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KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th
VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."
Yes, with Qt4 we should see KDE apps on all, Mac, Windows, and obviously, Linux. It will be nice to see some of the apps I use on a day to day basis (like Kile) ported to Windows. If someone starts using KDE apps, it'll ease the transition should they ever choose to switch to Linux.
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
For me, KDE is already good enough. I'd rather wait until KDE4 is really solid than ty get it out on some arbitrary ship date.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
As a common user, I care about
1) eye candy
2) rendering times
The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.
I get the impression that the KDE devs are simply aiming at delivering the best DE possible, with no particular user group in mind. Besides, I think thats a common dominator for most FOSS, since market share is secondary to good design (maybe a bit exaggerated but still), at least when compared to the proprietary world. Further more I would like to believe that KDE resembles OSX more than Gnome, at least from a developers point of view, with it's rich and structured dev platform. KDE is more than just a DE, it's a platform!
One simple question: Why can Microsoft not slip release dates without getting flack, but it's okay for open source projects? Both are slipping for the same reasons.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely mod you up...
I agree completely; most people I know who are "hardcore" linux users spend time tweaking their systems, but it's usually just to the point of getting all their hardware working, and then maybe glitzing it up a little bit, usually by downloading a theme they think looks cool. The thousands of fancy customization options usually get left behind, and completely reconfiguring how applications look and run is totally beyond what they care to do. The linux users want to *USE* linux, not waste hours and hours digging into arcane details to reach some potential "perfect setup".
Windows can be tweaked too, but definitely much less-so, and there isn't much support about it either. I don't know anything about tweaking MacOS, other than the fact that i've never seen anyone using a recent version of MacOS that looked like it had been customized any significant extent.
ìì!
Powerusers, like other users, prefer to use the defaults when they're sane and appropriate. But the 1% that I do change are the things that annoy the hell out of me, and that 1% isn't very different. Think of it this way, you can get into any car and drive. But, you may want to adjust the mirror up, down, left, right and that separately for the one on the left side, right side and center. And don't get me started on adjusting the seat, or hanging up a CD cover on the sunscreen, or adjusting the fan or the air conditioning or change the radio frequence, volume etc. Do I use them? Quite rarely. Would I get really annoyed if I learned it was bolted down and not changable? Yes. I'm a great fan of easy setups - this is what you must do to use it in a meaningful way. I'm also a big fan of "advanced"/"expert" settings, where the user could seriously bork the application. Gnome is too much either safety scissors or scalpel. I'd rather have a swiss army knife - looks rather complicated but it's not worse than finding the one function you do need.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For heaven's sake, don't spread FUD! That "stable code base" you talk about was a mess to mantain
It was a feature-complete, stable mess to maintain. Sure, it's a good idea to replace it with a better design, but not immediately before a major release when the rest of the desktop is pretty much finished and not if you can't finish it on time.
The "fanboys" you talked about were people rightfully ticked off by the constant, uncostructive and negative attitude on the part of the complainers
Those negative attitudes didn't come from nowhere. The initial criticism was reasonable, but it was met with stone-walling and blowing people off. Then they kept releasing beta after beta that didn't work right, continually telling people to wait and that they were trolls for complaining. It is that which really kicked off the flaming you see today.
which did not bring any improvement and only demotivated the developers.
If you're echoing the complaints that people aren't "constructively" criticising, I think you're wrong. When you take something that works and totally breaks it, it's your responsibility to fix it, and you shouldn't complain when people point out it's broken and want it back the way it was. There really isn't anything more to elucidate on when you tell somebody that they just fucked everything up and you want it back the way it was.
Those people did not even bother testing later revisions
Can you blame them? "Here's a beta". "But it's totally broken!" "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's another beta." "This one's broken too." "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's a release candidate." "Nope, still broken. Aren't release candidates supposed to be at least feature-complete?" "Stop complaining! It's not supposed to be ready until 4.1!"
When you continually feed somebody shit, eventually they are going to realise that the next spoonful isn't going to taste any better. Not testing later betas is completely understandable in light of how the stability has been misrepresented. The devs already know what they need to work on, they don't need testers to tell them. The real WTF is that if they already knew what the problems were and that it wasn't finished, why did they tag a "release candidate" that had absolutely no chance of becoming 4.0?
The rendering times should have improved, so has the potential for eyecandy but IMO that's minor. The area where KDE is improving the most is when it comes to the framework. For example, take Phonon which is a multimedia wrapper API for backends like xine, mplayer, gstreamer etc. What does that mean for you? Well, it means the application developers will spend a lot less time dicking around getting sound and video working and instead provide more end-user features. It means that if you got it configured right once, a different KDE app won't work because it's trying to use some other backend that doesn't work. It's not like it's going to rock your boat, I mean having this working is pretty basic right? Well, for the most part KDE is about making the basic things simple. There's a lot of "basic" functionality that can be really complex and waste application developers' time with few tangible results. It they still can't manage to make something flashy and cool with all the time that's freed up, well that's not really KDE's problem.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> And it's really in this regard the fact that Windows and Mac OS X are unconfigurable becomes obvious.
Both Windows and Mac OS X may be less configurable in this respect, but I would just emphasize that it doesn't decrease my efficiency at all, and it probably increases the efficiency of many other users. Here's why:
Tools contribute a lot more to efficiency than many things that would be configured in the window manager. For this reason, it is possible for me to be very efficient anywhere, even in Windows as long as I install a decent shell and terminal, install some vital command-line gnu tools, and install one or more script runtimes (I use perl). I also am dependent upon vim for efficiency in many things, but that's just me. Once I've got that, I don't care about much else that has to do with configuring the window manager. I just need it to switch me between processes and that's about it. Each window manager or desktop (Windows, aqua, kde, gnome, or even fluxbox) does things a little differently, but honestly the differences won't contribute to or degrade efficiency on a large scale: it's the availability of the tools that is important (and fortunately, the important tools are available on any platform, although it's too bad Windows doesn't come with any). A lot of people try to argue that a window manager is better than another in terms of workflow efficiency, but it's nonsense. You can learn and get used to any modern window manager and use it just about as effectively as someone using a different window manager, but if these vital tools are gone you're hosed.
Now I'll tell you why OS X is probably better for new or casual users in terms of efficiency: casual users don't know how to write perl scripts to perform mundane or repetitive tasks, and they don't know how to use grep or the other tools that make us more experienced users effective, but Apple has succeeded in creating smart gui front-ends to these tools or features that really work well. The three things I am referring to are AppleScript (which has been around a very long time), Spotlight (which also has comparable implementations on Windows and other platforms), and Automator (which is like a front-end to AppleScript which lets you do repetitive tasks without knowing any scripting at all). Even I use these tools sometimes; they're dead simple to understand and they certainly increase efficiency more than window manager options.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.