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.

Comments

Re:Do we really need notification?

[pak9rabid]

Do we really need notification of a (dot)1 release?

You must be new here.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[borker]

It's a pretty significant feature release and is probably a better example going forward of KDE4 can become than the .0 release was

Re:Do we really need notification?

[snl2587]

When it's a vast improvement over the (dot)0? Yes.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[theM_xl]

Not normally, but in this case the 4.0 release was mostly to let people know they could work from that - 4.1 is supposedly the usable version :-)

Fedora 9 packages?

[Lendrick]

Does anyone know where one can obtain Fedora 9 packages? I've been suffering through 4.0 for a while and I'd love to be able to upgrade, but I'd prefer to use fedora's package management rather than compiling it myself. It's just simpler.

Re:Fedora 9 packages?

[rdieter]

http://www.kde.org/info/4.1.0.php

Re:Fedora 9 packages?

[betterunixthanunix]

Enable the updates-testing repository for now. I did this on Sunday to get KDE 4.1 RC1 (4.0.99), presumably KDE 4.1.0 will be there soon (RC1 is a HUGE step forward from KDE 4.0).

Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE doesn't need you and has no obligation to do anything for you.

Re:Remember folks

[_Sprocket_]

Sorry - a rant about some abusive, ungrateful users isn't informative. It may, however, be funny.

Re:Remember folks

[halivar]

Do they need you? Do they have an obligation to do anything for you?

From my perspective, they're Santa Claus: they may not give me all the free gifts I want or asked for ("I want the entire GI Joe collection"), but they give me a helluva lot of free gifts regardless.

Re:Remember folks

[halivar]

BTW, unless you send money, time, or expertise to KDE e.V., you are a leech. This isn't a bad thing; it's what they want. Nevertheless, it means that you have nothing meaningful to contribute but bug-reports and feedback.

IOW, you have gotten absolutely zero reason for a sense of entitlement. When the XFree86 thing went down, I didn't bitch about it because I didn't do a damn thing for the project to earn the right. I just moved to x.org. If you think the KDE devs don't esteem your lofty opinions enough, consider using a different desktop.

Re:Remember folks

[jeevesbond]

According to the article Troy (the one who wrote the blog post you're referring to) already apologised for it:

Having worked on KDE 4 for more than three years, KDE developers reacted with understandable anger. In particular, Troy Unrau, best known for his "Road to KDE 4" articles, went so far as to say in his blog, "KDE and open source is not ever obligated to please users. We are not obligated to fix bugs. We are not obligated to implement things that you demand. We are not obligated to provide open forums for you to attack us personally."

A week later, Unrau apologized, but his rant had already fuelled the flames. When Unrau put his KDE activities on hold for personal reasons, his departure was widely seen as a reaction to the situation. Many saw Seigo's suspension of his blog so that he could focus on coding in a similar light, although he himself explains it as a wish to step down after more than a year of being the chief public relations figure in KDE.

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.

Re:Remember folks

[JohnFluxx]

You could send KDE money if you want..

Re:Remember folks

[SomeKDEUser]

Actually, the KDE e.V. is distinct from the KDE project, so you can be a contributor and yet have no connections whatsoever with the e.V.

And you can contribute more than just bugs and feedback. Artwork is appreciated, so is contributing text for the websites, and help on IRC.

Re:Remember folks

[jlarocco]

KDE doesn't need you and has no obligation to do anything for you.

Well no shit. You'd have to be a pretty big asshole to think otherwise.

Re:Remember folks

[Anarke_Incarnate]

You go ahead and try that. Go have an issue where a certified driver causes corruption and sue them for it. Go see if Apple, MS, or any other major vendor will actually do anything besides point to their disclaimer of reduced liability.

Often times it is considered "A feature."

Re:Remember folks

[jeevesbond]

If I buy a Microsoft or Apple product, they have an obligation to fix my bugs, or they lose my money and get bad publicity.

Which would be why Microsoft has been getting a lot of bad publicity recently (just joking!)

I like having that power.

You would have that power, and more, if you paid for a support from Canonical, Novell or Redhat (this last not so much, since we're talking about the desktop here and Redhat is more of a server distro).

You see, Microsoft or Apple don't really have an obligation to fix your bugs, as when you buy the OS you've handed over the only bargaining counter you held. Companies that support GNU/Linux, on the other hand, live and die by the quality of their support, and ability to retain customers in support contracts.

Let me give an example: if you have a heavy investment in GNU/Linux, and support contracts with Canonical. If they do something you don't like, you can switch to Mandriva or SLED. However, if you have a heavy investment in Windows, and Microsoft does something you don't like, what other Windows vendor are you going to switch to?

Microsoft in particular has a lot of power to force people into upgrading, they can leverage the other software they produce: Office, DirectX, games etc. to force you to upgrade by tying them to new versions of Windows.

Note that I'm not arguing whether desktop GNU/Linux is a joke, just that this is not the reason for it. :)

Re:Remember folks

[halivar]

True, but KDE e.V. is where you can send money, IIRC.

Re:Remember folks

[Risen888]

If I buy a Microsoft or Apple product, they have an obligation to fix my bugs, or they lose my money and get bad publicity.

No. No they don't.

Re:Remember folks

[Jellybob]

You won't be able to sue them for it, but I'm sure if you called up the company behind KDE they'd be happy to negotiate a price.

Re:Remember folks

[Anarke_Incarnate]

It seems somebody fails at the concept of open source.....

You could just hire somebody familiar with X Windowing systems and the code at hand (or pay current devs on the project) to do what it is you wanted.

Re:Remember folks

[Citizen of Earth]

If they want to have users of their product, they need to do something useful for them. Otherwise, they're real nowhere men making all their nowhere plans for nobody.

Re:Remember folks

[Eil]

KDE sounds like it's becoming the new Gentoo: a very nice system that was torn apart from the inside out by people who'd rather bicker than program.

I was once a happy user of both KDE and Gentoo, but for the last year I've been using stock Ubuntu on everything. Since then, my Linux experience has been a lot more... peaceful.

Re:Remember folks

[QCompson]

Wow. The Pidgin developer philosophy spreads.

Re:Remember folks

[bonch]

Which would be why Microsoft has been getting a lot of bad publicity recently (just joking!)

Well, yeah. A lot of people didn't upgrade to Vista. They stuck with XP. So now, Microsoft trying to fix both the technical and PR issues with Windows 7 to gain those customers back.

You see, Microsoft or Apple don't really have an obligation to fix your bugs, as when you buy the OS you've handed over the only bargaining counter you held. Companies that support GNU/Linux, on the other hand, live and die by the quality of their support, and ability to retain customers in support contracts.

You're just wrong. Microsoft and Apple do have an obligation to fix bugs, because they have a financial interest. To put it bluntly, their employees don't get money to feed their families with if you're not buying their products. The higher-ups have obligations to shareholders to deliver quality products, and if they don't, bad things happen.

The fundamental difference is that of responsibility. These open source developers don't have a responsibility to anyone. They're scratching an itch and working on whatever they want to. A company has customers, contracts, and shareholders they are beholden to which requires that they deliver quality products, because if they don't, they are hurt financially, and their public image is damaged.

Microsoft in particular has a lot of power to force people into upgrading, they can leverage the other software they produce: Office, DirectX, games etc. to force you to upgrade by tying them to new versions of Windows.

No, because if paying customers (such as those who have not upgraded to Vista) do not follow the upgrade path because a particular upgrade was bad, Microsoft will be required to address that because they have to make a living. That's why Windows XP support was extended to 2014.

When people criticized KDE4, they get told by a public relations guy that KDE isn't obligated to please them and that they don't need them. In contrast, Microsoft employees do need you because they need your dollars to feed their families, so if you are an unhappy customer, they will be obligated to please you.

Re:Remember folks

[Sj0]

I don't really see any problem with what he said. He's RIGHT. Regular users, especially rabid, demanding ones, don't add anything useful to an Open Source Software project. The number of users a piece of software has is just a pissing match. Unlike commercial software, where more users means more revenue, the opposite is true. The more users you've got, the more you're spending to serve them(Bandwidth isn't free), the more effort you've got to expend to meet their demands. Further, the less resources you have to focus on individual issues.

Re:Remember folks

[Risen888]

No, really. They don't. They've already got your money, sucker. Transaction complete. It's called a limited liability corporation.

Re:Remember folks

[Enderandrew]

The Pidgin philosophy is to take working features and just remove them for the sake of removing them, even if users scream they want to keep those features.

The KDE philosophy right now is to rewrite from the ground up. During the rewrite process, many original features aren't fully replicated, but there are also tons of new features. And they strive to eventually provide feature parity with the old version, and then some.

So, that doesn't seem like a remotely fair comparison.

Re:Remember folks

[Erikderzweite]

Except you don't buy it at all. You obtain a licence, they allow you the usage of their software which still is their property. Read the EULA, they have no obligations to fix bugs.

Re:Remember folks

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

And yet, with every new version of Pidgin, I find myself liking it more and more, and with every new version of KDE I find myself liking it less and less. Ok, I exaggerate, but most of my annoyances with KDE 4.0 persist into .1. And I have neither the time or the inclination to poke around and try and fix it myself. So I second that ubuntu experience can be much more peaceful.

Re:Remember folks

[Enderandrew]

I'm not all that crazy about the KDE 4.x desktop experience either. I'm all about KDE 3 personally.

Re:Remember folks

[turbidostato]

"shareholders they are beholden to which requires that they deliver quality products"

How can someone be so disinformed in this day and age???

Shareholders require to deliver *sellable* products. Sometimes the way to produce a sellable product is by means of its quality. More often than not this is not only unnecesary (marketing usually makes for a better output than quality) but even a liability (on pure market forces in order to oversell a product yours must be even better so if you are already selling a wonderful product your are in fact hurting your tomorrow's sells for a new product).

"No, because if paying customers do not follow the upgrade path because a particular upgrade was bad, Microsoft will be required to address that because they have to make a living. That's why Windows XP support was extended to 2014."

Or is it because *computer* vendors, due to a growing *competency* from other OS vendors like Apple or the Linux distributions pressed Microsoft that way? NT/2000 to XP upgrade mill based mainly on NT's lack of support did work properly.

"so if you are an unhappy customer, they will be obligated to please you."

Yeah, that's true in the country of free market cotton-sugar and capitalistic candy-houses. In the real world unhappy customers are not a problem as long as you can find another (and hopefully -for the vendor, cheaper) way to lock them in.

Re:Remember folks

[turbidostato]

"And that is the kind of attitude that will ensure that desktop Linux will not gain acceptance."

So what?

No, I meant it: so what?

Re:Remember folks

[ConceptJunkie]

See? This is what's wrong with Open Source... it's run by a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls who hold users in contempt and have no interest in providing them with something that works and is useful. That's why I stick with proprietary, commerical software: because I'm a paying customer I'll be treated with respect!

Re:Remember folks

[QCompson]

The Pidgin philosophy is to take working features and just remove them for the sake of removing them, even if users scream they want to keep those features. The KDE philosophy right now is to rewrite from the ground up. During the rewrite process, many original features aren't fully replicated, but there are also tons of new features. And they strive to eventually provide feature parity with the old version, and then some. So, that doesn't seem like a remotely fair comparison.

However, in the context of the previously linked blog-post, it is a fair comparison because both Pidgin and KDE developer(s) claimed that users don't really matter, and that only the opinion of the developers matter. I will agree that the Pidgin developers were much more blatant and offensive about their distaste for any user feedback.

Re:Remember folks

[x1n933k]

I agree.

So, this is a rant. Please don't quote me on this because my opinion may change moments after posing. So there's a bit of a rant I've been meaning to write for a while now and I keep putting it off since I am officially wearing the Slashdot user-mod hat tonight. Now, I take it off.

"Does slashdot need user moderators?"

Well if it is the type of user that is harming how a posting is viewed, then no we don't need those users. I have been hesitant to tell these users and to quote my favorite comedian, George Carlin, "Go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself."

I know this is cynical but the only real benefit to Slashdot having users is that some users turn into editors. This directly benefits Slashdot as a whole, the articles, the summaries, the slash-polls, it is essentially the editors doing this for themselves.

Sure, every user loves to be on the winning side of the Slashdot-Techmeme war but honestly if you're harming the rating of a comment by calling it something it is not that find a different post to moderate, if it's worthy of the type of moderation tag you want to give 5 times today, which I doubt is any. I wouldn't wish this kind of nonsensical modding to users on Afterslash, or any other pointless news site that you stupid people migrate to.

Slashdot and open source is not really obligated to please users (but it helps revenue). We are not obligated to give you the rights to even look at the articles without a login but we do, so we can then give you moderator rights which you can't seem to use properly. If you mod correctly we benefit from seeing a system that we thought, would make a person without a login, be able to view a post based on how funny, informative or interesting it is. If I want to laugh but I get an informative post, this a blatant misuse of the mod-system, it's wrong and only makes me more angry!

So, if you are one of those users who are stupid, maybe more uneducated, and don't know whether a post is funny or interesting or maybe you're on Prozac then please go away. Find another site to mod posts on (preferably closed source) as we have had enough of it!

Now that I've got that out of my system, I'm off to start a race of Wookiees, because I have a very hairy chest.

[J]

Re:Remember folks

[smellotron]

If I buy a Microsoft or Apple product, they have an obligation to fix my bugs, or they lose my money and get bad publicity.

No they don't. They have an obligation to weigh the cost of your bad publicity and lost business against the cost of fixing the bug, and then do whatever makes more sense for themselves. And the answer will most likely be "screw you" unless everyone else is having the same problem.

You, as an individual consumer of a piece of software from MS or Apple, don't have the power you think you do.

Re:Remember folks

[Tim C]

You see, Microsoft or Apple don't really have an obligation to fix your bugs, as when you buy the OS you've handed over the only bargaining counter you held.

Not so. Just because I bought XP (which I did) doesn't mean I'll buy Vista (haven't yet, but might). Also, while I don't know about Apple Microsoft certainly offer paid-for support, either on a contractual or per-incident basis. You also get a number of free support calls (three, I think) if you buy Windows retail. (Not for OEM copies or pre-installs of course - see your OEM for support in that case). No, individual consumers probably won't get bug fixes written for them - but large corporates most certainly will.

