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KDE GUI Software Operating Systems Linux BSD

What To Expect In KDE 4.1 288

Posted by timothy from the plenty-of-goodness dept.
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."
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What To Expect In KDE 4.1 More

What To Expect In KDE 4.1

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  • NVidia issues? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've been hearing issues about the performance of KDE 4.1 being rather terrible due to nVidia's hopeless support of XRender.

    I've run it myself, and I did notice that as soon as you got a few applications running you could visibly see the widgets and windows redrawing themselves, making it a very painful experience. GNOME, on the other hand, remains snappy (though I love KDE 4.1, even just because the picture frame allows pin-ups on my desktop!).

    Is this just subjective? Are there any fixes?

    For reference, t

    • Slashdot Effect Channeled (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@NOsPAM.gmail.com> on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:09PM (#24342347) Homepage Journal

      QT 4 and thusly KDE 4 use XRender quite a bit, and Nvidia's driver has horrible XRender support. You could go to the OSS Nvidia driver, and lose 3D acceleration, or stick with KDE 3.

      Ideally, I'd like to see the Slashdot effect channeled. This site has tons of users. We bring down sites accidentally with our massive numbers, but I've never seen the Slashdot Effect channeled for good.

      Can you imagine CmdTaco posting a story tomorrow asking every to pepper Nvidia with petitions all on the same day, demanding an improved driver?

  • Choices (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:23PM (#24341779)

    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.

  • That's not how I remember it. KDE 4.0 was stable libraries for people to learn with, and very new/unstable implementation of the libraries. KDE 4.1 was supposed to be a stable implementation of the already stable libraries. AFAIR, noone, except hardcore testers was every supposed to actually USE kde 4.

    • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:34PM (#24341929)

      KDE 4.0 was stable libraries for people to learn with, and very new/unstable implementation of the libraries. KDE 4.1 was supposed to be a stable implementation of the already stable libraries.

      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        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.

      • 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.

        Really? And was the same said of GCC 3.0 & 4.0? I suppose the same was also said of Kernel 2.6?

        The bottom line is this: OSS projects are ready when the maintainers tell you they're ready. It's always been like this, and it'll probably always be like this.

        ps. I should also point out for those with short memories that GNOME 2.0 wasn't exactly a great release. It was buggy, it lacked features AND applications, and it didn't even have a decent file manager. Nautilus was buggy and dog slow until versio

        • I suppose the same was also said of Kernel 2.6?

          Well, let me put it this way: 2.6 underwent quite a lot of development as 2.5, before it was released as a stable 2.6.

          More relevantly: If Linux 2.6 had been released without, say, support for proper Unix permissions -- if all files were mode 0777 -- people would complain. That's the kind of basic functionality that's utterly missing from KDE 4.0, which was trivially found in a GUI in 3.5.

      • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by segedunum ( 883035 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:34PM (#24342717)

        Ummm... okay, so you can rewrite the article: KDE developers don't understand release version concept, confuse users with improper 4.0 version number

        Hmmmm. OK. So there's another one who doesn't understand how open source development works.

    • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ospirata ( 565063 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:34PM (#24341933)
      That's true, KDE 4.0 was supposed to have stable core libraries, so major applications such as Amarok, Koffice and Kontact could be ported at KDE 4.1. The big issue was this numbering schema. If KDE staff have numbered in the classic way people wouldn't have created so many expectations, and thus there wouldn't have dissapointments.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by SiChemist ( 575005 ) *

      On the KDE website, there was no mention of KDE 4.0 being a developer release. It hinted strongly, in fact, that KDE 4.0 was a general release.

      It was only after all the problems and complaints that the KDE devs said that the release wasn't for mainstream users.

      • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:4, Informative)

        by amRadioHed ( 463061 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:17PM (#24342467)

        That's not true. I remember when KDE4 was released and the expectation from before day one was that it was not ready for mainstream usage.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by BigDXLT ( 1218924 )

          See, the biggest problem I see is the website(s) didn't know what was going on. Everyone who paid attention to the details and follow these kinds of things knew this. But then you have people who see "released" and look at the shiny screenshots and download it thinking it's the next best thing.

          KDE needs a marketing team. I'm talking about someone who can think on the same level as Joe Public. People that can get shiny pages like plasma.kde.org up-to-date.

          Nonetheless, having used KDE 4.0 off and on and n

      • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:5, Informative)

        by toga98 ( 109028 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:52PM (#24342901) Homepage

        On the KDE website, there was no mention of KDE 4.0 being a developer release. It hinted strongly, in fact, that KDE 4.0 was a general release.

        It was only after all the problems and complaints that the KDE devs said that the release wasn't for mainstream users.

