Ubuntu Open Week, KDE4 session

Ubuntu Open Week has some great sessions about KDE4, for example. Here’re the most important lines to me:

History of KDE4

00:02 <+Riddell> You see, at the time KDE was good
00:02 <+Riddell> Some people had planned to make a free software desktop environment and had succeeded.
00:02 <+Riddell> There was a desktop shell, a web browser, a file manager, a kick arse music player.  Everything you needed
00:02 <+Riddell> But it wasn’t taking over the world
00:03 <+Riddell> It was good, but it wasn’t notably better than the rest.
00:03 <+Riddell> Along the way Windows had become not quite so crap and Mac OS had been rewritten into something really very impressive, there was also someone called Miguel who kept submitting patches to KDE that got rejected, I heard he went off and did something else
00:03 <+Riddell> So in order to take over the world we had to do better than good.  Incremental improvements on what KDE was wouldn’t cut it.  We had to take a long term view and make something rocking.
00:04 <+Riddell> As it happens we had a good technical foundation to make something rocking on top of, the Qt library, which was being re-written for the multi-platform bling enabled world of the next decade
00:04 <+Riddell> Qt 4 came along and that allowed a whole lot more to be done with desktop applications.  It could make them beautiful.
00:04 <+Riddell> Qt 4 is a big step in taking over the world.  When compositing came along people thought that was beautiful but it only added beauty between the applications.  To have a truely beautiful desktop you need a powerful toolkit which can make beauty easy.  Fortunately Qt 4 does that
00:05 <+Riddell> So KDE had to be rewritten and this took some time.  It had to be made cross platform, easy to programme for complex things and most of all it had to be beautiful
00:05 <+Riddell> and when I say beautiful, artwork is a big part of that, but it’s a whole user experience
00:06 <+Riddell> Needless to say this affected Kubuntu a lot
00:06 <+Riddell> Kubuntu is a KDE distro.  We believe that KDE is the best desktop platform and so the best distribution can be made from KDE
00:06 <+Riddell> Our hope is to make KDE shine
00:07 <+Riddell> which will make lots of happy users

00:09 <+Riddell> 4.0 came out when it did because it had been ages in the making and open source needs people to release often
00:09 <+Riddell> else the developers get bored
00:09 <+Riddell> and you don’t want that, then they’ll go getting boyfriends and girlfriends and stop doing important things like coding

Ubuntu One & KDE

00:20 <@akgraner> QUESTION: Is anyone looking into Ubuntu One integration with for example Akonadi?
00:22 <+Riddell> sandsmark: yes but not enough for it to be packaged
00:22 <+Riddell> till adams did an akonadi plugin to get akonadi talking to the couchdb address book from ubuntu one
00:22 <+Riddell> but I don’t think it got completed to the extent it would be useful for users
00:22 <+Riddell> so anyone who wants to pick that up and run with it would be most welcome

Nokia & KDE

00:32 <@akgraner> mmiicc> QUESTION: Does KDE get any help from Nokia?
00:33 <+Riddell> well Nokia funds Qt development and KDE is built on Qt, so that’s a multi million euro help there
00:33 <+Riddell> they hire a couple of KDE developers and sponsor KDE conferences and developer sprints
00:34 <+Riddell> they also give jobs to a lot of KDE developers who go on to work on Qt (which is a mixed blessing since they often stop doing so much KDE stuff)
00:34 <+Riddell> of course Nokia’s interest in KDE and Qt is self serving, they want to own the best platform for cross desktop development so that people know and love Qt
00:35 <+Riddell> and they want that working on their phones so people know and love developing for Nokia phones
00:35 <+Riddell> which is all quite mutially compatible with KDE so we’re happy with the setup

00:43 <@akgraner> QUESTION: What’s the nokia-pim-suite in KDE svn: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/work/nokia-pim-suite/
00:43 <+Riddell> not a skoobie
00:43 <+Riddell> I guess it’s something mobile related but I’ve not heard of that before
00:44 <+Riddell> kdepim is still going through the KDE 4 process
00:44 <+Riddell> the apps are ported to KDE 4 but most aren’t ported to akonadi, the new data management server
00:44 <+Riddell> so there’s loads of activity going on there

Gnome & KDE

00:46 <@akgraner> QUESTION: Any changes KDE & Gnome will join their resources to become the One Desktop to Rule Them All? Say 5, 10 years from now?
00:47 <+Riddell> that’s not really technically possible, you’d need to rewrite Gnome in Qt and I don’t think there’s much appetite for that
00:47 <+Riddell> it’s a shame we have this desktop split, it’s a horrible waste of resources
00:47 <+Riddell> but well, KDE was here first :)

Conclusion

00:59 <+Riddell> so in conclusion, KDE 4 is going to take over the world. it’s a long hard job this and we’re still getting there
00:59 <+Riddell> but it’s the best platform and that is turning into the best desktop
00:59 <+Riddell> all helpers welcome in #kubuntu-devel
01:00 <+Riddell> and remember: by becoming a Kubuntu developer you automatically become good looking

01:01 <+Riddell> < rhkfin> QUESTION: does KDE have a community manager, if, who?
01:01 <+Riddell> not that I know of, one of the charms of KDE is it’s quite non-heirarchical and everybody gets on well with everyone else with very few exceptions, it’s a great community to be in01:03
01:03 < Riddell> rhkfin: you only need community managers if you hae a dysfunctional community

Way to go KDE, and thanks for 4.3.3

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