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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."
I'm not trying to troll here. It certainly looks more polished than the train wreck that 4.1 and 4.2 was, but is it just me or do QT4 and GTK applications just look ... bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?
That said, I like that it's making progress!
"Activities can now be tied to virtual desktops, allowing users to have different widgets on each of their desktops."
THIS is what i've been waiting for. I don't know why it was not there to begin with. Glad it's here. I wonder if it'll break my Mandriva One-modified KDE4.x, however. It would be nice to get back the ability to change the backgrounds on the login widget as well as the background when the desktop is locked. Mandriva seems to cripple that feature for the non-paid installs, and none of my sleuthing has let me to how to undo that cripple. It was one reason i paid $50 contribution to PCLOS 2007/8.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols. As noted above æ"å- is how one should write the Japanese word for "improvement". Unfortunately, many people outside East Asia has no idea how to read or pronounce that, so we "romanize" words based on a commonly accepted latin alphabet equivalent. The usual Latin alphabet equivalent is kaizen with a k. Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-- the most common example is the NTT wireless provider Docomo (meaning "anywhere"). Here endeth the lesson.
davejenkins.com |
Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-
Why is that? What's wrong with 'k'? In languages using latin-based alphabets, 'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant, unlike 'c' which varies a lot depending on the language and the word. In English, 'c' is sometime a hard consonant that sounds like 'k' (like in "crap"), and other times is a soft consonant that sounds like 's' (like in "celestial"), and sometimes is combined with other letters for something else (like in "cheese").
If you want to use a Latin alphabet to show non-native speakers how a word is pronounced, and the word has a hard 'k' sound, why not just use a 'k'?
Sure, sure. But this is the KDE project for pete's sake. Spelling the word with a C is a ... missed opportunity.
No, they did not fix 10,000 bugs. They closed 10,000 bug reports, which is a completely different thing.
Many of the bug reports were dupes. And many more were closed for one reason or another without actually fixing the reported problem.
While we're on the topic, does anyone know if/when KDevelop4 will be released?
Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.
I still have it on my Debian testing/unstable laptop. It's not a very new laptop and KDE4.2 ran very quickly on it. The desktop itself did not have glaring issues. None of the eye candy is enabled by default, so it doesn't look immediately fabulous on Debian. But turn stuff on and there's plenty of prettiness available. There were issues with Korganizer, so it sounds like they cleaned it up quite a bit. For the most part, I don't use konqueror any more since I found bojourfoxy. http://andrew.tj.id.au/projects/bonjourfoxy/
It's clear there is a huge amount of activity going into these releases because whole features have been rewritten since kde4.0. Over time, it looks like most of the common KDE applications have been ported to kde4 too, so there's still solid interest in the desktop.
It looks like they are continuing their efforts to simplify working with KDE as a programmer. So, maybe the bigger KDE4 story that isn't covered as much on slashdot is the programming side?
I'm actually using XFCE4 at the moment for no good reason other than change is good. It's leaner, with enough eye candy for me.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It really bothers me when I hear people make uninformed silly comparisons saying that KDE 4 just copies Vista or 7. Honestly, I think there are some great "pillars" that have great potential, but sadly are still under developed, such as Sonnet and Nepomuk I think KDE 4 is just starting to really come into its own and can become a truly great desktop. I just don't think it has delivered on its potential yet.
Conversely, in the areas that perhaps KDE should consider taking a page from Microsoft, they refuse to do so. When I've suggested to Aaron Seigo that he solve the "no-right-click" problem when designing Plasma to also be fully usable on a touch-screen, I suggested he take a page from 7 and use a multi-touch gesture such as 7's for a right-click. In 7, you hold one finger down and then tap with a second finger for a right-click. Aaron deleted my suggestion. I made it a second time thinking maybe I didn't post it, and he deleted it a second time. I've made suggestions to maybe take a few cues from 7's taskbar, and those are always deleted as well.
Is it honestly some great sin to emulate the better features of other desktops? Hasn't KDE done that from the beginning?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
From the KDE 4.0 launch and on, Kubuntu/Ubuntu has been shipping some pretty broken packages. I don't want to hate on the Kubuntu developers/packages, but it is the simple truth. And it sure seems like everytime I hear a complaint about KDE 4.x, it is from someone who had a bad experience trying KDE 4.x in *buntu land.
