KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released

angryfirelord writes "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase."

Comments

That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

but I prefer Gnome.

Re:That's nice

[phsdv]

And I prefere twm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm). And it is available on almost any machine running X11!

Re:That's nice

[orclevegam]

I usually use GNOME because I don't like the menus in KDE, but that's really neither here nor there as given a choice I won't use either. For me Enlightenment is the best. It's got the flexible menus of GNOME, with the eye candy of KDE. Only problem with enlightenment is it's not exactly the most stable WM ever made. The development is also spotty with long patches going between usable releases.

Re:That's nice

[orclevegam]

1982 called, they want their window manager back.

All kidding aside, what do you think of something a little more up to date but still minimalist like blackbox, or Xfce?

Re:That's nice

[slack_prad]

An option for option isn't flexibility.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooooo! You used more obscenities in your post than the parent poster used in his.

That must make you right...or something.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT THE HELL FOR? Thanks to vista most off the shelf computers have at least 2 GB of ram. Let the desktop rock. If I want moving background of poledancer going off behind my transparent windows, why not? I got the memory and CPU to let it run.

Re:That's nice

[crazybilly]

He's just venting the frustration natural to any new Gnome user. It's a result of wanting to change things and realizing the devs didn't think you needed to be able to change that w/o an hour of googling for which text file to edit, another half an hour of which setting to change and two more hours of figuring out how you did it wrong, how to fix it and then how to do it right. Venting like this healthy. Let the man be, hehehe.

Re:That's nice

[orclevegam]

WHAT THE HELL FOR? Thanks to vista most off the shelf computers have at least 2 GB of ram. Let the desktop rock. If I want moving background of poledancer going off behind my transparent windows, why not? I got the memory and CPU to let it run.

And there's nothing wrong with that if it's what you want, but some of us would like to use those resources on our applications instead of our window manager. It's always a good idea to be able to scale those sorts of things back so that when you really want to get some serious work done you don't have to fight with the eye candy over cpu cycles.

Re:That's nice

[hr.wien]

Then maybe Gnome's not for him? KDE seems like it's right up his alley, so why not just use that and be happy? People ranting on about how Gnome doesn't suit them, so everyone that does like it must be either ignorant fools or children who require hand-holding just grind my goat. Same with the ones from the other side doing the same thing.

That was in fact the entire point of my rant. Neither Gnome nor KDE can be everything for everyone, so just use what suits you the best and be done with it. Trying to make Gnome more like KDE and vice versa would ruin them both.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse for the old Gnome users. One day, everything is working the way you want it and the next day, you install an "upgrade" only to find 10 features you were using yesterday are completely gone because "there are other ways of doing it and people will just have to adjust to the one way we picked." It took years for Gnome 2 to get back some of the functionality in Gnome 1.x. Even now, it's still not the same.

Sincerely,
NOTABUG WONTFIX

Re:That's nice

[Haeleth]

You can use GNOME if you want to. People who want more flexibility (and to be treated like adults) can use KDE.

I used to think this mattered, but in practice for any moderately advanced user there's very little difference between them; the desktop environment provides launch menus and virtual desktops, and that's about it, because you'll be doing most of your file management from a shell prompt or a dired buffer, and the rest is just applications.

And really, the only thing in GNOME that ever annoyed me was the brain-dead unconfigurable window placement in Metacity that kept thinking I wanted my new window to appear on my second monitor, and that's become irrelevant now that the infinitely-configurable compiz is mature.

Re:That's nice

[kwark]

You forgot the horrible gtk filedialog, it is braindead (IMHO) and can be found in many applications.

Re:That's nice

[7ex]

Something about TWM appeals me. It's a strange (say: old) window manager, it's (almost) useless and there's really no reason to use it but I think it's cool.

Re:That's nice

[diego.viola]

I'm sure he doesn't love you too... KDE ROCKS, GNOME SUCKS

Re:That's nice

[sqrt(2)]

you'll be doing most of your file management from a shell prompt or a dired buffer Just when I think Linux users are starting to realize how regular people actually work I read something like this. Still a long way to go.

Re:That's nice

[piojo]

All kidding aside, what do you think of something a little more up to date but still minimalist like blackbox, or Xfce? My opinion is possible irrelevant (because maybe /everyone/ that uses /any/ window manager may feel this way about their respective WM), but I use Xfce, and it doesn't feel overly minimal. It seems very fully featured, with simple customization (that's not strictly necessary). In short, Xfce seems (to me) more fully featured than Gnome, and comparable with KDE in terms of features and ease of use. It's faster/lighter than either, too.

Re:That's nice

[frup]

But ignoring my hatred of GNOME and the morons that came up with its interface guidelines (I, and no one I know, have ever applied how to use my microwave to using a file browser), the important concept is choice. Choice is good.
I use GNOME but that is really funny :)

Re:That's nice

[sortius_nod]

If you want lightweight - ratpoison is about as lightweight as you can get.

Re:That's nice

[clayne]

I [b]do[/b] most of my file management from a shell prompt - and I use KDE as my environment 100% of the time.

(with 30+ konsole windows)

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not a normal user, and you do not think like one. People who think like you being in positions of authority in the FOSS community are what's holding the entire movement back from mass acceptance. Then there's an even worse subset that LIKES the way things are, and doesn't want Linux to be popular.

Re:That's nice

[clayne]

Did I mention I prefer C over C++ too? Stick-shift over automatic too, yep.

But here's the real actual reasoning behind such routine:

10 digits on the keyboard are ALWAYS faster than 2 digits on a mouse.

I'm not dissing all use of GUI-related mechanisms, but command line is succinct, direct, and efficient - which is why it has survived for quite a long time now.

Are you saying I should instead be using a window based file manager to drag little "objects" around rather than use "mv", "cp", "rm" and wildcards? That's absurd.

What you're not getting into is that most users know what they want to do before even making use of a mechanism for doing it - which is why a GUI file manager interface slows one down in almost all cases accept the "hmm, think I'll organize my files today" one.

A GUI file manager is not going to tell me what files have ".txt.0" in their name any faster than "ls *.txt.0" will.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Images and video. Using a CLI to manipulate those is a huge handicap since you can't actually see them. And I could get into the whole visual memory, spacial reasoning concepts but it's all been said before. There's a reason modern desktop operating systems don't rely on the CLI anymore.

Re:That's nice

[clayne]

Yes - that must have everything to do with inefficiency of the CLI and nothing to do with the stampede of mass-market clickety-clackity-push-a-lotta-buttons-burn-a-lotta-cycles-waste-a-lotta-time appeal, right?

I agree that video, images, *and* sound, have benefits in both visual and audible representations of their management. However - they do not represent the singular requirement for managing files. They make up a decent share *in that domain*, which is why I use the GUI folder viewing/thumbnails/etc. options for that particular purpose and the command line for most other things. You don't use a screwdriver to hammer nails do you?

If I still lived in the states, that would be my plate:

CMDLINE

Re:That's nice

[Dan Ost]

I want my window manager to manage my applications and work spaces, but beyond that, I want the WM to stay out of my face. It should never distract me from what I'm working on and it should never prevent me from doing something the way that I want to do it.

For these reasons, FVWM is my choice. It does exactly what I want and it stays the hell out of my way.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the overrated mod. Ever used as a tool for the cowardly and moronic of slashdot. Here's something to think about, a post can't be OVERrated if it has not been RATED at all yet.

Re:That's nice

[jaxtherat]

Yup, that's fine, mod me as flamebait. It's just a pity that when Linus posts similar flamebait, large (otherwise rational) chunks of the OSS community do the real life equivalent of modding it +5 insightful...

Re:That's nice

[djradon]

In Vista's new Explorer, I can search for those files in the same number of keystrokes: alt-d + tab + *.txt.0. No mouse movement required. Plus I can move backward and forward to cycle through previous-such searches without having to retype the search.

Re:That's nice

[clayne]

Cool. But how is that faster than "ls *.txt.0" ?

Also, how do you do this within Vista's explorer:

find * -type f -name '*.txt.0' | sort -k1,1 | less &
(other related or unrelated commands while waiting for an asynchronous notification from the shell)

Yep - that's how alot of GUI things suck. They don't make people more efficient, they slow things down. Command line work does have a higher initial learning curve, I won't contest that. However, after the initial novice experience is worked through, the interface pays off in far greater efficiency.

Like I said before, not all GUI elements are bad, definitely not. But I think the interface needs to take a step back and possibly relegate itself even more to just window and graphics management. Clicking yes/no/okay/cancel with a mouse everywhere is a WASTE OF TIME.

Re:That's nice

[turbidostato]

"Here's something to think about, a post can't be OVERrated if it has not been RATED at all yet."

Okay, let's think about it then.

Hmmm...
Done!

Look: Do you see that "(Score 0)" there, right after the subject? What do you think "Score 0" means? Well, it tells how your message is rated. Yes, it is automated; yes, it is not modded by a human but still, "0" is how your message is rated.

And if someone thinks your messege doesn't deserve even a "0" rating then the proper moderation is certainly, well, "-1 Overrated".

Did they de-fat KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, I used to hate GNOME for its simplicity but KDE turned into that fat kid stuffing double bacon cheeseburgers down his gourd about 4 years ago and he never stopped.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, despite all the extra features and configurability, KDE still manages to use about the same resources as GNOME:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html

KDE doesn't have much fat; it has muscle.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[DrXym]

Extra features and configurability aren't always a good thing at all. The KDE control center is atrocious with far too many panels, tabs, dialogs arranged illogically with common settings mixed in amongst obscure settings.

It seems KDE devs may have realised this since KDE 4 appears to have something more comparable to the OS X prefs (and GNOME's).

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[cheater512]

My only complaint is that the more advanced features are mixed in with standard ones.
The categories are pretty nice. A little bit of attention would make them perfect.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[smellotron]

Extra features and configurability aren't always a good thing at all. The KDE control center is atrocious with far too many panels, tabs, dialogs arranged illogically with common settings mixed in amongst obscure settings.

I wholeheartedly agreee... I've always been turned off by the sheer number of configurations that are presented in the GUI. Something more along the lines of Firefox/Thunderbird may be more appropriate, where there's a GUI to handle the common cases, and some sort of "raw configuration" access for the rare cases (like tuning your TCP/IP stack).

But here's the real kicker. KDE's configuration is all stored in nice little files in your home directory (IIRC, it's ~/.kde/config/*). The config files are all easy to edit by hand, assuming you have any sort of external documentation (say... maybe something on kde.org? Not sure, haven't looked it up recently). For anyone trying to synchronize desktop settings between machines, having an /etc-like tree of INI-style configuration files sure beats Gnome's registry solution. I like to put my configuration files in subversion (and be able to see *meaningful* diffs), so KDE works great for me. Configure once, run everywhere.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I think at one time this wouldhave been a valid criticism. But KDE by any measure has come a long way and only gets better. So while not perfect, it's certainly not bad.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[Enderandrew]

God forbid you have the option to configure your box how you like it.

Some of the menus could be better restructured to make better sense, and in KDE 4 some of them have. But I never get people complaining about having too many many options.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[logixoul]

Ok. How should this be fixed without separating the advanced features from the standard ones? :)
Trimming down the advanced features comes to mind, but it's rarely feasible. The other thing is Firefox-style extensibility... we have a long way to go.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[mad_clown]

It's not about having "too many options." It's having too many options that are presented in a cluttered, inelegant, seemingly haphazard way, I think.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[cheater512]

Well just sticking the more advanced things which will be rarely touched in a different tab is good.
I'm not suggesting having a toggle for advanced features nor culling them.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[logixoul]

Well, again, if the only thing these things have in common is that they're "advanced", we don't wanna separate them. But you make a good point -- if a group of options can be actually categorized as related (e.g. "Window Manipulation") while still ensuring this entire group consists of advanced settings (yes, "Window Manipulation" options are rarely touched) then they should be put into a separate tab.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[jbolden]

I've read that argument against user levels for years and I have yet to hear it actually defended in practice.

Users "don't know" (can't objectively assess) what their own skill level is. It's hard for users to objectively tell what skill level they should choose. Thus, they end up choosing a skill level based on a preconceived notion of themselves which has more to do with their self-esteem ("I suck at computers...") and beliefs ("I'm an überhax0r") than their true skill level.

For most apps there is simple rule if you the menu was filled the options you didn't know what they meant or couldn't figure out why you would use them it was probably set too high, if you couldn't read the help text explaining what they are for then definitely too high. If on the other hand after you turn the level up you see features you had actively wished for then you are at the right level. If you know where everything is on all the menus time to turn the level up.

Word, Access, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Real Basic all make excellent use of user levels and context menus to have hundreds or thousands of menus on complex obscure and specialized topics in general purpose apps.

Re:Did they de-fat KDE

[Azuma Hazuki]

You know, I used to hate KDE for this exact reason, but around 2.14 or so Gnome just became an absolute bloatmonger. And KDE at least does something with all that bloat; Gnome is packed with misfeatures "in the name of simplicity" that make it harder to add much more functionality to your desktop than you can on Windows.

And what do you use to change this? GConfEditor which looks so much like the Windows registry I actually cried when I saw it.

I used to use Gnome exclusively for about a year after starting with Linux. After that I went into a Fluxbox phase, then XFCE once version 4.4 came out (and to my mind, XFCE 4.4 is what Gnome always should have been...). Now I'm on KDE, and I find it actually goes faster than Gnome and very nearly as quick as XFCE on my machine. And it's tweakable, oh, God, it's tweakable. I can change *everything.*

And now they say KDE 4 is supposed to be leaner and faster. This is just...wow. I have never, ever in my life seen a major software project that got *faster* as it got older, especially not with a major version increment. I'm really looking forward to this.

Okay, I understand the audience Gnome is aimed at, and for recent Windows expatriates (i.e., 95% of the *buntu crowd) it makes sense. But something that limiting should at least have the decency to be lighter. If they ever make a GControl application that's analogous to KControl I may try it again, but I'll never go back to Gnome exclusively.

Yes but...

[Anonymous Coward]

does it run on Vista?

Re:Yes but...

[Surye]

It's built on QT4, so after they iron out a few details, yes.

Re:Yes but...

[cgenman]

Can someone quickly update us on the state of getting Koffice running on Windows? I vaguely remember it was KDE 3.5 that was supposed to precipitate the QT switcheroo which would facilitate compatibility.

I miss KMail, like the desert misses the rain.

Re:Yes but...

[davidsyes]

Eventually, and it'll run vista OFF.

Wouldn't be grand if in say, 4 years, KDE, X, or Gnome become so powerful as to be a semi-functional host environment for simple apps that don't need a full-blown OS? Not necessarily for LED book devices, but for say, tablets or hardware used for writing reports, creating content, etc.

Re:Yes but...

[logixoul]

KOffice 2 on Windows is running about as well as on UNIX now. I say in the KDE 4.1/4.2 timeframe (2008) it will become viable competition to OO.o. Some old screenies.

As for KMail, it's barely getting onto the KDE4.0 ship at all iirc. Too few devs. The Windows version is probably stalled.

Re:Yes but...

[DoofusOfDeath]

does it run on Vista?

Does anything run on Vista?

Re:Yes but...

[rts008]

Egads!.....You FOOL!!
What a can of worms you you have burst open here.!
The world may implode! We are DOOMED!

*obligatory*

'I was just upgrading to KDE 4.0, you insensitive clod!
In Soviet Russia/N.Korea/USA,a Beowulf Cluster of e-mails will run your Vista on *nix', even on a dead badger http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badger.shtml, and of course...CowboyNeal said:

"....'Daddy!'
Daddy?
DADDY!
Well son, since you haven't learned to respect your elders, it's time you learned to respect your betters!."http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066831/
    (very bad paraphrase from the movie : 'Big Jake'-John Wayne, and the Dog...in case this gets fsck'ed somehow)'

Ahh! I'm shocked at what has transpired here!

"does it run on Vista?" Uhmmmm....not sure, but I'll give you a running start of 20 seconds, and if you can reach your Vista before my 50 cal. 'reaches out and touches someone', then by all means run it on towards the Vista.

