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KDE 4.1 Beta 2 – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield takes a look at the latest KDE beta and finds it wanting: 'Very likely, KDE users will have to wait for another release or two beyond 4.1 before the new version of KDE matches the features of earlier ones, especially in customization.' He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say, 'Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake.' I'm not too sure about that — really, 'everyone?'"
yup! your right!
Contrary to the contributor's comment, I'm saying that 4.1 *is* better than 4.0, but not as much as better as people hoped, and that, in Folder View, it introduces a new source of controversy.
I twisted the original saying to reflect my opinion.
-Bruce Byfield ("nanday")
The article hardy complains about the crashes, it just says that you probably don't want to install it on your desktop, but try it with a live CD instead (and never mentions the crashes again). The summary, as usual, is a little misleading.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
While having a story linked to on Slashdot always makes my day, the summary given with the link doesn't accurately report what I said:
-- To say that I found 4.1 "wanting" is incomplete. I say that it is a major improvement over 4.0.x, but, based on the beta, isn't likely to deliver everything people want. I suggest that, while it has faults, it may be the most innovative free desktop currently.
- I say that it crashes, not as criticism (it is a beta, after all), but to suggest that casual users might not want to spend the time compiling it, and should use a Live CD to explore it instead.
- The full context in which I call KDE 4 a mistake is: "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was -- and whose -- is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything." In other words, all I'm saying is that it's causing a lot of controversy -- a fact that anyone who knows how to open a search engine can easily verify.
Trying to correct an impression that gets started in comments is difficult, but I thought I'd try anyway. So, let me spell out my opinion as clearly as possibly: I'm fascinated by the KDE 4.0 series with all its innovations (in fact, I'm using it on my laptop), but I think the KDE developers seriously misjudged user reaction, and that the software itself has a ways to go.
I don't mind in the least if people disagree with me, or even condemn me; you get used to it, after a while. However, I would prefer if they disagreed with or condemned what I actually said.
is the incredibly slow-ass file previews. What happened? I can now open up a folder of digital camera images and have Dolphin or Konqueror preview them, and 45 minutes later it will still be working to get all the thumbnails done.
The code itself is actually much unchanged (at least insofar as it still uses KIO). Perhaps the problem is related to Strigi slowdowns for Dolphin in KDE 4.0? In addition Dolphin in KDE 4.0 would try to show previews for all items in a directory. IN KDE 4.1 many optimizations were done such that thumbnails are only generated for visible items. Hopefully this should help.
So, would it be fair to say that you haven't removed any features, you just haven't gotten them all working yet? If so, that would give KDE users something to look forward to, instead of something to complain about.
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I dont see what people are complaining about.
I've been using KDE 4 for months and while it isnt perfect, the glitches are minor.
My biggest complaint is the rendering of the date and taskbar is...quirky (for me anyway on 4.0).
The pros outweigh the cons for me.
Dolphin is absolutely brilliant and Kwrite's tweaks are fantastic.
I'd die without Okular as well.
KDE 3.5 looks so old fashioned now. :)
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency.
Yup, Windows is just the model of visual consistency. Note that every application in that screenshot is a Microsoft application, so we're not even talking about third parties making a mess here.
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I run semi-nightly builds of SVN from Project Neon and I can say I'm very satisfied with KDE 4.1. Compared to 4.0.x there has been a tremendous leap in features and polishing, and the new Plasma features make it better for me to work. An explanation: Plasma enables you to zoom-in and out of your current desktop. When zoomed out, you can add another desktop ("Activity") in which you can place plasmoids like the one you were using before. You can switch between them using keyboard or zooming in and then out.
What makes it different from X11's standard virtual desktops? The fact that activities are completely independent from each other. I have one set of plasmoids on my "leisure" view, a different one in my "coding" view, and yet another one in my "writing" view. In this context, Folder View is absolutely brilliant, as you are not enslaved to ~/Destkop, but instead you can view many more dirs (including remote ones: anything that KIO supports works), and you can filter for file names/extensions (there are plans to do MIME type filtering in the future, IIRC). Like that, I actually work much better than with the old desktop paradigm (I *hated* when desktops became huge and pointless dumping grounds for anything).
Some missing features have crept in since last beta, including moving the applets on the panel.
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My problem with KDE 4 was the size of the panel and the decorations. I'm on a laptop with limited screen real estate, so I like window manager decorations to be as small as possible. I wasn't able to reduce these without breaking all kinds of things.
The last thing I tried, might have been a beta of 4.1, don't recall, was closer. I think I could resize the panel to be smaller vertically, but this screwed up a lot of things visually. I'll wait, I'm happy with KDE 3.5.
