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KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the when-improvements-amplify-each-other dept.

appelza contributed a link to Tuesday's announcement of the next step toward KDE 4.1: "The KDE Project is proud to announce the first beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 1 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 1 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in July 2008." I haven't used KDE much for the past few years, but the screenshots of a "grown-up" plasma are enough to make me correct that.

7 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Is KDE Taking the Lead? by ryanisflyboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I am not a window manager guru by any stretch. I use Gnome since that is what a lot of my friends use, and at the time I made the choice KDE didn't seem as capable. Now I look at KDE and get the impression that Gnome is falling behind in breadth and depth of features, configurability, and ease of use. Is that an accurate view of the situation? If so, why isn't Gnome able to keep up?

    1. Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead? by Chineseyes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Taking the lead of what exactly? Gnome has followed a trend of removing features and giving users few options while KDE has been giving users more features and more options.

      Some people feel that completely removing options is a good idea because they are looking to target corporations and limiting options makes support easier, but I have always felt that KDE's approach is much better. Give the users all the options they could imagine and then let them decide what is best. With KDE's approach you can always have some sort of locked down "corporate default" setting that would make support easier but with Gnome's approach what do you do when a user wants a feature that has been removed?

      --
      I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended

      --A wise old fart named SC0RN
    2. Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead? by theJavaMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would say it's the design philosophy. Gnome says "Do this our way, because it is better" (see the ok-cancel button debate). KDE says "You can do it this way, but you can also configure your own way".

    3. Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead? by cozziewozzie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The KDE team has been rewriting/porting basically everything over to Qt4, which was a gargantuan task.

      During this time, they used the opportunity to fix some long-standing issues and redesign some key components. Things were broken and in development for a long time, while the stable release 3.5.x went into bugfixing mode. Gnome was making steady improvements to their 2.x codebase this entire time.

      KDE is only now starting to reap the fruits of this effort. The real power of the platform will become more obvious in the coming years.

    4. Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead? by __aabvlw4075 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've been using linux since 1999, and in that time I don't recall there ever being a moment when it would make any sense to say that KDE didn't seem as capable as GNOME. Some people prefer GNOME's appearance, design philosophy, or set of apps to KDE's -- and vice versa -- but when it comes to capabilities, KDE has always (at least since '99) been the clear winner. In fact, lack of capabilities is GNOME's selling point -- less capabilities means a simpler interface that many people prefer.

  2. Re:KDE mature enough to drop the annoying K prefix by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Drop the stupid K prefix.

    iThere iAre iTwo iOther iCompeting gschools gof gthough, i'll grant iou.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  3. Bloat = many apps on a desktop, with few libs by CarpetShark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    KDE is absolutely not bloated. A modern desktop SHOULD provide a wide range of services to apps --- including net IO, a web browser component, rss, clipboards, drag and drop, color management, printing, contacts, emailing, calendaring, multimedia, threading, event passing, IPC, tagging, database access, URL shortcuts, launching, file management, thumbnails, etc. Many modern apps use these these things, and it makes absolutely no sense for them all to have dis-integrated separate implementations.

    If you want to see bloat, look at the apps for any popular desktop that DOESN'T provide a solid, modern, complete core. Run any modern workflow, like quoting a webpage and editing photos to embed in your spell-checked word processor document, to email to someone whose name is all you can recall. Compare memory use, workflow, and integration, AFTER getting used to each desktop for a few months and learning all of the little integration features provided by each solution. I challenge anyone to do it on linux and find a desktop that beats KDE.