*have penguins, will travel...with RPG's*

Re:Yes but...

[paulatz]

Could you please send me the address of your drug dealer? Use PM if possible.

Slashdotted.

[Valdrax]

Looks like plasma.kde.org is Slashdotted right now, so hey -- Wikipedia to the rescue.

Re:Slashdotted.

[recoiledsnake]

From the wiki:

Kross scripting framework will be used to allow developers to write widgets in JavaScript, Ruby, and Python in addition to C++ [1]. No prizes for guessing what the gnome version will be called.

Re:Slashdotted.

[statemachine]

Looks like plasma.kde.org is Slashdotted

They're busy compiling the new version on Gentoo. Check back in 3 days.

Re:Slashdotted.

[ThinkOfaNumber]

Looks like plasma.kde.org is Slashdotted right now, so hey -- Wikipedia to the rescue. from the wiki:

...providing an API for developers to write widgets and mini-applications called plasmoids, to place on the desktop and panel. why plasmoids? If they're using the plasma theme, why not cells, which are suspended in blood plasma. Or perhaps ions if we're talking physics. While I'm at it, how about crystals (mineral plasma); songs (Plasma the album); nucleii (cytoplasm); germs (germ plasm); or even enzymes (nucleoplasm). Ahh, wikipedia, shall I compare thee to a summer-of-code day? Thou art more lovely and temperate.

Re:Slashdotted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gross?!!!

Slashdotted

[JBHarris]

The main site is already bogged down. However, the major change is the completion & inclusion of Plasma. I like candy.

Re:Slashdotted

[nuzak]

Mmmm yeah, plasma. From the wikipedia page:

providing an API for developers to write widgets and mini-applications called plasmoids, to place on the desktop and panel

I don't care what the official name of them is, I'm going to call 'em plasmids :)

Re:Slashdotted

[dbc001]

The wiki article mentions that support for Apple Dashboard widgets is planned - that would be a huge boost.

In my opinion, the Dashboard is one of Apple's best features, and is really the only thing that I miss when I switch to a PC. The concept of having one-click access to lots of (configurable) real-time data is huge paradigm shift over the old methods (taskbar applets, etc).

Re:Slashdotted

[logixoul]

Oohhkaay, where to start... The plasma site is not the "main site", not to mention it's been unmaintained for more than an year. You're looking for the release announcement which is not slashdotted (it's a different server).
Plasma itself has been "included" in KDE since beta 1, which was in August...
It is not "completed" yet, either. It's still:

• kinda slow
• buggy (unreliable moving of plasmoids*, missing repaints...)
• feature-incomplete (you can't even move the panel)
• uses big chunks of custom code that will go away in a few months when Qt 4.4 comes
• many design decisions remain to be done (such as, should scripting in langs other than JS be supported?)

Plasma is not supposed to be just candy, either. The idea (which it does not pioneer), is that:

• Small atomic tasks (dictionary, feed reader...) should be presented in a flat, flexible plane where the human spatial sense can come into play
• Everyone, yes probably your sister too, can create and distribute a plasmoid of some complexity (aided by frictionless copy&paste, abstractions like the DataEngines, and it-just-makes-sense tools like the Plasmagik packaging system -- think XPI)

* plasmoid = plasma applet

Re:Slashdotted

[ConceptJunkie]

I don't care what the official name of them is, I'm going to call 'em plasmids :)

I'd like to suggest "plasmatics".

Re:Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, the Dashboard is one of Apple's best features, and is really the only thing that I miss when I switch to a PC. The concept of having one-click access to lots of (configurable) real-time data is huge paradigm shift over the old methods (taskbar applets, etc). Yahoo Widgets? You set it to only appear on F12 just like on OS X.

Re:Slashdotted

[Lobster Quadrille]

Shiny! I am compiling as I type.

Re:Slashdotted

[Lobster Quadrille]

I mostly just get irritated by the dashboard. Don't get me wrong- I used it a lot for the first few weeks I had it, and it worked great, but I really just never found a real use for it. I don't think I've looked at it in 6 months, and then only because I accidentally hit f12.

Screenshots

[arevos]

Screenshots are important for superficial people like me :)

I like the widget and window theme, but the kicker replacement at the bottom looks pretty tacky. It was the same in beta, and I'd hoped they'd change it for release, but it seems like they're sticking with it.

Re:Screenshots

[Mistshadow2k4]

I wouldn't say it makes you superficial. Good screenshots can be very informative when deciding whether or not you might like a program (or desktop environment), especially if you can see effects and/or menus.

Re:Screenshots

[orclevegam]

Dude, that link just got slashdotted hard. Think twice before posting a link to something on /. even in the comments.

Re:Screenshots

[MrNemesis]

In a word... UGH! I've been using Dolphin under KDE3 for a good six months now and have been loving it (barring apps like Ark not having any integration with it yet), but what they've done to Kicker looks absolutely hideous, in keeping with what they've done to my beloved Amarok interface in Amarok 2
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Amarok2preview30-07-07.png
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/jamendo_ktorrent.png

Can anyone show me any tasteful and useful implementations of Plasma? Or is it just being bandied about as bling-tastic fluff at the moment?

Re:Screenshots

[arevos]

Dude, that link just got slashdotted hard. Are you sure it's not just you? It still works fine for me.

Re:Screenshots

[nutshell42]

I like the widget and window theme, but the kicker replacement at the bottom looks pretty tacky. It was the same in beta, and I'd hoped they'd change it for release, but it seems like they're sticking with it.

No, it's gonna look like this. In fact, it already does in CVS apparently.

Re:Screenshots

[orclevegam]

Dude, that link just got slashdotted hard. Are you sure it's not just you? It still works fine for me. Well, I tried it again and it's working now. When I tried it earlyer I got a warning page saying the sight had exceeded its alloted CPU cycles. I'm guessing maybe an admin took a look at where the traffic was coming from and was kind enough to up this guys resource cap.

Re:Screenshots

[arevos]

No, it's gonna look like this. In fact, it already does in CVS apparently. I'm not sure that looks much better...

Re:Screenshots

[Wowsers]

Oh my goodness, what have they done to the kicker bar? It now looks like that cr@p in Microsoft Vista!

Can the kicker be reduced in width / not fixed to 100% and be made transparent? The thing is hideously ugly.

Re:Screenshots

[MrNemesis]

Maybe it's just me, but it looks like they've tried to emulate Vista and ended up making it look even more childish. Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny? Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners? I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice :/

I just hope to hell that the final release comes with a plasma theme the restores some semblance of sanity to the frankly (IMHO, natch) ridiculous looking taskbars in those screenshots.

Re:Screenshots

[nutshell42]

Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny?

Why did they put 3 battery applets on the desktop? Why is the clock huge and in the middle of the panel? Because it's not final. You can't honestly think that those buttons will stay that way?!

Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners?

Because it's not full size? You can have it run all the way across the bottom and it won't have the corners and sides but if you have a panel that's less then the full width of the desktop you're probably interested in what the sides are gonna look like.

I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice :/

And you got that insight from what exactly?

Re:Screenshots

[whatevah]

Oh come one... it's not tacky!!! Maybe unintuitive, or too simple, or ... retro? But not tacky!!!

Re:Screenshots

[X0563511]

Ick, I don't like it. To much like OSX. I hope that look is optional (it SHOULD be, knowing how KDE is configurable)

Then again, much of that is as much due to the colors and icons, and not so much the actual programs.

Re:Screenshots

[mrchaotica]

Heh, I got something like "You're killing the server, /. Here's one screenshot for now; check back later." : D

Re:Screenshots

[GuldKalle]

Yeah, it's up again, but only one picture, and this text:

You're killing the server /. Here's one KDE 4.0 RC 1 screen shot for now. Check back later.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe it's just me, but it looks like they've tried to emulate Vista"

Yes, it's you. It looks like a variation of OSX's Dashboard which has been around before Vista. Let's see. You only use Windows so therefore everything copies it, right?

Re:Screenshots

[Seumas]

I don't know that you can get any tackier than the cheap-feeling (though reasonably useful) default kicker in 3.5.8.

Anyway, no sense in me getting all eager for this. I'm not going to bother installing 4x until it's part of my preferred distro and I don't expect it to become part of stable distro branches for at least another year.

Re:Screenshots

[thePsychologist]

Okay, when will the Linux world realise that vertical space on the screen is at a premium? i.e. don't waste it. This huge taskbar/panel at the bottom wastes too much vertical space. So do almost every GTK theme. So whenever I find one I like I open the gtkrc file and reduce some of the y-thickness values. Look at the GTK file dialog. Vertical space is important. Why, in the default GNOME install of Ubuntu the buttons are just huge vertically. Sigh.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's not final. You can't honestly think that those buttons will stay that way?!

Hey, calm down. You're the one who linked to that picture as an example of what it's going to look like; maybe if it's not actually going to look like that, then you should of said so when you linked it?

Re:Screenshots

[Enderandrew]

Sadly, Plasma is not yet the revolution it is promised to be, but it does allow data-engines and a good scripting frame work to easily create Plasmaoids, it brought composite effects to Kwin natively, and it brought SVG rendering to KDE's desktop. So Plasma does have some immediate benefit.

Re:Screenshots

[Enderandrew]

Icon size can be adjusted within seconds.

And the taskbar is very much a work in progress.

Re:Screenshots

[Ash-Fox]

I like the widget and window theme, but the kicker replacement at the bottom looks pretty tacky. It was the same in beta, and I'd hoped they'd change it for release, but it seems like they're sticking with it.

That is not the final KDE4 theme.

Re:Screenshots

[Seli]

Plasma has nothing to do with compositing in KWin - KWin's compositing is, well, KWin's.

Re:Screenshots

[davidsyes]

Well, as of 1431 PST, I got:

You're killing the server /. Here's one KDE 4.0 RC 1 screen shot for now. Check back later.

LMAO. I'm killing the server... Here's *ONE* screen shot for now. Later...

Re:Screenshots

[logixoul]

Ark integration is a solved matter in KDE4's Dolphin.

The "kicker" (more correctly, "panel") theme you see is
a) a far cry from the old placeholder theme that just looked like a smudgy piece of crap
b) a demonstration of how easy it is to theme it (a single SVG), as opposed to KDE3's kicker which you can hardly theme at all
c) probably an approximation of what it will look like in the final, considering it's consistent with the plasmoid theme, and it's what the chief KDE4 graphic designer thought up

The current Amarok 2 UI is simply an flurry of brave ideas and unfinished code, which is why it's called Alpha. Eventually a coherent distillation of what you are seeing will find its way to the final product. Namely, you are probably offended by the new left tabs (which are there to demonstrate SVG theming), the big empty central pane (which will host a range of functionality -- lyrics, recommendations, etc -- made possible by the integration with Plasma's technology), the CoverFlow-like pane at the bottom, dubbed CoverBling (which is a basic experiment and will probably move elsewhere), the narrow blue Playlist (which got a complete rewrite this summer, again allowing lots of experiments in there, for example you can see hierarchical album-grouping in there right now, which may or may not make it to the final) or the top toolbar (which has WIP art/layout).

Re:Screenshots

[Enderandrew]

The Plasma project was to revolutionize the entire desktop, and thusly many people have credited the composite effects in Kwin as part of the Plasma project/goal/vision, even if it doesn't use the plasma libraries. Likewise, Oxygen started as an icon project, but the widget theme is named Oxygen, because it is part of the same vision/goal/project.

You need to learn to be down with buzzwords.

Re:Screenshots

[zlamma]

Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny? Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off?>
Duh! But what? What's that window titled Configure Battery Monitor that has a 'Size of the battery' field?
You wouldn't think they were going to hard code the size of scalable (SVG!) items just not to 'confuse' the easily confusable grammas.

Remember. It's KDE... not Gnome ;)

Re:Screenshots

[sqrt(2)]

I knew I wasn't the only person to take notice of that. Laptops and monitors are increasingly sold with widescreen monitors. All the screens I use now have them. The most common resolutions being 1280x800 for the smaller ones and 1440x900 for medium sizes. I only have one larger than that. Now when you make something that takes up an extra 10px of vertical space it's actually a larger percentage of the total space than before because of the different aspect ratio. Just a quick comparison between Ubuntu and XP's default shows this. Consider the very common situation of having a web browser maximized. Vertical space is so important in this case because web pages primarily are set up to scroll up and down to fit more content. The more you can see without scrolling the better. On Ubuntu you've, starting from the top, the top panel, the windows border, the Firefox controls, then the content of the page, status bar, lower panel. Both panels start out at 22px I believe and the window at the top is about the same. It's easy to see how the little things add up. On XP it's a noticeable difference--at least to me--not having those extra spaces. Add to that the problem of Ubuntu (and indeed all recent distros) using very large font sizes by default, a hold over from the days when font rendering sucked and you needed big sizes to hide the atrocious anti-aliasing (and they still look bad when small, try Ubuntu defaults, size 9, sub pixel hinting, check the word "File" or the number 8. Very uncommon I know so it probably hardly comes up), and you start to see that monitor space getting nickel and dimed away from the stuff that you really want to use it for.

Re:Screenshots

[MrNemesis]

If this is an RC, surely those screenshots are a fair approximation of what they intend it to look like in the final version, at least for now?

I wouldn't exactly call my post an "insight" because I've not used KDE4 yet, just googled for lots of screenshots of the betas and this RC. Granted, alot of them are there to show off the new features and thus there's an onus on making the changes "obvious", as per the battery applets. But I haven't seen any that integrate the usual applets I use (CPU and network monitor, pager and media control) in anything approaching a "minimalist", discreet fashion, and I get worried when I see a project that's supposedly close to a final release that seems to being going in the wrong graphical direction for my tastes.

Re:Screenshots

[jonadab]

So basically you're saying that the interface has been malapulchrated?

(Yes, I _was_ just looking for an excuse to use that word.)

Screenshots and previews of slightly olderreleases

[Rudd-O]

I have reviews of the general KDE desktop and Dolphin 4 on my page. I will review RC1 as soon as I can get Kubuntu packages.

Graphics suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a step backwards to me. I really feel that GNOME is much more refined and this looks more like alpha quality than a release candidate. I used to be a heavy KDE user but stopped using it once the developers started paying less attention to detail. Sorry about my rant but this is just my feeling on the issue.

Re:Graphics suck

[MrNemesis]

How is this offtopic? It's an opinion on TFA.

Re:Graphics suck

[cheater512]

This isnt a Release Candidate in the usual sense. Its still got quite a bit more to be done on it.

Also the graphics are full SVG. Very pretty.

Re:Graphics suck

[logixoul]

It's offtopic because he's commenting on the design of something which, get it, is not designed, just put together for a screenshot...

Re:Graphics suck

[KazushiSakuraba]

Alpha Quality? Just compare koffice with the gnome-office (abiword + gnumeric) joke.

Coming together

[eean]

I finally tried out a full KDE4 session last week and it is really coming together. I really look forward to the creative stuff people make with Plasma. Its not just a tool for having fun widgets on the desktop (which it is), but its designed so folks can easily develop their own taskbar, interactive wallpaper whatever.

So KDE 4.0 will be cool, KDE 4.0 + 6 months of people creating fun plasmoids, even cooler.

KDE 4 Live CD

[Rich]

For people who want to check out the RC without reinstalling KDE (and without risking breaking your existing setup) there's a live CD available at:
http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/
Have a lot of fun!

Re:KDE 4 Live CD

[angryfirelord]

Along with the SuSE disc, (K)Ubuntu users can add it to their repos: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde4-rc1.php

I'm sure that KDE 4 RC1 will be added to Debian's experimental repos shortly.

Re:KDE 4 Live CD

[mfg]

I've just tried this. The most obvious change is the new 'K' menu, which is unbelievably
awful and difficult to use. If there's no way to turn this junk off and go back to a
sane way of doing things then that alone will be enough to keep me on KDE 3.x. The system settings window is also horribly broken - the nice tree view of all the sections has been replaced with a stupid layout that requires me to constantly click on the back button when I'm looking for something.

