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KDE Open Source Software Linux

KDE 4.7.0 Released 212

jrepin writes "KDE 4.7 releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance. Lots of visual polishing took place with an update to the Oxygen icons, and improved consistency between panel items such as clock and notification areas. The window manager KWin brings a new shadow system and can now run on OpenGL ES supporting hardware, making it better suited for mobile devices. Network management widget is much improved. Navigating through applications and recent files is easier with the addition of breadcrumbs to the Kickoff application launcher. Kontact groupware solution rejoins the rest of the KDE software, with increased stability, better connection to new services and sharing of communication information between more applications. Dolphin file manager has a cleaner default appearance. The menu bar is hidden, but easy to reach and restore. The file searching interface has been improved. Marble the virtual globe now has voice navigation support and a map creation wizard. Gwenview image viewer now offers the ability to compare two or more pictures side by side. Digikam photo management app brings face detection and recognition."
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KDE 4.7.0 Released

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  • Not pulling a "Unity"? Right. Carry on then, and keep up the good work.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by m2vq ( 2417438 )
      I've always liked the KDE interface better anyway. It seems more professional (even back in the 90's) while Gnome has always been somehow "childish". And this was even before Unity-time.
      • I like them both, I just found that for low resolution laptops Gnome fit better, while if I had a nice desktop with lots of space for widgets, etc, I'd probably go with KDE. As an Ubuntu user, I'm re-evaluating my options and may go with KDE or possible XFCE if Gnome 3 does not allow me the configurability I need. The ridiculous 'menu at the top' decision of Unity completely rule it out for me.
        • For me it isn't only a matter of space, I'm not that fond of widgets. Being an Ubuntu user I prefer indicators, they suit me better than any other option, and they feel less bloated. XFCE is my backup option. I still don't blame Ubuntu for Unity, though. I found myself getting used to it pretty fast. The only direction I didn't really appreciate was the one Gnome took with Shell. That said, it's good to see that KDE is being conservative about their interface.
        • I've got a few users running on gnome with Kwin as the window manager because the window manager that comes with gnome won't beep the PC speaker and it also very badly messes up some things with some legacy applications (eg. mouse clicks don't work!).
          Personally I've had the same Enlightenment desktop theme since 1997 but have E17 at home.
      • I've felt the same way, too many feet. Rather use gnome though.
      • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        your professional is another mans clown show

        • your professional is another mans clown show

          Or another child's Fisher Price toy [guidebookgallery.org] .

        • by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Or more aptly, kitchen sink.

          KDE has traditionally cared more for eye candy over usability and it shows in the amount of clutter in the UI. Advanced settings mixed with basic settings on so on. It produces a desktop which is intimidating and inaccessible to new users because there is no direction compared to responding behaviour in GNOME, or OS X, or even Windows. Even power users don't need all that crap in their face, and even if they did it would be better to shift it off into a power tool for their be

          • Clown show is better. Shit is just popping out the sides like you have 22 clowns in a 20-clown car. GNOME is just one sad, fat clown turning his pockets inside out.

          • Even power users don't need all that crap in their face, and even if they did it would be better to shift it off into a power tool for their benefit.

            While GNOME cuts too deep sometimes [...]

            You're brushing off a crucial difference: in KDE, I pretty much always can disable/hide/remove the "all that crap." In the end, making out of the desktop precisely what I need or want.

            If GNOME has removed or added something, one is forced to use some quirks and tricks for as long as the developers do not change their mind. It got much better after advent of Ubuntu, but still at times I want GNOME to spary "all that crap in [my] face" - instead of the "beauty is skin deep" it often present.

          • It produces a desktop which is intimidating and inaccessible to new users

            I don't think there are that many new computer users out there. Maybe it's time to change the assumption that everyone wants or needs welded on training wheels.

            • by DrXym ( 126579 )
              New users to KDE. Being dumped in a sea of buttons, menus, dialogs, tabs, secondary dialogs is intimidating. It's a usability nightmare. And it's not about "training wheels" either. The purpose of desktops is to facilitate doing stuff and to do so in the most intuitive, minimal, forgiving, task centric way possible. If that means stripping esoteric settings, moving other stuff off into advanced dialogs or even into a separate a power tools app then so be it.

