KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released

dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."

Fuck yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror

This had always pissed me off with KDE. Mixing a file manager with a web browser? Not very UNIX-like.

Now I am a happy nerd.

Re:Dolphin

[PeterBrett]

Oh I hate stupid GUIs. Smart ones I have some time for.

Because browsing to audiocd:/ and dragging the contents of the "MP3" virtual directory to your ~/Music is such a stupid GUI. You really have no clue about the power of ioslaves, do you?

Re:What are they for?

[lbbros]

I can run KDE or GNOME on a normal PC, unlike the over-priced Apple offerings. That is enough for me to avoid considering a Mac.

Re:Fuck yeah

[Com2Kid]

I disagree.

I think that one of the most revolutionary end-user paradigm shifts that Microsoft ever did was to compiler Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer into one.

Think about it. The Internet, a seamless extension of your desktop. Why shift between the two? When broadband first came out, everything clicked into place, and I understood the eloquence of having IE and Explorer as one. Pick a window, type a website, get my data. Hit back. On my hard drive again.

Konqueror accomplishes this to even a greater extent. KDE has horrible UI in so many places, but they got one thing (more or less) right. Konqueror goes out of its way to integrate all the various file management techniques into one.

SFTP, ick, under Windows, have to load up some separate program to manage it.[1] In KDE, nope. It is just an extension of my computer. Not even an extension, except for the latency, it IS my computer. Files and web sites sharing tabs, why not?

I also loved having tabbed file browsing. I (just) missed out on the Dual Pane file manager craze, but tabbed file managers are a good substitute.

KDE sucks in a thousand other small (medium sized, and large) ways. Heck in of itself Konqueror has at least half a dozen UI issues that can be spotted within the first 5 minutes of using it. But do not claim that it is not very "Unix" like.

It is very Unix like. Files are files, a file is a file is a file. Does it really matter where it resides?

[1]Actually 2 commerical programs exist that allow the user to mount SFTP and SCP connections as drives. They still suck compared to FISH though.

Re:ambitious

[moosesocks]

Really?

I sort of thought that Gnome was beginning to edge KDE out after a few years of KDE being somewhat superior.

Right now, Gnome is lean, mature, and stable, even on relatively old hardware. As an added bonus, Gnome's GUI is clean and consistent compared to KDE's (not to mention that they've resisted the temptation to add 80 million configuration options to the menus and toolbars of every single one of their apps).

My other usability pet peeve with KDE is its heavy reliance on toolbars with dozens of nondescript blue icons. Even for experienced users, it's a bit daunting.

If you really want to take the minimalism to the next level, try out XFCE. It's more or less a very lightweight Gnome (sort of analogous to the early versions of Firefox versus SeaMonkey) that also uses GTK2. It's incredibly snappy even on old hardware, and the UI is fantastic (and pretty good-looking if I might add). I'd compare the UI to a vastly improved Windows 95 (or 2000), with a few mac-like touches thrown in. It does everything I need it to, reacts in ways that you'd expect it to, and just plain works.

The other guy in my cubible has a brand-new PC with Vista on it, and comments on how much faster my 6-year old PC appears than his.

Re:What are they for?

[flydpnkrtn]

yes but many of the themes and goodies actually increase productivity
making something pretty is ok.. making something that looks pretty and actually increases my productivity is priceless
if you prefer slimmed down run a really light WM like blackbox or xfce
the revolution is all about choice
;-)

integrated but not logical

[narfbot]

If the integration of Internet Explorer and Explorer were so seamless, then why do they still have separate icons for My Computer, My Network Places, and Internet Explorer? The reality is that these services are not the same.

Re:ambitious

[Anonymous Coward]

The KDE project is *very* ambitious, especially the feature set for KDE4. Hopefully this turns some heads over in the gnome camp. IMHO they have a LOT of catching up to do in everything from infrustructure to performance.

Gnome has to make a clear statement that "Mono" or "Silverlight" (whatever its port is called) will NEVER be part of it. It won't be required by ANY of system components and it won't do anything as "If you get Silverlight, your desktop will be prettier".

It is not about performance, it is about a person in development team doing everything to be called trojan of Microsoft in OSS community.

He also happens to be founder so.. that is the problem.

Re:kdolphin?

[Anonymous Coward]

you desperately tried to be funny, but failed miserably

Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0

[Indecision Bob]

The operative word being "sell"...

