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KDE Open Source Linux

KDE 4.6.3 Released 105

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
jrepin writes "KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks. This update is the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.6 series. 4.6.3 brings many bugfixes and translation updates."
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KDE 4.6.3 Released More

KDE 4.6.3 Released

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  • Dedicated to: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ancantus ( 1926920 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @01:59PM (#36050710) Homepage Journal

    It isn't mentioned in the summery, but:

    The 4.6.3 release is dedicated in memory of the young daughter of KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti who tragically passed away after a car crash last month. The KDE community wishes to express their deepest sympathy and support to Daniel and his family in this difficult time.

    Kinda nice, I am not to familiar with the KDE release cycles, do they dedicate every release?

  • Boring (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm tired of the 4.x user interface. It's so 2000's. When is KDE going to completely overhaul it's outdated legacy design and make the whole desktop work like my smartphone?? I want sliders and swoopy bars and stuff.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by blair1q ( 305137 )

      This.

      Also, it's dishonest of UI demos to be festooned with pretty pictures that make them look a lot more sharp and slick than they are. I have to stare at them until the novelty of the background wears off, and I can get a sense for what the controls will look-and-feel like.

    • That's part of the point of "activities". KDE should provide you different interfaces for different tasks. If you go to the cashew and select "activities" you have a few activity templates available, such as the "search & launch". So far nothing very interesting is available, but to be fair from what I understand the internals only recently became usable, so I'd expect the situation to slowly change.

      • If you go to the cashew...

        As soon as I saw they had something everyone calls a "cashew" it was clear to me they haven't found their way yet. "Go to the cashew"? Cashew?

        What are those guys smoking?

    • Install plasma-netbook. Voila! You have a small-screen optimised desktop with flashy graphics, large icons, etc.

      Works quite nicely on 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions. But not so nice on 1920x1080. :)

      GNOME-Shell and Unity are only just now catching up to something that's been available in KDE for a few releases now. ;)

  • KDE is really good now.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kvvbassboy ( 2010962 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @02:12PM (#36050878)

    KDE has improved *greatly* since its 4.4.x days. It is a lot snappier, less buggy and doesn't clutter up your desktop like it used to. With the rapid changes in various desktops, I tried working with the Gnome shell, Unity and KDE on my laptop, and found that KDE is the only one out of these which doesn't get in my way.

    It definitely will not run on older computers, but it runs great on my 3 year old laptop with intel built in graphics chipset and 4 GB ram. I highly recommend KDE to someone who wants to upgrade from gnome 2.32 but doesn't like gnome shell or unity.

    PS: I still run Gnome 2 on my desktop. IMO, it's the most efficient in terms of resources:features.

    • Agreed. I threw an extra gig of ram (total: 1.5) into a 2005 compaq lappy, and was incredibly surprised by the snappiness of the platform.

    • It also works quite well on netbooks with 1gb or ram, using the KDE netbook interface.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tyrione ( 134248 )
      Doesn't get in your way? How ironic. It's the reason I switched to GNOME 3 and the Gnome Shell. It's the minimalist look that isn't KDE with that abortion called Plasma I don't miss. Don't get me wrong, I still use the same KDE apps [Kate for instance] in Gnome 3 shell but now I'm not stuck dealing with all the resources used for Plasma. Gawd I can't stand that crap.

      • I completely ignore Plasma and that works fine for me. One day maybe I'll play with it and find out why it was worth taking such a PR hit over. Or not. In the mean time it doesn't get in my way and that is why I like KDE.

      • It's the minimalist look that isn't KDE

        Shut up, troll. [blogspot.com]

        that abortion called Plasma

        I don't even have a link, but you don't have an argument, so we're even. Shut up, troll.

        all the resources used for Plasma.

        My five year old Pentium D desktop and I say "citation needed." Also, "Shut up, troll."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Timmmm ( 636430 )

      Does it still have the irremovable 'kidney bean' on the desktop?

    • Compared to v3.5.10? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by antdude ( 79039 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @03:26PM (#36051486) Homepage Journal

      Is it a lot better than v3.5.10?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RichiH ( 749257 )

        Actually, ever since 4.5, things have been OK. 4.6 is really stable and has reached feature parity. Or will have once they fix the bug that makes you unable to use the classic mouse pointers without resetting them every time you log in.

