KDE 4.1 Released, Reviewed

StoneLion writes "After months of development and controversy, the KDE project announced the release of KDE 4.1 today. Linux.com (a Slashdot sister site) took a hands-on look at the new code, and reviewer Jeremy LaCroix says, 'KDE 4.1 simply rocks.'" Bruce Byfield's review is quite positive, as well.

My one erk with KDE 4

Hopefully they've gotten rid of that freakin' kidney shaped thing in the upper right corner. Talk about a useless static "feature". ugh!

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

From the Plasma FAQ [kde.org]:

Please provide an option to disable the upper right cashew.

Although putting an option to disable the cashew for desktops sounds reasonable, from a coding point of view it would introduce unnecessary complexity and would break the design. What has been suggested is, since the destkop itself (a containment) is handled by plugins, to write a plugin that would draw the desktop without the cashew itself. Currently some work ("blank desktop" plugin) is already present in KDE SVN. With containment type switching expected by KDE 4.2, it is not unreasonable to see alternative desktop types developed by then.

Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

I don't get it. Why all the fuss about the desktop background? It is just a background after all, and hidden by any windows you have open.

From observing 'ordinary users' running Windows, they use the desktop background for starting programs which have a shortcut there - because the Start menu is so congested with crap, they don't even look at it and are often incapable of running anything not on the desktop. Because of this most Windows application installers have taken to adding a desktop shortcut as well as a Start menu item. Of course in the long term this 'icon inflation' will make the background itself unusable and we'll have to think of something else. I can't help feeling that just making a usable Start menu would be a better answer.

The second use of the desktop background is because files get saved there by default from your web browser. Again, this seems to be because unsophisticated users have no idea of directories and if it doesn't go on the background, they can't find it. But on Unix everyone has a home directory and I'd expect KDE (or GNOME) to provide easy access to that directory, even for people who aren't aware that any other location exists.

The kind of technically skilled people who used to run Enlightenment probably enjoy having semitransparent widgets flip into shape in 3d on the background, but I don't see what usability advantages that brings. Would it not be simpler to make the background be a background - just blank? There is no difficulty in putting one application window _underneath_ another, so you will see it when the top window is moved or minimized out of the way.

I love Linux but...

Sorry but Linux.com and Bruce Byfield praising KDE is like PC Magazine praising Vista.
I would like to some more critical reviews.

Some screencasts on Plasma features

Here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com] there are some screencasts showing off some Plasma features.

So far, I am impressed

I must say I am impressed by KDE 4.1. The features I like most include Konsole's ability to have fonts changed by a slider, the new file manager (Dolphin) and the beauty the whole KDE 4.0 stack introduced.

What I would like to see includes better fonts and more useful and complete help files. I also miss Amarok.

I have had my disappointments too. My college website will not allow Konqueror. Plug-in installation still needs work so that it is as smooth as that on Windows XP.

I have nothing but praise for KDE developers who insisted that we needed a new way of doing things in KDE and therefore started developing KDE 4.0. At that time, I did not see any reason why we needed a new paradigm. Now I see the reason. Thank you so much.

Best KDE 4 distro?

For the adventurous that have been using KDE 4, which distros do you think have done the best job at packaging it? Also will they be releasing packages for KDE 4.1 shortly, or are they waiting for their next normal release cycle?

I've been having all sorts of kernel/Xorg headaches with Hardy Heron, and am looking to dump it. I'm planning on moving all my must-have software to another box running Debian stable which will free up my desktop to experiment with a new distro.

KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

After months of development and controversy

I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.

I tried it as a LiveCD and the desktop experience was lukewarm, so I went back to 3.5. But I never wrote off KDE 4. No one should have, and there never should have been any controversy, considering what 4.0 was. The 4.1 release is the one people have actually been waiting for, since the apps and desktop components have had time to adjust to the new libaries, so if you adopted 4.0 thinking it would be your new desktop and you hated it, you probably jumped the gun. Have another look.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.

The controversy is that it redefines what .0 means to most computer users and has meant throughout the release history of KDE.

It only occurred to me today, but I actually think KDE should do it again for KDE 5. If consistently used, there's nothing wrong with the following version numbering:

[b].0[/b] is the [i]zeroeth[/i] release set of a new product or technology generation. It could be used instead of silly names such as alpha, beta, preview and technology release alltogether and would indicate incompleteness.

[b].1[/b[ would be the [i]first[/i] release and would be complete.

This would probably also be more intuative to end users because only developers use zero-indexed lists.

Then again, it would not have provided the KDE release team with a way to push forward their new platform the way they did now. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Complaint about this review

I'm bugged by something he says in this review and I see reviewers doing it all the time: "everything ran fast and smooth, even when I had six plasmoids in use and desktop effects turned on, even on a modest 1.6GHz laptop." He's using the old megahertz myth [wikipedia.org]. If he's using a 1.6GHz Centrino 2, I doubt that I'll see the same performance on my 1.8GHz Sempron that's four years old.

Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

I've got to say, Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4 was extremely disappointing. Neither Ubuntu nor KDE provided a functional wifi manager - The Network Settings application shared by many Ubuntu desktops couldn't write a interfaces file that preserved WEP keys, and was insanely cludgy. Steal some code from Maemo, people.

More KDE4 specific, using it stripped me of any sort of effective GUI-based power management. Hibernation, sleeping, and battery usage controls were completely absent. All it brought to the table was a (commonplace and unimpressive) battery monitor.

I enjoy using KDE4, but I really hope they're getting their acts together with this release, so far as laptops go.

one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

People with openSUSE 11.0 can just click here [opensuse.org] to run the one click installer or go to http://news.opensuse.org/2008/07/29/kde-41-released-with-opensuse-packages-and-live-cd/ [opensuse.org] (or KDE developers [kdedevelopers.org])

KDE41: my experience

So far I've had the following issues/nags/etc:

* Using the resize on the upper right of the new menu instantly made the default size *bigger*, which isn't what I wanted, and there was no way to resize back to even its default size.

* Input Actions don't work at all. Yes, the action and the group it's in are not disabled, and KHotKeys daemon is activated from Global Settings. No key combos work.

* The main panel glitched out and everything was horribly spaced out when I tried to add and remove widgets from it; I had to completely recreate a new panel to fix it.

* While it's not exactly slow, it does have several slow redraw issues (e.g. the classic launcher menu) and I've seen it lag at random times much more than KDE3 ever did. I know this is probably to be expected, but it's worth noting. No, I don't use desktop effects (compositing), as I've seen that slows things down much more in general (games, etc) than it helps with desktop elements.

* System Settings crashed on me on more than one occasion.

Overall, much better than the completely unusable 4.0, but they still have a long way to go to make KDE4 even remotely stable.

Mish-mash

From TA

"As far as eye candy, KDE 4.1 looks simply stunning."

I look at this screenshot [linux.com] linked from the article however and I see a confusing mash-up of design agendas. Dolphin file manager looks drab and strangely cluttered with shallow implied 3D for tabs and other delimiters yet the OS X style scroll bars bulge out. What are those scrollbars supposed to be made of? Blown glass? Gel? The panel at the bottom caves in with greater depth than the background image.. The simulated lighting model they're using to shade elements come from all over the place. I can count about 3 contradicting implied directional lights, from the panel to the icons to the widgets themselves..

Other things confuse: What is that Logitech logo doing in the top-right corner? Those tiny minimise/maximise buttons look like they're from another universe entirely: not echoed in any other element on the desktop, lest of all the stripey title bar.

I'm not convinced much effort has been spent on making KDE look 'stunning'..

KDE was very tweakable last time I looked so I'm sure someone will come up with a unifying theme. Glad to hear stability and speed have been greatly improved.

Re:Do we really need notification?

Do we really need notification of a (dot)1 release?

You must be new here.

Re:Do we really need notification?

It's a pretty significant feature release and is probably a better example going forward of KDE4 can become than the .0 release was

Re:Do we really need notification?

Not normally, but in this case the 4.0 release was mostly to let people know they could work from that - 4.1 is supposedly the usable version :-)

Re:Do we really need notification?

Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Wouldn't the release of XP warrant a notification? Version numbers don't actually mean anything. Some vendors create a new major version every 3 months, with no modifications, while others only go from x.1 to x.11 every 3 years, yet add tons of functionality along the way.

Re:Do we really need notification?

I'm a lot more concerned about the substance of the release than what number they throw on it.

For instance, MacOS has only had point releases for going on a decade now. In this case, the release is a huge improvement over the point-oh-no.

Answered my own question:

http://www.kde.org/download/#v4.1 [kde.org]

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

Here is a picture of the recommended minimum system requirements for Vista:

http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/markrussinovich/WindowsLiveWriter/PushingtheLimitsofWindowsPhysicalMemory_878B/image_4.png [technet.com]

Re:Nvidia cards

I have been playing with KDE 4.1 on my gaming desktop since beta 1. I have a 9800GX2 and the only time I noticed the slowdown on resizing windows or moving the plasma widgets is when I had SLI enabled in the xorg.conf. When I disabled it the performance increased drastically and I had no issues with that afterwards.

It is definitely worth downloading and I say it is more then sufficient to replace KDE 3.5

Re:Nvidia cards

Use this setting:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

Using this trick, resize becomes snappy.

Re:Nvidia cards

I reply to mysel: to make this change permanent, I created a file called: /etc/X11/xinit.d/20nvidia-te-acceleration

which contains:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -x /usr/bin/nvidia-settings ]; then /usr/bin/nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1
fi

Re:Firefox 3?

Firefox 3 still looks like crap by default because it's a GTK program, you can use gtk-qt-engine-kde4 to make it play nicer with QT (Looks close to, but not exactly like, a QT4 program).

I also use an Oxygen icon theme for Firefox, since that program doesn't change any icons.

The scrollbar bug doesn't happen for me, not entirely sure under what conditions it happens, it's also possible that it has been fixed in newer version of that software or only happened with FF2.