KDE 4.0 the holy grail of Desktops ?

A couple of weeks back, I was greeted by the news of a very interesting project having been moved to KDE base. The project in question is a file manager named Dolphin. What is unique about this file manager is that it is light weight, is simple to navigate without overwhelming the Computer neophytes but at the same time does not sacrifice much functionality.

In fact, I installed Dolphin on my machine which has only one window manager namely Xfce. I do not have KDE on this machine. And normally, my experience is that while running KDE applications in non-KDE window managers, the applications suffer some latency at the time of start up. But I was surprised to see that Dolphin started as quickly as any other application. I would so much as say it was even quicker to start up than its equivalent Gnome file manager Nautilus in Gnome. I do not want to start anything by comparing one file manager with another. But let me say this, Dolphin is as easy and simple to use as the Gnome file manager.

Fig: Dolphin file manager with three different file views including split panes.

On concerns shared by the power users who have grown to love the present default file manager in KDE namely Konquorer, this is what Aaron.J.Seigo - the lead developer of KDE project had to say - and I quote :

So, what is the point of dolphin? First, I think it's obvious to everyone that konqueror kicks some pretty serious ass. The downside is that it's really tuned for a particular category of power users. Our plan is therefore to introduce a file manager that is aimed at the rest of the masses and tuned specifically for file management. Where does this leave konqueror? As a power user's app and generally useful multi-function tool. i expect we will continue to ship konqueror in its current form, modulo kde4 improvements to the ui and guts.

From the above statement, I have inferred two things namely :

1. The KDE users who have the mind set of Linus Torvalds need not worry as the new KDE (4.0) will still have all the features that make it the favorite of power users. And more importantly ...
2. The KDE team is making a pitched effort to rein in rest of the people which includes the grandmas and grandpas of this world by providing them an alternate file manager which doesn't overwhelm them.
   

I am sure you will agree with me that a file manager forms one of the most frequently used application in any desktop. You can't think of a OS or desktop devoid of a file manager. And by integrating the light weight file manager Dolphin into the KDE base, the KDE team is sending out a strong signal that it aims to be a Desktop fit for all kinds of people namely the power users and the grandma kinds alike.

Indeed if this trend is duplicated across other KDE applications, KDE 4.0 could very well end up as the holy grail of Desktops.

Is there a correlation between Socialism and Free Software ?

The word Socialism is a broad term. There are different streams of socialism. On one end of the spectrum, there is the extreme form of socialism known as communism infamous for its stringent following of its ideology, which was practiced by countries such as the erstwhile USSR (present Russia) and currently by China and Cuba. And at the other end, there is the more humane form of socialism as practiced by countries such as India and Sweden. That is right, India is a sovereign socialist democratic republic nation as stated in the constitution of India.

And before any of you point at the problems faced by India, let me tell you most of those problems are due to its burgeoning population and should not be attributed to its socialist aspect. And as far as Sweden is concerned, it is ranked as the 4th least corrupt nation in the world. A clue that it's people lead contented lives. And Sweden enjoys an ultra low unemployment rate of around 4% which is the least in the European Union.

Simply put, socialism is a process of control of resources by a community or state in varying degrees. So the big question is does the Free Software movement enjoy any relation with socialist ideology ?

If you go by the definition of Socialism, I would say yes. The source code is open and is controlled by the Free software community at large. And it is the community which largely decides and dictates the direction of a software's progress. Each decision is taken through consensus and by interacting with its users. Though at times there is bound to be a lot of bickering and clash of egos, for the large part, the job gets done splendidly. And socialism works in the software realm when it is a massive failure when implemented in an extreme form (read communism) in real life is because unlike the resources in real life, software is a replenish-able resource. You can literally make millions of copies of your source code and distribute it to others free of cost and still you will be left holding the original copy of the source code.

Having stated my views about this topic, I came across this lengthy article which talked about the inherent link between Free software and socialism. What held my attention was the insidious way in which they had portrayed the 'X' in Linux with a hammer and sickle - the trademark of communist movement. If anything, Free software movement is far removed from the mess that is communism.

Internet is fault tolerant .... Not !

Internet has become a part and parcel of most of our lives. But I did not realize the extent to which I personally was dependent on the Internet till two days back when due to a major underwater cable breakdown in the Mediterranean sea, the Internet slowed to a crawl - well you can say it almost stopped. News reports say 60% of India was affected and over 70% of Egypt.

In India for instance, the three main service providers namely TATA owned VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel Ltd were affected. The repair of the sea cables is expected to take a minimum of 10 days even when conducted on a war footing. According to news reports, the cable snag occurred near Alexandria, off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday affecting ILD and Internet traffic to Europe and the US.

Checking email which we all took for granted was a big chore with opening a single email taking close to an hour. Most sites were not accessible. It did not help that over 90% of the popular sites on the Internet are hosted on a server based in the United states with no cross continental mirroring plan to meet such a scenario.

An exception was Google search which did not see any slowdown because it has data centers in every part of the world and is prepared to meet such emergencies.

This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the Internet for carrying out even the most mundane but critical tasks like banking, paying bills and booking tickets. Now a days, more and more people are working from the safe confines of their home. As days go by we are getting more and more enmeshed in the online world and acquiring alternate identities. And keeping the Internet fault tolerant is turning out to be a very important factor in our personal wellbeing.