What To Expect In KDE 4.1

andrewmin writes "Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn't work most of the time. However, the developers were not without hope. They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0. That time is coming soon: in just four days, K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released to the Linux masses." A release candidate for 4.1 came out just over a week ago, with binaries available "for some Linux distributions, and Mac OS X and Windows."

KDE 3

I love KDE 3 and I'm quite content to use it. I spent about two years sitting very eagerly getting all excited about KDE 4, and now I'm a little apathetic about it. I'm not sure when and if I'll switch.

KDE 4 has a lot of great things going for it like Phonon, Solid, Akondi, Sonnet, SVG rendering, Decibel, multi-platform, etc.

I'm just not crazy about the desktop experience with it.

Calling Capt. Logic

Has Gnome really "gained a lot of ground"?
A lot?
Because of KDE 4.0?

Something about that just doesn't add up. My suspicion is that the vast majority of KDE users are still on 3.5x and jumping ship to gnome doesn't make sense either way.

Re:Calling Capt. Logic

I think you misunderstood the excerpt. What it says is that KDE lost ground in the last few years, which it did. Even SuSE, once a cornerstone of KDE's market share, defaults to Gnome now. Kubuntu is not on par with Ubuntu, and Red Hat/Fedora always was a Gnome shop. Today, no major distro has KDE as its default desktop environment. I'd call that "losing ground".

I hope KDE 4 is able to stop or even reverse this trend. I use 4.1 on a daily basis since Beta 1. It's mostly stable and shows big improvements compared to 4.0.

Wow.

I know that my writing sucks but this article was bad even by my standards.
Just from the burb.
"The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers."
Leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers what????

Re:Wow.

It's the first version of the article. It's only a for developers. You need to wait for the version 1.1 release to get the fully functional one.

KDE 4 has been very underwhelming

I have used KDE for almost 10 years now. Tried Gnome many times, but always go back to KDE. In looks there is no comparison, gnome is and always has been plug ugly.

Until KDE 4, KDE was superior in functionality as well. However, KDE4 suffered from multiple problems :

1. It was never meant for everyday users. For instance, a lot of indispensible KDE applets/widgets never made it on release date and some of the simplest tasks (plugging in a USB key) became needlessly complicated. It became good at obfuscating the essential and hyping the beautiful. It should never have been released - or perhaps released as KDE4-CODE which targeted developers alone. I understand that the open source development process depends on people trying out new software and reporting bugs, but this was too big a leap.

2. The developers paid too much attention to the looks of the interface and not much to the interface itself. I have used windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP over the years as well OSX in its many reincarnations, but KDE was always a relief to return to. With KDE4, that is no longer true.

I am not dissing the ideas behind KDE4. Perhaps many of them are overdue improvements if linux is to make it to the average desktop user (an outcome in which I haven't the slightest interest), but it was released too early. It gave an impression of being pre-alphaware and has ruined many people's opinion of the project.

Hopefully 4.1 will win people like me over and give us a compelling reason to upgrade from KDE 3.5.7.

Still not a complete transition

I'm a big KDE fan, and I've been looking forward to KDE 4 for some time. The volume of complaints about KDE 4.0 surprised me; it seemed fairly clear that 4.0 was about getting a usable but not feature-complete release out so that application developers could target the new platform. By feature complete, I mean supporting all the options that KDE 3.5 has, which blows away every other desktop environment I've ever used. This is, of course, by design, as Mac OS X and GNOME are designed with sensible defaults and a fairly limited set of options.

I think Fedora may have made a mistake in defaulting to KDE 4.0 in the latest release; the KDE folks could perhaps have made the release more explicitly a "technology preview" release. Kubuntu had the right idea - offer it in the repository, but leave the default at 3.5. This allowed me to try out okular, the new document reader (which rocks, btw - finally a decent non-Adobe PDF reader which supports annotations, though they could still use a little work). But having read the early release info, I knew that KDE 4.0 wasn't for me, so I haven't tried it.