Re:Remember folks

[the_arrow]

Yes if you buy from Apple or Microsoft, you get someone to call for support. But will they fix your bugs? Even if you give them extra money for it? Who knows!

If you use open source software, you can always ask the creator or maintainer of the software directly. And if that doesn't work, you can always ask someone else to fix it for you, free or for payment.

Re:Remember folks

[Risen888]

How can you read that into what's happening here? I have heard no argument from within the KDE camp about all this. There haven't been any high-profile schisms, no bitter blog posts, none of that. It's just a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the project pissing and moaning and spreading ill-founded opinions on Slashdot. Par for the course, really.

Re:Remember folks

[Sj0]

the vast vast vast majority of OSS developers aren't interested in "building a business centered on FOSS". Most of them have jobs, and those jobs make far more money than chasing some pipe dream of making a profit by giving software away for free.

Re:Remember folks

[Enderandrew]

One guy, Troy made that comment and later recanted. Several KDE devs with blogs on the Planet disagreed with him and said users are quite valuable. So it isn't fair to say the two design philosophies are the same, since the KDE devs don't seem to have that philosophy.

Re:Remember folks

[Overly Critical Guy]

How can someone be so disinformed in this day and age???

Shareholders require to deliver *sellable* products

That's exactly what was said, tard.

Re:Remember folks

[QCompson]

Really? One guy?

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3535

Re:Remember folks

[sir fer]

(I'm sorry, but that's my opinion).

And your opinion makes you look like a dumbass ;o)

I'm using FF3.0.1 on KDE4.1 now and it....rocks, altho my computer has been Linux-friendly, i.e. most things usually "just work" but I understand that there are users out there with machines that have issues...

Re:Remember folks

[sir fer]

How can someone be so disinformed in this day and age???

It's called "being American".

Re:Remember folks

[sir fer]

I have to agree. I was using KDE4.1 until now and while it worked well for a start, it went downhill slowly and surely to the point where I just couldn't be fucked anymore.

GNOME still rules the Linux DE IMO

Re:Remember folks

[robot_love]

Thanks, SjO. What could illustrate more emphatically the need to "build a business centered on FOSS"?

Your post proves my point, namely that there is no money in FOSS, and almost all FOSS developers must rely on income from outside of their FOSS project to keep themselves alive, therefore FOSS as a religion (instead of a business model) is an idea that will whither away.

Re:Remember folks

[sir fer]

IF THESE PEOPLE DON'T SEE ANY OBLIGATION TO THE END USER THEN WHY THE FUCKING HELL DO THEY EVEN BOTHER WRITING SOFTWARE? I'm sorry for yelling, but this whole "OSS devs don't owe anybody shit" attitude makes me wanna go postal. If that's how they really feel then why do they bother developing it at all? Maybe because they're such shitty devs that no one would pay them to work so they feel the need to develop OSS for bragging rights? Fuck them is all I can say.

Re:Remember folks

[Sj0]

Then your point is a complete non-sequitur and you should find someone else to reply to.

I'm not concerned with the sustainability of open source or lack thereof. I'm just saying that in the current model, developers don't need users, and users are in fact a burden.

Re:Remember folks

[turbidostato]

"That's exactly what was said, tard."

Thank you for your inspired and highly informative post, Mr. Overly Critical Guy.

Re:Remember folks

[westlake]

Unlike commercial software, where more users means more revenue, the opposite is true.
.

Firefox is supported by Google. OpenOffice.org by Sun. Neither are charities. Sun is paying whatever it takes to strengthen its position on the enterprise desktop. Google expects to hear lots and lots of add-clicks.

The numbers keep climbing or their money goes elsewhere.

The more users you've got, the more you're spending to serve them(Bandwidth isn't free), the more effort you've got to expend to meet their demands. Further, the less resources you have to focus on individual issues.

The more users you have, the more likely you are meeting their needs and not your own. Its trivially easy to cut your bandwidth and support costs to nothing, if that is what you really want.

Disappointing

[Tenrosei]

I was really excited and happy when I saw how nice it looked and then I saw the battery meter and was like yes it looks crisp and nice. Then the thought settled in "I got rid of my laptop so I wont have a battery meter for my desktop noooooo!!!!(Darth Vader Style)".

Re:Disappointing

[vizZzion]

I can send you a patch to make the battery applet report bogus values when there's no battery, if you want ... ? :-)

Answered my own question:

[Lendrick]

http://www.kde.org/download/#v4.1

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a picture of the recommended minimum system requirements for Vista:

http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/markrussinovich/WindowsLiveWriter/PushingtheLimitsofWindowsPhysicalMemory_878B/image_4.png

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[RingDev]

Not that I'm defending Vista, but KDE isn't an operating system.

Using a KDE release to rag on Vista's stability is like using a new product line from BF Goodwrench to rag on Ford Explorers.

I would say though, that KDE appears to kick GDI+'s ass. I haven't played around with KDE 4 or Aero enough to make such a comparison though.

-Rick

Firefox 3?

[Dwedit]

Is Firefox 3 still looking like ass on KDE, and when you attempt to make it use KDE themes, the scrollbars disappear?
Does KDE still ignore any preferences about what you set your resolution to, then suddenly switch your resolution only when you open the resolution changer program?

Re:Firefox 3?

[AP31R0N]

Are you asking us if the scroll bars disappear, or telling us they do?

Re:Firefox 3?

[Dwedit]

I used the previous recent beta version, so I doubt that it's changed, but if it has, it would be a nice surprise.

Re:Firefox 3?

[teprrr]

Don't know about your resolution issues, but about the Firefox thingy, check out Kde4 + Firefox3 0.10 Mozilla add-on.. It looks quite ok for me at least.

Re:Firefox 3?

[ChameleonDave]

I've been using only KDE 4 for a couple of months now, and I've not had those problems.

Re:Firefox 3?

[HappySmileMan]

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.

Re:Firefox 3?

[sricetx]

Is Firefox 3 still looking like ass on KDE, and when you attempt to make it use KDE themes, the scrollbars disappear?

Heck, it's like that with KDE 3.5, at least in Kubuntu Hardy Heron, so I don't think it's a KDE 4 issue. I just thought it was another example of Ubuntu shortchanging KDE users and delivering sub-par packages. KDE is less stable with Kubuntu 8.04 than it was in the Feisty Fawn release, in my opinion.

Re:Firefox 3?

[Enderandrew]

I'm not a fan of KDE 4, but Firefox looks the same on KDE for me. I never had an issue with the scrollbars. However, I also like to install gtk-qt-engine which allows gtk apps to use the qt widgets. And there are two Oxygen themes to help integrate Firefox 3 with the KDE 4 look.

Re:Firefox 3?

[segedunum]

Is Firefox 3 still looking like ass on KDE, and when you attempt to make it use KDE themes, the scrollbars disappear?

The KDE put effort into the QtGTK theme engine to mitigate this, but, you should complain to the Firefox developers as they stalled any kind of Qt port for a ridiculous amount of time (commit access to developers and other silliness) and then bitched in their blogs that there was no interest in a Qt port so they were removing it.

Re:Firefox 3?

[segedunum]

I'll also add that given how good KDE 4 now looks, maybe people will start bitching to the Firefox developers about why Firefox looks like arse. In all honesty, I don't hold much faith for Firefox for any Linux desktop. Hopefully we'll get really good WebKit based browsers built into KDE and Gnome by default.

Re:Firefox 3?

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

when you install the qt-gtk-library and tell gtk apps to use qt themes theres a button you click to fix the scrollbar bug in FF/T-bird... worked for me.

Nvidia cards

[Wiarumas]

From TFA (because I know some of you may not read it or at least not all of it:

"...users with Nvidia graphics cards and proprietary drivers may notice slowdown when resizing windows or moving plasma widgets, although I did not experienced this during tests with my Nvidia hardware."

Closer, but not quite there yet. Small problems like this are what is holding it back. However, with that said, I, for one, can't wait to get my hands on this.

Re:Nvidia cards

[joshtheitguy]

I have been playing with KDE 4.1 on my gaming desktop since beta 1. I have a 9800GX2 and the only time I noticed the slowdown on resizing windows or moving the plasma widgets is when I had SLI enabled in the xorg.conf. When I disabled it the performance increased drastically and I had no issues with that afterwards.

It is definitely worth downloading and I say it is more then sufficient to replace KDE 3.5

Re:Nvidia cards

[zebslash]

Use this setting:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

Using this trick, resize becomes snappy.

Re:Nvidia cards

[zebslash]

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

Re:Nvidia cards

[silentcoder]

For the record: I managed to sort out all my nvidia speed issues by loading XGL instead of AIGLX. Because XGL masks away the card itself and presents a generic interface, it worked around the nvidia driver issues very well. None of the other tricks made much difference for me.

Re:Nvidia cards

[HappySmileMan]

Closer, but not quite there yet. Small problems like this are what is holding it back. However, with that said, I, for one, can't wait to get my hands on this.

There was a lot of discussion about this, the KDE developers eventually decided NOT to fix these issues themselves because they are due to broken drivers, basically you either have to apply those config changes or hope NVidia improves their drivers.

I can't imagine how those drivers got so messed up, I've heard that any desktop effects are painfully slow on brand new NVidia cards, yet I'm sitting here running KDE4.1 with a 64MB GeForce 4 MX (which is like 5-6 years old I think) and it runs very fast...

Re:Nvidia cards

[Rich]

One difference is that we're doing lots of stuff using an ARGB visual (ie. true translucency). It seems these code paths haven't really been tested.

Re:Nvidia cards

[lakeland]

That's true.

Fortunately this kind of wizardry is now largely confined to people running the 'latest and greatest. Mom and Pop having Linux installed on their PC won't get KDE 4 until these kind of glitches have been resolved.

Re:Nvidia cards

[kc2keo]

hmm, for me I think I'll wait a month or so before I go and upgrade. Looks good. I'm a KDE user. Used Ubuntu + Gnome for a while but went back to Gentoo + KDE. I'm happy with KDE and appreciate their efforts.

Re:Nvidia cards

[glitch23]

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1
Using this trick, resize becomes snappy.

*Slaps forehead* Doh! Of course. I'm curious...where did you find that?

Re:Nvidia cards

[Jurily]

Mom and Pop having Linux installed on their PC won't get KDE 4 until these kind of glitches have been resolved.

Nor shouldn't they. It's an "early adopter" release.

OTOH, how will these glitches be resolved if noone uses it?

Re:Nvidia cards

[Saeger]

A better explaination can be found here. I'm also running KDE4 with an NVidia 8800, yet this "choppy resize" problem does not affect me, so I haven't needed a workaround.

Re:Nvidia cards

[Tim C]

It's also why a good few of us IT professionals simply don't have time for it any more.

Re:Nvidia cards

[pilot1]

Easier to just add this to the device section of your xorg.conf:

Option "InitialPixmapPlacement" "2"
Option "GlyphCache" "1"

Kubuntu Packages

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

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.

Re:Kubuntu Packages

[spud603]

thanks for finding that.

Re:Kubuntu Packages

[zoward]

Thanks for the link!

My one erk with KDE 4

[Khan]

Hopefully they've gotten rid of that freakin' kidney shaped thing in the upper right corner. Talk about a useless static "feature". ugh!

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[lbbros]

From the Plasma FAQ:

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.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[Ed Avis]

Didn't you read the article? The kidney is there in memory of Uwe Thiem, a long-time contributor to KDE who passed away recently after a sudden kidney failure.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[jjohn_h]

QUOTE: 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. UNQUOTE

No need to break it, just flush it down the bog.

I installed KDE 4.0.x with opensuse 11.0 and the main problem is not speed or stability. They have now improved in version 4.1, so what? The plasma crap is steaming to heaven. They have even managed to abolish the context menu on right click, imagine that. The problem is not speed or stability, the problem is the user interface. And in this respect we are enjoying developers who are just incompetent, ignorant and idiotic.

Let's hope the KDE fork will not be a long wait. There is already a proposal to recompile the 3.5 version with Qt 4.0.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[MrNiceguy_KS]

I'm just surprised its not called a "Kashew"

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[dotancohen]

Hopefully they've gotten rid of that freakin' kidney shaped thing in the upper right corner. Talk about a useless static "feature". ugh!

Do you mean Aaron's Annoy Me Box?

(apologies to Aaron, whom I respect very much)

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[vizZzion]

The cashew on panels disappears as soon as you lock your desktop (which for me is "normal operating mode").

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[vizZzion]

Which context menu on right click are you talking about? They do show up fine here as expected, like in one of the announcement's screenshots: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/screenshots/plasma-folderview.png Thanks for calling people all these words, but note that it doesn't make you look good in the eyes of those that are actually able to find something as simple as a context menu without having to curse in public first. I guess it's just a bad day for you. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[Khan]

I did read the article however, I must have missed that part. It's not that I hate the "Kashew" altogether...I just hate that I can't MOVE the freakin thing to say the bottom of the window.

  Unlike many other users, I prefer my panel at the top of the screen (and no, I am not an ex-MAC user). IMO, menus flow better from the top down. And that thing is just in the way.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[Yer Mum]

"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 a user-friendly desktop KDE is, surely people can use KDE just get the job done with a design philosophy such as this.

Thank goodness someone didn't decide to make container plug-in render a row of dancing monkeys in title bars on a whim then refuse to remove it because it'd be too much like hard work and suggest that someone else write another window plug-in without dancing monkeys.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[lbbros]

You have also to think about *mantaining* code, not just releasing it. That is one of the reason why kicker couldn't be just ported, AFAIK: it was way too complex and to add new features others would break.

Re:My one erk with KDE 4

[Yer Mum]

That was my point. The code needs to be designed around the needs of the user, not the programmer.

If KDE was re-written from the ground up and is already running into these kinds of problems then it's not off to a good start.

I love Linux but...

[LWATCDR]

Sorry but Linux.com and Bruce Byfield praising KDE is like PC Magazine praising Vista.
I would like to some more critical reviews.

Re:I love Linux but...

[WindBourne]

Hopefully, PCMag and a few others MS backed will do so. Of course, that would mean that they are giving it credence and I doubt that MS will allow that.

Re:I love Linux but...

