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KDE Open Source Linux

KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 Released 202

Posted by timothy from the after-much-waiting dept.
jrepin writes "KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform. These releases, versioned 4.6, provide many new features in each of KDE's three product lines. The KDE Plasma Workspaces come with a new Activities system, which should make it easier to manage different tasks."
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KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 Released More

KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 Released

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  • Thanks, (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    but no, thanks!

    My KDE 3.5.10 serves me well. No stupid Windows Vista-like menus, no bling bling. I'll wait for KDE5. Hopefully, they'll come to their senses.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by siride ( 974284 )

      You can turn all that off really easily.

      • People, it is an illusion that you just can turn stuff off everywhere. You can turn off things up to the level of how the system was designed. And KDE is now designed for over-componentisation, over-information and over-configuration. It needs a consistent narrative. Maybe it will develop one. This is needs something that would be good to turn on, not off. :)

    • If you really like 3.5.10 why don't you use Trinity [pearsoncomputing.net]?

      For me KDE 4.6 serves all my needs, memory footprint could be better, but it's now the way it should be.

  • I'm afraid to look (Score:4, Funny)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @06:55PM (#35026452)
    Every new release of KDE is like opening a box of chocolates.

    And then finding a worm in the seventh one ...

  • Wonderful - everyone should try this! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jahava ( 946858 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:03PM (#35026554)

    This is a fantastic and welcome suite of upgrades, bugfixes, optimizations, and changes. Thank you KDE team!

    For those who have forsworn KDE due to bad experiences with the 4.x line, let this be a formal request to reconsider your aversion. The initial KDE 4 releases were unusable, and this has greatly hurt their image and reputation. However, as of KDE SC 4.5, it is ready to replace other desktop environments. I promise you, to both GNOME users and KDE3.5 clingers: it is worth your time to try KDE SC 4.5 (or 4.6), and you will not be disappointed.

    For a bit of history, even the KDE team understood that the early KDE4 releases were not suitable for most users. They urged those who wanted feature-complete desktops to avoid it [wikipedia.org]. Much to their own disappointment, major distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE rushed to adopt it and the result was ... well, mass disappointment. The first release recommended by the KDE team as a KDE3.5 replacement was 4.2 [wikipedia.org], which was still generally lacking but worlds better than its predecessors. Every release contained more polish, and 4.5 was (in my opinion) the milestone of a release that fully eclipses KDE 3.5 and leaves no doubt about the vision of the KDE team.

    • Re:Wonderful - everyone should try this! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Beelzebud ( 1361137 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:18PM (#35026696)
      Every few months I try out the 4.x line, and I always walk away disappointed. It's got so much potential, and it looks really nice, but basic things still don't function like they should. Either the plasma widgets are broken or buggy, or it can't handle basic things like auto-mounting network samba shares in Dolphin, or when it does it won't stream video over a network without downloading the files first. Just too many rough edges for my taste. The last version I tried was 4.5, and literally just ditched it a few days ago and went back to Gnome. I plan on trying it again on the 4.7 release.

      • You realise that the functions you are asking for are OS functions, and not related to the GUI? If you want the beahviours you describe, then use FUSE -- perhaps through kio-fuse.

        In dolphin, I have sftp remote locations which appear just like any other folder...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Psychotria ( 953670 )

      I actually miss Linux in many ways. I used it daily from 1994 (Yggdrasil linux) until 2008 or early 2009 (various distros in between but during 2007-2009, Fedora). Then I got distracted with my photography and other tasks that basically _required_ me to use Windows (no, Photoshop under Wine did NOT work well at all, and GIMP doesn't cut it for lots of reasons). I changed my dual-boot to default to booting Windows XP and eventually the linux partition disappeared entirely. If I recall my last install of linu

      • I've since switched to GIMP but I did run Photoshop under wine perfectly for many years.
        For Windows apps that you absolutely can't live without and aren't supported in wine, there are always VM apps.
        I used to run Windows 2000 in qemu until I finally decided to cut the cord completely.

        • I've been running Windows in a window since around 2001, and haven't booted MS software on the bare metal since. This way I get all the usability and admin goodness of whatever Linux flavor I want, while still getting to use any Windows-only software that work requires of me. And having the ability to take snapshots of the machine is quite nice -- if an install hoses something in the virtual Windows box, I just roll back to the last snapshot. Plus the VMs are portable, since they're basically files, so I

          • I've been running Windows in a window since around 2001, and haven't booted MS software on the bare metal since. This way I get all the usability and admin goodness of whatever Linux flavor I want, while still getting to use any Windows-only software that work requires of me. And having the ability to take snapshots of the machine is quite nice -- if an install hoses something in the virtual Windows box, I just roll back to the last snapshot. Plus the VMs are portable, since they're basically files, so I can just copy the whole VM over to my laptop when I'm traveling.

