KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released 249
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."
ambitious (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll switch... (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool! (Score:1, Interesting)
Question from huge fan (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a huge fan of KDE, so please do not consider this a troll, flamebait, etc. I appreciate all of the componentization of KDE4, and frankly KDE3 does some things that are remarkable, like the way it handles file access to FTP volumes. But what I want to know is this: Why does it seem like the KDE screen widgets are "flimsy"? For some reason, everything seems thin and breakable. This seems to have perpetuated into KDE4. Am I the only one that notices this?
screenshot (Score:2, Interesting)
http://img247.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kde4fc1.
Re:KDE4 != KDE 4.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
All they mean is that KDE 4.0 will not have all the features that later releases of KDE 4 will have.
The point is that this is *not* commercial software, where version x.0 contains all the features you're ever going to get, and x.1, x.2, etc... just contain bug fixes and possibly a bit more shiny clip-art. I don't know if "release early, release often" can be applied to a project that's been 2 years in the making already, but if they waited until they'd written everything they could possibly think of into KDE4 before they released it, they'd probably *never* release it!
Yes, they've got a whole load more interesting ideas that will get added to future KDE 4 releases. New minor versions will have cool new functionality. They just haven't had time to do it all at once.
KDE 3.5 has a hell of a lot more stuff that KDE 3.0. But I'm glad they released KDE 3.0 in April 2002 instead of waiting until November 2005 to push it all out at once.
Re:ambitious (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Question from huge fan (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the main reason that I've stayed away from KDE. That, and the braindead menus, and the fact that I've never seen a theme for it that wasn't fugly, and its tendency to re-invent the wheel and/or put 500 functions in one app when I'd rather have 5 apps with 100 functions... OK, so the weird "feel" maybe isn't the main reason, but it is a reason.
It feels a bit like Enlightenment, in a way that I can't really describe. Also kind of like the QNX Neutrino GUI, oddly enough, though the two look nothing alike. I was bothered by the same odd feeling when using those, too (of the three, though, Neutrino seemed the least odd in this way)
Gnome and XFCE just feel more "solid", if that makes any sense.
KDE Integration (Score:5, Interesting)
Things like 'Solid', 'Plasma', and 'Phonon' sound great, and the idea of unifying for example sound and multimedia in Phonon is very nice - it will be wonderful for those developing KDE apps, and great for the user to have centralised control over multimedia settings. But then I thought about what KDE apps I actually use. Firefox, Thunderbird, Mplayer, Gimp, OpenOffice are probably the most commonly used, and they aren't KDE apps! So I find it a little annoying that most of the programs I use won't use these nice KDE features. It's for this reason I've switched to fluxbox recently - it seemed as though I was using KDE for the nice layout and desktop management, but not much else - and to be honest I can do without a Matrix screensaver and fancy titlebars when I can reclaim a load of space and performace (or course installing Amarok and k3b then pulls in a load of KDE libraries...). Don't get me wrong - I like eyecandy and so on, but I just don't seem to be using much else. The most useful part of KDE for me was Konqueror - there the tight integration really did shine, but it would be insulting to KDE to claim that's all it's useful for. This is of course the same for Gnome. Generally the idea of diversity is what makes Linux so strong, but I do sometimes wonder if a nice unified desktop that all works together (read: OS X) without seeming like lots of separate applications all using different libraries, all looking completely different, with some using OSS others ALSA (although admittedly this is no longer really an issue with current versions of ALSA) and only being able to use IO slaves and so on in the small number of KDE programs that I actually use, is just never going to be possible.
Of course this all comes down to the fact that Linux is about choice, which is great. But perhaps KDE and others are stretching themselves too wide - for example KOffice is nice, but OpenOffice has a great deal more functionality, so perhaps working to integrate existing solutions might be a better way to spend time. It's things like this that make you appreciate why standards exist... (you can have standards but still have choice)
I'm not really sure if what I've said is actually the case and maybe others have different experiences. I will definitely try out KDE4 when the final release is made. I've used it for years and I just hope that all the work to create a nice integrated environment will actually be something that will be used!
Re:Question from huge fan (Score:3, Interesting)
My trials usual only last long enough for me to say, "huh, this feels about as flakey as pre-OSX MacOS or WinME, even though I know it's not. Better change the theme to see if that helps", then to become flabbergasted and disgusted by the user-hostile configuration menu, at which point I usually quit and go back to Gnome. Sometimes I'll fire up Konqueror or Koffice to see if they still annoy me as much as they always do (not that I could use them anyway; the wife would freak out about Linux more than she already does if the default programs on it didn't match Windows whenever possible, with Firefox and OpenOffice and the like).
Then, in few months or a year, I'll see a
Truth be told, my favorite DE is XFCE, but I can't live without some of Gnome's features and can't be bothered to find 3rd party replacements for them in XFCE, so Gnome it is.
Gnome is too depending (Score:1, Interesting)
With Gnome on the other hand I can't even get into the GUI at all, probably because it fully relies on HAL. So yes; in my opinion Gnome isn't as mature as KDE.
Re:integrated but not logical (Score:3, Interesting)
I can understand integrating File Manager and FTP - that makes perfect sense. But why the web browser should be a part of that, I don't understand. The other problem with the integrated web browser/file manager is that it encourages the use of "single click to open". I almost never swear, but GODDAMN I hate that behavior! Come on, KDE, even Microsoft figured out to do away with that!