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KDE Responds To Misconceptions About KDE 4
Jiilik Oiolosse writes "PJ at Groklaw speaks with a member of the KDE team about some of the common myths circulating about KDE 4. 'There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed.' Among the topics discussed are: 'Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake,' 'I cannot put files on my desktop,' and 'KDE should just have ported KDE 3.5 to Qt 4 and not add all that other experimental stuff right away.'"
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/07/wild-rationalizations.html
For the unaquainted, here is the birth of K Pride Week:
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/07/k-pride.html
that if you install a mirror plasmoid and say "goatse" three times, RMS will appear and strangle you with his beard.
KDE 4 has great ideas, but kde 4.0 was not ready for use by the masses and was very buggy (I have a collegue using 4.0.5 and he's constantly having kwin crashes and other problematic behaviour especially with dual screens in either extend and clone mode).
While KDE 4.1 will be a lot better, again several important features have been moved to 4.2. For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself. These two "desktop icon types" have very different behaviour, which will be extremely different to understand to non-geeks. This will be really fixed in 4.2 where it will be possible to set the folderview as the desktop itself. The number of plasma widgets shipped by default in KDE 4.2 is still rather limited (no good RSS reader, weather applet, system monitor etc). Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life. All of this will probably be fixed for KDE 4.2.
I heard the administrator mode in systemsettings is not working and that a migration to policykit to make this work, is planned for kde 4.2. GNOME is using policykit already since a year if I'm not mistaken.
So while KDE 4.1 is a great release for advanced users (I'm typing this from KDE 4.1 RC1 with nice desktop effects!), you don't want to migrate your average non-geek family member friend or collegue to it.
It's unfortunate that KDE developers still try to deny or at least greatly minimize the impact of these kind of problems. A little bit more understanding from both sides (developers and users) and a bit less technology hyping, would be a nice thing.
The developers are not denying anything (except comments like 'KDE is dying!'). They just didn't realize that calling the package that included the completed KDE4 libs "KDE 4.0" meant that distributions would start pushing it out to users, and publicizing it before it was objectively 'ready'.
Why don't you just switch to Konqueror? KDE4 gives you that flexibility.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That's true.
That is pretty much it too. KDE 4 is changing everything about KDE's underlying structure with the hope of unifying things in ways that were literally hacks before. The concepts are great to the point of moving away from the "desktop" unfortunately they as you said finished up the libraries and hadn't finished up the front end.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
What distribution ships with KDE4 as the desktop by default? I'm not aware of any.
Uhm, Fedora 9, OpenSUSE 11.0 ?
See I think the Windows 3.11 with the Norton Desktop was one of the best UIs of all time. Most things were allways accessable at the top of the sceen. Your desktop was for running but iconifed applications so you could actually find a minimizes app by site if you happen to have more then a few running, no of this ever shrinking task bar crap. ( I actally had to write my own app for manageing minimized windows on XP becase the start bar is that usless if you have lots of stuff going ) NDW's drive icons were handy even if the concept was borrowed from MacOS. Group windows with different view were GREAT! Sometimes you had a lot of little related apps that you closed and open often in a work flow, use the icon box view for that window and it would be small enough you could keep it open but out of the way. Lots of stuff in a group, use the list view (similar to tare off pannel menues in Gnome / XFCE today ). Other stuff use the traditional windows icon view. It was way ahead of its time. Oh and you also had a powerful macro language batchruner/scriptmaker that was well integrated with the desktop, the possiblities were limitless and it was way easier in most cases then anything you can do with cscript/wscript today.
Its a shame it wont run well on modern Windows or I'd still be using it. On Linux I have settled on XFCE. Its gtk+ which I like as most of the applications I use are gtk based. KDE is nice but its not worth having to deal with a seccond took kit for. Gnome is to slow and its file manager sucks.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
To say that the first release of Dolphin will be binary compatible with all future releases of KDE 4.X (which is what the quote is implying) just doesn't seem right.
What's wrong with it? All it means is that nothing that's in the API in 4.0.0 will be removed or changed in an incompatible way for the lifetime of 4.x. Plenty of new features will be added, but they won't break any existing code. Programming languages like Perl, Python, and PHP (usually) do this all the time.
openSUSE 11 has KDE4 as it's default.
I've had no problems with it, apart from those that can be blamed on the lack of memory in this box.
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
Hmm, is that really the case?
I'm on gentoo. Kde-4.0 is hard masked which means it's not officially in the tree. You can unmask it if you really want to play with it but in order to do so you have to edit some config files which makes sure you know what you're doing. Kde-4.1 will eventually go into unstable (there you also find gnome-2.22, firefox-3, openoffice-4 etc).
Did other distros directly push kde-4.0 to stable?
Firing up ditrowatch I get 8 distributions with kde-4 and around 400 with kde-3. Among the 8 are Ubuntu, openSUSE, Feodora and PC-BSD.
Hmm, looking into the Ubuntu package database, I see kde4 is an extra package (no automatic update?) in Universe which has (I quote) no guarantee of security fixes and support.
It seems to be in Feodora-9, though. Is there a stable/unstable or whatsoever?
And it is in the just released openSUSE-11. Same here. Is it really in the default install?
I've been using Debian's experimental KDE 4.1 alpha/beta packages for a few weeks now, and my impression is that it's still KDE, and still too buggy to recommend to other users. Debian is probably several weeks after SVN, though.
My main problem right now is that most of the hotkeys have disappeared (a bug, not a design decision, I assume), and that I can't move plasmoids in the panel (supposed to be fixed by now, but not in Debian's packages). I don't miss the desktop-as-folder paradigm, but I do miss good information on how to create one's own plasmoids. Also, Kmail/Kontact crashes a lot.
This isnÂt true.
If you went to kde.org after KDE 4.0 was released, looked in the "download" section and selected the current stable release, you got KDE 4.0. The old 3.5.* was called legacy or something. If the developers didnÂt expect distributions to start pushing it out, they shouldnÂt have said it was the current stable release.
I notice its changed now.
Actually dolphin *has* tabs. I'm using a svn build (it says the version is 4.00.83).
Although I agree that lack of politeness is a bad thing, that has nothing to do with the KDE4.0 debacle.
The problem was that the KDE team didn't want to miss the Ubuntu Long Term Support edition, so they tried to get a KDE4 formal release for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. The alternative would have been to keep maintaining KDE3.5 until the next Ubuntu LTS, which, considering the facts, would have been a much wiser decision.
And no one said it will, Dolphin is not in kdelibs.
Mada mada dane.
You misread that quote. They are saying the libraries will remain stable until KDE 5.. That means kdelibs and such. Then they go on to say, since the libraries are stable, they should release to benefit the relatively complete applications that have built on these libraries (like Dolphin).
They're not saying Dolphin won't change. Just the underlying libraries.
Binary compatibility means nothing when talking about programs. You can only apply the term to libraries. (And even then it doesn't mean that the library "remains static", just that no features are removed or changed such that it would break existing programs that rely on them).