little rusty, so in order to get back into the swing of things, I thought I'd start with a quick overview of the current state of KDE in the press, including public sentiments in comments far and wide. To begin with, most of what follows is from Google's various services, Google News, Google Blogsearch, etc. I excluded all items that were already published in the KDE world in some way (Dot, planetKDE syndicated, etc.) as well as those not published in English.

Speaking of which, I don't know if many planetKDE contributors know this, but there are quite a few blog entries that get unofficial translations to other languages and reposted on the internet, usually with a link back to the original. For planetKDE authors, try picking some keywords from one of your more popular articles and running it through Google Blogsearch about a week later.

So what follows is a (somewhat) organized list of KDE's internet media presence in the last 7-10 days, with an occasional comment for things I find interesting from a Marketing POV.

• Yakuake (for KDE 4) Review (TuxArena)
• Krusader 2.0.0 (for KDE 4) Review (TuxArena)
  TuxArena is a little late on this one, as it was released three months earlier, however anytime KDE applications get print is important to the greater KDE application ecosystem. And I'm not talking about kde-apps.org, which is great (thanks, Frank), but wider exposure is great for showing the world that KDE is more than just the set of default apps that you find on most distros.
• Best Linux PIM: Kontact or Evolution? (Byfield)
• Newly Cooked: KRecipes for KDE 4 (Linux Magazine)
  Article about the porting status to KDE 4.
• KOffice 2.0 Reivew (Tech Radar)
  Some quotes: "KOffice's launch speed is comparable with that of OpenOffice.org 3.1, and its rendering is beautifully smooth, even when shifting around large blended objects." and "[...] the new KOffice isn't ready for the masses just yet. However, many of the elements in KOffice 2.0 show great promise and we look forward to testing the suite once more when it's ready."
• Sidux 2009-2 Preview 1
  Release notes state: "While KDE4 is certainly a work in progress, both upstream and in terms of making it viable for a release, this marks the first milestone release for sidux. Be aware that the KDE-lite flavours avoid KDE3/ qt3 packages, which means that k3b, kaffeine and umtsmon are not preinstalled. These packages will be part of the KDE-full flavours and are still installable."
  
  This is interesting as it relays a few pieces of information. 1) They consider KDE 4 upstream to be "a work in progress", 2) They don't want to install both KDE4 and KDE3 concurrently in lightweight installs (understandably), and 3) the applications they are waiting for (from KDE) are k3b and kaffeine. Interestingly, Slackware 13.0 will ship KDE 3 libs as part of the extras package in order to support k3b as well. It appears that k3b is the killer app from KDE 3 that hasn't made the full transition yet. We should perhaps focus on this as a community somewhat. Bugsquad, is there anything you can do to help?
• PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE
  This edition ships with KDE 3.5.10. The Release announcement, however, details that 2009.3 will use KDE 4.
• openSUSE 11.2 M3
  OpenSUSE is testing KDE 4.3 to be included with 11.2. Interesting comment to the announcement: "Seems like a trivial complaint but you don’t want your sporty car to just say Chevrolet, you want it to say Corvette. Likewise I would like the System to say 'openSuSE 11.2 Milestone 3 and KDE4.3 Beta 2' and not something else."
  
  This brings us back to Aaron's co-branding idea. There's a lot of work to be done.
• KDE 4.3 RC Review, Kubuntu Jaunty (TuxArena)
  The same site also has instructions on how to install the RC.
• Ubuntu 9.04 Review
  "Strangely, Kubuntu users have to do without Firefox and GIMP, and the KDE package manager is less user- friendly."
  
  This is a mixed problem. Kubuntu tends to ship with all the KDE apps enabled as defaults, which I think is great for KDE and the visibility of our apps, however, it seems that certain apps are ubiquitous and users expect them to be there.
• Yellow Dog 6.2
  Uses E17 as default, but also ships KDE, Gnome, XFCE. The interesting thing is that is runs on PPC and Cell processors. Has anyone tried getting KDE up and running on their PS3? This could be a good opportunity for Plasma media centre development.
• Mandriva 2009.0 KDE
  Shipping with KDE 4.2.2, and some praise for their Artwork in one of the comments: "However, now they’ve really nailed it. It’s the best looking KDE 4 implementation I’ve seen anywhere! Other distros need to take note." I still wish Mandriva KDE shipped a few more KDE apps, even if they aren't set as defaults. Krita is pretty good, but nowhere to be found, for instance. They should also be a strong candidate for some co-branding initiatives.
• PC-BSD 7.1.1
  Shipping KDE 4.2.4.
• Sabayon 4.2 KDE
  Shipping KDE 4.2.4. Can anyone tell me how Sabayon's implementation of KDE is?
• GCDS: KDE and Gnome Fortulate Common Goals
  Or, as one of the blogs that linked to this article said: "Pigs can Fly!"
• Linux Desktop Market Share (CertCities)
  The interesting/relevant quote: "I think it's finally time to throw in the towel. The latest numbers are out, and even with Ubuntu and other distributions doing such a fantastic job, after almost 20 years Linux still has only about 1 percent of the desktop market. This is after Novell's strong attempts to take the operating system into the classroom (bringing the price of student PCs down substantially), after GNOME and KDE both offered a better interface than anything coming from Redmond, and after hardware vendors started offering PCs without an operating system pre-installed. The cold hard fact is that users just don't want to run Linux."
  
  What I read from this: if the product is superior, and the price is unbeatable, and we're still "losing", then what remains is Marketing.
• Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts (Computer World UK)
  Glyn Moody covers the keynotes from GCDS. On page two is something interesting: "However, even I must disagree with Stallman on one thing he said. He noted that it was rather inefficient having two rival desktop projects, and suggested that it would be good if one day they might be merged – two alternative versions of the same underlying code." and "[...] I think it's vitally important that they continue to go their separate ways, each convinced that their approach is best, but each ready to be stimulated by – and learn from – what their colleagues and rivals are up to." I agree. Gnome need to be strong, as it drives KDE. Our target is not the 1% of the Desktop that Linux currently sits at. It should be the other 99%.
• Links Aaron's Plasma Screencast (TechWorld AU)
  This is one of many sites that picked up Aaron's Plasma Screencast. Quote: "Despite all the doubts about the initial direction of the KDE 4 series, the project is moving ahead well and, at the very least, 4.3 should finally dispel any claims that it is not ready for general consumption."
  
  Well, there will be the circular logic folks that will claim that because claims are made that 4.3 is ready for general consumption, that means exactly that it isn't, so they won't even try it. Well, whatever, I didn't write that quote. Fighting logic like that is like trying to push water uphill holding only a mop.
• KHTML/Webkit (OSNews)
  Never one to pass up some dirty laundry, OSNews covers planetKDE better than many other online news sources. They are one of the few sites that appears to take an active interest in developer blog posts, rather than simply skimming off the top of the dot.
• Akademy Awards (The H)
  Coverage of the Akademy Awards spread far and wide very quickly over the internet. Peter Penz, did you know you're famous? Try searching for yourself on Google News.
• Akgregator Mentioned (ghacks)
• Maemo to use Qt
  Well, this story is everywhere, and pretty much always mentions KDE. Google News shows that this popped up in dozens of places in English alone. Good press for the Trolls. Interestingly, KDE is usually mentioned as the prime example of something written in Qt in many of these articles. It's interesting that KDE's reknown gives a frame of reference to talking about Qt for many audiences.
• Nokia Android Rumours
  One of the better examples of Qt being introduced with KDE as a frame of reference.
• Timeline (Press Release)
  This one is not interesting for what it's advertising, so much as how it does it. It's a product based on Subversion, which is introduced in the article with respect to KDE, since KDE is more well known that Subversion. It appears that KDE's use of SVN is worthy of commercial press releases.
• Koala will be 'a definitive shift' for Ubuntu Linux (Tech Radar)
  Okay, this one is fun, the article is about Ubuntu, but in the opening, Shuttleworth is introduces as "first patron of KDE" as this will aparently give the audience a frame of reference. More interesting though is the comment: "Please stop mentioning that title until Kubuntu is treated as an equal and no the red headed stepchild of the Bubuntu family."
• KDE 4 on Ubuntu
  Well, one user was suitably impressed with KDE 4 after installing it on Ubuntu to become a convert. "The result was very pretty, quite slick. I even noticed an improvement in screen refresh speed when switching desktops in Virtual Box (notably Gnome-terminal always seemed a bit slow to repaint and Konsole feels a bit snappier)."
• Symbian Article
  Again, the content isn't as important as one of the comments: "Case in point: kde 4 and amarok. These two (and myriad other kde apps) lost quite a substantial userbase when they were reinvented from smart brunette heels to rather dumb but beautiful blondes (no offense to blondes meant, really). Yes, they're getting back on track but the symbian foundation may not have that chance."
  