        KDE 4.0 wasn't a developer release. What it was, was the first release with major architectual changes for public consumption. This was the first release with a stable library and without this release, a large number of KDE application developers wouldn't have a platform for porting and polishing their applications for KDE 4. Ultimately it is the decision of the distributions on what to include in their releases. I wouldn't consider KDE 4.0 a proper replacement for KDE 3.5.x, but I would make it available for use by application developers.

        All this was well known and openly discussed during the planning and development of the KDE 4 platform including 4.0, 4.1, 4.x. To state otherwise is disengenious at best.

        See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951 [groklaw.net] for more information.

    • Re:TFS is a lie? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Uberdog ( 73274 ) <<jay-slashdot.org> <at> <4st.org>> on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:42PM (#24342027) Homepage
      The main problem is the dichotomy between the KDE platform and KDE environment. It was a stable release of the platform, but not of the environment, because the tools which use that platform and create the environment (all the applications) hadn't been ported yet. They should really be two separate releases.

  • KDE 3 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@NOsPAM.gmail.com> on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:26PM (#24341811) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • "K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released onto the Linux masses"

  • Calling Capt. Logic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:29PM (#24341867)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by budgenator ( 254554 )

      Anybody that has used KDE for a while isn't likely to switch. Going from KDE to Gnome feels almost a foreign as going from KDE to Windows.

    • Re:Calling Capt. Logic (Score:5, Informative)

      by piquadratCH ( 749309 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:27PM (#24342617)

      I think you misunderstood the excerpt. What it says is that KDE lost ground in the last few years, which it did. Even SuSE, once a cornerstone of KDE's market share, defaults to Gnome now. Kubuntu is not on par with Ubuntu, and Red Hat/Fedora always was a Gnome shop. Today, no major distro has KDE as its default desktop environment. I'd call that "losing ground".

      I hope KDE 4 is able to stop or even reverse this trend. I use 4.1 on a daily basis since Beta 1. It's mostly stable and shows big improvements compared to 4.0.

      • I think you misunderstood the excerpt. What it says is that KDE lost ground in the last few years, which it did. Even SuSE, once a cornerstone of KDE's market share, defaults to Gnome now. Kubuntu is not on par with Ubuntu, and Red Hat/Fedora always was a Gnome shop. Today, no major distro has KDE as its default desktop environment. I'd call that "losing ground".

        And how much of that loss was due to any technical deficits in KDE? How many places to the right of the decimal point will you need for your

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by teprrr ( 733211 )

          Which means that developers can count on having the GNOME libraries present, and can't count on the KDE enviroment. Which means that they're going to develop for GNOME, not KDE.

          Eww, I doubt developers are using some toolkit instead of another because that they can count it's available and the other is not. And by the way, I doubt Gnome libraries are used in every base installation of every distribution, even though the distro may be a LSB-compliant. AFAIK LSB Core includes nowadays both GTK+ and Qt, but n

      • I hope KDE 4 is able to stop or even reverse this trend.

        Not ever gonna happen. Companies like RH and Novell have a lot of influence of Gnome and none over KDE, and that is the main driver of which desktop is the default. Stability, features, user base (-Novell!), etc., will not help.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          I hear you say it, but if said companies were bleeding a lot of users to KDE distros it would change. With OSS they can't just say "You must use this DE" like Microsoft can say "With the Vista kernel you'll use the Vista DE". KDE4 has a lot of unfulfilled potential that I hope will come to shine in the next couple of years, and if it gets as good as I hope they'll come willing or kicking and screaming. Of course, I'm something of a KDE fanboi though I'm still on 3.5.x series...

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by teprrr ( 733211 )
        Losing ground like this [kde.org]? And I think someone said that ASUS' EeePC also runs KDE, perhaps other UPMCs do that also? I wouldn't call that "losing ground" at least...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by the_womble ( 580291 )
        Mandriva has both Gnome and KDE versions. The installer either offers you a choice (Powerpack multi CD version) or comes in KDE and Gnome flavours (single CD version).

        It is a pity that Kubuntu sucks. At least Suse offers a reasonable choice.

        There are also a lot of smaller distros default to KDE: Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Knoppix, Slax, Slackware, Arch, TurboLinux, Vector, Linspire, Ark, Xandros, Pardus, Red Flag, ALT and probably a lot more I have not heard of.

        I think that big business is more comfortable wit

  • i've had issues (possibly hardware related) with gnome, but only on one computer...

    hopefully kde 4.1 doesn't break on my hardware like gnome did, otherwise i'd have to force 3.x version.

    the only part of kde i dislike is dolphin, i like nautilus better. oh yeah, and i still use firefox even with kde.

