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KDE

KDE Releases Applications and Development Platform 4.12 44

KDE Community writes "The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to KDE software delivering new features and fixes. With Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Platform frozen and receiving only long term supportt, those teams are focusing on the technical transition to Frameworks 5. This release marks substantial improvements in the KDE PIM stack, giving much better performance and many new features. Kate added new features including initial Vim-macro support, and games and educational applications bring a variety of new features. The announcement for the KDE Applications 4.12 has more information. This release of KDE Platform 4.12 only includes bugfixes and minor optimizations and features. About 20 bugfixes as well as several optimizations have been made to various subsystems. A technology preview of the Next Generation KDE Platform, named KDE Frameworks 5, is coming this month."
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KDE Releases Applications and Development Platform 4.12

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  • by socceroos ( 1374367 ) on Thursday December 19, 2013 @11:00PM (#45742885)
    It has really come along from the 4.0 days. Very stable for me - use it all day, every day at work. Only problem I have is that if you have a auto-hidden panel and a full-screen Citrix app then there is a 10px portion of the screen that is unusable right over the auto-hide hover area.

    Other than that - it's awesome. I can't live without Kontact, Dolphin, Okular and Gwenview.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I use vtwm. It's worked well for me since X11R4, and continues to work well, without the eye candy, bloat, and screen confusion of the Gnome or KDE desktops. Just turned on 3 noob Linux admins to it, because it *leaves your computer free to do work* instead of burning cycles with transparency, rounding, and useless cutesiness.

      • 1990 called... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        1990 wants its computing cycle counters back.

        I'm not about burning CPU just for the sake of doing it, but if you've got them to spare, why are we worrying about whether it takes 20 microseconds or 50 microseconds to respond to a mouse click?

      • I have a lot of respect for lean programs. I've been building my own hand-coded assembly kernel for the last few years as I have a fascination with lean, mean programming. However, KDE does offer a lot of very useful functionality that is an honest time-saver. I'm an akonadi+nepomuk convert. I also love KIO and Kate.

        IMHO, if I was going for lean, I wouldn't be using a GUI anyway. Definitely not for Linux sysadmin tasks!
        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          KIO frustrates me, well, Dolphin's use of it or something.

          When using SFTP:/ or FTP:/ access, things don't work right. Compressed files cannot be expanded in place, I assume because it calls up a command line utility.

          Gnome handles this far better, creating a hidden, but browseable folder in your home directory, that can be accessed just like anything else.

      • I use vtwm. It's worked well for me since X11R4, and continues to work well, without the eye candy, bloat, and screen confusion of the Gnome or KDE desktops. Just turned on 3 noob Linux admins to it, because it *leaves your computer free to do work* instead of burning cycles with transparency, rounding, and useless cutesiness.

        People seem to get this impression because the desktop effects stack of Linux is poorly optimized. It can be seen when trying to run a full bells'n'whistles Linux desktop on a low-end Atom/Bobcat system, and the animations turn choppy. At the same time, the same machines are butter smooth with Windows 7 and 8. (For games, Linux and Windows are already getting very close in terms of performance.)

        Properly optimized, low latency, compositing desktop is a joy to use and will not "burn cycles" in a bad way.

        • by Fri13 ( 963421 )

          Second gen netbook (Atom N420 if remembering correctly) here and Windows 8 doesn't even want to run in it, the beta works but is choppy and laggy when moving window or opening menus.
          On same time, latest KDE is butter smooth, without frame drops or lagging. And the difference is HUGE, as the "eye candy" is very valuable usability booster while same thing can not be said from Win8 at all because it doesn't have shadows for windows, almost non-existing animations and then full screen start screen (only help to

    • It has really come along from the 4.0 days. Very stable for me - use it all day, every day at work. Only problem I have is that if you have a auto-hidden panel and a full-screen Citrix app then there is a 10px portion of the screen that is unusable right over the auto-hide hover area.

      Other than that - it's awesome. I can't live without Kontact, Dolphin, Okular and Gwenview.

      Can't say the same. I use it (4.10), but there are sometimes Plasma crashes under high load; the battery icon gives out a false empty battery warning on resume from RAM. Overall, the UI is clunky. KDE has never had good UI design & nice themes. There are the moments where you feel like operating Windows95.

      GNOME3 should be stable enough now, I'll probably switch back to it soon. It gets out of the way and is appealing. I think the lessons from Mylyn should be taken seriously.

