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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."
Has Gnome really "gained a lot of ground"?
A lot?
Because of KDE 4.0?
Something about that just doesn't add up. My suspicion is that the vast majority of KDE users are still on 3.5x and jumping ship to gnome doesn't make sense either way.
I actually used KDE4.0 Beta as my main desktop, imagine that. It really wasn't as bad as people make out, I could see it wasn't ready, but the potential is there.
The ideas behind KDE4 are great, all it needs is polish (albeit a lot of polish). This is the point: if it were a turd, no amount of polish would make it good, but KDE4 does not fall into this category. It's just a knob that needs some Brasso. :D
I'm a big KDE fan, and I've been looking forward to KDE 4 for some time. The volume of complaints about KDE 4.0 surprised me; it seemed fairly clear that 4.0 was about getting a usable but not feature-complete release out so that application developers could target the new platform. By feature complete, I mean supporting all the options that KDE 3.5 has, which blows away every other desktop environment I've ever used. This is, of course, by design, as Mac OS X and GNOME are designed with sensible defaults and a fairly limited set of options.
I think Fedora may have made a mistake in defaulting to KDE 4.0 in the latest release; the KDE folks could perhaps have made the release more explicitly a "technology preview" release. Kubuntu had the right idea - offer it in the repository, but leave the default at 3.5. This allowed me to try out okular, the new document reader (which rocks, btw - finally a decent non-Adobe PDF reader which supports annotations, though they could still use a little work). But having read the early release info, I knew that KDE 4.0 wasn't for me, so I haven't tried it.
The new release brings the kdepim apps to the new KDE libs. Unfortunately, Amarok is on a separate release schedule, so we still have to wait there. For those that use KOffice, that too will be released later in the year, IIRC.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
For me, KDE 4 is ready when Amarok 2 is out.
Generally, this should be true. We'll know that KDE is really ready when the next generations of Kopete (IM), Amarok (music), K3B (CD/DVD burning), K9copy (video DVD backup/authoring), and the other end-user applications are ready and integrated. Otherwise, to use KDE apps I'd still need to have the KDE 3.x libs, and if that's the case, why rush to switch?
Well, would you rather they wait for now to release 4.0?
They said it clearly. If they were to delay the release the release would be late, worse, and have less chances of getting fixed. Now we have KDE4, now you can file ALL of those complaints at the KDE team, and they have the chance to fix 'em.
If you don't want to participate in their "beta test", use KDE3. It'll still be supported by the KDE teams for quite a while, and even further if you want that. But KDE3 is old tech and it's starting to show its age IMHO.