Here’s the distrowatch announcement.

Moving to KDE

The biggest change in this version is moving to KDE for the desktop.

Something important to understand about that:  when I say “KDE for the desktop”, that doesn’t mean Netrunner is running all KDE apps. There are a lot of GNOME (and other) apps in there, because we are trying to present the best selection of applications and for some reason some people like some of the non-KDE apps better.

Still, I really like the idea of mixing KDE/GNOME. The obvious downside is the “bloat” – the Netrunner ISO is ~1GB, which kills the LiveCD route - but the upside is we do have the ability to present a different (and hopefully better) mix of applications.

If you have input on the application selection – especially if you want to “side” with me and push for more KDE! – get on the netrunner forums and let me know what you like!

Spit and Polish

This is a strange thing for me, because as I’ve said many times I have zero graphic design skills combined with near-apathy for how a distro looks out of the box.

That being said, there is someone (Starbuck) who obsesses over the visual end, and I hope his efforts are appreciated. I do like the wallpaper and theme, and again if you have input on the graphical direction, take it to the forums, because I guarantee you it will get read and discussed.

So give it a try already

Enough yakking from me – download the thing and give it a try and if the spirit moves you post some feedback on the netrunner forums.

Good Stuff

I like to hear about some of the new stuff for KDE: Desktop changes according to geo-location? Very neat! OpenChange, the “Samba for Exchange”? Much needed!

That’s good stuff – exciting and useful with clear potential.

Confusing Stuff

Confession time: I don’t understand what the hell Nepomuk is. Here’s the main page – front page – description:

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

Um, ok?

Here’s the “Project Summary“:

NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries.

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.

Blah blah blah. Who writes this stuff? The acronym is horrible as well. Whoever wrote this might be far more educated than I am, but probably has much more boring weekends.

So please break this down so people can understand why they should be excited about “the social desktop”. Pictures and/or video preferred.

What does NEPOMUK bring to the desktop? Is it a button? An application? A search engine? A tasty dessert topping?

A sort of a start

If I follow about 4 links I eventually end up at Discover Neopmuk As a User, which is a good start but a bit hard to find and not as compelling as it could be. (It looks a bit out of date.)

This is an example of where I would like to see more effort put into the PR end of KDE. Instead of defending 4.0, move on and break down and hype up some of these new features! They are worth talking about – and they are worth explaining to potential users.

I would wager that the vast majority of current users only have a very vague idea (if any) of Nepomuk, and that potential users have no idea whatsoever. I also wager that fully half of those who DO know about it think it is “Neopunk”, and is some sort of new desktop theme.

It’s interesting to see that even now, 2 years down the line people are still bringing up the KDE 4.0 release. Perhaps it’s me but I don’t (either as a user or developer) feel that KDE 4.0 was labelled a “Complete” or “User ready” release.

Long Memories

I was just discussing KDE with some other people, and it sure didn’t seem like 4.0 was two years ago! It’s funny how memory works, but those of us in the discussion that had tried 4.0 when it was released remembered it like it was just last week!

Part of my issue with 4.0 was I never saw anything that indicated .0 was an “alpha” or “developer-only” release, or anything like that. Needless to say I was very disappointed in KDE 4.0 – which led to a period of using XFCE (which I found quite satisfactory).

I did try each major release and somewhere around 4.2.somethingoranother I finally felt comfortable enough to get on a pure KDE desktop and live with the bumps. My main desktop is KDE now and I am perfectly happy with it.

Try to explain that KDE is working fine now-a-days though and I get skeptical headshakes. For whatever reason, some people are hesitant to give KDE another try.

On Promotion and Defense

Here’s Mr. Crouch again:

I do agree that with the author in the article above that we really need to push the message to users that may have left KDE since the 4.0 release. KDE 4.4 is a GREAT release which may 3.5 users, I think, will find not only usable but a great step forward.

I strongly agree with this. Please, please, drop the “only idiots thought that 4.0 was for end-users” and similar defenses. (The comments here are chock-full of this).

It may or may not be true, but a lot of people thought that — myself included – and it just needlessly antagonizes people!

KDE 4 right now is an awesome desktop and doesn’t need to retroactively justify the earlier releases.

Instead focus on a clear listing of the improvements and features, and maybe even engage in a little self-depreciation and poke a bit of fun at the 4.0 release along the way. Let people know what they are missing today if they decide not to give KDE another look.

Try to re-capture those that might have left KDE! Don’t burn calories calling them liars – they obviously at one point cared enough to give 4.0 a try, I bet they could be convinced to give 4.4 a try as well –hopefully with a different result!

That being said, I was running into quite a few strange problems with KTorrent, the default bittorrent client. The number one problem was the vast majority of new torrents I added would have a status of “stalled” and rarely change to a normal downloading situation. This is apparently a known bug in KTorrent. I didn’t always experience this problem – KTorrent worked fine for several months -  but once it started happening it seemed to “stick”, and made KTorrent virtually unusable for me.

So, after trying (but failing) to resolve the bug,  I set out to find an alternative!

In the past, under XFCE, I really liked Deluge. A very solid and feature-rich client with a responsive dev team. However, this time I wanted to find a QT based client.

After a bit of searching, I ran across qBittorrent. Here are the things that were important to me that qBittorrent delivered on:

• Free Software
• QT-based
• Optional Web Interface for torrent control
• Optional Minimize to tray
• Stop/Start All Torrents easily
• Under active development

After using qBittorrent for several weeks now, I can only find one thing to complain about: You can’t seem to view/preview individual files in a torrent. One of things I often want to do is to look at a file in a torrent that is complete, even though the entire torrent is not complete.

Some clients make this very easy, and you can view (or even prioritize) files inside a torrent. I can’t find that functionality in qBittorrent.

This is a fairly serious shortcoming – not severe enough to reject qBittorrent over – but it is certainly something I would like to see added and certainly something I miss.

One thing that I don’t miss, but others might: the queue controls are not as fine-grained as in some clients. Personally, even though I would consider myself a fairly heavy torrent user, I’ve never really found such detailed control necessary. I felt like I should mention it though, because someone out there might like setting up scheduled queues or the like.

Special kudos go to the web interface which is very clean and responsive and is the best such interface I have dealt with.

If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!