A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

[damipereira]

Hi I've just installed kubuntu 10.04 and just coming from Arch Linux, which is simple in design (not to configure, but that's another story), I feel there could be a bit more of KISS in kubuntu.
From wikipedia "The KISS principle states that simplicity should be a key goal in design, and that unnecessary complexity should be avoided."
Some things I noted a bit "dirty":
1- Systray icons are loaded by the files in /usr/share/autostart/ so that even If I close bluetooth and printer applets they come back everytime (unless files in /usr/share/autostart/ are deleted)
2- Related to 1,I changed network-manager to gnome gui for some problem with dsl(I've seen bug reported) , nm-applet can't be loaded at login unless it's put in /usr/share/autostart/
Shouldn't all these work of autostart be left to kde? AFAIK kde handles this by opening all apps that were opened last logout (Is there any problem with this method?).
3 -Too much splited packages in repos I Guess this comes from ubuntu but what's the advantage of having For example chromium divided into all these packages:
chromium-browser - Chromium browser
chromium-browser-dbg - chromium-browser debug symbols
chromium-browser-inspector - page inspector for the chromium-browser
chromium-browser-l10n - chromium-browser language packages
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-dbg - chromium-codecs-ffmpeg debug symbols
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra-dbg - chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra debug symbols
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree - dummy upgrade package
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree-dbg - dummy upgrade package
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg - Free ffmpeg codecs for the Chromium Browser
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra - Extra ffmpeg codecs for the Chromium Browser

I know chromium is a bad example but What I'm saying is that IMHO there are too much -common -dbg -* packages with no apparent benefit(correct me If I'm wrong)

By no means I'm trying to offend any kubuntu developer or something. You've made a great work, I just wan't to know What people think of these, I could help tiding things too, I'm no developer but I'll do what I can. Thanks

[Ole Juul]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Welcome to the forums.

I'm not really sure what your question is, but from my point of view there are two ways to keep things simple. One would be to just use the system as it comes (like a Mac user would) and be happy with that. The other way is to use a more basic system like FreeBSD without a GUI. I do both, depending on what I want a box to do. For extreme neatness and architectural formality my favourite (and daily-user) is a DOS machine which is so neatly organized it makes GUI boxen look like pure chaos.

Bear in mind that Linux is open source and the pieces come from all over the place. Also, since we are not paying for it, there are sometimes things which are not as good as they would be if we were to give the developers a billion dollars every year. It's a trade-off. I take the bad with the good and revel in the fact that I have a system which I can modify (greatly) to suite my taste and not have to pay through the nose.

BTW: Microsoft has an annual revenue of $60 billion, which gives them the ability to put more work into the software. I would expect it to have extremely neat libraries and be many thousands of times better - but from reports of people who have tried it apparently "thousands of times better" is stretching it. I can't imagine why. You may not come from the MS world or (like me) not even have much experience with it. I'm just using it to illustrate why we can expect unpaid for Linux distributions to not always be perfect.

Regarding paying, I recently wanted to set up a serial link between a vintage piece and a Linux box. Basically just use my main Linux machine as a dialup ISP, except without the modems. The vintage part was easy because it was client side. What was amazing was that setting up the Linux side turns out to be all of one command line entry without even having to install anything! I don't know MS-Windows, but thought I'd figure out how to do it there so I could tell others. After researching it a bit it turns out that to do the same thing there would cost me about $300 for extra software. The bottom line is that for most people Linux can network and Windows cant. That is only one of the many benefits I get in return for a bit of roughness - and perhaps messiness in the libraries.

I know I'm bashing MS here but sometimes it's hard not to. The quality of their software doesn't effect me one way or the other. I'm really just comparing expensive software to free software. To me it's amazing what you can get for free. Linux rocks!

[damipereira]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Thanks for the reply but I also come from linux (Arch linux) which uses a lot of the KISS principle, and keeps things simple and the more default possible, and I thing kubuntu should do some of that too. I don't mean making programs work better, that's upstream job, what I mean is things like packages(make simple packages and not divide unnecessarily) and configuration files(putting systray icons in /usr/share/autostart doesn't seem a good and standard way to do things).I read it's because of debian but I also mean things like sudoers file which has a .d folder (why is it for?)
Anyway I think kubuntu could use a bit more of KISS.

