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."
Labelling. (Score:4, Insightful)
Had prior 4.X releases been 3.9X releases, with 4.0 coming soon, I suspect that the mood would have been largely positive.
Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I felt like all the jokes about people who buy a MS OS prior to the first SP1 being the "paying beta testers" would have been appropriate for KDE4.0 and 4.1, at least if they charged.
4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.
My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if 4.4 is going to be finally stable, or will it be 4.5 or 4.9.
4.3.3 is still broken in multiple ways.
Plasma crashes sometimes and still has troubles properly resizing and drawing its widgets.
Akonadi fails to start even on a pristine configuration, and its sophisticated "why can't I start" diagnosis fails to identify the problem. (I googled out that I had to comment out a line in its config file.)
Phonon works worse in 4.3 than it did in 4.2 for me. Its xine backend suddenly can't open my soundcard, while its gstreamer backend doesn't open vorbis files. (Other xine based programs work fine, gstreamer has all required plugins installed.)
KWin has a tendency to crash with compositing enabled (and more rarely without), on a geforce 7 series, which generally has worked rock solid for years.
Kopete crashes sometimes, Akregator used to crash in 4.2, haven't tested in 4.3 since I migrated to Liferea.
You could probably find a lot more warts, I don't use that many KDE apps. Bottomline is, even in 4.3 they still haven't gotten such basic functionality as a stable window manager and solid desktop widget drawing and resizing. Instead they're working on ever more features, ever more APIs and deamons that work as centralized points of failure...
Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l (Score:3, Insightful)
Apart from modding offtopic, is there anything else we can do?
And no I won't read at a higher threshold because of moronic moderators who bury other people's opinions with troll and flamebait mods.
Re:Hint for choosing default colors (Score:4, Insightful)
The non-interactive elements need to blend in, so yes they have to look "boring" and grey is a neutral color. The widgets, on the other hand, should pop up a bit (not Fisher-Price, plastic toys Windows XP-style pop though), so they should have some color to it.
I can't see the screenshots, the website is already slashdotted.
its a pity people/distros cant read (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone paying attention knew that 4.0 WAS NOT ready for general use yet like children on Christmas eve, they couldnt wait.
But of course we are in the home of the 'cant be bothered to RTFA', so id have more chances explaining fellatio to Ellen Degeneres than to convince this lot to read something first.
The funniest thing is when 4.0 came out, you could still use v3.5 which was updated twice that same year but some people were sooooo incensed that 4.0 was exactly what it was (incomplete) that they decided to NOT to go back to 3.5 even though nothing stopped them from still using 3.5.
Its times like this you realize that people are idiots.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros. So KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for prime time, too bad. So why the hell were certain distros inflicting it upon their users if it wasn't ready? Couldn't they have tested it, noticed that it wasn't ready, and waited before deploying it? I really don't know what they were thinking. My distro of choice (Arch Linux) waited til KDE4 was done before rolling it out, and Arch mainly aims to be on the bleeding edge most of the time. In fact I installed 4.0 anyway, because I wanted to try it out, but I really appreciated Arch's common sense in handling the matter. Not so for too many of the other distros though.
I don't think you need to be worrying about KDE 5.0 for a little while, but even if it does turn up sometime soon-ish, there's no reason why it needs to be as painful as 4.0. For example, the change from KDE 2 to KDE 3 was pretty smooth. Even if this hypothetical 5.0 release was a major change from the KDE 4 series, I would imagine that the KDE devs might learn from past mistakes (gasp!) and do things differently this time around.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Question: Are you using Kubuntu? I tried it a bit on a friend's Ubuntu install, and it was utter garbage. Debian's KDE is infinitely better. I can't remember having Kopete or Akregator crash on me, and I use those all the time. KWin might crash when using compositing with poor drivers, but X.org is currently in a state of flux -- it was stable until my latest update.
Re:Labelling. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Manually semantic != semantic (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you need manual before you can go automatic
I think that's right. Many efforts at semantic "stuff" (on the web, on the desktop, ...) don't gain traction because of "chicken and egg" problems. No one wants to tag because it's useless; but it won't be useful until many things are tagged, so that a search returns useful results, and relationships between objects can be automatically discovered.
