KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released

angryfirelord writes "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase."

Re:Screenshots

[Mistshadow2k4]

I wouldn't say it makes you superficial. Good screenshots can be very informative when deciding whether or not you might like a program (or desktop environment), especially if you can see effects and/or menus.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clear that KDE is more resources demanding than Gnome. Eye-candy features are always more demanding in terms of RAM / CPU power. Also, precompiled binaries as RPMs for KDE (Debian RPMs for example) are always running a little bit slower (20 - 30%) than if you compile them yourself with your own optimisation flags (CPU arch... and that magical -O3 ). Compiling Gnome or KDE over Gentoo always made a huge performance difference to me. Same thing for Xorg as well. God bless Gentoo!!

marccyr AT gmail DOT com

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clear that KDE is more resources demanding than Gnome.

No it isn't, or if it does use more, it's only a tiny amount:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367443&cid=21437045 [slashdot.org]

Eye-candy features are always more demanding in terms of RAM / CPU power.

Depends on how efficiently they are implemented. See e.g. e17. I can't help but notice that whenever e17 gets some new eye-candy people don't immediately scream "bloooat!".

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[DrXym]

Extra features and configurability aren't always a good thing at all. The KDE control center is atrocious with far too many panels, tabs, dialogs arranged illogically with common settings mixed in amongst obscure settings.

It seems KDE devs may have realised this since KDE 4 appears to have something more comparable to the OS X prefs (and GNOME's).

Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

on my desktop? That's the best they can come up with to show off their spankin' new window manager?

Why is it that everything KDE has to be GIANT and UGLY?
Kand Kwhy Kmust Kevery Kapp Kbe Knamed Klike Kthis?

Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[KWTm]

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"? Since there already is a term, "beta", that means "functional, with minor bugs to be ironed out", I would consider "Release Candidate" to refer to a true candidate --that is, it might really be released! KDE (or whoever the responsible author is) might say: "Okay, all those of you who downloaded Release Candidate x (where x=1,2,...), you can just go ahead and keep using it, because the RC has turned into the real thing."

Software or distros that are "coming together" are not Release Candidates. They have no possibility of being released. Suppose everyone who tried this KDE4 RC1 said, "Yup, everything works fine! No changes need to be made," would KDE release it? No, because they're NOT DONE YET --Plasma still has to be put together. Since they won't be releasing this version at all, it shouldn't be called a Release Candidate. It's another beta.

There's no shame in calling it beta (heck, half of Google's services are labeled beta); I don't see the need to keep advancing the terms. What's next? If "Release Candidate" comes to mean "beta", should we start using the term "Release Candidate with Potential For Use Unchanged"?

Maybe someone can correct on this if I'm wrong. What makes this a Release Candidate and not a Beta?

(Btw, diehard KDE fan here --I'm not even considering GNOME until they start having user-configurable key shortcuts. Waiting for KDE4 final release in December to be worked into Gutsy so I can put it on my Came-With-Ubuntu laptop.)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster

There are also a lot of people claiming the exact opposite, which lends support to my "tiny difference" theory. It's so tiny, the placebo effect completely overrides it.

KDE stills eats more RAM than Gnome. Bigtime.

Read the link, please - it actually doesn't. Here they are again:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html [kde.org]

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html [spooky-possum.org]

Note in particular the second link, by a GNOME developer (not that it matters when hard numbers and methodology are presented). Here's a quote:

KDE and GNOME identical to within a few MB!? How can we start a flame war with that? A very big congratulations to everyone working on the optimisation of GNOME! Now you just have to worry about what surprises KDE 4 will pull.

This is only to be expected since KDE adheres strongly to the Once and Once Only principle and is built with a toolkit whose makers derive a significant portion of their revenue from having it well on embedded devices.

Re:Screenshots

[nutshell42]

Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny?

Why did they put 3 battery applets on the desktop? Why is the clock huge and in the middle of the panel? Because it's not final. You can't honestly think that those buttons will stay that way?!

Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners?

