What's Coming In KDE 4.4 423
buzzboy writes "If you're wondering what the folks over at KDE have been cooking up for the next major release, KDE 4.4, well, quite a bit as it turns out. In a lengthy interview, KDE core developer and spokesperson for the project Sebastian Kugler details the myriad changes that are coming with the 4.4 release — the fifth major release since KDE 4.0 debuted to much criticism nearly two years ago. The project has closed about 18,000 bugs over the past six months and the pace of development is snowballing. The 'heavy-lifting' in libraries and frameworks for 4.0 is now starting to pay off. Perhaps the biggest change is in the development of a semantic desktop. According to Kugler, 'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?' There is also a picture gallery of KDE 4.4 (svn) screenshots so you can see what it will look like."
Kugler? (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus Christ, even the developers' names...
Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry, they are already slashdotted. That's what you get for requiring multiple requests to read a single article.
Re:Labelling. (Score:1, Funny)
You're absolutely right about there being quality problems with KDE up until 4.3. But keep in mind that even their most broken releases were still much, much better than GNOME.
GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.
GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.
On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.
Re:Kugler? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you mean to say Jesus Khrist?
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Funny)
While I don't know if this will help in your particular situation, I've found random sluggishness like that much reduced after I got an Intel SSD.
Now that's a ringing endorsement. KDE4: it won't be sluggish if you use a SSD!
Re:Labelling. (Score:4, Funny)
It's the choice of enterprise desktops because it fits with the mantra of locking down the user and preventing them from doing anything useful. With Windows you need bigbrotherware to do it. With GNOME, the functionality has simply been removed in the name of usability as part of Havoc Pennington's reign of terror.