KDE 4.8 RC 1 Now Available 140
jrepin writes with this quote from an article at Phoronix: "Just in time for some holiday testing, the KDE SC 4.8 Release Candidate is now available. The final release of KDE 4.8 is about one month away, but now the release candidate is available to ensure it shapes up to be a solid release. Among the features of KDE Software Compilation 4.8 is support for Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, quite visible improvements to the Dolphin file-manager, KSecretService is now available as a shared password storage pool, and there's many performance improvements. Lots of bug fixes (measured in hundreds) can also be found in KDE 4.8."
Re:Serious Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Slackware uses KDE as default
Yep, Slackware threw out the window GNOME many years ago, all the while keeping those 3-4 GTK+ useful applications.
The best decision they ever took. A pity some major distros never followed suit.
Re:Serious Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Serious Reply (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Serious Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Because "nobody" knows about KUbuntu. People getting into Linux for the first time pick Ubuntu, because that's what they've heard about, and they have no idea that Kubuntu even exists, let alone what it means, what Unity is, what KDE is, what Gnome is, or anything else that you take for granted.
The end result is that people are getting an exposure to "Linux" thinking "Linux = Unity", and by implication, "Linux sucks - this is garbage". They could, instead, be getting exposed to KDE, which does not suck, but the Ubuntu maintainers are too proud to admit that they have made a mistake, even with overwhelming feedback from the community.
Don't take YOUR level of linux knowledge as representative of everyone's. Most people have no idea that unlike most OSs, you can pick different desktop environments like KDE or Gnome or XFCE. It isn't something they necessarily even want to understand. If it's more complex than "Push this single download button" on your distro's download page, then in a very real sense people DO have to go out of their way to get KDE. And they don't know that they can, by and large.
I *really like* KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
I like KDE. I don't hear that said often, though. So I figured I'd say it, and relate my excitement and thanks for all the hard work that's gone into this impending new release.
Thanks, devs.
Re:Serious Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Judging by how Unity turned out, I think they felt that Gnome 3 wasn't crippled, frustrating, or slow enough.
4.7 KMail == Total Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been a KDE fan since 1.x, but one of the worst pieces of OSS I've ever used was in KDE 4.7 -- KMail 2. I thought it might just be me, but a little research showed that every distro shipping it has had many angry users. For me on OpenSUSE it's been an endless source of lost incoming and outgoing mail, performance problems, and generally horrible bugs. Totally broken development process -- the problems were widely reported during at beta, but ignored since KDE leadership insists on pushing the buggy/leaky Akonadi-Nepomuk stuff regardless of what it means to end users. I'll give KMail in 4.8 another chance, but I don't hold out much hope -- it's been years since Akonadi was introduced and everything associated with it has been a disaster.
The rest of KDE 4.7 is absolutely terrific though.
Re:Serious Question (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it condescending how you suggest offering "no choice" at install time is somehow protecting the new user.
How the hell is a new user supposed to know or care why there are bunch of different desktops, all of which do more or less the same thing but in different ways? How the hell is a new user meant to pick apart the war of words that has been going on for over a decade over which desktop is supposed to be the best.
The sensible thing for any dist is to pick one desktop and be done with it. If someone is in any way informed on the matter they will choose a dist which matches their preference, or will know how to install an alternative post-install.
So yes it is protecting the new user since it relieves them a question that they don't know the answer to, and of downloading a larger iso file. Arguably it also protects the dist since they don't have to waste time & resources supporting multiple desktops with all the overheads in support and bug fixing entailed by that.