Because it's not full size? You can have it run all the way across the bottom and it won't have the corners and sides but if you have a panel that's less then the full width of the desktop you're probably interested in what the sides are gonna look like.

I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice :/

And you got that insight from what exactly?

do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[phsdv]

Yes, I agree with you, xfce is a better choice. I am actually running xfce4.4.1 on my systems. Occasionally I do use twm, mostly by accident ;-) It is always a pain to use, but it does work...

But the whole "discussion" between gnome and kde is so useless. And also the bloated thing. Who cares? More and more people (will) have multiple cores and a few Giga bytes of memory. If the window manager uses some of these resources and it makes your job easier, please do!!! In case you have a smaller computer, then go and use a smaller desktop system. And do not 'force' your limitations on everyone else by wanting to have kde/gnome to run on every computer you own.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[DoofusOfDeath]

And yet I find myself installing more and more KDE apps on my GNOME system because of how slow or boneheadedly featureless their GNOME equivalents are.

I find that the KDE apps (k3b, kate, etc.) are more full-featured, but the Gnome desktop seems much cleaner to me. So I'm just glad they can peacefully coexist.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[orclevegam]

Well, there's two kinds of "bloated" and people often don't differentiate between the two. There's bloated in the sense of being written poorly and wasting a lot of resources for no reason, and then there's bloated in the sense of having a whole bunch of features that various people may or may not want (which usually determines if they consider it bloated or not). The first kind of bloated of course is clearly a valid criticism that needs to be addressed, the second kind however is mostly a matter of taste. Myself, I like a bit of eye candy, but at the same time I don't like to waste a lot of space, so I tend to lean towards either Enlightenment, or Blackbox for my WM. Both can be configured to be relatively minimalist in terms of screen real estate used by the various pieces of the WM, but in the case of enlightenment it tends to use some resources because of all the eye candy options. Does that make it bloated? Maybe, but that really depends on if you like eye candy or not.

Re:That's nice

[orclevegam]

WHAT THE HELL FOR? Thanks to vista most off the shelf computers have at least 2 GB of ram. Let the desktop rock. If I want moving background of poledancer going off behind my transparent windows, why not? I got the memory and CPU to let it run.

And there's nothing wrong with that if it's what you want, but some of us would like to use those resources on our applications instead of our window manager. It's always a good idea to be able to scale those sorts of things back so that when you really want to get some serious work done you don't have to fight with the eye candy over cpu cycles.

Before we get into a GNOME vs KDE flamewar...

[KWTm]

It's already starting. People are volunteering to post messages of the format:
"(x) sucks! Real people like me use (1-x) instead!"
where x = KDE or GNOME, and KDE+GNOME=1.

Anyway, let me step outside all this and say what *I* wish. I wish that KDE and GNOME apps would let the user choose what widget set to use. I think each of KDE and GNOME have applications that simply have no counterpart with the same quality. KDE has Amarok and K3b, while GNOME has Firefox and GIMP, not to mention non-KDE/non-GNOME apps like OpenOffice and FontForge. I'm glad that it's possible to run all of these under any desktop environment we choose --I myself happen to use the KDE desktop even for GNOME apps.

But those file dialogs and other GNOME widgets are just different enough from KDE to be irritating. In addition to the old debate about whether the "OK" or the "Cancel" button should be on the left, the file dialog shortcuts are inconsistent. Bookmarks for KDE file dialogs don't show up in GNOME apps, and the tree navigation in GNOME is different from KDE. I can never remember whether I click once or twice to get to that part of the directory tree.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to set apps to use a certain type of widget, the way KDE has modified OpenOffice so that it's only partially inconsistent with KDE, and maybe even make it user-customizable on the spot? (Yes, I know I'm dreaming, but still ...) Then all the volunteer recruits in the KDE/GNOME flamewar to go bash things out somewhere else, and the rest of us could get on with just plain using the various applications.

Yes, choice is good. GNOME is good, KDE is good, and Xfce, Enlightenment and twm are good. But we've come a long way, so let's set our sights a bit higher now.

iSee...

