Slashdot Mirror
KDE 4.0 Is Out
Many users wrote to alert us that KDE 4.0 has been released. Here's Computerworld Australia's take on the release KDE 4.0 is based on the Qt4 toolkit, which brings significant enhancements in the way memory is used. "So it ends up making KDE less resource intensive than KDE 3, which is quite an improvement," according to Australian KDE developer Hamish Rodda, who calls the new architecture "future-proof." Computerworld notes that developers are already at work porting the new environment to Windows and the Mac.
I've been looking forward to this showing up. It looks like they are having a bit of a challange porting it though :-(.
Oh well. It will probably show up with 4.1, which is fine, the bugfixes for missed critters will be done by then.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Australian KDE developer Hamish Rodda, who calls the new architecture "future-proof."
That sounds like a challenge to me.
Oh, it's on.
Love,
The Future.
I'm a keen and loyal Gnome user and a former Gnome developer.
I think the 4.0 release of KDE deserves an un-abbreviated summary on the front page.
Congratulations on this milestone guys, keep up your work.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Not having tested any of the betas or release candidates, but having seen countless stunning screenshots, I was anxious to try it out. Just installed it on Kubuntu, and to my dismay I found it to be a bit of a letdown. There's hardly any options to customise the desktop/menu/taskbar or general behavior, it seems to lack most widgets found in KDE3, and I have seen no option to add your own non-officially packaged apps as an icon to the desktop/taskbar.
The menu is a bit awkward to navigate, and again there are hardly any options to change the default behavior or look. I know they promised more features for 4.1 or 4.2/3, but I was still a little shocked as to how completely barebone it felt compared to KDE3, which I will continue to use for the time being.
Anyways, I'd still like to thank the KDE team for their effort, and I'm looking forward to using KDE4 once it has been optimised.
The KDE4.0 release is about so much more than memory usage!
o. Complete library overhaul
o. Complete graphical overhaul
o. Simplification (see Dolphin)
o. New desktop, taskbar, dashboard
The changes to a desktop environment don't get any bigger than that. I'm very surprised that the article summary only seems to mention memory usage.
Looks like Kubuntu already released a CD to install KDE 4.0 alongside your KDE 3.0. There are releases for openSUSE and Debian also, but it looks like other distributions are still working on it (including Fedora/Red Hat and Madriva).
My congratulations go out to the KDE 4 development team. While this release may be a little rough around the edges, it's an excellent base and framework for some seriously good releases to come. Thank you!
I'm sticking to KDE 3.5.8. I'm surprised that they released it this early considering the reported huge amount of bugs. I mean, Canonical wouldn't release Kubuntu 8.04 as a long term release because they knew that KDE 4 wouldn't be ready for prime time and nobody will support it in 2011. On the flip side, I'm glad (to quote Meatloaf) the Monster is loose. This means that KDE can go from (IMHO) XP look to something much closer to OSX. It also means that Amarok 2.0 is one step closer to reality for my Windows box at work. I look forward to Kubuntu 8.10 (or maybe earlier) with KDE 4.x in it. And let the visual sexiness begin.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
While I use KDE and like it, I doubt very much that the sentence [[KDE 4.0 is based on the Qt4 toolkit, which brings significant enhancements in the way memory is used. "So it ends up making KDE less resource intensive than KDE 3, which is quite an improvement,"]] is true: Qt4 use double buffering to provide smoother scrolling so I doubt that it's using less memory that KDE3..
/.) which tried to measure the memory consumption of KDE but the author failed to measure accurately the memory used (which is quite hard).
I remember a blog (linked by
So does anyone have realistic numbers on the memory used by KDE3 and KDE4?
Yours.
KDE.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
sounds like a cron job. script it yerself.
Well, the developers say that KDE 4.0 is far from finished:
:)
"KDE 4.0.0 is our "will eat your children" release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5."
