Comments on: Next Iterations of the KDE Workspaces

By: sebas

sebas — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:58:33 +0000

For me personally, I have an overall idea which aspects I want to see improved, and I work on those. It almost never happens that I’m actively looking for something to work on, the in-queue is always more than full, so I never actually lack ideas what I think needs doing, and what I’m working on.

Much of what we work on is decided on an individual basis (either by the person herself, or the employer), and fleshed out in communication with the team (either online, or during sprints).

The thing with brainstorm is that it addresses a problem, developers don’t usually have. Sure, it’s a good source of information, but given that I already have way too many things on my plate (and almost everybody I know in KDE has that), it doesn’t provide much direct value to me.

By: apache

apache — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 10:51:37 +0000

I wonder from where developers draw ideas about KDE future and based on what factors they do planning of their work.
It would be great if developers could have a look at KDE brainstorm and implement some user’s ideas. At the moment I as a user I am not even sure if they read it at all. KDE brainstorm and bugs.kde wishlist should be integrated into one system and developers should be more active in giving feedback.

By: fasd

fasd — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 19:30:38 +0000

Thank god! :)

By: sebas

sebas — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:46:21 +0000

no.

By: fasd

fasd — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:20:42 +0000

Ok… but will this convert KDE to facefuckin’-like-this-like-that-look-at-my-duck-face-in-the-bathroom-mirror-have-to-log-in-to-fb-to-run-konsole thing? Will you force this in invasive way for regular users?

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:34:05 +0000

Thanks Sebas,

Good to know that this is possible right now. I’ve been testing, but I have some issues with the sessions/activities combination (I got message ‘invalid option -session’ on running the activity). But it did work on the last try. I’m using KDE 4.8.3 (kubuntu)

I think it would be useful to implement separately from the sessions. The functionality seems to be ‘hinted-at’ if you do as follows: Create Activity –> Templates –> Development Activity… A dialog box appears “This activity template requests to run the following applications” (empty in my case — perhaps I do not have the intended applications installed).

Keep up the good work.

By: sebas

sebas — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:31:58 +0000

Au contraire :) Starting and stopping applications is entirely possible, and just works in the default setup of Plasma Desktop. There’s a niggle here and there, but overall, Session Management and Activities works together very well.

Some apps don’t restore their state properly, for those, we’ll need fixes (and bugs filed), but overall it works surprisingly well. I’m in fact using that mechanism daily, on more than one machine. You’ll want Plasma Desktop 4.8 for that.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:25:11 +0000

Interesting developments.

In relation to Activities, I think it would be really useful that particular Applications are automatically started when starting an activity (or switching to). Perhaps applications with certain profiles (e.g. Dolphin open with tabs showing all folders related to a project).

I don’t think that this is possible at present. (Which makes activities redundant in my case).

Thanks.

By: sebas

sebas — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:15:03 +0000

We are currently discussing advantages and disadvantages of it. I personally think it would bear some value, but I’d much rather have this discussion on the appropriate mailing lists (kde-core-devel, for example) than here.

The proposal is not about no more coordinated releases, but about decoupling the release schedules. That is also already explained by a few people on the list.

By: Kevin Kofler

Kevin Kofler — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:47:39 +0000

> We’ve proposed a few changes to KDE’s release rythms, basically decoupling the releases of workspaces, applications and (in the future) KDE Frameworks.

That’s going to make life really hard for us packagers: No more coordinated releases, harder to track minimum version requirements etc. I think it is a big mistake to do away with the coordinated software compilation releases.