In this case, I agree that manual tagging is a necessary precursor to more automated tagging. Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible. For instance text and word processors should be doing word frequency analysis and tagging with appropriate topics; code editors should tag with the language name; image editors should be doing crude image analysis and tagging (e.g. if it detects people in the image, this information should be saved somewhere; if the user applies red-eye correction, the location of the eyes/face should be recorded somewhere). Once this meta-data becomes more common, it's easy to see the utility. (e.g. Search: "A picture I edited last week that has three people in it...")
Even with manual tagging, the system can be fairly useful. You don't need to tag every single file for it to be useful: if you tag some group of files as "taxes 2009" then you'll be able to later find them, even if you haven't tagged much else. The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context. For instance the tagging in Apple's iPhoto is neat--but I quickly lost interest because I knew none of the tags would carry-over elsewhere. If I tag meticulously, I can search within iPhoto but nothing shows up in a desktop search using spotlight (at least the last time I checked; maybe they've since added that functionality?)... and the tags don't persist if I move the files to another system. For the user to feel like tagging is worthwhile, the tags have to be widely accessible, so that searching for them is actually useful.
Please: No More Vertical Text (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear KDE devs,
Please rethink the vertical text [tinypic.com] that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.
Thanks.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they need to get away from the 4.x series, it's a great desktop now, but a lot of people still have a bad taste in their mouth from only having tried 4.0. Similarly to how Vista SP3 is called "Windows 7," KDE should abandon 4.x and jump on the 7 bandwagon (Windows 7, Intel i7) and release 4.4 as KDE7; possibly KDE8 just for good measure.
Disclaimer: I am aware that Vista SP3 is distinct from Windows 7.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former user of Kubuntu and KDE, I agree with what you say: Kubuntu IMHO sucks.
I believe that that is big problem for KDE. Ubuntu has become the standard "easy and ready to use" Linux desktop. It is not perfect, it has a large share of problems but it has become the standard. As most new users will try out KDE through Kubuntu, and have a bad experience.
Add to that the KDE4 fiasco, and you get as a result KDE's popularity nowdays, a mere shadow of what it was years ago (when it was the preferred choice of more than 2/3 of the folks voting at LinuxJournal yearly poll).
Video thumbnails in dolphin/konqueror? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Last piece (Score:3, Insightful)
After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does.
What on earth can it be doing such that 400MB of RAM is justified? AFAICT, it's nothing more than a glorified metadata database. Sounds like the precise opposite of "lean" to me...
Every time it is thousands of bugs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Since KDE 4.2, they claim that "now" it is ready for general consumption, but at each new version they still claim to have fixed thousands of bugs.
If that 18000 number is to believed, doesn't that imply that 4.3 was a horribly buggy release?
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the problem with posts like yours - all the evidence is anecdotal. Although I had the occasional (still, quite rare) kwin crashes in 4.2.x, I had none since I updated. No idea what the widget-resize problem is, everything's smooth as silk here. Sound works like a champ, I use xine (with pulse enabled), plays everything smoothly. I only have the gstreamer backend installed because it's needed by a DVD authoring app (devede I believe). I haven't had akonadi installed on my setup until about 10 days ago. Since than, it has been running without any problems..
On a final note, Arch's packages are pretty much vanilla packages, and they rock solid (no pun intended). There was a brief period during the xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 update (they all happened at the same time on arch) that caused problems for many users, specifically those who have nvidia cards.... but all problems have been solved in less then a week. Again, if KDE works fine here, works fine on Mandriva (at least that's what I heard), then your distro's implementation is to be blamed, not KDE...
Re:Last piece (Score:3, Insightful)
I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.
That is strange. I am running KDE 4.3 on Debian Squeeze, and that option is there. I use it printing documents from Okular all the time. The printing does have many other issues though. It doesn't have even/odd page option so I can do manual duplexing, and setting page margins has me completely befuddled. When I print a document from Kwrite it doesn't have any margin settings of it's own - and the margin settings for the printer (which I am told are really there to define the unprintable areas for the printer) reset to the defaults each time I change them.
My biggest problem with KDE 4.3 is the fact that SSL is completely broken. I've stopped using Konqueror altogether because of this, and it causes annoyances in KMail as well. I can't believe they released with a bug that serious.
Re:Labelling. (Score:2, Insightful)
Really?
IMO a think all of the blame lies with KDE. If it wasn't ready for prime time, then don't mark it as a release.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah I kept hearding that so i went for a meander around debian and fedora and TBH i'm yet to see what people are talking about, there are differences but KDE in kubuntu is not significantly different from that in debian (kde3 vs kde3) or fedora (kde4 vs kde4).
