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From: Chris Ahlstrom on 8 Aug 2010 10:49
J G Miller posted this message in ROT13 encoding:

> On Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 18:42:13h -0400, Moshe Goldfarb declared:
>
>> KDE 3.x was very good IMHO.
>> KDE 4.x was a step backwards in just about everything except the eye
>> candy factor.
>> It does look very nice.
>
> Hey, something upon which we can actually agree.
>
> Now the question is, why did the KDE developers sacrifice
> functionality on the altar of appearance?
>
> Even the KDE 4 versions of applications are dumbed down
> eg old kscd you could access configuration options to set
> it up appropriately, whereas with the new kscd it is all
> "automagic" clever, and so for some situations just fails to
> work. And similarly for kaffeine where the configuration
> interface has been gutted all in the cause of simplicity.
>
> And it was the KDE people who used to complain about GNOME
> desktop and applications having a dumbed down user interface.

Well, I suspect moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4 was a big motivation.

By the way, I generally like Qt 4. Between that, Boost, and standard C++,
quite a lot of *portable* power.

--
It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill,
or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who
achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom
good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy
notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all
infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from
folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens
their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that
appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge,
and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum
competence will be quite enough.
-- The Underground Grammarian
From: J G Miller on 8 Aug 2010 11:42
On Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 10:49:10h -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> Well, I suspect moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4 was a big motivation.

Changing a widget set does not by its-self result in the dumbing down
of programs and the wholesale removal of configurability options.
From: Chris Ahlstrom on 8 Aug 2010 16:33
J G Miller posted this message in ROT13 encoding:

> On Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 10:49:10h -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> Well, I suspect moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4 was a big motivation.
>
> Changing a widget set does not by its-self result in the dumbing down
> of programs and the wholesale removal of configurability options.

Dude. Qt3 to Qt4 is a hell of a lot more than changing a widget set.

--
Q: What looks like a cat, flies like a bat, brays like a donkey, and
plays like a monkey?
A: Nothing.
From: Peter Köhlmann on 8 Aug 2010 16:50
J G Miller wrote:

> On Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 10:49:10h -0400, Chris
Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> Well, I suspect moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4 was a big
motivation.
>
> Changing a widget set does not by its-self result in the
dumbing down
> of programs and the wholesale removal of configurability
options.

You don't have even the tiniest of clues about the differences
between Qt3 and Qt4

--
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to sue us,

would you like me to delete all of your files?"


From: J G Miller on 8 Aug 2010 18:00
On Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 16:33:43h -0400, Chris Ahlstrom expounded:
>
> Qt3 to Qt4 is a hell of a lot more than changing a widget set.

Yes there is more to Qt than just widgets, and Qt4 has introduced, to quote

<http://doc.qt.nokia.COM/4.0/qt4-intro.html>

(o) Tulip, a new set of template container classes.

(o) Interview, a model/view architecture for item views.

(o) Arthur, the Qt 4 painting framework.

(o) Scribe, the Unicode text renderer with a public API for
performing low-level text layout.

(o) Mainwindow, a modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar,
menu, and docking architecture.

so my comment was flippant and imprecise.

But the point I was making still stands -- that changing the appearance
of the application, and how things are being done underneath in the code,
should not necessarily result in loss of configurability and functionality.

But the change from KDE3 to KDE4 was not just a change in the major version
of Qt being used, but I would argue, a major change in policy as to how
applications were to be presented and the degree to which the user could
configure them.

There are lots of examples -- I already cited kscd, and another one that
comes to mind is amarok which lost support for postgres amongst other things.
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