A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1

dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."

Slashdotted already...

[alfredos]

Sad... First post, and already:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Wonder what will happen to that poor server in just a couple of minutes? Will it beg for mercy? Resign and open a beach bar in the Caribbean?

For the lazy:

[X0563511]

What’s New? The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.
These are:

• A reworked notifications area;
• Window tiling;
• Webkit in konqueror;
• Stability improvements.

One of the big upgrades that was scheduled for KDE SC 4.5 was porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1. This is a little disappointing given that Akonadi has been full of promise for quite some time, with no real user visible outcomes. It would have been nice to see what Akonadi will bring to the party. However, it’s better to wait until all the kinks are ironed out. But unfortunately, it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.

That being said, there are a whole bunch of little improvements that I’ll talk about later on in this article.

Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 does

[agm]

The only thing holding me back from upgrading to KDE4 on my primary work computer (from KDE 3.5.10) is that I need an accelerated triple head display. From what I can tell this is just not possible with KDE4, while it is working fine with KDE 3.5.10.

Re:Well

[QCompson]

On a related note, Aaron Seigo had an interesting post on his blog (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html [blogspot.com]) where he struggled (mostly in vain) to explain to people why akonadi and nepomuk were needed or even useful. A lot of comments were similar to yours... basically, just give us a stable KDE desktop to run apps and stop messing around with whizzbang buggy features and eye-candy.

Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[victorhooi]

heya,

You know, I'm curious how many of the people complaining about bugginess and memory issues are running say, Kubuntu?

I'm on Arch Linux, and the KDE 4.x branch has been quite stable for me - the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.

And it's performed very well on my desktop, much more snappy/responsive than Gnome.

There's a lot of distributions that have done terribly, half-done jobs of packaging KDE. Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.

Arch has been stable for me, and openSUSE was quite good for KDE as well. Don't know about other distributions, but I've heard that outside of those two, the rest are pretty much a joke - they just do a bad job of packaging KDE, or adding their own half-done patches, and pushing out low-quality KDE desktops.

Cheers,
Victor

KDE 4.5 Beta 2 came out today

[TheCycoONE]

Interesting timing on this story. KDE 4.5 beta 2 was released today.

http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.5-beta2.php [kde.org] for the official announcement

Re:Will it perform better?

[fast turtle]

less resources than Banshee + Rssowl + Pidgin + Eclipse + Evolution + Evince.

and the reason why is because of Evolution. It's simply bloated beyond belief comparted to Slypheed, Pine or even Kmail. Yes I've used Kmail with Fluxbox along with Konq and Kwrite. Much smaller footprint even having to load the KDE binaries ontop of fluxbox then what I ever got with Evolution.

Re:For the lazy:

[adamofgreyskull]

fewer "feature" additions

I'd settle for zero feature additions and 100% feature retention.

Re:Well

[JackieBrown]

It's been forked - latest change was 4 days ago

http://github.com/gustavosbarreto/antico [github.com]

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[victorhooi]

heya,

Hmm, I really hope you know what you're talking about, and aren't just talking out of your rear-end...lol. Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've been a KDE fan since the 3.5 days, and a Ubuntu fan from around those days as well. So it was a natural progression to use Kubuntu. I've basically tried every Kubuntu release since 7.04, until around 9.10, when I basically gave up on it. The 8.x branch, from memory, was particularly patchy for me. I've also tried openSUSE for some time, and spent a bit of time with Fedora. Of these, Arch Linux, either with it's stock KDE packages or KDEmod has been the best, and Kubuntu by far has been the worst.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "in the same place", but they most certainly aren't the vanilla KDE packages - part of the whole point of Ubuntu is they add their own patches to the vanilla packages.

Look, if you don't believe me, take a look at these two articles, and in particular the comments on them:

Kubuntu Gets Some Love
http://www.osnews.com/comments/22113 [osnews.com]

http://www.osnews.com/comments/22348 [osnews.com]

Comments like this one:

"Kubuntu has always been a little unstable in my experience - even with KDE3, but since the switch to KDE4 it's been nearly unusable. openSUSE and Mandriva, for example, have the resources to work through a lot of the issues that have come up with KDE4, and I think on a whole both have done a great job. Kubuntu seems at a disadvantage, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone as a good distro to showcase KDE or even linux. It's just too buggy and frustrating. I have a lot of respect for the Kubuntu developers and their efforts, but they have a steep hill to climb."

Or this one:

"That's an appropriate comparison. I have to use Ubuntu at work and it's as if they go out of their way to damage KDE, so that people will get so disgusted with it that they'll switch to Gnome.

The problem with Kubuntu is not that it's being intentionally broken - it's just their shortage of resources. Blaming Kubuntu is stupid, because it's only so much a few guys can do.

It's a shame, really. It would be in KDE upstreams best interest to see that Kubuntu works well, because that's the distro they are going to get the majority of the users from. If you have a company policy specifying "Ubuntu", that's what you are going to use - and install kubuntu-desktop metapackage to get the kde environment."

or this one:

"Your attitude towards Kubuntu might be unfriendly, but it is kind-of deserved imho. Esp if you're a translator I can understand the frustration. I know and respect the two KDE-canonical employees (Aurelien and Riddell) but agree that Ubuntu puts less work in Kubuntu as it's user base would justify."

And there are more. As you can see, my views on Kubuntu's lack of polish is a fairly common one. Perhaps it's improved as of Lucid, I'm not sure. But the one time I did try the Lucid (Beta, mind you) Kubuntu live Cd, it refused to boot (IBM Lenovo X200 Tablet), and when I tried a later RC, it was horrible and broken (particularly plasma).

Cheers,
Victor