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Ten Years of Kubuntu

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Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#31

Post by sandGorgon »

m_mueller wrote: post #9
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community. The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach. I'm a post-3.5 r…

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

This is NOT true - IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/. It allows you to customize everything right upto the alt-tab behavior [1] and access to D-BUS for core OS behavior [2]

If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ [2] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/937/laine/

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#32

Post by ElectricFeel »

Great essay on Kubuntu, Tslolkovsky! It is an impressive overview of your accomplishments, in context, and that's perfect. I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds. My personal favorite is the one I use the most. Standard Ubuntu just does it for me. KDE is ok but Gentoo is just too lo-fi for me - I'm not interested in a product that is like living in a halfway house instead of a real house with a roof & doors & a working bathroom, if you get the point I'm trying to make here. I am aware that there are people out there who cannot lose their massive social anxiety problems & try to work on their computers. Red Hat Linux is apparently the one that's most like Windows & I've heard good reviews of it.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#33

Post by aruggirello »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

I enjoy Kubuntu and use it's cousin / child, Netrunner. Ships with all (most anyway) the things I wish Kubuntu shipped with, but a little extra I don't want, but that's ok, it's easier to remove things (Firefox addons) than waiting for the updates and what not. It even lets me use the "Windows Key" to open the KDE Menu, or at least their version of it, which is something I'm all too accustomed to from Windows. Been r…

I think you can probably customise Kubuntu as well; e.g. I always do remove the Ctrl+F4 key mapping from KDE so I get the "usual" Windows MDI behaviour.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#34

Post by _broody »

weland wrote: post #11
m_mueller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

I'm thinking strictly about the customization of the UI, not of "everything else" in System Preferences (e.g. hardware, network and so on). You can set individual icons but you don't have icon themes per se, can't change the UI theme (and I distinctly remember there was an application that did that very well back on 10.4, and 10.5 broke it along with most other efforts), can't change titlebar buttons and so on. E.g.…

How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).

The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#35

Post by giancarlostoro »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #24
joshuapants wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite warmed up to KDE. I think the problem was that it was a "Windows-like" interface but it never felt quite the same as Windows. I found it easier to adapt to GNOME, precisely because it was different than what I was used to. I did try the beta of Kubuntu with Plasma 5, however, and it seemed nice. I'll have to try it again sometime.

I've heard comments like yours before but this time it made me consider the other side of it. I wonder if your reaction is due to being a power user. If you've been a Windows power user for a while you're probably accustomed to doing things like setting PATH or other environment variables, installing/uninstalling things, starting and stopping services. If you have something that's a little "too much" like Windows but…

I've been in both sides, but you're right to some extent, one of the main things I need is supported by Gnome 3 by default, the "Windows key" whenever I press it, I expect either a dashboard or a menu bar where I can start typing whatever application I want to run, honestly that speeds up my workflow on Windows and Linux (where it is supported), instead of browsing through categories and reading through the list of software, I just press "windows", type what I want to use "Visual Studio", "Qt Creator", hit enter, and move on. That is my main thing, I do enjoy tiling windows. I know there's wonderful tiling managers, but they get more in my way than anything. If I can't get used to it in an hour I just wont bother.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#36

Post by stolio »

ElectricFeel wrote: post #32

Great essay on Kubuntu, Tslolkovsky! It is an impressive overview of your accomplishments, in context, and that's perfect. I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds. My personal favorite is the one I use the most. Standard Ubuntu just does it for me. KDE is ok but Gentoo is just too lo-fi for me - I'm not interested in a product that is like living in a halfway house instead…

> I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds.

Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The "GNU slash Linux" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system.

Should we point to Revolution OS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)?

Should we point to GNU's page about the issue (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html)?

Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#37

Post by UhUhUhUh »

There is not a single day that passes that I don't thank, silently and sometimes not, Linux and the distros it spawned (regardless of my own preferences). It must be clear by now that Linux OSs have recaptured and prolonged the spirit of the "personal computer" idea, which is basically to put the user in control of the machine, or the individual in control of something really. I can't be thankful enough for the hundreds or thousands of talented individuals who made that happen and still do. I think they deserve more praise than they get.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#38

Post by guelo »

m_mueller wrote: post #9
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community. The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach. I'm a post-3.5 r…

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

Great. Could you let me know how to change the color of title bars so that it's not a light grey active window on top of light grey inactive windows?

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#39

Post by weland »

madez wrote: post #30
weland wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception. Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of se…

> Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think. It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. > I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriou…

> It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. I think sandboxes are easier to realize than, say, a secure browser.

I'm not questioning the advantages that sandboxing seems to have, in general. What I am questioning is the ability of the development team that couldn't fix Gnome panel for several years to write a secure sandboxing solution, even when relying on cgroups & co..

Either way, I'd much rather run sane applications that patch and pray that neither the application, nor the jail, have any really disastrous bugs.

> This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

Your argument about permissions and sandboxing on Android is that they help privacy because you can feed fake or empty data to the application. I never managed to do that on my phone (but didn't try that hard, either) so I thought I'd see if there was any progress in that field. Xprivacy was the first result that showed up.

The way it does that, apparently, is by extending /system/bin/app_process to load a JAR file on startup, thus attaching itself to every process and replacing any method in any class. Yeah, no thanks. I can't wait to have the first catastrophic exploit in the Xposed framework making every single process vulnerable.

I tried a couple of other solutions a while ago, but most of them ended up crashing or freezing applications.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#40

Post by weland »

_broody wrote: post #34
weland wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking strictly about the customization of the UI, not of "everything else" in System Preferences (e.g. hardware, network and so on). You can set individual icons but you don't have icon themes per se, can't change the UI theme (and I distinctly remember there was an application that did that very well back on 10.4, and 10.5 broke it along with most other efforts), can't change titlebar buttons and so on. E.g.…

How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all). The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to cont…

Pretty sure I didn't take OS X as an example of how it's done. In fact, I took it as an example of how it's not done, which is why I find it unpleasant that Gnome is following in their footsteps.

> The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

It's much better when you have your hands on the keyboard. When I have a hand on the mouse already, having to rely on the keyboard is annoying for the same reason why having to rely on the mouse is annoying when you have your hands on the keyboard.

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