On 04/04/2018 03:05 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
You must start thinking about letting KDE3 die, the support is limited and the problems to maintain it increase exponentially.
Me, I'd be happy to still be able to run some of the KDE3 apps that were not ported. Kbabel, rekall...
for me it's not really that. I run the latest greatest plasma (current as of today) on Arch, and it is simply not the integrated and efficient desktop that KDE3 is. It is painfully obvious that what the original KDE team did was focus on desktop efficiency and human factors as the core of the development, and then each application grew from that coordinated effort and framework. plasma lacks that and it shows. plasma, as with kde4, was a let's port the kde3 apps to a new Qt framework, and instead of all working to develop that core and then developing apps outward that utilize the best of what Qt had to offer, you had one or at most a few developers responsible for making the old packages work on the new widget library. That has resulted in mismatched file choosers, and a round-peg in a square-hole feel to the desktop that just drives you batty when you are used to everything just working.. I wrote 100s of bugs against kde4 and close to that number against plasma/frameworks (both Qt and KDE bugs). One thing you glean, rather quickly, from working with the devs is a clear understanding what there approach to the desktop is and whether they are interested in making it the best it can be -- or whether they really just want to get it working and don't really care about the attention to detail. And that is, and will always be, the thing that differentiates a project that values making something the best it can be, actually creating something new to reach that goal -- or a project that is just porting something to yet another widget set... because... (well who knows...) Nothing would make me happier that to launch plasma and have it all work without ending up spending more time fixing things than just getting work done. But when things like font-rendering are so different that you can no longer print forms that paginate the same (important in my work), applications that are limited to a single instance that prevent you from being about to capture what is broken with them, it really leaves you wondering -- what's the point? [somewhat comical, desktop effects were totally thrashed in the latest updates just a couple of weeks ago, some effects just gone, no way to initiate the desktop cube any longer... that after the cylinder and sphere reflections were found to be using the cube reflection code causing the reflection to hop up and down over the title bar on rotate -- earthquake --(the radius of a sphere or cylinder doesn't change -- the vertices of cube corners very much do)..] But on a good note -- the basket-note pads for plasma received a major update and will now actually display most of the decades worth of Linux and programming information I have squirreled away there, and actually allow it to be edited without corruption. So I do see things getting better, but I saw things getting better with KDE4 too -- we see where that ended up after 8 years of patching, fixing, scrapping, rewriting etc... After 8-years of promising the next best thing since sliced-bread, it was relegated to the desktop trash heap of history, just to run off chasing the new Qt5 frameworks and the porting kde3/4 apps started all over again... If history is a good teacher -- we should look for it to be in reasonable shape somewhere around 2024. Meanwhile -- there is no reason Qt3 won't still be chugging along, and between a few talented devs and TDE, still providing all the patched and secure functionality of the latest gee-whiz widget set. </soapbox (don't even get me started about Gnome3)> -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org