The large success of Ubuntu we’ve seen in the recent years has come mostly due to the fact that Canonical is very good at adding polish to the functionality that was already there. It made the great tools of the free desktop software usable by everyone. They still do this wonderfully and I have full confidence that the Canonical Design Team will continue to make Ubuntu suit its users even better.

However, while reading OMG! Ubuntu!’s post about the music and document file browsers mock-ups something struck me. Something that started to bug me while trying out GNOME Shell now became clear. Canonical may be very good on polishing, it may be very good at innovating user interfaces, it cannot do without GNOME. It lacks content.

Now, I don’t mean this in a demeaning way. I have great respect for the vision that speaks from Unity. However, I would like to emphasise that working within GNOME would be much better for Ubuntu on the long-term, no matter how hard it will be in the short-term.

When comparing Unity and GNOME Shell, I noticed right away how clearly a philosophy speaks from GNOME Shell. When using GNOME 3, you can really notice how its developers have purposely worked together to create a coherent experience. It feels nicer than Unity. Plus: it uses GNOME technologies and that improves its integration in the rest of the desktop tremendously.

But after a while you start noticing a few things. GNOME Shell is less stable than Unity and it feels less solid and responsive. Moreover, whereas Unity’s rough edges are at its rough edges, GNOME Shell has rough edges spread equally all over. GNOME 3 looks less slick and sharp than Unity, GNOME 3′s default theme is less crisp than Ubuntu’s Ambiance.

It is a terrible shame that the huge effort Canonical made to get Unity to the high level it currently is, was not spent on making GNOME Shell even better. Canonical may be stubborn, but the company has great ideas and it could have done so much to make GNOME Shell really slick.

Canonical is not a very huge company. It does not have enough employees to create and maintain a whole desktop. This is already showing in the stalled innovation of Notify OSD and friends; I am absolutely jealous of GNOME Shell’s notification area. While GNOME is working on expanding and improving its GNOME 3 desktop, Canonical is still very busy with its own shell. The consequence of this is that the shell does not integrate as much in the rest of the applications as you’d hope. There is a lot to improve in the GNOME project, but when you improve it, you are sure that it fits with the rest of the desktop and that it will look and behave the same.

The Documents and Media file browsers I mentioned earlier can be great ways to give users access to their files. However, every time you implement a way to access stuff like this, you make a paradigm choice. If you want to satisfy the user, it should be consistent. Unity also gives the user access to files, but it does so in a different way. This causes a collision of paradigms. If Canonical wants to do it right, it should ensure consistency across all applications. This is a lot of work and will probably require the development of its own file manager, etc, in the long term.

Canonical does not have the workforce to fully maintain its own desktop. By creating its own shell, it may improve things in the short term, but it will only make things worse in the long run. While GNOME progresses along a different path, the two desktops will diverge even further. In the end, if we ever want to beat Mac OS X, Ubuntu will have to to get rid ofGNOME and Canonical will have to have grown substantially.

GNOME needs Canonical as well. There is no other company in the Linux distribution world that focusses on regular consumers and regular consumers are the target group that shape the OSes of today. I’m not sure how much longer Novell’s remains will stay around, Nokia seems to be on a suicide mission and Red Hat is a business oriented company. GNOME 3′s magnificent user interface philosophy is in need for a good set of clothes and proper manners and of all companies that are in existence today, Canonical is the best candidate to look after that.

My ego is not so large that I believe this blog post can change Canonical’s company policy—which naturally wasn’t thought out in one hour—but I do wish to add my voice to the chorus that say: Ubuntu should return to GNOME 3!

Inspired by that, I also blogged about what I would love to see in GNOME 3: ‘My wish for GNOME 3: better configuration tools‘. My gripe was the huge amount of tiny little configuration utilities that swamped the Preferences menu. Not only was it confusing to spread the settings across so many different windows, but it also looked bad and navigated horribly. The settings were spread out and not always easy to find.

A few days ago I installed the GNOME 3 LiveCD on my system to give GNOME Shell a try. I was amazed by the great progress that has been made with the GNOME Control Centre. Not only does it look much, much better than its previous incarnations, it also works much better.

Everything is now by default in one place. Navigation has improved. The way the configuration ‘capplets’ are designed is a lot more intuitive. It is not as cluttered anymore as it used to be and is easier to control. It is really a shame that it is not in Ubuntu Natty, because it is a tremendous improvement over what you currently get when pressing System Settings in the Session Indicator.

