KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released 334
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."
Did they de-fat KDE (Score:1, Interesting)
Graphics suck (Score:2, Interesting)
Fat or muscle? (Score:5, Interesting)
And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?
kde 4 apps will run on Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)
I just hope to hell that the final release comes with a plasma theme the restores some semblance of sanity to the frankly (IMHO, natch) ridiculous looking taskbars in those screenshots.
...where's the meat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental. Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them. I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets and that could help a lot to make this actually useful. Anyone actually tried using them yet?
When a new full version comes out and I find myself looking forward to the improved spellchecker, because it is still worse architecturally than on other platforms I use, but at least it is better... well I start to wonder what happened. I'm not trying to put down the developers or anything, this is obviously a lot of work, especially Dolphin, but I guess I was hoping for more. When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services? Where's grammar checking? Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already? As a Kubuntu user, I guess I'm just not really as excited by this as I'd like to be.
Re:Screenshots and previews of slightly olderrelea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'... (Score:2, Interesting)
I ran into this issue at work, where my computer was an 800MHz Celeron, I believe. I was originally running Gnome, but switched to fluxbox + aterm and it made a world of a difference in terms of overall desktop responsiveness. There are plenty of people who aren't running multicore boxes and don't have a few GB of memory lying around. If KDE/Gnome can be developed to run on low-end machines and still feel "good enough", then they should be blazingly fast on the ungodly-overpowered desktop machines that are the high end of today's desktop market.
The biggest issue, IMO, is that running Konsole outside of KDE costs nearly as much system resources as running KDE all-out. If that extends to other KDE-based applications, that basically rules any KDE app from being used on a machine like I described without performance penalties. The machine shouldn't have to be powerful enough just to run a desktop environment. That's the same path that Vista is going down, where you need a supercomputer just to log in.
In fairness to the KDE folks, despite my complaints about the bloat, it still takes up less memory than Firefox (I was a web developer... working in Opera... because 800MHz isn't always enough for Firefox).
Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys [kde.org], beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.
Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.
For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn." [kde.org]. The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it [kde.org]: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?
Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.
PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot [kde.org]: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.
Gnome developer's review (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fat or muscle? (Score:2, Interesting)
It just blows my mind that you had such a bad experience with k3b. It's pretty much perfect from my perspective. When phones switched from rotary to dial pads, did that throw you for a loop too?
Re:That's nice (Score:2, Interesting)
Sincerely,
NOTABUG WONTFIX
Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'... (Score:3, Interesting)
Xfce and others are great for older hardware, but even older computers can run KDE fairly well.
Re:That's nice (Score:3, Interesting)
And really, the only thing in GNOME that ever annoyed me was the brain-dead unconfigurable window placement in Metacity that kept thinking I wanted my new window to appear on my second monitor, and that's become irrelevant now that the infinitely-configurable compiz is mature.
Re:Fat or muscle? (Score:4, Interesting)
That may change in KDE 4, even though QT 4 is supposed to use less memory and run faster, but between the new kdelibs and Plasma, you have enough new features that is taking up more system resources than KDE 3. This is also still an early RC of the first release of the KDE 4 cycle. Given that KDE 3 got more efficient over time, I can hope KDE 4 will also get more efficient over time.
Re:Redunant (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Release Candidate? (Score:5, Interesting)
This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality...
And so on. Now, unless I missed something, a release candidate is when you think your product is about ready for public release but you want to have people test its "final form" first. You think it is ready, but you want to real-world test it to iron out bugs that have escaped you. Release candidates are not packages that are known to be incomplete. Is KDE doing this just to show some progress since the year is stretching on without a release of KDE 4? Just call it another beta. Heck, it sounds like it might should be alpha still. They are not yet to the final bugging stage, it is not feature complete, they are still adding new code. I can forgive them for calling an alpha a beta, but calling an alpha a release candidate? Come on!
(P.S., I know I'm hijacking a thread to get higher position with my post. Please forgive me. This post is in release-candidate status and the final form of this post is expected to be relevant to the current discussion thread.)
Without looking, I knew who wrote what PP quoted (Score:1, Interesting)
Initally, KDE4 was to be _released_ in October. Well, that did not exactly happen, largely due to Plasma being delayed. The feature freeze on current head impacts pretty much everything.. Except Plasma. On the other hand, Plasma is a core feature, KDE4 needs it to exist. So this is fine. BUT!
But what really ails me is that KDE eV is trying to do good PR while still admitting internally that 4.1 will be the first version that has the potential to appeal to people.
KDE4 will use less memory than KDE3, same as KDE3 used less than KDE2. Same thing for speedups (if your gfx card is supported properly).
KDE4 will feature APIs and backends that simply do not exist on this level of sophistication _anywhere_.
KDE 4.x will rock your world.
I would just hope that they had moved the release date to March and released as 4.0 what they try to get with 4.1, now. This will make a _lot_ of people willing to try out KDE4 run away screaming. This is especially the case as RC1 marks the point where the stable KDE DevKit is released. This means that third party devs have a whole month to get their apps onto KDE4.
(Side note, I love KDE, I would not want to miss it. I just happen to think that the kind of love its new dad gives it is well-meant if misguided.)