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.
Good to see the progress (Score:5, Interesting)
I've since switched to XFCE since Gnome went batshit crazy, but if I had to choose between the major DE's KDE ain't half bad. I used to use KDE 2.x way back in the day and switched away from it when KDE 3.0 came out (though I still install it and try it out every now and then), but recently developments have proven that while I don't like the direction KDE took, it certainly could be a lot worse.
Trinity seems to be kickin' as well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good to see the progress (Score:1, Interesting)
Because Unity is as batshit crazy as Gnome 3?
KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity (Score:4, Interesting)
I've tried for years to like KDE, and I just can't. It's too *busy*. It's the first desktop I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use right away - I clicked on a button, and up popped "Activities". Creating a new activity left me with a blank screen and nothing to do. Everything is animated and glowing, with huge distracting icons and drop-shadows.
GNOME is all right. GNOME 3 might be weird, but at least it's trying to do something other than emulate Windows or Mac OS X. It's just too buggy for my tastes.
XFCE is all right too, but I was turned off by how haphazard and...unprofessional Xubuntu was. I didn't like having to explain to my eight year old nephew's mother why he was asking what "Gigolo" did, for example.
Unity, despite its many faults, comes with Ubuntu. Despite *its* many faults, Ubuntu is the only open source OS I've used that actually seems like an integrated product. With Unity on Ubuntu, you don't get things like "Gigolo" which is just stupid or "lxrandr" which is inscruitable. You don't get a million different ways to customize things down to where you can make your desktop look like an angry fruit salad. That may or may not be a good thing.
Also, say what you will about Mir but Ubuntu is at least trying to make an integrated system. The other desktops are really poorly integrated with the rest of the system, resulting in my having to explain to my father "No, you're using Debian" "I thought I was using Linux" "You are, it's the Debian distribution" "Why is this called GNOME Terminal then?" "That's the desktop environment" "This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.
I hate to say it, but the non-baseline-Ubuntu distributions are not really doing a great job of making a desktop operating system. Like was said the recent thread on Fedora Core's newly-proposed model: they're just a bunch of products from different people thrown together into one mass. I appreciate the amount of effort the distributors go to, but Ubuntu has gone just a little bit farther and made something that feels like a modern, unified operating system. Some people don't like that, but a lot do.