I personally found KDE 3.5 quite nice to use, however when I updated to Fedora 9 I got KDE 4.0 beta which had IMHO annoying features associated with the fonts on the panel not scaling when I put the panel on my right hand side of the screen (does the same thing on the left as well). Top and bottom is ok but not have you did a left or right switch. What I disliked was the fact you could not grab the bar with your mouse and move it like you could with KDE 3.5 (and all other versions of KDE), instead you needed to pop-up a small window that allowed you to do this. There were other annoyances as well but the font scaling was IMHO the worst.
I recently updated my KDE on my Fedora 9 OS to kdebase-4.0.5-4.fc9.x86_64 and it still has the same "annoying" features that caused me to switch to Gnome. Maybe I am being too hard but I have used KDE since 1999 (Intel and Alpha machines) and have never found issue till now.
I have never had a crash with the new version of KDE but then again I have not persevered long enough to see a crash, instead I am back on Gnome again (Sigh!).
Please note I prefer KDE (at least 3.5) over Gnome however I don't care which session manager (there are others as well) I use just so long as it works and IMHO KDE version 4 definately needs some work.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
, unlike XP which will only be available to System Builder Licensees.
Yaaaaarrrr mate!
No, it doesn't. Parsing is syntax; interpretation is semantics. See below.
Yes, I know; I speak 5 languages and work in human language research. I've actually put a lot of time and effort into studying human language and grammar - it's kind of my thing.
Actually, "proper English grammar" is one dialect among many that comprise the larger language of English.
Judging by the bulk of your post, you didn't understand what I was saying. Syntax is structural. You could consider it as a collection of rules for governing the generation of strings in a language, or as a logical model for a system that analyzes strings ostensibly belong to a given language and yielding parses therefrom. It isn't a body of rules about sticking prepositions at the end of sentences or splitting infinitives, both of which are perfectly acceptable and common features of English grammar that have been in wide use for centuries. Syntax are the rules that make the sentences "John loves Mary" and "Mary, John loves" have the same interpretation (the second should be read kind of in a frame like "There's a big difference between Susan and Mary. John hates Susan. Mary, John loves.") and "Mary loves John" have a related but different one.
If you've ever taken logic, the difference might be clearer if you look at an example from predicate logic. Assuming that for this example, "A" is the universal quantifier:
A(x)(man(x) -> mortal(x))
Which is a translation of "all men are mortal." However the truth values of the predicates man and moral map onto the universe of discourse, there are rules that make assertions formally valid for interpretation. You could not say:
A(x)(man(x) mortal(x) -> )
not for any reason related to the interpretation of the predicates, but purely because of the syntactic constraints on the expression - it's just not well formed.
Lots of people didn't upgrade to Vista. I didn't. It's one of the strange things about gamers
I'm a gamer as well, and on my personal systems I faced the early Vista release problems that a lot of people did. The WDDM was a complete re-write for NVidia and ATI, and by the time they got to a stable level they were behind on optimizations. Also a lot of the optimizations are game specific and work differently than the XPDM, so they needed a lot of customer feedback to even get close to the 6 years of the XP driver optimizations.
If you are a gamer now, Vista is the fastest platform. Even with older video cards and older games. For example: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp
Around July-Sept of last year the Vista drivers caught up to XP in everyway, and jumped past XP in many games by as much as 20% or more because of the WDDM and how it can handle GPU scheduling and RAM virtualization.
(The WDDM and RAM Virtualization sounds a bit strange, but it allows Vista users to shove their texture quality to the roof without worrying about running out of VRAM on their GPUs, and with no performance penality.) So not only can Vista run games faster, but now that the WDDM drivers are optimized, it can do so with higher quality game settings.
in order to really get any use out of DX10 for anything more than taking pretty static screenshots, it's gotta be a GOOD video card
Technically this isn't true, but from the current games on the market is true. The games on the market now are DX9/DX10 hybrids using DX9 with some DX10 features turned on, and this is a kill for performance, where DX10 is designed to be about performance as much as more quality.
If current games were DX10 only and using real DX10 engines, even a light ATI 2400 would run the game rather well. DX10 is not much different than the XBox 360, as the XBox technologies are what defined DX10 and even the Vista graphics subsystem changes.
If you look at XBox 360 games that are running on native engines, they are doing DX10 quality with a DX10 equivalent video card that is less powerful than a mid range $100 ATI DX10 card.
So by people like yourself chosing to not move to Vista, the game makers have backed off on DX10 only titles, that were planned, and they would have ran rather well on even cheap DX10 cards with good performance (better than DX9) and better quality.
This is a case of the market and early reluctance to move to Vista killed a lot of new video game development, or at least set developers back to a DX9 path looking to tack on some DX10 features like the larger texture sizes, etc...