  Insulting metaphor notwithstanding, this comment appears to be by one of our typical "KDE 4 detractors", but shows signs of promise. The user claims "we're getting back on track", and I know a lot of that has to do with the code quality of KDE 4.2.x, as can be seen by the number of distro shipping it. (Slackware!)

Conclusion: KDE is a blonde, but used to be a brunette, but due to trick of the light is also redheaded. And here I thought blue was the colour :P.

That's all folks. Comment on anything you think would be useful as feedback to the marketing and promo folks, or email kde-promo@kde.org. If this media digest is useful to the KDE project as a whole, let me know and I will take the pulse more often. Cheers.

5:28pm: More than just code...
Well, there was this comment on my previous posting, which I will quote, and reply to in its entry. I think this is important, so I'm bumping it.
"Stop it.
Yup, another highly relevant KDE posting on KDE planet."

KDE is about more than simply software and technology. While pondering KDE marketing over the last several years, I've often thought about the definition of KDE. Of course, there's the classical definition, referring to the Desktop Environment, or even a commonly accepted alternative referring to the Development Environment. However, KDE is much more than that.

KDE is the also infrastructure that enables the project to exist, such as svn servers and build clusters, the dot and planetkde, the forums and mailinglists, the wikis and irc channels...
KDE is the also community, including the programmers and artists, the marketing team and translation team, bugsquad and the beta testers, the KDE e.V. and the forum moderators...

While, for many users, KDE is solely a Desktop Environment, and no thought is given to the people of KDE.

PlanetKDE exists, and has existed, as an amalgamation of people. These are all people who are in some way connected to KDE. These people are real people, who have lives, jobs, loves, dreams. These are people who eat, cook, program, travel, draw, stargaze, and occasionally build their own kernels.

The KDE community is made of people, not of code. This is very important as it keeps the people within KDE communicating, and working well together. Building a sense of community is something that is important to the long term health of KDE as a project, for without the people, there is no code. To this effect, KDE has been somewhat successful, via conferences like Akademy, or the occasional focused developer sprint which have introduced faces to people that had previously been known as an irc nick or an email address. If you ask members of the KDE community who have had the privilege of attending these events, they will to-a-man (or woman) tell you how useful it is to get to know the people you are working with on a personal level.

PlanetKDE is not just some official mouthpiece of the KDE Marketing Team. It is a place for KDE developers to showcase themselves, as people, to the rest of the KDE community. If they are working on something neat, they'll blog about it. If they lost their luggage on the way to the Canaries, they'll blog about it. If they've accomplished something personal, like obtaining a degree, well, that's important to the KDE community, and to their friends within the community. I want to hear about it.

Given the function of PlanetKDE is not that of an official mouthpiece, and never has been, perhaps then my posting about an internet connection might not be so bad. For example, I talked about my connection being "pretty shoddy anyway" which might help explain why I haven't been able to sign into the #kde* irc channels from home (only at work when I'm, well, working...).

Just because it's not relevant to you, as a single individual reading planetkde, does not mean that it isn't relevant to some other member of the KDE community at large.

Cheers, and thanks for reading the planet.

2:39pm: ISP DNS hijacking (or Rogers, I vote against you with my wallet)
Well, as I'm surfing the net this fine Sunday and reading all about the comings and goings at GCDS, slowing adjusting my hugh to an envious green, I happened to click on a dead link. Wow! I got a search page from the local ISP that provides blanket wireless to my apartment building. Roger's Cable, one of the largest ISP's in Canada, is DNS hijacking!

The problem is that I'm not the customer, the apartment block owner is, so I can't even complain. But here's the thing - with some 20 suites using the same pipe, the internet connection here is pretty shoddy anyway. I was thinking of spending the money to buy my own dedicated connection, and have been shopping around. Roger's has been advertising fairly extensively to me via snail-mail, and there's a kiosk in the strip mall across the street. Pretty convenient, and I was even considering their service. The more I read about it, however, the less likely I am to become a Roger's customer. Deep Packet Inspection, closed ports, inserting frames into websites, and now DNS hijacking! No thank you, Rogers. I think I'll vote with my wallet - I wonder how much dry-loop DSL is going for these days...

*green*

10:11pm: KDEslackindowsboxen
Well, today I installed KDE again. Only to make a long story short*, I used VirtualBox on Vista32 to host Slackware64 and KDE. The results should show to anyone that KDE 4 does not look like Vista... (the proof that Windows 7 does not look like KDE 4 is left as an exercise to the reader.)



* the long version of the short story:
I had Mandriva installed on a second partition on this laptop alongside the factory installed Vista Home Premium. It mostly worked, but after months of occasional tweaking, many drivers were still not working fully. This included the wireless, which was sometimes working under ndiswrapper, but flaky, the touchpad, which didn't work at all, the touch screen, which didn't work at all, the built-in wacom digitizer on the screen, the fingerprint scanner, the webcam, double-layer burning, composite drivers, external display, printer, and so forth. Due to these and many related issues, I spent most of my time in Vista, occasionally playing with KDE/Windows to my occasional fancy. For the record, KDE/Windows works fairly well for many things, but for others, you simply cannot beat a good-old-fashioned unix system. The final straw was that fish:// didn't work for me under windows, and I was wanting to use Kate/Windows to edit files over the wireless network. So! I decided it was time to try a virtual machine. VirtualBox has the license that makes me happiest, and generally works with a higher level of quality than I've come to expect from the average Sun product, so I tried it. It was then that I realized that my Vista partition was approaching full, so I decided to reformat my Linux partition to NTFS. OOps, bootloader stored files there. Okay, don't panic. Vista won't boot. Install Linux again as I can't find a LiveCD and my Mandriva USB key from Glasgow wasn't booting for some reason. Make a backup of my important docs to an external drive. Try using fdisk from a Win98 install CD to fix the MBR: No dice. Try using the HP rescue stuff that came with the Laptop: it tells me it failed to recover the boot thingy. Okay, forcing my hand, do a full system restore from the factory. Ouch - several hours later - remove 2/3rds of the items from Add/Remove programs. I don't know why HP doesn't give the option on install to skip all the 3rd party shit. Finally, install VirtualBox. I have a Slackware64-current disk on hand from a few weeks ago when I reloaded my desktop machine, so I try booting that: it says that although I have a 64-bit processor, I have to go to my BIOS and enable the hardware virtualization stuff to use a 64-bit guest OS under a 32-bit host. After doing that, I can install slackware. Yay! Last but not least, since KDE takes down the system about 20 seconds after loading, I figure out that I need to install the VirtualBoxAdditions stuff that lets the linux kernel/X/etc. run smoothly under the Virtual Machine. Whoa! this works great! I now have a real linux install of KDE that can more-or-less seamlessly integrate with Vista. On the upside, I get to piggy-back off of vista's drivers. If Vista is online, so is Slackware. My touchscreen works (mostly, the touchscreen events are translated to X mouse events, so no pressure sensing), my touchpad works great, including scrolling, and the VirtualBox X drivers even allow access to 3D accelleration through my Windows drivers. Neat. The only slowdowns I've noticed in Slackware are when it's using heavy disk io, and Windows always gets one CPU to itself. Whew! Now that was a mouthfull...

