KDE 4.2 Is Released 488
OhReally writes "It's a great day for Free Software: KDE, the desktop environment for Linux, Windows, Mac, and (Open)Solaris, has just reached version 4.2, exactly a year since the release of 4.0. This is a version suitable for broad usage, with many improvements all across the board, and lots of bugfixes. You can leave a comment or congratulate the developers here."
Thanks to the KDE 4 Devs! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been tracking the 4.2 betas on Kubuntu's repositories, and the final release is working very nicely. KDE 4.2 is finally at a stage where the 4 series can replace the 3.5 series for the large majority of users, and I've been using KDE since 2.0 came out.
Now I know there are going to be a ton of complaints about how "broken" KDE 4 is... but I have my own response to the critics [blogspot.com]. Is KDE 4.2 perfect? No, but I challenge you to show me a desktop that is "perfect". KDE 4 has finally gained critical mass, and even more great stuff is in store.
Thanks again to all the KDE 4 developers and bug testers who kept working even when it wasn't easy or popular! Your perseverance has paid off.
Re:/.'ed... (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of madness is it to link a dynamic forum message to slashdot? It is really irresponsible as there may be actual people needing to post/reply to that forum. What happened to linking a basic .txt file as "release notes.txt", even pdf wouldn't crash a server.
If I was a KDE user/ 4 adopter and needed official help, I would be really pissed now.
Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think KDE gets quite enough criticism ;)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling the day when I can say "It's good to hear Windows isn't garbage anymore," is far, far away.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a way to detect CPU/Gfx card acceleration capabilities and disable them in certain conditions? E.g. if there is no hardware support for transform and lighting?
Windows does it, OS X does it. It would prevent a lot of criticism. Not sure about CPU detection but at least OpenGL should give tips about hardware in multi platform manner and it could be scaled to support OpenGL ES in future (on PDA etc.).
Re:1 question (Score:1, Insightful)
I know I'm feeding the troll, but...
I think that KDE since KDE 4 has been one of the most criticized projects, even more than Windows.
Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows users and OSX users are going to attack Linux users on every front in every way endlessly and relentlessly.
I don't know if that's real fair to say. Linux users have a stigma (right or wrong) of being egotistical holier-than-thou types, from the new user newsgroups and IRC channels, all the way to here. Linux users are very quick to point out why your way sucks and why their way is better and clearly more superior, even if your only fault is that you use a different text editor. Moreover, the entire site of Slashdot is one big Microsoft troll, right down to the sarcastic and biased headlines and summaries, through to the tired 1-line comments marked +5 (has anyone made a joke about how Balmer likes to throw chairs lately?)
I don't see a lot of Windows and OSX users going around attacking Linux users. I do see a lot of Linux users who go around attacking anything that doesn't involve compiling your operating system.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Insightful)
usable doesn't mean bug-free though, I'm waiting until they unfutz some annoying bugs before going back from my temporary GNOME-refuge
Re:Why?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A couple of questions (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Icons: If you like the old ones so much import them. Due to the fact that the "old" KDE had multiple sets of Icons there was never any "one" set of icons that were the perfect standard for all time anyway. Nice attempt at a troll though.
2. K-menu working the same as the old one: YES and it has existed since KDE 4.0. If you read my post you would have seen exactly how to add it as well.. although that might require using a mouse in a slightly different way than the exact way you claimed you used to do in in KDE 3.5 so maybe it's beyond your comprehension.
3. The taskbar manages tasks and can group them together or not group them together and can have one or more rows depending upon how you configure it. I'm sorry if one task item might be off by one pixel which would cause you to have a cardiac infarction.
Let me guess: You never actually used KDE 3 and your trolling... AND the next post about KDE 4 will be how much you hate it because you don't think the developers have added anything new & exciting whily also making KDE 4 a carbon-copy of KDE 3 for no reason other than the fact you cannot make minute adjustments to some simple changes.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE was adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a 'user' release, but was solely for third party developers to actually get involved and start porting, and to make a difference. A pure developer preview. KDE 4.1 was stabilizing third party apps and the platform. KDE 4.2 is the first user-centric general use release for 4.x. It's not their fault that apparently many users and distributors didn't listen or care.
It's not as if they KDE left people without working 3.5, either. KDE 3.5.9 and 3.5.10 both brought bug fixes and improvements. "We're having an unstable/preview release, deal with it, the people who care about it will know about it" used to be common in the open source world.
It tends to lean towards better results if people can get ahold of things ahead of a 'stable' release, bazaar style, so bug fixes can be made, design issues can be settled, before it becomes a 'user' release.
