Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I’m very impressed! Although it’s still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.

While other articles will no doubt focus on the many benefits that Kubuntu 7.10 will bring, I’d like to look forward into the future. Namely, this is because of the upcoming release of KDE 4, which is currently planned for December 11, 2007.

I was disappointed today to hear that the release of KDE 4.0 will be delayed by two months. The delay is caused by the insertion of two extra betas.

But this isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it shows quite clearly how the KDE crew has a great grasp of the balance between releasing a product as soon as possible, but also releasing it with a reasonably high level of quality.

I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.

Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they’re actually trying to accomplish.

Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the “Philosophy” section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend’s house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

I’m very happy to see that Ubuntu has been a major force in bringing Linux to the masses. Those users get a better desktop experience that they would likely have gotten using a different operating system, while also benefitting from the low cost and the better security Linux offers. Unfortunately, I see a bothersome trend forming: Ubuntu users who seem to be under the impression that GNOME is the only desktop for Linux.

As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there’s a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.

Today I heard about a Linux distribution called Linux Mint. More specifically, I was interested to read about their release of a KDE Edition of their distribution. On the page talking about their KDE edition, they mention the software that is included with their distribution. But something seemed out of place. It took me a moment to realize what it was: … the default Web browser is Firefox 2.0.0.3.

GNOME 2.18 was released recently, and this release was reported on Slashdot. In the discussion for that topic, one user made a particularly interesting post concerning the state of today’s desktop environments. That user asks the question: So, when are we going to see smart and innovative desktops that dramatically improve user friendliness?

The actual benefits of 3D computer desktops is a topic I have written about in the past. And today I’d like to revist it, specifically after seeing an article linking to a YouTube video of Beryl in action. In short, the title of the article challenges Bill Gates and Microsoft to exceed what is shown in the video. Except I don’t think that there video really shows anything remarkable.

My last article was about the performance and memory consumption of the popular open source KDE and GNOME desktops. Well, it seems that that particular article was submitted to Digg. I looked at some of the comments that people posted, and I specifically wanted to address this one comment in particular.