[nanday]

Considering how much flack I've had in recent months for critical comments about KDE 4, I find this comment refreshingly funny. If you bothered to read, you'd see that, while I am very interested in what KDE 4.1 has to offer, I don't hesitate to say what is still missing, either. Oh, well. I must stop expecting the world to make sense; I'd be much happier that way. - Bruce Byfield ("nanday")

Re:I love Linux but...

[LWATCDR]

Doesn't have to be them but the problem is all too often KDE and or Gnome will be great praise when it really needs a swift kick in the butt.
KDE 4.0 really wasn't ready for prime time and I wouldn't be so sure about KDE 4.1 yet.

Re:I love Linux but...

[LWATCDR]

Sorry I guess I missed your articles on KDE 4. You are usually so very positive about all things FOSS that I made a bad assumption.
My bad. I have been very disappointed with KDE 4 that I went back to Gnome.
But then I am probably in the small minority that I like speed, stability, and simplicity over flash.

Re:I love Linux but...

[Risen888]

Not exactly on-topic here, but I just wanted to say that I really like that you take the time to read and reply to /. comments on your stories. When the /. crowd doesn't like a story it can turn into a shark-filled swimming pool real fast, with the story (and by extension the writer) getting shredded by the groupthink mafia, as indeed some of your past stories have been treated in this space. Thank you for braving the waters and taking the time to do this.

Re:I love Linux but...

[Risen888]

But then I am probably in the small minority that I like speed, stability, and simplicity over flash.

So you went back to... Gnome? You lost me there.

Re:I love Linux but...

[WindBourne]

KDE 4.0 was not suppose to be prime time. It has ALWAYS been intended for developers only. Sadly, ppl were not reading.

Re:I love Linux but...

[LWATCDR]

Gnome on my Ubuntu systems really does just work for me. And it is pretty speedy. I have to say that I have yet to find a GUI that I just love. Gnome just works for me at least the way Ubuntu packages it.
Kbuntu just never felt as right to me.

Re:I love Linux but...

[Risen888]

Sorry, my original reply was kind of a drive-by. Let me flesh that out a little more.

Speed: I find that Gnome/Compiz (configured to my liking) is about on par with KDE3/Kwin (ditto). Both of them seem to have a very slight edge on KDE4 at the moment. I don't expect that to last as the KDE code continues to mature. KDE 4.0.0 was dog-slow on my machine, KDE 4.1.0 is pretty damn snappy.

Stability: I'll give you this one. I find new and creative ways to make KDE barf every day.

Simplicity: This is where you really lost me. I find KDE (3.5.x or 4.x) much more coherent and integrated than Gnome. I don't want to get bogged down with examples, but here's one little one that I notice every time I use Gnome. The "System" menu in Gnome is a fucking mess. The divide between Preferences and Administration is nebulous at best, and the idea of putting all that crap in two huge and unwieldy drop-down menus was just bad. Compare to KDE's System Settings. It opens as one window with about a dozen categorical icons on it. Click an icon, it expands to all the relevant options for that category. Configure to taste, click the back button. Rinse, lather, repeat. (Yeah, that's right, I just said KDE's configuration settings were easier to deal with than Gnome's. Total heresy, I know.)

best regards
-p.

Re:I love Linux but...

[LWATCDR]

Never said that Gnome was perfect.
The System/Prefs are a mess but frankly I find them a mess everywhere. XP, Gome, KDE.
Most of the GUI tweekability I find to be useless except for CompWiz where I find the defaults pretty useless.
The big problem I have with most Linux systems is that they by default load a dozen of everything. XP isn't much better with Notepad, Wordpad, and edit all installed by default.
I found Gnome to be MUCH more stable than KDE 4. I found it more usable than KDE 3.5 under Ubuntu. When I use OpenSuse it is flipped around.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[michrech]

Since KDE 4.0 was never meant for users (I've read multiple articles about how it was only supposed to be for developers to get their KDE software ported) and 4.1 was supposed to be for "general use", I'd say this *did* warrant mention on slashdot.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[CastrTroy]

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.

ATI still freezing with kdm?

[dangerz]

I think it's more of a proprietary issue, but for those that have switched to 4.x, does kdm still freeze when you shut down X?

Re:ATI still freezing with kdm?

[dangerz]

What I meant is a 'proprietary drivers issue'. Missed that in the preview, sorry.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[MightyYar]

I'm a lot more concerned about the substance of the release than what number they throw on it.

For instance, MacOS has only had point releases for going on a decade now. In this case, the release is a huge improvement over the point-oh-no.

Some screencasts on Plasma features

[lbbros]

Here and here there are some screencasts showing off some Plasma features.

So far, I am impressed

[bogaboga]

I must say I am impressed by KDE 4.1. The features I like most include Konsole's ability to have fonts changed by a slider, the new file manager (Dolphin) and the beauty the whole KDE 4.0 stack introduced.

What I would like to see includes better fonts and more useful and complete help files. I also miss Amarok.

I have had my disappointments too. My college website will not allow Konqueror. Plug-in installation still needs work so that it is as smooth as that on Windows XP.

I have nothing but praise for KDE developers who insisted that we needed a new way of doing things in KDE and therefore started developing KDE 4.0. At that time, I did not see any reason why we needed a new paradigm. Now I see the reason. Thank you so much.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[orzetto]

My college website will not allow Konqueror.

Just change the user agent. Supposing it works like in KDE 3, go to Settings, Configure Konqueror, Browser Identification tab, and add a specific rule about how to identify to your college's website.

If it still does not work because your college's website uses some ActiveX or otherwise proprietary-nonstandard crap, rephrase your original comment as "my college's website is broken". Though it's a long time since I saw something not working in Konqueror.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[ForeverFaithless]

We're working very hard on getting Amarok 2 out of the door, and if you are enthusiastic please give our alphas and betas a try. Amarok 2 is quite usable at this point, We definitely will take a close look at each bug report, and we're aiming to make an awesome release really-soon-now :) --markey

Re:So far, I am impressed

[bigstrat2003]

If it still does not work because your college's website uses some ActiveX or otherwise proprietary-nonstandard crap, rephrase your original comment as "my college's website is broken".

Using tools you find despicable is not broken. Learn the difference.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

My college website will not allow Konqueror.

"Not allow"? Your college website is the problem. It is not coded to W3C standards.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[cp.tar]

My college website will not allow Konqueror.

"Not allow"? Your college website is the problem. It is not coded to W3C standards.

It is not coded to Microsoft standards either.

Microsoft Thesaurus Ultimate says the opposite of Allow is Cancel.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[brezel]

We're working very hard on getting Amarok 2 out of the door, and if you are enthusiastic please give our alphas and betas a try. Amarok 2 is quite usable at this point,

actually for me amarok is _the_ app that i will wait for with my switch to kde4. i've tried the dev versions and they look very promising. can't wait to use my favourite playa with the pretty new qt :>

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Jellybob]

Plug-in installation still needs work so that it is as smooth as that on Windows XP.

Hell no - the last thing the world needs is more browsers that let people install viruses with a click, hop, and a jump.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Daengbo]

If a site only works for one browser on one OS, then it's broken. It has nothing to do with finding tolls despicable.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[bigstrat2003]

Broken, by definition, means not working like it's supposed to. If the site's authors don't intend to support $browser, then it is not broken if the site doesn't support $browser.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Cro Magnon]

If a website doesn't support 10-20% of potential visitors, it's broken. If the designers did it on purpose, then their brains are broken.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[bigstrat2003]

If a website doesn't support 10-20% of potential visitors, it's broken.

Apparently you don't believe in using the proper meaning for words. I just explained how such a case can not be broken.

If the designers did it on purpose, then their brains are broken.

Quite possibly, but that doesn't make the site broken.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[manifoldronin]

Apparently you don't believe in using the proper meaning for words. I just explained how such a case can not be broken.

No, you have only established how the web site's _implementation_ was not broken, but not its design. A design that excludes lots of potential visitors when it _doesn't_have_to_ is clearly a broken design. Now I don't know about you, by my book, a piece of software with a broken design is broken.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[pbhj]

Sorry to be a huge pain but is there a repo for an Ubuntu (hardy) package that I can try. Last I tried (last week) couldn't import/open, and hence play, any music (this was on KDE 4.0.93 IIRC).

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Ant P.]

Well, if you're reading this thread I have one question... how well will it cope with a tiny screen? I've had 1.x on my eee but it was pretty awkward.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[smellotron]

Welcome to Linux on the desktop, where technical terminology and endless blame are the only responses you get to flaws in the product. Imagine telling your grandma to "just change the user agent." Linux on the desktop fails again.

What? It's not like this is some sort of failing of Linux. If a website is using User-Agent sniffing, and it rejects anything it doesn't think is MSIE, it's the fault of the website for not working, not the browser.

Your comment is akin to blaming Richard for being banned from accessing the "Todds Only" grocery store. It's his fault for not being Todd! Right?

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Jurily]

Broken, by definition, means not working like it's supposed to. If the site's authors don't intend to support $browser, then it is not broken if the site doesn't support $browser.

My guess is, a college website is intended for all college students, not just the ones with $default_browser.

Websites are for people, not browsers.

I can understand when e.g. a Firefox addon installation website doesn't support IE, but that's clearly not the case.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[bh_doc]

I also miss Amarok.

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.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[TBerben]

>

Though it's a long time since I saw something not working in Konqueror.

Gmail? Okay, Basic HTML works, but I want the full version.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[geekymachoman]

Offtopic, however ... I need to say this .. so mod me however you like.

1. Amarok looks like an e-mail client, not an music player (Yea, I know about Show player window but the option is barely usable).
2. It uses around 100 mb of RAM.

So if you'r a developer of amarok, instead of bloating it with uneccesary features and whatnot, you guys should work on minimizing RAM usage and speeding it up a bit. - If your already working on that, good.

Xmms was a way to go, but xmms lacked playlist management features, and it was not maintained properly, so it failed.

For the record, I use Amarok too, since Linux lacks better player now.

A lot of people think just the same about all this, so.. I think it needs to be said.

Try to accept the critic in a positive way, and please, stay away of 'ram is cheap' philosophy.
People really don't want to waste 100 MB of ram, to listen music, but most of them aren't aware it uses that much ram. Its a music player for god sake..

In a few years, Linux will be slower then windows with all these apps eating ram, and not caring.
Hell .. it already is.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[Risen888]

I think Xmms2 (or cmus, if you're feeling froggy, I really like it) is probably the one for you if your needs are simple. Amarok isn't "just a music player, it's a music player/manager/search tool/visualizer/tagger/et cetera. It's supposed to have the kitchen sink, that's what its users expect.

I'm not saying you're wrong to want what you want, but you are wrong if you expect Amarok to give you that. That's not what it's there for.

Re:So far, I am impressed

[geekymachoman]

I don't have anything against Amarok.
There are cool features, and adding music and stuff is imho, better then in xmms..

What users want ? Well, if im not mistaken, users (and I mean joe average) want simplicity, effectivnes, and all that to look pretty.

Amarok is ugly for a music player .. This is maybe matter of opinion, however, I know quite a few people not wanting to use amarok just because of those reasons i mentioned.

It looks like a email client, its not really that simple (at first, but enough if theres a choice), its hogging down the computer (some are aware of this some are not, but most of Linux users are aware). Assuming of course, they are 'using' Linux and Amarok, not trying to see whats the hype with all this linux stuff, then after three days googling for how to remove it.

I noticed amarok have a lot of popularity, IMHO, that's only because there's no normal music player for Linux.
You mentioned that ncurses music player and stuff.. Im not a zealot, what I want is music player that plays music, and have decent song/playlist management features.
Looks nice and stuff... if I already use these fancy desktop enviroments like kde, gnome,...

Winamp 3 (i think.. the old simple one) was a success, and everyone used it... when they overbloated it with all that they have now, no one is using it anymore (at least not the people I know used it before). Or they install some light version that looks normal and acts as a music player. If they have a choice.

"I'm not saying you're wrong to want what you want, but you are wrong if you expect Amarok to give you that. That's not what it's there for."

That's fair enough. Im only speaking in the word of few people I know. So, why not address the issues, if the people who develop it are aware that they will probably do better, if they 'fix' it.

That will gain more popularity for their project and more support, and make everyone happier.

Best KDE 4 distro?

[pavon]

For the adventurous that have been using KDE 4, which distros do you think have done the best job at packaging it? Also will they be releasing packages for KDE 4.1 shortly, or are they waiting for their next normal release cycle?

I've been having all sorts of kernel/Xorg headaches with Hardy Heron, and am looking to dump it. I'm planning on moving all my must-have software to another box running Debian stable which will free up my desktop to experiment with a new distro.

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[nonsequitor]

Gentoo. Not only do you get to run KDE 4.1, but you also get to watch it compile from source.

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[j_sp_r]

OpenSuSE has some really nice one, you can find them on http://en.opensuse.org/KDE

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[zach_the_lizard]

I second that. I've been using KDE4 compiled from svn for weeks now. It's getting better and better all the time, getting more stable and such. The things I miss most are Amarok and panel autohide. Panel autohide might be trivial to implement. Perhaps I should do some research and decide to use my n00b programming skills (if you wish to call them such) to use. Anyone have any idea if it would be easy to do?

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[DevonBorn]

Agreed. I've been using the unstable builds from OpenSuSE for the last month as I found 4.0 too restrictive and I've just upgraded to 4.1. It's much better than KDE 3.5 and 4.0 and you can still use all of the KDE3.5 goodies such as Amarok and K3b. A few things are missing (little things like changing desktop with scroll wheel on desktop) but I'm sure they'll be implemented soon. Otherwise the only problem is the driver for my 8400GS (and the worry that it may overheat and burst into flames but that's a hardware problem). KDE have done a great job with 4.1 and OpenSuSE have done a good job packaging it.

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[Ant P.]

Oh man, that's the best part too. Syntax-highlighted make output!!!11

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[visualight]

No, the best part is that instead of installing a dozen or so packages, you get to install over 200 hundred and still never be quite sure you got everything the upstream developers intended.

When they quit being a meta-distribution and started doing everything the "Gentoo Way", I went to kubuntu.

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[testerus]

the best kde based bleeding edge distro is still mandriva. Though you'll need the unstable (cooker) version. There probably will be a beta of the next release soon.
The one that comes with KDE4.1? http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Beta_1

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[Tatey]

You ought to take a look at Arch Linux which have released their binary packages for KDE4 (They've been in testing previously).