If they were allowed to persist and fester, any such issues outstanding would affect people using the software version for years to come (and longer if backwards compatibility mandates are taken into account).
I'm not trying to be pointed about it, but flaws and bugs creeping in and staying there more or less defines the Windows experience. It's okay if you have an app from 10 years ago you can't recompile (and hopefully still works on current video drivers/hardware), it's not so good if all of the source is available, and bad design choices can cause serious problems in writing and maintaining software.
Just because everyone jumped the gun and wanted KDE 4.0 to be perfect and immediately available even while KDE 3.5 maintenance was ongoing, was pretty much fooling themselves. GNOME seems to maintain a large number of projects under its umbrella, and when a release is made, everything's updated in line. KDE has a lot of major third party apps which required a significant amount of porting and rewriting to move from Qt 3.3 and KDE 3.5. Being able to shake down the libraries, and applications mean that the final release products tend to 'just work'. Less vendor patches needed just to clean things up.
The .0 preview, .1 stabilization, .2 starts as stable tends to mirror GCC's typical schedule in this case, however, and GCC's used for everything, took two years to get to the point where most things would finally touch it and ditch GCC 3.4.
A year's not long when you consider the entire KDE ecosystem has had time to work on things and most projects are releasing near-concurrently with full support.
Re:A couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
> Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how
> much better the system is for developers.
Bull. You don't care for eye candy. I don't care for eye candy. End users care. No matter how hard we wish it were otherwise it remains a fact. And if the new stuff makes things easier for developers it usually means more stuff gets developed. And remember, users don't buy an OS for what IT does, they buy for the applications they can run on it. So if KDE4 enables better apps to get written faster that benefits users.
As someone who has used GNOME since it first replaced FVWM95 as RedHat's default DE I'm starting to consider KDE. The last of the license issues (that launched GNOME in the first place) are finally fixed and GNOME has been making it crystal clear I'm not in their target audience for years.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny. I decided to use KDE over Gnome years ago 'cos Gnome was way too slow.
And you think your conclusion will remain valid forever or something? Software tends to change pretty quickly.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that KDE since KDE 4 has been one of the most criticized projects, even more than Windows.
I think they have on thing in common:
* Don't overhype it if you can't deliver on the promises!
Re:Future Roadmap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Woah (Score:2, Insightful)
It was a shame the KDE team had to drag KDE's brand name through the mud simply because they grossly failed to manage the user's expectations with the version numbering nonsense.
Gee, the fact that they explicitly say "don't use this, not for end users", and you can't fucking read makes it their problem?
Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
Of COURSE it's their fault. They were FORCED to explain that time and time again because they deliberately chose version numbers that say the exact opposite.
Besides, IMHO, 4.0 wasn't fit for developers either. Even in 4.2, they're STILL calling some of the APIs experimental.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE did not hype KDE4. Only the people who can't read and understand that it was a developer release, to prepare and have a framework ready so that 3rd party developers can have a target to develop against.
But, apparently this concept is too difficult for people to understand.
Re:Future Roadmap (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, KDE should have a Mac-style dock. There's a reason why there are so many dock clones out there, and why people put effort into making their Linux desktops Mac-like in appearance and behavior: Apple has some great UI designers and themers and they have, in most respects, produced the best desktop environment out there. That doesn't mean OS X perfect - there's a reason why my only Mac is a notebook but my home server, home workstation, and work workstation are all Linux boxes, too - but its GUI gets top marks for consistency, functionality, and good design. For example, to bring up the prefs in any OS X app, all I have to do is hit Command+, on a Mac. Even within KDE, there's nothing that out of the box simple for bringing up app prefs, and if you mix in apps from GNOME, XFCE, plain old X apps, etc, it gets even less predictable.
There's a lot that could be borrowed from the Apple playbook to improve Linux desktops, and yes, even some things from the Windows playbook, although most of the good ideas there have already been mined.
Re:Woah (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that obvious? I know, it's their software, they can do it however they want, and it's my fault for not reading the warnings, but you've got to admit that's completely different than any other project. Almost every other project would have called 4.0 an alpha, 4.1 a beta, 4.2 would have been a release candidate, and 4.3 would have been the official 4.0 release.
Naming releases completely different than anybody else makes it non-obvious in my book. Considering how much grief they've gotten from people complaining it's not ready, I'd guess I'm not the only one.
Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right, I bet you wrote that in emacs. On Windows.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, the fact that they explicitly say "don't use this, not for end users", and you can't fucking read makes it their problem?
The fact they named it 4.0 is much louder than whatever they said.
Remember how Wine took a decade to reach 1.0? That's what we expect from Open Source. You can scream and bitch all you want, but if you named it .0, it's your fault if it sucks.