10:04pm: One degree down...
Well folks, it's been a while since I've had time to do anything KDE related. Fortunately, I've now emerged from the smoke mostly intact and with a few extra letters behind my name. The road doesn't end here, however, and as the figure of speech goes: "out of the smoke and into the fire". I start my M.Sc. program in Planetary Sciences (Geophysics) as of September 1st. In the meantime, I get to work for my thesis advisor for the summer and, I guess, get a head start on whatever I'll end up working on...

This means I actually get to spend a minute or two on KDE once in a while again! Whee! First up, getting my desktop box running again. It's been out of commission for a few months now, ever since I tried to install PC-BSD on it. Now, don't get me wrong, I love PC-BSD - it's a sweet system, which runs fast and stable, with a good KDE implementation. My box just doesn't like PC-BSD, and will randomly hard-lock. I think it has to do with the ATI RS-480 chipset and FreeBSD just not getting along. Works fine in linux though...

So that brings me to the next order of business. Reinstalling linux to resurrect that box. I did some poking around, after having been out of the loop a bit, at some distros, and their status (statuses, statusi, stati? what's the plural of status?). To my pleasant surprise, Slackware now has an official 64 bit variety, although unreleased, which seems promising. I used to run Fred's Slamd64, which was very nice (thanks Fred), but because of it's 64-bit status, I'd end up having to modify all sorts of things to get them to build. Fun, but time consuming. Slackware64-current comes with KDE 4 (yay!), and flash is now available in 64 bit too. Tomorrow I will attempt to install this to get my box back up and running.

That reminds me - that box no longer has a monitor attached to it - instead, I've been running it through my 1080p HDTV, which at 42" and 1920x1080 is just a really big monitor. I've set up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and use the computer from across the living room. KDE and plasma actually fare very well for this task, after some font-size tweaking. There are a few glitches here and there, so once I've reinstalled everything and have an up-to-date KDE, I'll start filing bug reports for this use case. SVG graphics really help here, and so does kwin's effects. Nuno, your artwork is fantastic! Everyone who's seen KDE running on the screen has been left breathless. Good job everyone.

Who knows, maybe I'll have some time to actually contribute more than bug reports this summer. Looking forward to 4.3, and very envious of everyone heading to the Canaries.

Cheers

11:22am: Milestone release
KDE 4.2.1 is now offically replaced 3.5.x in slackware

[End transmission]

2:40pm: KHTML->Webkit->MS killer
Google Chrome beta web-browser.

Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Maybe MS starts now to get afraid of open source. They have a FAQ about licensing here up as well. Sadly (once again) webkit only references Apple, but at least we're in the browser id string.

5:41pm: The well traveled KDE hat
So not only has my bright blue KDE hat been to several conferences and presentations made in the name of KDE, but it is now being worn in the field to do geophysics.



That's me, in a place where I get no cell phone service - the pic is taken by my assistant on my cell phone which I brought along nonetheless.

Cheers folks

Psst. For those that haven't tried the koffice 2 alphas yet, it rocks :)

5:54pm: User experiences with Vista
Well, I've got a few new things to report afa user experiences go. First, I just bought my first laptop. I've had second-hand laptops in the past, but this is the first time I've bought a new one.

I walked into Staples (sort of a box-store for office supplies/etc.) and the sales guys immediately started to hver around me. To the first guy, I said, I'm willing to buy a new laptop immediately if you can show me one that will provide a good linux experience. He almost cried, but commission can make people do strange things. So he got the manager, and the manager started to deal with me personally as no one else had even heard of linux. Manager says: I haven't tried linux on any of these laptops, but we have this EEe thing here with linux on it. After informing him that I wanted a higher end computer, he decided to do whatever was required to make me happy.

So he logged one of the laptops onto the internal network, and asked me for the model numbers I was interested in - he started using google to find out what was supported. The Acer laptops, and some Dells, were 100% supported, so I knew that I'd have at least a few good options. However, there was this shiny, smallish (maybe 12 inch screen) HP sitting there with a touch screen, which could be used as a tablet PC. If I could get this thing running linux, I'd be in business.

After sitting on Google with the manager for a while, we discovered what devices in the HP tx2500 series were and were not support, and which ones I might get working if I'm willing to do some old-school kernel patching. In other words, support for the thing is not "out of the box", unlike some of the other laptops... still...

So I bought the thing - paid cash - and brought it home. Unpacked the thing to find Windows Vista Home Premium. Other than being very slow on a reasonably fast machine, my first real Vista experience hasn't been that bad - after I removed Norton, yahoo toolbar, HP's marketing bullshit, and so forth. The thing didn't come with recovery disks, sadly, so I had to create them after unpacking the thing - ah well, I guess that means my Vista install better live forever, or else it'll be impossible to recover later (it'd probably want to nuke my linux partitions).

It didn't come with any sane way to burn the Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 DVD iso, so I had to install a toy to do it. Works well enough. As far as ease of use goes, once installing the toy, I could right click on the iso to burn it. I wonder if k3b does this?

Anyway, thanks to the help of parada on irc, I'm pretty comfortable with trying to install linux on this and to have all the devices work, including the wacom touch screen. Can someone tell me how the hell the wacom screen can sense the pen before I touch it?

Next update: post linux install. Cheers folks.

Edit: Oh, also installed KDE/Windows on it - other than knotify4 crashing when trying to use phonon.dll, it works swimmingly. (just no notifications)

5:02pm: Creative use of folderview
So I think I've got a funny story.

I was recompiling trunk to see how things are moving along, and I tend to live dangerously when I do this. More so than the average user, since I'm pretty familiar with the workings of the KDE build system, and what I can get away with.

When I rebuild KDE 4, I first delete my active installation -- while it's still running. The apps that were loaded at the time of deletion *usually* keep working long enough for me to finish my system recompile. I generally load firefox during this time as konq doesn't like to have the ioslaves deleted while it's running. :) I know, I'm just asking for trouble, and today I got some interesting trouble.

So, I was done surfing for a while in firefox, and I click the close button. Instead of closing, or rather, in addition to closing, it takes out KWin. Well, since I've actually deleted kwin from the filesystem in the meantime, it cannot recover from its crash. Not only that, but I now cannot switch windows in any way (since I have no running window manager), and kwin managed to make plasma the active window before dying, hiding my konsole window and so forth.

Well, after trying to use the Run dialog from the keyboard shortcut, and failing, I started to think of ways to recover from this, so I can continue to monitor irc, and my build process without nuking X and those KDE programs that are still able to run. Upon inspection of my plasma desktop, I see I have only one applet running: the folderview. That's very fortunate for me though. I unlock the widgets, go to the folderview properties. Fortunately this shows up *above* the plasma desktop, so I can use the properties widget. The downside is that I cannot use the keyboard to interact with it, only my mouse. Fortunately I can navigate to a custom directory using the mouse. I set it to "/usr/bin", and let the folderview redraw. There's tons of entries here, so I resize the thing to make finding stuff easier. I decide there's too many icons, so I set a filter on "twm". I then get my folderview with one icon, twm. I click it, and I get twm! sweet, now I don't have to restart X, and can change windows again through creative use of the plasma taskbar.

