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KDE 4.1 Released, Reviewed
StoneLion writes "After months of development and controversy, the KDE project announced the release of KDE 4.1 today. Linux.com (a Slashdot sister site) took a hands-on look at the new code, and reviewer Jeremy LaCroix says, 'KDE 4.1 simply rocks.'" Bruce Byfield's review is quite positive, as well.
It's a pretty significant feature release and is probably a better example going forward of KDE4 can become than the .0 release was
http://www.kde.org/download/#v4.1
I've been waiting for the 4.1 release before trying 4.x. I didn't care for 3.x and while I'm not a huge fan of GNOME, I like it well enough for daily use. So, good news for be because it looks like Kubuntu has deb packages ready to install with a few easy steps ... thinkin' I'll give it a whirl tonight.
It is definitely worth downloading and I say it is more then sufficient to replace KDE 3.5
Please provide an option to disable the upper right cashew.
Although putting an option to disable the cashew for desktops sounds reasonable, from a coding point of view it would introduce unnecessary complexity and would break the design. What has been suggested is, since the destkop itself (a containment) is handled by plugins, to write a plugin that would draw the desktop without the cashew itself. Currently some work ("blank desktop" plugin) is already present in KDE SVN. With containment type switching expected by KDE 4.2, it is not unreasonable to see alternative desktop types developed by then.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Wouldn't the release of XP warrant a notification? Version numbers don't actually mean anything. Some vendors create a new major version every 3 months, with no modifications, while others only go from x.1 to x.11 every 3 years, yet add tons of functionality along the way.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Here and here there are some screencasts showing off some Plasma features.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Use this setting:
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1
Using this trick, resize becomes snappy.
I reply to mysel: to make this change permanent, I created a file called: /etc/X11/xinit.d/20nvidia-te-acceleration
which contains:
#!/bin/sh
if [ -x /usr/bin/nvidia-settings ]; then /usr/bin/nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1
fi
but does it run on windows?
actually... somewhat. Not the desktop environment itself, I dont think, but KDE applications. I wasnt able to get it to work when i tried it a few months ago. it might be working better now.
The article lines up pros and cons, though it is names "KDE4.1 Rocks!" actually appears rather fair and objectiveish. It claims the significant problems with 4.0 has been addressed. The earlier discussions here on /. have more or less focused on KDE4.0 being incomplete, which was taken to mean either incomplete as a desktop platform (insufficient basic functionality, such as icons, menus, expected behaviour etc) or desktop environment (complete set of application), and it is in this light that the article should be taken.
... is a container you can place on the desktop that can show the contents of any directory. Most distributions set one up in the default configuration to show the contents of the desktop folder, but you are no longer limited to having the contents of just the desktop folder displayed on your desktop -- you can add several instances of Folder View, each showing a different directory." This addresses the popular misconception and marketing catastrophe of KDE4 now having desktop icons.
... may notice slowdown when resizing windows or moving plasma widgets"
* KDE 4.1 Plasma panels are now resizable and you can have multiple , and they can be repositioned by dragging them by mouse.
* "The Folder View plasmoid
* The article raves about the beauty of KDE4.1.
* Application support has grown and out-of-the-download contains Konqueror, Dolphin, Gwenview, Kopete, JuK, Kontact, the KDE CD Player, and the minimalistic Dragon Player for videos
* Dolphin has been improved with tree view and tabbed browsing features.
* Is is faster than KDE4.0, "everything ran fast and smooth, even when I had six plasmoids in use and desktop effects turned on, even on a modest 1.6GHz laptop".
* "The new interfaces may take some getting used to by those accustomed to KDE 3. "
* "Nvidia graphics cards
* Amarok 2.0 is still not complete
The article is finished by saying that the author has finally replaced KDE3 as his production DE with KDE4.1.
In short, whether by design or by listening to the criticism, KDE4.1 seems to have addressed if not all then at least the most important warts of the unfortunate 4.0 release. I'll probably still wait for 4.2, but as a KDE fan I'm certainly excited!
I've got to say, Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4 was extremely disappointing. Neither Ubuntu nor KDE provided a functional wifi manager - The Network Settings application shared by many Ubuntu desktops couldn't write a interfaces file that preserved WEP keys, and was insanely cludgy. Steal some code from Maemo, people.
More KDE4 specific, using it stripped me of any sort of effective GUI-based power management. Hibernation, sleeping, and battery usage controls were completely absent. All it brought to the table was a (commonplace and unimpressive) battery monitor.
I enjoy using KDE4, but I really hope they're getting their acts together with this release, so far as laptops go.
People with openSUSE 11.0 can just click here to run the one click installer or go to http://news.opensuse.org/2008/07/29/kde-41-released-with-opensuse-packages-and-live-cd/ (or KDE developers)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Firefox 3 still looks like crap by default because it's a GTK program, you can use gtk-qt-engine-kde4 to make it play nicer with QT (Looks close to, but not exactly like, a QT4 program).
I also use an Oxygen icon theme for Firefox, since that program doesn't change any icons.
The scrollbar bug doesn't happen for me, not entirely sure under what conditions it happens, it's also possible that it has been fixed in newer version of that software or only happened with FF2.
So far I've had the following issues/nags/etc:
* Using the resize on the upper right of the new menu instantly made the default size *bigger*, which isn't what I wanted, and there was no way to resize back to even its default size.
