KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th 300
VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."
Re:A fixed release date is not a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But does it run Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:2, Insightful)
KDE aims for a Windows-ish philosophy of "everything should be configurable". There are options for just about everything, so you can tweak your desktop to be just the way you want it. This can be intimidating for newbies, but then KDE can also be configured to be very newbie friendly, and indeed many distros already do configure it that way.
GNOME, on the other hand, aims for a Mac OS X philosophy of only presenting to the user what they really need to use to get the job done, with some options hidden and others nonexistant. This is designed to be easy for just about anyone to pick up easily (probably why the Ubuntu team chose it) but it absolutely sucks for configurability.
To summarise: KDE is for end users but can be for power users, GNOME is aimed specifically at end users and noone but.
No need for a hard KDE ship date (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, KDE is already good enough. I'd rather wait until KDE4 is really solid than ty get it out on some arbitrary ship date.
release it when it's done (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
As a common user, I care about
1) eye candy
2) rendering times
The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:3, Insightful)
who might slip the release date? (Score:5, Insightful)
One simple question: Why can Microsoft not slip release dates without getting flack, but it's okay for open source projects? Both are slipping for the same reasons.
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree completely; most people I know who are "hardcore" linux users spend time tweaking their systems, but it's usually just to the point of getting all their hardware working, and then maybe glitzing it up a little bit, usually by downloading a theme they think looks cool. The thousands of fancy customization options usually get left behind, and completely reconfiguring how applications look and run is totally beyond what they care to do. The linux users want to *USE* linux, not waste hours and hours digging into arcane details to reach some potential "perfect setup".
Windows can be tweaked too, but definitely much less-so, and there isn't much support about it either. I don't know anything about tweaking MacOS, other than the fact that i've never seen anyone using a recent version of MacOS that looked like it had been customized any significant extent.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:KDE vs. Xlib/Unix (Score:2, Insightful)
"As sort of a disclaimer, I can say that do not find the desktop metaphor useful; an environment consisting of openbox/xterm and a text editor is all that I need most of the time."
Well then it would seem you are NOT the target audience for KDE, just STFU and move on...Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
The alternative is they release garbage, and piss everyone off.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
For heaven's sake, don't spread FUD! That "stable code base" you talk about was a mess to mantain
It was a feature-complete, stable mess to maintain. Sure, it's a good idea to replace it with a better design, but not immediately before a major release when the rest of the desktop is pretty much finished and not if you can't finish it on time.
The "fanboys" you talked about were people rightfully ticked off by the constant, uncostructive and negative attitude on the part of the complainers
Those negative attitudes didn't come from nowhere. The initial criticism was reasonable, but it was met with stone-walling and blowing people off. Then they kept releasing beta after beta that didn't work right, continually telling people to wait and that they were trolls for complaining. It is that which really kicked off the flaming you see today.
which did not bring any improvement and only demotivated the developers.
If you're echoing the complaints that people aren't "constructively" criticising, I think you're wrong. When you take something that works and totally breaks it, it's your responsibility to fix it, and you shouldn't complain when people point out it's broken and want it back the way it was. There really isn't anything more to elucidate on when you tell somebody that they just fucked everything up and you want it back the way it was.
Those people did not even bother testing later revisions
Can you blame them? "Here's a beta". "But it's totally broken!" "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's another beta." "This one's broken too." "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's a release candidate." "Nope, still broken. Aren't release candidates supposed to be at least feature-complete?" "Stop complaining! It's not supposed to be ready until 4.1!"
When you continually feed somebody shit, eventually they are going to realise that the next spoonful isn't going to taste any better. Not testing later betas is completely understandable in light of how the stability has been misrepresented. The devs already know what they need to work on, they don't need testers to tell them. The real WTF is that if they already knew what the problems were and that it wasn't finished, why did they tag a "release candidate" that had absolutely no chance of becoming 4.0?
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:3, Insightful)
If we look at those individual tweaks, the first thing we realize is that the KDE options which made them possible may sound whimsical. I mean, an option to define where and how a precise window of a certain application is shown when it is displayed? Yet, what we realize when we think about it for a moment is that no one in their right mind expects anyone to tweak all those options. On the other hand, what KDE's vast tweaking potential does offer is a way for each and every user to be able to adapt KDE to their particular use pattern instead of being forced to adapt to whatever default behaviour was configured by someone. It may take a single tweak for a user to feel perfectly confortable with KDE but what we must understand is that not everyone likes the same thing. So, in order for each and every KDE user to be able to perform their single tweak, KDE must support a whole universe of configuration options in order to support whatever feature every single user may wish.
