Bruce Byfield on his KDE experiences

[SteveRiley]

Saw this in the KDE Community forum, thought I'd share here.

How I Learned to Love the KDE 4 Series by Bruce Byfield

To start with, I started noticing a difference in design philosophy between GNOME and KDE. GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines advocate a minimalist design in which only the most basic functions are available in the interface. By contrast, although I don't believe that KDE has ever formally expressed its design preferences, you only have to look at apps like Amarok, DigiKam, K3B, KMail, or Marble to see a completist philosophy, rather like that of all those Victorians who set out to write the definitive study of their subject. If a feature has even the remotest connection to the core function, then sooner or later a KDE app will add it.

The "minimalist" and "completist" descriptions are so right.

[Qqmike]

Re: Bruce Byfield on his KDE experiences

Interesting. Even helpful for someone (like myself) who seems stuck on KDE 3.

" ... the fourth series [KDE 4.x] was not abandoning the features of the third series so much as rearranging them to make innovation easier ... if you choose, you can ignore them and work in much the same way as you did in KDE 3.x. But if you do use them, you soon understand that KDE 4.x is not breaking with the traditional ideas about the desktop so much as expanding them ... This approach is in marked contrast to both GNOME 3.x and Unity, both of which are full of marked breaks with the past and give you only the choice of enduring the breaks or else finding another interface."

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bruce Byfield on his KDE experiences

....
" ... the fourth series [KDE 4.x] was not abandoning the features of the third series so much as rearranging them to make innovation easier .......

In programming terms, that "rearranging" was Trolltech abandoning the old Qt3 API, which had grown into a kludge, and creating a new, modular API that allows rapid additions or removals of features by making them, in affect, plugins to the API. That's why the KDE dev crew could do experimentation in real time as they explored new ideas for the KDE desktop. It aggravated a lot of users, but the results, IMO, have been well worth it. Beyond a doubt, a fully activated deathstar KDE 4.7 desktop is the most powerful DE ever created. Trolltech could only do what they did by abandoning the Qt3 API and starting fresh with Qt4. There are objects in Qt3 which cannot be exported to Qt4, and there are objects in Qt4 which cannot be back-ported to Qt3 because of the difference in foundational code.

Also, Qt3 had an odd developer interface which was very cumbersome to use and made writing Qt apps a task where the developer twisted his app to fit the Qt dev tool. I almost gave up on Qt because of it. In Qt4, Trolltech switched to the generic way of writing C & C++ apps, making life MUCH easier for the developer. It also made using traditional version control systems a lot easier because none of your base code was tied up in huge, "Don't Edit", XML scripts that were automatically generated by the UI designer. The old Qt3 UI designer had a killer bug in it. IF you began using the "paint brush" the XML created by the UI designer when you saved your UI was too large for the moc (meta object compiler) which converted the XML script into C++ code, and your compile would quite because it ran out of resources.

[Qqmike]

Re: Bruce Byfield on his KDE experiences

GreyGeek -- Interesting. Thanks. Not a programmer (since 1980), but as on Ops Research guy, I have a better understanding of the essence of the change 3 --> 4.