* Input Actions don't work at all. Yes, the action and the group it's in are not disabled, and KHotKeys daemon is activated from Global Settings. No key combos work.
* The main panel glitched out and everything was horribly spaced out when I tried to add and remove widgets from it; I had to completely recreate a new panel to fix it.
* While it's not exactly slow, it does have several slow redraw issues (e.g. the classic launcher menu) and I've seen it lag at random times much more than KDE3 ever did. I know this is probably to be expected, but it's worth noting. No, I don't use desktop effects (compositing), as I've seen that slows things down much more in general (games, etc) than it helps with desktop elements.
* System Settings crashed on me on more than one occasion.
Overall, much better than the completely unusable 4.0, but they still have a long way to go to make KDE4 even remotely stable.
The various hotkey launch bars are the usable start menu and the better answer. Press hotkey. Type (part of) application or file name. Hit Enter. App launches or file opens.
Launchy is the one I am using:
http://www.launchy.net/#download
Tastes seem to differ quite a bit for this type of app, there are dozens of alternatives (and apparently some similar functionality is built into Vista).
And yes, they got popular with Quicksilver on the Mac.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
According to the article Troy (the one who wrote the blog post you're referring to) already apologised for it:
Also note that this is just one person, they are not representative of the entire KDE4 dev community. Secondly, note from that apology blog post, that Troy -- I keep wanting to write McLure -- Unrau has stopped working on KDE, so your point is not only inaccurate but untimely.
I agree with the Funny mod though.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I'd mod AC down, but poisonous propaganda like this deserves a rebuttal.
From the link provided So if you are one of these poisonous users who offer no thanks for the time, energy and skill that goes into creating KDE, please go away. Find another project to harass (preferably closed source) as we've had enough of it. That is a totally appropriate response to toxic personalities.
Furthermore, entities that exchange software for money need licensees, better known as users up to a certain point. Entities that write software for their own pleasure have no such need. So, literally speaking, KDE doesn't "need" users.
Finally, KDE 4.1 is great. I'm running it on an old Thinkpad t21 just fine. The packages are in debian experimental, which have no dependency issues if you are running Lenny. Also worth noting, Lenny is **very** reliable for production and desktop use right now.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Ok, a plasmoid is generally a visualisation of a Data Engine. There can be many plasmoids for the same data engine (eg. this means that if we write 10 task bars then the back end code is all shared). Unlike an application a plasmoid doesn't have its own process, and simply responds to changes in the underlying data engine (because of various bits of wizardry this means that they will consume less battery power too btw). In a model-view design, you can consider a plasmoid to be a pure view. That said, many of the current plasmoids blur this by including model functionality - this is likely to become less prevelant as we determine what data engines we need.
The number in parenthesis refers to the section of the manual where the command can be found. See man(1).
If he knew anything about Unix nomenclature, that'd be a dot(1) release.
Heck no.
(I don't, I'm still confused when people refer to man(6) or what-not. Can anyone help me out, I couldn't find a wikipedia page or FAQ on the numbers in parenthesis anywhere.)
It comes from the fact that the manpages have headings that look like e.g.:
LS(1) manual LS(1)
So ENTRYNAME(MANUALSECTION).
So essentially the thing(2) notation simply indicates in which section of the (now electronic) manual the thing is. For instance, commands are section 1, system calls section 2, library functions section 3, kernel interfaces section 4, file formats section 5, and so on.
It is mostly used to indicate that we're talking about manpages, so e.g. "see open(2) for details" indicates "open's manpage." More verbose usages such as "see the manpage for open(2)" are also seen.
This overlaps with a second usage, which makes more sense to me but is less common: to use the manpage notation to indicate which type of thing you're talking about. For instance, there is a command 'printf' and a library function 'printf,' so saying 'use printf(1)' or 'use printf(3)' to disambiguate the two is a convenient use of the 'manpage notation.'
But mostly people mean it as a shorthand for 'the manpage.'
How could you not understand the claim?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png
Look how the "R" pushes against the "o" in Root, how the "F" is against the "r" in Fresh, and how the "T" is against the "o" in Tools. Look how the "T" is right up against the "r" in Trash.
Look how freakishly wide the "H" is in Help and the "V" is in View. Look how weirdly thin the "F" is in File and the "T" is in Tools. "W" in general just looks strange.
Some letters are properly spaced from their siblings, and others are jammed right up against each other. Some letters are cartoonishly wide while others are strangely thin. Maybe you don't notice or care about any of this, but it's a lack of professionalism and attention to detail that has lasted for years. They keep rewriting their panels and shells and file managers, but they still won't change the goddamn font!
"Sufferin' succotash."
KDE 4.1 is not using webkit instead of KHTML. Webkit comes with Qt now, but KHTML is part of kdelibs which will remain binary compatible until we release 5.0. KHTML is actively being developed and improved. Konqueror still uses KHTML for rendering webpages. There is work for a webkit part under way, so in the future one might be able to use Konqueror with webkit as rendering engine. Some other features of KDE are already using webkit, however. As a developer, you can choose.
So do I.
Wait, actually I don't. Because I run Amarok 1 with KDE3 libs still installed, even with a KDE4 desktop. There are quite a few KDE3 apps I can run, in fact.