If that is the case, might I suggest that you try a better KDE distro? openSUSE, Arch Linux and Sabayon would be recommendations, in that order.
Here is a weekly snapshot openSUSE/KDE 4 SVN live CD.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/KDE4-UNSTABLE-Live.i686-1.3.62-Build1.1.iso
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'd like to give all these dev's that pushed/forced us away from tree/folder view a boot to the head. X-Tree Gold in the DOS days had more functionality then a modern file-manager does.
Here is a hint that you are doing something wrong:
If you have to spend time adding functionality to a program that worked before you removed another function, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!
I have recently moved to OSX for a big project I am working on, and I curse Steve Jobs mother every time I need to use Finder and open a dozen different windows/work my way through several nested folders that 3 mouse clicks would do in Windows Explorer/Konq. (from v3.5)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Disclaimer: I have not installed KDE 4.3 - yet - and I run Kubuntu 9.04.
First off, I would like to applaud the team for the work they did and continue to do for KDE. I have really pleased with how far they have come from 4.0 - which made Enlightement look full featured and bug free. I'm looking forward to improvements to Amarok and Kopete - especially with respect to the new Kopete Facebook chat plug-in. (I currently use Pidgin because it has facebook chat and it has killer-apps status - soon I'll kill someone because of it).
That being said, I'm not thrilled with their Akonadi PIM database. I have found it to be a serious resource hog and that many applications simply do not play nice with it. And the insistance that it must scan EVERYTHING again at start up is a serious WTF. I'm also not sold on the social desktop concept either - but I haven't played with it yet and I prefer for my desktop background to be more of a ever changing photo album, so I like it empty. Taskbar, thank you!
Again though, I want to thank the people at KDE and the volunteers who support the project. Good job!
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I like GUIs as much as anyone (and its the reason why the last system I bought is a Mac) but as a 10-year Linux user I already know this new package of FOSS loveliness is not going to save Kubuntu from being truly awful. It doesn't change the fact that so much in the Kubuntu GUI is broken (like not being able to set a static IP).
And I suspect this release will not suddenly display some inspiration or direction for either of those projects. What I will have, yet again, is a pile of (sometimes brilliantly coded) pieces that don't quite fit together or come together to make end users say, "Oh, I get it!"
There is a heap of stuff that KDE (and Gnome, and the distros) won't do because no one (not a single soul) will ever take responsibility for facilitating critical use cases across these projects. And that is why after all these years, the Linux desktop still "feels wrong" to most techies (and more confounding to average users than other OSes).
Some weeks back I was considering a switch to Gnome, but then a story popped up on Slashdot (with impeccable timing) announcing that Gnome will be put through the same whole-integer re-write process that KDE just went through.
No thanks.
Did they fix the ability to specify a geometry when starting an app (like Konsole) AND have it honored?
In 4.2 you could specify it, but it was ignored.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols.
Japanese has three phonetic writing systems, Hiragana, Katakana and "Romaji", the latter being their word for the Roman alphabet. These are traditionally reserved for separate contexts, but any can be used to spell any of the symbolic Chinese characters (Kanji), and may be at various times for a variety of reasons.
Xenophilia. I have seen it happening in various countries: in Italy, nicknames often end in "y", like giusy, francy, etc. where using "i" would be correct with respect to Italian orthography; in Norway, there are more and more Jacob's and fewer and fewer Jakob's; in the US, Staci instead of Stacey.
This also comes into advertisement, as using a foreign language seems exotic and acculturated. It is however quite comical to see how many spelling mistakes end up in such advertisement: as an Italian I could write an encyclopaedia of misspellings of Italian food ("Spaghetti carbonara", "Pizza casa di Mama", "Cambozola", ...); similarly, good look to you English speakers figuring out what a "No Stir" shirt is supposed to be in Italy.