Well folks, there you have it. Best mis-use of the folderview applet of the day :)

Now that I don't have to worry about marketing anymore, I get to write more fun KDE blogs as a user, wheee!

8:21pm: The KDE Hiatus
Well folks, time has caught up with me and told me something needs to go: my thesis, faculty presidency, hockey, work, or KDE.

After briefly considering dropping out of my program to work on KDE full-time, I've decided that my KDE commitments have to go. Of course, I can't go without making a few parting remarks (and a shot or two) :)

First, some apologies:

I apologize that my last blog entry caused quite a stir, a cascade of comments, blogs on both sides of the subject, coverage on CNET, and more. I want to stress that KDE likes users. We have an awful lot of them (anyone aware yet of the story about Russia's planned migration of their schools to KDE yet? I think there'll be a dot story about it soon.) Its just that certain users (and I stress, their numbers are really likely less than a dozen people) really need to leave us for other pastures as their presence is harming the project.

As a result of this debate, KDE is drafting a Code of Conduct which will be used as a ruler in future dealings with users (and even contributors) when problems arise. This will be publicly announced when it's done, shortly. Additionally, with a software update to the dot, and a moderation system, these dozen (or so) users can silently disappear into the background. Now we just need a similar system for kde's mailing lists, irc, and bugs.kde.org and the developers can peacefully work on making KDE 4.x rock the FOSS world.

Next: I want to apologize for being in marketing. I'm a better shit disturber than marketeer. I wrote articles about the KDE 4 branch before KDE 4.0 was released since it'd been 16 months since the 4.0 branch had been started, and no one knew anything about it. I made sure, that in my articles, I only covered those features that had code already in SVN, and were not simply on the drawing board, that way we could not be accused of vapourware. These articles hit digg, osnews, etc. and were read by thousands of KDE 3.5 fans, where hype was built in the comment threads. In a way, I'm afraid that I'm personally responsible for the hype, even though if you read my articles, you will see that I tried so hard not to.

So my apology is both to the users and the developers. To the users, I'm sorry I (we) couldn't control the hype better. I tried. To the developers, I'm sorry that people developed such high expectations about 4.0, an early release of 4.x which was clearly not meant for mass adoption yet. I'm sorry that the whiplash from this is hurting the community now.

I will not apologize for the KDE 4.0 Release Event though, as it was a great event (thanks again to Google for hosting it) that brought a lot of KDE people together to celebrate 30 months of hard work, and to mark the beginning of 4.x. This event will have helped to feed the hype, but it was more important than simply marketing - this event planted the seed for an annual KDE Americas conference, with Camp KDE beginning this January in Jamaica.

Oh, I apologize that SJVN has to call for a fork of KDE in order to drive up hits to his website. I know he's better intentioned than that.

I apologize to Tom Albers, with whom I've often disagreed. Last week we finally agreed on something, and now I'm going dormant. Poor timing on my part :)

And lastly, I'd like to apologize to Maksim and the rest of the KHTML developers for supporting a rift within the community many months ago. Maksim, you're brilliant. If/When the time is right for a merge, you will be the one to make that call, not someone like me from the peanut gallery.

Now for some thank-yous

First, to Sebas, Wade, and Aaron, who were the first to really pull me into the community as closely as I was. For almost 10 years I've been involved in KDE in one form or another (sometimes merely helping users in #kde), but these three made me feel like my contributions were important and appreciated, even though it was seldom code.

Next, to my many other friends within KDE (too numerous to mention) who have kept me active and positive for so long. You are too numerous to list, so I just say thanks. Many times, the people within KDE kept me contributing simply because they are so friendly and supportive.

To those users that support KDE, both publicly and silently, I thank you. You have no idea how much the thank-you emails mean to me, or mean to the other developers. If you want to make a developer's day, try sending a thank-you email. And not just to the public developers, but to those listed in the commit digest when they fix your favourite bug, or those that hang out on irc to solve problems. There are public people in KDE that are far outnumbered by those that are quietly contributing artwork, documentation, code, bugs, user support, translations, and more. These people are amazing and every once in a while, they need to be told that.

I'll be back

I'll contribute again in the future, when my time is no longer in such demand (will that ever happen?) In the meantime, I'll be on irc to support the developers as a happy user.

Cheers folks, and thanks.

9:20pm: Does KDE even need (certain) users?
So, this is a rant. Please don't quote me on this article, as my opinion might have changed a day after posting. In the meantime, there's a rant I've been meaning to write for a long time that I've put off since I'm officially wearing the KDE Marketing hat. Tonight, I take it off.

"Does KDE even need users?"

If the users are harming the project, we don't need those users. I've hesitated to tell these users to (quoting the recently deceased Carlin) "go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself."

From a cynical point of view, the only real benefit to KDE of having users is that some users turn into developers. This directly benefits the KDE project, the code, and the KDE developers who are writing the software (essentially) for themselves. Marketing in Open Source is a bit of a misnomer anyway, as we don't really benefit directly from having more users. Sure, every user loves to be on the winning side of the KDE-Gnome tug-of-war, but in all honesty, if you're harming the project, find a different project to be a rabid user of. If they'll take you. Which I doubt. I wouldn't wish the poisonous users on Gnome, XFCE, or any other project that you might gravitate to...

KDE and open source is not ever obligated to please users. We are not obligated to fix bugs. We are not obligated to implement things that you demand. We are not obligated to provide open forums for you to attack us personally. If you are kind to us, we might do some of those things.

So if you are one of these poisonous users who offer no thanks for the time, energy and skill that goes into creating KDE, please go away. Find another project to harass (preferably closed source) as we've had enough of it.

Now that I've said that, I'm off to start the race of Vulcans. Emotions are totally useless for technical development.

[/end rant]

2:30pm: A quick survey of KDE 4 Apps
So I spent the last few days rebuilding trunk and playing with some of the applications that don't ship on the same release cycles as KDE itself. Things like Amarok, KOffice, KTorrent, K3b, and more. So I figured I'd give a few comments on how the development of these things are going, especially KOffice 2. So, some thoughts on those applications that make the KDE environment the integrated, wonderful thing that a only full desktop environment can give.

Amarok 2 gets enough press, they don't need me to talk up how the cover downloading works now, or how I actually have to come up with new ways of crashing it because the old ones don't work... anyway, they're in bug-fixing/stabilizing mode now it seems, which is good news for all the amarok junkies out there.

KOffice 2 is moving along with the limited but highly talented manpower that they have, releasing alpha after alpha showing where the suite is heading. Unlike MS, which released Office XP before Win XP, KOffice has usually lagged behind the schedule of major KDE releases on account of the limited resources they have. However, if the irc channel today was any indication, there's some new bloody in there that's helping to speed things up.

I tried a few KOffice apps to see if they'd blow up. KPresenter fared worse than the rest, but even that is looking like it'll be quite a good program when finished. I only triggered one crash in KWord the whole time, although I wasn't using any of the advanced features. KSpread and Krita are both looking like they're ahead of the pack, both in terms of features, and stability. Fortunately, due to the highly shared nature of KOffice, improvements in one application usually simultaneously improve all applications.

Where ODF formats exist, KOffice is using them as the default, which is lovely. I can still load the old kwd, kpr files (although, at least in kpresenter, it wasn't rendered correctly). Switching to ODF is really important though, and the support for the format is ever improving. They've got some automated testing stuff going on too which helps ensure that there's few regressions in their support. I'll let them blog about it :)

When I first loaded KWord, I found two bugs. I brought one up on irc, and it's now fixed. The other is a little more bizarre, and I've been reading through the code trying to find a way to fix it myself. The bug: PgUp/PgDn are interpreted as the Home key. As I've been reading through the code, I'm impressed at how easy it is to understand, even for the likes of myself whose C++-fu is not so strong. Still haven't fixed the bug, but I've got a pretty good idea of where in the stack it comes from... KoPAView.cpp is the likely culprit...

