KDE 4.4 Released Alongside Website Redesign 368
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the new-and-shiny dept.
from the new-and-shiny dept.
Cryophallion writes "KDE 4.4.0 has finally been released, along with a redesign of the KDE.org website. New features include tabbed windows, improved desktop search and social desktop features. 'Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented.' A feature guide is also available."
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a similar opinion, but ended up upgrading to KDE 4.x from 3.x when it hit 4.3. While things are different, I find it very useful. The only thing I miss at this point is Quanta has no love -- or replacement.
Wait until there is a live distro using 4.4 and give it a try. Remember, different is different, not necessarily worse or better.
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not an expert on these things, but I'm fairly sure that is a complaint about Debian, not KDE. I'm not familar with how Debian does it, but if they handle things anywhere near the same as the Kubuntu people do, that would explain a lot...
Complaints from a GNOME user about ease of configuration are amusing though ;)
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree 100%. Amarok jumped the shark when it went to version 2.x. To the point where it was one of the best mp3 players to what the hell is this?
That said, KDE was almost unusable at 4.0 but is now quite nice (I used Gnome for a bit).
Can I put my taskbar at top now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Kubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
After the pathetic state of the last several Kubuntu releases...
I think that's half your problem right there.
Re:It still sucks for developers (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is different from most Linux projects how?
I don't think KDE should view itself as "most" Linux projects. KDE isn't an application, its a framework and base upon which to CREATE an entire desktop environment. Given the amount of hours which have obviously gone in to code development, I'm just asking for a tiny fraction of that effort put toward helping me understand how to develop apps for it. Open source shouldn't have to be synonymous with amateurism. And like I said, I'd be happy to help with docs, but I need some guidance. I really am not in the mood to spend several weekends working on docs just to have some "guru" tell me that I'm completely full of crap and I've just been wasting my time (and this has happened to me a couple times, it really has a tendency to sour a person toward contribution).
Re:Oh that's easy to explain (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can I put my taskbar at top now? (Score:1, Insightful)
> There's no such thing as a taskbar. There are Plasma panels,
This, this right here is what's wrong with KDE4.
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't care any less about how "cool" KDE4 is. I care about stability and functionality and being able to get my work done. What are your opinions on the functionality? Is it working well for you for day to day work? Any glaring bugs or issues? You also mentioned about external projects saying they "are stabilizing." Does that mean that they are not yet stable and have work to do to become stable?
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Kubuntu consistently puts out the worst KDE packages. If you want a good KDE desktop, please try another distro like openSUSE, Fedora, Sabayon, Arch, PCLinux OS, Mandriva, etc.
If you want to blame someone for the "disaster", consider pointing a finger at your distro.
Usually when I make this statement, half the time I get modded troll. The other half of the time I get modded informative. Frankly, I don't care. But I am speaking the truth here. Anyone who follows KDE knows that 90% of the complaints seem to stem from people running terrible Kubuntu packages.
Re:Hah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh that's easy to explain (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is here is not mean, honest people on the internet - who are never going away by the way, even if I felt too bored to comment - the problem is ego. The giant ego on some people who want to claim their opus is finished when it's not, and they know it, but they just want to pretend.
And they know perfectly well it's not - the bug database tells them so. But they label it "finished" "v10" "stable" anyway. And that's just kind of shameful when you're KDE. It's even worse when people do it on filesystems, databases, mailservers, router firmwares, kernels, etc.
Your no-meanies-giving-criticism world would be a dangerous one. Be thankful you live in the real one instead.
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
I totally agree though, Amarok turned into complete and utter shit
Hard to believe, but this is an understatement. I cannot think of any application that turned into a huge steaming pile like Amarok. Maybe Kino after the 0.6.x changes.
Re:Can I put my taskbar at top now? (Score:2, Insightful)
> There's no such thing as a taskbar. There are Plasma panels,
This, this right here is what's wrong with KDE4.