Looking back at the blog post I wrote in 2008 I can say that GNOME 3 has fulfilled my wishes for better configuration tools. It’s a great release, congratulations on this milestone, GNOME!

GNOME was founded by two Mexicans and currently seems to be predominantly dominated by people from the United States, with the foundation itself being based in the States. The most important companies behind it, RedHat and Novell, are both from the United States too.

Ubuntu was started and Canonical was founded by a South African based in London, where the company has its headquarters. Although there is again a very high American presence within the community and company, the leadership is much more eclectic than GNOME’s. Furthermore, the Canonical Design Team seems to be predominantly British.

Why would this matter? Our differences aren’t very large after all, the open source community is dominated (unfortunately) by white, Caucasian males and they have a lot in common. I think it may play a more important role than we have thought so far. Communication is very culture-bound and it seems that it is communication that has been causing most of the problems.

If we look at the rejection of ‘libappindicator’ as an external dependency, we may be able to see this more clearly. Canonical, say some people in the GNOME project, failed to push its inclusion thoroughly enough. They may have done what was formally required, but didn’t show the initiative that could have resolved the issues that were raised. They say that you need to find the right people to talk to, not expect a machinery to process your request once you’ve delivered an appropriately tagged package.

Canonical reiterates that it did what was required to propose a module as an external dependency. They say that they want to have someone to talk to, to have someone in charge who makes the decisions and can be phoned up if necessary.

Both parties expected different things from the other. This may be what caused the unease. Each party feels that it did enough and the other too little, so no one is to blame.

Strikingly, it seems that the cooperation concerning the application indicators/status notifiers with KDE—founded in Germany, its foundation still being based there—was very productive. Was this because of the persons involved, or because of the cultures? The communication ways I described above do seem to reflect the stereotypes of the two continents.

What should be said that the above is a gross generalisation. Generalisations can usually only be used, with great care, when you talk about large groups. In this case it might be better to talk about individuals instead.

I don’t think that what I said above is the whole explanation. I do think, though, that it is something we should keep in our minds. It may not only have played a role in worsening the unease and misunderstanding here, but it affects all communities that are truly diverse. Traditionally, FOSS seems to have been dominated predominantly by people from the US. Now that is changing, more people learn English—as an example, my father’s generation learned German, not English, as the most important foreign language at Dutch secondary school, for me it is English—and ‘developing’ countries are catching up.

Cultural differences will be more visible in communities, we need to be aware of the different ways different cultures communicate if we want to make sure no contributions go to waste.

However, I would like to take the opportunity to try to turn this into something positive. Because, 1% guys, we know we can do better! Don’t see this debate about Canonical’s contributions to GNOME as an attack on the Ubuntu project, but instead as a challenge!

Raise that number! Show your appreciation for GNOME by contributing to it. We all know the One Hundred Paper Cuts project; work on solutions for the bugs reported there and forward the the patches upstream! Go to GNOME Live! and browse the project pages for ways to contribute. For I believe that the best way to deal with criticism is not attacking the critic with starting a flame-war, but dealing with the problem pointed at.

The challenge: just 1% of the commits are from Canonical. The solution: contribute!

It seems from Dave Neary’s slides that @ubuntu.com addresses are also attributed to Canonical (correct me if I’m wrong!), so it is not limited to Canonical employees.

The day

There were some really interesting sessions today. I haven’t attended much, but I did go to the keynote about activists and journalists and the treats for them in an online world, and what the (FLOSS) desktop can do against that.
Another interesting one was the “GNOME 3 for your Application” talk. Some really interesting plans were shown. I can’t help and wonder, though, if a lot of this isn’t just duplicating stuff from Ubuntu’s Ayatana project, or at least touching it very closely. RedHat’s GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Ayatana seem to have a lot in common, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much cooperation and so far the standards and APIs proposed upstream were declined and refused to be used. It would be really a shame if GNOME Shell — which seems to be the big chunk that is going to contain all the new neat functionality — would be using a new API, separate from existing projects. If it would be using standards, but not be using existing libraries for them, then we’d have just dumb duplication of code. I can think of a better way to spend resources.

I hope there will be more cooperation, or at least communication, between RedHat and Canonical on this matter.

