Technologies going forward..
Twenty years ago, I was reading some books about Unix at the local library. By the time, it was really difficult for me to see, touch, or test an actual unix system and reading books was the closest I could get.
I remember that among the numerous very good ideas ™ in this system, one totally buzzed me : processes and memory protection. A piece of software was protected from other pieces. If one crahes, the other ones could still keep on doing their stuff. Amazing feature, isn’t it ??
Years later, and until very recently, I could proudly say to my friends: “I use linux, I don’t have such problems that you have in Windows and MacOS”. Well, of course, now at least MacOS is based on a serious kernel and the Windows kernel is far better in this regard. But still, unix has had it for very long, and among them, my favourite Unix : Linux.
… forward …
And then, people started to talk about plasma. It is cool, it is great, it is beautiful. One of the reasons I like KDE so much, is that I am very happy with the technology choices made by the project over the time (do you remember the drop of CORBA ?). I’m not into buzz and fancy desktop, so I did not pay much attention to plasma at the beginning. Later on, I started to try KDE trunk again. For months, it was about: compile, start, wait few seconds, plasma crashed, and the whole desktop/X session restarted.
Then, it got better : plasma crashing would not make the whole session crash, and plasma would handle its own crashes gracefully by restarting. Trust me, I really like KDE, but I could NOT resist to think “Hey, they now handle crashes as well as MS Word do!, great job!”. Well, of course, It was still pre-alpha times, you are not supposed to expect more at this time.
.. and backward
Still some months pass by, and came the beta time. I could finally get into KDE and plasma would not crash on startup. So I tried this new plasmoid thinguy. I added few plasmoids, played with them, even configured some. I tried to add a new one… and WLANG, suddently the whole thing crashed.
Do you see my point ? One of the plasmoids made the whole plasma thing crash. We are back 30 years ahead in time. End of process separation and memory protection. Back to the “don’t try to touch anything, it WORKS, don’t disturb it” and “I do not dare trying this new cool stuff because it could crash it all”.
Design
This sounded weird. Really, really weird. I wondered, and learned that indeed plasma was only one process. It seemed to me like a very bad design choice, but I do not know much about all of this, so I just kept my faith in KDE and did not worry too much. I don’t know anything about internals. I talked to a few people, on IRC, in real life… but nobody seems concerned. Nothing about that on the FAQ, not even on the (short) architecture documentation.
As time goes by, people put almost anything into plasma. I mean it : anything. Developers and users for once seem to agree, and everybody is happy. I still do not really understand the need to put a browser in a plasmoid, but if people enjoy that, I don’t have a problem with this. Free software is all about fun, isn’t it ?
After I updated to KDE 4.2.1, I’ve spent one hour to fix it, finally removing the plasma configuration files to get a usable system. I did not look further, but I guess I could have removed only one part of one file, or maybe even just remove a faulty plasmoid.
I don’t mind the hour I’ve spent… but I worry about the design of plasma. I do not dare asking plasma people, as it seems so.. deeply obvious. They MUST have thought about it, mustn’t they ?
A trend in KDE ?
Today I had to kill one of my konsole because one of the software I’m working on was eating all the memory. I used the great CTRL-ALT-ESCAPE kill feature and that saved my computer. Once recovered, I was really surprised to see that all my konsoles were dead. “ps” could confirm this. I usually have 4 or 5 konsoles with 5 or 6 tabs each. Lot of opened vi inside and so on. A doubt came to me and i started several new konsole, and then issued a “ps aux | grep konsole”. You’ve guessed it, only one was present. I rushed on konsole source code and konsole/src/main.cpp confirmed my fears : konsole uses only one process on purpose, through the use of KUniqueApplication.
I don’t understand and I’m sad about this.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong , I still think that a lot of things are still done right in plasma (and KDE in general): separation between data and views (nothing new, but still a great thing to do), packaging (though it’s not done yet, I like the ideas). And it looks darn good, that’s right, too.
I just feel very uncomfortable with this. This is the first time ever in more than 10 years that I am not happy with a KDE design choice, and a blog post looked like a great way to release this embarassment. As usual I’m afraid that people will read this post lightly, will feel insulted, and will answer with even more insults.
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