              Users of all levels can easily be accommodated b

              • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

                This is what usually drives me screaming from KDE, I just want crap to work at a reasonable level out of the box, I am not 14, this is not 1995, and I have much better things to do than spend a bunch of effort removing "all this crap" or spend an hour digging through a forum, just to have a sane desktop experience.

                I thought we had this GUI thing nailed

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      KDE's motd isn't "The user is a idiot" as is the case with gnome.

      • by Nate B. ( 2907 )

        Perhaps it's not as prevalent but it does exist in KDE as well. Mind that I was dedicated KDE user after 3.4 hooked me. I stuck with it until 4.4.something, or about a year ago on Debian. I installed a second video card and KDE4 lost its mind and barfed widgets, apps, and desktop backgrounds everywhere. I dumped it in short order, tried GNOME which coped better with the setup only by a matter of degree. I then gave XFCE4 a spin and it handles my Zaphod heads independent desktops like a champ. Session

        • a) your pet bug has actually probably been fixed: there was much work on multi -desktops

          b) The size of KDE?? Uhhh, it is modular now.your download is probably smaller than it ever was in the KDE3 days.

    • The way things in the KDE world are done, soon you'd be most likely able to configure your desktop to look exactly like Unity if you like, without that being the default or only choice.

  • by thsths ( 31372 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @09:31PM (#36903710)

    Each release takes longer before it becomes useful. KDE 1.1 was working just right for me. So was KDE 2.3. KDE 3 did not really mature until 3.3 or 3.4. KDE 4 is just now getting there, after 8 minor releases. Some things are still working better in KDE 3, or in KDE 1 for that.

    Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. But we are paying a huge price for "progress".

  • How's that coming?

    As a Firefox user who's children love Flash games, that's a /sine qua non/.

    • As a Firefox user who's children love Flash games, that's a /sine qua non/.

      What doesn't work for you? My daughter plays flash games on my home PC, which is Fedora 14 w/ KDE 4.6 and Firefox. I use the leigh123linux repo for Flash updates.

      • by Nutria ( 679911 )

        What doesn't work for you?

        Nothing, since I use GNOME 2.32. But v3.0 and (since I use Ubuntu) Unity approacheth.

        It's been a long time (Mandrake 7.0) since I used KDE, but ever since then I've consistently read of theming and font problems mixing GTK and KDE apps.

        • I guess I don't notice them. There's an optional thing you can install to force KDE font preferences onto GTK apps, if you want the consistency. I don't think I've installed that on a new machine in a while though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How's that coming?

      As a Firefox user who's children love Flash games, that's a /sine qua non/.

      Integration of GNOME/GTK+ applications in KDE is very good.

      http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/plasma.php

      Recognizing the modular nature of KDE software and the ability to mix and match applications from many different sources, KDE has also improved the Oxygen GTK themes, making applications from GNOME (and other applications using GTK+) blend seamlessly with KDE applications in your Plasma Workspace.

      It would be fair to say that integration of GNOME/GTK+ applications under the KDE SC 4.7 Plasma desktop is orders of magnitude better than integration of KDE applications under the GNOME desktop of any variety.

      • by siride ( 974284 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @10:51PM (#36904176)

        Don't forget QtCurve, which I find to be considerably better than the ugly and garish Oxygen theme.

        • Seconded!
          Personally though, I like the clearlooks/cleanlooks style to be better than both, but...

          Also, I run a very mixed desktop - half KDE, half GTK apps on top of a KDE desktop, with Metacity for my window manager. How more mixed could you get? :P

      • by Ant P. ( 974313 )

        orders of magnitude better than integration of KDE applications under the GNOME desktop of any variety.

        Nope, Qt supports GTK+ themes natively so those KDE apps work and look fine under GNOME. None of this playing-nice-with-others effort came from the GNOME camp, of course.

  • Quit whining (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pinkeen ( 1804300 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @10:37PM (#36904084) Homepage
    There will always be something that doesn't work as it should or as you would like it to be. KDE 4 is a stable, solid desktop environment. I used KDE as my day-to-day working dekstop since 3.x. I jumped the wagon when they ironed out showstoppers in SC4 and don't look back.

    BTW I wonder why there is so much complaining about KDE when it comes to some minor features? Such scale is unseen in windows world. Maybe windows users don't complain so much because ms doesn't care about fixing and improving things anyway? Here you can discuss and have things fixed or even redesigned in a matter of weeks or months.
    • Re:Quit whining (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RobbieThe1st ( 1977364 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @11:05PM (#36904254)

      Isn't there an old quote that states that when soldiers stop complaining, they've lost hope(or something like that?