T-shirts

I hope this will be the last time I mention those blasted shirts here. Finally we were able to hand out all t-shirts today after some of the organisation went to pick them up from the printer in Nijmegen yesterday night. The good news here is that the Igalia logo, which the printer somehow had made disappear from the final prints of the first batch of t-shirts, is on the newest batch. But still, with the Igalia logo missing from the first sponsors and the huge delays in the deliverances we’re of course not too happy with the service.

Social Media Livestream

The first view days there have been some issues with Identi.ca the UDStream based Social Media Livestream on the GUADEC website. At first the dents were shown with the time in GMT, whereas the tweets were correctly shown in CEST. After I had fixed this everything appeared to be right, but fortunately Stéphane Maniaci was kind enough to keep nagging me about it until I had completely fixed all problems with the microblogging system used more often than Twitter by the attendees. See, my hacky fix for the date problems (‘+ 2 * 3600′) was only working on Google Chrome/Chromium, but made all dents disappear in any other browser. After fiddling a bit with the date format I thought things were completely fixed, but they weren’t in all browsers.

Then I cleaned the code a bit up and by delaying the formatting the Date until after the Date class has been initialised the time is now correctly everywhere without hack, and Identi.ca isn’t broken anymore. This also means that the screen of the livestream in the venue is working at long last!
I’ll push my changes to the GUADEC 2010 Website’s Git repository next week(end) and will backport the changes back upstream to UDStream as well.

Collabora barebecue

Unfortunately, after two weeks of very hot weather, the summer started to fade a bit at the beginning of the conference. Now, this isn’t that bad for a conference, it makes being inside much more bearable, but it is a shame for beach parties. We were having a barbecue at “Beach Company”, but no swimming! The party was very well organised, and the vegetarians were happy with their own stuff and barbecue, and everyone had a great time. New to most of the international guests was the presence of large quantities of the Dutch version of satay sauce (or ‘peanut sauce’), which we seem to put in litres on everything, according to some of them.

Last words

Tomorrow will already be the last day of the conference! I can’t believe that after all these months of preparation GUADEC 2010 will be over! I can surely say that it has been a great fun so far and I’ve met some really nice people. Despite some problems with ordered goods (ahem, t-shirts, ahem), there weren’t any major problems and I’m glad that everyone seems to be enjoying the conference so much.

On to a great last day!

Several buildings, including the Maison de Bonneterie as seen from the tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Today was the first day of the main GUADEC conference and this meant that it was extra busy at the registration desk with many people checking in today. The day was marked by great talks, the first occurrence of WebM streaming for any event and the arrival of some more t-shirts.

I almost overslept this morning because I had worked until 3.40 in the night to make the streaming on the website ready for the first day of streaming. Fortunately Mart was there to wake me up and we made it to the venue just before eight o’ clock, in time.

Almost straight away the first attendees started to arrive and some of them still had to register. There are still some people not registered. We would ask them all to register still, so we can provide them with the necessary information and swag, but also for the municipality of The Hague, which sponsors us for every foreign attendee we have registered. (That is also why bringing the ticket is so important.)

I spent the morning trying to awaken a bit more, doing the regular tidying up, moving stuff, searching for and talking to people, answering questions and looking after the website. The afternoon I spent manning the camera of the Video Live Stream 1, in ‘Paris’, which gave me the opportunity to listen to some talks. I really liked the provocative humour of the ‘State of GNOME’ talk. No patronising, religion doesn’t need any more protection than other fantasies.
That was actually my day. Time does go quickly, but it seems a lot quicker when you’re writing about days you do loads of small things.

T-shirts
Yes, again t-shirts problems. We had hoped to have solved the t-shirt problems today, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do so. Summary of today’s progress:

• There are no separate speakers’ shirt, they get a regular conference shirt;
• We have run out of men’s M, L and XL definitely;
• Tomorrow we will, at long last, have the women’s sizes and the volunteer shirts;
• Leftovers of the volunteer shirts, if any, will be handed out to the other people still waiting for their shirt;
• Unfortunately the logo of one of our sponsors, Igalia, is still missing from the t-shirts, after the company we ordered the shirts managed to get the logo dropped from the complete template we provided.

Looking at Riviervismarkt from tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Network
The network isn’t using VPN or any other kind of tunnelling after all, as far as I’m aware. Instead we’re using Google’s public DNS servers. Privacy pundits might not be happy with this, but then privacy pundits would be very stupid privacy pundits if they wouldn’t be using their own tunnel at conferences anyway.

