KDE 4.0 Is Out

Many users wrote to alert us that KDE 4.0 has been released. Here's Computerworld Australia's take on the release KDE 4.0 is based on the Qt4 toolkit, which brings significant enhancements in the way memory is used. "So it ends up making KDE less resource intensive than KDE 3, which is quite an improvement," according to Australian KDE developer Hamish Rodda, who calls the new architecture "future-proof." Computerworld notes that developers are already at work porting the new environment to Windows and the Mac.

Why only 4 words on the main page?

[donscarletti]

I'm a keen and loyal Gnome user and a former Gnome developer.

I think the 4.0 release of KDE deserves an un-abbreviated summary on the front page.

Congratulations on this milestone guys, keep up your work.

Re:Why only 4 words on the main page?

[Nossie]

you actually tried it yet?

from my own toying it really does seem to be quite feature incomplete ... no disrespect to KDE, they said it was incomplete and it IS incomplete ... looks like an interesting option but in its current state I'd have to say gnome had more 'options' and that's saying something!

BTW just to emphasize, I've never been a KDE fan, I'm not really a huge fan of gnome either these days ... but feature wise KDE3.x IS much more complete, they have made some great advances but I'm not sure I'd have called this a .0 release

Re:This Could Be The Worst Thing For KDE

[teslar]

This should have been a KDE 3.9 release.

Absolutely not - KDE4.0 is a completely new thing and therefore by definition not part of the KDE 3.x family. It coexists for now in parallel with KDE3, it is not sequential improvement.

No, the sad truth is, this should have been KDE4 Beta 1. It's not finished, it's been rushed out. I like KDE and I appreciate that KDE4 is going to be very cool eventually, but this is not the time. And rushing products out before they are finished, saying that the real stuff will turn up in the .1 release, well that kinda reminds me of another company, except they call the .1 release 'Service Pack 1'.

Again, let's be clear about this - KDE4 is gonna kick some ass eventually, but releasing it in its current state has been a big mistake.

Re:This Could Be The Worst Thing For KDE

[Bralkein]

I used to think that, but then I changed my mind when I realised that there's a big difference between releasing something like KDE4 and something like Windows Vista or the latest version of OSX or whatever.

When Vista (just an example, I'm not bashing MS) was released, then Microsoft was having it put on store shelves, pre-installed on new computers and were generally selling it and distributing it for everybody to use. When you receive a piece of software in this way, you generally expect it to be in a complete and serviceable state, which is fair enough.

Something like KDE is different. Yes, the KDE community is very pleased with this milestone event and they are all having a party etc., but at the same time they are clearly advertising that the KDE 4.0 desktop is probably not ready for general use on most people's desktops. When your say that KDE 4.0 is released, it doesn't really mean the same sort of thing as the release of Vista, because all that's really happened is someone's created some source archives and put them on a website to download. I don't think any mainstream distribution is going to put KDE 4.0 into its repositories for general use, and as such the only people who are running KDE4 at this point are either developers or people who have gone to the effort of seeking out unsupported, community-provided packages out of their own curiosity. Most of the reactions I've seen from enthusiasts of this type have indeed confirmed that they do not believe KDE 4.0 to be ready for day-to-day use, but they're not disillusioned or upset or dissatisfied because they know that they deliberately sought out an unfinished product -- they just wanted to have a preview, really.

There is another point concerning this whole "maybe it should still be a beta" situation, which involves the distinction between KDE4 as a platform and KDE4 as a desktop environment. According to what I've read, a large part of the decision to release KDE 4.0 in the state it's in was to do with the fact that in order to end up with a complete desktop environment, there needs to be a community of developers working with the new platform. The concern was that people wouldn't want to start developing for a "beta" platform, only to have the rug pulled out from under their feet when the APIs were changed. This 4.0 release marks a stable target platform which people can start building on with confidence. It's important to realise that this isn't some sort of trick -- the libraries and frameworks underpinning KDE4 are apparently pretty complete and stable and it's mainly the applications which need the work.