        Why, KDE 4 even has quadkonsole now (not in mainline, yet), something that has been missing since 3.2!

        I used to be a _strong_ proponent of sticking to KDE 3, I even stuck my work computer to Debian stable instead of sid to keep 3.5.10. But really, you can switch now. It's OK.

        • Uhm, "quadkonsole" has been available since the first tabbed interface was added to Konsole. Just split the view horizontally, then split each of those vertically. Voila! 4 shells in one window, with only 1 menu bar and title bar. Save that as the default profile and your normal Konsole is now "quadkonsole". No fancy add-ons, extras, whatever required.

          And, if you are crazy, you can keep on splitting the view to get as many mini-shells onscreen at once as you want.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by RichiH ( 749257 )

            Obviously, you did not actually try splitting in Konsole and merely saw that the option exists.

            It's totally and utterly broken.

            • Broken how? It's worked perfectly fine for me the few times I've used it. Usually only split the screen once (horizontally or vertically), but I split it into 4 before posting.

              So, how exactly is it broken?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by RichiH ( 749257 )

                Split any way you want, start typing.

                You will type in all splits at once. Not quite useful.

    • I still run Gnome 2 on my desktop. IMO, it's the most efficient in terms of resources:features.

      You should definitely try Xfce and LXDE. They are both click-click configurable and much lighter then GNOME.

      • True. But, as far as lightweight desktops go, I am more of an openbox person. ;)
        • That's what LXDE is using by default (at least on Fedora 15). I was happily surprised that same GTK themes are supported by both LXDE (icons and pointers) and Openbox (window decorations).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by praxis ( 19962 )

        Xmonad has the best feature to resource ratio for my uses. Very customizable, very unobtrusive, very fast. I don't really need much else to manage my desktop.

    • Re:KDE is really good now.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @03:50PM (#36051706) Journal

      I threw KDE 4.6.something on a spare C2D box on a fresh install of Arch. That lasted about 2 minutes, as there was appreciable lag (at least half a second) switching between the tabs at the bottom of the app menu.

      I would not call KDE 4.6 snappy by any stretch of the imagination. On the same machine, I can open as many windows as I want and still switch virtual desktops faster than it takes to redraw the screen. There's no excuse for any GUI element to take longer than a vblank interval to draw.

      • What the hell are your specs? I'm running KDE 4.6 on Arch (and on a beater box at that), and it is much more than acceptably fast over here.

    • Re:KDE is really good now.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by oakgrove ( 845019 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @04:25PM (#36052002)
      I personally think Kde4 is fantastic and I'd be thrilled to use it for more than the 5 minutes it always takes me before I scuttle off back to Gnome were it not for one thing. The kickoff menu is a complete disaster. Tabs lining the bottom and a complete click and delayed hoverfest to find anything. it's pure abomination. And the classic menu omits the one thing that makes the new menu useable: instant search. Lancelot is terrible too, imho. If there were just a good menu for the panel, I'd be using kde. until then, Gnome 2.32 for me.

      • As others have noted, Krunner is great. Also, if you really need the menu replacement, try Lancelot.

    • KDE has improved *greatly* since its 4.4.x days. It is a lot snappier, less buggy and doesn't clutter up your desktop like it used to.

      Mostly true, however I made the mistake of upgrading to Unbuntu 11.04 day before yesterday and besides trashing my Catalyst driver unrecoverably I now have a really nasty new bug: mouse clicks stop working for all widgets except window decorations, usually once each day on resume.

      I have some less than polite comments about how Ubuntu version upgrades also force install the latest bleeding edge kernel without asking, but that only cost a couple of hours while this new KDE bug constantly forces me to restart

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      yea ok I find just the opposite, see I have been on a Linux kick, trying to get away from the canned distros like ubuntu and mint, so I get a system built and use KDE and WTF

      you know when you have a broken desktop method when the user spends the first moments with a new system on google trying to figure out how to get a normal and functioning desktop, and I still cant move the bloody icons once there, yes, great, first time using KDE in a long time and I am on google hopelessly trying to figure out how to c

    • Fun fact! KDE runs pretty great on my 7 year old laptop with Intel built in graphics and 1.5 GB RAM.

    • It definitely will not run on older computers

      I dunno man, I'm running 4.6 on a Pentium D with Intel graphics and 2 Gb of RAM, and I'm doing fine. Desktop effects and the whole shebang.

