What To Expect In KDE 4.1 288
andrewmin writes "Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn't work most of the time. However, the developers were not without hope. They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0. That time is coming soon: in just four days, K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released to the Linux masses." A release candidate for 4.1 came out just over a week ago, with binaries available "for some Linux distributions, and Mac OS X and Windows."
Choices (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE 4.1 candidate version is quite good. And by the time it is adopted by "mainstream" linux users it should be excellent. The nice thing about the KDE project right now is that both the 3.5.x and 4.x lines are usable, so people have a choice for when they want to adopt 4.x.
KDE 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I love KDE 3 and I'm quite content to use it. I spent about two years sitting very eagerly getting all excited about KDE 4, and now I'm a little apathetic about it. I'm not sure when and if I'll switch.
KDE 4 has a lot of great things going for it like Phonon, Solid, Akondi, Sonnet, SVG rendering, Decibel, multi-platform, etc.
I'm just not crazy about the desktop experience with it.
Calling Capt. Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Has Gnome really "gained a lot of ground"?
A lot?
Because of KDE 4.0?
Something about that just doesn't add up. My suspicion is that the vast majority of KDE users are still on 3.5x and jumping ship to gnome doesn't make sense either way.
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that my writing sucks but this article was bad even by my standards.
Just from the burb.
"The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers."
Leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers what????
Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm... okay, so you can rewrite the article: KDE developers don't understand release version concept, confuse users with improper 4.0 version number, and gain a reputation for a buggy major release.
Re:first post (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually used KDE4.0 Beta as my main desktop, imagine that. It really wasn't as bad as people make out, I could see it wasn't ready, but the potential is there.
The ideas behind KDE4 are great, all it needs is polish (albeit a lot of polish). This is the point: if it were a turd, no amount of polish would make it good, but KDE4 does not fall into this category. It's just a knob that needs some Brasso. :D
Still not a complete transition (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a big KDE fan, and I've been looking forward to KDE 4 for some time. The volume of complaints about KDE 4.0 surprised me; it seemed fairly clear that 4.0 was about getting a usable but not feature-complete release out so that application developers could target the new platform. By feature complete, I mean supporting all the options that KDE 3.5 has, which blows away every other desktop environment I've ever used. This is, of course, by design, as Mac OS X and GNOME are designed with sensible defaults and a fairly limited set of options.
I think Fedora may have made a mistake in defaulting to KDE 4.0 in the latest release; the KDE folks could perhaps have made the release more explicitly a "technology preview" release. Kubuntu had the right idea - offer it in the repository, but leave the default at 3.5. This allowed me to try out okular, the new document reader (which rocks, btw - finally a decent non-Adobe PDF reader which supports annotations, though they could still use a little work). But having read the early release info, I knew that KDE 4.0 wasn't for me, so I haven't tried it.
The new release brings the kdepim apps to the new KDE libs. Unfortunately, Amarok is on a separate release schedule, so we still have to wait there. For those that use KOffice, that too will be released later in the year, IIRC.
KDE 4.1, 4.x release dates are immaterial to me (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, KDE 4 is ready when Amarok 2 is out.
Generally, this should be true. We'll know that KDE is really ready when the next generations of Kopete (IM), Amarok (music), K3B (CD/DVD burning), K9copy (video DVD backup/authoring), and the other end-user applications are ready and integrated. Otherwise, to use KDE apps I'd still need to have the KDE 3.x libs, and if that's the case, why rush to switch?
Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:1, Insightful)
what classic way? I'm no hardcore linux geek - I've been just toying with linux (and KDE) for about 3 years - and even *I* know that any x.0 release, of anything, will be buggy, unstable, and generally not for production use. x.0 means "it runs more than it crashes; but don't expect any sort of solid stability, to get any work done, or for anything to be exactly the same in the x.1 release"
The blame lies squarely with distributors. I wanted to install KDE4 for tinkering purposes, it took me a whole hour just to find the packages - KDE themselves are not trying to push 4.0 onto everyone's desktop because they know that it isn't production quality yet, but still everyone blames them because distributors are sending it out with the latest releases anyway.