    • How did GNOME break on your hardware? It doesn't do much, if anything, which is hardware-dependent. Methinks something else was broken, or it wasn't a hardware problem.

  • Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:33PM (#24341911) Homepage Journal

    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: (Score:2)

      by Hucko ( 998827 )
      err having not read the article can't comment on its quality, however the sentences you pointed out were passable and parse-able. The answer is the object of the sentence, KDE 4.0.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by nfk ( 570056 )
      That's poetry. It means that when you mention KDE 4.0 everyone leaves except the hard-core KDE lovers. Come to think of it, I use KDE and I'd rather leave than witness hard-core KDE love.

    • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nahor ( 41537 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @08:02PM (#24343805)
      It's the first version of the article. It's only a for developers. You need to wait for the version 1.1 release to get the fully functional one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eil ( 82413 )

      Leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers what????

      Gnome. :/

  • What is in it for me ( a user ) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:33PM (#24341919) Homepage Journal

    No, I'm serious. Other then some questionable eye candy, what can i as a user get out of 4.1 that would make me want to switch from 3.5.x?

    I dont have time to be a developer, so all the 'under the hood coder stuff' isn't directly important to me.

    Dont get me wrong, ive always preferred kde, but after 4.0 giving me nothing but grief i need good reasons to switch again.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) *

      For what is worth, is it possible to format an SD or USB thumb drive in any way using the GUI?? I could not find how to do such a thing in Ubuntu (Gnome), Fedora or KDE, the last time I tried (about a month ago), so I had to reboot to windows to do it with a simple right-click format.

    • Re:What is in it for me ( a user ) (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:16PM (#24342443) Homepage

      1) All KDE applications using Phonon and thus the same sound server, no more "oh I can't play audio here because I'm playing it over there". Or maybe that's pulseaudio's job to really fix, but I'd be happy either way.
      2) The Phonon framework hopefully means I can use one media player (Dragon Player?) for all my needs, with a codec backend like on other operating systems. Right now mplayer/xine/vlc work on different media.
      3) Once the KDE4 applications are up and running, you can use the same applications on Windows. No need for learning a separate application when you have to use Windows.

      That's at least my top three...

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tom9729 ( 1134127 )

        I don't mean to troll, but I've been able to use one media player for all of my needs for years. :-)

  • KDE 4 has been very underwhelming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slashdotlurker ( 1113853 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:39PM (#24341997)

    I have used KDE for almost 10 years now. Tried Gnome many times, but always go back to KDE. In looks there is no comparison, gnome is and always has been plug ugly.

    Until KDE 4, KDE was superior in functionality as well. However, KDE4 suffered from multiple problems :

    1. It was never meant for everyday users. For instance, a lot of indispensible KDE applets/widgets never made it on release date and some of the simplest tasks (plugging in a USB key) became needlessly complicated. It became good at obfuscating the essential and hyping the beautiful. It should never have been released - or perhaps released as KDE4-CODE which targeted developers alone. I understand that the open source development process depends on people trying out new software and reporting bugs, but this was too big a leap.

    2. The developers paid too much attention to the looks of the interface and not much to the interface itself. I have used windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP over the years as well OSX in its many reincarnations, but KDE was always a relief to return to. With KDE4, that is no longer true.

    I am not dissing the ideas behind KDE4. Perhaps many of them are overdue improvements if linux is to make it to the average desktop user (an outcome in which I haven't the slightest interest), but it was released too early. It gave an impression of being pre-alphaware and has ruined many people's opinion of the project.

    Hopefully 4.1 will win people like me over and give us a compelling reason to upgrade from KDE 3.5.7.

  • Still not a complete transition (Score:5, Insightful)

    by proxima ( 165692 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:41PM (#24342005)

    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)

    by pxc ( 938367 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:45PM (#24342081)

    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by DarrenBaker ( 322210 )

      All these Ks are giving me a HeadaKe (it's not a tumour).

    • I've never really been a KDE user, but Amarok 2 does look pretty nice.

      I can't say I'll actually use it, but I think it's one more thing I can recommend to people giving Linux a spin.

