instead, the reaction i received was like a bucket of cold water in my face. many people, including some of our own core devels, decided to instead naval gaze about methodologies and poo-poo the idea that our software really was that great. granted, my observations were the digital equivalent of "back of the envelope" calculations, but they were generally accurate. it was a highly discouraging event for me, really.
ever wonder why people don't talk about KDE's efficiency? because we don't let them.
today i read in Ben Maurer's blog that Konsole takes "takes 50 kb per tab". he notes that even after Aivars Kalvans's great work on gnome-terminal, konsole is still 5 times more efficient with memory per new tab. now, how do you think he will be received by his community by announcing gnome-terminal's improvements? cheering? almost certainly.
will those same people who decided to get into a pedandist's duel when i said that konsole was so much better than xterm due to it's per-tab efficiency head off to correct Ben? probably not.
Come on you people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
it don't hurt to let someone else smile once in a while...
so here's today's cool note about something KDE's doing right IMHO: KIMPRoxy. the KDE instant messaging proxy provides an interface that any IM app can implement to publish information about who is online at the moment. in turn any other app can subscribe to this information and use it as it makes sense. so, for instance, kmail can show you that the person who sent you the email you are currently reading is online. whether that person is online in kopete, or kontact or any other such app. sweet.
instead of hardcoding interoperability between applications, which is short term thinking and brittle, KDE has built generic facilities for working together so that we may build applications out of smaller pieces of existing technology. in fact, this allows us to build new applications, even new types of applications, tomorrow without having to reinvent all the interoperability we've put in place everywhere else. this makes so much more sense than anything else out there and is really starting to show in our applications.
viva la 3.4!
3 comments:
Yes..... I see that the memory, and resource, usage of Gnome as a whole has hit the proverbial fan. I know, I used Gnome and especially Evolution quite a bit for eigtheen months circa 2001, 2002. That was before they really decided to put what they perceived to be Enterprise Features(tm) in it as well. It's pretty shocking what's happened to Evolution.... I just get the impression that they've put Gnome etc. down in front of several people who haven't used it (or KDE, or Unix-like systems) before, got them to use it for a while and found out the reality. That's my personal opinion though.
Anyway, what I will say is that getting an efficient desktop and applications is a heck of a lot more than running valgrind or a memory profiler. It's not even about memory usage on its own either. It's the base toolkit and programming tools that you use, the level of re-use that occurs and all of those little things throughout that all snowball and combine to make an efficient desktop environment. It's incredibly difficult and not straightforward. Microsoft have had resources to panel-beat Windows into shape, but Gnome and KDE don't have that. I can only imagine how that complexity will increase with additions in the future like Cairo etc.
Anyway, long live fast, efficient (and henceforth usable ;)) open source desktop environments :).
Re: the KIMProxy, it might be worth checking out the freedesktop project galago ( http://www.galago.info/about.php )
Unfortunately it seems to only have gtk widgets at this point, but they "have plans" for qt ones two (whatever that means). It uses the sexy new D-BUS.
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