      • Re:Love KDE (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) on Friday December 20, 2013 @12:01AM (#45743107) Homepage

        Different strokes....
        I think KDE has a brilliant UI that supports my workflow wonderfully. I find it much better than Mac OSX and MS Windows in almost every aspect. Haven't used Gnome since the early 2.0 days, but I never liked how it worked or how it looked, and I found KDE programs superior for my use: K3b, Krusader, Kmail, Amarok, Kontakt, Digikam, Gwenview, KTorrent, Konsole are IMHO superior what else I have seen on Linux.

        Never had KDE Plasma crash on me, even with extreme loads.

        • by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

          I love KDE, though I was about to post my usual rant about the indecipherability of the difference between "Special Window Settings" and "Special Applications Settings" after opening the "About KDE" dialog in Dolphin to determine that I have KDE 4.10.5. When that dialog appeared completely on top of my Dolphin window, I figured I'd go in and give it a try to get "Remember position and size" to work sanely - and y'know what, it suddenly works as I thought it should. For some reason my old settings were rec

      • Gnome 3, yes, Gnome Shell and Unity, no. It's too bad too, as I actually didn't mind Gnome Shell that much.

    • Krusader is a KDE favourite of mine. Very underrated. It is twin panel, tabbed file-manager, with masking filters (e.g. select only "*.otd" files), the ability to unpack archives, and has superb "synchronise folders" feature. It's mass rename feature is very good too.

      • Does synchronisation use rsync or is it a from-scratch implementation?
        • Does synchronisation use rsync or is it a from-scratch implementation?

          Not sure, but I don't think so. It works a little different from simple folder syncronisation tools.

          First it compares the two folders and then display display the differences using kdiff (or similarities, depending on the filters). There are various ways and options for filtering this, but when satisfied, one use the filtered output to synchronise the folders.

          So it gives one a very good overview of what is going to be synchronized, and what exactly you want to synchronise at all. So folder synchronisation f

      • Krusader is just plain excellent. Perhaps the best twin-pane file manager I can think of.

        • I think Krusader is the best file manager at all. Using drag-and-drop with multiple windows is just a pain on MS Windows and Mac OSX.

          Almost everyone I know who doesn't use a twin panel filemanager have an incredible messy 'home' catalogue. Things just get dumped there, and because reorganising using MS Explorer sucks, the crust just accumulate.

  • by Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) on Thursday December 19, 2013 @11:29PM (#45742995) Homepage

    I look forward to the GPG backend to Kwallet. I was never quite sure how safe the encryptet wallet was, but with GnuPG I know what I get.

    Ctrl-Click to launch URL's directly from Konsole looks nice too. It is a "right mousebutton" context menu at the moment, but clicking underlined URL's just seems right.

    Great for "journalctl" with the "-x" switch that enables the catalogue db's, so that error messages in the log file are displayed together with full explanations and URL's pointing to support and documentation etc.

  • KDE on windows (Score:4, Interesting)

    by staalmannen ( 1705340 ) on Friday December 20, 2013 @01:36AM (#45743461)
    I wonder if I could use the KDE on Windows effort on those asking for help with Windows 8 (right now i have just slapped classic shell on there). My "secret" hope would be that when they are comforable enough with KDE I could convert them to a proper OS (I usually give OpenSuse KDE to novice users but use Arch myself). The case for an alternative user-installed desktop environment has never been greater on Windows, so definitely an opportunity.
  • Kongrats! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, 2013 @03:51AM (#45743811)

    Kkkudos kto kyhe KKDE kteam! Kthis kis kuite kthe kakomplishment! Kviva kla krevolukion!

  • KDE is definitely a nice desktop environment, though I confess I'm still a big fan of KDE3 (and even Windowmaker). There are still a couple of things I just don't get though, so there's still some room for reason to prevail as the KDE4 platform matures. (I'm using opensuse 12.3, for the record).

    1. It annoys and scares me that all of the Plasma desktop widgets seem to have an option where they can be controlled remotely. I absolutely don't understand the point of that, worry about its security implications

    • And there are some great KDE4 apps. But Kontact is not one of them. I anxiously install and run it on every new desktop, thinking "this time, it's going to work." And it never does. Kontact on my opensuse box regularly gets hung trying to open a "choose a file" dialog box (say, if I'm attaching something to an email). I blame its ridiculous database and akonadi semantic crap foundation.

      No such issues here. I use Kontact every day at work hooked up to exchange (IMAP + Davmail to hook up to exchange). I have occasionally in the past seen issues with the open file dialog when you have favorites added that are no longer accessible like NFS or SMB shares. I haven't seen that in ages, but maybe that is just because I don't have anything added into my favorites. Running Kubuntu instead of OpenSUSE here.

      Akonadi works pretty well now too, but there are some occasions where the IMAP process see

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