Long Time No Blog – Goodbye 2009!
January 17th, 2010Topics: Personal, FOSS, KDE, Computers, Maemo, N810
Another year has passed. Now that I’ve just finished a major exam and taken care of some school requirements, I can finally take a breather and look back at the past year, and hopefully learn and grow from it, too.
Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of personal reflections and FOSS/KDE-related topics and how those have affected me. If you’re looking for some analysis or review of KDE events and trends only, please feel free to ignore this. Otherwise, hold on to your seat (or bed) as this might take a while. 
KDE. Of course it’s only proper that I start with the KDE stuff. What can I say? KDE continues to grow and rock! Sure, there are still KDE SC 4 naysayers. Those will always exist, and some of those we lost may never return. What’s important I think is that KDE unwaveringly pushed forward with their vision for KDE SC 4, of course with some adjustment along the way from listening to feedback. I believe that the hard investments in the “pillars” will pay off really soon now (if it hasn’t yet already). Plasma, one of the most hard hit, will truly shine as more and more people gravitate towards computers that are no longer your usual desktop or laptop forms. In the meantime, the rest of the KDE Software Compilation 4 continues to rock, as they have always been, even since 4.0.
In contrast, my contribution/presence in KDE, mostly focused on user support and, recently, through the Community Working Group and Userbase, went the way of the Dodo. Everyone who knows me personally can attest that I’m a slacker. But more than that, I kind of took a big hit from some burnout due to many factors. And I’m not even a full-pledged developer yet! I don’t want to point fingers or name names, so let’s just leave it at “I need to grow a thicker skin” (actually applies everywhere when dealing with people), which I’m constantly working on, now that I’m semi-back. Nevertheless, for the CWG, the only responsible thing to do was to open up the position for someone who deserves it more. I’m still hoping (and working towards) to pick up the pace this year, especially in programming.
Distro Odyssey. I have yet again switched to another distro. Source Mage GNU/Linux is a nice distro that gave me what I was looking for back then. It still is a nice distro, but my needs have changed. SMGL is really an advanced distro. Unfortunately, a bit too advanced for my current level of Linux knowledge. It was also taking up too much time to compile updates again and again on my turtle desktop. So I went looking again for a distro, this time a binary-based one that wouldn’t lose too much of what I learned to love in SMGL: control, vanilla-ness, relatively small community (compared at least to the “big ones”). I now have a new computer (which I forgot to/didn’t blog or dent/tweet about), which solves the compilation issues. But still, I’m not that confident at my Linux fu to dare dance at that level again.
My first stop was Arch Linux, a distro I’ve long been curious about but never really tried. It did have some of the qualities that I liked in SMGL (I might even dare say that their package management systems are somewhat similar, even in limitations ). Unfortunately, I was left between the devil and the deep blue sea. Perhaps I’ll blog (and be corrected) about my experiences some other time, but suffice it to say that Arch kind of left me dissatisfied as a KDE developer who wants a vanilla KDE experience that just works and almost always up-to-date. I don’t even want to start talking about Chakra (no offence meant). 
After some … “convincing” from a dear friend who also just recently switched from his distro of 7(?) years, I tried the Fedora KDE spin (which, by the way, is the most downloaded Fedora spin). I was pleasantly surprised. My first ever Fedora experience was Fedora Core 5, and it was a bleeding edge mess (no RPM hell for me back then). This time, things just worked (except for a few NVIDIA driver-related hiccups). I can even run on their latest “testing” repo and not have any breakage (haven’t tested the kde-redhat repos yet). Even better than some distro’s “stable updates” repo. 
Their KDE community is not that large, very friendly (upstream-friendly as well), and helpful. And yes, no RPM hell so far. Again, maybe more on my distro choices some other blog post. I can’t really say if I’m going to stay in Fedora, but so far, inertia has taken over. I have very little reason to go looking for yet another distro for now, so I’m not gonna drag my butt yet. 
Maemo, N810, and Mobile. Maemo and Nokia in 2009 was one media frenzy/controversy after another. Ever since Nokia acquired Trolltech, it was already presumed that Qt will eventually play a major role in Maemo’s future. That role was cemented when Nokia revealed that Maemo 6 (codename Harmattan) will be using Qt instead of GTK+. However, they announced this even before Maemo 5 (Fremantle) or even the device that it will be running on, the N900, were released, creating a spectre of uncertainty among the community and outsiders as well. Of course, for a KDE guy, that’s good news. But things haven’t been so rosy, at least from where I’m standing, with a N810 in my hand. I’ve always dreamed of getting KDE SC 4 on the N810. Not just a regular KDE workspace forcibly slapped on the small form factor, but a real and decent “port”, probably beginning with something like a plasma-netbook for tablets. While that might be technically possible, unfortunately for me it seems that any and all such future efforts will be poured on Maemo 5 or 6 and the N900 and later. While the N810 is a pretty decent mobile device, it has some limitations that might not be attractive to those doing a KDE SC port, such as no OpenGL ES drivers (although it seems that the Mer team has already received them, so that might change in the near future). Mer might be the future/last hope for my N810, but I’m not exactly sure it will be “port”-friendly. Everyone is all about Maemo 5/6 and N900, and I really can’t blame them. A fact of life I’ll just have to accept and watch from the sides. I definitely don’t have the skills to start things myself and by the time I do get to that level, I might already have my own Maemo 5/6 device to enjoy.