Speaking of which... I've been using e17 for a while. It is not feature-complete but it is use-able. And it does not crash on me like XFCE does (I'll probably get modded down for saying this...)
Anyway, I am not here to bash anyone, just wanted to put things in perspective. Enjoy your WM, whatever it is
No, the sad truth is, this should have been KDE4 Beta 1. It's not finished, it's been rushed out. I like KDE and I appreciate that KDE4 is going to be very cool eventually, but this is not the time. And rushing products out before they are finished, saying that the real stuff will turn up in the
Again, let's be clear about this - KDE4 is gonna kick some ass eventually, but releasing it in its current state has been a big mistake.
From a A google search of the forums and a thread on the PCLOS forum it would seem that they are also waiting out the storm before getting their toes wet...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
k.d. lang 4.0 has been out for, like, a decade and a half.
But I don't want my computer to feel like a Mac. That's why I use KDE (3.x; 4.0 IS a bit awkward ATM). Don't get me wrong, I don't hate on OSX. In respect to Usability (and UI design in general) they're (IMHO) killing every other DEBut when I bother booting up my Mac at home, I can only spend about fifteen minutes on it before I get irritated by the lack of options to customize any number of things. And Finder... oh wow I loathe that thing.
It should be noted that I definitely have issues with KDE as well, but none of those issues are in any way related to "awkward menus" or "button placement" or "unnatural organization". I'd be curious to know what you find so awkward about them?
oo
Originally it was Kool Desktop Environment.
Can't help it but the GUI design looks shoddy. Icons to big, bad alignments across the board. The design team needs another month or two. Visually this is a beta.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I think your post is quite an overreaction, I don't think any serious person cares about the name of a program, and the deal is that the K itself is not a big deal. Enterprise has been using things names as retardedly as "Java" or ".net" I mean, seriously...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I used to think that, but then I changed my mind when I realised that there's a big difference between releasing something like KDE4 and something like Windows Vista or the latest version of OSX or whatever.
When Vista (just an example, I'm not bashing MS) was released, then Microsoft was having it put on store shelves, pre-installed on new computers and were generally selling it and distributing it for everybody to use. When you receive a piece of software in this way, you generally expect it to be in a complete and serviceable state, which is fair enough.
Something like KDE is different. Yes, the KDE community is very pleased with this milestone event and they are all having a party etc., but at the same time they are clearly advertising that the KDE 4.0 desktop is probably not ready for general use on most people's desktops. When your say that KDE 4.0 is released, it doesn't really mean the same sort of thing as the release of Vista, because all that's really happened is someone's created some source archives and put them on a website to download. I don't think any mainstream distribution is going to put KDE 4.0 into its repositories for general use, and as such the only people who are running KDE4 at this point are either developers or people who have gone to the effort of seeking out unsupported, community-provided packages out of their own curiosity. Most of the reactions I've seen from enthusiasts of this type have indeed confirmed that they do not believe KDE 4.0 to be ready for day-to-day use, but they're not disillusioned or upset or dissatisfied because they know that they deliberately sought out an unfinished product -- they just wanted to have a preview, really.
There is another point concerning this whole "maybe it should still be a beta" situation, which involves the distinction between KDE4 as a platform and KDE4 as a desktop environment. According to what I've read, a large part of the decision to release KDE 4.0 in the state it's in was to do with the fact that in order to end up with a complete desktop environment, there needs to be a community of developers working with the new platform. The concern was that people wouldn't want to start developing for a "beta" platform, only to have the rug pulled out from under their feet when the APIs were changed. This 4.0 release marks a stable target platform which people can start building on with confidence. It's important to realise that this isn't some sort of trick -- the libraries and frameworks underpinning KDE4 are apparently pretty complete and stable and it's mainly the applications which need the work.
Wow, thanks for the warning. I was almost considering using gnome.
lol: You see no door there!