Does anyone know if the changes will prevent old themes from working? I like the Marble theme from old versions of KDE and have been adding it back myself since they inexplicably dropped it. Assuming they fix the thingsI mentioned above and I switch to 4.x, I'd like to be able to use it.

Fat or muscle?

[Valdrax]

And yet I find myself installing more and more KDE apps on my GNOME system because of how slow or boneheadedly featureless their GNOME equivalents are. (Evince, I stab at thee! So much hatred for its sluggish rendering and inability to change its default view.)

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clear that KDE is more resources demanding than Gnome. Eye-candy features are always more demanding in terms of RAM / CPU power. Also, precompiled binaries as RPMs for KDE (Debian RPMs for example) are always running a little bit slower (20 - 30%) than if you compile them yourself with your own optimisation flags (CPU arch... and that magical -O3 ). Compiling Gnome or KDE over Gentoo always made a huge performance difference to me. Same thing for Xorg as well. God bless Gentoo!!

marccyr AT gmail DOT com

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clear that KDE is more resources demanding than Gnome.

No it isn't, or if it does use more, it's only a tiny amount:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367443&cid=21437045

Eye-candy features are always more demanding in terms of RAM / CPU power.

Depends on how efficiently they are implemented. See e.g. e17. I can't help but notice that whenever e17 gets some new eye-candy people don't immediately scream "bloooat!".

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster. Even with eye-candy features disabled, KDE stills eats more RAM than Gnome. Bigtime.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ricer.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[passthecrackpipe]

Also, precompiled binaries as RPMs for KDE (Debian RPMs for example) are always running a little bit slower
where can I find these RPM's for Debian? And do I need to run them through alien first?

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster

There are also a lot of people claiming the exact opposite, which lends support to my "tiny difference" theory. It's so tiny, the placebo effect completely overrides it.

KDE stills eats more RAM than Gnome. Bigtime.

Read the link, please - it actually doesn't. Here they are again:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html

Note in particular the second link, by a GNOME developer (not that it matters when hard numbers and methodology are presented). Here's a quote:

KDE and GNOME identical to within a few MB!? How can we start a flame war with that? A very big congratulations to everyone working on the optimisation of GNOME! Now you just have to worry about what surprises KDE 4 will pull.

This is only to be expected since KDE adheres strongly to the Once and Once Only principle and is built with a toolkit whose makers derive a significant portion of their revenue from having it well on embedded devices.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oups!! My bad. I simply ment RPMs. Or anything precompiled (and not optimized for your arch).

Marc ;)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[DoofusOfDeath]

And yet I find myself installing more and more KDE apps on my GNOME system because of how slow or boneheadedly featureless their GNOME equivalents are.

I find that the KDE apps (k3b, kate, etc.) are more full-featured, but the Gnome desktop seems much cleaner to me. So I'm just glad they can peacefully coexist.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[timothy]

Same here.

I like lots of the KDE apps (K3B is awesome, though the Gnome burning apps are now quite good as well). Yep -- it's nice that I can run the Gnome desktop (which I find very pleasant, though I like others as well) and KDE apps. I look forward to Okular as my PDF reader, for instance, but Kpdf is probably the fastest and more flexible of the various PDF readers on my system at present.

timothy

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?

Good god, I hope it never does.

In GNOME, I can just drag files to the CD-R window, or right-click an .iso and choose Burn. I think that's pretty darn good.

I tried K3b once, because everybody said it was so cool. There's a waste of half an hour. The entire interface is completely full of panels, dialogs boxes, checkboxes, and radio buttons. (It's like the designers thought a blank screen is a challenge to fill it with as many things as possible.) And despite having used horrible command-line tools for CD burning in the past, I couldn't figure out what a lot of the controls were supposed to do, so I had to read large portions of the Help file. Unfortunately, the Help is in a cool browser window, so it's one page per option (or maybe per panel).

It was in fact far worse than command-line clients. On the command-line, you can say "try the defaults!" by simply not passing in any flags; in the GUI, there was no way to tell what was default or not -- initially the options looked like a checkerboard, so you couldn't even simply uncheck everything. And on the command-line, when you want help, there's a single place (the manpage) to find help, and you can search the entire thing, and nothing else, quickly and easily; KDE help is probably neat if you're browsing around, but if you want "show me what all of these switches do!", it stinks.

So I wasted 30 minutes trying to get K3b to do something, and then gave up and went back to the command-line. That, I think, is the ultimate insult for any program. Well, that and being so painful that it inspires one to rant on slashdot about what a horrible program it is.

I like to think that K3b has gotten better since then, but I doubt it. The entire KDE way seems to be "let's have entire menus of menus of dialog boxes of options". Can the user's CD burner spin at 53x? Then we need to have a control in the interface that says "53x"! We can't possibly disallow the user from doing something that is technically possible, no matter how stupid it might be!

Re:Fat or muscle?

[jdclucidly]

The K3b equivalent in Gnome is called Brasero. Try it.
For ripping, Sound Juicer.

As far as Evince complaints, it's the only PDF viewer with PDF Forms support so that seems pretty featureful to me.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Just Some Guy]

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster.

And if Mustangs were really faster than Accents, you'd never see whale tails on a neonned Hyundai.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[CopaceticOpus]

In k3b, you can also drag files into the window and click Burn. Yes, there are other options if you click around, but the defaults are just fine. What, did you think you had to look through each screen and thoroughly evaluate each possible option? The advanced options are there if you need them, and can be ignored if you don't. That is exactly how it should be.

It just blows my mind that you had such a bad experience with k3b. It's pretty much perfect from my perspective. When phones switched from rotary to dial pads, did that throw you for a loop too?

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet I find myself installing more and more KDE apps on my GNOME system because of how slow or boneheadedly featureless their GNOME equivalents are. I was the opposite way. I used KDE but for the most part used GNOME apps. When I made the switch to Gnome with Dapper, I don't bother with the few KDE apps I used anymore. The only two I still use are . I really don't see why you're complaining about speed, though. Most Gnome apps feel quite snappy and look much better (Clearlooks Classic is just beautiful. I hate the new Clearlooks , though, as it makes even Keramik look good by comparison) than their equivelant KDE apps.

For the most part the configuration is much better as well. When I used KDE I'd spend days tweaking everything to get it to a state I want and then I wouldn't be saitified and would up doing even more tweaking. With Ubuntu's Gnome, though, the only things I have to do is get rid of the brown (Clearlooks Classic + Tango and a blue background), enable delete in Nautilus (browser is already enabled, I despise the one window per folder that Gnome (and Fedora) defaults to), and get set the toolbars to "Text beside items". For most apps I really don't feel the need to bother changing anything unlike the endless tweaking I did with KDE.

(Evince, I stab at thee! So much hatred for its sluggish rendering and inability to change its default view.) I agree with Evince. It's a PoS. Try to open this in it for example. KPDF handles it perfectly, while Evince does white text on a white background through most of it. WTF?

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b? Try Gnomebaker. The interface is similar, and unlike K3b I can get it to burn cds that don't have the "track 2 that never ends" problem.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

evince and kpdf both share the same rendering library, called "poppler" (http://poppler.freedesktop.org/).

and yes, the cd-burning functionality built into gnome's nautilus gui is pretty basic, but there are dozens of better burning programs - try brasero.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[ne0n]

Brasero is my weapon of choice. Now that I've helped you, why don't you find me the native KDE equivalents of Evolution (PLEASE don't say krashy KMail)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Enderandrew]

Please mod parent down. Every benchmark and testcase shows the same apps run faster, and use less memory on KDE than Gnome, and the default desktop on KDE runs faster and uses less memory on KDE than Gnome.

That may change in KDE 4, even though QT 4 is supposed to use less memory and run faster, but between the new kdelibs and Plasma, you have enough new features that is taking up more system resources than KDE 3. This is also still an early RC of the first release of the KDE 4 cycle. Given that KDE 3 got more efficient over time, I can hope KDE 4 will also get more efficient over time.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Brasero is my weapon of choice. Now that I've helped you, why don't you find me the native KDE equivalents of Evolution (PLEASE don't say krashy KMail) Someone seems to have fixed most of the KMail crashes recently. You might want to try a recent version. (Provided you liked KMail /sans/ crashes) There is also mailody... not sure how it is.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the same boat. I find myself using a lot of KDE apps (Amarok, K3B, Ktorrent) and I love how easy it is to script stuff with dcop (although I understand that is getting dumped for KDE4) but I use Gnome on the desktop. I'm not sure how much of this is because Ubuntu spend more time polishing and integrating their Gnome distro than their KDE one, I really should give Suse or something a whirl again.

At least a small part of it is because KDE apps look nice in Gnome, but I could never get Gnome apps to look decent in KDE. And Firefox and Thunderbird were outright atrocious.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[davidsyes]

In Gnome, what I DO like are emblems. Gnomes with emblems are nice and not gaudy. I wish (or hope that KDE) gets them. Their absence is ...emblematic of a prob....lem....

Re:Fat or muscle?

[pherthyl]

(although I understand that is getting dumped for KDE4)

Not dumped, replaced. DCOP is gone, but it is replaced by DBUS, so you can do all the same things using dbus.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Valdrax]

When Brasero can verify a disk created on the fly, we'll talk.

(I honestly can't believe that people don't bother to check if their files are properly burned before clearing them off disk!)

As for mail programs, I don't know. Neither Evolution nor KMail particularly impressed me. I use Thunderbird (and I don't like it that much either).

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Valdrax]

Interesting. I didn't have poppler installed on my system until I installed KPDF last week. Still, evince feels a LOT more sluggish on my system. It takes about 10 seconds to open a file and 5-7 seconds of unresponsiveness after each change to the window (such as resizing the window, turning off "continuous," and turning on "best fit" like I have to do EVERY SINGLE TIME I open a file to read). HATRED.

Anyway, the CD burning functionality in nautilus is too basic, and I don't like brasero either because it doesn't verify burned disks -- a must have feature for me since I'm usually deleting files immediately after they're burned.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[MMC Monster]

Ditto.

Frankly, I can't think of a photo manager on any OS that works as good as digikam. It's default to ask every time whether to move or copy files you drag and drop a photo from one folder to another is great for novices. I'm not afraid to set up digikam for my dad's photo library.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[hotfireball]

I find that the KDE apps (k3b, kate, etc.) are more full-featured, but the Gnome desktop seems much cleaner to me. So I'm just glad they can peacefully coexist.

Actually they are don't: developers from both kingdoms hate each other, slashdotters modding down their opposers and applications on any Linux distribution looks different, not integrated at all because of overall incompatibility.

Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE guys will always reject the true fact that they ALREADY won on Unix desktop, that it is time to be together. Instead, they will never unite together to be one heart, they will never try to develop common protocol for UI (which is essentially a documents) and they will continue their damn Holy Jihad.

We, as users, will never see in Linux desktop integrity between applications to let system dialogs be similar (OK/Cancel at one standard place, "Apply" button for everything or apply automatically etc), common shortcuts same, same usability feeling, keyboard navigation, theming, icons etc. IOW, indistinguishable from each other for end-user.

Instead, we will have forever two different things, like "GUI No One Might Enjoy" and "Kids DesKtop Environment due to Khildish looK", where both will be replaced by an ascetic FluxBox with 20 xterms running... Done! Others, who need decent desktop like Beagle with small CPU/Mem usage, fast F-Spot, tightly integrated environment which can run fast on old G3/256M RAM with all eyecandy which OSX had implemented number of years long time ago -- all of them are just lame lus0rz! :-)

And yes, do not ever mention devil's OSX as an abstract example of a technology forever ever. Otherwise you will be shot as troll immediately. Like me just now. ;-)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod parent down for not addressing a single thing (and there was only one) of the grandparent post while at the same time telling people to mod them down.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[clayne]

The people who claim KDE eats more RAM than GNOME, and even vice-versa, don't know shit about virtual memory systems or memory management in a modern OS.

Cmon guys, "top" is not what you use to determine how much a particular set of applications are consuming, footprint wise.

Paging, shared maps, and libraries - do some research.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Say What? KMail has never crashed for me, and I have at least 2 dozen filters configured in it. I have been using KMail for years now, even when I ran gnome.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod parent down for requesting that we please mod parent down. And yes, mod me down while you're at it.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Atti K.]

That's right. My KDE 3.5.8 just flies on Gentoo, while it seemed sluggish on openSuSE. (on a 3-year old AMD Sempron) And it took less then a day to compile all of it :)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[segedunum]

At least a small part of it is because KDE apps look nice in Gnome, but I could never get Gnome apps to look decent in KDE. And Firefox and Thunderbird were outright atrocious.

Since KDE uses QtGTK and is able to get Gnome to use the KDE/Qt theme, how on Earth did you manage this? I cannot for the life of me understand how KDE apps look good for you in Gnome, since the reverse is not true.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every benchmark and testcase shows the same apps run faster, and use less memory on KDE than Gnome,

Let's try the opposite: most benchmarks and testcases show the same apps run faster, and use less memory on GNOME than KDE.

Prove me wrong.

I welcome any facts and statistics that can be reproduced, but I hate statements pulled out of thin air like that.

Note: if you run some comparisons yourself (as I did), please exclude any benchmarks based on OpenSUSE/Novell and their bastardized version of GNOME. But feel free to pick any other recent Linux distribution like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Gentoo, etc. You can also run tests on Solaris or OpenBSD if you prefer. Please compare the current versions of KDE (3.5.8) and GNOME (2.20) in order to be sure that you are not not comparing versions that were released more than 6 months apart. Once you have reliable statistics based on the current version of each desktop, you might be surprised about which one is faster and consumes less resources.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?

Amen. Gnomebaker is a joke. While we're on the subject, Evolution is irritating and buggy while KMail is actually pleasant to use.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[segedunum]

Let's try the opposite: most benchmarks and testcases show the same apps run faster, and use less memory on GNOME than KDE.

Which you've never done.

Once you have reliable statistics based on the current version of each desktop, you might be surprised about which one is faster and consumes less resources.

When I have equivalent and functional applications open for the tasks I'm performing? I doubt it sweetheart:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

Why do you think there has been a general feeling with Gnome users that performance has been a problem, and why do you think that people like Federico Mena-Quintero are feeling the need to trawl Gnome for performance related issues - full-time?

Re:Fat or muscle?

[cloakable]

Okay (KMail isn't the equiv of Evolution anyhow). Kontact!

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think there has been a general feeling with Gnome users that performance has been a problem, and why do you think that people like Federico Mena-Quintero are feeling the need to trawl Gnome for performance related issues - full-time?

And this is precisely the reason why I asked for a comparison of the current versions of KDE and GNOME.

The article that you linked to is based on measurements done with GNOME 2.12 and 2.14, released released respectively in early September 2005 and April 2006. GNOME 2.12 is more than two years old. The comparison was against KDE 3.5.2 + patches from April-May 2006. Considering that a lot of performance improvements went into the KDE releases up to KDE 3.5.8 (thanks to Lubos Lunak and others) and into the GNOME releases up to GNOME 2.20 (thanks to Federico Mena-Quintero and others), the comparisons based on old versions of either desktop are obsolete now. Besides, even these measurements done more than a year ago by Lubos had been quickly corrected, showing that already at that time, KDE and GNOME were much closer to each other than initially reported.

So I asked for performance data related to the current versions and you just re-post a link to some data that is obsolete since at least a year? Nice try!

Contrary to what you claim, I have done some measurements myself, using the standard desktops (no compositing or GL hacks, no C#/Mono applications). But I have to admit that I was comparing KDE 3.5.6 (released in January) against GNOME 2.18 (released in March) and later upgraded to 2.20. I have not tried KDE 3.in terms of performance and resource consumption5.8 yet, so I do not want to post detailed numbers and be accused of being unfair because of the GNOME version that I was testing is a bit more recent than the KDE version. But just a few hints: from a cold start, the GNOME desktop was ready 6 to 10 seconds earlier than the KDE desktop; after starting basic applications like KWrite/Gedit and Konqueror/Epiphany, KDE was usually using 5 to 10 MB more than GNOME; opening the main menu was twice as fast for GNOME without the icons, but a bit slower with the icons. Note that there are still many things that can be improved for GNOME: enabling many panel applets takes too much memory, while the KDE memory usage for similar features does not increase as much. GNOME does not seem to be very efficient when loading icons in the menus, although it seems to be a bit faster now than a few months ago. Also, the start-up time for both desktops could be much faster, especially if you shut down your computer at night and do not want to use suspend-to-disk.