The KOffice team has a Release Plan up on the website that doesn't go any farther than Alpha 9. There is the soft feature freeze on the schedule though, which means that a more formal release plan is likely not too far away. That's good, because I love KOffice, and I'm impatiently waiting for trunk to be ready to go... maybe they can get a beta (or alpha 10) ready for Akademy to really get some bug hammering sessions going.

I didn't have any blank disks to test k3b with, but it compiles, installs and runs. I don't know what their schedule is, but it's one of the missing links for a pure KDE 4.x environment right now, so I'm happy to see them progressing.

Additionally, I played with KTorrent, which works just as great as always, despite being unreleased. Hrmm, I wonder if it'll be ready for KDE 4.1 next month.

One of the very few apps that I'm still missing is a KDE4 IRC client. I don't know if konversation porting is yet underway, but xchat is driving me up the wall in the meantime.

Also on that list is a network manager applet for 4.x. I know there's a plasmoid in development, and I know that it's missed the freeze for 4.1. I think that this might be one showstopper for KDE 4.1 getting get press. (I know that we can use the one from KDE 3.x, but 4.1 will see a lot of people nuking KDE 3.x)

Anyway, if you're looking for things to work on for KDE, KOffice 2 has plenty of bugs that live only a few lines below the surface :)

Cheers folks, and happy hacking.

10:46am: Plasmoid relocation
Just in case you (like me) have been wondering what happened to extragear/base/plasma for the last week or so, and haven't yet popped into #plasma on freenode to inquire: many of the plasma modules not* now live in trunk/KDE/kdeplasmoids

Cheers folks, and happy hacking

*Edit: typo.

9:01pm: Congrats to Wine on 1.0
Well, I'd just like to raise my voice in the chorus of congratulations that are echoing throughout the web (and often hiding in the Firefox 3.0 stuff). Congratulations to the Wine project on Wine 1.0, from your friends at KDE :) I see your roadmap for post-1.1, and your list of supported apps and I wonder, is your 1.0 release the tipping point? Can people use a fully FOSS stack for everything these days?

Cheers, and thanks for your hard work.

6:24pm: KDE 4.0 is NOT a failure; it is a place to start
There is an old saying that "Any press is good press", amongst the marketing types. Well, I was checking on KDE in various news sources today, and we must be getting a lot of "good" press. Is bad press still "good" press?

Anyway, first I'll link to the articles, so that you can read them and draw your own conclusions, then I'll give my take.

Desktops in Trouble: "KDE has spawned a new release, KDE 4.x, and although it looked promising at first, KDE is in trouble. People are not only complaining about its instability (which is not a good thing in itself) but also about the direction KDE is taking. It is a change of paradigm. KDE has always been what you wanted it to be. You could install it as is and just use it or tweak it until you were happy with it. Just about everything was configurable and every possible feature was available. That was what the KDE audience liked about KDE."

The rest of the article is not quite that negative, and the author does manage to say a few good things about KDE before the conclusion is reached, but this is the paragraph that Google News selected as it's anecdote.

KDE 4 sucks big time: "[T]he newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All glitter, all bloatware. And what’s with the desktop icons? Where’s the simplicity? Do you want to confuse new users to death?
The first releases were so buggy that only serious promotion through blogs and news articles kept people’s interest alive. Then came “bugfix releases” that didn’t change anything from the overall look point of view. Mimetype icons still missing."

While I can easily identify this article as the ranting of a single user, who, as domain claims, likes to rant. The comments are what bother me. Feel free to read them all and see if it's just reaction to imperfect distro packages for 4.0, or what. From some of the comments: "I agree with you there. I discovered KDE4 by downloading the KDE4 version of Kubuntu. I do not recall it saying anywhere that it was beta, a work in progress, or a concept demonstration. It was passed off to the naive user as a new GUI option. THAT is what is most wrong with KDE4: the premature promotion of it as working software."

Now, I've never tried the kubuntu 4.x packages, and maybe they are just bad, but I'm not sure where they got the impression that 4.0 was no longer a work in progress. I mean, I guess not all the users read the KDE news, or managed to read some of our promotional signals during the 4.0 release phase (which were clearly about where 4.x was going in the future, and not all about 4.0 being the second coming of Christ...)

I know that there are problems with 4.0. I've been using trunk for months because it's such a large improvement, even though not marked 'stable'.

Of course, this one has already been covered on Planet KDE in the last week, but I want to point out something a little bizarre. Wingo posted this original blog entry: gnome in the age of decadence, in which he talks about Gnome needing some revolutionary change to keep it vibrant. In the comments, which is where I found some interesting responses, KDE is mentioned quite frequently. Some comments are pretty harsh: "NOOOooooo. . . Don't use KDE4 as an example of what to do in order to move Gnome forward. The web is awash with complaint after complaint of KDE4. Sometimes, "good enough" and "just works" are high platitudes." but others simply "Get it(TM)": "We should separate the complaints about KDE4 and KDE4.0 ;).The complaints have been that KDE4.0 doesn't have all the functionality that KDE3.5.9 has. But that lack of functionality is not the "vision" that was mentioned here. Those absent features are absent because KDE4 is a big effort, and the initial release was more about preparing the groundwork for upcoming versions of KDE4. They are not absent because KDE-devels decided that "the future KDE will have less functionality than 3.5 has". It was due to the fact that implementing all those features would have been too much, considering the manpower, resources and time. But they will make their comeback."

So with those that follow the blogs closely, and see how and where KDE 4.x is going, we're making progress. Even Thom over at OSNews has some nice things to say about KDE these days: "The KDE project saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they had reached a certain limit when it came to what could be done with the KDE 3.x series - they named it the "big friggin' wall", and decided that in order to get over that wall, incremental updates wouldn't do - they needed massive changes, a big jump, and they went for it. It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality" Hey, I wonder if that was in reference to an old blog post of mine? Ah, here it is. That just reminds me of that fact that sometimes people remember what we say over on planetkde :) I should just repost my blog posts using some sort of cron job, that way people can still find them after they fall off the bottom of planetkde :)

Anyway, enough rambling. We (KDE) need to look at this response and judge whether or not it was fully expected. We knew there would be some pushback to the major changes in KDE 4.0, because, believe it or not, history is simply repeating itself. KDE 2.0 was met almost exactly the same way, although open source was flying a lot lower under the public radar in those days. It took until KDE 2.2 before distros mostly stopped shipping KDE 1.1.2 and were happy with 2.x. I think some of the distros jumped the gun on 4.0, and sometimes I don't blame them (KDE 4.0 is very pretty in places), but in other senses, most of these distros are the same ones that delayed for months (or years) after Apache 2.0 came out before adopting it. It seems that KDE is held to a different standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.

So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!

Cheers folks. Be safe.

7:57pm: Checking up on old articles, for shits and giggles; Praise for Polish Linux's KDE articles
So today I was reading the Polish Linux article, part of a series that is periodically covered KDE from SVN (to the delight and occasional flaming of many fans) and it reminded me of how I ended up with this Marketing thing in the first place. It's been just under a year since my last Road to KDE 4 articles went live, and for shits and giggles, I thought I'd revisit them to see what has held together through the last year, what ended up as vapour, and so forth -- For my amusement more than anything else, although it might be interesting to some. So I present...

The Road [From] KDE 4[.0]

My very first article published about KDE (in any media) was: The Road to KDE 4: SVG Rendering in Applications. It covered the (then) new SVG capabilities that were beginning to be exploited in various parts of KDE. I think I like the current KRunner graphics much better :) This has been a forward march since those days, with many apps taking advantage of the scalable graphics in many places. Now if only it didn't take so long to render the things when you first load an app :) Improvements for the future, both code and artwork, are surely on their way.

