On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:13:56 +0000, Richard James wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:50:21 +0000, loki harfagr wrote:
>
>> Now I'll suppose that the eye-candy is just eye-candy and the
>> functions behind will be sharp and useful, unlike most the Longhorn
>> sequels ;-)
>
> Tried to answer this last night but I was having trouble getting all the
> facts and it got too late. Anyway it looks like I might have to eat my
> hat here.

Don't worry, that was an edible hat, mostly matze and colored sugar ;-)
I was essentially joking about the look but was quite confident the
system behind was way more than meet the eye, the KDE couldn't keep
on much longer with the old b0rken base (as you detailed).
Anyway, thank you for the extensive answer, it was much better than
my jokes!

> On the surface plasma just looks like a silly toy. SuperKaramba on
> steroids right?

Right, especially since Karamba never made the grade and sucked
resources like a cousin from Vista that may have looked silly :-)

> But if you look deeper into the issues behind some of
> the design changes made in KDE 4 you will see the ingenious bit of it.
>
> Why isn't KDE 4 just KDE 3.99 + 0.01? Why chuck out all the old code and
> write the new stuff? The reason for doing so was to rebuild the system
> on a better base. Here is a quote about why Kicker is replaced by
> plasma.
>
> "So why was kicker dropped and something new created instead of just
> improving kicker?

That is good news, really friggin good news!
I'll stop my post here, I have no point to add here but I'm
sure I'll give the KDE 4.1 an extended try-out and my daughters will
certainly give a good crash-test at it as they are much more involved
in "effectively working eye-candy with a function" while I'm a bit
more inclined in my old days to prefer effectiveness ;-)

Afterall I'm using parts and apps from KDE (kmail,quanta,amarok) which
I like (though the tendency of these to change the looks and settings
while not giving full settings control is somehow tiring), in case
the stuff you described is 9/10 true I'd be really interested as it
may well be the days we've at last got rid of the puny "desk top"
metaphor and we'll be on the highway of relational functions databases!