Linux Tag has been a great show, and I've really enjoyed it. The presentations and booths have been terrific and I managed to meet up with several projects that I haven't had enough time with recently.
The two talks I did went well, and the other KDE people's presentations were seriously great. Till's presentation on Akonadi started with the new logo splashed across the projection on the wall behind him and it's just so stunningly beautiful; a great visual for a really excellent project, which Till does a great job in representing. Sebas' talk on beautiful features in KDE4 reminded me how beautiful (and not just visually) KDE4 has become.
I also managed to switch over to the KDE4 version of Kontact this week, leaving just one other major KDE3 application I'm still using on a daily basis (konversation) and two minor ones (krandrtray and knetworkmanager). I'm hoping KDE4 replacements for all three of those will be available by the time 4.2 rolls up.
Kontact is really taking shape; there are some small oddnesses to it at the moment (such as no visual feedback on dragging as to the current drop target folder) but it works solidly in 4.1 Beta1, migrated nearly all my settings perfectly from the KDE3 version and the new painting style for events in korganizer is really rather beautiful.
Unfortunately, not all is roses. I have one more day after today in the city and then it's back to the airports for me as I trek back to Canada. I'm also dealing with a fairly unending stream of sillyness from my blog entry on desktop icons, which now has over 200 comments and has spawned a couple of really poorly informed replies in the blogosphere.
It's been a really good reminder of the importance to keep things simple in my blog so as not to confuse the heck out of people as well as how emotionally attached many people are to the desktop we are working on.
Live and learn.
While it has been tempting to just stop communicating at all about these things (people can't complain ignorantly about things they don't know about ;) that runs counter to my belief that things should be developed openly.
It has been very rewarding, however, to not only read many positive responses to that blog entry but even more so to watch people coming by the KDE booth at Linux Tag here, use the demo systems and be really happy with it.
It's also been great to meet some faces in the project that I haven't met before, as well as see some old friends I haven't seen in a while. All the same, I can't wait to be back home. I got the P-man a bunch of stickers for his laptops, as well. =)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
I was impressed how you patiently answered one "silly" question after another at the KDE booth. I was standing by a group of two unknown guys who were asking a constant stream of weird questions and I was waiting for the moment that you'd turn around and leave the booth. :)
I would have thought that the experience of the heated debate after the anouncement to switch to dolphin as default filemanager also revealed soem weak points in communicating such changes to the user community.
Maybe you should think of these "silly commentators" better as of enthusiastic KDE 3 users, who are afraid that something essential for thier work is taken away in KDE 4 --- and even worse they didn't hear of any problems with the "old skol" desktop before. Just reading in a blog that somthing essential has changed and you should be lucky with that causes these kinds of debates.
If you want to avoid these irritations (and frustrations for you and the unhappy users), maybe announcing and discussing the problems with the "old skol" desktop couldn't give them the feeling to be taken by surprise.
Some people love thier KDE 3 desktops! Don't consider them "silly" or "just afraid of changes" or even a "loud obnoxious minority" as you did in the dolphin debate.
Anyway, "He who codes decides", but I think that these two debates (dolphin vs. konqui and Deskto Icons) are at least to some degree the result of poor communication to the user base and would have benn avoidable.
Come on! your blog is great! It's the one to be informed at new kde features, and you write really well and funny. Just remind those old skol readers that there will be the old skol behaviour availliable, and problem solved.
@furanku:
"Just reading in a blog that somthing essential has changed and you should be lucky with that causes these kinds of debates."
that much is apparent; though your characterization here is incorrect and demonstrates a bias here.
while i think this new approach is an improvement, i never presented a condescending "you should be lucky" position.
i am learning quite a bit about the people who read my blog through all this, however.
also, if you are going to quote me, please do so accurately. it's not really nice to paste together words into new phrases and then pass that off as what i said verbatim.
you were referring to a comment i made on the dot about dolphin and specifically people who really freaked about the decision to include dolphin with all sorts of rather unflattering insults.
you had asked if i has expected such a strong reaction and my exact reply was:
"yes, actually. i'm very aware of how loud people in this community can be. sometimes to the point of being obnoxious, particularly when anyone dares to do something progressive that disturbs the status quo."
unfortunately, that assessment is absolutely right. there is a small number of people who are very obnoxious and very loud. and yes, a few of them showed up to talk about icons on the desktop.
there were also lots of non-obnoxious people who joined the conversation, including some who didn't like the idea of not having desktop icons.
so the picture you're painting of me, namely that i considered the people who disagree as being silly or obnoxious is incorrect. i simply consider the obnoxious and silly people to be, well, obnoxious and silly, regardless of their position. some of the replies in that blog entry were anything but civil or thoughtful.
i responded to the guy who told one person who was complaining rather unflatteringly to "fuck off". i asked them to remain civil; so as you can see i really don't care which side it comes from. obnoxious is obnoxious.
btw, "old school" as applied popularly refers to anything from previous iterations of a given genre. there's a lot of "old school" music that i really like. based on things i've read elsewhere, it seem some have misunderstood that term.
anyways, to the core of your comment:
"enthusiastic KDE 3 users, who are afraid that something essential for thier work is taken away in KDE 4 --- and even worse they didn't hear of any problems with the "old skol" desktop before."
yes, that's pretty much it: emotionally engaged people who lacking critical knowledge and/or context to perform accurate analysis who are letting themselves be pushed and pulled about by fear and who have a near zero trust level. the only part i can do much about is the critical knowledge / context parts, which is really not easy to do when it comes to complex topics.
it probably doesn't help that blogging is a fairly poor medium in general for discussions: it's mostly one way communication between a speaker and an audience where the audience can't "see" each other and the speaker has already left by the time the audience arrives. it's really difficult to have a reasoned conversation in such a venue.
i sometimes wonder why i bother blogging at all, given the above challenges.
