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KDE 4.3 Released

Jos Poortvliet writes "After another 6 months of hard work by over 700 people, after fixing over 10,000 bugs and granting 2,000 wishes, KDE 4.3, or 'Caizen,' is here (the release takes its nickname from the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement). The KDE Desktop Workspace introduces, besides the usual stability and speed improvements, new widgets, the ability to 'peek' in a folder with folderview, and activities tied to virtual desktops. The KDE Application Suites feature improvements in the utilities like a more formats supported in Ark and the return of the Linux Infrared Remote Control system. Instant messenger Kopete introduces an improved contact list and KOrganizer can sync with Google Calendar. Kmail supports inserting inline images into email and the Alarm notifier has gained export functionality, drag and drop, and has an improved configuration. The KDE Application Development platform has seen work on integrating the Social Desktop and the new system tray protocol from Freedesktop.org. You can watch a screencast of the Desktop Workspace here."

11 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. Re:making progress by Narishma · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your problem is not KDE, it's Kubuntu. One of the worst KDE distros I've every tried.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  2. Re:KDevelop4? by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's currently in Beta 4, and judging by the release times of the previous Betas, and assuming Beta 4 is the last before the final release, I would guess the somewhere between the end of this month, and the end of September.

    I know that doesn't really help, but if you are really that interested, start playing with the beta.

  3. Re:Per-desktop activities assignments by 0racle · · Score: 4, Informative

    It went away when Plasma became another layer above the window managers virtual desktops. Had plasma simply been a library and a method for displaying desktop widgets this wouldn't have happened but some retard had to have it this way, so away went different wallpapers for different virtual desktops, along with a lot of other features KDE3 had though most regressions were not because of plasma.

    I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't.

    Anyway, now with KDE 4.3 you can have one activity for all your virtual desktops or have one activity per virtual desktop. If you do the former, you can have all your desktop widgets on all desktops (handy so you don't have to switch around to use that folder you put on your desktop or to check the weather) but loose the ability to have different wallpapers for those desks OR you can have different wallpapers by having a different activity on each virtual desktop and loose the ability to share widgets across all desktops. So if you want that folder or your weather widget on every desktop, you're going to launch a separate instance for each activity.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  4. Re:making progress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Decent KDE distros

    http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/
    http://www2.mandriva.com/
    http://chakra-project.org/

  5. Re:That's cool and all. by pseudonomous · · Score: 3, Informative

    Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.

  6. Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K by vivin · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Spelt" is also the past-participle simple-past form of "to spell". It's a little more common in countries that use British English. "spelt" and "spelled" are equally correct.

    --
    Vivin Suresh Paliath
    http://vivin.net

    I like
  7. Re:making progress by Narishma · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd recommend Pardus, Mandriva or Arch Linux.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  8. Re:Folder Sneek?? by stilborne · · Score: 3, Informative

    > I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.

    it did. system settings did too. just turn them on in the view options.

  9. You can check it out on Windows too by oneandoneis2 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm stuck with XP all day, but courtesy of the folks at KDE on Windows it's still possible to check out the release candidate for 4.3, and soon 4.3 itself should be available too. As detailed on my blog, it's as simple as:

    Go to the website and grab the installer (kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe). Should download in seconds, then you can run it to start the REAL downloading and installation process.

    Stick with all the default unless you have good reason not to. Apart from anything else, most servers don't seem to have the "unstable 4.2.95" package. I got mine from ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de

    Skip all the language packs unless you really need them, install the rest. Let it get on with it. When it finishes, check the "run system settings after exit" box and finish.

    It has some slightly odd choices for the defaults, so I went through and set everything to "Oxygen" to make it consistent & easy. But the main reason to run this thing is just to check that the QT apps work on your machine before you try and run the full KDE environment.

    Assuming it works, try a few of the other KDE apps that will have appeared in your Start menu. It has games! :o)

    To get KDE itself running, you need to run something which is, for some reason, not in the options in the KDE submenu in the Start menu. Go figure. Why would they want to make it easy to run KDE on Windows after you've downloaded KDE for Windows..?

    To get the actual desktop environment, you need to run plasma-desktop.exe, which in a default install will be in C:\Program Files\KDE\bin

    That should launch your KDE experience, and you can have a play from there. So far, it's a little unstable (Should be better once 4.3-proper is available) but otherwise performing fairly well.

    --
    So.. it has come to this
  10. Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K by dakameleon · · Score: 3, Informative

    In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.

    If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.

    That quite ignores the fact that there's an official ISO standard, an addendum to the ISO standard endorsed by the Japanese government and taught in Japanese schools, and a widely used defacto standard system for transliteration used outside of Japan, and even inside.

    All of which specify the transliteration of the word in dispute as 'kaizen'.

    It's all the more ridiculous for being inconsistent with years of C-to-K swaps used throughout KDE.

    --
    Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
  11. Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus by ion.simon.c · · Score: 4, Informative

    *shrug*
    a) You should check out 4.3. It's nice.
    b) Xinerama is going away, dont'cha know? If you haven't tried xrandr, you might want to. If you have, and it doesn't work like you'd expect, see if the fixes are in the works.
    c) When you try out 4.2 or 4.3, give the "Folder View" configuration a spin:
    * Right-click on the desktop
    * Click on "Appearance Settings"
    * Change the "Desktop Activity" "Type" to "Folder View"
    * Click "Okay" or "Apply"