            Cheers,

            Yes, you've listed several distinct advantages of the VM approach. I should have included in my initial post that I still do have Linux machines (my fileserver for example) I just don't use it as my primary desktop OS.

            • If you only need Windows for one or two apps, you might give VMware or Parallels a spin -- both work on hosts running Lin/Win/Mac, and with Unity mode in VMware or Coherence mode in Parallels, the integration with the host desktop environment is much smoother. In fact, as I write this in FF in Mac, I've got some of my Windows-only work software each appearing as their own window just under the browser window via Parallels, and iTunes in the background keeping my ears happy. When I'm at my desktop, I use a

        • I've since switched to GIMP but I did run Photoshop under wine perfectly for many years.
          For Windows apps that you absolutely can't live without and aren't supported in wine, there are always VM apps.
          I used to run Windows 2000 in qemu until I finally decided to cut the cord completely.

          Last I tried Photoshop (CS4?) under Wine it didn't work perfectly, but it's quite possible I stuffed up the installation.

          Yes, having Linux as my primary OS and using VM's to run those programs I cannot live without is a perfectly valid and reasonable option. It's just that 99% of my apps require Windows so I do it the other way around now (run linux in a VM, whereas in I used to run XP in a VM under linux and have a dualboot system as well). I don't do a lot of programming these days, but when I do I use th

    • To me, KDE just looks so darn busy compared to Gnome. Until they change that overall aspect of design, I really don't see using KDE regularly.

      I like a few KDE programs a lot, especially Kate. But the overall desktop just isn't doing it for me.

      • Have you possibly tried changing a setting in KDE before?

        Seriously, it's not that hard. My desktop is entirely bare, I have a vertical panel with just a task bar, tray, and clock. My plasma theme almost completely lacks gradients. Oxygen is probably least offensive in this regard - it looks great on my high dpi screen, and isn't ridiculously glassed like certain themes are.

        • Have you possibly tried changing a setting in KDE before?

          Seriously, it's not that hard. My desktop is entirely bare, I have a vertical panel with just a task bar, tray, and clock. My plasma theme almost completely lacks gradients. Oxygen is probably least offensive in this regard - it looks great on my high dpi screen, and isn't ridiculously glassed like certain themes are.

          It's not the theming so much as programs like Dophin. It seems like, for whatever reason, KDE programs have really cluttered toolbars and controls around the edges of various frames. It seems like with Gnome, there's more of a design ethos of hiding most details behind menus and configuration dialogs, whereas KDE apps seem to like putting them all in front of you on the main window. Maybe I'm over generalizing, but that's my impression anyway.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by siride ( 974284 )

            Have you even used Dolphin? It has as many toolbar icons as Nautilus does. In fact, Dolphin is like a slightly better clone of Nautilus. If you pick a theme other than ugly-ass Oxygen, it actually looks pretty decent. I, myself, use QtCurve, which has the added benefit of providing a GTK version that uses the same settings as the Qt version, so your GTK and Qt apps look as similar as they ever will.

            • Interesting. I'll probably give 4.6 a try once it hits Ubuntu's repositories.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by pxc ( 938367 )

                With the release of KDE 4.6, KDE has also finally incorporated oxygen-molecule, which is a very complete Oxygen theme for GTK+.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lanner ( 107308 )

      Let's start with the fact that if this was a KDE message board, and I was to thoughtfully complain in any way, my message would be quietly deleted. I don't bother posting any feedback, filing bugs, or doing anything for KDE any more. KDE doesn't give a fark about it's users. The developers are writing code for themselves and some strangely distorted user-effigy they built up, but who doesn't exist.

      But nevermind KDE as a Window Manager itself. What you did to apps like Amarok is a crime. Fark you. I li

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by siride ( 974284 )

        I whole-heartedly agree about Amarok. Used to be my favorite music app back when it was a clean, but featureful clone of iTunes. Now that it's panel-mania with no discernible UI goal, I can't stand it. I really hate apps that insist on you having a playlist before you can do anything. Maybe I just want to click on a song in my collection and play it? I don't want the wikipedia entry or lyrics to load. I don't want album art. I just want to play a damn song.