Personal. The last quarter of 2009 was a very trying time for me and my family. I almost lost a close friend to a vehicular accident. Typhoons that ravaged the country and severely affected people that we know. Deaths in the families of our friends. And probably the worst experience of all was having our house broken into while people were still in there, sleeping. I was staying with my aunts at a hotel when it happened, which they say is a good thing as we might have lost more than just material things. Though I still get nightmares even today, and the general feeling of helplessness and insecurity hasn’t completely vanished.
Still, things weren’t all that bad. We did remain unscathed by the typhoons that passed. And we also got to see our aunts from the U.S. again. I got a new decent computer, one that’s not almost obsolete even before the date of purchase (as my previous desktop was). And we’re still whole and alive as we entered the new year, with new hopes and dreams. So yeah, life isn’t all that bad.
So long 2009 and thanks for all the fish!
Just some small updates, while I'm trying to get off my ass and migrate the site completely to Textpattern.
January 17th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Just a friendly advice. Your repeated use of KDE 4 is wrong. It should say KDE SC 4 instead. You seem to be aware of the software compilation concept, but actually even when refering to that you get the name wrong. It should not be KDE 4 SC but rather KDE SC 4. (It’s not the software collection of kde 4 but version 4 of the kde software collection. An important destinction we as KDE spokespersons should always remember. )
Happy newyear
January 17th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Updated. Thanks.
Actually I was really unsure what to use. I mean in some places is used “KDE 4″, I wasn’t referring to just a compilation of applications (SC) but more like a general vision or spirit or identity that differentiates this current incarnation from “KDE 3″. How would call that?
January 17th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
I would be quite interested by your experience with Archlinux and Chakra. I’m thinking about switching to Arch (I’m a KDE user of course ^^) and the work of Chakra seems very fine, so I would be interested by the problems you encountered with Arch and what you don’t like with Chakra.
As I’m sure others would be quite interested, if you have some time for a blog post …
January 18th, 2010 at 1:27 am
good question. I guess you just have to write something along the lines of: the new spirit KDE introduced with SC 4
January 18th, 2010 at 8:33 am
Just wondering what was your problems with Arch. After having done a lot of distro hopping myself I’m having the best KDE experience I ever had with the kdemod packages. The packaging is fast and mostly unaltered (excepted for some artwork), the community great and the “hackability” fantastic.
January 18th, 2010 at 8:50 am
@Casper: I was hoping for something shorter, specially since I have somewhat referred to that repeatedly.
@Alex: It was really just a matter of very personal tastes/requirements. I wanted a KDE experience which was as vanilla as possible. Or as my friend put it, “KDE (SC) as we ship it”. I’m sure a lot of users (and even some developers) would rather prefer a branded/customized KDE experience. In that case, Arch or Chakra/KDEmod is actually very fine indeed and I’d probably choose it over other heavily branded KDE distros. But I’ve had some issues with distros that patch KDE a lot. So Chakra/KDEmod was not for me.
January 29th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Nice web site man, picked up a few nuggets here…can’t wait for Cataclysm, I read a rumor that it’s going to be coming out Nov 2010, though with Blizz you can never tell :/
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:52 am
Hey “slave”!
New year treating you good? Havn’t talked to you in a while.
Didn’t like Arch? tried the kdemod repo? I liked it pretty much when I tried KDE a few months back. Right now I use Gnome though. Wondering how KDE4 has been comming along. I use Arch on the home download box and on the server, SMGL on the desktop (biggest horsepower)… so I can preach about both
February 5th, 2010 at 6:24 am
Well. Chakra/KDEmod is indeed patched and has some branding, but not as heavily as the KDEmod 3 packages
And only “proven” patches are included into the KDEmod packages, we like to have a usable working environment too 
However, i cant understand that you think the standard Arch KDE in their [extra] repository is too much branded/customized/patched. From all distros that i have seen, the standard Arch pkgs are the most vanilla ones. No branding (just a new “Arch” submenu in the kmenu, optional) and _no_ patches beside some bug- or security-fixes when they are needed.
Did you even try it or just KDEmod?
February 5th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
@Elisamuel: Master! New year has been treating me good/bad. It’s mixed. But it has only been one month (or so). KDE is doing better than ever.
Of course, I concede that it will never suit everyone’s tastes. That’s why I just love FOSS. You can choose what you want, or create what you need.
@Jan/Funkyou: Hmm, I must have said something wrong up there. The Arch “official” KDE packages are indeed very vanilla, with limited patching. I do understand that some amount of patching needs to be done to integrate KDE or fix issues. My problem with the [extra] packages is that they don’t have debug info packages available. That’s a big disadvantage to me, since I will end up rebuilding KDE myself (through ABS most probably) just to get debug info.
I have heard that Chakra is indeed less patched than KDEmod 3. And that’s probably true. But it’s still a bit patched more than I’m comfortable with. But I will hand it to the (you?) Chakra guys for at least making these patches very much public (installed in a local directory under /usr). I’ve forgotten some of the changes, but the biggest patch/mod that stuck to my mind was the application of the fake transparency for the panel, which was clearly rejected by upstream. I know it’s a distro’s prerogative, but it kinda left a bad taste in my mouth.
That said, I still think Arch is a pretty decent distro and Chakra a very good KDE “spin”. I’m sure users are going to like the mods and the tools. It’s just that I personally kinda fall outside that group. It’s really a case of a very specific/niche need more than anything else.