On 02/13/2010 05:08 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
You don't need to. I never have and don't see myself ever using virtual desktops and desktop activities. I'm sure for one developer those capabilities helped with development work by allowing setup and saving of different pre-configured desktops holding all apps and views relative to each project he was involved in. Maybe he does both nepomuk development, dbus and PolicyKit -- whatever. I'm sure that it would be helpful to have a nepomuk development activity and a dbus configured activity and so on. He liked it, he idea got pitched, other developers liked it, and it became part of the New KDE.
However, this is completely lost on 99% of end users. There are only so many ways you can rearrange your email and web browser into different activities before they all start looking the same... The hardship on the devs is the countless thousands of hours that have been sunk into something that will only be used by a tiny fraction of end users. That's one of KDE's biggest stumbling blocks. Priority focused on the normal end user...
I respectfully disagree, David. Multiple desktops are one of the key Linux differentiators from Windows and OS-X, and I would personally be sunk without them. But I'm not alone, I support a group of scientists and engineers who also make good use of multiple desktops. I can name one acoustic data analyst who uses twenty desktops at a time. She has various processing jobs going on all the desktops and dances around them all like a sugar-plum faerie! In case you're wondering, she's running the processes on a network of remote servers, so she's not slamming her desktop system. Once a serious scientific professional gets used to Linux and KDE, they're hooked and can never go back to Windows. BTW, I agree with Basil: KDE-4 is ready for use (mostly) and I like it! I had some problems with crashing (screen savers) and desktop wallpaper edges getting screwed up, but those problems seem to be gone now. Okular is great and now I don't need Acroread hanging around leaking its memory all over the place. One problem remains with npviewer, which is probably related to Flash. I had one problem two days ago that filled up my home disk with hundreds of gigs of errors in .xsession-errors. I think the root cause was npviewer again, but I'm not sure. I also figured out how to remap my caps-lock key to a second control key using a KDE GUI. Another one of my perversions: God intended the control key to be immediately to the left of the "A" key. Some IBM designer is probably roasting in hell by now for changing the IBM-PC's layout to something that "looked" better, but confounded technical touch typists. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org