I'm a fan of mpg123 and shell scripts myself. It needs so few system resources it's silly. But Amarok, which I used when I ran KDE, is quite an excellent piece of software.
Method of processing duck feet
But consider Joe Average, the non-technical guy who decides to ditch Windows in favour of Linux, since he's read a few good things about it and all that. Exactly the kind of user everyone feels Linux should be targetting if it is ever to achieve critical mass. Assume for the sake of the argument, that he installs Kubuntu. His current KDE version - and he is probably aware of it, or will find out very soon - is 3.5.8. Now he visits kubuntu.com. The site tells it in no uncertain terms that "KDE4 is the start of something amazing" and to "be free with KDE4".
If that's not enough to make him install KDE4 without second thought, he can visit kde.org and learn, again, to be free and that the " KDE Project Ships Fourth Major Version of cutting edge Free Software Desktop". He also learns that The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. and that the KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. and so on. Nowhere immediately obvious does it say that it is not, in fact, ready, feature complete or stable.
So, what happens to Joe Average? He installs KDE4, tries out a few things, finds it broken in several places, not working as expected in others and not configurable where he may want it to be configurable. Compared to WinXP, it will feel to him as a significant step backwards (probably more because of the brokenness than the lack of features compared to KDE3). In the end, he'll just go back to Windows because, clearly Linux isn't there yet.
Bottom line, this should have been a Beta and it should have clearly been advertised as such, not via comments on some mailing list but clearly visible within the main announcement.
My guess is that the whole reason for releasing now is the desperate hope that they'll have something decent ready for Kubuntu.
And I imagine that in another few months, it's going to be better than KDE3. By that I mean functionality; KDE3 just hasn't been particularly stable for me. (The ACID3 test crashed Konqueror, and Konqueror quite frequently crashes while I'm typing comments on Slashdot...)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Unlike the bunch here that cries "It should be called KDE 4.0 Beta 1", I believe that it should be called KDE 4.0. It signals that the base technology is ready and it is time for adoption by a larger mass than what the release candidates had. Remember that KDE 3.5.8 is a matured product, KDE 4.0 is not. It doesn't happen over night.
Whiners aside, yay, KDE 4.0 is here. Congratulations everyone!
iThink you may be just a bit iPredisposed to think of iLinux apps as having weird iNames.
Honestly, why is iCrap better than Krap?
What program isn't an application?
Or at least, it's generally possible to know it's an Application from context; by knowing what it does. It's generally not possible to know, without the naming scheme, which desktop environment (or graphics library) a given application uses.
It gdoes make it a bit geasier to Kfigure out gwhich iApps go to Kwhich iDesktop Kenvironment.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If only I had mod points...
I just don't think customizability is chief to usability. Unifying concepts and designs and out-of-the-box functionality are much more important- if the customizability is wide open enough that a clueless user can accidentally customize away something useful, then the design fails.
I wish I could go more into what exactly bothers me about KDE, but it's difficult. I just feel uncomfortable when I use it- something about the over-use of organizing devices (like lists pointers, font color cases, connecting lines, separating bars...) bubbliness of letters and buttons, and overall drab in the design scheme. It feels like I am seeing too many small icons at any given time, or too many options and not enough clear usage paths across my desktop. What I am NOT doing is not hidden well enough-- i.e., the functionality is not smooth enough for my usage to be visually isolated from the rest of the desktop.
I think gnome's exacting HIG is probably tantamount to its functionality.
Because unless your name is "Internet Explorer", people won't know, just from the name, what kind of program it is. I think most of us have generally accepted names like Firefox, but unless someone already knows what it is, how would you know Firefox is a web browser? Should we just be naming the first project "Web Browser", and subsequent projects like Konqueror, iCab, etc can fade into obscurity?
I suspect GwenView is a response to a Windows image viewer, IrfanView.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think one of the main points to rush out... the release is that it gives programmers time to start porting there software for it.. thus when 4.1 or the real release, Is availible it will be leaps and bounds ahead on development .