Re:konsole improved?

[Doug Neal]

I didn't see the simplest improvement in konsole listed:

rm konsole && cp xterm konsole

Argh, we always have to hear from the elitist Unix purists whenever KDE or GNOME comes up. Name 3 things that are better about xterm than Konsole? Or even just one thing? Get with the times, Unix desktops have moved on.

Re:ambitious

[__aaltii7299]

I've been using Kubuntu (used to be a SUSE man) and Dolphin for a month now and it makes life a hell of a lot easier. If you want to convert someone from Windows, put in the KDE XP theme and KBFX, and then show them Dolphin, Krita (fuck Gimp), Liferea, Amarok, and Pan. Setup the Media folder as your default in Dolphin and it is basically My Computer. You'll have to put the Home folder and Trash folder on the desktop for them as well (I hate that Ubuntu puts the trash icon on the taskbar, or that it can't do something as simple as mount a second hard drive without editing fstabs).

If you want people to be comfortable using Linux, then never ever fucking mention "su", "make", "command line", "fstab" or "config file". Everytime someone mentioned to me that if I wanted a certain application or driver I'd have to compile it myself, I immediately deleted that flavor of Linux from that lab computer and installed Windows. I started doing this back with Red Hat 7, and seeing as I am never planning on migrating from Windows, I have the luxury of experimenting with Linux. I will not compile anything. Ever. Nor will I edit config files of any stripe. It doesn not matter that I know how to do this, i should not have to. And if I have to do that then you are not ready.

I'm not interested in spending ten hours configuring an operating system for every one hour of usability. And Gimp guys I will not use a shitty interface just because you feel that it is "intuitive".

Re:konsole improved?

[abigor]

For those of us that actually have to, you know, do work and be productive, konsole is a godsend. Feel free to sit at home with an xterm open and be cool, though.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Have they fixed the memory leaks?

[The Master Control P]

I've run on KDE ever since I switched to Linux with Mandrake 8.2. One thing I've noticed of late is that Konqueror seems to freaking hemmorage memory over time. My machine has 1GB of ram, and eventually it reaches the point where Konqueror and X combine to use up 2/3 of my physical memory. Throw in Amarok and a few other low-level hogs (like mysqld) and it's page swapping time. At this point, I just have to restart my desktop (luckily KDE [mostly] saves it's state before doing this) and poof, back to being snappy.

It usually takes about two weeks to a month of nominal use, but still. I run my desktop continually, and it's an annoyance. I lose time-dependent web pages, SSL web pages, and all my SSH terminals.

IMO, something shouldn't be released out of alpha until "valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes [app]" doesn't show any lost blocks more than a few hundred bytes.

Re:ambitious

[lilomar]

Seconded.

Gnome just feels cleaner than KDE to me.

Re:KDE Four Live CD

[diegocgteleline.es]

E17 doesn't needs "more devs". E17 needs to:

- Release SOMETHING, even if it's incomplete, because if you try to be perfect you won't never have a product. Releasing "incomplete" products allows you to attract people and then have more programming resources. The KDE guys are not going to include some of the promises of KDE 4.0 until 4.1 which means that KDE 4.0 will be incomplete.....AND WHO CARES? E17 did beat Mac OS X and Vista in some fields before Vista was released, but since they don't release anything, now vista and mac os x have released infrastructure to do what E did before them, now E looks like they're catching up, and in some sense it's true.

- Realize that enlightenment only has sense if you aim to be a full desktop, not just a "desktop shell". I like enlightenment, but then those guys say that E17 "will not compete with GNOME or KD"E....so I keep using GNOME/KDE. They aren't so good in the graphic field as E, but since they are the ones that are desktops, it only has sense to improve and support those, not the one that is not aiming to bring good linux desktops to the masses. Technology itself is cool, but if you don't make it have real-world applications then I don't care.

Re:KDE Integration

[pherthyl]

Of course, if you don't use KDE apps you can't benefit from their integration. For me it's the opposite. I try to use as many KDE apps as possible. Sure, konqueror-the-web-browser is not quite as compatible or full featured as Firefox, but it integrates much nicer with the rest of KDE (spell check, password saving, file downloading, mimetype handling, keyboard shortcuts, file dialogs, configuration, widgets) that I use it 95% of the time over Firefox. Instead of Thunderbird I use Kontact and webmail, instead of Mplayer there is Codeine, and for most simple image editing tasks Krita and Kolourpaint are good enough so I rarely have to reach for the Gimp. The only app that really has no replacement is Openoffice, and with the KDE integration module it more or less fits into the desktop.

