KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released

Crobain writes "The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release."

Re:Essentially A Win2k Clone?

[MrNaz]

Constantly trying to reinvent a perfectly round wheel results in
a) New problems that need to be worked out from scratch
b) Totally different use patterns which may or may not work in the real world
c) Reluctant users

Personally, I don't see a problem with following patterns that were created for Windows. There's no reason that the existing desktop format can't be extended and have features added to it if need be. This "lets go a totally different direction just coz we don't want to follow MS" is stupid. MS spent huge amounts of R&D finding out what regular users will be able to use, and freeriding on that seems like a good idea to me.

Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.

Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.

Re:Plasma again...

[Psychotria]

I am not sure even 4.1 will be a stable release. However, they have made massive improvements. Most of the KDE 4.1 ported applications look really nice (and, yeah, it's not all just eye-candy). Running KDE trunk (aka 4.1) today resulted (for me) in quite a few crashes (more than a week or so ago). Do these crashes worry me? Not really, because I send the core-dumps etc to the developers so they can reproduce them and write fixes.

I didn't know that 4.1 went alpha today, and (IMO) that seems a bit hasty... BUT it will get more people testing it and (hopefully) submitting patches... so, in that light, it's a good thing.

Re:KDE vs OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, every time I do my yearly let's give Linux another chance the first thing that jumps out at me are the awful font rendering.

However, in that screenshot it really isn't the font rendering that is the problem it is the almost headache inducing UI element spacing problems. The one off apps I throw together in Inteface Builder look like polished commercial apps compared to that screen. I can only assume Linux developer tools don't have anything like the snap to guides that give every OS X app that elegant look and feel.

The difference in UI layout reminds me of the dramatic difference there was when I first took a document I carefully typed up in Pagemake years ago to a friend who was a professional pagelayout person and the amazing professional quality difference she made with 30 secs worth of font and spacing changes.

Re:hmm

[pherthyl]

So you gazed into your crystal ball and figured out that 4.1 will not be stable? Since it hasn't been released that's quite the accomplishment. I use a snapshot of 4.1 at work, and I haven't seen it crash in weeks.