So there is still a lot of work to be done on both sides. But please do not look at old data and assume that nothing has evolved since then. Several improvements made in the last years have significantly reduced the memory usage and the general snappiness of both desktops.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[marcosdumay]

You find those RPM here, but you'll have to pass them trough alien. Anyway, I don't recommend using those packages, since they are normaly too old for testing and too unstable for stable ;)

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops! Accidental paste in the middle of the text just before pressing the Submit button:

I have not tried KDE 3.in terms of performance and resource consumption5.8 yet, so [...]

Should be:

I have not tried KDE 3.5.8 yet, so [...]

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Rabid9797]

It's true that Gnome really is missing out on a good burning program like K3b, but its pretty blind to say there are no good features in gnome, or that its slower. There's a reason many distro's choose gnome, its becuase its less resource hungry and has less eye-candy built in than KDE does, and that makes it less of a load on older computers, and just makes things more efficient in general. Personally, after trying both KDE and Gnome on ubuntu(in two sperate installations), I really found Gnome to be the better of the two.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been following this discussion for a while, realized what I am doing with my life and should go hang myself. Reading nerds argue about Gnome vs. KDE for the millionth time is no way to spend a life. However, jumping on the mod parent up/down bandwagon does make sense. Mod parent up for being altruistic and asking to be modded down. Mod me down for mod talk. happy kwanzaa!

Re:Fat or muscle?

[segedunum]

And this is precisely the reason why I asked for a comparison of the current versions of KDE and GNOME.

You miss my point. The reason why people have been looking at performance issues in Gnome is because everyone knows they're there. You can't try and spin this.

The article that you linked to is based on measurements done with GNOME 2.12 and 2.14, released released respectively in early September 2005 and April 2006. GNOME 2.12 is more than two years old. The comparison was against KDE 3.5.2 + patches from April-May 2006.

I'm afraid you don't get out of it like that. Gnome has had a track record of performance problems, and although small incremental improvements have been made, mostly in places like fontconfig, it hasn't become efficient and a speed demon overnight. It still have redraw, efficiency and memory issues in many areas.

Contrary to what you claim, I have done some measurements myself, using the standard desktops (no compositing or GL hacks, no C#/Mono applications). But I have to admit that I was comparing KDE 3.5.6 (released in January) against GNOME 2.18 (released in March) and later upgraded to 2.20.

Then release them and we can pick them apart.

But just a few hints: from a cold start, the GNOME desktop was ready 6 to 10 seconds earlier than the KDE desktop;

What do you mean 'from a cold start'? Gnome is not an operating system. Your terminology is bollocks before you even start. If you mean when logging in, absolute bollocks. No one in a month of Sundays is going to believe that because it doesn't happen, and I've logged in to umpteen Gnome and KDE desktops on lots of distributions. Funny no one else has picked up on this glaring performance difference anywhere.

after starting basic applications like KWrite/Gedit and Konqueror/Epiphany, KDE was usually using 5 to 10 MB more than GNOME;

What were you using to measure this? I'm afraid if you look at Lubos Lunak's figures and technique for doing this, you'll find that the figures he gets and the random figures you have got vary so much that you can't blame this on a couple of point releases.

opening the main menu was twice as fast for GNOME without the icons, but a bit slower with the icons.

Measurements?

Also, the start-up time for both desktops could be much faster, especially if you shut down your computer at night and do not want to use suspend-to-disk.

That all depends on your distro. It really depends on what you mean by 'start up' time.

So there is still a lot of work to be done on both sides. But please do not look at old data and assume that nothing has evolved since then.

This is not old data. There are many glaring differences between memory usage that they haven't been solved in a few point releases, and writing 'various performance improvements' on a changelog doesn't mean a thing ;-).

If you can do what Lubos has done to let us all know that things have changed, then that's great. As it is, just because you've rambled on about your own anecdotal personal experiences in order to let as all know how 'snappy' and memory efficient Gnome is, it doesn't mean any of these things people have widely talked about for years have changed.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[ne0n]

Thunderbird was OK until a corruption in my gigantic MBOX file really made me aware of maildir's superiority.
As for DVD burning... what we need is a PIE/PIF scanning tool such as Nero CD-DVD Speed because "disk verification" (Nero/k3b-style) isn't that useful IME. Currently I use TY +R discs and use a Windows machine running CD-DVD Speed to verify each burn.

Re:Fat or muscle?

[quakehead3]

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b?

k3b could be ported to gtk. This is the power of free software!

KDE vs Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

So here is a question from someone trying to move to Linux on a laptop for my kids to use.

KDE or Gnome?

I recently had a very busy weekend trying edubutu, ubunutu, xubuntu, and gOS on an IBM T40, with mixed results.
I did not get around to kubuntu, perhaps I should have.

All around, it went very smoothly, particularly with improvements to my networked printers.

But I never could get the multimedia apps to behave correctly. The iron test was www.nasa.gov. My five year old could watch the videos there all day long. The best I could achieve was getting about 2/3 of them working. Even then, they didn't stream, they downloaded in their entirety, then started playing.

Yes, I went through all the ubuntu lists. I loaded mplayer, w32codecs, and flash_non_free. All to no avail.

Would I have had better luck with a KDE install?

FYI: I started in Unix on PDP-11 back in the day and have been on various SVR4/Solaris/RH4/BSD hosts ever since, so I am not a total newbie on this. But I do not normally do multimedia in those environments.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[eean]

KDE or Gnome won't matter for this sort of thing generally.

Assuming you meant Nasa TV, did you try just installing Real Player? Its Linux version is way less bloated. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RealplayerInstallationMethods

The summary is you add the Canonical commercial repos and then apt-get install realplay.

For most other video (and maybe the Nasa site as well) mozilla-mplayer works well.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[DrXym]

GNOME. It's simpler, has less to break and works just fine for adults and children. If you absolutely must have every single knob, dial, button and setting in your face or reachable from a menu then KDE is a better choice.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

*NOT* Gnome, that's for sure. I use Gnome but I'm waiting for KDE 4 and then I'm leaving.

I don't need every single knob, dial, button, and setting in my face. But it sure would be nice to be able to do things like add my own icons and MIME types or adjust the screen-saver settings. You know, the things that every desktop environment since Windows 3.1 can do.

If you think simple stuff like that falls into the category of 'power user', then I suggest you take a look at a calendar. It's 2007, damnit!

Gnome has been dumbed down to the point of uselessness.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[_Sprocket_]

KDE or Gnome?

I recently had a very busy weekend trying edubutu, ubunutu, xubuntu, and gOS on an IBM T40, with mixed results.
I did not get around to kubuntu, perhaps I should have. Ubuntu is (for the most part) a Gnome environment. Kubuntu is the KDE oriented version of Ubuntu. At this point, Kubuntu lacks the polish seen in Ubuntu. As you seem to be getting your feet wet, you probably would want to stick with Ubuntu and its polished Gnome environment.

Me, myself... I'm using Kubuntu. I just like KDE better and am familiar enough with it to deal with Kubuntu's occasional rough edge. You might feel inclined to test those waters once you're feeling like you've got a good footing.

It should be stressed that the issue of Gnome vs. KDE (vs. Blackbox, Enlightenment, etc., etc.) is mostly a matter of interface and taste. The applications you run aren't necessarily restricted by your desktop... even if they are often bundled with one project or another.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is for retards, no surprise that there's a strong mono contingent over there. KDE is like the clean-cut, sporty desktop, I like some of the ideas but somehow I still hate it.

My fav desktop is XFCE, closely followed by fluxbox WM. Then it's IceWM and E17, with WindowMaker, FWM, KDE and finally Gnome. But whichever way you look at it, KHTML and Gecko are the future of app development. The desktop enviroment is becoming less and less relevant each year.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Dragonslicer]

I personally prefer KDE. I did buy a Dellbuntu laptop recently, so I got to see Gnome for the first time in many years. My initial impression was that Gnome reminded me of a Mac style desktop, whereas KDE is generally a more Windows style. If you like the Mac style, you might like Gnome better. The important thing to remember is that both Gnome and KDE can run applications that are designed for the other, they just might not fit very well visually with the rest of your desktop. Ignore all the idiots that keep yelling "KDE sux" or "Gnome is 4 l0s3rs" and go with whichever one you like better.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely go with KDE. Especially if you are coming from a Windows environment, as the UI will be more familiar than the Gnome UI. I personally think that KDE is the very best thing in the Linux world -- it's very powerful (KIOSLAVES, etc.) and very customizable. Gnome to me seems dumbed-down, although some prefer it. To each his own, I suppose.

I personally run Kubuntu 7.04. My advice would be to stick to the Feisty (7.04) release. I tried the Gutsy (7.10) version of Kubuntu but found it to be too buggy. Also, in Gutsy for some reason they switched Konqueror out as the default file manager for Dolphin. I really hated Dolphin. It lacks really basic features of a file manager, like a field where you can type in the path to the directory you want to work with.

Oh, and my 5 year old can use KDE just fine.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Tribbin]

Try something like mozilla-plugin-vlc or mozilla-player.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[glittalogik]

I just switched back from Kubuntu (7.10) to Ubuntu after getting sick of all the bugs - Dolphin wouldn't save bookmarks even after I fixed up the permissions on the bookmarks file, k3b kept crashing every time I tried to burn a data-DVD, the settings manager crashed several times whilst I was just browsing through settings, there was the Kopete issue where it crashed every time it tried to connect to MSN, the list goes on.

Now, some of these issues got fixed, and I did contribute logs/backtraces to the bug reports already filed for others, and this being my first time with KDE I *do* actually like using it - It's pretty and configurable, and the Monochrome icon theme totally does it for me. I just wish it was more stable.

Is there a KDE-centric distro that has a bit more polish, or should I wait until there's a Kubuntu release with KDE 4.1 or whatever? I haven't looked at XFCE or any of the others yet, but I'm not exactly a power user and GNOME is winning plenty of Just Works points right now.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[slyn]

Ubuntu is (for the most part) a Gnome environment. Kubuntu is the KDE oriented version of Ubuntu. At this point, Kubuntu lacks the polish seen in Ubuntu. As you seem to be getting your feet wet, you probably would want to stick with Ubuntu and its polished Gnome environment.

As I understand it, that is one of the things the K/Ubuntu Dev's want to work on in the next release. Ubuntu has some Gnome only features that they want to transfer over so that Ubuntu + Kubuntu have feature parity, which will probably help with some of the rough edges that you speak of.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, thanks for the feedback...

It seemed that in the Ubuntu lists, there where often discussions of different media environments depending on whether you were installing under gnome or kde, though it may have had more to do with konquerer vs firefox.

BTW: gOS was very interesting for three reasons. 1) It booted from power off to useable desktop in about 1/4 of the time of Ubuntu. 2) It handled the wireless connection much better. It was running a process, xault, that automatically associated and enabled the wireless access if it had a known profile. For Ubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu, I had to reestablish the wireless networking by hand after each reboot. That was weird. 3) The google desktop integration was very smooth. They did a good job.

The major problem I had with gOS, is the media (using mplayer/w32codecs/flash-non-free) was less usable than the others. On quicktime videos, I got the audio stream, but no video at all.

Next up (woo hoo!) Fedora 8 and then SUSE. Yup, burning through them all. Given my current exposure, the nod goes to edubuntu to give to my kids.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[_Sprocket_]

Me, myself... I'm using Kubuntu. I just like KDE better and am familiar enough with it to deal with Kubuntu's occasional rough edge. You might feel inclined to test those waters once you're feeling like you've got a good footing. Incidentally, if you do get comfortable with Ubuntu and want to give Kubuntu a try, moving to Kubuntu is as simple as selecting and installing the Kubuntu packages (selecting kubuntu-desktop will do most of the work). At this point, you're free to jump between environments as you wish.

In my case, I have a custom GDM screen so I use GDM instead of KDM (basically your log-in screen). My desktop is KDE... but instead of the normal KWIN I use Compiz-Fusion. I use a lot of Kubuntu's standard KDE applications. Notable exceptions are Evolution (email) and Pidgin (IM). Mixing and matching is fairly easy once you start to learn what you like.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[_Sprocket_]

It seemed that in the Ubuntu lists, there where often discussions of different media environments depending on whether you were installing under gnome or kde, though it may have had more to do with konquerer vs firefox.

Devil's in the details, I'm sure. But my guess would be that the discussion was mentioning specific media applications associated with each particular environment (i.e. Totem vs. Kaffeine). While there are defaults, you can install and run either one under either environment. And then there's plenty of other options. Totem and Kaffeine both use some common multimedia libraries - Xine being one of them. You can also use the Xine media player itself. VLC is another excellent example (even among Windows folks).

As an aside, media is a tough thing for the Linux. All these proprietary codecs are wrapped up in a world that Linux really isn't a part of. That doesn't stop the Linux (yes, yes... "Linux" is a kernel... but you get the idea) hackers from tagging on to it all. But it can be a bit bumpy at times (but then I've had some iffy times with particular codecs and Windows as well).

BTW: gOS was very interesting for three reasons. ...

The major problem I had with gOS, is the media (using mplayer/w32codecs/flash-non-free) was less usable than the others. On quicktime videos, I got the audio stream, but no video at all.

I'll have to check gOS out. Looks kind of nifty. Based on Ubuntu - so it can't be all that bad. ;) I would guess your rougher time with media under gOS had to do with versions (but hey - devil's in the details, right?).

Next up (woo hoo!) Fedora 8 and then SUSE. Yup, burning through them all. Given my current exposure, the nod goes to edubuntu to give to my kids.

Yup. Give 'em all a shot. I'm a fan of Debian and Ubuntu. But I've used SUSE and (at the time) Mandrake when they better served my needs. All these outfits tweak their configurations a bit differently and one might resonate better with you than another. While Linux is Linux... the little tweaks can make a difference.

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[Ploum]

If you started to watch Nasa's video streaming on a PDP-11, I will agree that you are not a newbie and I will welcome our new w32codec overlord !

If not, your rant is just useless. Do you imagine the Wright brothers getting into an Airbus A380 or a F22 raptor and saying : "We invented the airplane, we are not newbie, if we cannot pilot this plane then this plane has a problem"

Re:KDE vs Gnome

[ApostasyX]

Try PCLinuxOS for a KDE based distro with polish.

kde 4 apps will run on Windows

[eean]

Plasma isn't planning too, but most KDE apps will be able to run on Windows. If not at the KDE 4.0, then in the near future.

Compiz

[PitaBred]

Does Compiz Fusion work with KDE4's RC's? I love my KDE, but I've grown quite fond of Compiz Fusion... do they still support the aquamarine widget translator or whatever that is?

Re:Compiz

[eean]

Just promise to try out KWin's composition features first when KDE 4 comes out. Their emphasis is on functionality. It would be like adding salt to your food before eating any if you don't try KWin out first. :)

Re:Compiz

[Narishma]

KDE4 has it's own composition manager.

Re:Compiz

[PitaBred]

I'm rather partial to the desktop cube, as well as the wobbly windows. Gives me feedback I like, and other people drool over it ;) Anything like that in the KWin compositing? I haven't seen anything quite the same, but I haven't spent more than 30 minutes poking around, either.

Re:Compiz

[Seli]

We've decided that cube and wobbly score quite low on the gain/effort scale and they won't be in 4.0 (but somewhen later when somebody will feel like writing them). For virtual desktops there is a different effect and there's only a silly wobbly-like demo effect showing it's possible.

Goddamnit

[Anonymous Coward]

When are you people going to learn!! If there are no screenshots THEN IT DIDN'T HAPPEN!!!

GODDAMNN!

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[eean]

I figured they were just being quaint.

But I suppose just lazy if they updated the Gnome icon.

Is Baghira supported?