I haven't run openSuse or mandriva yet so perhaps they are truly better but Debian's KDE is not significantly better and in fact lacked tweaks that had not made it upstream yet, so I'm starting to suspect it's just more generic ubuntu hate or as a result of ubuntu seeing more work on gnome, because I'm at a push to see any real difference.
Upgrade path for 3.x users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless there is an upgrade path for the current users of KDE-3.x, I'm not interested. I wish, somebody were to simply fork the project an picked up the 3.x branch, porting to Qt-4.x (easy) and merging fixes (tedious), but maintaining compatibility with the existing installs.
Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how...
If, as some KDE-apologists claim, version 4 is a "whole new desktop environment", then KDE-3.x is abandoned and I may as well consider Gnome or something yet different for the future. If KDE-project wants old users to trust them, they need to make their new code backward-compatible. In fact, if they are really good, they'd try to keep compatibility going both ways — so that you could go back to KDE-3 (such as when sharing home-directory with a system, that does not have KDE-4 installed) and things will work as much as possible. For example, the format of KNotes has not changed at all and the data can be shared between old and new versions of the application...
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Labelling. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like blaming the butcher when a restaurant under-cooks your chicken.
Certainly, KDE used poor meat handling practices.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.
I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?
Where KDE4 really fell flat for me was feature parity between the new core apps and their 3.5.x predecessors. My experience is that these crucial apps regressed or substantially changed in many ways. My work flow in photo image processing more or less died with the new Gwenview, which changed its feature set and behavior substantially, and I hear a lot of complaints from users of Amarok, which was a stellar music player in KDE 3.5. IMHO, the real "KDE is ready to use now" release (call it 4.0 or whatever) should have been the one where the core apps had at least 90% of their previous features, if not full feature parity.
Me, I'm still on KDE 3.5 and wondering where to go next. I love the new libraries and the overall look of the new desktop ... but that's the problem: it's a new desktop. Whether I leap to KDE4, Gnome, or something else, it's the same amount of work to me, and that's where the KDE project screwed up.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
How to remain sane and happy (Score:3, Insightful)
Tip of the day: don't think in terms of megabytes, megahertz, etc. Think in terms of money.
$75 worth of RAM should be enough for anyone. $90 of disk space is enough for MythTV, though $270 of disk space works a lot better. AMD's $60 CPU is better than Intel's $60 CPU, but Intel's $300 CPU is better than AMD's $300 CPU. And so on.
Re:its a pity people/distros cant read (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone paying attention knew that 4.0 WAS NOT ready for general use yet like children on Christmas eve, the developers couldn't wait to label it as a stable integer release.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
just a minor nitpick: a project is dead when it has no devs, not no users.
But as long as it has users, one might become a dev...
Re:Labelling. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?
For one, because the distros didn't seem to hear or pass on those warnings. The KDE-centric distros pretty much all went "and now we're upgrading you to 4.0" as if it was the most natural upgrade path in the world. And I dare you to find any place in the release announcement [kde.org] that gave you any hint that's it's not for everyone. You hear "Wait for x.1" about every x.0 release, so you expect the general warnings of "this is a major new release, expect bugs" but still have certain expectations. They would have to come with much, much more explicit warnings that said "This is NOT what you normally expect from a x.0 release, it's much, much more incomplete and buggy than that. Maybe they did but it was a whisper compared to the fanfare it was introduced with.
Re:Labelling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shuttleworth has made several comments about wanting to see a future Gnome built in Qt, and said a few times that he felt the real innovation was happening in KDE-land. I often wonder if he regrets hitching his wagon to Gnome.
I think Ubuntu is the primary reason that Gnome is still being pushed along as much as it is. However, GTK+ was not designed initially to power a desktop. Given that Qt ships out of the box with a Clearlooks engine, and that Qt is a better multi-platform framework, I don't know why there hasn't been some serious discussion to perhaps move a future Gnome to Qt.
You gain all the benefits of a modern Qt framework, yet you can still design with the concepts that Gnome is supposed to be based on (sane, simple desktop). You can follow Gnome conventions and perhaps just deliver a BETTER Gnome experience.
Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
See, nobody forces you to update.
Not entirely true. I don't know how the KDE team managed it, but at some point in time, long before KDE 4 was actually something I'd call stable, most distributions (Fedora, Kubuntu, ...) dropped KDE 3 support.
