[conspire] greetings from latest debian mint "linux ", supposed kde4

[Ed Biow]

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> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:00:26 -0800 (PST)
> From: bruce coston <jane_ikari at yahoo.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: [conspire] greetings from latest debian mint " linux "
>     supposed kde4
> Message-ID: <776129.55002.qm at web65501.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Don't wonder why Linux lost market share recently :

I sympathize with the feeling the some parts of the Linux community
have been making some awkward choices recently.  Grub2 & KDE4 were
very much beta software when major distros began packaging them for
mass consumption. Changes in X have not been consistently helpful,
either. KMS has been making it impossible to use the previously
rock-solid intel driver on some chipsets, for instance, and what
happened to my xorg.conf? (Don't tell me, I know.) Lots of folks have
been vexed by Pulse Audio, as well. Many of these big changes are
apparently headed somewhere, true hot-swappable monitors, per
application volume control, more granular and versatile boot choices,
etc. but in the meantime things that we'd gotten used to aren't
working the way they used to and some of their replacements seem a bit
under-done.
> I got the current debian mint version of " kde " 4 " working " - WOW
what a stinker , you can't even escape the slab to get a root programs
menu like what a human interface has ! Recent versions of kde4 let you
do that but not this filth .
Actually, you can have back the old style menu, both in Gnome & KDE4.
I actually have both the Mint Menu and the traditional non-slab menus
in my Ubuntu-based Mint install on my new laptop, both in KDE &
Gnome.  The Mint slab menu is the one that I find the least
objectionable and for some things it comes in handy, though I much
prefer the traditional menu for most things.

I have LMDE on a machine in the attic and I have to say, I really like
it.  Regular Mint is noticeably slower than standard Ubuntu, LMDE is
still pretty sprightly in my experience. What is odd is that Mint
chose to release a version based on Debian testing right before
Squeeze went stable.  We'll have to see how it does when the big
post-freeze changes start flooding in to testing in the next month. On
my LMDE install I'm not planning to do a "apt-get dist-upgrade" for a
month or so until things sort themselves out.

Personally, I find it easier to install the proprietary bits on
standard Ubuntu than to beat the slow & ugly out of Mint, but I may be
alone there, Mint is the second most popular release on Distrowatch,
getting 1615 page hits compared to 2100 for Ubuntu in the last 6 months.
>
> It's no surprise that the recent " corporate " version of Pardus uses a
KDE3 variant , apparently foreign corporations don't desperately hate
their employees . Last I saw Oracle Linux has real KDE too .
Regular Pardus has been using KDE4 for quite some time.  Oracle has
also switched to KDE 4.34 on its latest version based on RHEL 6
released last week.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=oracle

It is interesting the the first "free" stable clone of RHEL 6 has come
from the evil Oracle, Centos & Scientific Linux are still releasing
alphas & betas. If you really like KDE3 Centos 5 should be supported
through 2014. Too bad everything else about it is so dated, as well.
>
> Just because the dying company maned Microsoft moved the panel
somewhere bad and destroyed their start menu with the " slab "
abomination does not make it a good idea . As an analogy microsoft
coders changed their start button as a form of pissing their names in
the snow . AND now your users don't really expect such microsoft errors
any? more . [ More mobile devices ship now than computers and microsoft
stinks at mobile , the handwritings on the wall , barring serious
changes microsoft = dead . ]
Actually, what bugs me is how often KDE & Gnome slavishly mimic OSX, I
kept seeing what I thought were brain-dead changes, and then when I
played around on a Mac I saw were they were coming from. Personally, I
don't understand why everyone says OSX has such great UI. It seems
hard to configure and counter-intuitive to me. When I was trying to
clean up a browser infection a friend had I felt powerless using
Finder, but once I could find a terminal I knew my way around.
>
> Can't get a visual tool with root privledges for anything from any
password on this system when running the " kde " no matter what , not
even installing their " kdesudo " !
>
That is a weird little quirk, I have no idea why the KDE devs did that
(actually, the entire plasmoid "semantic desktop" is completely
mysterious to me, they took a world-class desktop environment and
really screwed it up, though now that I know my way around it a bit
better I don't find it quite so irritating. You can try gksu or sux,
maybe, or simply copy your user's .Xauthority file to the /root
directory.  I'm on a KDE3 machine now (Lenny), I forget how I most
often get around that.
> Did the new user interface folks try to implement more " features "
that oppose the known preferable methods from user research again , and
I mean really doing research as opposed to polling your best buddies and
declaring all other facts false . This is degenerating back to the parts
of the most disfunctional gnome human interface guidelines where I found
them boldly claiming " real research " proved the opposite of the real
referenced findings of human interface research amid a Multiverse of
obfuscations .? Kde3.x did so many things so well , like giving me the '
Be II ' window title bars when set to do that , that it suffered a giant
smear campaign over bugs . Nobody does the user preferences as well as
they did . The side panel here truly stinks when compared to the old
kde3 style of implementation .
KDE4 also mucked up some great applications (e.g. amarok) and
seriously degraded others. In the konqueror file manager, for
instance, the terminal emulator no longer tracks changes in the GUI's
directories, drag and drop behavior in folders with many
sub-directories is almost impossible because the target folder keeps
scrolling around unpredictably, and meta-data doesn't work nearly as
well as it did (or at all, really). Remember how highlighting a jpg or
ogg file in KDE3 konqueror would give you picture dimensions or tag
information? Mostly even if you look at the Properties for the file
you can't find that in KDE4, even if you run the stupid nepomuk-strigi
file indexing which hobbles slow systems, takes a lot of space, and
seems to be of no earthly good.  But you can give individual files
tags and ratings.  Does anyone ever use that?