[otis wildflower]

Me likee me brushed goldtone metal theme...

Re:Is Baghira supported?

[logixoul]

No, nobody has stepped up to port Baghira to Qt 4. Its author has moved on to Bespin.

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[Falladir]

You'll catch more flies with honey, man. There's a place for vinegar, and this isn't it.

The outdated logo reflects Slashdot's history. If they changed the icons too often, it would be distracting and hurt continuity. You'll probably be modded down for trolling or baiting flames, and you deserve it.

LOOKS great!

[j_sp_r]

I installed it using the OpenSUSE buildservice, but I can't seem to find out how I do these things:

1) Dock the systray in the panel
2) Move the taskbar inside the panel (or any other applet for that sake)
3) Remove plasmoids

Other then that, it start to look slick!

PS. I tried finding this information on the internet, found some close bugreports and it seems the functionality might be there, but as long as I cannot find out how it works (I tend to get spammed a lot about computer problems) it's not really userfriendly (or poweruserfriendly for that matter)...

Re:LOOKS great!

[Anonymous Coward]

i have the same problems as you and more. this isn't a troll. I love using kde. I have only used kde since i have moved to linux permanently. 3.5 has worked very good for me.

when i load kde 4 I have about 4-5 plasmoids already loaded for some reason but they are not any specific program. they do not have any icons. also for some reason kliper has an icon on the background. the one is half off screen so when I click on it to move it I can't. I get 4 black squares about 1/4" x 1/4" in random spots. they will not go away.I try to click on them but they are not clickable. the screen does not refresh all the time. I can click and drag like i was trying to highlight something the lines distort the background and stay there for about 5 second until the background refreshes itself.

I have gone back to kde 3.5.8 for now. I might try kde 4 later when more bugs are fixed.

I am about the interest

[bogaboga]

For one thing, I am happy about the interest in KDE. With the flames about KDE I used to read on slashdot, I am happy to knew that there are still folks that are interested in KDE and its direction.

These folks have contributed to what many call the slashdot effect on sites that host KDE news.

Question is: Would it be the same effect if it were GNOME?

Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

on my desktop? That's the best they can come up with to show off their spankin' new window manager?

Why is it that everything KDE has to be GIANT and UGLY?
Kand Kwhy Kmust Kevery Kapp Kbe Knamed Klike Kthis?

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that everything KDE has to be GIANT and UGLY?

You might want to check your usage of "has" in this instance. Most of this shit is configurable. If you're just too lazy to change it, then use something else and shut up.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Kand Kwhy Kmust Kevery Kapp Kbe Knamed Klike Kthis?

Gexactly. GGNOME Gdoesn't Ghave Gthese Gissues.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[FudRucker]

i think he is one of those lolcat fanboys...

i has cheezeburger...

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[silent_artichoke]

gI gDon't gKnow. iThat's e-Strange. xSeems iTo kBe gA xTrend.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[JohnFluxx]

> Kand Kwhy Kmust Kevery Kapp Kbe Knamed Klike Kthis?

Like? The filemanager is called Dolphin, the taskbar thing at the bottom is plasma, and so on etc etc.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the system monitor is called KSysguard ;)

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of this shit is configurable. If you're just too lazy to change it

Because when I sit down at a desktop, I like having to resize every little detail because the default is GIANT

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Ash-Fox]

Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget on my desktop?

I don't know why, but if you don't like it, you can turn it off.

That's the best they can come up with to show off their spankin' new window manager?

I didn't think KDE was into showing off as much as working right.

Why is it that everything KDE has to be GIANT and UGLY?

If you don't like it, you can change it.

Kand Kwhy Kmust Kevery Kapp Kbe Knamed Klike Kthis?

While many applications to begin with a K, there are many that don't. I also don't see it being any worse than Apple naming a bunch of applications that begin with 'i', or companies sticking their company name in front of every software product name (Microsoft, Adobe do this a lot).

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Why apply prefixes to application names? Google on 'kmail' versus 'evolution' and you will understand.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[EzInKy]

Because when I sit down at a desktop, I like having to resize every little detail because the default is GIANT


It is probably a lot easier for you to downsize details that seem tiny to you than it is for people who have to upsize details that seem tiny to them.

Re:Why do I want a giant clock or battery widget

[Enderandrew]

Many KDE apps have moved away from that naming scheme actually.

Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[KWTm]

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"? Since there already is a term, "beta", that means "functional, with minor bugs to be ironed out", I would consider "Release Candidate" to refer to a true candidate --that is, it might really be released! KDE (or whoever the responsible author is) might say: "Okay, all those of you who downloaded Release Candidate x (where x=1,2,...), you can just go ahead and keep using it, because the RC has turned into the real thing."

Software or distros that are "coming together" are not Release Candidates. They have no possibility of being released. Suppose everyone who tried this KDE4 RC1 said, "Yup, everything works fine! No changes need to be made," would KDE release it? No, because they're NOT DONE YET --Plasma still has to be put together. Since they won't be releasing this version at all, it shouldn't be called a Release Candidate. It's another beta.

There's no shame in calling it beta (heck, half of Google's services are labeled beta); I don't see the need to keep advancing the terms. What's next? If "Release Candidate" comes to mean "beta", should we start using the term "Release Candidate with Potential For Use Unchanged"?

Maybe someone can correct on this if I'm wrong. What makes this a Release Candidate and not a Beta?

(Btw, diehard KDE fan here --I'm not even considering GNOME until they start having user-configurable key shortcuts. Waiting for KDE4 final release in December to be worked into Gutsy so I can put it on my Came-With-Ubuntu laptop.)

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[orcrist]

Agree. 100%. Took the words out of my mouth.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[eean]

Release management is a complicated thing. In this case it would be really easy to just delay and delay KDE 4. It wouldn't really accomplish anything though.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"?

No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.

Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.

For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn.". The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?

Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.

PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Graftweed]

Maybe someone can correct on this if I'm wrong. What makes this a Release Candidate and not a Beta?

While I agree that in the case of KDE 4.0 they are really abusing the RC moniker (and "Beta" before that), it kinda makes sense if you're not aiming for a stable and feature complete 4.0 release. Aaron Seigo has said many times that the development is already taking far too long, and at some point they have to put it out there for people to test or risk turning into another E17.

So a RC makes a kind of twisted sense since they're only aiming at getting KDE4 out the door so that people can start testing and building upon it. They shouldn't really be calling it a .0, which denotes a fairly stable release, but there you go.

Also, it has to be said, that the only part of KDE 4.0 that's still lagging behind and buggy as hell at this point is Plasma. Unfortunately this is also the most visible part of it, and most people will judge the entire package based on it. I fear it will alienate a lot of people who think that KDE 4.0 = KDE4.

Plus, they already have release parties scheduled, so a RC at this point is pretty much a necessity ;)

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[JohnyDog]

I agree, i've seen the term abused throughout both business and open-source scene alike. My favourite is Dovecot which managed to get 32 release candidates throughout whole year, completely changing module/plugin API and major data structures somewhere inbetween. Well at least they followed the release cycle - just week ago one salesman told me that his company's product successfully progressed from gamma to beta stadium.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[camcorder]

GNOME has user-configurable key shortcuts (GNOME has it's own term called keybinding or depending on what you mean accelerator keys), if it means you want to give "shortcuts" to menu items, just set /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels gconf key to true. Then you can set accelerator key to whatever you want when you hover on a menu item.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[jdclucidly]

(Btw, diehard KDE fan here --I'm not even considering GNOME until they start having user-configurable key shortcuts. Waiting for KDE4 final release in December to be worked into Gutsy so I can put it on my Came-With-Ubuntu laptop.)

Gnome's platform has had control-panel accessible Keyboard Shortcut applet since at least Gnome 2.8. Individual Gnome apps choose to let you do keyboard shortcuts just like any other application. Gnome Terminal, for example, lets you change keyboard shortcuts since Gnome 2.10. You don't have to bash the competition mindlessly to prove that you're opinion is more valid. If you have something valuable to say (and you do!), let it stand on its own. I know this is Slashdot and mob mentality rules, but really, let's be authentic about our experiences for the sake of progress.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Took the words out of my mouth. Yes, IP theft is rampart in Slashdot nowadays.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, because different compiler/libraries are being used it should run faster (esp. on older hardware) and have smaller memory requirements. Which, imho is the case, should make it quite a bit better than 3.5. So I am optimistic on this single fact alone.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it's definitely going to run faster. But that doesn't necessarily make it "quite a bit better" if you lose features and gain bugs at the same time. Something that runs twice as fast but crashes every half hour and doesn't do what you want isn't anywhere near as good as something that runs half as fast but never crashes and does what you want.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Enderandrew]

It is being called a RC because KDE is much, much more than a "kicker" panel. There are many apps in the KDE project. The core underlying technologies, libraries, and most of the apps are quite stable. Plasma and the desktop are still evolving DAILY.

However, people see an ugly looking taskbar and assume the overall quality is really poor.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[TekPolitik]

according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in.

Presumably this has something to do with English not being the first language of a large chunk of (most?) KDE developers. A release candidate is a candidate for release. It's hugely disappointing to see the "RC 1" headline and then find out it's not an RC as the rest of the world defines it.

Something that compiles... hell, there's not a name for that. I guess the nearest name would be a "build", but a build typically goes through multiple statuses. At the risk of stating the obvious the usual statuses are "alpha" testing which is "internal" (in open source this is just a recommendation of course), and "beta", which includes external testing, "release candidate" where QA has cleared the build for release if nothing major crops up during the candidacy period, and "production" (aka "release"). If the build is known never to be intended to be promoted to production then it can't be a release candidate.

Labelling something not intended for release as a "release candidate" is deceptive - hardly a good look for anybody.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[mattcasters]

All that because you don't like the release system KDE uses? WTF?
Who cares if they call their beta releases banana's and their release candidates apples?
It's up to the distributions and the community to decide whether or not the release is good to include/deploy or not.

So what's the worst case scenario? You have to wait a few months until you get a 4.0.1? Few! If that's the biggest problem you have, count yourself lucky.

How about you starting to have some respect for the developers and all the people that put hard work into this release?
How about you showing some understanding for the fact that only a tiny fraction of their intended target audience is going to install a beta or RC and that it's practically impossible for them to test each and every possible situation without your help.

Shees!

Matt

P.S. With or without disclaimers, shooting half-truths and BS around in the dark, you're still a troll. If you have a problem, file a fracking bug report.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

All that because you don't like the release system KDE uses?

No, it's not the release system itself, it's the attitude behind it. Talk about how great non-existent features are. Can't meet the release date because you over-promised? Cut features. Can't even get the old system working with the new libraries? Cut even more features so it's less functional than the old version. Get flattered? Tell them how great 4.0 will be. Get criticised? Tell them the criticism doesn't count because it's not supposed to work right until 4.1.

They want all the praise that goes along with a shiny new finished 4.0, but they can't actually achieve anything more than a 3.9 tech preview in the timeframe they set themselves. Yet rather than actually put it off for a few months, they are steaming ahead telling everybody how great it is out of one side of their mouth while deflecting criticism with excuses with the other side of their mouth.

This attitude is antithetical to everything the open-source culture holds dear - marketing over quality, release dates over features, bullshit over honesty and transparency. That is what I abhor, and the release system is merely one symptom of it.

So what's the worst case scenario? You have to wait a few months until you get a 4.0.1?

No, the worst case scenario is that open-source gets a reputation for pulling shit like this, the same shit everybody here rags on companies like Microsoft for.

How about you starting to have some respect for the developers and all the people that put hard work into this release?

I had respect for the developers. From the 1.0 betas right up until the 3.x releases. The change in their attitudes lost them that respect.

How about you showing some understanding for the fact that only a tiny fraction of their intended target audience is going to install a beta or RC

So they call what by all rights is a beta "4.0" in order to trick their target audience into testing it? What integrity!

and that it's practically impossible for them to test each and every possible situation without your help.

I've contributes bugs, testcases, the occasional patch for previous versions. I haven't bothered with 4.0 because it's quite plain all they care about is reaching the finish line.

And you are being really dishonest by characterising my argument as a demand that they "test each and every possible situation". I'm not asking for the moon. I'm asking that they take the same attitude towards quality that they used to take before. Cut out the bullshit and stop letting the fawning go to their heads.

P.S. With or without disclaimers, shooting half-truths and BS around in the dark, you're still a troll.

You haven't mentioned anything you consider to be a half-truth or BS, you just complained about my attitude.

If you have a problem, file a fracking bug report.

The word is "fucking". And there is absolutely no way a bug report can fix this.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[pherthyl]

It's funny how worked up you get about this stuff. For the most part, I agree with you. KDE4.0 is going to have regressions compared to 3.5.x, and the current release is definitely not RC quality. But in the end, so what? Apparently it has thrown you into a terrible rage, but who really cares about the labeling or when it is ready? Once 4.0 is released, you can try it, and if it is not good enough for you, then you can wait till 4.1 or whatever version you believe lives up to the hype. Personally I'm already hooked on the new apps of KDE4.0 that I don't want to go back, and am willing to tolerate a panel with few features for a while.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[mattcasters]

Dear Anonymous Coward,

Just because you have an opinion, it doesn't make it the truth.
The truth is that version 3.5.8 is rock solid for me on Kubuntu. Again, where's the rush?

Many years and versions ago, KDE decided they were not in the packaging business.
If Kubuntu drops a buggy KDE 4.0.0 build on me, you can be damned sure I will blame the Kubuntu maintainers.

However, since there is no buggy 4.0.0 build to speak off and a release is still months away, all your talk is just that: talk.

One - big - troll.

And I'm done feeding.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Release candidate" does not mean "most of the apps are quite stable and some major components are still evolving daily". That's commonly known as an alpha. "Release candidate" means "we think this is ready to be released as 4.0, but we'd like everybody to give it a quick check to make sure we haven't missed anything critical". You should have every expectation that the work to go from release candidate to final release is simply a case of bumping the version number. It is an outright lie to call this a release candidate.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Enderandrew]

In the grand scheme of a project the size of KDE, the panel isn't a major component. To the end user, it seems to be very important because you see it so predominantly. There is a difference in perception here.

Note I'm not really arguing with you, just trying to demonstrate the other side's perspective. Personally, I think the desktop interface is crucial to your experience using KDE, and for all the hype, Plasma didn't even seem to have much of a vision or design until very late in the game, and where as other major technologies and libraries in KDE 4 were well established, Plasma code appeared very late in the game.

For all the articles on the visual style, and that is what people will focus on, I fear most people will miss the jump to QT 4, SVG rendering, Solid, Phonon, Decibel, DBus, Oxygen, Sonnet, Okular, Strigi, Dolphin, Nepomuk, etc.

Amarok got a major redesign, and from what I read, Koffice got a major rewrite and redesign as well.

So I echo somewhat what the KDE devs are saying right now, that KDE 4.1 will probably start blowing people away. Right now, I think there is a sexy car covered in an ugly tarp here.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years and versions ago, KDE decided they were not in the packaging business.

Yes, so they don't have to deal with all the headaches that go along with packaging for multiple platforms, not so they can stop caring about quality.

The truth is that version 3.5.8 is rock solid for me on Kubuntu. Again, where's the rush?

Where did I say there was a rush? I'm the one arguing that they should have delayed the release, remember? I'm accusing the KDE developers of rushing. Do you seriously not get that?

However, since there is no buggy 4.0.0 build to speak off and a release is still months away, all your talk is just that: talk.

They are planning on releasing 4.0 in less than three weeks. Not to mention the fact that "Release candidate" means they are telling the world that it is virtually finished.

Just because you have an opinion, it doesn't make it the truth.

One - big - troll.

Once more, you are accusing me of not telling the truth and calling me names, yet do not point out anything I have said that is not true. If anybody here is dishonestly arguing to wind people up, it is you. Either address what I am saying, or be quiet. Don't bother calling me a liar and troll unless you can back it up.

Answer me these two simple questions:

1. Do the developers deflect criticism by saying 4.0 isn't the real thing and 4.1 is?
2. Do any of the press releases or articles talking about how great 4.0 will be mention this fact?

