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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 really liked 4.2 already and have been using it for a while now. As for the looks: I think it's just a matter of getting used to it. Now that I worked with 4.2 a while I find KDE 3 applications to look bigger / clunky / unpolished.
When I first switched from Windows to Linux I also found KDE 3 applications to look unpolished. After using it for a while and after getting used to the style I suddenly found Windows to look unpolished.
But I'd say it took me way less time to get used to the KDE 4 looks then it did with KDE 3 so I guess they are in fact more polished ;)
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'?
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?
You have to be careful when using too many colors, or else you might wind up with something like Windows XP which looks like it was designed by Fisher-Price.
Seriously, it's easier to be minimalist, as you won't offend or annoy people as much. If you try to do more bold things, aesthetically, you might find some people who love it, but a lot of people will absolutely hate it. GM just had to shed an entire car company that tried "bold styling" too much, called Pontiac. Here's an example of one of their more famous forays into non-conservative styling:
http://www.edmunds.com/media/reviews/top10/05.trucks.worst.residual.value/05.pontiac.aztek.500.jpg
I found this image in an article about "worst residual value". With something that ugly (though I'm sure the designers didn't think so), it's hard to find people to buy it from you. I recall this vehicle being an outright disaster in sales.
Of course, that's the beauty of themes. Unlike a car, where once it rolls out of the factory you can't easily change the way it looks or its color, changing a theme on your desktop environment is pretty trivial, taking only a few mouse clicks. So it's better if the DE uses a minimalist theme for the default, and then offers some more exciting themes as options which users can select if they want.
Actually, it's probably not just him.
Qt4 has larger spacing margins and padding on widgets by default in there layout system than Qt3. Also, I believe KDE4 uses larger fonts and more anti-aliasing than KDE3 systems, so the same dialog with the same set of widgets and text most likely is larger in KDE4 on a pixel basis.
That said, you can probably control this to some extent with font settings etc, but the widget padding and margins are up to the application developer.
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 want to mod funny... But, i want to respond, too.
It's really nice to be able to show off the KDE (compiz/KDE/Mandriva/et al) desktop rotting the cubes and polygon desktops around, in ONLY 256 MB of SHARED VIDEO RAM,not the umpteen .75 GB or 2GB vista demanded before even turning on Aero. It's a nice, good feeling to have people looking over my shoulder or asking about that desktop, and being able to say, "No, this is not Vista. It's KDE, in Linux. And, this has been possible about or more than a year prior to Vista's release, and i had some of these features working on a 128 MB graphics card from CompUSA, and even wowed the Comcast guy who was restoring my service back in late 2006..."
Makes people wonder who the hell decided vista needed all that graphics power to do what Linux (and Mac) have been on lesser resources. Conjures up thoughts of collusion/screwing the consumer --- depending on one's perspective, that is...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.