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with sc
I use neither Gnome nor KDE, and still believe that a major release of either warrants a full article on the front page.
And I don't care that most of the changes are under the hood, this is supposed to be a nerd site after all.
There's a splash screen (one of the "tip of the day" screens) for KDE startup that claims the K doesn't stand for anything at all. That said, I don't think it said anything about it never having stood for anything, just that it no longer stands for anything.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Alright, I'll give you that one. I suppose I have been paying rather close attention to the whole thing, and it's easy to forget what the general level of awareness is.
However, I don't buy this rather ridiculous picture of "Joe Average" you're painting. So this guy, completely new to Linux, downloads Kubuntu, manages to get it working and then straight away cracks open his
As I said before, I think there would be a problem if the KDE 4.0 desktop was the first thing that greeted a new user, but it isn't, and furthermore it seems very unlikely that it will be.
Valid points. I spend a lot of time customizing my KDE environment to meet my usability needs, so perhaps that's why I don't see the same issuesor at least don't see them AS issues. Gnome's (and OS X's) strength is their usability right out of the 'box'. In KDE (and Windows, to a lesser degree) you need to take advantage of the options to edit the environment in order to improve the usability of the product.
This is precisely the reason I'm not upgrading to KDE 4 yet. The options to customize the DE to make it a little more usable just aren't there yet.
oo
And don't get me started on the whole "IntelliActiveDirectCrapX.NET" stuff...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Linux applications have taken the whole single letter prefix thing a bit too far. Let's see a package listing of all the KDE apps on your system, then compare =)
It was a way to differentiate GNU software from the native software it replaced, but then continued on to crap that only runs on Linux anyway. Also, X Windows programs mostly had x's so you knew an X environment was required. This continued on to modern Gnome/KDE systems where X is almost always running, X apps rarely need to be in your path anymore, and most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actually program filename. Gnome and KDE are even largely compatible with each other now.
I'm not suggesting renaming gcc to cc. Going forward though, remember (or FIND OUT) what the conventions actually mean before putting another f'ing k... or g... titled application in a GUI shell. In some places it may actually be appropriate, like a gfoobar/kfoobar that perform the same function. If you don't need both though, drop the damned prefix in the GUI. The NEED for the prefixes in modern Linux GUIs is long gone. It's just a branding now, and it's extremely overdone. It gdoes make it a bit geasier to Kfigure out gwhich iApps go to Kwhich iDesktop Kenvironment. Apple software isn't branded with an i to tell us it runs on iMacs.
How about this.
If it's in the KDE menu, it's a KDE APPLICATION!
If it's in the Gnome menu, it's a GNOME APPLICATION!
What if you want KDE apps in your Gnome menu or Gnome apps in your KDE menu?
THEN WHY THE F*** DO THEY STILL NEED TO BE DIFFERENTIATED?
At least rename the shortcuts the GUI launches.
I think part of the problem is that we don't have a good term for this kind of release. It's not just a beta, because this release will be receiving security updates and other fixes, which a beta wouldn't receive. So instead of trying to come up with a new term, which would then have to be explained over and over again, they just decided to call it 4.0.
Although personally, I don't see why they didn't just follow the progression of Greek letters and call it something like "KDE4 Gamma 1.0" (with small fixes producing e.g. "KDE4 Gamma 1.1", "KDE4 Gamma 1.2", etc).
Good point. However it does not bother me that they use "K" in front of many of the applications that are available on KDE. I like it. But thats just me. Now that I think of it they do go a bit too far.
Now if you excuse me I will have some Koffee. But right after I finish editing my Conf files in Kwrite.