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would suggest the attitude is ultimately unimportant. Ignore the marketing hype and look for the meat, just like with anything else. (If you don't like it, ask for a full refund.) Many open source developers are possessed of unplesant attitudes, but the software they create stands or falls (in the end) on its merits. If you want good social skills and behaviors from people who statistically tend to be on the extremely weak social skills end of the spectrum, I would suggest a reality check and finding another (solvable) issue to worry about - your blood pressure will thank you.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the grand scheme of a project the size of KDE, the panel isn't a major component. To the end user, it seems to be very important because you see it so predominantly. There is a difference in perception here.

I'm sorry, but that is simply a very poor excuse. It is something that typical end-users interact with constantly. It's a critical feature, regardless of how much code it takes to implement. And really, if it's such a small thing for the developers as you say it is, then there's really no excuse for it not to work right.

Note I'm not really arguing with you, just trying to demonstrate the other side's perspective.

Sure, but my argument is that this is a really lousy perspective if your goal is to build something that isn't completely crappy from the end-user's perspective.

for all the hype, Plasma didn't even seem to have much of a vision or design until very late in the game, and where as other major technologies and libraries in KDE 4 were well established, Plasma code appeared very late in the game.

Quite frankly, I think that if it hadn't received so much hype when it was vapourware and if it wasn't a core dev's pet project, there's absolutely no way it would have even been considered for inclusion. They ripped out stable code for critical features and replaced it with something that is at best experimental.

For all the articles on the visual style, and that is what people will focus on, I fear most people will miss the jump to QT 4, SVG rendering, Solid, Phonon, Decibel, DBus, Oxygen, Sonnet, Okular, Strigi, Dolphin, Nepomuk, etc.

You know what, I was really looking forward to that stuff as well, but these silly games the devs are playing has totally killed my enthusiasm for KDE 4. I'm planning on switching distros soon, and had I done it six months ago, it would have been Kubuntu. Now it will be Ubuntu. I'll install KDE 4 when it arrives, and there's still a good chance I'll use it if none of the things I rely on have broken. But I've already switched away from a few KDE applications because of regressions, and it's possible the same will happen with the entire desktop, depending on how much GNOME has progressed since I last tried it.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably this has something to do with English not being the first language of a large chunk of (most?) KDE developers. A release candidate is a candidate for release. It's hugely disappointing to see the "RC 1" headline and then find out it's not an RC as the rest of the world defines it. It has more to do with their goal of creating a cheap knockoff of Windows. Everything about KDE has that feel. From Krapper (Kicker) to every last dialog and application. Buttons and other controls are made overly bubbly and fisher price. It only makes sense that they adopt Microsoft's view of "Beta" and "Release Candidate".

To Microsoft:
Beta=Alpha
RC=Beta
Release=RC1
SP1=RC2
SP2=Release

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Enderandrew]

I rarely respond to ACs, and here I did it twice.

However, frankly if you're looking at Kubuntu/Ubuntu, then KDE isn't really for you. Kubuntu is a poor implementation of KDE, and Ubuntu really isn't a very good distro to begin with. It is a popular buzz word, but if you want freedom, flexibility, choice, and a great desktop, then Ubuntu isn't the way to go.

If you want an extremely simple installer, a simple desktop, then Ubuntu is the way to go, and KDE really isn't.

I won't argue one is better than the other. Pick what you want.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Turmio]

Btw, diehard KDE fan here --I'm not even considering GNOME until they start having user-configurable key shortcuts. Waiting for KDE4 final release in December to be worked into Gutsy so I can put it on my Came-With-Ubuntu laptop.)

What's your problem? I hope you're not a troll but just ignorant. User-configurable key shortcuts have been in GNOME like forever. System/Preferences/Keyboard Shortcuts, easy.

And in fact in any GNOME application you can define your own shortcuts for _any_ menu item visible in the top menus (though this feature is not enabled by default, it can be enbled by System/Preferences/Appearance/Interface tab/click Editable menu shortcut keys checkbox). When enabled, just navigate on top of a menu item with mouse, but don't click it, instead press the key combo you'd like to assign to this menu item and you're done. Now you can launch the action of the menu item by pressing the shortcut you chose.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[iznogud]

Did you ever heard of term "inflation"? It's not applicable just to money or Universe, but to software as well:

Before -> After
Alpha -> not ever the programmer can start it
Beta -> Alpha
RC -> Beta
Release x.0 -> RC1
Release x.1 -> Release x.0

etc, etc

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[The_reformant]

Yes, IP theft is rampart in Slashdot nowadays.

I agree and the crenelallation of apple fanbois too

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, frankly if you're looking at Kubuntu/Ubuntu, then KDE isn't really for you.

I don't know where this bizarre distro flame came from, but I've been using Linux since 1996 and I'm quite capable of deciding for myself which desktop and distro I use, thank you very much.

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[eean]

KDE 4 has been compiling since shortly after its branch was opened... which would be a few years ago. That is obviously not what RC means in this case.

To some extent these labels are more for internal consumption. There is a tendency in some open source software to just keep things in beta forever (eg gstreamer, k3b until very recently though it only has one main dev so it doesn't matter really). Not only does this look sloppy and undermines the whole point of beta software (having "stable" versions with 1 release versions), but I think it can affect how the developers perceive their own product.

Really I'm just trying to stay that having extended betas is a good way to stagnate a product. Linux has the right idea with frequent releases; they actually don't have any plans for a Linux 2.7.

Keeping things in beta adinfintum probably does dodge some slashdot armchair bitching though. :P

Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?

[eean]

Yeesh whats your problem with Kubuntu? Did you love the "Window" menu in Konqueror that much? :)

KDE4 Graphics

[Mazin07]

Will there be full hardware-acceleration of the graphical effects, like Compiz provides, or will KDE 4 continue to have ugly faux transparency? The screenshots of Plasma look nice, but if there's no good graphics engine behind it, like OS X does, then it's merely a gimmick.

Re:KDE4 Graphics

[ssj_195]

Will there be full hardware-acceleration of the graphical effects, like Compiz provides,

Yes. There already is, in fact. Aaron Seigo has prepared a screencast which will be linked with this week's Commit Digest. Among other things, it shows the true transparency of Plasma applets and the panel. Also, you can check out these old (non-Plasma related) kwin_composite videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WBLlc6xCQ4

or will KDE 4 continue to have ugly faux transparency?

Eavesdropping on IRC, I get the feeling that aseigo hates this hack more than you do ;)

Re:KDE4 Graphics

[vizZzion]

KDE's window manager supports compositing now, via plugins and ships some handy ones by default. ARGB visuals also belong to the new goodness that comes with Qt4.

...where's the meat?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental. Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them. I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets and that could help a lot to make this actually useful. Anyone actually tried using them yet?

When a new full version comes out and I find myself looking forward to the improved spellchecker, because it is still worse architecturally than on other platforms I use, but at least it is better... well I start to wonder what happened. I'm not trying to put down the developers or anything, this is obviously a lot of work, especially Dolphin, but I guess I was hoping for more. When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services? Where's grammar checking? Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already? As a Kubuntu user, I guess I'm just not really as excited by this as I'd like to be.

Re:...where's the meat?

[AvitarX]

KDE 4.0 is about cleaning up the backend all the way (or whatever).

The big improvements for the users are to be added in point releases (which should be pretty big, like in gnome), with all of the KDE 4 promises to be built on the better backend which is getting finished up now.

Re:...where's the meat?

[logixoul]

Okay now it supports Widgets. KDE has supported widgets for years, via SuperKaramba (which is bundled from 3.5 onwards). Plasma brings some innovation into the area.

I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets Not in the main branch, no. A showstopper for this is that it would require using the WebKit renderer, which still doesn't come with Qt (but it will next year).

When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services? What do those have that KParts don't? Never used OS X myself...

Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental. Sure, the single biggest change in KDE4 vs KDE3 is the porting to Qt4.

Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already? I won't compare to non-free platforms... from what I've heard, OS X's desktop environment kicks our ass in every way other than freedom.
So, off the top of my head...
KWin got compositing support, meaning you get eye candy ala Compiz, except with a more mature codebase.
Plasma is technologically superior to others' applet solutions.
Marble is the fastest and leanest desktop globe.
KRunner is (will be) similar to OS X's Spotlight.
Lancelot is unique as a zero-click start menu. The utility of this remains to be seen.

About the spellchecker, Sonnet, its main developer mysteriously disappeared an year ago, and development has been slow since. No grammar checking in 4.0, no. It does have improvements over the KDE3 spellchecker (KSpell2) -- like the ability to recognize separate languages in separate paragraphs and use the right dictionaries.

KDE4 is not just this RC. There's 2 years of development behind it, starting from the 3.5 branch. And there's lots of years ahead of it, to make the most out of a really solid foundation... IOW if you want "meat", come back for 4.1.

4.0 is for early adopters.

Re:...where's the meat?

[jesterzog]

Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them.

I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think every release of a product should have to force obvious new features down a user's throat, and I'm quite happy to not be excited. Some apps you just don't want to change too much. The kernel is one of these, because it's expensive to update apps for new APIs, and a GUI/desktop is another, because major changes result in more re-training costs (either personal or within an organisation).

Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins. It might be that you now actually get these after a while, if the cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries make it easier for someone to develop and integrate them effectively.

Re:...where's the meat?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What do those have that KParts don't? Never used OS X myself...

With OS X you can drop arbitrary functions in the Services or ~/Services directory or a service can be part of an application. Unlike KParts the developer of an application does not have to specifically include a service when they code it, rather it can be accessed by all applications, even if the developer of that application had no idea such a service existed. It is used in OS X for spell checking and grammar checking so it works everywhere, but applications like Graphviz offer to graph any random table of data in any application. Stand alone services do everything from translate text between languages to rot13 text.

KRunner is (will be) similar to OS X's Spotlight.

I've never seen or heard of KRunner. Is it a Beagle implementation, reusing the actual spotlight code from Darwin, or a from scratch implementation?

No grammar checking in 4.0, no.

That right there is where OS X's system services are a big win. Before Apple included one by default, I just installed a third party service for grammar checking everywhere.

And there's lots of years ahead of it, to make the most out of a really solid foundation... IOW if you want "meat", come back for 4.1.

I understand building a good foundation, I'm just a little disappointed that there is nothing in this foundation that is really novel and does not exist elsewhere already. I guess I keep hoping KDE will stop playing catch up and really leapfrog the competition in some way. KDE is solid and useful, but honestly if not for certain application's lack of support on OS X or Windows, Kubuntu might fall off my list of everyday OS's and become something to tinker with occasionally.

Re:...where's the meat?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think every release of a product should have to force obvious new features down a user's throat...

I usually think of features as being offered. If they are not useful to me, I don't use them.

Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins.

The problem with implementing a spelling or grammar checker outside of the design of the desktop environment, is that you don't want every app developer to have to implement their own both for efficiency and because it means it won't reach a lot of applications. I was hoping KDE would update KParts to catch up with OS X's system services so that applications and stand alone services could offer such functionality globally. I agree it is best to offer these as plug-ins, but plug-ins to the entire system, not just one app. Unfortunately, no such framework has yet been introduced in KDE.

Re:...where's the meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't know what you are trying to say here AFAIK the spellchecker in KDE can and is used as a plugin in any app. Certainly Konquerer, Kmail & other KDE apps all use the same cosde to do their spell checking. Also one KDE component can call any other running component at run time using the dkop interface in KDE 3 & dbus in KDE4 what does apples system services do above and beyond this?

Re:...where's the meat?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Also one KDE component can call any other running component at run time using the dkop interface in KDE 3 & dbus in KDE4 what does apples system services do above and beyond this?

The OS X system allows the user to drop a file in a directory and all applications will gain the functionality, regardless of whether or not the programmer of that application knew such a service existed. The OS X system allows an application to offer services to other applications, regardless of whether or not the programmers of those applications did anything.

Think of it this way, KDE does not ship with a grammar checker by default, thus no one is going to code their apps to use some third party grammar checking KPart library that is not on most systems. Now suppose you buy a commercial office suite like StarOffice that offers some functionality, like thesaurus lookup. On OS X, it can offer that function as a service and Mail.app and Safari can both suddenly look up highlighted words in the thesaurus. On KDE there is no way for StarOffice to suddenly grant this ability in Kmail and Konquerer. Another example is, prior to the latest version OS X did not offer a built in grammar checker, even though such functionality is awfully useful to me for helping me proof documents. I just downloaded a free, third party one and dropped it in ~/Library/Services/ and suddenly my word processor, e-mail, Web browser, chat client, terminal, text editor, etc. all had the ability to check grammar. If there is a way to do this on Kubuntu I'd really love to hear how.

Here are some services I installed:

• PDF to RTF
• 30 text conversions (line endings, tabs, encodings, etc.)
• grammar checker
• translation services between 14 languages
• bibliography auto-formatting
• search google and wikipedia
• speak text english and german
• summarize text
• statistics on text
• insert date/time in various formats

Here are some services that came as functions of applications:

• graphing data sets
• lookup words in 5 online dictionaries, a thesaurus, and an acronym database
• calculate checksums
• create font collection from selection
• screenshot/timed screenshot
• replace with thesaurus selection
• mail selection to

Those are functions I use (I make most of my income writing), but the main benefit of this system is people can add the services they need, which they presumably know a lot better than the person writing a given application.

Release Candidate released

[Cajun Hell]

I don't think "candidate" means what you think it means.

Re:Screenshots and previews of slightly olderrelea

[Dulcise]

Actually, Dolphin (from my experiences) can be set up a lot like Krusader, in a nice split screen with hotkey short cuts, I was much a grieved to find there isn't anything like it when I tried to switch to gnome yesterday (to check out Fusion).

do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[phsdv]

Yes, I agree with you, xfce is a better choice. I am actually running xfce4.4.1 on my systems. Occasionally I do use twm, mostly by accident ;-) It is always a pain to use, but it does work...

But the whole "discussion" between gnome and kde is so useless. And also the bloated thing. Who cares? More and more people (will) have multiple cores and a few Giga bytes of memory. If the window manager uses some of these resources and it makes your job easier, please do!!! In case you have a smaller computer, then go and use a smaller desktop system. And do not 'force' your limitations on everyone else by wanting to have kde/gnome to run on every computer you own.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[orclevegam]

Well, there's two kinds of "bloated" and people often don't differentiate between the two. There's bloated in the sense of being written poorly and wasting a lot of resources for no reason, and then there's bloated in the sense of having a whole bunch of features that various people may or may not want (which usually determines if they consider it bloated or not). The first kind of bloated of course is clearly a valid criticism that needs to be addressed, the second kind however is mostly a matter of taste. Myself, I like a bit of eye candy, but at the same time I don't like to waste a lot of space, so I tend to lean towards either Enlightenment, or Blackbox for my WM. Both can be configured to be relatively minimalist in terms of screen real estate used by the various pieces of the WM, but in the case of enlightenment it tends to use some resources because of all the eye candy options. Does that make it bloated? Maybe, but that really depends on if you like eye candy or not.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[smellotron]

But the whole "discussion" between gnome and kde is so useless. And also the bloated thing. Who cares? More and more people (will) have multiple cores and a few Giga bytes of memory. If the window manager uses some of these resources and it makes your job easier, please do!!! In case you have a smaller computer, then go and use a smaller desktop system.

I ran into this issue at work, where my computer was an 800MHz Celeron, I believe. I was originally running Gnome, but switched to fluxbox + aterm and it made a world of a difference in terms of overall desktop responsiveness. There are plenty of people who aren't running multicore boxes and don't have a few GB of memory lying around. If KDE/Gnome can be developed to run on low-end machines and still feel "good enough", then they should be blazingly fast on the ungodly-overpowered desktop machines that are the high end of today's desktop market.

The biggest issue, IMO, is that running Konsole outside of KDE costs nearly as much system resources as running KDE all-out. If that extends to other KDE-based applications, that basically rules any KDE app from being used on a machine like I described without performance penalties. The machine shouldn't have to be powerful enough just to run a desktop environment. That's the same path that Vista is going down, where you need a supercomputer just to log in.