The new release brings the kdepim apps to the new KDE libs. Unfortunately, Amarok is on a separate release schedule, so we still have to wait there. For those that use KOffice, that too will be released later in the year, IIRC.

KDE 4.1, 4.x release dates are immaterial to me

For me, KDE 4 is ready when Amarok 2 is out.

Generally, this should be true. We'll know that KDE is really ready when the next generations of Kopete (IM), Amarok (music), K3B (CD/DVD burning), K9copy (video DVD backup/authoring), and the other end-user applications are ready and integrated. Otherwise, to use KDE apps I'd still need to have the KDE 3.x libs, and if that's the case, why rush to switch?

using KDE 4.1

Since Archlinux is providing packages for of the KDE 4.1 tag from svn in it's testing repos I've merged to 4.1 and I'm amazed how everything works. I only had to find a new irc client since konversation isn't ported yet but I found Quassel and compiled the second alpha of amarok2 and now I'm happy :)

Just keep using KDE 3.5.x until you want to switch

From what I've been reading KDE 4.1 still will be a little on the rough side and there are issues with the closed source nvidia driver (get other hardware!).

There's no obligation to use KDE 4.1, since KDE 3.5 will still be there and supported as well. I don't understand the whining from users feeling let down or dissapointed, you always have a choice.

I try using KDE 4.x.x every now and then, I suggest you try the same without a feeling of being forced to use it, just curiosity!

In the long run, I believe KDE 4 will be a very solid platform for desktops for a very long time (until the next big change of course ;-)

Cheers (and no worries!)

Simon

I like it

I've been using every weekly build for SuSE 10.3 since 4.0 came out and have seen it get more and more stable. I have some issues, some are KDE's fault, some aren't.

• No OTR for Kopete yet, which is in Kopete 3.5
• In Kopete, if you're logged in, and log in from another computer, rather than saying "there are now two of you logged in", it crashes
• Okular (Awesome!) keeps losing the ability to show me PDFs. I figured this out and fixed it once, then it broke a couple of builds ago and I can't remember what I did.
• I've never successfully burned a CD with k3b 4.x
• There is a checkbox that is basically the "make KDE go fast now" option, if I wasn't on a Mac right now, I'd say where it is exactly. The box is set to "slow" by default
• I can't figure out how to move plasmoid applets around the desktop. So if I have a weather applet, it goes in the top left corner and can't be moved. Luckily, if I make a Folder Browser plasmoid, it goes right over the weather one, and also can't be moved, so...problem solved?

Those are the ones that I've had problems with that are KDEs fault. This one probably isn't, but it makes 4.0 worthless to me:

• Horrible graphic tearing, mostly in KDE 3.5 apps or GTK apps (kpdf, Thunderbird, Firefox, also any rdesktop session). This seems to be due to be due to using a compositing desktop. I notice it in Compiz too under 3.5. I believe the issue might be that for anything to work, you should sync on vblank, however if you have multiple monitors, sync on vblank freaks out and makes things worse?

Overall though, I really like it, especially since someone clued me in to the Make It Fast setting. This is coming from a KDE user since 1.x. I loved 2.0 when it came. Hated 3.0 (which grew into my favorite GUI of all time including OSX), hated 4.0, like 4.1 OK so far.

The .0 releases.

If you've been in the IT industry for a little while you learn to avoid any and all .0 releases. They are more trouble than they're worth. Always.
Windows NT wasn't usable until SP4 I think. XP started behaving semi-resonable after SP2. Vista? I've heard that the latest SP fixes a few of the more critical things (from a users perspective).

OpenOffice 1.0? Not all that great. Firefox1.0? Better than the competition, but good? FF2.0 wasn't without errors.
Actually the first .0 release that I've seen that's been fair is Firefox3.0.

"Avoid .0 releases for they are crappy and full of bugs". You can call that haegers law if someone hasn't named it before.

.haeger

Re:TFS is a lie?

KDE 4.0 was stable libraries for people to learn with, and very new/unstable implementation of the libraries. KDE 4.1 was supposed to be a stable implementation of the already stable libraries.