Re:Best KDE 4 distro?

[Zarhan]

Yeah, it's always nice to recompile entire kdepim when you want to install one plugin for Kopete. Gentoo's modularising of KDE package was a good thing.

And you can still use the originals if you like, it's just emerging kde vs. kde-meta.

Slackware packages?

[TheDarkMaster]

Someone knows where have packages for Slackware? I tryed compile the source, but do not work (too many strange dependences from thirdy party librarys, test on Slackware 12)

(do not the bad english, I not american)

Re:Slackware packages?

[appelza]

Does slackware even have FF3 yet? I don't think you'll have much luck other than relying on external binaries someone other than the slackware maintainers create. Slackware likes being ancient. They still use LILO by default...

Re:Slackware packages?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Does slackware even have FF3 yet? I don't think you'll have much luck other than relying on external binaries someone other than the slackware maintainers create. Slackware likes being ancient. They still use LILO by default...

Slackware users don't care about defaults, we go get whatever we want. LILO is good because it's simple, but I've installed grub on machines as well. It's not hard.

Re:Slackware packages?

[AceofSpades19]

Well considering that slackware's newest release was well before ff3 release and they don't package beta software with it, of course they don't have it. Actually, Slackware 12.1 has newer software then debian stable, so I wouldn't call it being ancient. To the GP, check out Rworkman's kde 4 packages

Re:Slackware packages?

[Cro Magnon]

Actually, Slackware 12.1 has newer software then debian stable, so I wouldn't call it being ancient

That's like saying a Model-T isn't ancient because it's newer than the horse-and-buggy.

Re:Slackware packages?

[linuxrocks123]

> That's like saying a Model-T isn't ancient because it's newer than the horse-and-buggy.

Any horse older than a Model-T should be checked for the zombie virus.

Re:Slackware packages?

[TheDarkMaster]

ops... Is "do NOTE the bad english"

Is not easy to me write on another language

Re:Slackware packages?

[TheDarkMaster]

Damn, wrong again :( (and slashdot dont let you correct or delete wrong post)

I try to say "do not note my bad english", or "don't fry me for the bad english", something like this.

Re:Slackware packages?

[AceofSpades19]

I would at least want my computer to be stable over having bleeding edge packages, if your computer is crashing every 5 minutes because of you having the newest packages, then it doesn't make much sense to use it

Re:Slackware packages?

[TheDarkMaster]

I'm brazilian :) (portuguese is spoken here too)

KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Random BedHead Ed]

After months of development and controversy

I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.

I tried it as a LiveCD and the desktop experience was lukewarm, so I went back to 3.5. But I never wrote off KDE 4. No one should have, and there never should have been any controversy, considering what 4.0 was. The 4.1 release is the one people have actually been waiting for, since the apps and desktop components have had time to adjust to the new libaries, so if you adopted 4.0 thinking it would be your new desktop and you hated it, you probably jumped the gun. Have another look.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Rob Kaper]

I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.

The controversy is that it redefines what .0 means to most computer users and has meant throughout the release history of KDE.

It only occurred to me today, but I actually think KDE should do it again for KDE 5. If consistently used, there's nothing wrong with the following version numbering:

[b].0[/b] is the [i]zeroeth[/i] release set of a new product or technology generation. It could be used instead of silly names such as alpha, beta, preview and technology release alltogether and would indicate incompleteness.

[b].1[/b[ would be the [i]first[/i] release and would be complete.

This would probably also be more intuative to end users because only developers use zero-indexed lists.

Then again, it would not have provided the KDE release team with a way to push forward their new platform the way they did now. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[FishWithAHammer]

This is stupid. Whole numbers indicate whole releases. Revision numbers indicate improvements.

It's not the world's fault that KDE really, really, really didn't want to look stupid by shoving their release back even further.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Random BedHead Ed]

It only occurred to me today, but I actually think KDE should do it again for KDE 5. If consistently used, there's nothing wrong with the following version numbering

I agree. I actually like the KDE 4 scheme better than the usual one. Partly I like it because terms like "alpha" and "beta" are used inconsistently nowadays, and are often abused. The so-called controversy with KDE 4 erupted mainly because KDE didn't go the easy route and call it 3.99 or beta. The complainers didn't pay attention to what they were getting and had false expectations as a result. However, the paradigm that .0 would be a library freeze to build a platform foundation was very sound, IMHO.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Daengbo]

It would be kind of like how Ubuntu 8.04 was the beta release, and people should have waited for 8.04.1.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Eil]

Just because companies and open source projects are abusing the definitions of alpha, beta, and n.0 versioning schemes doesn't mean it's okay to continue abusing them. Companies and projects should be publicly admonished both when they release something as 1.0 when it's clearly not finished for end users and when they cling to the "beta" tag for years to use as excuse just in case a major problem is found.

  * Alpha: Incomplete early preview for testers and developers
  * Beta: Feature-complete but needs testing and debugging
  * 1.0 (or 2.0, 3.0, etc): Feature-complete, tested, debugged, and ready for end-users to enjoy

Any deviation from this means your marketing department is dictating your development cycle and I think we can all agree that no good could possibly come from that.

That being said, I like KDE a lot and used 3.x for years, but I'm staying on Ubuntu until I can be sure that KDE 4 is relatively stable and complete enough for daily use. Unfortunately, since they're so confused about their version numbers, there is no clear indication of when that will be.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[segedunum]

The controversy is that it redefines what .0 means to most computer users and has meant throughout the release history of KDE.

No it hasn't. Most users of most distros never saw KDE 4.0 unless they fiddled with their package management systems.

What people don't understand with open source software is the layers involved in terms of development and the decisions made at each level as to whether the software is good enough. Developers carry on cranking out the releases until everyone says "Ahhhhh, yes" and most distros are totally fine about shipping it.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[smellotron]

Whole numbers indicate whole releases. Revision numbers indicate improvements.

In open-source projects, whole numbers also generally suggest more aggressive churn, which means more bugs. I think it's pretty common for *.0 releases to have weird new bugs. KDE just pushed that to the next level by making sure some of those bugs were "application X does not exist yet".

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[smellotron]

I think you're missing the point that 4.0 was stable for developers. For a desktop environment with a big hairy dependency chain and massive internal churn, providing a stable library release is a critical step to help application developers. The alpha/beta/rc terminology doesn't work so well when the ultimate goal is releasing 1/2 of the platform.

It would have been interesting if they had decided to call it "4.-1", though.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

I can't understand all the fuss over .0 myself...
from a marketing perspective a lot of people are uncomfortable with a .0 release because it is the newest version and probably bug prone. For this reason my old boss named the next itteration of their product 3.1 after 2.6 to trick their potential clients.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[FishWithAHammer]

Windows 95 worked. NT 4.0 worked. OS X 10.0 worked. They were all feature-complete and usable. KDE 4.0? Ahahaha, no. (And KDE 4.1 is still horrible.)

As for GNOME--I wouldn't know, I switched to KDE before GNOME 2.0.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[FishWithAHammer]

They're the ones trying to push KDE4 as "branding," not me. If you're trying to establish a brand, the first release--which they were touting as "stable," and KDE 3.5.x as "Legacy," by the way--had better be feature-complete.

Re:KDE 4.0 was always more of a test release

[wall0159]

Not wanting to start a flamewar, but I think one could argue that Microsoft does the same thing with Windows. Win2k, WinXP and (apparently) Vista were all crap on release, and required several service packs to make them usable. (Hopefully this will be retrospectively true for Vista)

Complaint about this review

[Lord Byron II]

I'm bugged by something he says in this review and I see reviewers doing it all the time: "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." He's using the old megahertz myth. If he's using a 1.6GHz Centrino 2, I doubt that I'll see the same performance on my 1.8GHz Sempron that's four years old.

Re:Complaint about this review

[vizZzion]

Did you try? I saw KDE running quite well on an Eee PC, and Plasma even reasonable well on an OpenMoko FreeRunner. It doesn't seem to need either a lot of MegaHertzs or RAMs.

Re:Complaint about this review

[Tim C]

That's not what he's complaining about - he's saying (quite rightly) that raw GHz figures are utterly meaningless.

Re:But ... does it run linux?

[brunascle]

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.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[Zarluk]

And, taking previous releases of KDE as example, 4.5 will be the full-fledged, stable version, so it will also worth a note ;-)

(no flames, please, I'm a KDE user, too)

Pros and cons of KDE 4.1

[MaulerOfEmotards]

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.

* 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 ... 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.

* 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 ... may notice slowdown when resizing windows or moving plasma widgets"

* 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!

Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[MrZaius]

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.

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[WindBourne]

Keep in mind that KDE 4.0 was meant to be used by developers. It was not user level. The hope was that by giving it a .0, that it would encourage app developers, but discourage regular users. After all that is what seems to happen in the windows world. But I think that Linux has more in common with Apple than with Window; That is that users put more trust in it.

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[AceofSpades19]

don't complain about the *buntus and call it kde's fault. The KDE project has no control over what wifi manager ubuntu has.

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[andrewd18]

Linux has more in common with Apple than with Window; That is that users put more trust in it.

We'd put more trust in Windows if it hadn't given us such a piss poor track record.

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[pbhj]

KDE 4.0 was [only] meant to be used by developers

Yeah, we heard that they called it KDE4.0-developer-edition and clearly stated "this is a non-functional development version which will not provide a usable desktop", oh wait ...

</sarcasm>

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[smellotron]

Yeah, they probably should have gone with "KDE-Core-4.0" and only bundled the necessary applications. But it still would have caught flak from people, since whatever word you use (Core, Libs, whatnot) will still be ignored by a vocal minority.

Re:Power management? Decent WiFi controls?

[lbbros]

There is a NetworkManager plasmoid in development. I don't know if the developers will release it separately or if we'll have to wait till KDE 4.2 for that, though.

Integrated distros? VMWare images?

[ivoras]

Any integrated distros or VMWare images with KDE 4.1 I can try? Yes, I could download the packages - build it from source even, but I'm sure some busy bees have it ready somewhere.

one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[houghi]

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)

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[rajivvyas]

I am not sure how many people use OpenSuSE. The problem I've faced with openSuSE is it's very very slow on my five year old PC and very difficult to install. On my old laptop with 192MB Ram, it wouldn't even install as the RAM was too low for it.

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[houghi]

Do the CLI install instead. As for slow, don't run KDE or GNOME.

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[mystuff]

Do not use the 1-click installer above to install KDE 4.1 on a x86_64 (64 bit) system, it will break (unless you take 2 hours to resolve the dependencies). Just do it via the command line or via Yast2 (adding a community repo like the KDE4:Factory:Desktop repo is easy as cake there).

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[legrimpeur]

that's the factory repository. As far I understood, and I might be mistaken, that's bleeding edge. You should rather use this one click install http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/STABLE:/Extra-Apps/openSUSE_11.0/KDE4-DEFAULT.ymp

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[legrimpeur]

me dumbass that was for 4.0 for 4.1 was the one in the parent post... who was the right...

Re:one-click install for openSUSE 11.0

[houghi]

The one-click install does exacly the same as via YaST and uses the same tools.

KDE PIM

[pavon]

Did you spend much time using Kontact or any of the PIM applications individually? I can't live without KMail or KOrganizer, and haven't heard much about them in the KDE 4.1 prerelease reviews I've read other than the fact that they are included.

Re:KDE PIM

[dotancohen]

Did you spend much time using Kontact or any of the PIM applications individually? I can't live without KMail or KOrganizer, and haven't heard much about them in the KDE 4.1 prerelease reviews I've read other than the fact that they are included.

I have had some trouble with Korganizer moving events. It could move them to different hours, but not different days. I thought that I filed a bug but I cannot find it. I'll search again for it...

Other than that, you are going to love the new Kmail (labels!) and Akregator.

Re:KDE PIM

[Risen888]

I am presently using Kontact 1.3 on KDE 4.1. This is just the "port to Qt4" release, it doesn't really take advantage of the new KDE desktop technologies like Nepomuk. But it's pretty stable, and KMail seems to handle IMAP better (I have no justification for this other than my personal experience). But overall, it's just like you remember it.

Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'm probably in the minority running Fedora instead of an Ubuntu release but I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the Fedora Project in keeping up with something like this. The KDE 4.1 release is sitting in rawhide like a coiled snake waiting to pounce, and what happens when I install it? It fails on a series of icons. Who does that?? And to RingDev, you're absolutely right KDE isn't an O/S and Windows isn't either. Windows is a GUI that sits on an unstable CLI, they just hide it more/better.

KDE41: my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:KDE41: my experience

[betterunixthanunix]

Sorry, I cannot reproduce any of your findings. Which release are you running? Which distro?

Re:KDE41: my experience

[DMUTPeregrine]

Tested on Kubuntu Hardy, KDE4.1 from the launchpad repos.

1) Clicking resize moves your mouse to the lower-right corner, and lets you resize. Clicking the mouse stops resizing. If you move the mouse just after starting, the window size will change. That's sort of the point. I had no problem getting back to normal size.

2) Not sure what's wrong here, it works for me. All my shortcuts work.

3) It crashed when I tried to add a kate launcher, but restarted instantly. Couldn't reproduce the resizing/layout problem you described.

4) Try turning off vsync, it caused Kwin to use a ton of cpu for me. Nvidia 8800GT.

5) With 4.0 it would crash for me on opening the "display" section, but that works now. Haven't noticed anything, but haven't tested thoroughly.

i almost love it

[friedman101]

i've been using kde4.1 for a couple of days now and it is pretty great. there are a few annoyances however....

-khotkeys doesnt work for me
-desktop search doesn't seem to work (ala strigi)
-artifacts left in the system tray

Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Ed Avis]

I don't get it. Why all the fuss about the desktop background? It is just a background after all, and hidden by any windows you have open.

From observing 'ordinary users' running Windows, they use the desktop background for starting programs which have a shortcut there - because the Start menu is so congested with crap, they don't even look at it and are often incapable of running anything not on the desktop. Because of this most Windows application installers have taken to adding a desktop shortcut as well as a Start menu item. Of course in the long term this 'icon inflation' will make the background itself unusable and we'll have to think of something else. I can't help feeling that just making a usable Start menu would be a better answer.

