Slashdot Mirror

sfcrazy writes "The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments. With 4.10 KDE users can experience a much more sane global-menu like implementation without interrupting their workflow. A list of improvements is available here." This release makes major steps toward further Qt Quick/QML integration (more plasmoids are written using QML, you can create animated desktops using QML, etc.). KWin's configuration applet also supports fetching extensions from KDE Look. Perhaps the best improvement is a new indexer for Nepomuk, with claims that the semantic desktop is finally usably fast (after suffering through a multi-week indexing on my laptop, I have to say Nepomuk is really cool, but having an unusable system for that long is not so I for one welcome our new indexing overlords).

As part of a KDE-wide effort to prepare for Qt 5/QtQuick2, and a push to improve the window manager, KWin now sports QML decoration support. Currently, the C++ API for decorators is "...not very Qt like and requires a strong understanding of how the window decoration in KWin works ... [and] seems to be too difficult to be used." This complexity increases maintenance burden: "In 4.9 we ship four window decorations: the Aurorae theme engine, Oxygen, Plastik, b2 and Laptop. Together they are 10 kSLOC of C++ code and 1 kSLOC QML code (Aurorae). Before Aurorae got ported to QML the size of the decorations was 13 kSLOC. Overall that is about 10 per cent of the KWin source base, which is rather large." Basing his work on the QML version of the Aurorae engine, Martin Gräßlin set out to port Plastik to QML (the C++ version has already bitrotted, and was slated for removal): "After one and a half days of work I’m proud to say that writing decorations in QML is possible. ... In the current state the decoration consists of 370 lines of QML code and I expect to need an additional 100 lines to finish the buttons (they are already functional, that is the close button closes the window) and add some of the configuration options. The same API in C++ consists of 1500 lines of code. So we do not only get fewer lines of code but also a more readable and easier to maintain codebase. For something like a window decoration a declarative approach is much better suited than the imperative C++ way of painting elements."

Carewolf writes "KDE's 'looky' has a new challenge. This time to contribute SVG wallpapers for KDE 3.4. The four best wallpapers will ship with KDE 3.4 when released next year and the best gets a choice of gifts from corefunction.com. Join now to help make KDE 3.4 the best looking KDE release ever."

Carewolf writes "KDE's 'looky' has a new challenge. This time to contribute SVG wallpapers for KDE 3.4. The four best wallpapers will ship with KDE 3.4 when released next year and the best gets a choice of gifts from corefunction.com. Join now to help make KDE 3.4 the best looking KDE release ever."

Michael Pyne writes "It's finally out, KDE 3.3.1 has been released with many bugfixes and translation improvements! Those who just want to start downloading can visit the KDE 3.3.1 Info page, which also includes packages for Red Hat, SuSE, Conectiva, and Yoper." wikinerd adds some details, writing that the new version "fixes a number of bugs in Konqueror, improves JuK and enables VPL in the Quanta webpage editor. The new Plastik theme is very fast and may become the default style in 3.4."

SuperDuG writes "Seems that intellectual property and copyright laws are something that Linspire still doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of. Their flash intro has with it some popular Linux images made by a rather talented artist. An email to Klowner was the first notice he ever got about the images being hijacked, not once has Linspire requested permission to use these images in their ad campaign. They seem pretty similar to me, you be the judge."

An anonymous reader writes "Some guy on kde-look recently released code that makes gtk apps use the current qt theme. Seems this would be a major development for unifying the 2 environments. From the URL: This GTK theme engine uses the currently selected QT style to do it's drawing. Basically, it makes your GTK apps look like QT ones. "

Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."

Karma Sucks writes: "For the first time that I remember, RMS is encouraging collaboration between the GNOME and KDE projects. He offers a concrete idea: Unifying the themes between KDE and GNOME. Matthias Ettrich once went far enough to propose a default unified 'Linux' theme that both Qt and GTK+ could support."