KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look 224
dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparing GNOME 3 to KDE 4 is a great way to see the difference between the projects.
On one hand, the KDE devs managed to perform almost a complete rewrite for KDE 4. Qt 4 was radically different from Qt 3, and KDE 4 included a huge number of architectural changes, as well. Although it was an absolutely huge amount of work to do, but the KDE community managed to get it done within a couple of years, they got KDE 4.0 released, and it has provided them an excellent platform to build off of.
The changes for GNOME 3 are nowhere near as radical. It consists of mainly incremental improvements, with the version number being incremented to hide the fact that GNOME hasn't had a major release in almost a decade. They're not even moving to a significantly different version of GTK+ or anything like that, either. Yet this effort was started in 2008, but we aren't expecting to see anything useful from it until 2011, due to delays.
Strong Opinion != Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:3, Insightful)
I have 0 problems getting around / get work done on KDE (any version), and have regularly used KDE for day-to-day work years ago. My point was it just takes too much time to get to know it (well). Especially for ordinary users, who don't have the patience a power-user might have. With that as a given, anything that a n00b user (count me out) can't find quickly, is lost on that user. And you'll have to agree that non-power users are the vast majority of desktop users.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is coming from a Ubuntu (Gnome) user, so please blast away:
KDE needs to be heavily customized to make it usable for the Joe Public end users. Which is fine. That's what distributions do. The thing is, each distribution does it different, so the user experience with KDE can vary greatly depending on which distro he installs.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:0, Insightful)
No. You are still not getting it. You don't know the definition of the word troll. Nobody cares what tour opinion is, but we don't want you calling a legitimate poster a troll. You sir are why the mod system on Slashdot does not always work as intended. Please stop being ignorant, and learn what the terms mean, rather than spreading your ignorance like a disease.
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:4, Insightful)
[..] users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time.
Users do not - but professionals do.
All the little things chip time very fast - the time I'd rather did something useful, instead of bunch of mousewavings, modern desktops tend to impose on me. That's where the hundreds/thousands little options come into play: they allow user to remove the road bumps from the daily workflow.
That's why highly customizable desktops like KDE/Flux/WM/IceWM/etc would remain popular: many who graduate from being an end-user find GNOME, after getting "familiar" with it, quite limiting.
Though sure if you spend 90% of time in Evolution and FireFox, then you pretty much do not care what desktop you run and the whole argument about the desktop environments becomes moot.
Re:I have not liked KDE for quite a while (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's what's going on:
1. Akonadi - makes sense now that most people have big address books, have to sync calendar & contact data with multiple cloud based services and have multiple email addresses. The idea is much like an SQL server: let MySQL do the storage and retrieval work, and let the client application focus on logic. It's a great idea, but it's taken some time to get the implementation right. One of the real reasons that there are only a few viable desktop PIM applications is that you have an amazing amount of code to maintain to store and retrieve data. The Akonadi model will really pay off as developers start using it to integrate PIM data into their applications.
2. All the stuff running in the background: check the service manager in system settings. Now, if we could only get the program name reported to ps to be the same as the clear, easy to understand description in the service manager.
3. Well... there's AmaroK, BasKet, Okular and many others that don't start with K. It is actually nice though to be able to quickly see what is KDE and what isn't by the file name.
4. The recent two releases have really cleaned up a lot of the nagging problems KDE has had since the 4.0 change. The desktop is rock solid now.
You have to be kidding about configurability and themes, though. Even our desktop themes (see QTCurve & Bespin) and window decoration themes (see DeKorator & Arorae) have themes.
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:5, Insightful)
PEBCAK. KDE is useful in its default settings. As a rank n00b, you probably should try to get to know it before fiddling with settings you don't understand.
Really? This is the attitude you chose to go with?
What we have here is an OP who gave an honest and accurate critique of his/her experience with KDE. Simple as that. They thought it was too complicated, and that the complexity wasn't valuable. It didn't work in a manner that they desired, and that resulted in them disliking the software. This is exactly the kind of feedback the KDE team wants. All of the OP's problems should not exist - that's one of the KDE team's design goals. The OP's impressions, experiences, and feedback could, if funneled down to the right people, result in a superior desktop experience for everyone.
Instead you are quick to dismiss and blame the OP as incompetent and useless. This valuable feedback, while dismaying in the sense that it depicts a KDE team failure, is extremely useful for both parties. The user seems open and interested in thoroughly using the product, and the design team wants to create a product the user wishes to use. A person with the slightest (a) intuition, or (b) training in psychology and human-computer interfaces would tell you that this type of cooperation between developer and end-user is priceless. But here we have you, whose attitude is one of the stronger cancers on the open-source community.
Not every product is for everyone, but mainstream desktop environments and window managers are the exception. Creating a central piece of software as complex and feature-rich as KDE is extremely challenging. For any given use-case scenario, KDE has to provide a direct and obvious path to an end-goal while ensuring that every other feature keeps a low profile. This is hard stuff, and KDE is groundbreaking in their approach. Their team has developers, artists, engineers, managers, and designers all striving for this goal. The OP is a critical piece in that puzzle.
And as a disclaimer, I do, and probably always will, love KDE. KDE4 started out weak (by design) and is building towards an amazing desktop environment. Every subsequent release provides marked progress towards that ideal. I hope we get an entire gamut of feedback from every possible class of user, because that gives the KDE developers the kind of information they need to make good design decisions towards an ideal desktop environment.
Assholes like you really need to stop getting in the way of that ideal.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: ... then why so few distro's use it as their default DE?
