"Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night"
- They Might Be Giants
When Plasma was first ripping its way out of my meandering thoughts, I was rather preoccupied with one thought only: "I need something that can improve on kicker ..." When I eventually added the desktop to that thinking I felt I was making progress and getting ambitious.
Well, we're a ways further down the road now and Plasma has become a lot more than a desktop and a panel. It's blossomed into a component model on top of Qt's canvas that is being used by "regular" applications and has katamaried other component systems in the process in a romp towards becoming a more universal canvas.
This has left us with two little historical accidents: the shared settings of libplasma-using applications are in plasmarc with the desktop's view settings and the desktop shell binary is called "plasma". Neither seem overly brilliant ideas given the current usage of the Plasma library.
So this morning I made some commits that changed "plasma" to "plasma-desktop". This makes the desktop shell fall more into line with things like plasma-overlay (screensaver widgets), plasma-mid, krunner, etc. in not claiming sole ownership of the term "plasma".
This also means that the settings for the desktop are now plasma-desktoprc and plasma-desktop-appletsrc. I added a kconf_update entry that will migrate your setting auomatically if you log out and back in or kick kconf_update manually from a command line.
Speaking of command lines, you'll also need to get used to "plasma-desktop" instead of just "plasma" and "kquitapp plasma-desktop" instead of "kquitapp plasma".
One rather positive result is that theme settings are kept separate from the desktop shell settings. They are still in plasmarc. In turn, this has made it easy to add a straight forward approach to have libplasma using apps to re-load the current theme when one of the other libplasma apps modifies the shared theme settings.
These changes will show up in 4.3, and shouldn't really impact the usual interaction of the average user.
"Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way"
- They Might Be Giants
13 comments:
Hi Aaron, I've a quick personal question for you, regarding plasma:
Back in 2005 (?), when you showed us the whole concept of plasma (the fusion between widgets, panels and desktop), how did you know that it's going to become the kicking ass plasma that we have right now, even though there was actually no code back then. I want to know, what was that thing, that made you reach the goal exactly (widget rotation, widget zooming, etc.) as you've planned. Or better to say, were you actually 100% sure that all this stuff is going to work as you have planned it?
Thank you, bye.
You probably don't remember it, but I think I called you an idiot (or something less ugly, yet still pejorative) back when you had the idea of Plasma and SlicKer was still a fresh idea.
I just wanted to tell you that I take it back (I just remembered that I haven't yet, sorry) and think what you achieved with the Pillars of KDE(4) and Plasma is something amazing.
Thank you and all the KDE people who made this and so much more a reality!
You rock so hard, you're making granite cry! XD
katamaried is not really a word, is it?
you are the dude so whatever works best for you..
oh, and cheers from istanbul.
Plasma ownz ye all!
@Dread Knight:
Actually, it should be "Plasma-desktop ownz ye all!"
;)
Quick question,
Will plasma-desktop respond to a theme update set by other libplasma apps via the plasmarc file?
Geez Aaron, give credit where it's due!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_%28Not_Constantinople%29
Yay!
Plasma is now Plasma-desktop.
Kde 4.0 is now Kde 4.2
KDE4 is not almost as good as GNOME (which is now almost 5 light years close to Leopard)
Of course, Istanbul (Not Constantinople) isn't originally by They Might Be Giants. According to The Purveyor of All Knownledge, it was originally recorded in 1953 by a Canadian group called The Four Lads.
I reckon They Might Be Giants did the best version, though.
Hey All,
I've posted a nice long KDE 4.2 related rant here: http://randomtechoutburst.blogspot.com/
Basically, I'm growing tired of having KDE 4.2 being trashed by people who don't want to put in any time to learn something new. I have some things I'd like to see improved in KDE too (there's always room to improve) but I'm getting a little tired of pundits hating KDE 4 because it dares to not be exactly like KDE 3.5.
Think of it as a petulant review ;-)
Damn it Aaron, now I've got that song stuck in my head. :)
Ah yes, nothing like commemorating the loss of one of the greatest civilizations that ever flourished (through two Ages).
Of course, had Rome not accentuated the demise of its main christian competitor, the Rennaisance probably wouldnt have happened for them and western civilization. So yippee for us I guess :-+
===
Yeah, the transition to 4.x sucked but things like Plasma are gonna really pay off now abd down the road.
I too had my moment of doubts and am happy people have the humility to make their mea culpas.
BTW, my favorite v4.1 distro was Mandriva 2009. The most buggy was Kubuntu.
Go v4.2!!
Its the one I finally take my folks off KDE3.5. Its ready.
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