What To Expect In KDE 4.1

andrewmin writes "Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn't work most of the time. However, the developers were not without hope. They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0. That time is coming soon: in just four days, K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released to the Linux masses." A release candidate for 4.1 came out just over a week ago, with binaries available "for some Linux distributions, and Mac OS X and Windows."

Comments

Re:TFS is a lie?

[Uberdog]

The main problem is the dichotomy between the KDE platform and KDE environment. It was a stable release of the platform, but not of the environment, because the tools which use that platform and create the environment (all the applications) hadn't been ported yet. They should really be two separate releases.

using KDE 4.1

[lukrop]

Since Archlinux is providing packages for of the KDE 4.1 tag from svn in it's testing repos I've merged to 4.1 and I'm amazed how everything works. I only had to find a new irc client since konversation isn't ported yet but I found Quassel and compiled the second alpha of amarok2 and now I'm happy :)

Re:KDE 4.1

[HappySmileMan]

They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0.

The KDE developers never promised that all the holes and problems would be fixed in 4.1...

Reminds me of 4.0 when /. was saying it would be a finished DE, despite the KDE developers themselves saying this wasn't the case. People will be happy with KDE when /. stop exaggerating and lying about what it will be like

I like it

[xrayspx]

I've been using every weekly build for SuSE 10.3 since 4.0 came out and have seen it get more and more stable. I have some issues, some are KDE's fault, some aren't.

• No OTR for Kopete yet, which is in Kopete 3.5
• In Kopete, if you're logged in, and log in from another computer, rather than saying "there are now two of you logged in", it crashes
• Okular (Awesome!) keeps losing the ability to show me PDFs. I figured this out and fixed it once, then it broke a couple of builds ago and I can't remember what I did.
• I've never successfully burned a CD with k3b 4.x
• There is a checkbox that is basically the "make KDE go fast now" option, if I wasn't on a Mac right now, I'd say where it is exactly. The box is set to "slow" by default
• I can't figure out how to move plasmoid applets around the desktop. So if I have a weather applet, it goes in the top left corner and can't be moved. Luckily, if I make a Folder Browser plasmoid, it goes right over the weather one, and also can't be moved, so...problem solved?

Those are the ones that I've had problems with that are KDEs fault. This one probably isn't, but it makes 4.0 worthless to me:

• Horrible graphic tearing, mostly in KDE 3.5 apps or GTK apps (kpdf, Thunderbird, Firefox, also any rdesktop session). This seems to be due to be due to using a compositing desktop. I notice it in Compiz too under 3.5. I believe the issue might be that for anything to work, you should sync on vblank, however if you have multiple monitors, sync on vblank freaks out and makes things worse?

Overall though, I really like it, especially since someone clued me in to the Make It Fast setting. This is coming from a KDE user since 1.x. I loved 2.0 when it came. Hated 3.0 (which grew into my favorite GUI of all time including OSX), hated 4.0, like 4.1 OK so far.

Re:What is in it for me ( a user )

[Kjella]

1) All KDE applications using Phonon and thus the same sound server, no more "oh I can't play audio here because I'm playing it over there". Or maybe that's pulseaudio's job to really fix, but I'd be happy either way.
2) The Phonon framework hopefully means I can use one media player (Dragon Player?) for all my needs, with a codec backend like on other operating systems. Right now mplayer/xine/vlc work on different media.
3) Once the KDE4 applications are up and running, you can use the same applications on Windows. No need for learning a separate application when you have to use Windows.

That's at least my top three...

Re:TFS is a lie?

[leenks]

Ubuntu 8.0? Ubuntu doesn't have version numbers, they just have dated releases - perhaps you meant 8.04 (April 2008) - followed by lots of patches as they appear to the various packages.

The Apache setup in Debian and Ubuntu is one of the best around, and I've not had any problems with it - what exactly could you not do with it?

Re:Calling Capt. Logic

[piquadratCH]

I think you misunderstood the excerpt. What it says is that KDE lost ground in the last few years, which it did. Even SuSE, once a cornerstone of KDE's market share, defaults to Gnome now. Kubuntu is not on par with Ubuntu, and Red Hat/Fedora always was a Gnome shop. Today, no major distro has KDE as its default desktop environment. I'd call that "losing ground".

I hope KDE 4 is able to stop or even reverse this trend. I use 4.1 on a daily basis since Beta 1. It's mostly stable and shows big improvements compared to 4.0.

Re:TFS is a lie?

[toga98]

On the KDE website, there was no mention of KDE 4.0 being a developer release. It hinted strongly, in fact, that KDE 4.0 was a general release.

It was only after all the problems and complaints that the KDE devs said that the release wasn't for mainstream users.

KDE 4.0 wasn't a developer release. What it was, was the first release with major architectual changes for public consumption. This was the first release with a stable library and without this release, a large number of KDE application developers wouldn't have a platform for porting and polishing their applications for KDE 4. Ultimately it is the decision of the distributions on what to include in their releases. I wouldn't consider KDE 4.0 a proper replacement for KDE 3.5.x, but I would make it available for use by application developers.

All this was well known and openly discussed during the planning and development of the KDE 4 platform including 4.0, 4.1, 4.x. To state otherwise is disengenious at best.

See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951 for more information.