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."
Re:1 question (Score:5, Interesting)
Get over 4.0. There is no changing what happened and it's too easy a bitch anyways.
KDE 4.2 is functional and should work beyond expectations for most typical home users.
It even intergrates google gadets into plasma!
Cool (Score:3, Interesting)
It's good to hear KDE isn't garbage anymore.
Unfortunately, for all its cool tech, I still find the default look and feel hideous.
Is there some kind of "style" they're going for or is everything just kind of randomly put together or what?
Re:1 question (Score:3, Interesting)
Download it and make your own judgment, however I will echo the sentiment that it is a VAST improvement over 4.1 and 4.0.
I find it odd that Linus just made a stink about KDE a week before 4.2, and had he tried 4.2, he might have felt differently. Then again, last I heard he was using Ubuntu, and they made a big mess of their Kubuntu/KDE 4.x packages, which has really caused the KDE project some undue negative press.
That being said, there are some legitimate gripes about the previous releases, and some bickering over whether or not the KDE devs need users, or value their input, to which the varied KDE devs (expectedly of such a diverse group) gave varied responses.
openSUSE probably puts out the best packages, though I hear the Arch KDEmod packages are quite good as well.
I also really dig that I can run KDE (including Plasma) on Windows.
Nice improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking of switching to XFCE this week (after about 8 years on KDE), but I think I'll hold off.
good job devs!
Oxygen (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, in the infancy of KDE 4, there was this project that was supposed to provide a consistent look and feel to KDE called Oxygen.
The early mockups looked fairly different from the first incarnation, and both look very different from what we have today.
Overall, it does look more consistent and polished. The taskbar looks sharp. The plasma theme looks sharp. The Oxygen widgets and window decorations are still plain and boring. I also still don't understand how Oxygen was largely plain white with no contrast for a year, where as the Plasma theme and taskbar was plain and black.
It was jarring and inconsistent.
However, the icons (save for the horrible folder icon) do present a very consistent, very professional appearance. It is hard to argue with the icon set on the whole.
I just want to see an Oxygen set for OpenOffice. I know OpenOffice isn't a KDE project, but most every distro ships with OpenOffice, and it would be nice for integration to see some Oxygen-based icons for OpenOffice.
Future Roadmap (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that KDE has laid the framework for development, and recreated most of the features from KDE 3 as well, where do they go from here? Can they do something truly innovative?
(No, widgets aren't innovative).
The folderview, as a fullscreen containment with wallpaper theming is a plus. I'm looking for other innovations in how we interact with software.
Adjusting dialogs and the interface to work well on small form factors is another step in the right direction, but honestly I think they also need an Oxygen-widget derivative specifically for minimalist screens.
Multi-touch gestures are trendy, but other than mobile devices, I don't expect to touch my PC screen.
The concept of a fully-realized semantic desktop sounds interesting, but is currently half-baked at best.
Would it be a crime for KDE to steal some of the better innovations from OS X and Windows 7? Should KDE offer an official dock, or revamp the taskbar? What about both?
Kwin, for all its nifty-ness could take a few pages from Windows 7.
What about a crazy concept? People keep talking about a Web OS, cloud computing, etc. I've seen a proof of concept of Plasmoids served via a web plugin. KDE runs natively on Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris today. What if you could store your KDE desktop settings and sessions online?
Sit at any computer with most any OS, and have your desktop. Plasmoids that aren't installed locally could even be served up online.
Where do you think KDE should go in the future?
Re:Thanks to the KDE 4 Devs! (Score:1, Interesting)
Hear hear.
I upgraded my kubuntu (via the spechul repo) a few hours ago, and I am actually amazed.
KDE Devs, don't let the trolls get you down. KDE rocks.
Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
"People here attack F/OSS Software almost constant."
People here attack proprietary software almost constantly, and in far greater numbers, too. There are an equal number of trolls and astroturfers on both sides, which is impressive considering the proposition that most "/. users Are WINDOWS users", as if that means they automatically support proprietary software or are automatically opposed to open source solutions.
Windows crashing jokes and Apple cult jokes are okay, but Linux pile of half-broken crap jokes aren't? Develop a sense of humor, because guess what, there are pros and cons to everything, and not everyone has to have a religious devotion to everything discussed.
Windows has its uses. Proprietary software has its uses. Linux has its uses. Open source software...you get the picture. People can make choices. Developers are free to release their code with an iron fist heavily slanted in their favor, or they can send it out into the world with no strings attached, or they can find some suitable middle ground. All approaches are valid. People are free to choose to walk into limitations--everything has them: Windows, OS X, Linux all have flaws.
If Linux users get attacked constantly, it's that small subset of "Linux users" who believe that There Can Be Only One Software Model and that TEH LINUX IS PERFECT. They are trolls, astroturfers, and zealots themselves.
Re:Future Roadmap (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Woah (Score:3, Interesting)
... and if it's only in use when you have decent graphics the computer probably don't take much of a hit since almost anyone is actually making good usage of their graphics card in Linux/whatever unix or unix-like OS.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been using KDE 4.2 since the first beta on Kubuntu 8.10. There have been a few things I had to fix myself that typical end users probably wouldn't be able to figure out, but mostly that's been distribution related (conflicting audio servers, and for some reason I ended up with two power management daemons at first).
To be honest I like it so much I was even using it every day before Nvidia released updated drivers. Before the drivers things were a little slow and glitchy. But now everything is smooth and fast.