Ummm... okay, so you can rewrite the article: KDE developers don't understand release version concept, confuse users with improper 4.0 version number, and gain a reputation for a buggy major release.

Re:TFS is a lie?

Ubuntu 8.0? Ubuntu doesn't have version numbers, they just have dated releases - perhaps you meant 8.04 (April 2008) - followed by lots of patches as they appear to the various packages.

The Apache setup in Debian and Ubuntu is one of the best around, and I've not had any problems with it - what exactly could you not do with it?

Re:TFS is a lie?

OTOH, people that configure their Apache usually don't use Ubuntu. You don't belong their target market.

Do they? People certainly use Debian, and the Apache configuration is the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people are using Ubuntu on servers instead of Debian; Ubuntu LTS server releases get support for much longer (5 years from release.) The current 8.04.1 LTS server release will receive security updates until 2013. The Debian policy is support for one year after the release of the next version (so if 5.0 is released on time, 4.0 will be unsupported in September 2009.) The last few Linux servers I've set up have been Ubuntu LTS Server instead of Debian stable.

Considering today's free Linux distributions (as in free to download & updates), I'd pick CentOS or Ubuntu LTS for a Linux server because of their long security update periods.

Re:TFS is a lie?

That's true, KDE 4.0 was supposed to have stable core libraries, so major applications such as Amarok, Koffice and Kontact could be ported at KDE 4.1. The big issue was this numbering schema. If KDE staff have numbered in the classic way people wouldn't have created so many expectations, and thus there wouldn't have dissapointments.

Re:TFS is a lie?

The main problem is the dichotomy between the KDE platform and KDE environment. It was a stable release of the platform, but not of the environment, because the tools which use that platform and create the environment (all the applications) hadn't been ported yet. They should really be two separate releases.

Re:TFS is a lie?

On the KDE website, there was no mention of KDE 4.0 being a developer release. It hinted strongly, in fact, that KDE 4.0 was a general release.

It was only after all the problems and complaints that the KDE devs said that the release wasn't for mainstream users.

KDE 4.0 wasn't a developer release. What it was, was the first release with major architectual changes for public consumption. This was the first release with a stable library and without this release, a large number of KDE application developers wouldn't have a platform for porting and polishing their applications for KDE 4. Ultimately it is the decision of the distributions on what to include in their releases. I wouldn't consider KDE 4.0 a proper replacement for KDE 3.5.x, but I would make it available for use by application developers.

All this was well known and openly discussed during the planning and development of the KDE 4 platform including 4.0, 4.1, 4.x. To state otherwise is disengenious at best.

See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951 [groklaw.net] for more information.

Re:first post

I actually used KDE4.0 Beta as my main desktop, imagine that. It really wasn't as bad as people make out, I could see it wasn't ready, but the potential is there.

The ideas behind KDE4 are great, all it needs is polish (albeit a lot of polish). This is the point: if it were a turd, no amount of polish would make it good, but KDE4 does not fall into this category. It's just a knob that needs some Brasso. :D

Re:first post

Oddly (apparently), I found KDE 4.0.x to be quite stable. For me, its problem was that there wasn't anything implemented other than some "shiny bubble icon" eye-candy. It's not really "polish" that KDE4 needs - it's had THAT from the start. It's actual functionality that it has really been needing.

I've been using the current SVN builds for the 4.1 series, and it's looking much better in terms of actual functionality than the 4.0 series was. There are still a few irritating missing bits (like metadata display [duration/bitrate/etc. for mp3 and ogg-vorbis files, for example] and a fully working version of K3B for KDE4, etc.) but from my perspective they've done a very credible job of addressing many of the major shortcomings from the original KDE4(.0) releases.

I think the whole "plasmoids" thing that they've been frantically laying the groundwork for will probably make dealing with the remaining missing functionality pretty quick.

Re:KDE 4.1

They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0.

The KDE developers never promised that all the holes and problems would be fixed in 4.1...

Reminds me of 4.0 when /. was saying it would be a finished DE, despite the KDE developers themselves saying this wasn't the case. People will be happy with KDE when /. stop exaggerating and lying about what it will be like

Re:KDE 4.1

Well, would you rather they wait for now to release 4.0?