        • Totally agree. I gave up on Amarok, too. It's crazy how it's bloated with all these UI features I never use. I am using bare VLC now. It's not pretty and quite barebones. The backend is a dream, plays everything. Of course, it's totally lacking DE integration, and for my taste it's a bit too barebones, but what can I do. Surprisingly, there are not too many decent linux audio players around :(

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by siride ( 974284 )

            DE integration is overrated. Just look what it's done to Windows, where every program under the sun has shell integration and start up services that use as much of your RAM and CPU cycles as they possibly can while providing little to no added value.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by horza ( 87255 )

            Add me to the list. It is so heavy and slow, but losing working Shoucast station integration was the last straw for me. Before Amarok I was using Songbird, until that died, then I went to using Exaile [exaile.org] under KDE. Excellent player. Clementine [clementine-player.org] is supposed to be Amarok-lite (based on the KDE 3.5 version), but I now use Guayadeque [sourceforge.net] which is snappy and has all the functionality I need.

            Phillip.

      • Try Clementine (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrJimbo ( 594231 ) on Friday January 28, 2011 @01:08AM (#35029000)
        Clementine [clementine-player.org] was inspired by amarok 1.4 but it uses QT4 instead of QT3. I started using it around 0.3 and was sold then. It is up to 0.6 and it is hands down the best music player out there IMHO.

      • Re:Wonderful - everyone should try this! (Score:5, Informative)

        by lbbros ( 900904 ) on Friday January 28, 2011 @04:15AM (#35029756) Homepage

        Let's start with the fact that if this was a KDE message board, and I was to thoughtfully complain in any way, my message would be quietly deleted

        Care to bring specific examples? I'm one of the administrators of the KDE Community Forums, and not once we have deleted a message we disagreed with. In fact all that's asked to users is to respect the Code of Conduct, their opinions can be freely expressed.

      • Fark me, if you want to say FUCK just say FUCK. Smurfing hell....

    • Re:Wonderful - everyone should try this! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @10:13PM (#35028128) Homepage Journal

      For those who have forsworn KDE due to bad experiences with the 4.x line, let this be a formal request to reconsider your aversion. The initial KDE 4 releases were unusable, and this has greatly hurt their image and reputation. However, as of KDE SC 4.5, it is ready to replace other desktop environments. I promise you, to both GNOME users and KDE3.5 clingers: it is worth your time to try KDE SC 4.5 (or 4.6), and you will not be disappointed.

      They said this about KDE 4.2. They were wrong.

      They said this about KDE 4.3. They were wrong.

      I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thsths ( 31372 )

        They said this about KDE 4.2. They were wrong.

        They said this about KDE 4.3. They were wrong.

        I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.

        Even worse, they also said it about KDE 4.1. And KDE 4.1.3 really p*ssed me off by being a terrible incoherent and buggy scaffolding.

        With KDE 4.2 things did indeed improve, and some early adopters (such as myself) were actually happy with it.

        Although I still miss the good old days when KDE was neat and nimble, and you could run it on all your systems, even a 5 year old laptop. Nowadays even XFCE has gotten really fat, and my only resort for old hardware is LXDE. Which incidentally is a lot like KDE 1, on

    • Re:Wonderful - everyone should try this! (Score:4, Funny)

      by DrJimbo ( 594231 ) on Friday January 28, 2011 @01:16AM (#35029030)
      Sorry KDE, I've moved on. I suggest you do too. I'm glad the therapy and new meds are working out for you. I believe you when you say you're all better now and won't ever try to cut off my ballls with the kitchen knife again but there has just been too much water over the dam. I've found a new DE and we are in love. This one is better than you ever were even before you went a little crazy.

      PS: I'm posting this under a friend's account just in case you're not quite all better yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cronius ( 813431 )

      They urged those who wanted feature-complete desktops to avoid it [wikipedia.org]. Much to their own disappointment, major distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE rushed to adopt it and the result was ... well, mass disappointment.

      I didn't follow that situation closely, but in my opinion they totally failed in communication. They said it was for "early adopters" but at the same time they labelled it 4.0 and stating something in the line of "we want as many early adopters as possible."

      That's doublespeak and a total communication fail. Part of communication is *keep it simple* so that there's nothing to misinterpret and nothing to get "lost on the way".

