KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1 264
A few days ago, the KDE project shipped the first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release. Reader dmbkiwi submits a link to a rundown of what 4.7 looks like, snipping from which: "Previously it was Gnome that was the steady plodder making minor incremental changes through the 2.x series, building stability and only adding minor features. However, with the recent releases of both Gnome Shell and the Unity desktop on Ubuntu, the Gnome/Ubuntu side of the desktop linux equation has made radical and controversial steps away from the well loved Gnome 2.x series, leaving KDE 4.x as the 'steady as she goes' option."
Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much (Score:5, Insightful)
People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar.
Where does this notion come from? I've see in it before and I doubt it has any merit.
In fact, I would expect that the majority of people coming from Windows use Gnome since it is the default DE for Ubuntu and other popular distros.
Giving KDE a new chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's time to be cautiously optimistic again.
When Unity came out, I gave it its 21 days[*]. After that time, I was still not very happy with it, so I figured that after using Gnome 2 for a while, it was time to give KDE another chance.
Well, I'm glad I did. There are still little niggles here and there if you look up close, but as a whole, things work pretty darn well. They've finally managed to return to that KDE sort of state from the 3.5 days, where multitudes of little features activate as needed to support your workflow and otherwise stay the fuck out of the way. Klipper is still so freaking convenient that I miss it sorely wherever I don't have it (the Gnome equivalent, Glipper, unfortunately didn't work very well for me). Also, Chromium now natively supports the KDE password storage thing. Quassel is like a smoother X-Chat with less bugs.
All in all I've been somewhat pleasantly surprised, and I think I may keep it after its 21 days. There are still things that annoy me -- their overthought Akonadi thing, for instance; seriously, guys, I shouldn't need an RDBMS to freaking read mails -- but much fewer so than I feared. Maybe it's time to be hopeful again for that Linux desktop thing we've been hearing about.
[*] When trying out a new tech, you've got to give it at least three weeks of real use, it is said; otherwise you can't necessarily tell if it sucks or if it's just different from what you're used to, and thus, uncomfortable at first.
Re:Or stop fucking wasting space. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).
You were deprived of a proper desktop as a child. You know nothing of multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations is beyond your ken. It's like you were raised in a cage.
I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps.
I think you're out of your mind. Okular is the best document viewer I have ever seen. Show me a pdf reader that does a third of the things that Okular does, and does them half as well, and I will eat my hat. Kontact is absolutely gold. Even the file manager has been doing things for three years that Windows Exploder still can't even imagine doing. Marble...well, I was gonna say Marble's the best at what it does, but actually, it's the only application that I'm aware of that does what it does.
why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel
Yeah, we got that. We've had it for years. Have you looked? No you haven't, have you?
KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be.
"foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.
Re:Where are the GUI designers going to realise... (Score:4, Insightful)
> Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager.
Why changing something that works, for the worse?
> The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.
I wouldnt mind if all those fabulos capabilities you allegedly "enjoy", were for the better, but they arent. They are mostly a superficial, never ending designer circlejerkoff in fight for winning the useless "oh shiny, now wheres my starbucks app" crowd. But you cant win that crowd for more than a year, because they change trends faster then you change underwear. You fool yourself by thinking that every time you completely jettison the old, working configuration, for a completely new design, you are improving something, but you arent. Youve just entered the fashion zone, without realizing it.