Re: KDE Usability survey

[kosh <kosh@aesaeion.com>]

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 01:42 pm, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> Second, It may not be the design goal to run on the lowest end stuff (like
> a system built out of Linux, Dietlibc, TinyX and twm or something :-) ),
> but I hope it isn't the goal of the kde project to become as big as Windows
> Xp or something (exageration for the sake of demonstration).
>

I don't care if it becomes 10 times as large as Windows XP so long as it is 
using that to do something useful. For example the kde ioslaves save me a 
huge ammount of time since I can use just about any url protcol from any app 
transparently. I really don't care what load that puts on the system because 
frankly it is worth it. Memory is cheap and so is cpu power and for what I do 
(building custom web apps) the time saving of a system like that are worth 
the minor cost involved. For about $500 you can get an athlon xp 2200, a 
KT400 board and 1G of DDR333 ram.

It would be nice if kde where faster then it is now sure but I would not trade 
that speed for features that I use now and hope to get more of in the future. 
I would like it if I could embed kate in all <textarea> </textarea> objects 
on the web so that I could use a real editor in them. If it uses up more 
memory to do that I don't really care because the gain would be worth it. The 
stuff could be made optional but I want the option to turn all of it on that 
saves me time. kioslaves save me a good 30 minutes or so day and that is 2.5 
hours/week or 125 hours/year. For 125 hours I can afford to sink a lot more 
into hardware if that is what it takes.

> Third, (<nitpicking>) the machine I named is low-end by todays standards,
> but by no means "extremely" low-end. It would be like a space shuttle ride
> for the majority of the worlds population.
>
> So I find the most important thing that KDE can focus on, snappyness and
> system requirements. And stability off course.

I would hope they focus on stability and features primarily. Hopefully by 
making things more modular they can make it faster and more featureful since 
if you don't use those features you won't take the speed hit.