Re:Woah (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't defend thier choice but from reading the blogs at the time of 4.0 it was quite clear, the people that have screwed over kde4 have been the ditros (looks at kubuntu & fedora) because they should have seen it wasn't really ready.
As for the naming reason I think the arguments went something like:
1) it cant be called 3. something
2) each release cycle produces a stable product at the end of its alpha,beta,rc cycle. Bear in mind that stable is in terms of what the release was for. kde4.0 was released stable enough to test and kde4.1 was stable enough to develop on.
3)security and stability fixes would be released for the previous versions
4)there is no golden rulebook of numbering so they didn't care too much
given these assumtions i cant think of a saner numbering scheme (i can however think of saner assumptions)
Re:1 question (Score:1, Insightful)
No, that concept isn't too difficult to understand. We understand it very well.
But apparently it is too difficult to stick to sane numbering schemes.
Releasing it as KDE4.0 was nothing but a marketing gimmick saying "we're finally there".
I'll stick to 3.5 until 4.3 or 4.4
Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish the KDE fanboys (and the KDE developers themselves) would stop trying to rewrite recent history and just admit there were mistakes made.
There were mistakes made.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a mistake. It happens, it wasn't ill-intentioned. It seems to be fixed now, so all that can be done is to learn a lesson about how expectations can and can't be managed in the future.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's your fault for not reading what was explicitly made public.
4.0 was made 4.0 for a very specific reason. It was API stable. There is no excuse for not knowing what it was; they told you what it was. Why should they label it based on your expectations?
Re:A couple of questions (Score:3, Insightful)
So don't upgrade?
Re:1 question (Score:3, Insightful)
There were some very bad mistakes made... 4.0 should have been named 3.99
Sincerely,
A KDE fan
Re:Woah (Score:4, Insightful)
What about 4.0alpha, 4.1beta and 4.2? Or 4.-2, 4.-1 and 4.0?
Re:1 question (Score:4, Insightful)
If a man takes a car and gets in a freak accident that blows it up because he didn't read the manual, it isn't the car company's fault. If no one could be bothered to read anything surrounding KDE 4.0 or 4.1, it isn't KDE's fault that there was confusion. They probably could've addressed such confusion in a more timely manner, but I'm sorry, I don't know of anyone else who managed to miss the fact that KDE 4.0 was anything other than a developer release.
And here is the crux of the problem. The KDE team attempted to redefine the meaning of betas, RCs, and final releases.
If a man takes an experimental rocket-car for a drive and it blows up, it isn't the rocket-car company's fault. However, if a man takes a Honda Civic for a drive, and it blows up unexpectedly, then Honda would most certainly would take a lot of the blame.
And please... lots of people missed the fact that KDE 4.0 wasn't anything but a developer release. Hence the controversy. If they wanted it to be just a developer release, they could have (duh) labeled it a developer release!
Re:1 question (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Version numbers have a set meaning... not just whatever you feel like having it mean.
$ eix -I openssl
[I] dev-libs/openssl
Available versions: 0.9.8e-r3 0.9.8f 0.9.8g-r2 0.9.8h-r1 0.9.8j
Would you like to reconsider your statement?
Re:Pretty (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have even the slightest clue about how "the themed stuff in Qt [trolltech.com] even works?
Qt doesn't have themes, Qt has widget styles, which are used in Plasma just like they're used everywhere else in KDE. Where that support ended we got to innovate, so Plasma provides a common appearance API so that widgets will look and feel the same across the whole desktop.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new to IT if you haven't learnt that "suitable for early adopting users" means "hey, come be our guinea pigs, if you dare". If you consider that to be suitable for end users, you must hate your end users a lot.
Re:1 question (Score:2, Insightful)
That is precisely his point. version numbers are just that, pointless numbers.
See, LaTeX has a version number converging to e.
Emacs only changes the last digit nowadays, even for big updates.
For a long time, linux odd minor version number meant unstable.
Ubuntu gave up on numbers, they have dates!
A version number means what the devs say it means, nothing less, nothing more. So basically, you _have_ to read what the devs say. You cannot assume anything from the version number.
Hell, someone might decide that the first three characters of the hash of the tgz might be a good version number. And it might be, too.
Re:Woah (Score:4, Insightful)
They told me, really?
Sort of like getting on an interstate with a "this road requires you to drive on the left side" sign on the side of the road, in small letters, behind a bush. It's entirely against long-lived convention (at least in the US), goes against common sense, and is dangerous if not foolish.
Anyone who's used a computer for more than a week knows that "point release means it's the new stable release", or at least reasonably close to one. If they intended it to be otherwise, it should have been BETA (or some other versioning scheme, like what the Linux kernel used to use back when you could reasonably download a kernel and have every module included work).