On a side note, the users aren't the only people tweaking KDE. All distros perform their fair share of customization. The difference between KDE and some desktop environments like the windows shell or GNOME is that in order to customize them, the developers will have to break out their compilers and write their own features. With KDE it only takes a few strategically placed mouse clicks.
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is exactly what GNOME's doing - there's a sensible default database of MIME types. I've never felt the need to edit the MIME types, nor should I have to feel the need. This applies to other areas of GNOME as well.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:3, Insightful)
Both Windows and Mac OS X may be less configurable in this respect, but I would just emphasize that it doesn't decrease my efficiency at all, and it probably increases the efficiency of many other users. Here's why:
Tools contribute a lot more to efficiency than many things that would be configured in the window manager. For this reason, it is possible for me to be very efficient anywhere, even in Windows as long as I install a decent shell and terminal, install some vital command-line gnu tools, and install one or more script runtimes (I use perl). I also am dependent upon vim for efficiency in many things, but that's just me. Once I've got that, I don't care about much else that has to do with configuring the window manager. I just need it to switch me between processes and that's about it. Each window manager or desktop (Windows, aqua, kde, gnome, or even fluxbox) does things a little differently, but honestly the differences won't contribute to or degrade efficiency on a large scale: it's the availability of the tools that is important (and fortunately, the important tools are available on any platform, although it's too bad Windows doesn't come with any). A lot of people try to argue that a window manager is better than another in terms of workflow efficiency, but it's nonsense. You can learn and get used to any modern window manager and use it just about as effectively as someone using a different window manager, but if these vital tools are gone you're hosed.
Now I'll tell you why OS X is probably better for new or casual users in terms of efficiency: casual users don't know how to write perl scripts to perform mundane or repetitive tasks, and they don't know how to use grep or the other tools that make us more experienced users effective, but Apple has succeeded in creating smart gui front-ends to these tools or features that really work well. The three things I am referring to are AppleScript (which has been around a very long time), Spotlight (which also has comparable implementations on Windows and other platforms), and Automator (which is like a front-end to AppleScript which lets you do repetitive tasks without knowing any scripting at all). Even I use these tools sometimes; they're dead simple to understand and they certainly increase efficiency more than window manager options.
Re:What are the main differences between KDE & (Score:1, Insightful)
Right now I need to be able to add MIME types for files that Gnome doesn't know about (*.S, *.s, *.asm, *.hex, and a bunch of others).
So, yea, it really does help to be able to customize MIME types.
Re:I find the introduction of Dolphin interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)
Though Dolphin nicely allows you to set your default view type (I choose Detailed List), and seems to mimic the OS X Finder left-side bar, it has problems. First, the left-side bar isn't matched with a top-side 'shelf' like Finder has... so your ability to quickly place/remove custom locations in the UI has no counterpart for placing custom tools. Second, you can't drop items onto folders in the left-side bar to copy them; Dolphin will simply add all those items to the bar! That it encourages users to split the window vertically is no help for novices sense of confusion either; I have recommended Dolphin to other users for the last time.
Konq has no setting for default view type, and it defaults to thumbnails. Ugh. Even worse, Konq's identifying icon changes to whatever you're viewing at the moment, so it shifts from default to folder to web page icon, etc, leaving me unable to find windows in a busy task bar. Finally, Konq's tree view is generally un-helpful: Its difficult to know when it will follow your movement to another dir (and its rare) and the categories that I must constantly shift between ('home' and 'services') just to move files between home and external drives are asinine. (Also: the Printers category doesn't play nicely with CUPS, Network is useless for samba shares, and don't get me started on the KDE dir properties dialog that sets up samba shares guaranteed not to work).
Though Konqueror has great abilities WRT protocols like ssh and sftp, it doesn't make up for the fact that NONE of the FOSS file browsers can match the balance of usability and (non-broken) features in OS X and Windows browsers.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
See.. Not difficult.