I think a lot the impetus to change was a desire by the developers to
move to a newer tool set, qt4, not that I understand anything about
it. And, supposedly at some point KDE4 will be installable in Windows
and OSX, I wonder if contemplation of those future ports didn't cause
some of the strange design decisions the devs made. But they are
trying their best & I'm sure they have been hurt by the reception that
KDE4 has gotten in much of the community. Some of the real blame
adheres to the distributions that moved people to KDE4 before it was
really ready.  Of course, the KDE devs shouldn't have given what they
frankly described as beta software the 4.0 moniker, either.
>
> Grub2 seemed to find some more things it can maybe boot as a side
effect of me? changing the default boot entry . I Desperately wish it
had found them earlier .
> My cat insists I stop now
> ?- Bruce ...
> Murder adding the trinity repositories to sources.lst of my installation
>  of the? most recent debian variant of Mint and they don't appear to
> work . Does anyone know how to fix it ? I'm not sure squeeze was the
> right version but nothing downloads from pearson or sometimes debian at
> all . Is this new version churn from debian . I'd like a " desktop
> environment " vs. this filth !
Sorry for the frustration. I don't know what your issue is.  I've
installed Trinity both on Squeeze and on Ubuntu Lucid and it mostly
works fine, with some quirks. The instructions are very straight
forward: http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/debian_installation.html
>
> ?- love and kisses - Bruce
>
> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:57:03 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [conspire] greetings from latest debian mint " linux "
> supposed kde4
> Message-ID: <20110218015703.GS26458 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
>
>> > Obviously you don't like KDE4.  How much effort would it be to install
>> > an earlier version of KDE?  Or is Mint like Ubuntu, which makes it
>> > easy to install the "standard release" and difficult to do anything
>> > else?
>
> This is just an off-the-cuff impression, so take cum grano salis, but
> the hitch is going to be package dependencies.  You could take an
> installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition and remove KDE 4.6 packages,
> but then where are you going to get a set of Debianised KDE 3.x
> software, even in Debian source code form, let alone compatible
> binaries? 
Actually, LMDE still uses KDE 4.4x, though that should change soon.
> A fallback would be to attempt to find a non-Debian, but
> nonetheless maintained and debugged, set of KDE 3.x source code and
> attempt to create and compile a set of Debian packages from that, but
> that sounds like a huge project.  One would have to hate 4.6 and love
> 3.x a _whole_ lot, and have a great deal of time and energy to spare.
Check out the Trinity stuff over at Pearson. It installs a whole tree
of dependencies in /opt/kde3, so you can chose whether to log in to
KDE3 or 4. It seems to work pretty well for now.
http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/

How tenable it is going forward is a different question. There are
already some seams appearing where newer desktops are leaving Trinity
behind.  For instance, I wasn't able to make the creaky old kcontrol
Display Control handle my particular radeon dual monitor situation,
1920x1080 horizontal and 1280x1024 vertical, though KDE4 and Gnome do
cope with them well, particularly Gnome, which actually remembers my
settings between logins, while KDE4 offers to remember them, but
somehow never does. Another issue is that the /opt/kde3 stuff isn't in
your normal path so if you are not logged in to KDE3 you have to use
the whole /opt/kde3/bin/COMMAND path to call up a KDE3 program.

But I like Trinity. I'm hoping that KDE4 will finally be as usable as
KDE3 by the time Lenny is no longer supported as oldstable in a year,
but if not, hopefully Trinity will still be around.

Ed Biow




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