KDE Blogs 

Since the last blog I've added a few more goodies to KHTML most interestingly text-shadow, but also :target, :enabled and :disabled pseudo-classes. The most interesting development in KHTML though is Germain's work on incremental repaints (speeding up CSS animated webpages). Hopefully he can fix the last couple of regressions and commit it soon. Read More

So, Aaron, you got very vocal about it.... You think the Open Source Desktop efforts are killed by porting these very same deskops' applications stack over to Windows, making a complete sweitch-over completely un-attractive. Read More

My friend Aaron fears Open Source on the Desktop gets killed. He's not afraid of Microsoft though. He thinks it's the "enemy within". Nah, not his words. I'll rephrase it: He thinks, the deadly danger comes from some little efforts going on in some corner of the KDE project to port some KDE applications to the MS Windows platform. Hmm.... again my words... OK, you better go and read his blog entry yourself. For now, let me say this: I always valued my friend Aaron's balanced way of reasoning in past "opinion battles" (oh, yeah -- those occur very frequently on KDE mailing lists). But this time I think he is very un-balanced, one-sided, black-and-white only, static in his thinking. Maybe more on that later. (Now first to finish this customer job -- cloning a CUPS master daemon from system space to run several copies in userspace, all with different security settings and custom options, on different non-privileged TCP/IP ports....) Read More

The lie: Step 1) Porting KDE applications get Windows users used to KDE applications. Step 2) Once they are used to the applications they migrate. The reality: Okay this is "Programmer Logic". Now lets look at the way business works. Rule #1 the cheapest thing is to do nothing. The second cheapest thing is to do as little as possible. This is why all those "Temporary Solutions" also known as "Hacks" or "Kludges" always last for friggen years. What porting apps to Windows does is keeps those people who could possibly migrate to KDE for the use of a single killer app to NOT migrate to KDE. If the only compelling reason for Linux is cost, why would they bother beyond the bare minimum. Read More

I got an ADSL connection last week, but as my operating system was not supported, I was left to configure it myself. After around 12 hours fighting with my network interface card, I gave up, plugged-in another hd and installed an old copy of windows on it so that I could at least get the connection working via USB and read my e-mails. And so for two days I was kind of forced to use Windows 2000. Using it was not very pleasant, but in the end it was a good thing: it reminded me how great KDE is. Read More

All this reasoning about porting kde to windows will bring more people to kde linux is flawed. Granted it might bring some of them into linux or any unix for that matter but those are only those who like to experiment with new toys.The great majority of people doesn't like change in their life and believe me here when i say the keyword here is change For those who believe that they will change to linux because they have the applications on windows I ask you this: Did ever see what happens in an office when you change the wordprocessor from wordperfect 6 to ms office, or even something simplier than that Windows 95 to 98 to 2000? Users are lost! and some of them are even moronic enought to ask to have a course paid to help them use the new version of windows even if they use it for years, simply because it not the same version number, so they forget everything they know. Read More

Today, a lot of people have voiced their opinion on wether or not it's a good idea to port the KDE plattform to Windows. In other news, I whitnessed another uncessary crash today, that was due to a stale library that had an old interface. On load, it crashed and teared the application down. Read on to learn how to avoid those problems. Read More

We were discussing about the pro/cons and ideas around this. There is a wiki page, feel free to comment. Here

I was working on render_list.cpp the other day and decided to complete our set of CSS2 list-styles. I just wonder if anyone anywhere has ever used the armenian and georgian styles, or even the various japanese "alphabetic" types? The really crappy part of all these styles is that the CSS2 standard doesn't say how they should be handled or rendered. They just list the 3 first entries or so, if they even do that. Read More

Chapter III of the crusade is done. Kopete now supports displaying KABC pictures both in the metacontact tooltip and in the contact list itself. Further integration with specific protocols avatars and this property is coming. How it looks by now? Read More