In fairness to the KDE folks, despite my complaints about the bloat, it still takes up less memory than Firefox (I was a web developer... working in Opera... because 800MHz isn't always enough for Firefox).

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Enderandrew]

For all the "bloat" KDE uses less memory and runs faster than Gnome, and we're in the 21st century, so I do expect a fairly fully-featured desktop.

Xfce and others are great for older hardware, but even older computers can run KDE fairly well.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Blkdeath]

If KDE/Gnome can be developed to run on low-end machines and still feel "good enough", then they should be blazingly fast on the ungodly-overpowered desktop machines that are the high end of today's desktop market.

When you first start KDE, or even after it's already configured there's an option to scale up/down the intensity (bloat) of the Window Manager from the left hand side which is very basic, low bloat all the way to the right side which is all the glitz and glamour enabled. Or you can go through and en/disable each individual feature to suit your tastes.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Alphager]

For all the "bloat" KDE uses less memory and runs faster than Gnome Citation needed.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Seli]

How about e.g. http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/?

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Alphager]

How about e.g. http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/?

WHOA! If those numbers are true (hey, they are on a KDE-site!), then the preconception that KDE has more bloat than GNOME needs to be discarded. Do you have a similiar page by the GNOME-people or a neutral third party?

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Seli]

You can verify the numbers yourself, there are instructions included. Or rather you can find out the current state, since the article is more than a year old. As for something done by somebody from GNOME, there is http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html, written later, that says the usage is roughly the same. Note however that despite being some kind of a response to the first comparison this one measures the numbers in a way that is not recommended by it, and it even admits so in the 3rd paragraph (go figure). Not that I have any real reason to disprove the numbers though, it may very well be that in that specific configuration the usage was roughly the same, within the noise caused by the measurement method.

So yes, to sum it up, just generally claiming that KDE is more bloated than GNOME is a nonsense and has been for a long time (and maybe even that's never been true, for fair comparisons, but I don't remember anybody doing one in the long past, at most various flawed comparisons).

PS: And, just in case you find some similarity between my nick and the URL of the first comparison, it is not incidental.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Alphager]

Thanks.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[jbolden]

It doesn't work that way. As a designer you constantly have to make trade offs relative to the underlying hardware. There are a huge number of desktop enhancements that could be released if we assumed people had 8 CPUs and 20 gigs of ram. KDE 2 was a usable with 200mhz, 64m of ram. KDE3 was aimed higher and 4 will be aimed higher still.

800mhz Celeron was introduced around Jan 1, 2000. It was a low end chip then designed for inexpensive machines that really didn't even need the power of a "modern" or even laptop. I see no reason that any modern app should consider that machine a supported platform.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[Chi-7]

There is no cure for sloppy code, ( besides wiping the hd) just ask "micro-squish" about how many (rem) lines are in their offerings. Well written eye candy, although it can become resource hungry, but giving the user the ability to determine how resources are utilized is not a bad thing at all. Sometimes a bit of candy is good, although for myself, I find elegance in functional simplicity. KDE has always offered me the choice, rather than having the decisions made by marketing. I am eager to see the new KDE offering. Chi-7

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[smellotron]

800mhz Celeron was introduced around Jan 1, 2000. It was a low end chip then designed for inexpensive machines that really didn't even need the power of a "modern" or even laptop. I see no reason that any modern app should consider that machine a supported platform.

While I agree with you that the computer is very old, that kind of attitude is what makes me hate the majority of Web 2.0 apps. I think developers should be using slower-than-average computers and network connections in their dev environments. Too many developers write obscenely inefficient programs simply out of ignorance. I understand that a desktop environment gets more expensive as it starts to do fancier things like complete DBUS/DCOP, automatic device polling, fancy visual cues, etc. But that doesn't mean it's a blanket excuse to write sloppy-slow code or ignore the "maybe-too-slow-but-let's-try-anyways" 5-year old processors.

Re:do not stop progress by not wanting 'bloat'...

[smellotron]

For all the "bloat" KDE uses less memory and runs faster than Gnome, and we're in the 21st century, so I do expect a fairly fully-featured desktop.

That's why I use KDE on my linux box, instead of Gnome. But I do love the simplicity and raw speed of Fluxbox.

FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

Has KDE made any more progress in cross-desktop (eg. with GNOME) compatibility according to the FreeDesktop.org compatibility specs?

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[SargentDU]

Why don't you investigate your site and let us know?
Why ask us and then give that webaddress?
Too lazy to go there yourself?

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

Investigate "my" site? What are you talking about?

I'm not a KDE expert - or even a FreeDesktop.org expert. This is an announcement of KDE, so I asked thinking a KDE expert could tell not only me that relevant news, but also the rest of the people reading. Who might not be familiar with FreeDesktop.org and its relevance to KDE, but could learn something about it, even if they don't have the answer I'm looking for.

What do you think Web discussion sites are for? Are you too stupid to understand that you are not the only one reading the page you're staring at?

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[vizZzion]

KDE now uses DBus for inter-process communication, poppler for pdf rendering, Xesam for desktop search queries, icon-naming as FDO wants it and a lot more.

So yes, KDE did made cross-desktop progress.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[eean]

KDE wrote a lot of specs at FD.org, its not like they have to play catch-up.

KDE has dropped DCOP and uses DBus now, I suppose thats the biggest news on the fd.o front.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

Do you know if KDE is now using the same standards and implementation of registering URL protocols (like http:) and MIME types (like text/plain = .txt) so any app can hand a URL to the "OS", which then retrieves the data according to the protocol, and opens it according to the MIME type? KDE and GNOME used to use different registries and message passing. If they're unified, then not only does the desktop unify the different apps, but unifies it with the other desktop's apps. Which makes which desktop is chosen more a matter of style than of substance.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Ash-Fox]

Do you know if KDE is now using the same standards and implementation of registering URL protocols (like http:) and MIME types (like text/plain = .txt) so any app can hand a URL to the "OS"

There is a standard? I can't find it on freedesktop.org. Got a link?

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

One of the FD.o specs is "MIME actions".

The URL protocol registration is actually a defacto standard residing in the web client, like Firefox or IE. Both of those registries should be part of the OS, so all apps can use them - even if there's no desktop, like on a server.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Ash-Fox]

The URL protocol registration is actually a defacto standard residing in the web client, like Firefox or IE. Both of those registries should be part of the OS, so all apps can use them - even if there's no desktop, like on a server.

Clicking for details on the specs, I found:

KDE is planning to support it for their next major release.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[logixoul]

yes, in respect to icon themes, the mimetype database, DBus and a few other things.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

Well, that page was last updated at all 2007-3-22, and I think that note has been there since I saw it in 2003, or at latest 2005. Since KDE 4.0 is a major release, I thought I'd ask whether they were finally implementing according to that plan.

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[Doc Ruby]

Cool, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. I've been waiting almost 4 years for that MIMEtype DB compliance. DBus is a major bonus.

Is there a changelog that details that FD.o work?

Re:FreeDesktop.org?

[logixoul]

Not that I know of. BTW, KDE uses HAL now as well.

I've always had a sneaking suspicion...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that these guys were their GUI designers.

Redunant

[Anonymous Coward]

I would't say a holier-than-thou stance dealing nothing but redunancy is a career to crave for. I would analyze my own post if I were you, and evade using its "desired effect" for anything, in future dialogues. (Well, if I (you) can identify the "desired effect idea," then I (you) guess anyone can, and so it's not a good thing to do, it's become "undisguised", so to speak.)

If it's something the world doesn't need, its truly people who act like you. - Noone needs this kind of shit.

Re:Redunant

[Mistshadow2k4]

Ah, one of my foes/freak/whatever didn't have the guts to post as himself. I've posted AC myself many a-time, but I've never done so just to troll somebody. Y'know, if you hate someone enough to do this that you've never actually met, maybe you're taking your online life a bit too seriously.

Decent Software - But the Marketing?

[jdeisenberg]

I did a quick test with a KDE 4.0 LiveCD a couple of days ago; it worked well, and I like the way it looks. But who decided on the code name?(from the press release):

KDE Project Ships First Release Candidate for Leading Free Software Desktop, Codename "Calamity"

Re:Decent Software - But the Marketing?

[Wylfing]

Klearly it should have been named Kalamity.

Re:Decent Software - But the Marketing?

[MrHanky]

It's a Beta, and as such not intended for people with no sense of humour (i.e. marketdroids and consumer lifestylists).

Re:Decent Software - But the Marketing?

[logixoul]

bleh... "whoosh"

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[nutshell42]

The outdated logo reflects Slashdot's history.

Unlike the GNOME logo?

If they changed the icons too often, it would be distracting and hurt continuity.

Once every six years should be possible without distracting everyone.

You'll probably be modded down for trolling or baiting flames, and you deserve it.

What trolling? I called them lazy and that's about it. Since when is calling someone "lazy" on /. enough to be called a troll? If I'd called them sons of whores that ass-rape sheeps while devouring Linus' children for the greater glory of Adolf Hitler, it might have been borderline trolling. But lazy?!

Even more importantly, dupes are a running gag on /. (although they seem to occur less frequently nowadays; the tagging system at work or nostalgia at work? =) and quite often you realize that not even the editor who posted a story bothered to click the links included. If that's not lazy I don't know what is.

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[mrchaotica]

What trolling? I called them lazy and that's about it.

No, you didn't. You called them "lazy fuckers," which is significantly less polite than merely calling them "lazy."

The way I see it...

[Anonymous Coward]

you have 4 choices:

KDE & vi
KDE & emacs
Gnome & vi
Gnome & emacs

Let the flames begin!

Before we get into a GNOME vs KDE flamewar...

[KWTm]

It's already starting. People are volunteering to post messages of the format:
"(x) sucks! Real people like me use (1-x) instead!"
where x = KDE or GNOME, and KDE+GNOME=1.

Anyway, let me step outside all this and say what *I* wish. I wish that KDE and GNOME apps would let the user choose what widget set to use. I think each of KDE and GNOME have applications that simply have no counterpart with the same quality. KDE has Amarok and K3b, while GNOME has Firefox and GIMP, not to mention non-KDE/non-GNOME apps like OpenOffice and FontForge. I'm glad that it's possible to run all of these under any desktop environment we choose --I myself happen to use the KDE desktop even for GNOME apps.

But those file dialogs and other GNOME widgets are just different enough from KDE to be irritating. In addition to the old debate about whether the "OK" or the "Cancel" button should be on the left, the file dialog shortcuts are inconsistent. Bookmarks for KDE file dialogs don't show up in GNOME apps, and the tree navigation in GNOME is different from KDE. I can never remember whether I click once or twice to get to that part of the directory tree.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to set apps to use a certain type of widget, the way KDE has modified OpenOffice so that it's only partially inconsistent with KDE, and maybe even make it user-customizable on the spot? (Yes, I know I'm dreaming, but still ...) Then all the volunteer recruits in the KDE/GNOME flamewar to go bash things out somewhere else, and the rest of us could get on with just plain using the various applications.

Yes, choice is good. GNOME is good, KDE is good, and Xfce, Enlightenment and twm are good. But we've come a long way, so let's set our sights a bit higher now.

Re:Before we get into a GNOME vs KDE flamewar...

[pherthyl]

while GNOME has Firefox and GIMP

Neither Firefox or the GIMP are gnome apps. They use GTK, but the gnome libraries are entirely optional.

And things like the portland project aim to allow apps to use native file dialogs for the environment they're running in.

Re:Before we get into a GNOME vs KDE flamewar...

[logixoul]

I agree. Just some notes...

But those file dialogs and other GNOME widgets are just different enough from KDE to be irritating. KGtk lets you use KDE file dialogs in GTK apps.

the old debate about whether the "OK" or the "Cancel" button should be on the left QtCurve lets you use the GTK button order in KDE apps.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to set apps to use a certain type of widget, the way KDE has modified OpenOffice so that it's only partially inconsistent with KDE, and maybe even make it user-customizable on the spot? Not sure what you mean here. Are you looking for something like GTK-QT Theme Engine, which lets you use KDE widgetstyles in GTK apps?

Re:Before we get into a GNOME vs KDE flamewar...

[marsu_k]

Firefox isn't a Gnome app, it just happens to use GTK+. Whether Gimp is a Gnome app is debatable... However, if you run KDE and dislike the Gnome file dialog (who wouldn't?), check out kgtk.

Bah! You youngsters.

[Tony]

Why not:

KDE & GNOME & vi & emacs?

Why artificially limit yourself? These stupid flamefests show off ignorance, laziness, and a pro-wrestling-like mentality. Use them all, as they were meant to be used.

Re:Bah! You youngsters.

[RailGunner]

Well let me tell you something, Mean Gene, that Pro-Wrestling - I mean, "Sports Entertainment" mentality is what makes this country great, brother!
All my little Huckstermaniacs lining up to take their steroids^H vitamins, say their prayers, and edit configuration files in vi are what make this country great, brother.

And let me tell you this, brother, at Survivor Series, when me and my tag team partner, KDE, get you and your little ceramic GNOME in the ring, we're going to unleash the full fury of Huckstermania, brother!

SO WHATCHA GONNA DO WHEN HUCKSTERMANIA RUNS WILD ON YOU!

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[darthflo]

This may seem strange to the average Slashdotter, but a large percentage of humanity actually enjoys and participates in sexual intercourse, popularly also referred to as "fucking". I even recall at least one slashdot editor (CmdrTaco) posting stories and/or comments (a few weeks back with all the /. anniversary goodness) emphasizing his fondness of his rather new offspring which was quite probably conceived due to some fucking of his with his wife. Offensive seeming terminology isn't always that offensive, you see?

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[sayfawa]

I think they are being "quaint". They were quaint with the Gnome icon for years as well, using an old rocky looking Gnome icon from last century. Some people liked it the same way some people like this old KDE one. But they kept being bitched at by people like the OP until they gave in and changed it. Although the Gnome people were much more polite in their requests.

An Evaluation of KDE4 In One Significant Word

[Anonymous Coward]

Kool

Gnome developer's review

[jdclucidly]

I co-maintain Gnome Games and decided to do a review of KDE 4 RC 1 yesterday. I posted it on my blog.

Re:Gnome developer's review

[samwichse]

Thank you for the concise and thoughtful comments. I'm glad to see your attitude toward a competitor is constructive and even positive. It really adds credence to the whole "two major DE's foster healthy competition in the open source world."

Sam

Re:Gnome developer's review

[eean]

I agree with you, it was a good review.

So of course it gets marked Troll on Slashdot. :P

Re:Gnome developer's review

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain why this was moderated as a Troll?

It was a fair and constructive view

Re:Gnome developer's review

[Anonymous Coward]

You answered your own question.

Re:Gnome developer's review

[Billly Gates]

What did you mean when you said KDE doesn't support other languages?

Miguel used this argument when kde 2.x was still in beta many years ago.

There is python and perl KDE libraries and I believe Ruby even has a port. The only thing that gnome has that kde doesn't is a Java api thats integrated with kde. Actually gnomes java api requires java.net mono. I know that sounds strange.

I think any object oriented language beats C when your doing event object oriented driven desktop environment.

Good!

[12357bd]

Now I am only expecting the next version of Mandriva (the best KDE oriented distro?) to incorporate the new KDE generation. Good work!

Re:Good!

[Ash-Fox]

Now I am only expecting the next version of Mandriva (the best KDE oriented distro?) to incorporate the new KDE generation. Good work!

I think Kubuntu may interest you.

Re:Good!

[lsolano]

Me too. I'm very happy with 2008. I hope they package KDE4 soon for 2008.

Gnome is NOT Mac like

[JoeCommodore]

I wish all you Gnome/KDE guys would not refer to Gnome as "Mac like". Actually as a long time Mac user I find KDE more Mac like than Gnome, in KDE things just happen as they should (which is usually the feeling I get with the Mac Desktop), in Gnome I always feel like I'm missing 'something'. It might also be the included K-APPS with KDE which are VERY useful and easy to operate.

