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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."
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.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
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.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
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.
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.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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...
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
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.
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.