Plasma has been improved substantially in this release. It's very usable. I really like the idea of FolderView widgers. When you drag a folder from the file manager to the desktop you get a little menu asking if you want an icon or a FolderView. Plasma also lets you have multiple "activities". So I have a desktop set up for quick access to my music and videos, another one for reading comics, and a few more that a project specific. This is so much better than a single desktop folder. What they still need to work on though is removing some of the confusion between Plasma's multiple desktops (which controls the contents of the desktop background) and KWin's multiple desktops (which lets you have application windows on different virtual desktops like any decent window manager).
I also really like being able to place multiple images on the background (in the picture frame plasmoid, which also does slide shows).
Amarok 2.0 deserves special mention. It still doesn't have all the features from the 1.x series (notably the ability to transcode on the fly when you transfer to your mp3 player) but I am very impressed with the interface. It has its own Plasma containment for holding widgets, and when you drag items from your library to the playlist this containment becomes a set of drop targets for "append to play list", "queue" etc.
KTorrent is now my favourite bittorrent client. Actually KTorrent was pretty usable back when 4.0 was released, I even used it in Gnome for a while.
Kontact, KMail and the rest of the PIM suite I'm not so sure about. They're connected to Akonadi which hasn't been working very well for me. I loved KMail back in the KDE 2 and 3 days.
Dolphin is a pretty decent file manager. The only thing I really miss from Nautilus is the spatial mode, but at least they added tree style expandable folders in the list view.
In general I'd call this a good-for-end-users release. Hopefully there will have been a few 4.2.x point releases before Kubuntu 9.04 is released to clear up any remaining bugs.
In terms of speed the system is very usable. On my Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of ram it seems just as fast as using Gnome. On my friend's Pentium M with 512 MB of ram it's usable, but not as snappy as Gnome.
Since I've been using KDE 4.2 on my laptop, I've had a lot of people notice how cool Linux is. Instead of trying to show them something and explain it while their eyes gloss over, they're asking questions and wanting to know if it would work on their computer. That doesn't mean they're going to try it (on Linux at least) but it does mean that KDE has finally figured out how to be visually appealing to non-nerds. The default theme in 4 is much better than Keramik from 3.1, that's for damn sure.
So to answer your question, this is the release that distributions should have waited for before replacing KDE 3.5. It was simply madness that so many distros went to 4.0 and 4.1 as a default and not letting users switch back to 3.5.
If you have a Unix-ish desktop KDE 4.2 is definitely worth a try. It's probably also worth a try on Windows and Mac but I don't have those so I can't comment on them. Still, if you have a free afternoon and you're a big nerd like me who enjoys playing with new software, KDE 4.2 is worth a try.
WTF? Akonadi Requires MySQL? (Score:1, Interesting)
I have no words - can anyone point me to a sane sounding explanation as to why on earth is a full fledged RDBMS installation is required for using PIM?
What problem does it solve that hasn't already been solved by many people across many platforms time and again?
Wow.
Re:1 question (Score:3, Interesting)
They're still huge. I hated it until I got a 19" 1680x1020 LCD. Now KDE looks perfect and XP looks tiny. Everything about KDE is geared for large displays. It's actually very nice if you have one.
Re:Oxygen (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to see OpenOffice run in KDE without messing up everything else's color palette whenever the OO's window isn't minimized. It doesn't really affect usability, but it's really, really obnoxious. I don't know exactly what it is but it looks terrible.
Also, someone tell the KDE devs to at least replace the gfx buffer with a solid color. At the minute whatever barf is left over is shown while dialogs are initializing.
(Note that I happily use KDE 4.1 every day.)
Re:1 question (Score:5, Interesting)
Amarok 2 does not have support for an equalizer, because Phonon (KDE4's media backend) does not have equalizer support. I have seen no timeline which indicates that there are even plans to add equalizer support to Phonon (although, presumably I'm not the only one missing this feature).
A google search of "phonon equalizer" yields nothing of any value.
Does anyone know if there will be an equalizer for phonon?
Re:Woah (Score:5, Interesting)
When the user has a locked system he doesn't care!
I do care! I care because I want to look for a solution, not throw my hands up in despair like some other users do.
How else do you think things get fixed? People like me notice and write it up. It gets fixed.
How long have you been running 4.2? Have you submitted any bug reports or contributed in testing? No? Then you have no right to bitch about it.
Re:Woah (Score:3, Interesting)
Meh, I'd prefer the CPU to be creating a basic scene graph for a GPU to display rather than copying pixels left right and centre and applying filters and effects in a CPU based compositor.
Designers need to be more anal (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of days ago some guy got flamed for saying "The alignment is off, doesn't anybody even look at their software before releasing it?", with the most useful response being "your font settings are probably different to the developer's, they don't see what you see"; and I agreed with them. But looking at screenshots for myself, even the official screenshots showing how good it looks, look bad. annotated example [shishnet.org]. (PS. Any idea where I can send that to to have people fix it?)
/me goes back to enlightenment 17, ever more appreciative of Raster's perfectionism...
Re:Woah (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
And anyone who's used one for more than two weeks knows that if you're after stability, you have to "Wait for version x.1/SP1/etc..."
Re:Woah (Score:3, Interesting)
More specifically, the KDE developers should prioritize getting 4.x to feature parity with 3.5.10.
From the betas I've looked at, it still doesn't work well with dual-head setups, there's still no obvious way to assign different wallpapers to different virtual desktops (or screens), I still can't get a window list by middle-clicking on the desktop, etc., etc. All of the features that have kept me "swimming upstream" on Fedora all of these years to use KDE rather than GNOME are no longer present in KDE 4.