Yeah, they silently lost their kool pretty early on. :)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
As soon as this shows up in Gentoo Portage (the main branch, not an SVN overlay) I intend to backup my configuration and switch to KDE4. Yes, I know I'll run into things that don't work the way I expect and a few missing features. I figure if I want to see KDE 4.1 sooner, I can at least put in some effort to test and report problems. Now that the feature-freeze is over, developers ought to be able to deal with the "but the icons are icky" complaints that everyone seems to make, too.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Oh come off it, the purpose of the 4.0.0 release is not to tempt joe average away from win XP in an even more tempting way than 3.5.x
They said its the START of something amazing. Its a bit of PR, you don't say oh by the way use our old stuff for the time being.
Joe average will use the desktop installed by the distro, is any joe average type distro using kde 4.0.0 by default? No. Does the Eee PC or a dell notebook ship with KDE 4.0.0? No. Do you think they plan to? No. Do you think joe average can work out how to go back to 3.5.x if by some miracle they manage to install 4.0.0 and deliberately log into this new DE? Yes.
Bottom line, you don't call something a beta just because it might scare away Joe average when you are writing open source. Their goal is to get KDE4.X into shape as quickly as possible to supercede KDE3.x and this is the right way to do it. Ultimately it will be the distro that decides the time by providing the 4.X by default.
I'm curious about your definition of "Joe Average, the non-technical guy". Is this the Joe Average that has never visited Microsoft's main website, just clicks "Yes" to software updates provided by Windows Update, and at most changes the wallpaper and screen saver? Or is this the Joe Average that installs every virus that claims to remove viruses and surfs Warez sites? I can see where the second Joe Average might be a problem, on any platform.
So, what happens to Joe Average? He installs KDE4, tries out a few things, finds it broken in several places, not working as expected in others and not configurable where he may want it to be configurable. Compared to WinXP, it will feel to him as a significant step backwards (probably more because of the brokenness than the lack of features compared to KDE3). In the end, he'll just go back to Windows because, clearly Linux isn't there yet.That's a bit of a stretch. Joe started with a stable copy of KDE3. He played with it enough to figure out how to upgrade to KDE4 all on his own. In the end, if he is unhappy with KDE4, he will undo his upgrades and go back to KDE3. If Joe does react the way you predict, let's hope he doesn't come across a blog praising TWM.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Which is strange enough how I feel about gnome. Now mind you. I am more comfortable with Fluxbox, Enlightenment and Afterstep than gnome. All of which are NOT at all like Windows. So it is not that KDE is striving to be like Micorsoft Windows which makes it comfortable.
Gnome has that "itch" that you can not scratch syndrome going for it. If something is almost what you want but not quite...well to bad you are stuck with it. In KDE there is enough room for customization you can often get exactly what you want.
In addition to that the KIO slaves are so sweet. It does not matter where a file is stored at, on a local share, NFS, SMB, FPT or SFTP, you can just give a URI. Then Boom! Away you go with using it.
With DKOP going away with the move to HAL for interprogram communications. I wish all systems had the KDE base libs and evyerone would build GTK2 apps on top of HAL and KIO.
vi +
What a bunch of bullshit. Your mythical "Joe Average" will go to the Ubuntu website and download the Ubuntu or Kubuntu iso. U7.10 comes with Gnome 2.20.0. Stable. K7.10 (once updated) comes with KDE 3.5.8. Stable. "Joe Average" (a nonsense made-up concept, btw) isn't going to out looking for a new desktop to install in the first place.
Second, even taking your unlikely scenario, so "Joe Average" does go to kubuntu.org and follows the instructions to download KDE4, he's still going to have KDE 3.5.8 to fall back on. The only way you can download a version of Kubuntu with only KDE4 is if you get the Hardy alpha (and I'm not even sure about that, can anyone verify?)