The free GNOME stickers in the shape of the logo of our beloved desktop environment, at the information and registration desk.

This was probably the calmest day of the whole GUADEC conference. At the last day before the main conference there were just some BoFs and the second part of the GNOME Developer Training, and we had a lot of time to finish some preparation and clean up a bit.

Network
The people running the GUADEC 2010 network — baptised ‘Central Command’ by themselves — are less lucky; there are still a lot of problems with getting everything stable. The network set up by them is working correctly, but the uplink to the ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ network is going through a rather nasty firewall: SmartDefense. Its name is aptly like the names of a lot of trojan horses, since I’ve overheard several people with impressive firewall experience (including SmartDefense) saying all kinds of nasty things about it.

To sum it up: the firewall sees one IP address for all conference attendees and starts blocking some when it sees some things as an attack. The person who is able to and has the authorisation to change the firewall’s settings was only available to us Friday and is on holiday, like pretty much every one of the other non-powerless IT staff. The ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ doesn’t want to, can’t and will not fix this issue. This means that, despite the fact that the venue is connected to SURFnet, the Dutch academic internet connection capable of 1 Gbit connections (during testing before the start of the conference the download speed was around 30 MB/s), the internet would be borked…

…were it not for our heroic network managers to work on a solution: VPN. They’re working on setting up a massive VPN to get past the horrific firewall. We hope that this will make the network use bearable, and maybe even more than that.

Please don’t flame our networking staff, but give kudos instead. They’re working very hard and are doing their best to make the conference enjoyable for you. Make sure is enjoyable for them as well.

Every attendee gets this free bamboo USB stick. These 2 GB contain sponsor material, the video message from Neelie Kroes and the Ubuntu Wallpapers.

T-shirts
Any paying attendees — professional and employer sponsored registrations — receive the GUADEC t-shirt. Apart to that there are other people who get (free) t-shirts and there will be children sized white t-shirts with the GNOME foot (cute!) for sale.

However, unfortunately Tuesday we received just one box with t-shirts and are still waiting for the rest. We’ve got the children’s t-shirts and the men’s L, XL and XXL. Men’s S and M, women’s sizes and the other t-shirts weren’t available for the whole day.

We hope to receive those tomorrow morning. If you didn’t receive your shirt yet, please keep an eye on the social media and the registration desk.

Please try to take the size you’ve entered during the registration — if you pre-registered, of course — as we want to make sure everyone who pre-registered for the conference gets the size (s)he entered on the site.

Starting Wednesday there will be swag for sale!

The GUADEC 2010 Love/Hate Wall: hugs, tears you want to share? PostIt!

Love/Hate Wall
Inspired by FOSDEM and previous GUADEC conferences we put up a Love/Hate Wall underneath the huge GNOME banner in the foyer. You can share your hugs and tears with a simple PostIt. At the end of the conference we’ll photograph the result and will make the photos available online, but if you’re attending, please make sure to take a look!

It was pointed out that Love and Hate are strong emotions, and Hate is a strongly negative one. However, the reason we’re not using “I would wish…” and similar structures is because:

• We want to trigger a response, and strong emotions trigger a stronger response and result in more discussion;
• The Wall is nothing formal, it is just a fun way to share your frustration, ideas and thanks.

No flamewars please!

This wall is much more interesting than you!

My day
Comprehensive and concise!
±8.00: At the venue to open it
During the day(ordered randomly):

• tidying up the registration desk, adding information and removing clutter;
• helping with answering questions from participants, lost prospective students and interested Haagse Hogeschool employees;
• trying to keep sponsors happy with the website;
• preparing the website for the video streaming tomorrow;
• setting up the Love/Hate Wall together with Vincent and William
• having lunch
• playing IRC on with the walkie-talkies

18.00-19.00: working on making the website ready for video streaming and emptying the building of people, cleaning up for the day and preparing for the next one.

Registration-related note: if your name is written in a different alphabet than the Latin one and your alphabet is not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian or similar we can provide you with a badge that shows your name in the correct way! Just make sure you mention it when registering.

The famous GNOME banner in the foyer of the Haagse Hogeschool, as seen from next to the registration desk.

Today we kicked off the pre-conference of GUADEC 2010 with the GNOME Open Desktop Day and several interesting BoFs. (None of which I attended.) However, for the organisation it was also the day everything came together: the hard work to prepare the conference now really resulted into something physical: all the enthusiastic attendees already swarming the place! Also, we spent the day setting up things and finishing the last preparations. The main conference will only start Wednesday, so there is still one day left before it starts!