Just keep using KDE 3.5.x until you want to switch (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've been reading KDE 4.1 still will be a little on the rough side and there are issues with the closed source nvidia driver (get other hardware!).
There's no obligation to use KDE 4.1, since KDE 3.5 will still be there and supported as well. I don't understand the whining from users feeling let down or dissapointed, you always have a choice.
I try using KDE 4.x.x every now and then, I suggest you try the same without a feeling of being forced to use it, just curiosity!
In the long run, I believe KDE 4 will be a very solid platform for desktops for a very long time (until the next big change of course ;-)
Cheers (and no worries!)
Simon
Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm... okay, so you can rewrite the article: KDE developers don't understand release version concept, confuse users with improper 4.0 version number, and gain a reputation for a buggy major release.
I think they completely failed to understand that when you make a release of KDE, people expect it to be a release of the K Desktop Environment, not some libraries that might be used to build the DE. "KDElibs 4.0" "KDE4 Developer Release" "KDE4 Framework" take your pick but don't call it a KDE release if the DE isn't ready for release.
The .0 releases. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've been in the IT industry for a little while you learn to avoid any and all .0 releases. They are more trouble than they're worth. Always.
Windows NT wasn't usable until SP4 I think. XP started behaving semi-resonable after SP2. Vista? I've heard that the latest SP fixes a few of the more critical things (from a users perspective).
OpenOffice 1.0? Not all that great. Firefox1.0? Better than the competition, but good? FF2.0 wasn't without errors. .0 release that I've seen that's been fair is Firefox3.0.
Actually the first
"Avoid .0 releases for they are crappy and full of bugs". You can call that haegers law if someone hasn't named it before.
Um.. Come Again? (Score:2, Insightful)
Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars.
According to who? At best, this is purely a matter of opinion. From a technological standpoint KDE 3.5.9 is better than Gnome 2.2, and I say that as someone who rather enjoys using Gnome.
Exactly what proof do you have to substanciate this seemingly erroneous claim?
Most of the comments are about 4.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad we don't have a good discussion about 4.1. Most of the criticism I read is about 4.0 or the way it was marketed. When 4.1RC1 was available I finally uninstalled 3.5.9. KDE4.1 is really great (except for the nvidia thing, obviously).
I love the plasmoids. It's another dimension of configurability, which is why we loved KDE in the first place. I don't get the ZUI, and it's completely useless to me. KDE4.1 is incredibly stable for me. The looks and responsiveness rival OSX on my system (which is a quad-core with 3GB). Except I decide what colors I want to use.
Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmmm. OK. So there's another one who doesn't understand how open source development works.
Who started with KDE3.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
I seriously got a question who of you all started using KDE3.0 directly when it came out?
At first i prefered the 2.x version because it gave me much more usability but after a few weeks i slowly started using KDE3.0 more and more and with 3.1 was totally hooked on the new interface and desktop it gave me so much more pleasure then the 2.x version. it still missed out on features but slowly but surely most of them were reitergrated into KDE3
so all in all this is just the evolution of KDE4 into a replacement of KDE3. you will not be forced into the new KDE4 right away.
you can wait and make the switch when you think it is ready
Re:KDE 4.1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, would you rather they wait for now to release 4.0?
They said it clearly. If they were to delay the release the release would be late, worse, and have less chances of getting fixed. Now we have KDE4, now you can file ALL of those complaints at the KDE team, and they have the chance to fix 'em.
If you don't want to participate in their "beta test", use KDE3. It'll still be supported by the KDE teams for quite a while, and even further if you want that. But KDE3 is old tech and it's starting to show its age IMHO.
Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they? People certainly use Debian, and the Apache configuration is the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people are using Ubuntu on servers instead of Debian; Ubuntu LTS server releases get support for much longer (5 years from release.) The current 8.04.1 LTS server release will receive security updates until 2013. The Debian policy is support for one year after the release of the next version (so if 5.0 is released on time, 4.0 will be unsupported in September 2009.) The last few Linux servers I've set up have been Ubuntu LTS Server instead of Debian stable.
Considering today's free Linux distributions (as in free to download & updates), I'd pick CentOS or Ubuntu LTS for a Linux server because of their long security update periods.
Re:What is in it for me ( a user ) (Score:3, Insightful)
And how well does ALSA work in Solaris? *BSD? Windows? Mac OS X? Yes, that's what I mean...
The Phonon provides a cross-platform framework for developers to use multimedia in their applications easily. I doubt vlc or mplayer do that so easily...
Oh, does all of Gnome apps also do? Like Nautilus and so on? That's something new to me.. Does it also happen with no major porting work?
Re:What is in it for me ( a user ) (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mean to troll, but I've been able to use one media player for all of my needs for years. :-)
Re:KDE 4.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
I would also like to point out that Konqueror was "replaced" by Dolphin, which in my opinion was a bad decision.
Given that the file management capabilities of Dolphin are exactly duplicated in Konqueror, you aren't forced to use Dolphin.
The point of Dolphin, I think, was to make things easier for newbies, and to provide a lighter-weight option for people who don't use Konqueror as a web browser.
Re:Disastrous. (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny thing... I've been a Linux user since the beginning, early '90s, kernel versions in the 0.x range, later downloading early versions of Slackware one floppy at a time at 1200 baud and installing it from floppy sets.
For the first time in my life, I'm tempted to go to Windows (XP, to be specific). You want to use the latest web browser(s) or other fundamental applications, you need the latest distros. The latest distros (Fedora 9 in my case) ship the latest desktop.s And for the first time in many years in Linux, I feel very frustrated by the current desktops.
The Unix way was "everything is predictable," "everything is modular," and "everything is configurable." None of these things appear to remain... Windows XP is, at the very least, very predictable and will support all the latest versions of fundamental applications.
In Linux, more and more, the structure of the system is changing so fast it doesn't resemble any of the Unices; the desktops have taken strange directions; half of the commands for which I almost remember the man pages by heart seem to have been depricated and/or replaced.
I'm just not productive in Linux these days, and here I sit spending hours trying to get previews to work and/or a desktop that moves at a reasonable speed.
Did anyone ever fix the un-easily-editable menus in GNOME, or the "I open a new window every time you visit a new folder and I don't have a URL bar" file manager? I suspect there are GConf fixes for these things, but there's no reason I can see why I should waste two or three hours tracking those down instead of just booting into Windows.
I'll go to bed. (sigh) Maybe things will look nicer for this longtime Linux user in the morning.
Re:then dont release it as "KDE"4.0... (Score:3, Insightful)
If its not a stable usable release which is a functional upgrade from your prior version then DONT put it in STABLE REPO's, dont release it out as a 'finished' product.
You seem to think the folks of the KDE project put it in your distro's repository. They didn't. What to package is a distro's choice. Fedora and Kubuntu both packaged a sucky KDE4 (Kubuntu is better now, since the RC1), Suse did very well.
Really, complain to your distro's packagers. Especially if it isn't possible to combine KDE3 and KDE4.
Re:first post (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:first post (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, stop talking even about KDE3. What about OS X?
Remember 10.0? The one that was so slow, so unstable, and so lacking in features that Apple eventually had to give a free 10.1 upgrade to everyone who got suckered into buying it?
Yet despite that disastrous start, OS X is now recognised as a mature and stable OS, even among those of us who don't particularly like using it. KDE4 will almost certainly go the same way. At least you didn't have to pay over $100 for your copy of KDE 4.0, like those poor suckers did for OS X 10.0!
(And don't mistake me for a KDE fanboy, either. I use Xfce, and look on the KDE/GNOME flamewars as a disinterested observer.)