I would much rather see Konqueror and KOffice improve to surpass Firefox/Openoffice than have those projects given up. If you've ever seen the Mozilla codebase (or even worse, the Openoffice one) you wouldn't want anyone to be forced to work on that mess. Open source projects need to place the utmost importance on code quality to attract new developers. There aren't a lot of people willing to contribute to an open source project purely in their free time in the first place, and making the codebase hostile is a great way of scaring off those precious few. Without the commercial backing of Sun and the Mozilla foundation, neither Openoffice or Firefox would be even remotely close to where they are today. While all the grunt work has made them both into nice products, I don't like betting the farm on something that is essentially reliant on a constant influx of cash to keep going.

Re:OK, someone needs to say it...

[pherthyl]

I have used Linux for many years. I have tried out KDE from the very early versions of KDE/QT. However, the only thing that has always sent me back to Gnome in a day or two has been how farking ugly/blocky the QT widgets and toolkit, etc can be!

Oh dear. The look is dependant on the theme being used. Don't like it blocky? Choose a different theme! Just like GTK isn't ugly even though it appears so in these [lysator.liu.se] screenshots [sourceforge.net]. There are obviously good and bad themes for both toolkits.

Oh, and why do the fonts in KDE look like blocky crap, however look so much smoother in Gnome on the same system with the same fonts?

Because Gnome uses 96DPI for all fonts, while KDE uses whatever value X11 gives it for the DPI. Due to lots of broken systems, this value is sometimes wrong. If you think it is wrong, go into the Control Center, click on Appearance -> Fonts, and choose 96DPI from the combo box and restart KDE.

Re:App icons in KDE4

[alexhs]

And your exemple exhibits the same problem (dozens of ...) the OP was complaining about:

• Back - Forward : does it mean previous page next page or does it work like in the browser, that is if you're page 15 and you're jumping page 80, back will get you page 15. Page navigation is already present in the bottom left corner anyway.
  
• Fit to... : why a separator from other zoom options here ? Also these are already present in the drop-down. You might like it as a shortcut, the bar can be customizable, but this shouldn't be here in the default setup
  
• Zoom tool : Yet another zoom thing ? You don't have anything other to do when reading docs than zooming in and out ?
  

Now compare to Evince [wikipedia.org]

Navigation and zooming are here, with much less place taken.

Now what's missing in Evince :

• Open Recent : Who use that anyway ? People use the browser to do that. It's in the file menu, and if you want a shortcut there's Ctrl-O like in all applications.
  
• Select tool : I think you're always in select mode. Like with most other apps. So you might like the hand to grab the page but this is not consistent with file/web browser, office suites...
  
• Ghost Script messages : This one is ridiculous, it's not like people are reading this. As a developer,
  starting from the console and watching stderr is good enough.
  
• Reviews : Apparently, that's the only useful feature in Okular that's missing in Evince
  

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Re:Cool Stuff Planned

[Enderandrew]

When the question was posted on "the dot" the kwin developers said they thought it was just better to start from scratch. They made no mention of even attempting to work with the compiz team. So I'm not basing this off assumptions, but rather the statements of the devs. If there is no plugin api, then why is that plenty of people are able to write plugins?

And frankly, an api must exist, it just is a matter of how well it is documented. If the KDE team wanted to better understand it, and they felt the code wasn't documented well enough, that is when you ask questions. However I am willing to bet that if I ask the compiz team right now, they'd say the KDE devs never contacted them.

Re:Cool Stuff Planned

[Phisbut]

Don't use completely unrelated and/or made-up names for products and technologies.. It's not called microsoft "glbalf", it's microsoft "office".. hmm wonder what that does.

Yeah, "Office" is such an obvious and related name for what it does. Too bad I want a software to use at home. Guess I'll get "Microsoft Home" for that. Oh, and I play videogames too, and I would like to excel, so I better get that "Microsoft Excel" thing. I mean, the name says it all, it makes you excel. And when I want to access my email, should I use "Microsoft Access" or "Microsoft EMail" (ok, so they fixed that one with Vista's MS-Mail, but I don't have Vista...)?

Product naming, no matter the domain (be it software, cars, etc.) is more marketing-speak than logic. Get over it.