KDE's Plasma is heating up

[luca.b]

The subject comes from a Linux.com article (http://www.linux.com/feature/114560) describing this new technology in KDE 4. Far from being vaporware, development has really caught up nowadays with a lot of work from a few developers. Aaron Seigo's blog (http://aseigo.blogspot.com) has also many posts on the matter.

I can say I'm glad the KDE developers continued working on Plasma despite the extreme (and unjustified IMO) criticisms that many raised.

[straps]

I want it for Gnome too...it's fantastic

[mips]

I want it for Gnome too...it's fantastic

Gnome Devs might not like that idea ;)

[gnomeuser]

As a GNOME user I wish the KDE developers the best of luck with KDE4, I'll stick to GNOME but that doesn't mean KDE4 isn't presenting some interesting stuff. I do like the corona of feature icons they do with Plasma, clearly it can be abused to make a horrible UI but the idea is much nicer than a context "open with" menu when multiple options apply equally.

I'm hoping for the best for our friends over at KDE and I will be looking for the first beta releases to hit Fedora 8 (we'll be shipping KDE4 as the only KDE option, final if at all possible which looks good if they stick to their schedule and we stick roughly to ours, if not the closest RC with a post release update to final as fast as possible).

[GeneralZod]

This is all something of a relief, as Plasma has been something of a cause for concern for some time. Not just the lack of user-visible progress, either: I've been monitoring the Plasma SVN directory since around Christmas time and since very, very recently it was basically completely dead: the only commits were compile fixes from where the code had bitrotted, and I think I measured the number of lines of Plasma code back in February and found that it came to an absolutely tiny amount; ~2k lines, IIRC. Most of the progress we see here has basically been achieved over the last few weeks.


I want it for Gnome too...it's fantastic

The rendering portion is quite heavily tied to Qt - in fact, aseigo said that Plasma would have been quite difficult to pull off even with Qt4.2, as a lot of required functionality was not introduced until 4.3. Having said that, a huge amount of the success of a project is tied to its architecture, and there's no reason why the concept of DataEngines etc - or even the DataEngines themselves - couldn't have a GNOME equivalent, and Cairo should be up to the rendering portion of it.

Edit:

Here's the corresponding Digg article:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/KDE_s_Plasma_desktop_project_still_gaining_ground