      It's exactly that here: With KDE, it's possible to make change happen. Windows? No way!
      So, people complain. Because it might get better.

    • It is a mystery to me too. Even the mac users who obsess about the tiniest details of their holy interface are not nearly as anal as the kde3-or-death users.

      And it makes particularly little sense as KDE SC4 is better in pretty much every way as KDE3. Maybe is comes from investing so much emotion in your desktop and being shown that deep down, at was not nearly as great as it could be. Perhaps linux users care more about their software than normal users, and any change is seen as a personal insult.

    • by archen ( 447353 )

      BTW I wonder why there is so much complaining about KDE when it comes to some minor features? Such scale is unseen in windows world. Maybe windows users don't complain so much because ms doesn't care about fixing and improving things anyway?

      Where I work we've recently started migrating from Win2k to Windows 7 and I can assure you all I hear is complaints about pretty much everything. The difference between Windows and KDE/Gnome is that windows users don't have a choice. What else are they going to use? Yeah, exactly. Basically they take whatever MS gives them and they live with it.

    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      you can only fix something so much before it looks like a monstrosity, kde has bypassed that point years ago, its a vomit pile of weird controls and slow performance, and why? so a nerd can tweak it out without having to open a text file?

  • So let's say I did a lot of Linux back in the day, now days, I do it rarely under vmware with OSX. I've been installing (k)Ubuntu now and then again. What's the best KDE friendly distro these days (running under vmware)?

    • by nzac ( 1822298 )

      Most distros support KDE well enough that it does not matter. Make your decision depending on what you want

      openSUSE supposedly is pretty good for KDE (i run gnome) from what it see it has pretty good visualisation support (used with WMware often).

      You will have to at least upgrade to tumbleweed (like testing) or factory (sid) to get 4.7 before November I suspect though.

    • Slackware is a great KDE distro. If Slackware scares you off, try the KDE edition of Mint.
    • As much as I hate to say it, Kubuntu is the one I've had the least amount of frustration with (I've tried OpenSuSE, Fedora, and Chakra besides). There's a lot more eyes on Kubuntu and a lot more forum posts related specificly to Kubuntu, so it's easy to find answers, and Canonical does a good job of installing the basics by default (codecs, flash, binary drivers, etc.).

      • Interesting, I always found Kubuntu to be exremely frustrating and a poor KDE experience overall, it isn't very integrated with the ubuntu stuff, unlike vanilla ubuntu. Maybe I should try it again, but i'm reluctant at this point :(
    • The best distros for KDE are either the ones that modify it the least, or the ones that customize it with such attention to detail that it's great. In my opinion, the best so far are:
      • ArchLinux
      • Slackware
      • SuSE
  • by Anonymous Coward

    It's just a shame it took so long for it to evolve into a usable and stable desktop. After losing hope due to months of buggy, incomplete and lame releases that prevented me from using my computer in the same way(s) I could with 3.5.x, I actually switched to Windows 7 some 8/9 months ago.

    I installed Kubuntu 11.04 yesterday, with KDE 4.6.2. I've not yet tried 4.7, but KDE4 is extremely good now. I just hope the devs begin to recognise that having revision numbers two-thirds of the way to the next major re

    • by Teun ( 17872 )

      that having revision numbers two-thirds of the way to the next major release is far from being an acceptable situation, and this has tarnished the reputation of KDE for quite some time to come.

      Huh?

      What could be wrong with KDE4.28 ?

  • Lots of comments here comparing KDE to Gnome 2, 3, and Unity, and a couple of posts praising LXDE (which I also like). I'm surprised there are so few who have mentioned E17. I installed Bodhi Linux (Ubuntu with E17 desktop) on a netbook and have been extremely impressed:

    1. Fast, low memory usage, but ...
    2. Manages to be beautiful ...
    3. Without being in your way.

    Its "Run Everything" (equivalent to Alt-F2 run dialog) is exceptional, the menus are generally sensible, and it's easy on the eyes. I'd highly re

  • Desktop Environments? In all my 4 pcs I run gentoo+openbox+fbpanel+pcmanfm+my own stuff and it replaces all that bloated crap. When I did use desktop environments, I used Gnome, since KDE just looked like crap to me (3.x times).

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