Condensed version of above: You are talking out of your ass.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Great idea. After all, iPod, Mac, or Excel are much more easily recognizable terms and oh-so-relevant to what they do. Marketing sure knows best.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Glad to be of help. I hear Banshee's getting some kind of UI overhaul soon so maybe it'll look even better by the time you check them out. :)
How did you imply I was complaining about they using those technologies? I was complaining about the names... Java and .net are very silly names, then we got to talk about firefox, silverlight , tomcat, really, names in the technology world are always very lame, and you got to accept suffixing .net to application names is not much better than the K-obsession ...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I see where you are coming from- I don't really like either in all cases. My primary concern is that gnome is better from a design and usability standpoint- more researched, more well thought out and planned- but KDE is superior technically. It's faster, smoother, uses less ram. It's just generally a more logical way to build a desktop environment. I want so badly for KDE to be a *beautiful* system, but too often I am disappointed by its default options and don't have the energy to swim upstream and change everything to the point where it's almost-gnome.
I can't get into AfterStep because I grew up on Microsoft systems- I've never used NeXT, but I've used Mac OS X. NeXT feels dead to me- and fluxbox and enlightenment are too minimal. I like a lush environment where all functionality is immediately apparent and somewhat easy.
That aside, I really like QT.
The only solution is for me to become a KDE dev, I guess. If I like what KDE does but I don't like how it does it- it's truly the only way.
I use xtdesk for icon support. What is cool about, as seen in the picture, is that instead of getting a context menu for the icons, I get a menu of more apps to launch. Since I do desktop support. I have an icon for each location, left click and I remote into the server for that location. Right click and I can pick any desktop at that location to remote into.
It makes me the envy of the windows guy doing support. He can often be heard cursing as he is looking up a computer to find out where to remote to. Whereas I am always on right click then one left click away.
I would have to give up that goodness to go back to KDE.
I find I like all of the goodies in KDE, but the light and quick feel of gtk2 apps.
vi +
The problem with that is not everyone likes GNOME. I used it for several months on Fedora 3 or 4, and it was ok, but I was much more impressed with KDE. I thought KDE was very usable and well-thought-out; I could power my way through Konqueror, etc., and do all sorts of nifty things that wasn't possible in Nautilus, for instance. Some other post somewhere said you could use GNOME "with 512 MB", and that would certainly explain another factor; I had an older Pent 3 with 128 MB of RAM, and KDE still ran smoothly. And don't even get me started on how much more I love the configurability of KDE compared to GNOME. However, I can definitely appreciate GNOME's appeal, even if I'm not as enthusiastic as you or others. I like KDE better, but it was certainly still a joy to use GNOME. It's simply people with different preferences making what they think are the best decisions based on their preferences. GNOME has one philosophy, KDE another. Anyway, this was a long post to say: please don't ever join the KDE devel team just to make it look more like GNOME. If I wanted GNOME, I would use it; I like KDE because of the very fact it is KDE. Likewise, I'll develop for KDE, won't complain about the parts of GNOME I don't enjoy, and leave GNOME the way you like it. Deal?
Or report bugs/wishes on bugs.kde.org
There's always a need for people with a good eye for UI. I'm a KDE developer and I know that I personally do not have a good eye for such things. There is a usuability team, but they are completely swamped with work.
I'm always happy for people to make suggestions on improving the interface.
That said, people are still generally more than willing to trade stability for more / better features. Once can say Linux's problems lie in lack of hardware support, lack of 3rd party software, etc. But look at Apple. Apple has been gaining ground - even in businesses. I hate to say it because I'm definitely a function over form guy, but let's face it, it's the oooh ahhh factor of the hardware and OS that has made them as popular as they are today. Make no mistake, this is a giant leap for linux because never before has linux had a generally available ooh ahh desktop that (in time) the average joe can have without going through a lot of trouble.
.Ellis Web Based Database
"the effects are very slow and drop frames, there are remnants everywhere, you name it. This is annoying, but acceptable, seeing this is the first official release of the new KWin, and you cannot expect the developers to reach the same level of stability and performance of OS X' Quartz Extreme, Vista's Desktop Window Manager" http://osnews.com/story/19159/KDE_4.0.0:_Sweet_Follows_Sour