The only similarity I can see is that the menu is on the top (and then it acts more like a Windows menu as it is full of different apps, not functions, something the Mac never had.)

In short KDE "feels" much more intuitive, like the Mac.

Re:Gnome is NOT Mac like

[Dragonslicer]

I think it was the menu at the top that gave me the Mac impression. I only used it long enough to install kubuntu-desktop, and I haven't really used a Mac in years. I was really only referring to appearance, but I'll take your more-experienced word for it.

Performance

[Windwraith]

Amusing. I tried the SuSe liveCD yesterday and I was quite impressed about it. I ran the CD on qemu without acceleration module and vmware player, from a slow Kingston SD memory card (to add insult to injury), the performance while sluggish in parts (resizing panels in krita) was generally quite snappy even in the conditions set by the slow emulated, non-opengl-based system.
Resizing and rotation of plasma widgets was pretty fast, and the animations were instant even in qemu. I also took a good look at Krita, something I've been anticipating anxiously and I was impressed. The laggy mouse lines (a complete polygon aiming to do a curve) turned into a curved line in front of my eyes with no delay after the mouse button was released! Krita is looking very promising so far. I also enjoyed my sights of Dolphin 4, although I am more of a Krusader kind of person, it was nice.
The widget theme (oxigen, right?) was improved to a point I enjoyed. I specially liked the buttons and the green/orange highlights, I love those colors. I didn't like the window decorations though. The wallpaper is flower-powery, amusing at least, but not something I relate to technology...maybe if it was a cybernetic flower... Is it intentional that using the Plasma "zoom out" function the wallpaper is scaled in a corner and the rest becomes a vast desert of whiteness? While I found the function good to play with widgets the wallpaper not keeping scale makes it a bit of an eyesore. Also, the taskbar screams beta...and I grew to hate the menu. It's simply...slow.
All in all, I am looking forward to use this baby soon. I hope Krusader gets there soon :P

Still waiting for koffice 2.0

[Billly Gates]

And also for the opendoc plugins for ms-word to mature.

With these 2 things I can finally switch to linux. MS word and excel compatibility are important and I refuse to use openoffice.

Re:Still waiting for koffice 2.0

[Ash-Fox]

Koffice is not part of KDE. It's a separate suite of applications that is built upon KDE.

Re:Still waiting for koffice 2.0

[Random BedHead Ed]

and I refuse to use openoffice.

And you refuse to use openoffice because ...?

Sorry, but I'm curious. It's not the best office suite I've seen, but it's filled the niche nicely from what I've seen, with even a lot of Windows people using it. Still, some people seem to hate it with a detached "It goes without saying that this app stinks" attitude that I've read in a lot of places. Personally I've found it to be stable, and it has all the features I need. The default settings leave a lot to be desired, but that takes only a minute to remedy. What sorts of things do you find to be lacking in it?

Re:Still waiting for koffice 2.0

[eean]

It's part of the KDE family though. :)

Re:Still waiting for koffice 2.0

[Billly Gates]

It takes over a minute to load up, doesn't support clear type fonts, can't open access databases, I am partially color blind and I can't read the different curves in calc that I can in Excel because the lines are the same, and many other issues.

I used to use openoffice but 2.3 is slower than Netbeans on a pentium1. The font situation is just very bad and of course there is compatibility problems with ms office. Opendoc might fix this as soon as some of the third party opendoc addons for office become complete.

Koffice is much much lighter and supports system fonts and integrates with KDE.

Until the situation is resolved I am going to stick to using Windows.

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[Constantine XVI]

Keep in mind this is the same Slashdot that still uses the Debian logo for Ubuntu stories, yet manages to get new icons for the Wii and 360 (PS3 not necessary since their controller never changes on the outside)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

iSee...

[newr00tic]

iThere iAre iMore iCamps iDoing iThe iSame iThing.. ;)

Re:iSee...

[De Lemming]

WinThe WinWindows WinWorld WinLuckily WinDoesn't WinHave WinThis WinIssue.

Re:iSee...

[Tiberius_Fel]

MSI MSThink MSYou MSAre MSNot MSQuite MSCorrect.

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[Ash-Fox]

Your KDE logo is outdated.

This reminds me of a thread a while back when someone representing the Gnome community complained about the Gnome logo being out dated, this lead to a lot of funny spoofs where Bill Gates was writing about getting the Microsoft logo updated.

I mean you've finally managed to replace the similarily outdated GNOME logo so get your ass in gear.

I will never understand what lead the Gnome community's decision of making a foot on a penis logo.

Some of us

[gambolt]

have figured out that bypassing Windows means not having to buy a new PC every three years.

An rc while waiting for more features ???

[maxm]

Wasn't that called a beta in the good old days?

Release Candidate?

[Columcille]

Release candidate? Come on, I know people are pretty lax about terms to use - alpha, beta, RC, what do they even mean anymore? But come on, this is going a bit far:

This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality...

And so on. Now, unless I missed something, a release candidate is when you think your product is about ready for public release but you want to have people test its "final form" first. You think it is ready, but you want to real-world test it to iron out bugs that have escaped you. Release candidates are not packages that are known to be incomplete. Is KDE doing this just to show some progress since the year is stretching on without a release of KDE 4? Just call it another beta. Heck, it sounds like it might should be alpha still. They are not yet to the final bugging stage, it is not feature complete, they are still adding new code. I can forgive them for calling an alpha a beta, but calling an alpha a release candidate? Come on!

(P.S., I know I'm hijacking a thread to get higher position with my post. Please forgive me. This post is in release-candidate status and the final form of this post is expected to be relevant to the current discussion thread.)

Re:Release Candidate?

[Brian Gordon]

Apologizing for hijacking a thread? You must be n--ever mind, sub-100k uid o_o

Re:Hey Slashdot, - Professional?

[Man in Spandex]

Professional? I believe you're mistaking Slashdot's staff with the guys at Fox news.

Re: gnome burning app

[ThinkOfaNumber]

And when is GNOME ever going to get a good burning app like K3b? Gnome has one. It's called K3b.

Re: gnome burning app

[jaxtherat]

Please mod parent up. I agree, this whole discussion is silly. You can run any KDE app in Gnome if you have the libraries installed, and vice-versa.

All this psycho right wing DE advocacy is nothing but a childish pissing contest, and is symptomatic of the fact that people need to feel like they belong to something special, and that everyone who disagrees with them needs to have their brains bashed out with a rock.

Sheesh, we're no better than fricking cavemen with cool gadgets and nukes...

Konqueror

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's hoping they turned konqueror back into a real file manager and not a rendition of explorer.exe. Web browser integration is pretty poor to begin with, without having non-kde apps that like to open konqueror (even though firefox, or iceweasel to myself, is the 'default' browser).

Not quite the 4.0 they had envisioned, but it work

[Anonymous Coward]

This lacks a few things they had hoped to include, like Raptor (new menu), Akonadi (PIM framework) and Decibel (qt/kde implementation of telepathy) and some others. But the screenshots and testimony say that it is shaping up nicely and 4.0 might be more usable than it was predicted to be. I need to try out that latest livecd and see whats going on.

Also I don't know whether to shame or applaud KDE for their latest developments in kwin. They have implemented their own compositing effects like compiz has into kwin. Now two programs that do the same thing is usually bad, but an in house (wrong use of the term, probably) solution is better for KDE than relying on compiz.

Plasma similar to Mac OS X GUI?

[John Musbach]

Is it just me or is Plasma quite similar to the Mac OS X interface? Gotta be careful with these things, as much as I enjoy having all this eye candy I'd hate to see the Linux community fall to the wrath of the Apple legal department.

You forgot how FS release schedules work

[Qwaniton]

Oh come on, remember how this works. In today's Free Software projects, we've learned how to develop as professionals and deliver product on time instead of when it's donewhen we feel like it. How do we accomplish this? Simple. We pick a date and when that date hits we freeze the code, bugs and all! We pick what bugs we really want to fix, even though it's obvious from the Bugzilla it's riddled with bugs of all kinds. The bugs we pick are deemed "crucial" after careful deliberation via a mailinglist flamewar full of nerds. After we fix, say, half of these, we ship the release and let the distributions break it with all sorts of patches. We continue pushing out new features disguised as bugfixes, which take approximately an eternity to trickle down to the end-users (we write for the distributors, God forbid we make it easy for end users, they might hurt themselves). Debian especially, never content to just let shit be, applies ten thousand patches that turn KDE into a desktop environment almost but not entirely unlike a regular KDE install. Eventually it approaches stability and polish, but somehow it always manages to pull back when someone decides to add new glitz. Notice to Free Software developers: Why not code in mind for the UNIX nerd in the Terminal content to ./configure && make && make install shit? The distributors will patch the piss out of your code anyway. See this [kde-buildsystem] mailing list post if you want to know what I'm talking about. Thank Christ the reply I linked to was written by someone with a grasp of reality. As for me, right now, I'm on Windows 2000 and loving it. My ThinkPad T21 has a no-Linux policy mainly because the kernel pukes when it talks to the hardware, but even after I fix that (in a no-GUI boot which you Ubuntards wouldn't understand), I find myself using an OS exactly as this comment describes. I'll come back to GNU/Linux when GNU gets its shit together and glues its compnents together into an actual GNU system; Linux developers write competent, consistent and standardized userland tools and APIs; and distributors/GNOME developers (they're the same thing at this point) stop writing castrated crucial components like safety scissors a la NetworkManager. Modern GNU/Linux distributions are like houses of cards. Despite all of this, I love KDE with all my heart and I wish I could try KDE 4. I miss Unix. However, I don't miss the current state of affairs in userland 'N*X, especially Ubuntu. Until I find a solid distribution I can actually use to its full potential (besides Slackware), I'll resist temptation and stay far away.

Re:You forgot how FS release schedules work

[Anonymous Coward]

That almost made sense, but not quite.

Re:You forgot how FS release schedules work

[jbolden]

Well I can tell by your user idea you've been around a while, so I'm going to give you the 90s answer.

1) KDE build was not a simple make. The configure aspects were difficult. Moreover different sub components started using the variables from the make to mean slightly different things. This was a coordination hassle and the in thing (think Eric Raymond and the python configure system for the kernel) were these meta configuration systems. It made sense at the time and it makes sense today.

we write for the distributors, God forbid we make it easy for end users, they might hurt themselves)
2) OK if you like Slackware, lets talk about what Patrick did. The idea of Slackware was that to get advanced packages to work you needed to configure multiple packages in a way that they could successfully communicate. That is a simple compile without any forethought wouldn't actually work (think for example getting a TeX graphics package to work which might involve stuff for X, stuff for TeX and the graphics package itself). So by creating meta packages which were integrated and then doing a reasonable job of integrating those meta packages people were able to use integrated packages.

The Linux world is too large for any single individual to understand without tremendous effort all the complexity in getting a wide range of packages to integrate.

Dont like it...

[comm2k]

They seriously need to stop wasting so much pixels... I agree with the poster somewhere above that why are most of the things by default so gigantic?! The taskbar is way too fat. The new 'start'-menu is horrible. Did anyone there use the iPhone too much or just wanted to annoy people? There is a reason why they do it that way on the iPhone - it has a limited resolution. Having this thin "go back" button is like adding insult to injury.

I also cant understand why the default view of dolphin includes 3 BIG BUTTONS to change the view layout but not one for standard copy/paste/cut stuff.. this is a file browser?

At least this is KDE and not Gnome so all of this can be 'konfigured'. But that will be another 2 hour klick-fest.

No...

[Toby_Tyke]

No, in the "good old days", we called that an alpha.

Without looking, I knew who wrote what PP quoted

[Anonymous Coward]

Aseigo, the core dev of Plasma and new overlord of all that is KDE. The basic problem is that Aaron is a self-proclaimed diva that is rather full of himself.

Initally, KDE4 was to be _released_ in October. Well, that did not exactly happen, largely due to Plasma being delayed. The feature freeze on current head impacts pretty much everything.. Except Plasma. On the other hand, Plasma is a core feature, KDE4 needs it to exist. So this is fine. BUT!

But what really ails me is that KDE eV is trying to do good PR while still admitting internally that 4.1 will be the first version that has the potential to appeal to people.

KDE4 will use less memory than KDE3, same as KDE3 used less than KDE2. Same thing for speedups (if your gfx card is supported properly).
KDE4 will feature APIs and backends that simply do not exist on this level of sophistication _anywhere_.
KDE 4.x will rock your world.

I would just hope that they had moved the release date to March and released as 4.0 what they try to get with 4.1, now. This will make a _lot_ of people willing to try out KDE4 run away screaming. This is especially the case as RC1 marks the point where the stable KDE DevKit is released. This means that third party devs have a whole month to get their apps onto KDE4.

(Side note, I love KDE, I would not want to miss it. I just happen to think that the kind of love its new dad gives it is well-meant if misguided.)

Not as..

[Anonymous Coward]

superficial as me http://youtube.com/watch?v=DzraMSNvhQI

- Paul

Amature Night

[SeanJM]

The cosmetics look very poor. It was prettier before.

Fisher price

[BlueParrot]

My gut reaction is it looks as if KDE is moving more and more towards the "fisher-price" look. I guess this could make it a bit less frightening to new users, but do we really need everything to have "child-proof" rounded corners? There will be at least a couple of checkboxes to turn this of, right?

On a more serious note, the screenshots I have seen look quite nice in the sense that I could probably convince my mother to use this, I'm hoping it comes with a more streamlined theme as well thou.

Re:Fisher price

[logixoul]

Nope, no checkboxes. But you can make your own Plasma theme by editing the rounded corners in the SVG. Should take about 30 secs. As for the widgetstyle, there already exist a few edgier KDE4 styles... Skulpture, Phase, Quarticurve.

Re:Hey Slashdot,

[comm2k]

That debian/ubuntu logo.. OK. But where there old Wii/360 logos to begin with? :p

GNOME has config'able keys? Thanks!

[KWTm]

GNOME has user-configurable key shortcuts (GNOME has it's own term called keybinding or depending on what you mean accelerator keys), if it means you want to give "shortcuts" to menu items, just set /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels gconf key to true. Then you can set accelerator key to whatever you want when you hover on a menu item.

Oh, GNOME has that? I didn't know that. Maybe it's time to give GNOME another look.

Would you know if the key configs are stored in a file that I can replicate on other systems? That is, if I've got the keys set to what I want, can I copy the file from my laptop to my desktop (or vice versa) and have them take effect, rather than going through all the menus and pressing the keys again?

Also, is there any danger of me pressing a key accidentally while on a menu item? Normally I would use (say) Alt-F to get the File Menu, then cursor down, and space (let's say). Does that mean that the Space key will be redefined as that menu item? What if the mouse accidentally moves by a pixel before I hit the space key --can it still tell that the mouse move was accidental?

Also, am I able to use the Meta key (labeled as the Windows symbol on most keyboards)?

This is exciting --maybe I will once again have the choice of using either desktop environment after all.

Re:GNOME has config'able keys? Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you know if the key configs are stored in a file that I can replicate on other systems? That is, if I've got the keys set to what I want, can I copy the file from my laptop to my desktop (or vice versa) and have them take effect, rather than going through all the menus and pressing the keys again?

Yes they are in .gconf directory, you can either choose selected paths in that directory, or move it totally so you have other configuration to mimiced in other desktop.

Also, is there any danger of me pressing a key accidentally while on a menu item? Normally I would use (say) Alt-F to get the File Menu, then cursor down, and space (let's say). Does that mean that the Space key will be redefined as that menu item? What if the mouse accidentally moves by a pixel before I hit the space key --can it still tell that the mouse move was accidental? Also, am I able to use the Meta key (labeled as the Windows symbol on most keyboards)?

Space key is not mappable so you can use space as a menu item selection. And you can use Super (ie. Meta) key to assign keybindings.

KDE and Gnome has grown too fat

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE and Gnome has grown too fat, even for my Core 2 laptop. I mostly use evilwm. Windows have a 1 pixel border (or wider if you must). It has no menus. No icons.
It has good keyboard control, including repositioning and maximise toggles. Snap-to-border support. Virtual desktops. Tiny footprint (single sourcefile).