KDE Software Compilation 4.11 Released 99
jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.11 of Software Compilation, which is dedicated to the memory of Atul 'toolz' Chitnis, a great Free and Open Source Software champion from India. This version of Plasma Workspaces will be supported for at least two years, and delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling. KWin window manager incorporates first experimental support for Wayland. This release marks massive improvements in the Kontact PIM suite, giving much better performance and many new features, like scam detection and scheduling e-mail sending. Kate text editor improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin file manager became faster, and the educational applications bring various new features. The Nepomuk semantic storage and search engine received substantial performance improvements."
The performance enhancements to nepomuk (KDE's semantic desktop engine) are particularly welcome. This release of the Plasma desktop also marks the end of Plasma version one; primary development focus will now switch to updating KDE for Qt 5. There should still be more updates to KDE 4, however. Also released recently by the KDE team was the first RC of Plasma Media Center 1.1.
Re:A Note about Plasma (Score:5, Insightful)
This has the appearance of being planned by adults. Put a bow on Plasma and shift resources to the Qt 5 port, refactoring oversize bits and reducing interdependence.
At least it makes sense. Sometimes GUI/DE people fail to do that. Make sense, I mean.
Re:Good to see the progress (Score:2, Insightful)
I installed Kubuntu on an old windows XP computer for a friend, the thing was visibly slower than XP. It took my friend 10 minutes to give up and reboot the computer on XP partition, never to come back.
This has started to become the problem lately: the biggest flagship desktops (KDE, Unity and GNOME3) are slower than Windows. To compete in the same ballpark, in Linux you have to downshift for example to XFCE (which is actually an excellent DE). But you have to trade off all of the 3D desktop eye candy. Not all people need those candies, but Windows can run them smoothly even on an Atom netbook or a crusty Pentium 4 box. On low-performance machines the graphics stack of Windows is just a winner. I don't know if Wayland or Mir makes an improvement to this, but I hope so.