[Vistaus]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

You do realize that /usr/share/autostart is only for all users? If you want something to autostart for just you (or if you're the only user on the computer), you can just put it in either System Settings>>>Autostart or /home/yourusername/.kde/Autostart

[toad]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Hi damipeira,

KISS in Arch is beautiful which is one of the reasons I am an Arch convert. I used to be kubuntu and thoroughly liked it, but don't expect _any_ one distribution to satisfy all of _your_ wishes/needs/requirements

Anyway, have fun with kubuntu but I know you'll be back 8)

[Rog131]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Useful

> HOWTO find Kubuntu's manual / reference / guide / documentation / help


KISS - we are not same kind of users

The packages are splitted because:

-dbg
Debug packages are those who want to help. There is no need to install those if you are not interested to file the bug reports.

-l10n
Additional languages. If your language is supported by the standard installation then you don't need the additional language pack.

-ffmpeg-extra
Non free codecs. There are users who only want to use the free and open source apps. Also, there are countries with the copyright or legal issues. More > RestrictedFormats

-inspector
This package contains 'inspector', allowing web developpers to inspect any element of a web page at runtime (html, javascript, css, ..). There are user who are not interested this kind of action.


Sudoers

things like sudoers file which has a .d folder (why is it for?)

Well

sudo cat /etc/sudoers.d/README

#
# As of Debian version 1.7.2p1-1, the default /etc/sudoers file created on
# installation of the package now includes the directive:
#
# #includedir /etc/sudoers.d
#
# This will cause sudo to read and parse any files in the /etc/sudoers.d
# directory that do not end in '~' or contain a '.' character.
#
# Note that there must be at least one file in the sudoers.d directory (this
# one will do), and all files in this directory should be mode 0440.
#
# Note also, that because the sudoers file is not a 'conffile' in the Debian
# sense, and sudoers contents can vary widely, no attempt is made to add this
# directive to existing sudoers files on upgrade. Feel free to add the above
# directive to the end of your /etc/sudoers file to enable this functionality
# for existing installations if you wish!
#

[Vistaus]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

@Rog131:
"-l10n
Additional languages. If your language is supported by the standard installation then you don't need the additional language pack."

Nope. If I install chromium-browser without l10n, Chromium shows up in English even though language of the entire system is set to Dutch. When I install chromium-browser-l10n, it detects my system language and then Chromium shows up in Dutch. So you always have to install chromium-browser-l10n, unless you're system language is set to English or you don't care about English Chromium.

[Rog131]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Vistaus:

Nope. If I install chromium-browser without l10n, Chromium shows up in English...

Hmm - - i though that it is what i wrote:
If your language (Dutch) is supported by the standard (Chromium) installation then you don't need the additional language pack...

or

If you are using the English language setting then you don't need the additional language pack.

[damipereira]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

KISS - we are not same kind of users

Thats the stuff I came to look for, If people are ok with this I guess I'll learn to live with it too, if not I would report it as a bug.

You do realize that /usr/share/autostart is only for all users? If you want something to autostart for just you (or if you're the only user on the computer), you can just put it in either System Settings>>>Autostart or /home/yourusername/.kde/Autostart

Yes I know but what I wanted was something(kbluetooth and printer-applet) NOT to be started automatically for my user. Finding /usr/share/autostart was not easy (not hard as it just needed a google search but still would be hard for novice users and troubling for more experienced ones) . Maybe it should be set per user in kde autostart KCM and default to actual apps on /usr/share/autostart. I think it's a bit frustrating for a new user to close a systray icon just to find it next login with no apparent way of getting rid of it exept removing the app. And I'm starting to understand why are splited packages a good thing sorry for not looking a bit more into it.

Well

sudo cat /etc/sudoers.d/README

I have seen that but still don't understand what's the problem with 1 simple sudoers file, a whole folder seems too complicated

[verndog]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

You do realize that /usr/share/autostart is only for all users? If you want something to autostart for just you (or if you're the only user on the computer), you can just put it in either System Settings>>>Autostart or /home/yourusername/.kde/Autostart

That's fine for starting, but the OP wanted Bluetooth not to start.

[kyonides]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

I think it's a bit frustrating for a new user to close a systray icon just to find it next login with no apparent way of getting rid of it exept removing the app.