The second use of the desktop background is because files get saved there by default from your web browser. Again, this seems to be because unsophisticated users have no idea of directories and if it doesn't go on the background, they can't find it. But on Unix everyone has a home directory and I'd expect KDE (or GNOME) to provide easy access to that directory, even for people who aren't aware that any other location exists.

The kind of technically skilled people who used to run Enlightenment probably enjoy having semitransparent widgets flip into shape in 3d on the background, but I don't see what usability advantages that brings. Would it not be simpler to make the background be a background - just blank? There is no difficulty in putting one application window _underneath_ another, so you will see it when the top window is moved or minimized out of the way.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[dlZ]

The background icon issue will be resolved as soon as we can all easily arrange by penis.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[maxume]

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.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[gparent]

Did you even use the Windows start menu, or are you one of those Windows bashers that never used the OS?

How is it "unusable"? Just like most start menus, it has places you can go to (Gnome also has this) such as My Computer, etc.

It has a shortcut to the control panel, a quick way to get help and also to open a command prompt or whatever program you need.

Once you open the "Programs" option though, it gets very confusing. You are presented with various complicated options such as "Accessories" (For accessories), "Games" (for games) and "Startup" (for programs launched at startup!).

Seriously, Windows might have some flaws, but at least stop making new ones up. If the start menu is so complicated and unusable to you I don't know how you even manage to go through GRUB.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[cp.tar]

Windows Start menu is all fine and dandy until you install some software.
At that point it becomes unusable.

Instead of sorting themselves into categories, programs sort themselves by vendor.
How intuitive is that, exactly?

Of course, it is editable, but how many users are willing to do that? I am a competent user, yet I still can't be bothered.
Instead, I use launcher applications and the like.

Windows Start menu wastes time, and that is why it is unusable.
Compare the Windows Start menu with the new KDE menu... and IIRC, Vista's new menu is a rip-off of KDE's.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the desktop background is _my_ space as much as anything on the screen can ever be. So anything that's there which I didn't put there is invading my space. And it better has some fucking good reason for that!

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[FishWithAHammer]

I like having icons on my desktop; it lets me locate icons spatially instead of paging through a list. I want it to work like KDE 3 and not waste my time on "plasmoids". Until it at least attains the functionality of KDE 3 (does it amaze anyone else that they say they won't have a basic desktop, like every other DE, until around KDE 4.3?), it's worthless to me.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[steelfood]

The desktop so quickly gets cluttered with so many program shortcuts, files and folders, and file and folder shortcuts that it becomes a nightmare within weeks. The start menu at least has only applications and application-related links.

Some people really do treat their desktop the same way they treat their desk top.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Haeleth]

Why all the fuss about the desktop background? It is just a background after all, and hidden by any windows you have open.

Some of us have screens more than 12" across, and therefore do not automatically maximise every window.

Fortunately, it turns out that (properly configured -- I don't know if KDE4 supports useful configurations) the root window is very convenient. Right-clicking in it pops up the application menu, removing the tiresome need to reach all the way to a corner of the screen just to open another xterm. Minimised application icons go to the desktop, making it possible to organise your running programs in a full 2D grid instead of the fiddly and restrictive 1D line that "panels" limit you to.

Yup, I'm describing the UNIX desktops of 15 years ago, from back before Windows 95 poisoned the minds of GUI designers. Fortunately it's still available -- Xfce, at least, can be configured to provide a sane and efficient desktop, though it inexplicably appears to mimic Gnome by default (or maybe that's just Xubuntu).

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Lordrashmi]

Of course, it is editable, but how many users are willing to do that? I am a competent user, yet I still can't be bothered.

Yeah dragging and dropping items is pretty tough...

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[psmears]

My my, how hard is it to 'right click' then select Sort by Name. Yep that is pretty tough.

It's not very hard—but it's also not very useful, as it doesn't solve the problem that the programs are still sorted by folders almost always named after the vendor.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Risen888]

You know what? You can have all that! It's an exciting new project called KDE 3! Check it out (and stop wasting everyone's time with this blather)!

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[AikonMGB]

Except that it's more like right-click -> Sort by Vendor; I know who produced a certain piece of software I'm looking for, but most people won't. Further, just because I can doesn't mean I want to.

I spent the majority of a day a while ago sorting all the shortcuts in my start menu into menus similar to Ubuntu's, and I loved it. However, it took way too long and was way to frustrating, especially when you go and install new software or updates (which assume the shortcut is missing, so re-add it).

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[FrozenFOXX]

I've gotta agree with the parent here, you really don't realize quite how broken the traditional "start menu" design is until you either A)start loading a LOT of software in there or B)you start using an application launcher.

On the Windows box at work I installed Launchy, removed nearly every option from the start menu to make it as streamlined as possible on the odd occasion I DO need to use it and have been running that way for months. For a little extra sanity I made three folders on the desktop to group up applications that aren't in the start menu (like a Resonate Central Dispatch application). I've clicked on the folders less than ten times in three months. I've clicked on the start menu exactly twice.

Once you even halfway know what you want to access on a system there's no need to rely on a cumbersome piece of design like a start menu.

For KDE 3.x there's Katapult. For Gnome there's Gnome-Do. For KDE 4.x there's Krunner (or whatever it's called, just hit Alt-F2). Learn them and love them.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[FrozenFOXX]

Um, not sure what the problem is. KDE 4 allows you to put icons on your desktop. Even better it goes beyond the functionality of KDE 3 in this respect since you could make several containers in different areas of your desktop and put different icons in each one, thereby giving you even more spatial control cleanly and efficiently.

What can't you do for KDE 4.x that you can do in KDE 3.x that's a show-stopper for you?

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[metamatic]

The problem is, there are a lot of people like me who are terrible with names, and remember things based on position. This is an issue with the new KDE 4.1 K menu, which seems to assume that everyone remembers names of programs.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[maxume]

I like the way launchy handles it. It reads the program names from the start menu, so if I can't remember a name and want to look, the icons are still there, rather than somewhere else, or not installed. I think most of the launcher apps do it this way, as it makes a lot of sense to make it an additional capability, rather than a replacement.

I have a lot of crap that I use for this or that, once in a while, installed, so my start menu, at the base level, has more than 100 items in it. No way am I going to remember positions for that much stuff, and organizing is a pain (especially when icons don't get uninstalled), so a search based launcher is fantastic.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[cp.tar]

it took way too long and was way to frustrating, especially when you go and install new software or updates (which assume the shortcut is missing, so re-add it).

Basically, you need to think up categories in advance and have the programs install in their proper places when you install them. If they allow it.

Too cumbersome.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[cp.tar]

For KDE 3.x there's Katapult. For Gnome there's Gnome-Do. For KDE 4.x there's Krunner (or whatever it's called, just hit Alt-F2). Learn them and love them.

Launchy is now available on Linux, too.

And I really love the Dock + QuickSilver combination on the Mac.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[gparent]

Just because you threw a bunch of paper all over your desk doesn't mean you get to blame the desk for not sorting it for you. You still created your own mess.

Sure, Windows' start menu isn't cleaned up automagically, but it's very easy to do it yourself.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Hijacked Public]

I don't think you understand.

The parent poster is complaining on behalf of users who don't really have a solid handle on any aspect of the computer other than means to launch and use the few applications they care about. I have known many of them who are afraid to delete shortcuts from their desktop or Start Menu. They are afraid to move them around. They are afraid to rename them. I try to explain the difference between a shortcut and an executable. They do not understand.

And those of us who do understand usually just want to do some work with our computer, not get constantly bogged down with administrative tasks and upkeep. And the free-for-all Windows allows application installers results in just that kind of bogging down.

Install something new:

1. delete its desktop shortcut(s)
2. open Start Menu -> drag executable shortcut to All Programs -> delete vendor named folder containing the uninstall link and the link to the vendor's web site
3. check Start -> All Programs -> Startup to see if anything stupid has been added, delete if so
4. Start -> Run -> regedit. Check the two or three places in the Registry to see if anything stupid has been set to start at boot
5. Check Services...whatever menu based rigamaroll you have to go through these days to do that...disable any automatic services that are stupid
6. Open up My Documents, sort past all the various "My..." folders to find and delete the various stupidities your new app created there

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[cp.tar]

Just because you threw a bunch of paper all over your desk doesn't mean you get to blame the desk for not sorting it for you. You still created your own mess. Sure, Windows' start menu isn't cleaned up automagically, but it's very easy to do it yourself.

When I install programs under Windows, I don't always get to choose where they will be installed.

So it is like an office desk, where people put things in your In tray, but also wherever else they please. And then I'm not doing my job, but cleaning up the mess instead.

Sorting the Windows Start menu is not at all easy; it is quite a time-consuming task.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[microbox]

The kind of technically skilled people who used to run Enlightenment probably enjoy having semitransparent widgets flip into shape in 3d on the background, but I don't see what usability advantages that brings. Would it not be simpler to make the background be a background - just blank? There is no difficulty in putting one application window _underneath_ another, so you will see it when the top window is moved or minimized out of the way.

Aesthetics has an important place in design.

The aesthetic quality of an environment affects the mind, which affects everything you do - effectively colouring your presence. Here's a crude example: you might be more prone to a negative state of mind standing in a dump, then around some beautiful statue in a park.

Good aesthetics is conducive to a healthy state of mind, and thus a more creative and precise reaction to the world.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[gparent]

For the rare times where the Start menu shortcuts aren't at the right place, it isn't exactly hard to drag and drop in the right place. I get to do it every time I install an app on my linux machine since I dislike the default sorting system.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[vizZzion]

Last time I checked, KDE 4.1 supported black, empty background pretty well. I think that even worked in 4.0 already. As to the icons on the desktop, with 4.1 you can have any directory you like displayed on your desktop -- if that's what you prefer. The folderview will keep it restricted to a certain area on your desktop, so it won't cover valuable black background.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[vizZzion]

Not entirely true, if you type for example "cd" in kickoff's search bar, the following options appear: - CD Ripping - CD & DVD Burning - CD Player ... no need to learn application names.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[vizZzion]

That's actually one usecase we tried to improve. You can now arrange folderviews on your desktop spatially. For example, put a folderview with your work-related files top-right, underneath a directory that holds your movies, and maybe one with application shortcuts, bingo. In 4.2 we'll make it possible for you to have it messy as well :)

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Sj0]

It's probably Microsoft's fault. I'm certain their UI requirements state that you should have the 'start/programs/vendor name/program name' scheme.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[pbhj]

The second use of the desktop background is because files get saved there by default from your web browser. Again, this seems to be because unsophisticated users have no idea of directories and if it doesn't go on the background, they can't find it.

You make a common mistake. You believe that because you find something unhelpful that it is just "unhelpful" whilst really it is "unhelpful for you".

I use the desktop as a temporary store, eg for downloaded files and work in progress. I like them to be visible at the click of a single button (hide all windows / reveal desktop; missing in KDE4 when I last tried (2 days ago)). When I've determined the correct place to store something or when I've discerned it's proper worth it is either remains in a visually separated desktop position, is added to a hierarchical store, placed in a tmp folder, trashed or deleted.

Without a usable desktop, see KDE4, I resort to a ~/tmp directory but the utility is reduced unless I do funky things to keep this as the lowest desktop and prevent it's minimisation, etc..

I'm sure I'm not alone in finding a triage place for files to be useful?

One other use is allowing my (just turned) 3 year old to find gcompris and tuxpaint without having to navigate the diabolical new K-menu.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[FishWithAHammer]

No, I'll just go back to Windows. Like I did. :) I don't stick with dead projects.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[porl]

obviously you wouldn't be using vista then...

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Gazzonyx]

And then do that again when you uninstall and are left with dead entries because the uninstaller can't handle a task so difficult as finding its executable in the start menu. That is, if it doesn't blow up upon not being able to find it, and leave you to manually pull the shrapnel from the registry ('cause it'll leave its entry in "Add/Remove Programs" and then not run when you try to remove it). And as a bonus, if you update the program, you get to this twice!

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[FishWithAHammer]

I use Server 2008 on my desktop, since I got it free via MSDN. I haven't bought a copy of Windows in years, and wasn't going to start with Vista. :P

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[boud]

Fortunately, KDE3 is not dead, but will be maintained for a long time to come.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Tim C]

Instead of sorting themselves into categories, programs sort themselves by vendor.
How intuitive is that, exactly?

Generally the name of the vendor features quite prominently on the box of the software you buy. I agree that perhaps having categories might be better, but that's not a problem with Windows as such, but with it being the way things have always been done.

I would also not like to end up with a start menu containing entries for, e.g, "Office Software", "Office Suites", "Word Processors", "Games", "3D Games", "Entertainment (Games)", etc.

Who would create the categorisation and how would it be enforced?

Of course, it is editable, but how many users are willing to do that? I am a competent user, yet I still can't be bothered.

Well, I am - just like I'm willing to organise my DVDs and books, put things in sensible places in my kitchen, etc. You add stuff to a container, you've got to be prepared to organise that container. Why would a PC be any different? It can help a little, but it can't do everything for you.

Compare the Windows Start menu with the new KDE menu... and IIRC, Vista's new menu is a rip-off of KDE's

They're certainly very similar, but I don't know which came first.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[timbo234]

Yet that's exactly how it works on Linux. Looking at the menu on my Linux box everything is arranged in proper categories like 'office programs', 'internet' etc. even commercial apps like skype go in theri right place

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[AmaranthineNight]

Even that can be rather frustrating and annoying, since some apps throw themselves into the "All Users" portion of the start menu, some only install on your user account. If you're sorting into pre-dreamed-up categories, you need to create duplicate category folders in both your personal start menu and the all-users start menu, and if your new app creates shortcuts in both for some inane reason, drag them around separately OR figure out the magic perfect location that gets Windows to let you drag a new folder into position on the Start Menu rather than dropping it off into a new subfolder.