Next, there was The Road to KDE 4: New KOffice Technologies. KOffice 2.0 development was barely underway at the time, and the flake library was brand-spankin'-new. The Flake system is definitely cool, and can be seen in the recent KOffice Alphas. Additionally, Kross was discussed in this article, relative to KOffice, but it's since found its way into a number of other parts of KDE. I've experimented with it myself, and find it pretty neat. :)

I ruined a few people's day on the KDE Promo list when I published The Road to KDE 4: Full Mac OS X Support while they were working on an official press release. However, as you can tell from the KDE/Mac Website, RangerRick and a few friends are still trucking along. Additionally, KDE on windows was pretty much in its infancy then, but now I have it installed on my work computer, if for no other reason than to play Konquest during lunch :)

The article The Road to KDE 4: Job Progress Reimagined is one of the few disappointments among the list. I know that a lot of the underlying libraries were changed to permit this one to work, but the end result for the user has never materialized in the fashion it was imagined. Maybe it's time for an intrepid plasma hacker to actually write this applet as it was imagined!

I took a look a Kalzium and KmPlot in this one, which showed off two excelled KDE EDU apps - these EDU apps have been pretty quite recently, although there's been almost continuous improvements happening to them.

My article on Phonon The Road to KDE 4: Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier caused a bit of an uproar, with some flamers coming out of the woodwork (not necessarily on the dot, but on those other websites where the story was picked up...) It's nice to see how successful Phonon has been in KDE 4.x already, plus the uptake in Qt. :) Very cool.

I covered Okular and Ligature in the next article, two (then) competing document viewers within the KDE space. While competition is usually a good thing, Ligature is now all-but-dead. Okular is quite nice :)

I spent some time talking about CMake and it's implications to KDE. These days, Alex is even employed by Kitware (last I checked), and the cmake website features KDE prominently as a success story. On a side note, I've recently started to play with one of Kitware's other products, known as Paraview. It's a 3D visualization program for random things, written in Qt and VTK, and scripted in python... it's quite nice for me to load geological information for display, versus some rather bad tools that exist to do the same in the commercial world.

This one caused an uproar (to the flamers: was it worth it?). The Road to KDE 4: Dolphin and Konqueror. In retrospect, Dolphin rules, and Konq still rules, although I (like many others) do not use konq for file management any more, it's nice to know that the promises then of ensuring that Konq would live on have indeed come true.

Remember when Oxygen was just a whisper? The Road to KDE 4: Oxygen Artwork and IconsI did this article the week that the Oxygen icons were first turned on as the KDE default icon set. At the time, the styles and so forth weren't done yet, but it showed off some of the changes from 3.x to 4.x. Oxygen has come a long way since then, infiltrating every part of KDE, and making it a much more distinct visual experience than 3.x. Keep up the good work, artists of KDE!

Well, Amarok 2.0 is not yet released, and probably won't be for several more months yet, but that's okay. When I had written this article (The Road to KDE 4: Amarok 2 Development is Underway) SVN had just branched for 2.0, and the first attempt at porting was compiling. Of course, Amarok now looks quite a lot different, but the vision remains the same as a year ago...

The Road to KDE 4: Strigi and File Information Extraction: Well, strigi has gotten smaller and faster, and is just as invisible as ever (which is exactly as it should be...) However, the article mentioned NEPOMUK, which was still very young at the time. Nepomuk has become more and more interesting to KDE developers since that time, being integrated into a few places in KDE, and showing great potential for future development.

The Road to KDE 4: Solid Brings Hardware Configuration and Control to KDE: Well, Solid is very successful, and still growing. Most visible in 4.0.x was the removable device support that got built into KDE everywhere. Underneath though, Solid continues to improve, with support being implemented for non-HAL based backends (Windows), and networking user interfaces in the works (see the plasma playground).

Konsole Gets and Overhaul, and that's become Konsole for 4.x, plus a few other improvements. Robert's been busy :)

I got to show one of the first KWin Composite articles to the world (although word had definitely already gotten around)... I am particularly proud of this article, as a Marketing guy, as I managed at the time to write it in such as way as to avoid the almost unavoidable flame war from the Compiz community, even after the article hit digg and other high traffic websites.

My very last article as about KDE PIM technologies. In this article, I talked about a lot of future PIM technologies that would be arriving with (or post) 4.0. One of the features there was Akonadi, which is only now seeing the light of day for most real users. Well, it still promises to be as good as the original article claims. :) Some of the other libs never fully arrived, and I guess I've got another few items for the vapour list. At the end, I said "The next article will be on either Krita or Kate (haven't decided which one will go first)."

Well, I never got around to another article in that series (sorry), as I started to write for Ars Technica (but even that was short-lived), got involved in the Release Event planning, and generally got too busy. Ah well, this reminds me of how thankful I am to see the Polish Linux reviews, which fill much the same void that my articles did a year ago, for those users that are starved for KDE information. :)

Be Free! :)

12:09pm: Incommunicado
My summer of geology begins! I'll be away from the internet in general for the next three weeks or so, although I hope to be able to check my email now and again. Happy hacking :) Oh, by the way, if anyone hasn't already read it: I recommend reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

/me waves at all the gearheads.

10:40pm: Life is full of acronyms
So life is settling down into a gentle lull; a calm between the storms that are school and summer work. This gives me a chance to finally blog about a few things that are going on, all interesting to me but only some interesting to you, my captive audience. :) As I began to write this article, I found that my life is filled with many, many acronyms. So I thought I'd share them with you :)

First, I posted several weeks ago that I ran for president of the University of Manitoba's Student Union (UMSU). I lost, but got a respectable 25% of the popular vote. Most Americans will now be thinking to themselves that losing with only 25% is pretty damned bad, but that's what being stuck in a two-party system drills into your brain. There are successful political parties in Soviet Canuckistan that cannot seem to break the 15% barrier, such as the New Democratic Party (NDP), but that never stops them from being happy with the results. Ah well, there's a silver lining: after I lost the UMSU Pres. position , I ran for Co-Pres. of the Society of Earth Sciences and Environmental Student (SESES). SESES is the student body for my faculty, which then interacts with UMSU council on many occasions. Whee!

Well, that's just one of the many busy things that are coming up for the next school year. I am also going to be captaining an ice hockey team again (Go Glaciers!) which takes some time... I might have to play Goal, which is a tough position, but also fun. I'm also quite probably being a Teaching Assistant (TA) for at least one course next year, but I don't know what or when yet...

The most interesting thing on the schedule for next term, however, is my thesis paper. For those readers that don't already know, I'm somewhat obsessed with planetary science. (I keep asking the Marble folks when I'll be able to load lunar and Martian maps into the program, but they claim their math is inflexible for bodies of a different diameter than Earth... I'll get to that problem one day...) For my thesis, I get to order and use Satellite data to attempt to determine geological properties from orbit. This is very cool, as it directly ties into my love of planetary sciences. It also should be very challenging, as the maths required to process Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are quite challenging. PDE's FTW :)

But that's all more than four months from now, and in the meantime, I still have things to do: For the first two weeks in May, I am going on a field trip put on by the Prospectors and Developers Ass'n of Canada (PDAC) called the Student-Industry Mineral Exploration Workshop (S-IMEW). I get to travel to Sudbury, Ontario, and do some research into the origin of the nickel deposits there, in particular with respect to its economic implications. Well, considering that the Sudbury nickel is related to an ancient meteor impact, I should find that very interesting...