They said it clearly. If they were to delay the release the release would be late, worse, and have less chances of getting fixed. Now we have KDE4, now you can file ALL of those complaints at the KDE team, and they have the chance to fix 'em.

If you don't want to participate in their "beta test", use KDE3. It'll still be supported by the KDE teams for quite a while, and even further if you want that. But KDE3 is old tech and it's starting to show its age IMHO.

Re:KDE 4.1

I typically enjoy reading your comments and I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but I've just seen so much piss poured on KDE4 here on Slashdot that I've got to reply to someone or I'll blow my damn stack. So bear that in mind, because I'm gonna go off a little here. Nothing personal.

KDE had no credible reason for releasing it as 4.0

The KDE development team elaborated very well their reasons for releasing 4.0.0 on the schedule and in the manner that they did. This topic has been covered at least 5409 times in the last two weeks on Slashdot. Can we please move on now?

Where's Katapult? Where's Kmail/Kontact? Where's Amarok? Why is Konsole huge? Why's everything huge, including the panel, with no way to reduce it? Why is the menu so weird -- and if this is a replacement for Katapult, why can't I open it with a keystroke?

In order:

Katapult's not there anymore.

Kontact is there. I have it open on another desktop right now.

Amarok is also in the middle of a development cycle. The development version is there, the stable version hasn't magically disappeared either. It's not easy to rewrite an application to not only a new version of the DE, but a new version of the underlying frameworks and a new version of the widget set. It's hard hard hard hard work. You could help. Or at least shut up and let them work.

Konsole looks pretty much the same to me as it always has. Yakuake, btw, has improved dramatically.

You can change the panel size, this functionality has been there now for months.

If you don't like the new menu, use the old one. It's still there.

The new menu is not a replacement for Katapult. Alt-F2 is the replacement for Katapult. Which is good. Katapult had more bugs than a badger's asshole.

major apps like Konqueror, Kopete, and Amarok simply crash, and frequently.

I don't use Konqueror, so I can't speak to that. I have had Kopete open on this machine for weeks on end, it has not once crashed out on me. Not once. The development version of Amarok is just that, a development version. Expect it to crash. On the flip side, Kontact puked all over the place on a daily basis for me on KDE 3.5, and it's much more stable now. The crashes I do get regularly are KTorrent (when exiting the program, and also when trying to remove >3 torrents from the list), and sometimes Plasma when I log out. Bugs have been filed. I have no doubt that they will be fixed. Have you filed bugs on your crashes?

Listen, I'm not trying to get bitchy here, but seriously, can we all tone down the vitriol here? Considering that KDE4 is a complete break on all levels from KDE3 (both in the sense of "a break from the paradigm" and "compatibility break"), I'm thrilled with how quickly problems have been spotted and fixed (sometimes to the point where the problem I noticed in the morning has been fixed by dusk).

Slashdot Effect Channeled

QT 4 and thusly KDE 4 use XRender quite a bit, and Nvidia's driver has horrible XRender support. You could go to the OSS Nvidia driver, and lose 3D acceleration, or stick with KDE 3.

Ideally, I'd like to see the Slashdot effect channeled. This site has tons of users. We bring down sites accidentally with our massive numbers, but I've never seen the Slashdot Effect channeled for good.

Can you imagine CmdTaco posting a story tomorrow asking every to pepper Nvidia with petitions all on the same day, demanding an improved driver?

Re:What is in it for me ( a user )

1) All KDE applications using Phonon and thus the same sound server, no more "oh I can't play audio here because I'm playing it over there". Or maybe that's pulseaudio's job to really fix, but I'd be happy either way.
2) The Phonon framework hopefully means I can use one media player (Dragon Player?) for all my needs, with a codec backend like on other operating systems. Right now mplayer/xine/vlc work on different media.
3) Once the KDE4 applications are up and running, you can use the same applications on Windows. No need for learning a separate application when you have to use Windows.

That's at least my top three...