Yes, it's entirely too flexible and properly-abstracted, we might restrict user choice!
(the fact the default configuration is incredibly like the Windows 95 contruct, not withstanding).
For the mentally handicapped, click on the 'cashew' and drag the label 'screen edge' to the top of the screen. Gods, when did the Slashcrowd devolve into babies that need to be spoon-fed? The typical Mac user is less afraid to explore his desktop options.
Re:Amarok 2.x (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a goddamned music player, why should I have to "make an effort" at all? Not to mention, that is hardly the only thing wrong with it.
I was patient with Amarok 2 for a long time. Far too long. Eventually I got fed up and wrote my own fucking client for xmms2 so I could finally listen to music with something that wasn't a complete pain in the ass and could reliably scan my music collection without placing all of my Rush albums under random jazz artists.
Re:Oh that's easy to explain (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, when someone tries it and has a ligit complain, they're told, STFU, you get what you pay for.
I am trying really hard to remember reading a bug report that was answered with STFU. Maybe because complaints look more like offence (Concern look like doing a lot of that on this topic) in direction of /. (where maturity is not a prerequisite), then STFU answer is not surprising.
In your opinion, how should "OMG, KDE suxors, crashes all the time. And Amarok, gah!!!" be addressed? With "Thank you for valuable input, we will address these issues right away"?
Re:Gnome 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gnome 3 (Score:1, Insightful)
This really tells you everything you need to know about Gnome/KDE.
Also, you've got to love the double standards: People still whine about KDE4.{0,1}, and hold up gnome as some golden standard. Gnome 2.0 was a total trainwreck, and it took them about 6 years to recover to a point comparable with 4.1.x, which KDE reached 6 months after 4.0
Re:Is it time to look yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
My forays into the KDE 4.x release series were unpleasant too, although not necessarily for stability problems.
Look, it's obviously a labor of love, but sometimes the eyes of love are a bit blind to faults. The hardest thing to do in any creative endeavor is to set aside some idea you really love. But you have to do it, otherwise you end up with an exuberant but irritating mess. KDE 4 had a kind of an Andy Hardy "hey kids, let's revolutionize desktop technology!" feel to it. Or maybe like an art show for young UI designer's desktop concepts. It doesn't have a natural feel to it, by which I mean that after a few minutes with it you forget you're using some arbitrary set of conventions. It's an attention grabbing user interface, and I don't want my attention grabbed. I have my own uses for my attention.
The things I value in a user interface are consistency, responsiveness, and deference. I want the interface to stay out of my way, not to educate me on somebody's philosophy of user interface design. I regard my computer a my slave. When I give it an order, I want to be able to that quickly and have the result be absolutely predictable in how long it takes and how it ends up. I am not interested in any shuck-and-jive that the user interface designers want to throw into the process.
The whole program of revolutionizing the desktop is out of date anyway.
Re:Amarok 2.x (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire aim of Amarok is to provide contextual information about your library (and all other music sources you play) to help you rediscover your music.
There are simple players like Juk.
If you want a really simple client, then Amarok is not for you. If you liked Amarok 1.4, but don't like the defaults in Amarok 2, it takes less than a minute to configure it how you want.
I'm not seeing any reasonable explanation for someone being upset that Amarok 2 being MORE FLEXIBLE than Amarok 1.4 when it comes to making it look and operate how you want.
I already know the music I own and it's accompanying context. Hell I follow the bands I like, buy their CDs, even rip them to flac/mp3/ogg/whatever when I'm at my workstation to have background music [assuming I'm not doing heavy compiles and then I turn to the standard home system]. I have the liner notes, know what gear they used, etc. Amarok is still a POS design and those fat buttons at the top look like a 12 year old designed them. The interface looks like a bad version of Kopete's contact list, mixed with a center piece for the Artwork and other stuff with the right column being a narcissistic opportunity to rate my own music. I bought it. I already like it.