These sand sculptures were located near the 'Binnenhof', the Dutch political centre, portraying famous (Dutch) paintings.

The whole morning — and, I have to admit, part of the afternoon — was spent trying to get the registration system up and running. The most problems were caused by the printer and the templates for the badges, but the first few hours were spent on getting the scanner to work. If you haven’t registered yet, you should be able to do so tomorrow. If you have been able to register already, but didn’t receive the GUADEC 2010 USB stick, please be aware you can get one at the registration desk.

The network guys (Yes, indeed I’ve only seen guys in ‘Central Command’ so far.) are doing a terrific job considering the limited time they had to prepare the whole network and the fact that this whole week the IT staff from the Haagse Hogeschool seems to be on holiday (timing!). Tomorrow the wireless network should reach its full capacity.
There are two different networks available: GUADEC-2.4 and GUADEC-5. The number in the name corresponds to the frequency of the network: GUADEC-2.4 is 2.4 GHz, GUADEC-5 is 5 GHz. The latter is the fast and everyone who can is asked to connect to GUADEC-5 because it is faster (and has got more capacity?). However, not all wireless cards can use the newer 5 GHz frequency, they can use the GUADEC-2.4 network and are probably not even able to see the other.

The Monday evening trip of GUADEC 2010 was to Madurodam by night. This is a park of miniature buildings and structures from the whole of the Netherlands.

This evening was the trip to ‘Madurodam’, the smallest town of the Netherlands where you can see the most famous buildings of the country on a 1:25 scale. There is no need to go to the rest of the country anymore, apart for the nature and the (water) sports and other activities! We went with a nice group using tram line 9 — you’ll probably want to take that line to the Collabora Beach Party as well — in the evening, which gave a nice view of the models with the lights. The night ended with an impressive lightshow using video projectors, laser lights and smoke and water to project on, as well as a regular type of projection screen.

A tip: if you want to follow what’s going on at GUADEC, take a look at the (JavaScript-heavy) Social Media Livestream! (Yes, that is an adapted version of UDStream. I’ll probably see what code would be valuable to contribute back ‘upstream’ from GNOME to Ubuntu after the conference.)

Maandag is de GNOME Open Desktop Day, een op overheid gerichte dag waaraan ook NOiV en het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties meewerken.

De hele week, van maandag tot en met vrijdag, zijn er ‘BoF‘-sessies. Dit zijn informele bijeenkomsten van teams in het GNOME-project en informele discussies over verschillende onderwerpen. Kijk eens op de agenda op GNOME Live! om te zien wat er allemaal te doen is!

Woensdag barst het echt los, dan begint het hoofdeel van GUADEC. Het programma ziet er veelbelovend uit! Allerlei soorten ‘talks’ zullen er gehouden worden: van een statistisch overzicht van het GNOME project door David Neary tot een uitleg hoe het geolocatieraamwerk ‘GeoClue’ gebruikt kan worden in programma’s door Bastien Nocera en een praatje van Sílvia Miranda over het verbeteren van de kwaliteit van vertalingen in GNOME.

Het is nog niet te laat om je op te geven! Heb je zin en tijd? Kom naar de Haagse Hogeschool, maar vergeet je niet eerst te registeren!

[GUADEC2010] Neelie Kroes on open source and the importance of communities

When uploading the video I wanted to make sure that everyone, even people with hearing disabilities or people who are not so proficient in English, to understand the video. That’s why I wrote a transscript and made subtitles available in English and Dutch. I also mailed the gnome-i18n mailing list with a request for more translations and soon I got a response from Samuel Goméz who had translated the subtitles to Spanish!

This was great, but of course the process could be easier. Other people at the gnome-i18n mailing list had suggested the use of sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert SRT files to PO or POT files.

Now I’ve made the subtitles I’ve got available in GNOME Git in the ‘video-subtitles’ module and have requested it to be added to GNOME’s Damned Lies translation infrastructure.

What next? Although there’s only one video in the repository at the moment we need more languages! If you can help to translate Neelie Kroes’ message to GUADEC to your own language, please don’t hesitate to do so! I’ll make sure they’ll end up on YouTube.

The Video Subtitles project can also use more videos. If you’re someone who’s hosting the GNOME videos on YouTube, or somewhere else, please contact me if you want to participate.