All of this because it doesn't have a sane way to install software and populate the start menu. The XP start menu is much better in that at least for your most often used software it's all easily available. The Vista start menu has that little search bar (which is nearly useless, launchy handles things much better, but it's a step in the right direction), but once you go into the jungle that is "All Programs" the menu is pretty much completely useless.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[AmaranthineNight]

Microsoft failed to set standards for their other products or give some guideline to third parties.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511447.aspx

Windows Vista UI Guidelines relating to the start menu. They'd prefer you didn't do the whole "Vendor Name" scheme, but Adobe or the likes can get away with it because they have a lot of software that would make a mess if you just threw icons for each into the top level. (unfortunately I'm pretty sure that they do that instead of grouping them together the way MS recommends). Office does the same thing, if I'm not mistaken. It includes links inside the folders to a lot of useless stuff but clutters your start menu by adding 6 or 7 icons to the bottom of your list. So MS should really follow their own guidelines...

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Nurgled]

Who would create the categorisation and how would it be enforced?

The distribution would create the categorisation, of course!

Oh, wait...

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Risen888]

Oh, I get it now. You're one of these people, aren't you? Yeah, Windows is probably the place for you. Quit pissing in our pool.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Risen888]

Bullshit. To wit: When I'm installing Ubuntu for someone, I will typically install N packages that aren't there out-of-box. The equivalent of "throwing a bunch of paper all over my desk," to use your (bad) analogy. Guess what? My "desk"(-top computer, har har) sorts it for me! Holy shit, what will they think of next?

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[gparent]

You missed my point, but don't worry about it. This discussion is old now.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[Ed Avis]

I use the desktop as a temporary store, eg for downloaded files and work in progress. I like them to be visible at the click of a single button

Would it not work just as well to use your home directory as a temporary store, and have a single button click to show your home directory?

One other use is allowing my (just turned) 3 year old to find gcompris and tuxpaint without having to navigate the diabolical new K-menu.

Yes, this is the second use I mentioned; surely the problem could be addressed just as well by making the start menu simple and uncrufted.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[rantingkitten]

Uh, actually, it's more like an office desk which I try to keep extremely tidy and clutter free.

Then I ask HR for a box of paperclips, and instead of handing them to me, they dump the paperclips all over the desk, then stick post-it notes on each one so I can find them easier, then they put a sign on my wall telling me that there are paperclips on my desk and I should look at the post-it notes to find them.

Then, after I've cleaned up the mess and go home, they come back to my desk and tap out a few more paperclips onto it, because they think I must have made a mistake in cleaning it and I really wanted more crap on my desk.

Really, if I install a program, you can just put the launcher in a central place with all the other program launchers. Gnome does this. KDE does this. Windows lets any program shit all over the start menu, often twice, then add a systray startup item, a desktop shortcut, a "quicklaunch" icon which will get hidden behind the forty seven others that are already there, and then it will bleat incessently about how there are unused icons on my desktop. :P

I am the first to blame users for most things, but this isn't one of them. It takes a very strict and painstaking way of doing things to keep all the app launchers in Windows sane.

Re:Why does anyone care about the 'desktop'?

[gparent]

It takes a very strict and painstaking way of doing things to keep all the app launchers in Windows sane.

Step 1. Drag.
Step 2. Drop.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!

Really, the windows way takes a few extra steps, but if it takes the major part of your day I don't know what to tell you.

Mish-mash

[delire]

From TA

"As far as eye candy, KDE 4.1 looks simply stunning."

I look at this screenshot linked from the article however and I see a confusing mash-up of design agendas. Dolphin file manager looks drab and strangely cluttered with shallow implied 3D for tabs and other delimiters yet the OS X style scroll bars bulge out. What are those scrollbars supposed to be made of? Blown glass? Gel? The panel at the bottom caves in with greater depth than the background image.. The simulated lighting model they're using to shade elements come from all over the place. I can count about 3 contradicting implied directional lights, from the panel to the icons to the widgets themselves..

Other things confuse: What is that Logitech logo doing in the top-right corner? Those tiny minimise/maximise buttons look like they're from another universe entirely: not echoed in any other element on the desktop, lest of all the stripey title bar.

I'm not convinced much effort has been spent on making KDE look 'stunning'..

KDE was very tweakable last time I looked so I'm sure someone will come up with a unifying theme. Glad to hear stability and speed have been greatly improved.

Re:Mish-mash

[lord_sarpedon]

KDE was very tweakable last time

Not this time.

Gnome has that annoying 'users are retarded' concept. I used to use KDE 3 because it had lots and lots of configuration options, some of which might be useful.

I tried a 4.1 RC recently. The 'plasma' system is terribly underdeveloped. In a lot of cases, the 'settings' dialog is...one checkbox. These aren't just widgets - you see this issue with a lot of major UI components. Like the desktop.

Re:Mish-mash

[dbcad7]

You can still tweak everything in Gnome, It's just not as easy as ticking off a check box.. requires some thinking.. To change some colors, and design your own theme means loading up gimp, editing some .rc files in a text editor, and compressing your files in a folder with ark.. takes a little smarts.. So who is really treating their users as retarded ? ... Next thing you know, KDE will have a check box that says.. "Do stuff I want"

But seriously.. the whole idea that gnome is designing with a 'users are retarded' philosophy is not quite correct. I think they have a pretty good set of gui configurable options.. could they use more ? probably.. but it's not quite as bad as the KDE guys seem to make it out to be.

Re:Mish-mash

[buchanmilne]

Dolphin file manager looks drab and strangely cluttered

Most likely this is the only application-related one.

shallow implied 3D for tabs and other delimiters yet the OS X style scroll bars bulge out

Default theme.

The panel at the bottom caves in with greater depth than the background image

If I understand what you mean, this is a theme issue.

The simulated lighting model they're using to shade elements come from all over the place. I can count about 3 contradicting implied directional lights, from the panel to the icons to the widgets themselves.

Theme.

What is that Logitech logo doing in the top-right corner?

Easy access to adding plasmoids etc. It is part of plasma, and as such not visible over windows.

Those tiny minimise/maximise buttons look like they're from another universe entirely: not echoed in any other element on the desktop, lest of all the stripey title bar.

kwin theme.

Right, so maybe if you actually tried it, you would be able to use something else than the default themes, and you wouldn't think it's a mish-mash ...

Ugh.

[monkeySauce]

STILL can't hide system tray icons?

This is a big problem for me. I don't have a widescreen monitor, so the system tray is taking over the panel, squeezing my task bar to a frustratingly small size.

KDE3 has an excellent system tray icon hiding mechanism. Why does KDE4 make me look at them all, all the time?

Re:Ugh.

[icebear.dk]

I follow the KDE panel development mailing lists and blogs so I read just this week that the System tray hiding is going into the KDE SVN or is already in. I don't know if it will be backported to a KDE 4.1.1, but it is a definite for 4.2.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[mixmatch]

Isn't that what alpha and beta releases are for? If the developers behind KDE really intended 4.0 to be fore developers, then I'd say that they aren't very smart and intended to turn users away from their software.

Re:But ... does it run linux?

[HappySmileMan]

Most of the KDE apps are just about integration, but there are a lot that I'd use, Dolphin, Amarok, K3B, Konversation, Dragon Player (Just in that it's very light and quick to use, not claiming it's "better" in any technical sense) and possibly KTorrent I would use a lot on Windows if I could.

Not to mention the KDE games are generally better than any other desktop games (although desktop games in general are only good for time-wasting :P).

However I think the DE itself WILL be able to run on Windows, I've seen some screenshots ages ago and vaguely recall hearing about how it will change your startup screen to allow you to choose between KDE4 and Explorer.

I KJust KWish...

[Bravoc]

they KWoululdn't Kstart KEverything with a 'K'

I KMean, KWhat's Kup with KThat?

Re:I KJust KWish...

[Risen888]

Like Dolphin, and Dragon Player, and Gwenview? Yeah, they don't do that anymore. Next caller, please!

Re:I KJust KWish...

[Bravoc]

No, I was thinking more like: KDirStat KDM Kinfocenter KlamAV Konsole KWallet Kexi Kile KPresenter KSpread KWord KPlato KDissert KNoda

etc, etc, etc.....

Re:I KJust KWish...

[Risen888]

Oh, so you're talking about applications that were made >3 years ago. I thought we were discussing the news. My mistake.

I will definitely try it out but ...

[slashdotlurker]

Finally, users are likely to miss Amarok 2.0 (at the time of this writing it's not yet completed) and a KDE 4 version of KnetworkManager.
KDE marks a triumphant return to full usability with the 4.1 release. I've read that some KDE 3 features still need to be ported to KDE 4, yet I'm hard pressed to think of anything missing, except for a way of hiding the panel.

You do not have amarok and knetworkmanager and this fellow is "hard pressed to think of anything missing". Is he high or something ?

Maybe it is just the default look

[DaveV1.0]

What ever it is, it still looks like OS by FischerPrice to me. Of course, I could say the same about XP, Vista, and pretty much every other OS.

Why do they all look like they were designed for 4yos?

Re:Maybe it is just the default look

[DaveV1.0]

yeah, I know, maybe I should have said "GUI", but I am also talking about other OSes.

What is a plasmoid?

[SpinyNorman]

Can someone please clue me in as to what a plasmoid is? What are the differences between a plasmoid and a regular application? Why would I want to use, say, a folder view plasmoid rather than a regular file browsing app?

Re:What is a plasmoid?

[Haeleth]

Can someone please clue me in as to what a plasmoid is?

As usual, Wikipedia is your friend:

A plasmoid is an extra-chromosomal DNA molecule separate from the chromosomal DNA which is capable of replicating independently of the chromosomal DNA. In many cases, it is circular and double-stranded. Plasmoids usually occur naturally in bacteria, but are sometimes found in eukaryotic organisms (e.g., the 2-micrometre-ring in Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

Hope that clears things up some.

Re:What is a plasmoid?

[emurphy42]

"Plasmoid" is KDE's name for "applet". See also Wikipedia's article on Plasma

Re:What is a plasmoid?

[Rich]

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.

Re:What is a plasmoid?

[Americano]

Dear Epic Fail, thank you for playing. Next time, you might want to spell it 'plasmoid' rather than 'plasmid'... and if you're going to quote, you might want to consider spelling the words in the quote properly... or maybe even cutting & pasting, since, you know, it's an electronic format. Plasmid and Plasmoid are entirely different terms, and have entirely different meanings.

From PlasmOid:

A plasmoid is a coherent structure of plasma and magnetic fields. Plasmoids have been proposed to explain natural phenomena such as ball lightning,[1] magnetic bubbles in the magnetosphere,[2] and objects in cometary tails,[3] in the solar wind,[4][5] in the solar atmosphere,[6] and in the heliospheric current sheet. Plasmoids produced in the laboratory include Field-Reversed Configurations, Spheromaks, and the dense plasma focus.

From Plasmid:

A plasmid is an extra-chromosomal DNA molecule separate from the chromosomal DNA which is capable of replicating independently of the chromosomal DNA.[1] In many cases, it is circular and double-stranded. Plasmids usually occur naturally in bacteria, but are sometimes found in eukaryotic organisms (e.g., the 2-micrometre-ring in Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

Just updated

[pinkocommie]

Loved the look, seems far more 'modern' if you may , menu animations etc
10 minutes in and I've had to temporarily go back to KDE 3.x (I was using KDE4.0 before)

My second X Screen is not accepting any keyboard input (regardless of how an application is started up there).
I even had a session of KRDC started from the command line and had whatever I typed in the command line instead of the application on the second screen.

Re:Just updated

[Mix Master Nixon]

[historical_revisionism]

It's to be expected. 4.0 was strictly for developers, and 4.1 is a testing release, where everything can't be expected to work properly. 4.2 is the release for the end users.

[/historical_revisionism]

Re:Just updated

[Wheely]

Indeed. This annoys me. Everyone saying 4.0 was only for developers completely ignores the fact that the KDE home page had 4.0 as the "Current Stable" version and 3.5.X as "Legacy" or something like that.

Re:Just updated

[borker]

yeah, so when a typical everyday mom and pop user goes to the upstream project's website to update their desktop shell by compiling from source, they get confused... real common problem that.

Re:Just updated

[Wheely]

That is not the point. The point is that it was labeled "Current Stable", not "Developers" or "Beta" or "Release Canditate" but "Current Stable".

I presume most would agree that this suggests it was the current stable release. Particularly given the 3.5 release was labeled "Legacy".

This is fine by me but I hate history being re-written quite so soon after the event. Why not just admit it was a mistake.

Re:Just updated

[borker]

it is the point. the vast majority of users get their desktop from their distros. At the time you were talking about, KDE's "current" "stable" source code version was 4.0. 3.5 was no longer "current" in that it was in maintenance mode... fresh, feature development was occurring in the 4.0 branch. Obviously in hind sight the communication could have gone better, but 4.0 wasn't a beta or an RC or anything it was the current release of the KDE development branch. The library API had stabilized and it was ready for it's intended user base: application developers, distro packagers and early adopters.

Re:Just updated

[Wheely]

Yes, I know all this but if you went to kde.org, clicked on the "Download" link and then clicked on "Current Stable" you got KDE 4.0

If you did this the day before KDE 4.0 was released you got err... the stable 3.5.X release with no caveats about its intended audience.

It may sound trivial but I think this was a significant reason why 4.0 got such bad press. It got everything a stable KDE has always got apart from the stability. I think it a bit churlish to start saying it was never meant to be for general users.

Re:Just updated

[notamisfit]

You're wasting your time, you know that right? The KDE types do not want to hear about the flaws in their flawless release cycle. Really, if Seigo and all the Kool-aid drinkers would have just manned up, admitted they made a mistake with the "it's a release/no it's not" bullshit, and moved on, we might actually have an interesting discussion about the features of the new release.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[phoenixwade]

Do we really need notification of a (dot)1 release?

Of course we do, we always cover shiny new Beta Software Releases when they are common to most Distro's.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[phoenixwade]

Isn't that what alpha and beta releases are for? If the developers behind KDE really intended 4.0 to be fore developers, then I'd say that they aren't very smart and intended to turn users away from their software.

Yes, but the RC (Release Candidate) isn't slated until v4.3 - and this IS news for some of us.... Even those of us who decided after the 4.0 release that Gnome was the path of enlightenment...

(Okay, so the last line was intended to be punny....)

Color me skeptical

[QCompson]

Especially after that trainwreck of a .0 release. Does anyone know if in Kubuntu:

1) the application shortcuts (khotkeys) are fixed. Last I checked in 4.1 beta, it was still not possible to set a shortcut for konsole. This alone makes the desktop unusable.