[newr00tic]

iThere iAre iMore iCamps iDoing iThe iSame iThing.. ;)

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

All that because you don't like the release system KDE uses?

No, it's not the release system itself, it's the attitude behind it. Talk about how great non-existent features are. Can't meet the release date because you over-promised? Cut features. Can't even get the old system working with the new libraries? Cut even more features so it's less functional than the old version. Get flattered? Tell them how great 4.0 will be. Get criticised? Tell them the criticism doesn't count because it's not supposed to work right until 4.1.

They want all the praise that goes along with a shiny new finished 4.0, but they can't actually achieve anything more than a 3.9 tech preview in the timeframe they set themselves. Yet rather than actually put it off for a few months, they are steaming ahead telling everybody how great it is out of one side of their mouth while deflecting criticism with excuses with the other side of their mouth.

This attitude is antithetical to everything the open-source culture holds dear - marketing over quality, release dates over features, bullshit over honesty and transparency. That is what I abhor, and the release system is merely one symptom of it.

So what's the worst case scenario? You have to wait a few months until you get a 4.0.1?

No, the worst case scenario is that open-source gets a reputation for pulling shit like this, the same shit everybody here rags on companies like Microsoft for.

How about you starting to have some respect for the developers and all the people that put hard work into this release?

I had respect for the developers. From the 1.0 betas right up until the 3.x releases. The change in their attitudes lost them that respect.

How about you showing some understanding for the fact that only a tiny fraction of their intended target audience is going to install a beta or RC

So they call what by all rights is a beta "4.0" in order to trick their target audience into testing it? What integrity!

and that it's practically impossible for them to test each and every possible situation without your help.

I've contributes bugs, testcases, the occasional patch for previous versions. I haven't bothered with 4.0 because it's quite plain all they care about is reaching the finish line.

And you are being really dishonest by characterising my argument as a demand that they "test each and every possible situation". I'm not asking for the moon. I'm asking that they take the same attitude towards quality that they used to take before. Cut out the bullshit and stop letting the fawning go to their heads.

P.S. With or without disclaimers, shooting half-truths and BS around in the dark, you're still a troll.

You haven't mentioned anything you consider to be a half-truth or BS, you just complained about my attitude.

If you have a problem, file a fracking bug report.

The word is "fucking". And there is absolutely no way a bug report can fix this.

Re: gnome burning app

[ThinkOfaNumber]

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?

Gnome has one. It's called K3b.

Re: gnome burning app

[jaxtherat]

Please mod parent up. I agree, this whole discussion is silly. You can run any KDE app in Gnome if you have the libraries installed, and vice-versa.

All this psycho right wing DE advocacy is nothing but a childish pissing contest, and is symptomatic of the fact that people need to feel like they belong to something special, and that everyone who disagrees with them needs to have their brains bashed out with a rock.

Sheesh, we're no better than fricking cavemen with cool gadgets and nukes...

Re:...where's the meat?

[logixoul]

Okay now it supports Widgets.

KDE has supported widgets for years, via SuperKaramba (which is bundled from 3.5 onwards). Plasma brings some innovation into the area.

I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets

Not in the main branch, no. A showstopper for this is that it would require using the WebKit renderer, which still doesn't come with Qt (but it will next year).

When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services?

What do those have that KParts don't? Never used OS X myself...

Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental.

Sure, the single biggest change in KDE4 vs KDE3 is the porting to Qt4.

Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already?

I won't compare to non-free platforms... from what I've heard, OS X's desktop environment kicks our ass in every way other than freedom.
So, off the top of my head...
KWin got compositing support, meaning you get eye candy ala Compiz, except with a more mature codebase.
Plasma is technologically superior to others' applet solutions.
Marble is the fastest and leanest desktop globe.
KRunner is (will be) similar to OS X's Spotlight.
Lancelot is unique as a zero-click start menu. The utility of this remains to be seen.

About the spellchecker, Sonnet, its main developer mysteriously disappeared an year ago, and development has been slow since. No grammar checking in 4.0, no. It does have improvements over the KDE3 spellchecker (KSpell2) -- like the ability to recognize separate languages in separate paragraphs and use the right dictionaries.

