KDE 4 Promises Large Changes

HatofPig writes "As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works."

Comments

Re:I hope its not bloated

[Pienjo]

In the past, I've successfully made myself a "KDE lite" by getting rid of the biggest resource hog: the desktop and the window manager. OpenBox (At least: version 2, I assume version 3 is just the same) honours the same windowmanager hints, and can (could?) offer a system tray as well.

In a nutshell:

* Make a .xinitrc (or an .xsession, I usually have a symlink from the first to the second), which starts openbox at the end
* Start docker (The OpenBox system tray replacement), kicker, klipper, and whatever other kde components you want to launch.

Tadaa. Done. KDE-lite.

Waste of all the progress!

[Bralkein]

Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now. ;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.

The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:

Interesting interview with Aaron Seigo
Another good interview with Zack Rusin
Official site for KDE Plasma, the KDE4 desktop.

Re:Stability, ease of use and speed

[Nasarius]

It's a nuisance when Windows Explorer on an average Athlon is slightly more responsive than Linux and KDE

Interesting. I've found the opposite to be true, especially with the Start/K menu. If you want to speed up Konqueror's file browsing features, turn off stuff like document previews.

Re:Speed and memory consumption

[Nasarius]

The slowness of remote access has absolutely nothing to do with "outperforming the premier Linux desktop". Such things work on a much lower level. VNC does suck compared to RDP, but look at NX.