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KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released
dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."
The KDE project is *very* ambitious, especially the feature set for KDE4. Hopefully this turns some heads over in the gnome camp. IMHO they have a LOT of catching up to do in everything from infrustructure to performance.
to KDE from Gnome if the default media player can play DVD videos with menu support. A browser plugin that allows me to seek streaming movies would be great too. Stupid Totem + gstreamer.
No, these are going to be polished releases, so are definitely deserving of the full "4.0" number. You missed the 2 Alphas, that was a while ago. This is the Beta, which is ready for some slightly more widespread testing, but not guaranteed to be completely stable. The "pre" releases, or release candidates, which should be around next month, should be almost there with only minor bugfixes in place.
All they mean is that KDE 4.0 will not have all the features that later releases of KDE 4 will have.
The point is that this is *not* commercial software, where version x.0 contains all the features you're ever going to get, and x.1, x.2, etc... just contain bug fixes and possibly a bit more shiny clip-art. I don't know if "release early, release often" can be applied to a project that's been 2 years in the making already, but if they waited until they'd written everything they could possibly think of into KDE4 before they released it, they'd probably *never* release it!
Yes, they've got a whole load more interesting ideas that will get added to future KDE 4 releases. New minor versions will have cool new functionality. They just haven't had time to do it all at once.
KDE 3.5 has a hell of a lot more stuff that KDE 3.0. But I'm glad they released KDE 3.0 in April 2002 instead of waiting until November 2005 to push it all out at once.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
I have always preferred KDE over other options, and am very excited by this. However I do wonder if there is a fundamental problem with the design of the desktop environments for Linux.
Things like 'Solid', 'Plasma', and 'Phonon' sound great, and the idea of unifying for example sound and multimedia in Phonon is very nice - it will be wonderful for those developing KDE apps, and great for the user to have centralised control over multimedia settings. But then I thought about what KDE apps I actually use. Firefox, Thunderbird, Mplayer, Gimp, OpenOffice are probably the most commonly used, and they aren't KDE apps! So I find it a little annoying that most of the programs I use won't use these nice KDE features. It's for this reason I've switched to fluxbox recently - it seemed as though I was using KDE for the nice layout and desktop management, but not much else - and to be honest I can do without a Matrix screensaver and fancy titlebars when I can reclaim a load of space and performace (or course installing Amarok and k3b then pulls in a load of KDE libraries...). Don't get me wrong - I like eyecandy and so on, but I just don't seem to be using much else. The most useful part of KDE for me was Konqueror - there the tight integration really did shine, but it would be insulting to KDE to claim that's all it's useful for. This is of course the same for Gnome. Generally the idea of diversity is what makes Linux so strong, but I do sometimes wonder if a nice unified desktop that all works together (read: OS X) without seeming like lots of separate applications all using different libraries, all looking completely different, with some using OSS others ALSA (although admittedly this is no longer really an issue with current versions of ALSA) and only being able to use IO slaves and so on in the small number of KDE programs that I actually use, is just never going to be possible.
Of course this all comes down to the fact that Linux is about choice, which is great. But perhaps KDE and others are stretching themselves too wide - for example KOffice is nice, but OpenOffice has a great deal more functionality, so perhaps working to integrate existing solutions might be a better way to spend time. It's things like this that make you appreciate why standards exist... (you can have standards but still have choice)
I'm not really sure if what I've said is actually the case and maybe others have different experiences. I will definitely try out KDE4 when the final release is made. I've used it for years and I just hope that all the work to create a nice integrated environment will actually be something that will be used!