KDE4 is not just this RC. There's 2 years of development behind it, starting from the 3.5 branch. And there's lots of years ahead of it, to make the most out of a really solid foundation... IOW if you want "meat", come back for 4.1.

4.0 is for early adopters.

Not quite the 4.0 they had envisioned, but it work

[Anonymous Coward]

This lacks a few things they had hoped to include, like Raptor (new menu), Akonadi (PIM framework) and Decibel (qt/kde implementation of telepathy) and some others. But the screenshots and testimony say that it is shaping up nicely and 4.0 might be more usable than it was predicted to be. I need to try out that latest livecd and see whats going on.

Also I don't know whether to shame or applaud KDE for their latest developments in kwin. They have implemented their own compositing effects like compiz has into kwin. Now two programs that do the same thing is usually bad, but an in house (wrong use of the term, probably) solution is better for KDE than relying on compiz.

You forgot how FS release schedules work

[Qwaniton]

Oh come on, remember how this works. In today's Free Software projects, we've learned how to develop as professionals and deliver product on time instead of when it's donewhen we feel like it. How do we accomplish this? Simple. We pick a date and when that date hits we freeze the code, bugs and all! We pick what bugs we really want to fix, even though it's obvious from the Bugzilla it's riddled with bugs of all kinds. The bugs we pick are deemed "crucial" after careful deliberation via a mailinglist flamewar full of nerds. After we fix, say, half of these, we ship the release and let the distributions break it with all sorts of patches. We continue pushing out new features disguised as bugfixes, which take approximately an eternity to trickle down to the end-users (we write for the distributors, God forbid we make it easy for end users, they might hurt themselves). Debian especially, never content to just let shit be, applies ten thousand patches that turn KDE into a desktop environment almost but not entirely unlike a regular KDE install. Eventually it approaches stability and polish, but somehow it always manages to pull back when someone decides to add new glitz. Notice to Free Software developers: Why not code in mind for the UNIX nerd in the Terminal content to ./configure && make && make install shit? The distributors will patch the piss out of your code anyway. See this [kde-buildsystem] mailing list post [kde.org] if you want to know what I'm talking about. Thank Christ the reply I linked to was written by someone with a grasp of reality. As for me, right now, I'm on Windows 2000 and loving it. My ThinkPad T21 has a no-Linux policy mainly because the kernel pukes when it talks to the hardware, but even after I fix that (in a no-GUI boot which you Ubuntards wouldn't understand), I find myself using an OS exactly as this comment [slashdot.org] describes. I'll come back to GNU/Linux when GNU gets its shit together and glues its compnents together into an actual GNU system; Linux developers write competent, consistent and standardized userland tools and APIs; and distributors/GNOME developers (they're the same thing at this point) stop writing castrated crucial components like safety scissors a la NetworkManager. Modern GNU/Linux distributions are like houses of cards. Despite all of this, I love KDE with all my heart and I wish I could try KDE 4. I miss Unix. However, I don't miss the current state of affairs in userland 'N*X, especially Ubuntu. Until I find a solid distribution I can actually use to its full potential (besides Slackware), I'll resist temptation and stay far away.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Images and video. Using a CLI to manipulate those is a huge handicap since you can't actually see them. And I could get into the whole visual memory, spacial reasoning concepts but it's all been said before. There's a reason modern desktop operating systems don't rely on the CLI anymore.

Dont like it...

[comm2k]

They seriously need to stop wasting so much pixels... I agree with the poster somewhere above that why are most of the things by default so gigantic?! The taskbar is way too fat. The new 'start'-menu is horrible. Did anyone there use the iPhone too much or just wanted to annoy people? There is a reason why they do it that way on the iPhone - it has a limited resolution. Having this thin "go back" button is like adding insult to injury.

I also cant understand why the default view of dolphin includes 3 BIG BUTTONS to change the view layout but not one for standard copy/paste/cut stuff.. this is a file browser?

At least this is KDE and not Gnome so all of this can be 'konfigured'. But that will be another 2 hour klick-fest.