On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 21:57:49 -0800 (PST) Darrell Anderson humanreadable@yahoo.com wrote:
I use KDE 4.8 on one of my laptops and use it nearly the same way as I use Trinity. Could you just name such a "latest desktop fashion" which is: -newer than KDE 3.5 -visible from the user (e.g. not the fact that KMail2 uses Akonadi), and -which use is *required* in the KDE4 desktop interface
Sure, I can do that. :)
Odd that you should exclude KMail and Akonadi, which pretty much pins the tail on the donkey.
Because it is a technical one, and I was talking about user-interface change. If it works (and it seems to finally work in 4.8) it won't change anything for the user. Moreover a SQL DB is not necessarily heavy, such technology was already used in LAMP stacks a decade ago, when the first PIV's were the latest radiators from Intel.
KDE4 will not run on older hardware. An idle, stripped-to-the-bones KDE4 desktop (along with the underlying operating system) requires more than 512 MB of RAM. That more or less excludes people on fixed incomes with older computers and people in developing regions of the world from using KDE4. From my perspective KDE4 has become a geek's playground and geeks almost always have bleeding edge hardware. Understandably so because time is money. The faster development proceeds the faster the results. Better hardware improves that kind of environment. But that kind of environment is not what non developers use, which is where software should always be tested. Fellow geeks using bleeding edge hardware and sharing similar opinions seldom provide good feedback for usability testing.
I think it will somehow run on 256 MB of RAM. But not anything less. By the way 512 MB of old-technology RAM is significantly cheaper than a new computer, if the motherboard supports it. In France it is something like €15 including taxes.