      They could have communicate this better much better. They could have called each ver

  • I basically use a setup where I use many GUI apps from both KDE4 and Gnome, Emerald as the WM and avant-window-navigator as a panel. I use gnome-terminal over the KDE one (Terminal). I've tried KDE4, but my machine is too slow to run it properly, and I think Gnome just has a cleaner design - but I'm a command line sort of guy, and only fire up Nautilus to access SMB shares, so it's probable that I've missed many of KDE4's usability details. Strangely enough, I can use Compiz with effects like transparency a
  • or are there a lot of comments that KDE & Gnome are dead? What are Penguins suppose to use?

    • Well, they are not dead, but they seem to be becoming irrelevant. Consumers really like touch phones and pads and app stores, and only android seem to work well in these devices.

  • 32-bit went fine, 64-bit was a bit of a pain... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pointbeing ( 701902 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:29PM (#35026782)

    Don't know anyone else who's had this problem but on the 64-bit upgrade X started throwing errors about a missing session - then you clicked "okay" and KDE started normally.

    Solution was in this thread - all I had to do was select KDE as a session once.

    http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=91936 [kde.org]

    Also, my panel lost transparency although compositing was enabled. Changing the panel theme and then changing it back solved that.

    On the 32-bit netbook which has just about all unnecessary stuff turned off including akonadi KDE's memory footprint went from ~180mb to ~170mb at idle. I use compiz instead of kwin on both machines, though.

  • Thoughts on KDE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TopSpin ( 753 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:50PM (#35026936) Journal

    With KDE 4.4/5 the basic desktop (window manager, taskbar thinge, desktop, etc) became worthy (stable, mostly feature complete, etc.) Memory use is entirely reasonable. The file manager (konqureror) even survived. Yay KDE.

    I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.) Fortunately it can be removed with few consequences; think I've seen one program that spewed some console errors because the dbus services were missing. Now the only goofy thing left is the 'kde wallet' nag that jumps up once in a while for software you wouldn't suspect of being integrated with KDE by default (that one may actually belong in the distro's lap.)

    (This isn't an appeal to have these things explained; I'm not interested and won't be developing an interest.)

    Thanks for the great work on the basic desktop stuff KDE. Please consider that some folks would prefer a less integrated experience; KDE is found in places where unloading your life into various 'social' databases or configuring your personal info into single-sign-on 'helper' stuff is very inappropriate. A 'just works without all the personal info/high touch integration and corresponding configuration nags' option would be ideal. Overlooking this is entirely understandable; enthusiastic developers often have tunnel vision and fail to consider the simpler use cases while building their visions. Without those people nothing would be built at all.

    Also, KDE needs a built-in (meaning no extra stuff to install, lightweight, no glitches, no elaborate tray pop-ups) no-mouse-required, minimal-keyboard-gymnastics way of entering all Unicode characters into everything that accepts text.

    Thanks again.

    • No kidding, holy shit. There's a person on Slashdot that kind of doesn't like something and is reasonable about it. What the hell are you doing here? :p

    • I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.)

      Akonadi [kde.org] is basically an abstraction layer for all PIM data (e-mail, contact info, calendar, to-do list, etc). As long as you're not using KDE's PIM programs, you won't miss it.

  • For those still waiting... (Score:4, Informative)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Thursday January 27, 2011 @08:24PM (#35027126) Homepage

    For those still waiting for KDE to port things from KDE3, there's Trinity - http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ [pearsoncomputing.net] Not perfect, but a great alternative.

    It is nice to have OCR and Quanta fully functional again.

  • I just wish (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheABomb ( 180342 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @09:52PM (#35027952)

    they'd put Ksirtet back in kdegames. At one point, I was 81st in the world on its worldwide high scores board, and that was my life's peak.

  • Bluetooth (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EEPROMS ( 889169 ) on Thursday January 27, 2011 @10:29PM (#35028236)
    Wonder if they have bluetooth audio fixed, I find KDE 3.5.* allows me to pair a BT headset (I have three models all work fine with Android) but KDE keeps trying to treat the headset as a data transfer device instead as an audio out device.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EEPROMS ( 889169 )
      Sorry I meant KDE 4.5.* (although KDE 3.5.* has the same issue).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by lbbros ( 900904 )

      You'll need the pulseaudio module for bluetooth, enable the pulseaudio support in Phonon and then use the newly-released "bluedevil" (new version of the BT stack for KDE) to pair your headset.

      This is AFAIK.

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