Yay, KDE4

[z0M6]

Unlike the bunch here that cries "It should be called KDE 4.0 Beta 1", I believe that it should be called KDE 4.0. It signals that the base technology is ready and it is time for adoption by a larger mass than what the release candidates had. Remember that KDE 3.5.8 is a matured product, KDE 4.0 is not. It doesn't happen over night.

Whiners aside, yay, KDE 4.0 is here. Congratulations everyone!

Re:This Could Be The Worst Thing For KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come off it, the purpose of the 4.0.0 release is not to tempt joe average away from win XP in an even more tempting way than 3.5.x

They said its the START of something amazing. Its a bit of PR, you don't say oh by the way use our old stuff for the time being.

Joe average will use the desktop installed by the distro, is any joe average type distro using kde 4.0.0 by default? No. Does the Eee PC or a dell notebook ship with KDE 4.0.0? No. Do you think they plan to? No. Do you think joe average can work out how to go back to 3.5.x if by some miracle they manage to install 4.0.0 and deliberately log into this new DE? Yes.

Bottom line, you don't call something a beta just because it might scare away Joe average when you are writing open source. Their goal is to get KDE4.X into shape as quickly as possible to supercede KDE3.x and this is the right way to do it. Ultimately it will be the distro that decides the time by providing the 4.X by default.

Re:Doesn't compare

[Bent Mind]

If an application comes with KDE (KWrite for example), I can see adding the K. It signifies that the application is actually part of the KDE project. Developers outside the KDE project sometimes use the K to signify that the application depends on kdelibs. I think this is what started the problem. Gnome's use of G is a little more confusing to me. The G in Gnome stands for GNU. However, it's sometimes used by developers to signify that the application was designed for Gnome. Does that application use G to signify that it requires Gnome, or that the copyright is owned by the GNU foundation, or both? I would rather the G just signify that GNU owns the copyright.

Avidemux2 has an interesting scheme. They have an executionable that checks the name it was called by. It has soft links called avidemux_cli, avidemux_qt4, and avidemux_gtk. This makes much more sense. If your application depends on kdelibs, and it's not part of the KDE project, call it application_kde.

How about this. If it's in the KDE menu, it's a KDE APPLICATION! If it's in the Gnome menu, it's a GNOME APPLICATION!

Gnome and KDE use the same configuration files for the menu ( /usr/share/applications/*.desktop ). You can edit the .desktop file to prevent it from appearing in one menu or the other. That way you can start gedit when in Gnome and kwrite when in KDE if that is what you want.

...most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actually program filename

At least rename the shortcuts the GUI launches.

On my K-Menu, under Graphics, is an icon labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". It starts the gimp-2.4 application. For the menu, it's fine that it's labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". However, I'd rather type gimp (or gimp-2.4) if I choose to start it from the command line. If most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actual program filename, then why would you need to rename the shortcuts the GUI launches? Just set the icon name to the longer name.

Re:Underwhelming

[ilikepi314]

The problem with that is not everyone likes GNOME. I used it for several months on Fedora 3 or 4, and it was ok, but I was much more impressed with KDE. I thought KDE was very usable and well-thought-out; I could power my way through Konqueror, etc., and do all sorts of nifty things that wasn't possible in Nautilus, for instance. Some other post somewhere said you could use GNOME "with 512 MB", and that would certainly explain another factor; I had an older Pent 3 with 128 MB of RAM, and KDE still ran smoothly. And don't even get me started on how much more I love the configurability of KDE compared to GNOME. However, I can definitely appreciate GNOME's appeal, even if I'm not as enthusiastic as you or others. I like KDE better, but it was certainly still a joy to use GNOME. It's simply people with different preferences making what they think are the best decisions based on their preferences. GNOME has one philosophy, KDE another. Anyway, this was a long post to say: please don't ever join the KDE devel team just to make it look more like GNOME. If I wanted GNOME, I would use it; I like KDE because of the very fact it is KDE. Likewise, I'll develop for KDE, won't complain about the parts of GNOME I don't enjoy, and leave GNOME the way you like it. Deal?