I, for the least, will try to make subtitles for as much of the videos I’m uploading to the GUADEC YouTube channel.

It was decided after the last conference that instead of coming up with a new website every year we wanted something that would be reusable for several conferences. Koen Martens set up Open Conference Systems and the great designer Vinicius Depizzol made a beatiful theme for the website.

I’ve been working on maintaining the website, extending the functionality a bit and pushing the code to Git for everyone to access. You can download the code from the guadec-web module at git.gnome.org. All patches will be considered. We don’t have a product registered in Bugzilla, but of course mails are welcome.

One of the things I’ve been working on was adapting UDStream for use on the GUADEC website. You can see it in action at the ‘Conference lifestream‘ page. I haven’t pushed the code to Git yet, but that’s because I’m also working on integrating OpenStreetMap with the accommodation page.

I’m unsure whether to file a merge request with the changes I’ve done to UDStream. I have to admit that I didn’t change a lot, most of the changes to the theme and changes to the way the JavaScript is included in the HTML file. Does anyone know whether UDStream is going to be used again during the upcoming UDS in Brussels?

In order to allow testing of this new version I’ve uploaded both versions to a PPA. Devhelp 2.28.1 is in ppa:qense/devhelp and 2.29.2 — 2.29.3 was a mere version bump –in ppa:qense/devhelp-testing. If you find a bug in the first one, it should be reported against Debian since the only change I made there was adding an entry to the changelog.
For 2.29.2 I copied the ‘debian’-directory from 2.28.1 and removed all patches. Apart from that the only change I made was running ./autogen.sh before uploading to make sure the necessary files were there.

If you’ve got a question, please leave a comment.

For example: I’m using Compiz-Fusion, Emerald and AWN. Because of this I’ve got a list of configuration utilities for appearance and graphics:

• Awn manager
• CompizConfig Settings Manager
• Screensaver
• Screenresolution
• gnome-appearance-properties
• GDM theme

The special effects tab of the gnome-appearance-properties program is useless now because I’m using custom settings.

Although I do appreciate the work both the Ubuntu and GNOME developers did to make configuration easier and I have to say that a lot has improved, like the gnome-appearance-properties program bundling all different theme programs. However, it can still become a lot better.

At least some configuration utilities should be looked at to see if they could be merged with others. But I think that some more fundamental changes could even make it better. What about a pluggable system that divides all configuration tools into some basic categories. The ‘System’ menu would contain these categories in its root and all programs like Synaptic would be moved to Application->System tools for the sake of consistency.
Each category would have its own program based on the same framework to make things consistent. When a new configuration tool is installed it would appear as some kind of tab. All settings that require root privileges can be handled with policykit.

This would just make browsing the tools easier, but doesn’t solve the issues like the enabling of Compiz. There is no other solution for this than just going by all settings and see how this could be improved.

There is also an idea at Brainstorm suggesting something similar:

It already has quite a lot of votes, but giving it more attention can’t hurt.

Again, I’m not affilated with GNOME. I don’t know if this is something GNOME developers would like, I don’t even know if they’re ever going to read this. But maybe they’re already working on something like this! I don’t know.
What I do know is that this issue is, at least in my eyes, one of the weakest parts of GNOME. It deserves some attention. I hope I this post helps a bit.

Wat ik ook wel eens doe is tekenen met beryl. Er zit een ingebouwde klad functie in waarmee je snel iets kan tekeken.

De installatie ging heel simpel, ik installeerde kubuntu-desktop en alle benodigeheden werden binnengehaald. Daarna heb ik nog kde-devel geïnstalleerd en wat andere pakketten. Toen alles gedowload en geïnstalleerd was kon ik beginnen. Tijdens de installatie was door debconf gevraagd of ik kdm als standaard login manager wilde gebruiken, waar ik ja op antwoorde om ook dat eens te bekijken. Wat meteen al opviel was het blauw, kdm(wat langzamer laadde dan gdm), het splashscreen en de dekstop zelf waren blauw en bloated. Ik houd daar niet zo van, maar KDE moet erg goed te configureren zijn, en er is veel te vinden qua eye-candy op het internet.
Als je voor de eerste keer opstart(als nieuwe gebruiker) start KPersonalizer op waarmee je een paar basis dingen kan instellen.
KDE voelde gelijk goed aan, alhoewel het eerst wel even wennen was. Het eerste wat ik ging doen was opzoek gaan naar thema’s. Ik vond na kort zoeken deze twee pagina’s:

-www.kde-look.org
-themes.freshmeat.net

Het was wel even zoeken naar hoe je thema’s moet installeren, wat in GNOME, volgens mij, makkelijker gaat. Er is heel veel in te stelllen, maar je moet wel erg zoeken. Bij sommige dingen wist ik niet meer waar ik ze terug kon zetten.
Kate is de ingebouwde teksteditior, een soort Gedit, maar dan veel geavanceerder, wil je een wat simpelere text-editor, dan heb je KEdit, die weer iets minder kan dan Gedit. AmaroK is heel erg goed, de speellijsten en collecties zijn erg handig te beheren en als er een nieuw nummer komt, dan komt er linksboven een bericht die niet alleen handig is, maar ook mooi. Voor AmaroK is op kde-look.org ook veel te vinden. Omdat ik Thunderbird gebruik heb ik KOrganizer nog niet kunnen testen, maar ik heb het wel even doorgekeken, en het heeft zo op het eerste gezicht wel iets van Evolution.

Ik vind Konqueror beter dan Nautilus, maar het jammere is dat ze met Konqueror alles schijnen te willen doen. Als je een plaatje wil bekijken in een groter formaat en het opent, opent het in hetzelfde venster, in tegenstelling tot bij GNOME. Wat Konqueror wel weer voor heeft zijn de tabladen, waar je, net als bij de tabbladen bij Gedit/Kate, snel niet meer zonder kunt.
K menu doet erg aan Start denken uit het wel bekende systeem uit Redmond, maar het zit toch iets anders in elkaar. Zo heb je categorieen, waardoor alles makkelijker te vinden is, maar dat heeft GNOME ook. Tussen de startmenu’s van GNOME en KDE zit niet veel verschil, alleen zit bij KDE alles meer in een menu, maar dat wordt waarschijnlijk met KDE4 anders(en in het geval van KDE: beter).

Een ander ding waarom KDE vaak geprezen word, en waar ik net al ook iets over zei, is het configuratiescherm. Alle instellingen bij elkaar. Zoiets is er ook voor GNOME, maar dat is niet meer dan een venster met alle snelkoppelingen naar de beheertools erin. Er is heel veel in te stelling in KDE, en dan heb je ook nog instellingen in Konqueror en als je met de rechtermuisknop klikt op menu’s, applets en meer. Het is erg handig dat er zoveel in te stellen in KDE dat het soms verwarrend is, maar ook weer handig, omdat je bijna alles van KDE naar je wensen kan aanpassen.

Wat ik ook weer goed aan KDE vind is dat KDE zo goed GTK+ programma’s ondersteund. Ik had gtk2-enginges-qt-{nogwat) en gtk2-engines-pixmap-qt al een keer eerder geinstalleerd en alle GTK programma’s werkten goed, wat je niet van QT programma’s onde GNOME kan zeggen.

Als je over icoontjes op het paneel gaat komen er grote, duidelijke tooltips te voorschijn.
Ik denk dat KDE, mede door de duidelijke, grote text, beter geschikt is voor slechtzienden.

Ik ben ‘verkocht’. Ik ga vanaf nu KDE gebruiken, mede door dat er zo veel programma’s en documentatie voor beschikbaar is. Wat wel weer jammer is, is dat bij de Ubuntu documentatie bijna alles voor GNOME is, wat eigenlijk logisch is, omdat Ubuntu bedoeld is voor GNOME.
Als je begint zou ik toch voor Ubuntu gaan, omdat je anders om komt in de configuratie schermpjes en je eerste ervaring met Linux zal waarschijnlijk niet positief zijn.
Ben echter niet vies van wat configuratie, ben je wat meer ervaren, wil je meer mogelijkheden en/of wil je zoveel mogelijk controle over je systeem, dan zou ik KDE gebruiken.

Mijn nieuwe computer komt vandaag of morgen aan en dan kan ik een schone installatie doen met Kubuntu, zodat de menu’s weer opgeschoond zijn en ik weer opnieuw kan instellen, nu ik wat meer ervaring heb met KDE. Het enige wat ik nog zoek is ene goeie FTP client, want ik gebruik nu nog GFTP, maar dat is verschrikkelijk wrak en onstabiel, en bovendien een GNOME programma.
Klik hier voor screenshots van de standaard KDE.