2) The expose type feature has been fixed to give it proper sensitivity? I had to continually jab at the top left corner of my screen last I tried it, and I was lucky if it worked 25% of the time.

Another major annoyance for me in konqueror is the fact that I can't right click and select back. Instead, I right click, and am presented with a history list of pages; since there is also no rocker navigation functionality, I am essentially forced to use the traditional back button at the top of the screen. Very inefficient.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[phoenixwade]

I'm a lot more concerned about the substance of the release than what number they throw on it.

For instance, MacOS has only had point releases for going on a decade now. In this case, the release is a huge improvement over the point-oh-no.

Yes, but if you drop off the "10." of the version number then Apple is conforming to the same Standard as most of the rest of the world.

I'm using OS X 5.4 right now, after upgrading this G5 from OS X 4.11. for some reason Apple likes being redundant (OS (Roman Numeral 10) 10 point version number....

Maybe it's the mathematical part of the Jobs reality distortion field....

Re:Remember folks is Flamebait

[mpapet]

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.

Screw KDE 4.1

[bloobloo]

I want Amarok on Windows.

/greedy

Re:Screw KDE 4.1

[eean]

Its coming... and it will come out using KDE 4.1 likely. :)

KDE 3 better than KDE 4 for vertical toolbar

[pz]

One thing that the KDE developers and testers seem to be not paying attention to is having the toolbar on one of the vertical edges of the screen.

This is my preferred location (the reasons why aren't important, but it makes far more sense to me to put the tool bar there).

None of the KDE screenshots show this location. Few of them even show the toolbar at the top of the screen. While it is possible to put the toolbar on a vertical edge with KDE 4.0 (haven't tried with 4.1), it is horribly buggy and ultimately unusable.

This was not the case with KDE 3 where the vertical placement worked fine, and elements like the pager and clock were well adaptable to the new location. Elements that in KDE 4 are really, really broken with a vertical toolbar.

It seems with KDE 4, we've taken a large step backward in design.

Re:KDE 3 better than KDE 4 for vertical toolbar

[Haeleth]

This is my preferred location (the reasons why aren't important, but it makes far more sense to me to put the tool bar there).

An increasing number of displays nowadays have wide aspect ratios. On such screens, there's plenty of horizontal space, but vertical space can be at a premium. It's hard to see why anyone with a wide display would not want the toolbar to be vertical...

Re:KDE 3 better than KDE 4 for vertical toolbar

[taniwha]

simply because it uses fewer pixels - a lot of space that gets wasted with window names in the horizontal bar gets reclaimed when the names are truncated - I switched to a horizontal KDE bar years ago and going back would be such a pain

Re:KDE 3 better than KDE 4 for vertical toolbar

[pz]

An increasing number of displays nowadays have wide aspect ratios. On such screens, there's plenty of horizontal space, but vertical space can be at a premium. It's hard to see why anyone with a wide display would not want the toolbar to be vertical...

Exactly my thinking.

Rawhide != updates-testing

[betterunixthanunix]

Try installing from updates-testing instead.

Re:Remember folks is Flamebait

[Intron]

"KDE 4.1 is great. I'm running it on an old Thinkpad t21 just fine"

That is great news. Whenever I see something with a long list of new features I kind of groan about what the new hardware requirements are likely to be.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[Daengbo]

You must be new here.

he says as I compare UIDs ....

KDE's one stupid, fatal flaw

[klez23]

I'd use KDE happily & lovingly if only I could disable the damn "tap-to-click" on my trackpad! I've been unsuccessful every time I've tried, leading to constant accidental clicks...

Re:KDE's one stupid, fatal flaw

[Bill Dimm]

I'd use KDE happily & lovingly if only I could disable the damn "tap-to-click" on my trackpad!

Isn't that an X-Windows problem, rather than a KDE problem? Anyway, here are the notes that I jotted down last time I dealt with it (not sure where I got my info):

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to turn off conversion of a tap on the
touchpad into a left mouse click (begs for accidents):
      Option "TapButton" "0"
      Option "MaxTapMove" "0"
      Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
Note that some people recommend also doing:
      Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
      Option "VertScrollDelta" "0"

Re:KDE's one stupid, fatal flaw

[klez23]

Thanks for the info!

Gnome doesn't have this problem, so I'd always assumed it wasn't X, but a KDE design decision. I'll try that when I get home though.

Re:real target audience

[SiChemist]

Although some rabid KDE4 fanboi has modded you "troll" for expressing your opinion, I have to chime in and say that I agree with you. I'm far less interested in desktop eye candy than whether the software and features that I need (and have in KDE 3.5.9) are available. For me, it still looks like "not quite there yet".

Also, I totally agree with you about Dolphin. After I saw what the dolphin devs called "tree view", I've given up on them making it good enough to replace Konqueror.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[Daengbo]

Apparently, it's a trend to go against convention and Gnome's bump to 3.0 won't add any features at all.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[sectionboy]

Actually, it's a (dot)(slash) release.

Re:The font still sucks

[c-reus]

I keep hearing that the default fonts suck but I've never understood the claim. The screenshot you linked to looks fine.

Can you provide a screenshot for comparison for what a decent default font should look like in your opinion?

Re:This time...

[FishWithAHammer]

Except that "folder view plasmoids" look retarded.

I want a desktop. I want a desktop that acts just like the desktop that all other relevant desktop environments on all other relevant operating systems. You know, like the one KDE3 has.

But no. This is just indicative of the future of KDE: "you want? Fuck you, we have a VISION." It pisses me off, because when I used a Linux desktop, KDE was always my choice. Can't say that anymore.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[Tweenk]

KDE is a desktop environment. GDI+ is a set of advanced (or obfuscated - I didn't use them personally) drawing APIs from MS. It's like comparing Mass Effect to OpenGL, so your example is much further off than the original comment. You could compare GDI+ to Cairo but not to KDE!

The comparison between Vista and KDE is completely acceptable when we take "KDE" to mean "KDE on Linux". Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.

Re:Please

[XnavxeMiyyep]

In addition to the lameness filter, we should also implement the Stupid Filter, once it is finished.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[FrozenFOXX]

Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.

The key difference is that Linux itself is usable to at least some people, a DE just makes it usable by a lot more people. Conversely Vista isn't usable by anyone, Aero just makes it obvious to a lot more people. ;)

Re:Do we really need notification?

[MightyYar]

Yes, but if you drop off the "10." of the version number then Apple is conforming to the same Standard as most of the rest of the world.

That was exactly my point - the numbers are not significant... the magnitude of the upgrade is. In Mac-land, the point releases have been pretty darned major. It is the same with this 4.0 -> 4.1 move on KDE. Similar to the move from 10.0 -> 10.1 in Mac land.

Re:The font still sucks

[BlackCreek]

Can you provide a screenshot for comparison for what a decent default font should look like in your opinion?

(This is not a flame! I do use KDE mind you!)

I am not the OP, but if you want to see what decent fonts look like google for a Ubuntu (Gnome) screen shoot.

Here is an anecdote for you:
As a full-time KDE user, when I bought a computer for my parents (1 year ago) I installed Kubuntu on it. Since Kubuntu has been such a mess in the last year, upon my last visit, I installed Ubuntu on that computer.

My mother (~60 years old, has no clue whatsoever about what KDE or Gnome are) upon being presented to what I called a new Linux flavor, said, spontaneously, within some 5 seconds looking at the Gnome menus:

Oh, the fonts are much beter

Re:Remember folks is Flamebait

[Daengbo]

If you read down into the comments, though, you'll find fairly decent chaps (Flar in particular) are basically told to FOAD and that KDE is better off without them.

Re:What slashdot effect?

[Daengbo]

That's because they call it "The Digg Effect" now. Meh.

Re:What slashdot effect?

[wastedlife]

Whoosh.

Overused meme, but nothing else truly conveys what just happened here.

Is there a decent 'Debian based' KDE distro?

[BlackCreek]

Hello,

I use Debian based for more than ???, oh, well, too long.

Debian used to cost me too much time to set-up, so I have been using Kubuntu; but Kubuntu is.... "not a good distribution" (i.e. a piece of s***).

Is there a decent, relatively up-to-date, Debian based distro for running KDE? I *really* need to stop using Kubuntu, and would like to avoid having to chose between a Debian system, and KDE.

Re:Is there a decent 'Debian based' KDE distro?

[notamisfit]

Not really. Most of them are Kubuntu spin-offs. The ones that aren't really aren't much to write home about either. How many times are you having to set up Debian anyways? Do it right and it should never be more than once.

Re:Is there a decent 'Debian based' KDE distro?

[bfree]

sidux is debian based (it adds it's own repository to debian and retains binary compatibility). It sticks to unstable (sid) and so no Kde 4.x release until it reaches it though.

Re:The font still sucks

[ThePhilips]

It all depends on settings.

I'd say, Ubuntu was first distro which actually made Gnome look good in general and fonts in particular. (Before Ubuntu kicked in, default fonts to read menus/ets in Gnome 2.x required a microscope. No font settings dialog was presentin 2.0.x releases either.)

I would also add that default Kubuntu isn't really good example of KDE setup. Many complain about it. Even I complain about it. If you like *buntus - then use default Ubuntu and do not wander around. The beauty of such easy-to-use distros is in their default settings: do not like them - do not use the distro.

But to give an example of up-to-date Debian-based KDE-centric distro ... Well, I'm still looking for it by myself ~_~

This is supposed to be impressive?

[DanielJosphXhan]

So let me get this straight. You can move widgets and you can resize panels? Will the madness never end?!?!

Re:Do we really need notification?

[wild_berry]

New here? Get off my lawn, you pesky n00b!

Re:What slashdot effect?

[Daengbo]

;) Indeed.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[dotancohen]

Here is a picture of the recommended minimum system requirements for Vista:

http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/markrussinovich/WindowsLiveWriter/PushingtheLimitsofWindowsPhysicalMemory_878B/image_4.png

Does Vista really need 2048 GB of memory or is the MB scale supposed to read KB (Which would mean 2 GB of memory)?

Re:But ... does it run linux?

[Enderandrew]

I've actually seen some screenshots of plasma widgets and panels on Windows. Aaron Segio said he didn't personally plan to port plasma to Windows, but someone else was doing it.

Bye bye to KHTML?

[Midnight Thunder]

Now that KDE 4.1 is using WebKit in place of KHTML, does this mean EOL of KHTML? For anyone using Konquerer in the new KDE, how does web performance differ from the previous version?

Re:Bye bye to KHTML?

[lbbros]

Who ever said that? KHTML is still being actively developed.

Re:Bye bye to KHTML?

[vizZzion]

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.

Re:real target audience

[DevonBorn]

You can still run KDE3 applications on KDE. Like with GTK apps you just need the required libraries installed and they'll run. As for Konqueror - it's still there. It still does all of the things it used to so use it instead of Dolphin. It's probably also possible to change Konqueror to be the default file manager.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[SanityInAnarchy]

for some reason Apple likes being redundant (OS (Roman Numeral 10) 10 point version number....

Unless you read the X as the letter X, as a nod to Unix. If they bumped it to 11, that'd be XI, which would ruin that scheme -- and if they bumped it to 20 (XX) they'd be rightly accused of version inflation.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[SanityInAnarchy]

Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person

That depends very much on how you define "DE" -- after all, the iPhone doesn't have a proper DE, yet is usable to the average person.

(Yes, I realize the iPhone doesn't run Linux. I believe the analogy holds -- but if you must, take the EEE PC in its default mode. It has KDE installed, but that's the "advanced" mode.)

Re:Do we really need notification?

[Anpheus]

If he knew anything about Unix nomenclature, that'd be a dot(1) release.

(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.)

Re:Maybe it is just the default look

[jhfry]

You don't work in user support do you? Most computer users are 4 year olds.

Do you realize what the most asked question I am faced with... "how do I change my screensaver?" Of course the user means their desktop wallpaper. Keep in mind I work at a government site with a standard wallpaper enforced by policy.

I think it is a GUI's ultimate goal to make the user feel like a 4 year old can use it. Of course, most 4 year olds are more sophisticated than many average users, but that's beside the point.

Those of us who are technically proficient will immediately change things into a "power user" configuration which will eliminate wasted screen realestate by title bars, scroll bars, icon labels, etc. But those users who are essentially 4 year olds will still get their shit done.

My only complaint about modern OS's is that they seem to favor percieved easyness over actual usability. Sometimes it's best to require the user to learn something new, as long as what they learn is intuitive. I still remember the days of WordPerfect 6... where any idiot could type a document and quickly glance at a keyboard template for the "special features". The pros could do almost anything without thought, while still maintaining 40+ wpm. Make the OS easy, but change stupid conventions... for example I don't need a icon to do anything if you would simply make it obvious that pressing X+Y to do it would work.

Not to forget the #1 feature

[JiminyJones]

KDE 4.1 top feature, which for some reason is not mentioned in any of the reviews, is its new, sleek theme. In 4.1, the default theme is so black that it has a negative RGB value (as opposed to boring old 4.0, using a simple zero). Some say the color was created using pictures of black holes, or thermal imaging of an object at absolute zero.

Re:Not to forget the #1 feature

[smellotron]

I hate to burst your bubble, but negative values in the standard RGB spectrum are physically possible. So yeah, negative-red would give you a blacker black, if the output medium had a wide enough gamut.

Re:Not to forget the #1 feature

[JiminyJones]

I think you should also review this before researching any further.

Re:Not to forget the #1 feature

[smellotron]

Yeah, I realized you were joking about it... I just found it ironic that you were more correct than you knew.

Begrudgingly Back to Gnome

[Spudds]

I've been a long time Gnome user. A month or two before the release of KDE 4.0 I decided to look into KDE a bit and after poking around, decided to try it out. Hearing all the cool stuff about KDE 4 I decided to wait until it was released. I hung in there for 4.0, all the 4.1 betas, and 4.1 RC1.

During RC1 I had to deal-breaking show stoppers:
* I could NOT move a plasmoid on the desktop. I'd move it, and then it would snap right back into place in the upper-left corner.
* I could NOT resize a panel so that it was vertically *smaller*. I can resize it larger, but it simply won't let me make it smaller.

Also, less of a deal breaker for me:
* Zero support for separate monitors on separate video cards.

I waited around for 4.1 official, thinking these were just bugs and would be fixed by final release, but nay, they're still there in 4.1. Perhaps it has something to do with kubuntu's packaging, I don't know.