So, if you wanted to upgrade your distribution (in order to get new version of other programs, not related to KDE), you were pretty much stuck with KDE4.
Re:System Activity feedback (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, brilliant. Thank you for the opportunity.
First, the positive: the System Activity app is excellent, one of the pieces of KDE that doesn't piss me off of late. I was particularly impressed when I noticed that System Activity takes note when I strace a process and adjusts its display accordingly. It's the small details.
Now, on to the feature request: more detailed memory displays. Based on the mouseover text for the memory column I am not sure if the calculation is made based on the contents /proc/<pid>/smap (Shared_* and Private_*) or guestimated from RSS and VSZ as used to be traditional. A way to group processes by library loaded and (private) memory allocated for those libraries would also be great. No big deal if you find it too much trouble to implement, though: SysAct is already pretty damn fine and I like it.
Re:Labelling. (Score:2, Insightful)
bollox, its was labelled by KDE as a developers release to encourage the porting of applications to KDE4. If people/distros couldn't read/understand that then its their problem, not the KDE team. People shouldn't blame others for their own shortcomings in reading and comprehension. Its a yawn to still read this sort of crap excuse from posters. I read reasons the KDE team put out, understood them and didn;t install 4.0 as a result.
Re:Please: No More Vertical Text (Score:1, Insightful)
You are aware that the space you call wasted is meant to be hidden?
And what is the problem with horizontal scrolling on text longer than the width of the text area? Not everybody wants their text to be line wrapped, I do so I just enable it.
What Windows Vista or 7 ideas are they aping? The critique of the horizontal tabs have existed since at least the 3.x days, long before Vista or Windows 7, so it can't that you are referring to.
The accusation that KDE is copying windows have existed even longer, but I've never seen someone actually point to a feature that is a copy.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
"I shouldn't have to dig into your dev or user mailing list to determine if I should pick up a version."
While I'm with you about your overall message, I can't agree with the above sentence. You (as an end user) shouldn't go to the devs' mailing list *at all*; that's the distribution packagers' work (or yours, only if you happen to be a developer/integrator). For them it's easy (and kind of an obligation) to find what a release is meant to.
Where you really need to put the culprit (if anywhere) is at the distribution level since it's at that level where the decision of including or not including a given software/version is taken.
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
When it is released to early:
"Release early, release often is our mantra"
When it is not released yet:
"We have no artificial deadlines - it's released when it's ready"
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because you don't understand the process. Just because it's released, doesn't mean you should use it on your production server/main computer. It's meant both for bug tracking as well as indicate the direction they're headed. In the end, it's a way of producing better software, by having much more beta testing, and more envolvment of the community.
See the Debian Development Process [wikipedia.org]. A packages version is early released to unstable. As its main problems get fixed, it migrates to testing. Then it spends some time until its mature and all (or almost) the bugs have been squashed, and that's when it is ready for inclusion in the next stable release.
Just because it's release, doesn't mean it has to be ready-for-production. Also see the Agile methods: in some, you can distribute snapshot of your software to the clients every two weeks. It's not a full product, it's a way of getting the client to understand how is the development progress going, and where is it headed.
Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users? (Score:3, Insightful)
QT3 and QT4 have substantial API differences - the amount of effort to port a KDE3 app to QT4 would be far above what you are implying. While I agree with the intentions of your post, and strongly support backward compatibility, you might as well be asking for GNOME to be ported to KDE4. It could happen, and there are people already considering going about it, but it's a massive undertaking that won't bear fruit any time soon and will only ever see the light of day in enough people care (which right now, they don't... KDE4 apps, even in the 4.3 release, do lack some things that 3.5.x has... but they also have some things 3.5.x lacks, and most 4.3 users seem fairly content with their feature-sets).
Re:Labelling. (Score:3, Insightful)
How the KDE team managed it? I'll tell you how. By telling everyone very loudly "Hey everyone, this is not ready for prime time, we are putting it out for testing and feedback, it will eat your babies and make your daughter worship the devil!"
Seriously. Everyone was warned. No one was ignorant.
Also, wrt Kubuntu, that should in no way be taken as indicative of the quality of KDE. In fairness, I haven't tried 9.10 yet, but since KDE 4.0 shipped, I have found every successive Kubuntu release to be unbearably bad. I have since switched to Arch, which has a thriving KDE community, and have not looked back.