"at least to some degree the result of poor communication to the user base and would have benn avoidable"
i think you underestimate how insistent some people are on arguing regardless of the topic ;) i also feel you are giving no responsibility to the readers, which is a shame.
in any case, i'm working on improving how clearly i am able to put things forward. i don't expect to ever satisfy everyone.
The Konqueror/Dolphin thing is getting real tiring, if it is that much of a problem there should be a super easy way of making one or the other work as the default. like a specific button or tick in the control panel.
but, what do I know? I am just a dirty filthy happy end-user! :)
Hey Aaron! Heads up, don't let yourself get down by comments like these. It was such a nice event and I was really honored to get to know you.
Hope we'll see you again sometime in Germany (what about Froscon this year? Or LinuxTag next year?). The beer alone should be enough to get you convinced :)
Greetings from the Kubuntu-de.org guys and gals. Keep up your work!
I wouldn't waste time answering some of the questions. There are some valid points raised (about fullscreening folder views and stuff) which deserved to be clarified, but so many comments just didn't read past the title of the blog and had a hissy fit. Pretty sure it's safe to ignore those. Not worth getting worked up about it.
Good blog entry! I haven't found any Linux Tag videos anywhere, could some kind soul point me towards any recordings of the talks? I'm particularly interested to see Sebas' talk mentioned here.
After reading the icons post I feld curious and downloaded the live cd of KDE 4.1 beta.
After playing around I couldn't find any problem, I mean, I was able to stack icons in a folder view or drag an icon from Dolphin to the plasma desktop imitating the old behaviord, the problem I see with this is the especific contexts menues for the icons are gone like, copy, cut, etc, and can be a problem for me, since Im one of those users who clutter the desktop with files by choise, not to blame Firefox.
And btw, I think plasmoids needs to have more default options like: Clone This Plaismoid (To clone a plasmoid and reconfigure it without the need to drag another one from the plasmoids list) and Restore Original Size (In case you rotated it or changed its size by accident).
And btw, KDE 4.1 beta looks pretty stable now, Im sure I-ll give it a try after it gets relesed.
ps. SUSE really needs to pick better fonts.
Hi Aaron,
it was great to meet you in person here in Berlin - thanks for coming by and having the talks and being available at the booth as well as at the party in the evenings. Until the next event!
I hope you enjoyed your stay here, hope to see you again at the next conference!
liquidat
Hey Aaron.
I _love_ your blog. It is so insightful and there is so much cool new stuff. Your post about distro sync was one of the best blog posts I have read this year ( well .. the ars technica "blog post" about filesystem history was better, but it was prolly _a lot_ more work )
Please don't stop blogging. I think you should just be a little more .. idk .. careful not step on KDE3 lovers toes or something...
But I am sure you will manage to do that ;)
Keep up the great word.
Cheers,
- Tom -
ooh, stickers.
I want stickers!! ;)
I think people just misunderstand plasma. They can have the same desktop they always had.
BUT
They can have so much more.
Thanks for your answer, Aaron!
I also know writing comments to blogs is not a really good way to discuss thing, and hesitated to write a reply to your answer at all, as we both expressed our points and further discussion often just leads to escaltions.
I can understand that you are annoyed by commets like mine and others --- and I have a loooot of respect for all the work you do for KDE, thank you very much for that!
So much for the deescaltion ;)
Now for the in your oppinion inaccurate quotes: I know you never applied for the job as a KDE spokesman, but let's face it, in fact you are. You said all these words I quoted in the context of the Dolphin vs. Konqueror debate. While I can understand that you are a human being with an finite patience, you shouldn't get carried away using these terms in a misunderstandable context. I know it's not fair to ask much more responsibility from you than the readers, but everything you say gets more attention than the other comments.
"emotionally engaged people who lacking critical knowledge and/or context to perform accurate analysis"
Hmmm ... you're doing it again ;) With that you disqualify all critics as uninformed and incompetent.
IMHO Folderview will hopefully get a more powerful replacement for desktop icons in 4.2. But it's not yet in 4.1 beta and probably will not be in 4.1. That's a bit problematic, since after the release of 4.0 a lot of KDE 3 users were really looking forward to make the switch to 4.1. Some people love thier desktop icons, and there's nothing wrong with that (KDE: Be free ... ;) ). IMHO it would have been a better solution to let Desktop Icons and Folderview to live in parallel during 4.1's lifetime until Folderview is completed and accepted as the better way of handeling Desktop Icons.
But well, I can really understand if you're fed up with that discussion. And, sorry, I'm not a native english speaker, maybe some things sound more rude then I meant them.
Post a Comment