So, what's wrong with K you ask? There are already too many of them and it does not attract enough attention, that's what is wrong.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
It's taken me about six weeks and 7 books to get here. I started at about my normal reading speed, around 250wpm, which sounded really fast. Audio books are normally around 170wpm. After each book, the words start sounding really slow, so I sped it up. There are several tricks. First, use Eloquence (Voxin on Linux), since it's easy to understand at high speed. Second, always use the same voice. You're ear is good at understanding speaker-independent speech, but it's even better at learning a specific voice. I'd bet most people here on slashdot could understand speech at this speed after a similar effort.
Unfortunately for me, learning to understand even faster than this is going to be harder. I don't have any problem understanding individual words at higher speed, but I start losing comprehension. My brain isn't wired to assemble concepts that fast. A blind friend of mine has solid comprehension at over 800wpm, which is just amazing, but he's been blind since childhood, and he's freaking brilliant. He says I could eventually get near his speed, though I'm doubtful.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Does KDE/Gnome do a panning widget yet? Spent months trying to get panning working on my 800x400 eeePC, wrote a little hacked up util to watch the mouse and pan screen as necessary, eventually gave up with that kludge and went back to XP which does panning out of the box.
Fucking xorg - all they responded with after they dropped 'native' support for panning in xrandr is that it's a problem for the DE to deal with. DE's don't seem to care too much as all they're doing is working on 3D eye-candy. Forget basic functionality like a virtual panning screen, that's in the too-hard basket.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Get any PDF, HTML, TXT, etc. Copy and paste it into gedit. Orca does a great job reading from gedit.
Creating the mp3 is trickier. Save the TXT file from gedit. Then, strip all the UTF-8 characters, like "circumflex", which is easy: just strip all the characters with the high bit set using a simple C program called stripUtf8. Then, use a customised version of the Voxin 'say' program to create the .wav, and 'lame -V2 file.wav' to create the mp3. To use the 'say' program, you'll need to pay under $10 to a non-profit in the UK. I hate to sound like a add for them, but that's the only legal way to get it cheap.
I've put the source for stripUtf8 and my customised 'say' program here.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
What you've posted is just a travesty. You have an excuse only if you are actually blind, and need to consume large amounts of text aurally.
After a few seconds, one gets used to the voice, and its incomprehensible stream of sound becomes a comprehensible but ugly stream of sound. I'm currently listening to the Arabian Nights, read by Johanna Ward, with her precise, velvety voice. Each character sounds different, emphasis is where it needs to be, etc. With your way of doing things, not only is there no emphasis, no change of pace, no different intonation for dialogue, but things such as italics are deliberately stripped out even before the text reaches the synthesiser, along with all the diacritics necessary for words to be properly spelt and uttered. Résumé will become resume.
Does that mean that Quanta web development tool will be native to KDE4 finally?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I agree with you in some points.. I loved the KDE3 polish. The way I could right click on an image and change it from tga to png on the fly. The way sftp, and smb worked in all the save and open dialogs. It was a pleasure to operate. However, I'm a graphics nut and I do love the new interface. I also like the search in the menu. I can no longer get used to Gnome for that one reason.
KDE is coming together, albeit slowly but it is coming. I've been using Digikam, and Amarok, and Kdenlive lately. Watching them progress so much this last year has reminded me of what it was like to whatch kde3 progess. All of the amazing changes that happened, and we waited for almost daily.
Now with KDE4 we just expect that all of the stuff we got with KDE3 was just going to magically hop on the train, but it hasn't. It is taking time just like it did with the 3 series, and we are impatient because we have work to do and our lives to go on with. I understand how you feel, but I also understand now though that it will work out... and I am now at least OK with that and certainly willing to wait.
once more into the breach
Comparison to Windows or even OS X is funny. You know why? KDE is also a gigantic suite of Windows applications which uses native Windows frameworks, controls. Same for OS X version. For example, a lot of open source developers expect ogg native playback on the host OS. What do I do? I simply install quicktime componenents from Xiph.
Best way is watching it compile on OS X, you will figure the magic.
That is a single proof you need when you talk about people -not- understanding what KDE 4 revolution is for open source. It is not "bigger, more stylish" KDE 3. As I said on my previous post, one should find a real or virtual windows and install kde 4 to it before talking about it.
For example, if Windows 7 sends a "right mouse button pressed" signal when one does that gesture, KDE 4 under Windows 7 will have it. You understand what I mean? Think beyond Linux&BSD.