  • using KDE 4.1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by lukrop ( 1302325 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:50PM (#24342131)
    Since Archlinux is providing packages for of the KDE 4.1 tag from svn in it's testing repos I've merged to 4.1 and I'm amazed how everything works. I only had to find a new irc client since konversation isn't ported yet but I found Quassel and compiled the second alpha of amarok2 and now I'm happy :)

  • Just keep using KDE 3.5.x until you want to switch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pooh22 ( 145970 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @05:52PM (#24342155)

    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

  • I like it (Score:5, Informative)

    by xrayspx ( 13127 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:12PM (#24342379) Homepage
    I've been using every weekly build for SuSE 10.3 since 4.0 came out and have seen it get more and more stable. I have some issues, some are KDE's fault, some aren't.
    • No OTR for Kopete yet, which is in Kopete 3.5
    • In Kopete, if you're logged in, and log in from another computer, rather than saying "there are now two of you logged in", it crashes
    • Okular (Awesome!) keeps losing the ability to show me PDFs. I figured this out and fixed it once, then it broke a couple of builds ago and I can't remember what I did.
    • I've never successfully burned a CD with k3b 4.x
    • There is a checkbox that is basically the "make KDE go fast now" option, if I wasn't on a Mac right now, I'd say where it is exactly. The box is set to "slow" by default
    • I can't figure out how to move plasmoid applets around the desktop. So if I have a weather applet, it goes in the top left corner and can't be moved. Luckily, if I make a Folder Browser plasmoid, it goes right over the weather one, and also can't be moved, so...problem solved?

    Those are the ones that I've had problems with that are KDEs fault. This one probably isn't, but it makes 4.0 worthless to me:

    • Horrible graphic tearing, mostly in KDE 3.5 apps or GTK apps (kpdf, Thunderbird, Firefox, also any rdesktop session). This seems to be due to be due to using a compositing desktop. I notice it in Compiz too under 3.5. I believe the issue might be that for anything to work, you should sync on vblank, however if you have multiple monitors, sync on vblank freaks out and makes things worse?

    Overall though, I really like it, especially since someone clued me in to the Make It Fast setting. This is coming from a KDE user since 1.x. I loved 2.0 when it came. Hated 3.0 (which grew into my favorite GUI of all time including OSX), hated 4.0, like 4.1 OK so far.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xrayspx ( 13127 )
      I forgot one more thing that sucks:

      Try to make a bookmark in Konsole for "ssh -l ASA 10.250.1.254". First, just typing it in the Bookmark manager is a bitch, but you can't have capital letters, at all, even if you change the bookmarks.xml, it changes them to lower and rewrites the file.

      I'm obviously trolling for some answers with these posts, so hopefully someone knows some workarounds, and especially what we found that sped up the GUI by tons, which I just can't remember at all.

  • The .0 releases. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by haeger ( 85819 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:17PM (#24342451)

    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.
    Actually the first .0 release that I've seen that's been fair is Firefox3.0.

    "Avoid .0 releases for they are crappy and full of bugs". You can call that haegers law if someone hasn't named it before.

    .haeger

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zsau ( 266209 )

      Back in ancient history, the law was to avoid any of Microsoft's version 4.0 products; MS-DOS 4.0 especially was particularly bad, Windows 95 was suspect etc. From my limited experience with it, KDE seems to be more strongly influenced than Microsoft's systems than other systems, or than Gnome is. Perhaps the developers thought they'd emulate Microsoft especially well here?

    • I don't think users should necessarily avoid point-O releases as much as they should avoid becoming early adopters. Sometimes those are the same thing, but not always. :-)

  • 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)

    by Filip22012005 ( 852281 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:24PM (#24342571)

    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.

  • Better, but Core System Apps not there yet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dlevitan ( 132062 ) on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:52PM (#24342905)

    I've used KDE 4.1 RC1, but its just not there yet. First, it's still not as stable or bug-free as KDE 3.5. This is partially due to packaging (since Ubuntu hasn't quite figured out all the dependencies yet) and partially due to the code itself. An even bigger problem, however, is the lack of core system applications that just aren't there yet. For example, KPowerSave and KNetworkManager are essentially requirements for any laptop. Neither of these is present nor, for example, does 4.1 let me suspend the system. The backend (Solid) for a lot of these things is present, but now someone has to write the front end that someone can actually control.

    And, as others have commented, amarok, digikam, and koffice aren't ready yet either. I think it's going to take until at least 4.2 or 4.3 for it to be really usable and 4.5 until its actually fully polished.

  • Who started with KDE3.0? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25, 2008 @07:05PM (#24343065)

    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

  • They say "use KDE 3 if you want stability".
    Stable MY ASS. I've submitted recently several bugs and which are marked as "fixed in KDE 4". Most of the annoying bugs I currently run won't be fixed for KDE 3.

    P.S: I've just sumbled upon a konqueror bug which made me to write this message again!! AARGH

    I'll begin to make plasmoids in python as soon as kde 4.1 final is released. I already started to use KDE 4 apps. KGet 4 is sooo much better than kget 3. I'll start to use konqueror 4 also.

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