Then, in the middle of May, I head up north to Thompson, Manitoba, where I will be spending my summer working in geophysics for Vale INCO (a relative of CVRD). That may require some programming, likely a lot of data analysis, and quite possibly some brain-numbing math. PDE's FTW again! :) Due to the relative isolation of this community, I will be skipping Akademy this year. Hey! Why isn't Akademy an acronym? I mean, every other FOSS event is an acronym: GUADEC, FOSDEM, FOSSCamp, FISL...

Actually, the plague of acronyms isn't entirely their fault. As I've recently discovered, trying to come up with names is very difficult without resorting to acronyms. For example, our KDE developer conference that we were planning for next January recently needed a name that wasn't just "that thing we're planning for Jamaica..." So far our working title is Camp KDE... notice that we didn't "K" the work Camp, nor did we come up with a crappy acronym, but I guess KDE is already a crappy acronym :)

Ah well, this lull is letting me work on some of the organizational things that this event will need, as well as giving me a little time to experiment with coding for KDE again. After asking some questions on irc, as well as the Manitoba Unix Users Group (MUUG), I've settled on coding with python for my project. The idea is to create a program that is self-updating over the internet. Think of Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPG's) or similar programs, where there is a patcher involved... well, in open source a MMORPG would be very difficult as the sources are avaialble... The only way to contain security would be to do all important decision making on a server or similar. But that's not unusual -- the unusual problem comes in when you consider that every user is likely to have a pretty unique system that they are running the game from... after all, KDE runs on a number of different Operating Systems (OS's), and I'd expect the game to be able to run on all of our supported platforms...

Well, without cross-compiling binaries for every platform in existence and distributing them simultaneously, that leaves me with having to choose languages that run in a virtual machine (VM) (like Java), or those that are interpreted, like {Java|ECMA}Script, Python, Ruby, etc... Again irc helped out on this one: QtScript appears to be too lightweight to do a full application, and I don't speak Ruby, so the last of the list is Python. I already speak python, but I don't speak Qt/KDE API's. This is a good time for me to learn, as I have two weeks before I leave for S-IMEW. In my pursuit to learn PyQt/PyKDE/Kross/etc., I discovered that there was no one irc channel for this kind of thing: so I started #kross. In a week, it's grown to ... four people :) If my calculations are correct, then we should have 1460 users a year from now. :P I've also been experimenting with QGraphicsView stuff, but can't figure out how do to QGraphicsLayouts properly... I can use the old fashioned QHBoxLayout and such just fine using widgets-on-canvas (WoC? This sentence needed an acronym...).

Well folks - I think I've run out of acronyms for the night. Be safe folks.

6:48pm: KDE Americas is born; Jamaica to host first conference
For quite a while now, KDE has gotten a reputation for being somewhat euro-centric. While we have contributing members everywhere, the project was borne in Europe. As KDE has grown and our contributors have become more distributed, it has been increasing difficult to shake this reputation, even within our own project.

So while we have a strong user community in certain South American countries (Brazil comes to mind), we have no sense of unity between these geographic regions since most KDE events have been held in distant Europe.

After a successful, well attended release event held in Mountainview last January, it has become apparent that there are enough people in the Americas to warrant holding KDE events on this side of the pond. So I present the plan: one sanctioned KDE contributor/user event in the Americas every year.

In order to ensure that we do not conflict with the well-established and well-attended Akademy, this event will be held roughly 6-months opposite of Akademy: this means if Akademy is late July or early August, then we use late January or early February.

Additionally, since the release event was in California, and we don't want the event to seem US-centric, we will move it around to proposed locations in much the same way that Akademy is...

Our first KDE Americas event will be held in Jamaica next January. This location was chosen by consensus based on a number of reasons: flight availability, cost of accommodations, a strong team of users on the ground to help with the event, a good internet connection, and a local business/government environment that is warming to open source.

Now, just to clarify, this will be a developer meeting with talks, hacking, etc. Just because it's in Jamaica in January does not mean that it's an excuse to take a vacation... although having a conference in Canada in January is definitely less appealing.

We will keep mostly quiet about this event until after Akademy (since we want KDE to be able to focus on that event until then), but we will be looking for sponsors and volunteers to help make this event a success. Right now, if you need additional information, or would like to know how to help, please contact either myself (troy) or Roger Pixley (daSkreech) on irc or via email. (we generally idle in irc.kde.org, #kde)

Cheers folks

10:53pm: Secrecy lifted...
So folks, now that the polls are closed, I can finally lift the veil of secrecy that has been sitting over my life for the last three weeks. For the last few weeks I have been waging a somewhat major campaign for the Presidency of the U of Manitoba student union. Due to archaic election by-laws, the internet was off-limits for all purposes but email for the last little while. Yuck. Anyway, you can read some details (if interested) at the website of our campus rag at themanitoban.com

Anyway, this was not a small campaign, as our student union represents about 23,000 undergraduate students. Right now the ballots are being counted, but I will be happy no matter the result. If I win, then I have work to do, and will have a very busy year that is likely filled with more politics than scholarship. However, if I lose, then I still have a summer job contract sitting there for me which will keep me busy for the summer.

I am very happy about my decision to run this campaign, even though it was a great deal of effort, as I got my platform out in the public and received a warm response from 90% of the people I talked to. Since the closing of elections, I have received a number of emails from individuals who are patiently awaiting the results, and although it won't be made public until Sunday, I am celebrating already...

...By drinking the bottle or wine that I got as part of my organizational efforts in Mountainview. I shared it with Sonya (my cuter half) tonight, and I must say, the wine is just as good now as it was in California. Thanks again Celeste for the wine -- it's amazing :)

The wine serves two purposes: if I win, it's the celebratory wine, and if I lose, it's a celebration of the end of campaigning, where I very successfully sold what could have been an unpopular platform only a few years ago.

You see, in Canada, education is a provincial jurisdiction, and in my province (Manitoba), tuition has been frozen at all major public universities for eight years now. (There are no major private universities here.) My platform included elements that would have seen tuition rising alongside inflation in order to ensure the competitive nature of the university, both nationally and internationally. We'll see if the students bit or not.

Cheers folks -- I'm sure my next blog entry will contain the results :)

1:27pm: The week off that never is...
Well folks, it's "spring break" here for me, but that's a bit of a misnomer since it isn't even spring yet. The uni. officially calls this week "Reading Week", but really it ought to be called the "suicide prevention among students week" since that is truly the purpose of its existence up here. After all, it is -20C on a daily basis, with only 9 hours of sunlight at this time of year...

Anyway, this week was supposed to be somewhat of a week off for myself, but things never work out that way, for a number of reasons. First being that I am campaigning for student government at the U of Manitoba. I cannot reveal what position I am campaigning for or any platform points on my blog due to bizarre campaign bylaws that our student union has in place in order to try to make the available resources perfectly equal to all candidates. Now this means that the internet is out-of-bounds except for a small designated webspace, which costs $30 to rent for one month (and you don't get a domain, php, etc...) plus facebook!

This frustrates me, as a long time facebook holdout (disliking that much data in one place), as this essentially says to me that I can do nothing on the internet except talk about things in a very vague manner (such as this post) without disqualifying myself from the campaign. I can't even say that I'd change it if I win, since that would be a platform point, which I cannot release.

So this campaign will keep me very busy, which is fine, it's just that my week off is now crammed with platform decisions and so forth... plus homework, visiting folks that I can't see during regular hours, etc.

