Early computer aided art and programs I’ve written, dating back decades.

In the mid 1990s I used ImpulseTracker to create music. The music sucks. But losing the original source .IT files would be heartbreaking.

Likewise, my first programs, written as a child in MS DOS batch files circa 1991 – basic menu driven interfaces that facilitated launching my installed sharware… I don’t have the games the program points to anymore, but that isn’t the point ;)

Threading intensifies

I’m excited about this, even if it is just baby steps. It’s been one of my very few complaints about python, having spent two decades using it.

I’m hoping that pyside and QThreads can be made to work with noGIL. That would be super sweet. :)

I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.

KDE had a policy editor back in v2.0… honesty I never really followed whether those features stuck around. But the simple version is to lock down write access to folders in $HOME, such as .config or similar. Linux already prevents most users from installing programs over the system directories without root, but I’m not sure if you can restrict new programs with +x in $HOME unless you write-lock the whole folder… Someone with more network admin experience probably knows this :)

Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.

I’m actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn’t owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch… But it’s still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

Oooh, I wish I had time for this. :)

It’s probable there are better ways at finding things, but sometimes these commands are sort of muscle memory and I don’t even think to explore what else is out there once I have something that works for me ;)

It’s hard to teach an old dog like myself new tricks. I still think git was a mistake and long for centralized revision control systems… Because that’s what I grew up with ;)

I hate to alarm you but… What is a file system except dynamically allocated memory. ;)

KDE always gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Like, set the transparency of all windows to 100% and wonder why the system is fucked, or whatever haha.

Working blind, and from memory (I didn’t check my system): depending on your system, there will be a kwin config file in .local or .config or .kde or similar in your home directory. Assuming you have console access, df -h | grep kwin will probably find it for you. Take a peak in the file first to make sure it’s reasonable that this is the right file to nuke. Rename it something like kwinrc-backup and restart KDE.

Heh, that’s amusing ;)

We did do the high version numbers for alpha, beta, RC etc. leading into 4.0 as well.

You can find some of that here: 4.0 release schedule - go through the version history of that page. Fun times. (Makes me nostalgic.) You’ll note that the release date got pushed back a few times as more betas and things were inserted. You’ll also see version numbers like 3.97 for release candidates.

Kids these days and their type hinting. Back in my day, all objects were ducks, and we liked it!

It’s funny. I was around from KDE 1.1 to about 4.7 and some of those decisions were things I was involved in directly… Like the branding shift towards KDE as a community (people sharing vision and development infrastructure) as opposed to KDE as a monolithic desktop environment. I haven’t been involved for ages now. I did some coding too, but not a tonne.

The KDE 4.0 release messaging was one of my core tasks. We had a release party in Mountain View – and we invited all the packagers for all the distros to the event. Linux community “luminaries” like Patrick Volkerding were there and it was a great party. But we thought that, by bringing all the packaging types there, we had the messaging problem bottled – and KDE 3.5 and 4.0 would be offered alongside each other as though they were different desktops entirely. (Like Gnome, or whatever… Just choose what to launch in your session manager.) What happened instead is that 3.5 was dropped like a hot potato and users fled 4.0. Distros didn’t want two versions of libraries installed, so running a 3.5 app in a 4.0 environment was difficult, but not all the 4.0 apps had been ported yet. Yikes! This is a huge reason for the subsequent split between version numbering of Desktop releases (later Plasma) and things like “Frameworks”.

Side note: we had even considered the idea of KDE (as a community) offering multiple desktop interface offerings, each with their own branding. So you could run Plasma, Kicker (a hypothetical KDE 3.x desktop environment ported to the current frameworks), etc. alongside applications from multiple versions of desktops. This was the reason the session management code was in KRunner rather than Plasma, for example. This would allow highly experimental user interfaces to be developed around the KDE libraries. But that never happened, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, for 4.0 – so much for Linux applications and the mantra “release early, release often.” Lesson learned. Linus, I’m so sorry for disappointing you. ;)

You folks are awesome 👍👍

Meow 😻

That is a fantastic article!

Excellent work folks. Bug fixing is not sexy (even more so in open source projects), but greatly appreciated 👍

Instead of the blogspam, here are the real release notes: https://numpy.org/devdocs/release/2.0.0-notes.html

There used to be (in the 4.x days) a general installer which allowed pretty much who whole KDE ecosystem to be installed on windows. Does that not exist anymore? I used to use Okteta on windows this way :)

Tl;dr: don’t use @property during design, it’s almost certainly the wrong pattern. But use it to retrofit a method to a value.