A: Because there was a time, 10 years ago when Gnome was created to address a licensing problem with the library that powers KDE called QT. Gnome was built using GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit), which was GPL. KDE's QT was under a permissive commercial license that was not 100% GPL compatible. So most distributions that cared about free went the Gnome route, despite it consistently lacking features vs. KDE. At this point, KDE's QT is GPL licensed, and has been for some time and KDE has advanced significantly in capability over the past two years to the point that it's really not even close, so far as features, flexibility and technology under the hood go.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5. So far as performance goes, if your GPUs drivers are decent, KDE4 will run rings around Gnome (especially if you turn on OpenGL rendering for QT which effectively uses your GPU for rendering everything).
Really when it comes down to it, it's GREAT that there is a choice for users between KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Evolution and GNUstep. Giving users a real choice in how they interact with their computer is a really good thing because new and better ideas come from competition and exchange of ideas. It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war, because the holy part of the war died when QT was released under the GPL.
Re:I have not liked KDE for quite a while (Score:3, Insightful)
"I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey."
And then Apple copied them with the letter i, and I've never heard anyone describe that as childish.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:3, Insightful)
GNOME has stagnated, and is of little value these days. KDE is offers more features, better performance, greater reliability, and just an overall better experience in every way.
What is the point in relentless chase for more features? I am pleased with spartan Gnome, and to me it offers better experience. People have different tastes, and beauty of Linux is that you can choose different desktop without being forced to use something you don't like. In my opinion it would be better if more energy was spent on adding features and polishing various applications instead of desktop environments.
Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me (Score:5, Insightful)
My two points are:
* KDE isn't complicated in general use.
* The user chose the option to delve into the system and fiddle with things. That's the PEBCAK part. Not incompetence as much as misguided geekiness. It's your own fault if you spend hours tweaking instead of simply using a tool the way it's designed.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4"
that's funny. The release of 4.4 marked the day I stopped using it altogether. They decided that having 3 RDBMS (one for Amarok, one for Akonadi and one for strigi) is better than having one. They decided that Plasma and Kwin effects should come before memory leaks fixes (i.e.: Amarok) and so on.
KDE is more advanced technically but it's constantly lacking a certain amount of refinement that would make the project far better than competing DEs.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5).
Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.
Regardless, I can't stand KDE4. As mentioned all over, the interface is incredibly cluttered. While I don't like Gnome for not including more easily accessible advanced options which could be simply hidden/buried one level down, until the KDE developers learn to keep things simple and bury their options hardly anyone uses, and basically actually start heeding user interface design and workflow, Gnome will have to continue to be my DE of choice.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end all I want is something that places the programs somewhere on my screen.
Which programs? Where? On which screen? How do you move them? How do you find and launch the programs you want? How well do all of your programs integrate? How do you find specific files?
What you say is true, but misses the point. There is a huge amount that can be done to make your workflow more efficient than an environment which just requires you to manage everything yourself. I view KDE as something of an ongoing research project in this space, which is also fairly usable. There are some really cool and useful ideas in KDE right now... things like activities which, when fully completed, will allow you to define a set of applications and tools that you use together in particular ways. When you activate an activity, all of the relevant components are started and placed on-screen in the way that you want.
A simpler feature that KDE has long provided -- and which GNOME still doesn't and I don't believe Enlightenment, WindowMaker or XFCE provide -- is the ability to define per-application window settings that affect placement, sizing, etc., so that those apps always act in the defined ways. I use this to make my multiple desktops more efficient. Each of my virtual desktops holds a particular type of application, and each application is assigned to always come up on the appropriate desktop. So I never have to try to figure out which desktop a given app is on.
Comprehensive desktop search to make finding files easy, a good, efficient way to launch programs, seamless integration between applications, both local and on-line -- these are all things that a more sophisticated DE can provide. Oh, and yeah there's also eye candy, some of which has utility, and some of which is just pretty, and I do think aesthetic value is real value as well.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war
That almost couldn't be helped, since Gnome was explicitly created to try to kill off KDE (if you think that choice of words is harsh, you should read what some of the Gnome founders said back in the day). Gnome was created with a negative goal, and I think that underlying fact prevented them from excelling.
I now use Gnome only because distros tend to write their system settings UIs for Gnome first and then forget to write some of them for the KDE flavor.
The main problem KDE has is one of "sensible defaults", or lack thereof. A lot of buttons and functions that should be optional and looked-for by advanced users is pushed right in your face by default. Trying to coach new users on KDE (4.x especially) has been exasperating. The default KDE configuration should be nearly as simple as Gnome; Neither DE is trying to find a good balance in that regard.
Another problem is that people coming to a Linux distro have to be aware of things like "DE" apart from what their OS is. I usually find people understand when I first explain, but forget basic details and start to feel confused on the subject a couple of months later. Its one of the things that makes them reject "Linux" in the end.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:1, Insightful)
I know this sounds a bit strange and hard to believe, but the people working on Plasma and KWin aren't the same people that work on Amarok.
Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, he's not ignorant. His observations are spot-on from an end-user's point-of-view. This illustrates how the KDE devs are scratching their own itches. That's expected in open-source development, but KDE is a huge project, and it's released to end-users with the expectation that they will use it day-in, day-out. It's delusional to expect end-users to put up with segfaults and utter failures in software after five major iterations. But that seems to be the expectation of many KDE devs--or, at least, the sum of all their uncoordinated expectations.
What KDE needs is an overriding commitment to quality: it should be job #1. Bugs first, features (and ripping-out-and-replacing huge chunks) second.