A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 122
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."
Will it perform better? (Score:2, Insightful)
Biggest problem with KDE is its massive memory usage and poor performance on low-end hardware. It's much worse than GNOME not to mention the actual lightweight DE's.
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.
Re:For the lazy: (Score:5, Insightful)
The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.
...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...
KDE 4 has had five releases since Jan '08. It wasn't until 4.3 in August '09, 19 months after 4.0, that the thing became tolerable. Prior to then it was very unstable, amazingly memory hungry and lacking features that 3.5.x had had for years. If the only thing 4.5 and all future 4.x releases accomplish is stability enhancements, bug fixes, even less memory use and recovering those few missing features that vanished with 4.0 then the KDE developers deserve our praise.
As far as I'm concerned they can take all that PIM stuff, Akonadi whatever and shovel the lot into 5.x. Do as you will with Konquerer's HTML engine but, with respect, DO NOT FUCK UP THE FILE MANAGEMENT functionality. Linux already has several good browsers so Konquerer's ability to render web pages has little or no actual value any longer.
it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.
Whatever. If they are working on stability and efficiency they do the lords work. 4.x should be rock solid, fast, efficient and feature complete. The rest is damage that belongs in 5.x, which needs to start existing sometime soon and then bake for a good half decade or more.
Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy" (Score:4, Insightful)
He is probably just indicating that those with the most issues seem to strangely be coming from the kubuntu camp, fedora, opensuse etc seem to treat kde as more a first class citizen than second.
Then again it could just be typical ubuntu users are more from the newer to linux camp and thus complain more in general.
Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was having various stability problems with KDE4 (up to and including 4.4) on pretty much every distro I've tried - Kubuntu was on the list, but also OpenSUSE and Mandriva.
I do run Arch now, and 4.4 seemed to be better in that in terms of stability. But the whole thing still feels so unpolished coming from either KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.x that I can't be bothered.
It feels like KDE4 developers are chasing the uber vision of the desktop of the future (which is totally unlike the desktop of today) that they have in their head, and KDE4 releases that we see in the meantime are stepping stones on that road. So they're neither here nor there, and it is not clear when the road is going to end (if it is going to at all, which I'm starting to doubt at this point).
Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For the lazy: (Score:3, Insightful)
Like this guy, I have nothing good to say about the KDE developers and their current desire to remove code and replace it with new, less functional, more buggy, code that just happens to have their names on it. It's like they just want to check in stuff with their name to get credit in the community ("I wrote most of KDE, all by myselfs!").
Had I posted this on a KDE forum, it would have been deleted before morning.
Re:For the lazy: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't understand why they want to deprecate the best file manager ever and elevate the worst browser ever.
Re:Please tell me its better. (Score:1, Insightful)
KDE 4 has been just as good as 3.5 for awhile now.
Only if you're very, very high. Put away the bong, and I think you'll find that KDE4 quickly loses its appeal.
Dolphin will do whatever you were doing in Konqueror most likely.
It does not even come close to matching what I use Konq for.
I disliked Dolphin at first, but when tabs were implemented (several years ago), I wasn't able to discern any functional difference really.
This is known as "Putting lipstick on a pig".
A previous post summed it up very well as "the trainwreck that is KDE4". Here's a concept for the KDE devs: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If you guys wanted to implement the Next Big Oooh Shiny, you should have started your own fucking project that could die a miserable flaming death on its own without dragging my stable, unobtrusive, and extremely usable desktop along with it to the graveyard.
Thank the gods I was able to find a working KDE3 repo after installing openSUSE 11.2 for the first time recently. I've had to do a little tweaking but I've nearly got to the point where I've got my customary desktop back, no thanks to you brain-dead morons. If/when that's no longer possible, I'll go back to WindowMaker.
--Zontar The Mindless (9002), posting anon because KDE4 is not worth logging in for.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
And honestly... once you make that desktop, you may as well as stop all development except for bug fixes, otherwise people will complain that it is turning into the next KDE.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a DE really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.
Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.
'In truth, graphics and sound are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a shell really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.
Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own shell functionality around bash shell than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.'
Should Free Software really be playing a game of catch-up to proprietary software? The two main proprietary OSs are Mac, which defaulted to a GUI in 1984, and Windows which did the same in 1985. KDE and Gnome, the two main Free Software GUIs, came out around 1997 and 1998, 13 years later.
Now, GUIs were new fangled way of interacting in the 80s. What's the new fangled equivalent at the moment? One candidate is Internet-accessible services/databases/RDF/LinkedData/SemanticWeb/etc. At the moment these are almost entirely Web-centric: everyone's solution to interoperability and ubiquitous access seems to be to dump more stuff on the Web. Let's see how that might pan out:
Success: Everything is now done in the browser. The desktop paradigm dies, taking projects like KDE with it, and everything becomes the browser tab.
Failure: It doesn't work out properly. We're left with a mess of incompatible, buggy sites that make trying to get anything done a nightmare. It's all thrown out as a bad idea because it didn't work on the Web. We move back to the desktop, which has none of the networked-database goodness.
Now, what happens if a desktop like KDE integrates this technology into itself? In the success case that the Web takes over, KDE does not die. It becomes even more useful since it can interact with all of these Web equivalents because it's all standard. No more "doesn't work with Linux/BSD/etc.", because everything's on the Web, and KDE is an extension of that Web outside the confines of HTML and the browser.
In the failure case that this Web migration breaks down then not all hope is lost, since this stuff is still available in every other application that doesn't happen to be Web-based.
In reality, of course, there'll be a middle ground. However, you can bet that in the next few releases of OSX and Windows there will be equivalents to Nepomuk turning up. Of course the Windows one will look like a combination of Exchange and the registry, such that small database updates can break the system, and nobody sans Microsoft can interact with it. The OSX one will probably be more standard, stable and useful, but the database will only allow updates from the iTunes Data Store. Do we really have to wait for such crippled systems to cement themselves in place before we realise that we want one too, or do we grab some EU funding now and try to do it right?
It doesn't stop you from using KDE4, or KDE3, or sitting in a console and doing your image editing via Emacs on an XPM file.
So it was an accident? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's really not better.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it's just one more example of how mainstream Linux has lost sight of the UNIX philosophy.
Re:So it was an accident? (Score:2, Insightful)
It really *is* better.
You see GNOME actively drops features and then the drop itself is presented as a new feature. The dropped features will not come back. The developers think its actually better that way. (Its a whole philosophy)
KDE has had some features missing due to the change from 3.x to 4.x. In the beginning quite a bit of features were lacking, but gradually most have been re-introduced. If any are still missing (and it might be the case) then this is considered a *bug*. And it will be fixed in the future (shortage of manpower or developer interest non-withstanding obviously).
Personally, i don'd miss a single feature anymore that i used in the 3.x era and there are quite a few new awesome stuff.
So, yes, it is much much better. KDE does not drop features because it assumes the user is an idiot. There simply was a period that some went missing due to a significant architectural change. The vast majority have been re-implemented and the remaining are a matter of time.
It can't think of a simpler way to put this and i thought it was pretty obvious but apparently some mod disagreed.
Re:So it was an accident? (Score:4, Insightful)
You really think dropping features for years at a time in a stable release is ok if you just call it a bug, effectively meaning there is no stable release?
All your hyperbole aside, the Gnome strategy is at least honest. There's no reason they couldn't opt to put back whatever features they've dropped in the future, but they're being up front that they're not going to now.