KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released

Crobain writes "The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release."

Plasma again...

I am a very long time KDE user, and I expected 4.0 to be a great desktop, but it turned out to be a alpha so I kept using the old 3.x series.

The scope of 4.0 was quite big, so understood the problems and I hoped for 4.1 to be a stable release.

Reading the dot news on kde.org I found that the have gone back and rewritten a lot of plasma again. This means that it will need a new period of stabilization again.

I just hope that this time they don't release before it is ready. It would be a huge blow to the project's reputation. 3.5 is excellent, so we can keep using it until they are really ready with the new version. No hurry.

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If you read also Aaron Seigo's blog, you'll see that this API change had been expected *way* before KDE 4.0 release. Libplasma is scheduled to go into kdelibs at some point (~ 4.2) so the API must be OK because then it'll be frozen. Besides, Plasma was rea

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I am not sure even 4.1 will be a stable release. However, they have made massive improvements. Most of the KDE 4.1 ported applications look really nice (and, yeah, it's not all just eye-candy). Running KDE trunk (aka 4.1) today resulted (for me) in quite a

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In other words, is this KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Alpha or KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Release as an upgrade to KDE 4.0 Release Alpha?

That clears things up...

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I've been using KDE 4 for months.

While it still has quirks around the place and isnt production ready, I cannot go back to 3.5.
It looks and feels so old fashioned in comparison. :)

The quirks generally dont impede productivity at all.
They are just there.

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If you have a few minutes, could you please take a look at my 3.5 desktop [imageshack.us] and check if it's possible to configure 4.x this way now? I'm using my desktop configuration for a few years now and I'm quite used to it, but last I checked it was impossible to get

Too much candy?

Perhaps the candy is nice if you have a huge dual screen system. I have not tried it on my dual screen desktop yet.

I have tried it on my small-screened laptop and found the candy annoying and pixel hogging. Yes, I know I can turn it off...

As my 16 year old

double the effort

I'm not a kde user but I must say some of the things that I've seen about it would make me consider giving it another go. I quite like some of the ideas they've got, but I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets

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Actually, there's more than two.
XFCE definitely counts as a "desktop environment".
If you expand that to include window managers, you'd add at least fluxbox, blackbox, openbox, windowmaker, ratpoison, and icewm.

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I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this i

won't work. (Re: double the effort)

You're making a simple math equation, but 1 + 1 is not always 2.

If you combine the developers working on GNOME and KDE you won't end up with one project that's twice as productive. In fact, it will be very unproductive because each set of developers have

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Unfortunately fluxbox is not a Desktop Environment; it's a Window Manager.

Love KDE4 idea, but devil in the details

I am using KDE 4.0, yeah its rough, yeah some basic functionality isn't there. And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller.

However, despite all the failures, which I believe will come around, KDE is really moving to the next step and once the polish is applied it will outshine the rest. A desktop were apps of every shape and color can be integrated. Where the best ideas don't have to be accepted by the head developers, customization, and opening the doors to open source even further. It is a place were truly original ways to organize data and display information will come. It is were we will begin to move beyond just making a windows 3.1 gui more fancy and with more features. I think these are worthy goals. I put up with the annoyances now because I want to be part of it. I think it will be big.

But seriously, developers, start getting functionality working. You have to get people to use it. The widgets will come but you need functionality to get people to use it. No drag and drop for icons on the desktop, can't move around widgets in the bottom bar, right clicking doesn't give you widget specific options. And when they do, it is very limited, like the digitial clock being set to 12 hour time. I know these aren't sexy to work on, but nothing else matters if this isn't done.

Lastly, what I think will make the biggest appeal is making kde install easy on vista. People hate the vista interface, but have to have it for the new stuff underneath like directx 10. If you can make kde4 stable and install smooth on vista, you will have a firefox style pickup of it.

WUBI is great for testing KDE 4.0

Yesterday I installed KDE 4.0 on my corporate laptop!!! Next to Windows, without touching the partitions! All thanks to a small program called wubi and which makes it possible to install Kubuntu and the others _inside_ Windows partitions. So far I have le

Feature freeze, no new features only bugfixing?

That's not true my friend, I think you misunderstood the 4.1 Release Schedule [kde.org]. We're in soft feature freeze, but planned features can still be added to the code until May 19th ;-)

Re:Feature freeze, no new features only bugfixing?

Shameless plug on the Plasma FAQ (which I, among others, work on):

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/FAQ [kde.org]

The first three questions should answer at least part of your doubts.

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Plasma aims to change that, incorporating semantic application elements, and bringing cooperating technologies to the user's fingertips in a way that is visually appealing while easing work flow.

Howdy, it seems some of the Apple and Microsoft marketing guy

PolishLinux (p)review of KDE 4.1

Here is a related (p)review of latest revision of KDe 4.1 (not the exact alpha just released): http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-4-rev-802150-work-in-progress/ [polishlinux.org] "Plasma has gone under major API changes and is still a bit wonky, Dolphin gets tabs (hell yeah!), Phonon gets a Gstreamer backend, KWin gets wobbly windows (hell yeah!), and KInfoCenter and K3b get KDE4 ports. KDE 4.1 will be sure to blow your mind." A bit more comprehensive and screenshot-rich than the ArsTechnica article.

Re:Essentially A Win2k Clone?

Constantly trying to reinvent a perfectly round wheel results in
a) New problems that need to be worked out from scratch
b) Totally different use patterns which may or may not work in the real world
c) Reluctant users

Personally, I don't see a problem with following patterns that were created for Windows. There's no reason that the existing desktop format can't be extended and have features added to it if need be. This "lets go a totally different direction just coz we don't want to follow MS" is stupid. MS spent huge amounts of R&D finding out what regular users will be able to use, and freeriding on that seems like a good idea to me.

Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.

Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.

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Have you even used KDE 4.1? It is nothing like Windows 2K. I guess I really shouldn't respond to trolls.

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It's not really as bad as the ars screenshot would have you believe. For instance, look at this one [wikimedia.org] instead. And remember how easy it is to apply themes to any linux desktop - there are some really slick themes out there.

But your point is still valid. Th

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"Pretty much well established" by who?

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I've been using KDE for a while now but a quick try-out of 4.0 made me install XFCE and Gnome again. I am now happy in GTK-land with GDM loading xfwm4 and nautilus.

Sorry but my DE should not take that much power, Vista is a mistake, why follow them down th

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So you gazed into your crystal ball and figured out that 4.1 will not be stable? Since it hasn't been released that's quite the accomplishment. I use a snapshot of 4.1 at work, and I haven't seen it crash in weeks.

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There is always time taken in loading the supporting libraries, which really only affects the starting time of the first app that uses them. For subsequent apps that also use them, they're already loaded. Have you ever tried to start gedit while running a