All said and done, I think KDE4 is amazing and has huge potential but until simple things like moving plasmoids and making panels smaller isn't an issue, I simply can't use the desktop. If anyone has any advise about why those two things happen I'd love to hear it as I really want to use KDE4 as my primary desktop.

I guess I'll be waiting for KDE 4.2.

Oh and P.S. Thank you KDE Devs for all your hard work! It looks amazing and I can't wait to see where it goes! I will definitely be rejoining your camp as soon as the environment doesn't impede on my productivity!

Re:Begrudgingly Back to Gnome

[boud]

Since both things (moving plasmoids and making the panel smaller) have worked for me for quite some time, there must be something wrong locally. I'm suspecting either a botched upgrade (meaning you think you're running 4.1 final, but actually still use rc1), or the distribution packages are broken (I am using OpenSUSE 11 myself), or some old configuration issues are plaguing you. To test the latter, you can move the .kde4 directory to kde4.back, logout and login to test with the default values and see whether these problems persist.

Re:Begrudgingly Back to Gnome

[Spudds]

Unfortunately I've tried that several times, but I appreciate the reply.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[Gill Bates]

The number in parenthesis refers to the section of the manual where the command can be found. See man(1).

Re:Do we really need notification?

[ezzzD55J]

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.'

Re:Please

[ryanov]

I typed "I never ride the bus because of all of the blacks" into it, and it was classified as not likely to be stupid. Either the stupid filter is stupid itself, or it's a bit racist.

As a warning...

[Karellen]

...from the KDE devs, read this before you install:

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F

(Disclaimer: I used KDE 4.0, was aware it was a developer release, and liked it for what it was despite the lack of polish. I've been using the KDE 4.1 betas and RCs for a while and really like what's been done and it's really usable for me. But YMMV and there are some parts that aren't up to par with 3.5.x yet. That's fine - I didn't use those parts. But if you are using them, then 3.5.x is still being patched and updated, so it might be worth waiting 'til 4.2 before you switch.)

Re:As a warning...

[QCompson]

Christ, why didn't they have such a page front and center when they released 4.0? Did it take that much negative feedback to awaken the KDE developers from their google-release-party induced stupor?

Re:Do we really need notification?

[ryanov]

A good example is crontab(1) and crontab(5). Try 'man 1 crontab' and 'man 5 crontab' and you'll get the command and the config file, respectively. It normally doesn't matter, as if there's only one in the manual, you get the one if you do 'man whatever'.

Re:Maybe it is just the default look

[jhfry]

Appearently the less-than character doesn't parse well... that was supposed to say still remember the days of WordPerfect LESS-THAN 6...

Re:The font still sucks

[vizZzion]

KDE's default font is "Sans", so whatever your vendor or yourself set up as your system's default font. If it doesn't look good on your display, it's probably due to AA settings, which you should be able to change easily. I do agree that some distros ship sucky default fonts that do not even have AA capabilities, but on my system, the fonts look crisp and clean.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[scaryfast]

That's clearly a Photoshop.

There's still some free resources that aren't being mauled.

Re:The font still sucks

[bonch]

A decent default font would be, for instance, Helvetica/Lucida in any default OS X screenshot. The fonts in those KDE screenshots are enormously wide. Words look uneven because many letters are much wider than others.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone could not understand the claim, but I guess we're all just throwing out opinions here. I'm certainly not the only person to say this--just do a Google search for "linux fonts suck." The font Sans just looks so huge and garish to me, and I've never been able to stand it. It has an odd, amateurish, almost cartoon-like quality that has always made me dislike KDE screenshots.

Re:A second attempt

[vizZzion]

Except that Troy is still active in KDE, only less visible, and never "removed from the project" as you try to put it.

Re:A second attempt

[lbbros]

Aside from the debatable statements (read: meaningless name calling) of your post, you're also inaccurate. Troy wasn't "removed".

Re:ISVs need to start making LSB-compliant package

[vizZzion]

A desktop goes a bit further than only installing files in the right place. You also want it to tie in with security mechanisms (su vs. sudo), just as an example, and maybe you also want to install two binaries with the same name at the same time. LSB doesn't solve that problem for you ... Where is KDE packages not LSB compliant, btw? That would be useful information, rather than just a random statement I cannot verify (and thus fix) at this point ...

Re:The font still sucks

[Overly Critical Guy]

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!

Re:This time...

[vizZzion]

That desktop has been there for more than 20 years. What are you complaining about? On a serious note, you'll be able to use the desktop as file dump just like in traditional desktops with 4.2 again.

Re:Panel object can be moved.

[vizZzion]

He also writes that the panel cannot be resized and thus not repositioned. That's done with the small arrows you get when you open the panel controller with the cashew.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[setagllib]

If you knew anything about Unix nomenclature, you'd know the number in a man is just the section. And if you'd read "man man" as all good geeks should, you'd have all the sections spelled out.

              1 Executable programs or shell commands
              2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
              3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
              4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
              5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
              6 Games
              7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
              8 System administration commands (usually only for root)
              9 Kernel routines [Non standard]

Re:real target audience

[Risen888]

Parent is not a troll. Parent is misled. Items of note:

1. Amarok is in a separate development cycle, it's managed by totally different people. I'm running the Amarok 2 development version and it's all right. Still lacking some of the features of the 1.x cycle, but they're trying to port it to entirely an entirely new framework. Good work so far. Check it out.

2. If it's not enough for you, there's nothing stopping you from running KDE 3 applications on KDE 4.

3. Yeah, Dolphin sucks.

Re:Maybe it is just the default look

[DaveV1.0]

Yeah, I feel your pain. I have worked support before.

But, I think the "make the user feel a 4yo can use it" doesn't have to mean "Looks like it was made for a 4yo." I think it is that perceived easiness vs actual usability that you mentioned.

The UI doesen't have to look, well, childish to be easy to use and understand.

Re:Maybe it is just the default look

[Sj0]

You almost NEED that perception though. People are lazy and easily scared, and highly emotional.

If it looks hard, then people are going to think it's hard, even though a Grade 3 education is all you've needed to be able to use a PC for the past decade.

If people think it's going to be hard, they won't even try.

Re:Please

[XnavxeMiyyep]

It's a program. It doesn't judge your argument as much as it judges the prose and the structure of your writing. For instance, I typed lol u tk him 2 da bar and it returned that it was most likely to be stupid. It's a work in progress, but I think it'll turn out to be pretty cool when it's done.

Desktop backgrounds?

[Trogre]

So does this release allow you to set the different desktop backgrounds for different virtual desktops across multiple monitors, like KDE 3 did?

Or are they still trying to dumb down the desktop experience a la GNOME, Ubuntu and KDE 4.0?

Re:Desktop backgrounds?

[lbbros]

Although you can't do that with virtual desktops (yet), activities (look up the definition of Zooming User Interface in the Plasma FAQ link already mentioned in the comments) can have both independent backgrounds and plasmoid layouts.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[smellotron]

... x.1 to x.11 every 3 years ...

Do my eyes deceive me, or are you using binary for those version numbers?

Re:This time...

[smellotron]

I want a desktop. I want a desktop that acts just like the desktop that all other relevant desktop environments on all other relevant operating systems. You know, like the one KDE3 has.

Everyone says that about every piece of technology until they discover something better. Even if it's ultimately not successful, I find it commendable that the KDE devs are willing to try something new.

Re:Do we really need notification?

[DMUTPeregrine]

It could be stranger. TeX's version numbers tend towards pi.

Not impressed yet?

[Gazzonyx]

Just wait 'till you see the screen savers!

Another use for Man(#) notation

[Gazzonyx]

Well, from time to time, I use the "()" notation as a subtle "RTFM" if I'm mentioning something obscure or complex. For me, it's kind of like linking to wiki when the discussion of something is well out of scope for the topic on hand.

When you see the "()"s, you know exactly where you get more info on the subject. I think this is somewhat usual for mailing lists and multiple CC'ed emails where you have people of varying degrees of experience. I think it really does help S/N ratio, IMHO.

Re:The font still sucks

[boud]

There is no font "sans" -- it's a generic placeholder that will be substituted by whatever font the distribution thinks is a nice sans-serif font.

In any case, anyone who is able to discern any difference between the font rendering in Gnome and the font rendering in KDE is deluded -- both desktops use _exactly_ the same font rendering technology. If you don't like the default options, you can set your preferred kind of anti-aliasing, hinting and font size.

Re:This time...

[FishWithAHammer]

Doesn't it amaze you that this extremely basic functionality was omitted at all before a release?

Re:A second attempt

[FishWithAHammer]

You're right. My bad, I thought they'd done something sensical.

I used to contribute money to KDE projects (because I'm not a C++ programmer, otherwise I'd have been contributing code), but with these people running the show and the direction they've chosen to take the project (with a wannabe cult-of-personality type trying to run the show, more's the pity), I said to hell with it went back to Windows. It's unfortunate seeing a project I used to really, really like decide to barf on its shoes. :/

Reactionary...

[msimm]

The same people that teeter on that poisonous-user edge couldn't take a balanced view if it bit them.

I was expecting it to be some kind of proper rant; but all he really says is some users are assholes. News flash, it's true. None the less, as some manner of representative what you say can and will be misconstrued by the little people; hence, generally it's still a good idea to keep your public mouth shut.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[Tim C]

Well personally I define "DE" as "desktop environment", and hence the iPhone is usable without one. It wouldn't be usable without the GUI it does have, however...

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[tehcyder]

Does Vista really need 2048 GB of memory or is the MB scale supposed to read KB (Which would mean 2 GB of memory)?

Gosh, I'm not sure, after all most PCs have about 2048 GB of memory as standard nowadays, so who knows?

Using screen hot-corners?

[Macka]

I've got a few different systems I use, running Mac OS X, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and I use the screen corners a lot; all configured the same using either Expose on OS X, or Compiz on Gnome/Linux. If I plant my mouse in the top left corner, windows from the same application group are exposed. Using the top right corner all windows in the current Desktop view are exposed. Bottom right hides all windows revealing the Desktop, and bottom left shows all my virtual Desktops (Spaces in OS X).

I've been doing this for years on OS X (more recently on Gnome) and now it's as natural a breathing.

Can I do the same on KDE 4.1, or does the desktop plasmoid thingy in the top right hand corner stop me from doing that?

Computer UI or Art?

[cpcnw]

Bring back the KDE2/3 UI - its all gone wrong ...

Re:Do we really need notification?

[CastrTroy]

Well, it depends on how you do version numbers. Remember Windows 3.1, and then 3.11 for work groups. Some people actually like the idea that 3.11 is less than 3.2, because, well, it is. Instead of using numbering systems that don't make any sense, like 3.1.1.

Call it something like 'Mojave'

[wisty]

Set up a blind test, call it something like Mojave. Tell everyone it's an experimental OS from Apple, or Google's OS, or Sugar 2.0. See if they like it.

Distro or DE ?

[buchanmilne]

I'm using KDE 4.1, I don't see such ugly fonts.

So, I fail to see how this is a DE thing, as opposed to a distro thing ...

Re:The font still sucks

[carnalforge]

Spot on! I use kde from the 2 days and a month ago i had to buy a new laptop. then tried ubuntu (the only linux distro i had around) on that and got surprised with the fonts, really the best default choices. But now back on my favorite, gentoo/kde as i found this setup better swits my needs. While we are at it, anyone knows how to (or where to get) the fonts used on ubuntu in kde?

Re:The font still sucks

[JesseMcDonald]

It's not "a lack of professionalism and attention to detail", it's a consequence of aligning edges with the nearest pixel. You can either have blurry fonts with precise spacing or clear fonts with the sort of sub-pixel spacing variations you describe. You prefer the blurry fonts; that's fine. You can configure KDE to render fonts that way as well. Similarly, GNOME can be configured to perform the subpixel alignment demonstrated in your screenshot.

KDE and GNOME use the same libraries for font rendering; the differences in appearance are purely a matter of preference, not capability.

Re:SARCASM CENTAL

[dotancohen]

Does Vista really need 2048 GB of memory or is the MB scale supposed to read KB (Which would mean 2 GB of memory)?

Gosh, I'm not sure, after all most PCs have about 2048 GB of memory as standard nowadays, so who knows?

So THAT'S why we need 64-bit operating systems, I see.

Re:The font still sucks

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

It's a very generic font face, true. The font rendering looks very nice.

Which are you commenting on?

Re:The font still sucks

[TuringTest]

it's a consequence of aligning edges with the nearest pixel. You can either have blurry fonts with precise spacing or clear fonts with the sort of sub-pixel spacing variations you describe.

Or also you could have both, but that would require rewriting the font rendering engine, as the GP suggested.

Re:The font still sucks

[TuringTest]

And second error, what you think looks strange is called kerning.

Actually no, kerning would be solving that strange look. It looks weird because it isn't doing proper kerning.

Re:The font still sucks

[JesseMcDonald]

OK, although that isn't technically a problem with KDE itself, but rather with the FreeType rendering library. Still, it's nice to know that one can have both clear fonts and (mostly) accurate spacing.

Would you happen to know why KDE and GNOME behave differently in that regard, given that they use the same font rendering engine? Or is it as I said, that the reason GNOME's fonts look better to the GP is that GNOME doesn't enable sub-pixel positioning by default?

Re:Do we really need notification?

[awrowe]

Nah. man finger(6) is your next mission.

PRAISE THE LORD

[xmvince]

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!!!

Re:The font still sucks

[macro187]

Actually the font rendering is being done by Xft using Freetype according to settings configured through fontconfig.

Re:Please

[ryanov]

I realize I'm probably walking into some straw-man argument, but how do you figure?

Re:Please

[ryanov]

How does that differ from a grammar checker, though?

Re:Please

[XnavxeMiyyep]

They're working on an elaborate algorithm that forgives some grammatical and spelling errors, but punishes more for others.

Re:The font still sucks

[fnj]

what you think looks strange is called kerning

That is a ludicrously BAD job of kerning. In fact, I think it's a complete absence of any attempt at proper kerning, but if it's just a lousy attempt at kerning, it's laughable. It doesn't do KDE any good when people's first reaction on seeing it is to burst out laughing, or gag with nausea, on seeing the default fonts.