rohitj's domain

Having used Gnome, KDE, Unity among other desktop environments, having seen the designs like desktops, workspaces and activities, I still find somethings missing, somethings very important. I will explain it with few examples :

1) Recently, a friend of mine (an android user) had an episode. She was in class and her Pandora application in her android phone started playing music all of a sudden. She had her phone in silent mode, but supposedly android (and now ubuntu (not sure about other distributions)) has different sound settings for different applications. Hence, a silent mode did not ensure that Pandora didn’t create sound.

2) I usually put my laptop on sleep mode when traveling from one place to another. One time, I took my laptop for presentation, and on projector people could see that my current tab was facebook and I was playing some song. Similar thing happens when I go to talk, and open my laptop to work while listening to talk.

3) I work on my laptop. At home, I have an external monitor where I prefer to use Skype and I like a bigger font, and none of the windows are full screen.

4) When I am working, I have a certain set of applications and when I am not working, I have a different set of applications. When I am not working, I don’t want my work applications to waste my system resources, and vice-versa. Also when I switch between these modes, I want certain applications and settings to start or quit.

Now, with activities or workspaces or desktops, you can separate applications from 2 kinds of environments, but most of the environment settings are still shared. For example, audio will still be the same on both activities, and probably font size as well. Also, both activities run in parallel. There is no way for a user to say that I am going into work mode and hence these set of applications should start automatically.

It will be really nice to have an additional feature so that, when I log in or unlock screen, I am asked what kind of environment I want, so that I could pick if I need my audio to be mute or not. If I want only a particular set of applications to be visible or not. Such things are not really important for desktops as desktops stay in similar environment, but laptops change environment very frequently, from lab to home to presentation to talk. One can not always ensure that the desired settings are indeed enabled before a mishap happens.

What I don’t understand is how come no one has addressed this. Also, to my understand, it should rather be simple to atleast achieve partial goals in this line.

Another glitch with Kontact. I use wordpress for this blog. And I recently started using kontact journal to keep some private journal entries. Now, Kontact journal allows you to use XML-RPC, which means I can use kontact to write and read blog posts from this blog. I tried that, and I changed my last blog entry in Kontact. But instead of changing the post, Kontact deleted the post. This is ridiculous. Seriously, Kontact people need to straighten up their basic testing protocols. The first and foremost thing is that data *must* not be deleted. And someone told me that open source developers are the most intelligent developers. I sincerely and with sadness doubt that.

So, one of the reasons why I use ubuntu and not debian is that I want relatively new softwares. But ubuntu’s release period is really irritating now. They release a new version in every 6 months. Of course, nothing major changes this short duration. So, all they do is mainly add new release of KDE or gnome, thats it. Basically in ubuntu upgrade is practically equal to a decent size update. Now, there is nothing wrong is releasing new releases every six months, the problem is that those new softwares are not supported in previous release. For example, Jaunty has KDE4.2. But Intrepid will not have 4.2. Just because KDE updated, and because I want to use KDE4.2, I have to upgrade (or I have to use unsupported KDE, which I want to avoid, for obvious reasons). I wonder how big an issue it would be for system administrators. This is getting irritating. The definition of upgrade and update is totally screwed for Ubuntu.
The only decent difference as I see between Jaunty and Intrepid is KDE version, couldn’t they just give an update for KDE. I believe same goes with gnome.

Now then summer is coming, I think I will again be exploring various distros. Any suggestions?

Update : Oh, the issue with upgrading is that there are chances of things breaking. For example, when I upgraded to Jaunty, my knetworkmanager was gone. So, I had to use LAN and install it. fglrx drivers are not installed. And stuff like that.

Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.

0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.

1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.

2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)

I went to a group meeting. Usually, my laptop is not used for projector. But since, everyone else had mac, and they didn’t have the connector, I had to use my laptop. I had to restart X to get the projector working. Now, my default my KDE starts kopete, firefox, kontact, amarok, skype, plasma. The worst is plasma, skype and kopete. Plasma because I have this photobox on my desktop which shows pictures. Now, there is no objectional photo being displayed, but I still want to avoid showing that in public, because they are a little private. Skype because it doesn’t start in minimized mode. Kopete because it starts showing offline messages. Also, the sound. Now when I am in a group meeting, I want my desktop to be a little formal. I don’t want all this on startup. But when I am using it for normal purpose, I want all these things. So, here is the wishlist. Is it possible that on start, I could have an option to start the Window Manager in a formal mode, or unformal mode. Like I have an option to select between gnome and kde on start. I strongly believe that its a really important feature, and it should be available. Since I use mostly KDE applications, I believe KDE framework should have such facility. It will also be easier that way.

For last few days, I have been talking to people (mainly IITK students) about different events we have in FOSSKriti. I found people pretty enthusiastic about different events. I am pointing out those events here:

0: RoR : Y4 batch, being highly affected by Prof. TVP’s, is highly interested in attending RoR workshop. Some people want to learn RoR, some people want to discuss RoR. And I assume that some people will come because they know Saurabh Nanda.

1: Linux Kernel : Those who eff around there linux distro, especially Gentoo users, and those who have slightest interest in systems, were found interested in this.

2: Lisp : I personally am going to attend this event as a participant, not as organizing team. . And I am sure I will bring 10 more people. Actually no, some people were found interested in this workshop, specially those who are doing compilers course, or those who have done compilers course.

3: Linux Chix :

(female.isIITian())&&(female.isGeek())&&(female.hasTalkedTorohitj()) = 0

So, I am not sure how many females will turn up, but I am sure people will be there. This is the second event I want to attend. I want to see what they are upto.

4: KDE4 : Those who do not know, recently there was a big shift in IITK linux community. People broke their long loyalty for Gnome, and shifted to KDE. Alas!! KDE4 is still not in official repos, but they are still on KDE. They think its worth waiting for KDE4. Of course, this talk will attract these people.

Left are beagle hackfest and Clutter talk. Beagle is a must-attend hackfest. (afterall it substitutes stupid google desktop ). And clutter? I have no idea about it.

So recently I shifted to KDE. I used to be a gnome user. Rather may I say I used to be gtk supporter. Never liked QT. Didn’t have QT for long time. But with QT4, things have been changing. One should look at articles related to KDE4. KDE4 is going to be awesome. Well, I am on KDE3.5, not KDE4 yet. But I am loving KDE3.5 as well. I like it the way KDE integrates its different applications. They all talk to each other.

Kontact for example is way too cool. Its a proper bundle of applications that I needed as my daily scheduler/mails/feed reader. As usual feed reader doesn’t update properly. It takes time to update, but its fine.  Everything is at one place. Plus it shows notifications in tray. KOffice on other hand doesn’t have good qualities yet. Lets see what KDE4 does to KOffice. But this idea of showing all option on left sidebar is awesome. All your applications in one place. I am in love with KDE now.

Though this left sidebar has problem as well. In KDE 3.5 this sidebar doesn’t minimize itself, so for normal screen people it looks ugly. I hope in KDE4, or lets say by KDE4.1 they will come up with this minimization thing. KDE4.1 will also have proper support  proxy. Developing country like who are not given enough public IPs need it.

Konqueror? I do not like it as of now, but I guess thats because shifting is always difficult. Its been 3 years using firefox. Firefox is still awesome for me. Kopete doesn’t have proxy support in KDE3.5 .

Desperately waiting for KDE4.