Hell, even Microsoft did this with W7. It went API stable, and then they released a beta. it was very obviously a beta, because they're calling it that.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
What a bunch of bullshit, I am so sick of hearing this nonsense. There were blog posts by a lot of the KDE people, it was (obviously) all over the damn front page of kde.org, it was on frickin' Slashdot, it was in every Linux forum. Everybody knew. You knew. I knew. We all knew. "Here is KDE 4.0.0. It is API stable. It is totally gonna eat your children, but it's API stable. Now code, people."
To further butcher a bad analogy I saw a couple posts down, this is kind of like getting on an interstate with a big sign on the ramp saying "NO FUCKING GAS FOR A LONG TIME! TURN AROUND AND TAKE A LEAK!" and bitching about the incompetence of the highway department when your car runs out of gas.
Seriously. This is getting ridiculous. You can obviously read, because you can write. I'm sure you saw the announcements all over the internet when it came out, God knows everybody else did. If you chose not to believe them for whatever reason, I don't lend your ill-informed self-centered opinion one goddamn bit of credence. Why should anybody care what you think of anybody else's version numbering?
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it is manifestly your inability to read the phrase "early adopting users" and parse what the hell it meant. Next question.
Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
No, *you* are attempting to define the meaning of version numbering. There is no such standard. Lots of teams, companies, groups, and lone crazy hackers number their projects in lots of different ways. The current version of Ubuntu is 8.10. Not because it is the tenth update of the eighth major version, because it was released in October of 2008. Go bitch at them for their non-compliance with your holy version numbering scheme.
Re:Woah (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually everybody has a right to bitch about it. It's just not helpful.
Get off your high horse.
GP's right, when the system is locked up (meaning bug reports can't be generated in a nice way for those who don't know how to submit them manually, from another system) all the user cares about is the fact they can't use their computer. They don't care what's to blame, they just want it to not be locked up. Bitching about it, at the very least, will shed light on the fact the issue exists and is pissing users off. Hopefully some dev will try and fix it then.
Re:The real question is (to me): (Score:3, Insightful)
That's pretty awful logic you have there. If the value of the features added is greater than the value of the features lost, then it should be worth switching.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to say, I wasn't really a KDE user at the time so I didn't as I wasn't paying attention.
However, I did know that KDE4 was new and so figured it wouldn't be for wide scale use for quite some time. I tried it out when I first installed Kubuntu a few months ago. My experience was that it was nice and shiny and mostly stable but couldn't deal with my dual screen setup for some reason and so I went to KDE3 and was very happy.
Kudos to the KDE developers for this new release and anyone who thinks that it's magically going to be bug free is most likely an idiot who doesn't understand software.
I'll have to see if they've fixed whatever issue was stopping me from using both my screens properly!
Re:Pretty (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be ridiculous. It's the same thing to anyone who's not being pedantic. Or maybe it's not, like a .0 release is beta release in KDE-world.
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why should they label it based on your expectations?"
Because this is what communication is about.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
Replace the "4" with "10" and you have OSX...
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
> Because, as you describe, the project used the 4.0 and 4.1 versions to get application developers on board, a lot of manpower was removed from the 3.5 branch.
If manpower wasn't removed from the 3.5 branch then we'd be a year behind at least. There really aren't that many developers. Most applications only have 1 or 2 main developers behind them.
Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think KDE gets quite enough criticism ;)
I agree. And every time, it's about KDE 4.0.
Some people are just too dimwitted to quit. They get something for free, and get shocked, SHOCKED when they have problems. KDE4.0 discussion was an interesting drama piece in the beginning, but now it's just old.
Back in the day, people got excited about future promise of software, even if it was too buggy for daily use. Now, we are flooded with dimwits who don't really care about the tech, and want the whole world to know it.
Here's a tip: if it doesn't work, don't use it. There is no need to go around every forum on the net and whine, whine, whine.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
One Question: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the interface still five years ahead of Microsoft Windows? It's hard to tell from the screenshots.
I remember seeing features in KDE several years ago that would later show up in Vista.
KDE is one of the few truly innovative projects in the open source realm - they're actually moving forward and trying new things rather than trying to clone existing products. Which is what we need more of in the open source realm.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Insightful)
You know who didn't get the message? Despite all the thousands of notices you just mentioned?
The maintainer who put it in Fedora. The one person who MOST needed to read and understand it.
So, basically, STFU. Regardless of what you think, that right there is PROOF POSITIVE that the message was no good, and communicated poorly. It's already happened, you can't deny it.
Re:Woah (Score:1, Insightful)