That's not completely true, you can still remove it manually either from konsole by using sudo rm something or from Dolphin or Konqueror if you open it from konsole by typing kdesudo dolphin or kdesudo konqueror. If there's some systray icon that keeps reappearing, it might be because it's not in your user (home) folder but in the system one (I guess somewhere in your /usr/share folder).

[kubicle]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Hi I've just installed kubuntu 10.04 and just coming from Arch Linux, which is simple in design (not to configure, but that's another story), I feel there could be a bit more of KISS in kubuntu.
From wikipedia "The KISS principle states that simplicity should be a key goal in design, and that unnecessary complexity should be avoided."
Some things I noted a bit "dirty":
1- Systray icons are loaded by the files in /usr/share/autostart/ so that even If I close bluetooth and printer applets they come back everytime (unless files in /usr/share/autostart/ are deleted)
2- Related to 1,I changed network-manager to gnome gui for some problem with dsl(I've seen bug reported) , nm-applet can't be loaded at login unless it's put in /usr/share/autostart/
Shouldn't all these work of autostart be left to kde? AFAIK kde handles this by opening all apps that were opened last logout (Is there any problem with this method?).

As far as KISS goes, arch uses /usr/share/autostart just the same as kubuntu.

System wide autostart items have their place and not everything can/should be left to user specific kde session management.

Of course disabling unneeded services should be simpler for a user, the desktop file spec includes a tag for that "X-KDE-autostart-condition" with which you can easily set the system wide default for starting/not starting and change the default for individual users. Unfortunately not all KDE .desktop autostart files include this tag (so if you use it, you'll have to re-edit the files after upgrade file overwrites).

For bluetooth, the solution is already coming in the form of bluedevil (which will likely be the default bluetooth handler in Maverick).

As a kded service, bluedevil can easily be disabled in systemsettings if not needed.

[damipereira]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

As far as KISS goes, arch uses /usr/share/autostart just the same as kubuntu.

System wide autostart items have their place and not everything can/should be left to user specific kde session management.

Of course disabling unneeded services should be simpler for a user, the desktop file spec includes a tag for that "X-KDE-autostart-condition" with which you can easily set the system wide default for starting/not starting and change the default for individual users. Unfortunately not all KDE .desktop autostart files include this tag (so if you use it, you'll have to re-edit the files after upgrade file overwrites).

For bluetooth, the solution is already coming in the form of bluedevil (which will likely be the default bluetooth handler in Maverick).

As a kded service, bluedevil can easily be disabled in systemsettings if not needed.

I never checked well that folder in arch but what I know it's that if it was there it was not beeing too much used I mean I could close any systray icon (klipper,kmix,bluetooth) and they wouldn't appear in next login, I think this is because of using /usr/share/autostart but it could be something more.

I think it's a bit frustrating for a new user to close a systray icon just to find it next login with no apparent way of getting rid of it exept removing the app.

That's not completely true, you can still remove it manually either from konsole by using sudo rm something or from Dolphin or Konqueror if you open it from konsole by typing kdesudo dolphin or kdesudo konqueror. If there's some systray icon that keeps reappearing, it might be because it's not in your user (home) folder but in the system one (I guess somewhere in your /usr/share folder).

Yes I know that's why I said "apparent way"a new user wouldn't guess /usr/share/autostart has bluetooth and pirnter .desktop files that should be removed(wouldn't even know what a dekstop file is).
I imagine a new user trying to close them, then as that wouldn't work, he would go to preferences, start looking and find autostart KCM which has nothing related to bluetooth/etc, it seems a bit frustrating at first.

[kubicle]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

I never checked well that folder in arch but what I know it's that if it was there it was not beeing too much used I mean I could close any systray icon (klipper,kmix,bluetooth) and they wouldn't appear in next login.

I agree that this is how it should work, and in fact, most tray apps behave that way also in kubuntu. If you close klipper, it'll ask whether you wish to start it on subsequent logins, because it supports the autostart condition tag. For some apps like printer-applet and kbluetooth, the option seems to have been overlooked by their devs (kbluetooth won't be a "problem" for long, as I mentioned, it has already been superseded upstream.)

There is also this trick you can use to disable autostarting for specific users. Still not obvious, but should work over upgrades as long as the .desktop file name stays the same.

[toad]

Re: A bit of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) in kubuntu ?

Ha, I right click on systray and select those applets I want shown and those I want hidden - okay, so they all start, but at least I don't see them