Erg! Well, these are not the only things that are keeping me busy over this week: I also need to travel out of town to give a KDE related presentation at Brandon Uni.'s unix group. Brandon is the second largest city in my province, but that doesn't say much as there's only maybe 60K people there (give or take a little...). That said, I'm told the turnout is usually pretty good for talks there simply on account of the fact that so few people bother to give talks there, and so they are starved :)

Also, we (KDE folks) will make the decision sometime this week on the location of the next KDE Americas conference/meeting/shindig... Helio was swamped with work (as usual) so he didn't get a proposal together for Brazil, but we still have two good proposals to choose from for January 2009. Maybe for the Jan. 2010 event, we'll end up in Brazil finally -- There are too many KDE users down there to ignore :)

Lastly, the week I'm back in school will be even worse, with several midterms, papers due, a hockey game, campaigning, lectures, labs, and a trip to Toronto over the weekend to attend a major geosciences convention. Hopefully the hostel there is of higher quality than the one I was forced to spend the first night in when I went to Akademy last summer :)

Cheers folks

7:36pm: A public spat!
Disclaimer: this entry is personal, and does not reflect any official, issued opinion of the KDE project.

Well folks, it's fun as an observer to see some of the public, high publicity spats that occasionally occur around KDE throughout the blagotubes. First, Aaron posts a rather long (arg! I hate multipage interviews, an excuse for more ads!) interview over at linuxworld.com.au. On page 2, Aaron takes a shot at *ubuntu for being entrenched in certain decisions of their past. Well, Jono Bacon (PHB type at canonical these days) didn't like it, and fired back via his blog.

Now folks, public spat aside, I think that it is true that there are many disenfranchised KDE users on the kubuntu front who are tired of being second class citizens, lagging a year behind on many features going into Ubuntu, or getting broken patches that are only occasionally sent upstream.

To those users, don't believe that kubuntu is the only good KDE distro out there! There are many very popular KDE distros in the world that treat KDE as a first class citizen. I will recommend, based on their support of the KDE community, a few very good alternatives for those kubuntu users that are tired of waiting for change:

OpenSuse: This distro has always been one of of KDE's strongest friends, both past and present, under all sorts of capitalization schemes which I may or may not get correctly in any given post. They have many people working on KDE directly or indirectly, and contribute frequently to upstream which helps to improve KDE for everyone. However, since OpenSuse is tightly associated with Novell, and there are some that morally object to their agreement with a certain American Behemoth, which rules them out. It's too bad, because it is an extremely good distro.

Mandriva: Mandriva is on the upswing these days. It was originally created under the name Mandrake, which was Redhat+KDE in origin. This alone should tell you how important KDE is to them, however their story is a little more interesting. After a few years and several releases, they merged with Connectiva, a south american distro that was also KDE-centric to be renamed as Mandriva. They are huge supporters of KDE via conference hosting, developer hours (directly and indirectly), and like the openSuse folks, they have a very good relationship with KDE. (As a side note, I run this happily at home now, since I moved from kubuntu).

Slackware: Well, my recent post somewhat illustrates Slackware's long-term commitment to KDE. Slackware has outlived most other distros, and tries to keep things simple, and unpatched where ever possible. If you are looking for a 'virgin' KDE, and don't have issues with occasionally having to much around in the bash prompt, I highly suggest slackware. Reporting bugs form slackware's KDE packages are appreciated by most KDE maintainers, as the KDE in slackware is pretty much exactly the KDE that we issue from SVN.

Fedora?: Kevin and the folks at Fedora have recently spent a lot of time re-factoring Fedora in order to make it desktop agnostic. The KDE SIG group there is doing much to improve Redhat/Fedora's image of being historically anti-KDE. If you like *ubuntu, but don't like their implementation of KDE, this might be a good place to move to, as KDE visibility and support is on the upswing (rather than in limbo). They recently did some rebranding to ensure that KDE and Gnome are given equal billing for the download discs, which is one of the main suggestions to *ubuntu that seems to be frequently rejected.

Arch: For those that prefer to watch things compile, but are not comfortable with going straight to gentoo (and all the community issues that come with gentoo), try out Arch. They ship two versions of KDE, one that is more-or-less virgin, and another known as kdemod. kdemod is special, as it is basically a complete collection of all the best KDE patches that have been floating around the internet, and are pulled from almost every distro around. The downside is that reporting bugs from kdemod to kde is not really too useful, as the patches may make the behavior unique, but this is a problem that is common for the more customized distros. The arch folks tend to have fairly decent communications and relations with the KDE community, via irc or otherwise.

PC-BSD/Desktop-BSD: While not linux at all, these two KDE distributions are based on the FreeBSD system. They offer high amounts of polish for KDE users, and can introduce you to the world of free operating systems that exists outside of Linux. I would say that 99% of KDE will work the same on Linux and FreeBSD, but the hardware support may be different. Some people have reported that FreeBSD based KDE installs tend to be much faster than Linux based KDE installs, although this isn't necessarily the case for all hardware. The downside for these two is that KDE 4.x is still unusable, although I'm sure that [ade] and friends will have this all worked out shortly.

There are many other good KDE distros out there, and I have only listed a few of them. There are regional distros such as Red Flag (China), TurboLinux (Asia, recently rebased on Mandriva), Pardus (Turkey), ALT Linux (Russia), as well as successful commercial distros such as Xandros (made popular on the Asus EEE), which come with their own set of unique advantages and problems. These distros have huge user bases that are simply not talked about in the North American (or even European) open source media outlets. I'm sure that there's good KDE distros that I forgot to mention (add them to comments if you want!). A quick check of distrowatch will show you how many KDE distros are out there right now, however many are much more popular than distrowatch's regionally biased statistics would suggest. Don't simply believe the slashdot commenters and related internet groupthink that seems to think that KDE is not shipped by default by any distros that matter. I guess the slashdot crowd only ever uses Ubuntu or Redhat and doesn't care about global reality :)

I love Riddell for the job he tries to do with kubuntu, but without more support from the top-down, he's sadly fighting a losing battle (imho) against the sheer amount of support that goes into the other parts of *ubuntu. Maybe Riddell can use this post as justification to apply for more manpower, which would be a great positive outcome for those users that don't want to leave just yet. If he doesn't get that help, then those users might consider moving elsewhere...

So, to those kubuntu users out there who are only hanging on by the thin thread of hope that the situation will improve in a few years, why not consider your options. You are not alone, and many KDE people who were previously on kubuntu (because it just worked) have left it for greener pastures. Jono and Canonical make a lot of money on KDE (kubuntu) deployments, support, and more, despite how little they put into kubuntu. Users migrating away might be the only message we can send to them that they will understand.

Either way, KDE is very strong outside of kubuntu; you just need to take a look around.

11:56pm: Slackware is king!
[insert tongue into cheek] At the recent KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, members of the open source community at large were invited to attend to partake in the celebrations surrounding KDE 4.0.0's release. There were many attendees from around the world, but the real surprise came when we counted those that were representing the distros.

You see, Slackware accounted for half of all the distro people at the event. Since this event was fairly well attended, one can safely assume that this ratio is actually an accurate representation on reality, and that Slackware is once again rising to reign supreme as the most popular linux distro currently being produced.

They credit their no-nonsense, just get the work done attitude to their recent rise to the top, as well as their continual support of KDE, which earns them numerous endorsements from the thousands of KDE developers that are running Slackware in very public positions, and totally ignore the commercial distributions and their fancy installers and package manager :P

Well, kidding aside (Slackware doesn't really have 50% of all linux users out there), it was nice to see such a large turnout from the Slackware community (I think there were 7 people there, including fearless leader, Patrick Volkerding). It is interesting to note that these folks are all from North America, except for Fred, which means that for many of them, this was their first interaction with the KDE community. This stresses even more the importance of having KDE events in places other than Europe, as there are people that simply will not make that flight.

And to add to the compliment of their attendance in droves, Patrick even drove there from Minnesota! To put that into perspective for you Europeans, that's about 15 hours on the road and a lot of energy drinks.

Anyway, congrats to the Slackware team for showing up all the well-funded distros with the grass-roots effort. Cheers.