  • The list of changes [kde.org] look pretty minimal. Not really interesting unless you use Kopete. Much as I enjoy KDE 4, Unity looks interesting. Give it another couple of months for KDE to release their next version, and for Unity to shake out some of the kinks, and it could be worth upgrading to Natty.

    Phillip.

    • Not really interesting unless you use Kopete.

      Oof.. Their naming drives me nuts. It just looks like they misspelled Kaopectate

    • Seriously, KDE developers needs to throw some time into the plugin selection or just say 'Screw it - we're porting Empathy'. Kopete still has a lot to offer over Pidgin & Empathy including video, mutliple identities and a clean, nice looking interface! The issue I see (beyond the Akonadi / Nepomuk fiasco) is that there are only a few plugins for Kopete when there are literally hundreds of plugins for Pidgin. Plugins like Bot Sentry and the ability to sort contact by the chat log size. These are indispe

      • Speaking of Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, I'm going to jump in with a not-very-on-topic question about the KDE system that's going to display my ignorance:

        What the heck is Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, and how does it affect me as a user? Every explanation I've found has been too abstract to relate to.

        As far as I can tell, "Akonadi" = "You must have MySQL installed or else KDE is completely unusable. Oops, sorry if you already had a running MySQL system set up --we're going to take it over now."

        "Strigi" = "If

        • Facetious or not, you seem to be spot-on with each of those points. That junk has given me fits each time I've installed KDE on a computer. It's not getting in my way quite as much now, but it sure isn't doing me any favors.

        • As far as I can tell, "Akonadi" = "You must have MySQL installed or else KDE is completely unusable. Oops, sorry if you already had a running MySQL system set up --we're going to take it over now."

          Akonadi also has the excellent feature of refusing to run just after you import all your contacts into KAddressBook. Usually, the only fix is to completely nuke Akonadi and Kontact, reinstall, and start all over.

          Fun times. :)

          Cheers,
          RM

  • Of course they did... (Score:3)

    by Dcnjoe60 ( 682885 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @02:41PM (#36051090)

    Of course they just released a new version of KDE. Ubuntu shipped last month.

  • Not news (Score:3)

    by diegocg ( 1680514 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @02:57PM (#36051208)

    This is a minor release...

    • The Seventh Law Of Slashdot: Whether the topic is a KDE bugfix release or the death of Osama bin Laden, some asshole will say "this is not news."

  • I wonder if Dolphin can auto-mount samba shares yet. Even Thunar does that these days.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gnud ( 934243 )
      Well, you can browse the local SMB network with ease - and all KDE programs can read/write to SMB shares automagically.

      • So playing video back from SMB shares won't work by clicking in dolphin. A *lot* of KDE tries to induce a copy to local disk before *starting* to open, which is useless when the file is many gigs. Of course, if you want to use a non-KDE app because it's better or the only one, the KDE developers *should* consider that problem (even though I've seen them express the rather foolish sentiment that it's not their problem).

        kioslaves *were* great, then gvfs came along and went the extra mmile of FUSE integratio

      • And what if I want to use superior programs than the KDE programs? It should be about choice, not what the KDE team feels I should be using. gvfs is open source, I'm not sure why they don't just use it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Use SMB4K.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by d6 ( 1944790 )
      I wonder if Dolphin runs any better than explorer.exe yet. I've been fed up enough to change my installs back to Konq...

      • And surprisingly konqueror uses a dolphin kpart for file management...

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by d6 ( 1944790 )
          Reagrdless of any shared code, one behaves much better than the other

          - Konq saw a network share that I have to manually mount with dolphin (no big deal really)
          - Konq hasn't crashed once since I changed back. Dolphin locked up regularly. (this was the big deal)
  • ..yay, let's have a global proxy setting for everything and force that on everything. KDE & Gnome developers both seem to thing that's brilliant. Except.. configure konqueror to use say privoxy and poff, kopete doesn't work anymore. this has been an open bug for several years and I guess pr. proxy app support will be added.. never. great. the panel auto-hide feature actually hides the panel since 4.6.2, so some things are improving. I don't like plasma much, switched to xfce due to that, but the KDE ap

  • ...and Debian won't see this in sta(b)le until 2013.

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