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."

Comments

Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[bheer]

...interesting to see the KDE team drop the K from a word where it'd actually be appropriate.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[davejenkins]

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.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[Grishnakh]

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'?

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[vivin]

"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.

Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K

[dakameleon]

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.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

I'm afraid I wont get personally excited about any KDE release until they get it working with the Orca screen reader, which works very well with Gnome.

I only read at 250 words per minute, but my listening speed is now at 460wpm for reading fiction, and over 500wpm for Orca reading web pages. I have a blind friend who listens to his computer at 860wpm. This is very cool stuff, so it's a shame KDE is late to the game.

"granting 2,000 wishes"

[FooAtWFU]

I wish for a hundred million dollars.

And world peace. And a pony. And the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[evanbd]

What? No blessed +2 silver dragon scale mail?

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[orzetto]

I wish for a hundred million dollars.

INVALID

And world peace.

LATER

And a pony.

WONTFIX

And the year of Linux on the desktop.

WORKSFORME

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Wow, so you listen to 7.6 words per second when "reading" fiction. Let me guess, your favorite is steven king? (I heard he writes it at a slightly slower 6 words per second).

But all joking aside, KDE should be compatible with audio readers for the benefit of blind people.

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;)

Re:making progress

[Narishma]

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

fixing 10,000 bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

KDevelop4?

[DoofusOfDeath]

While we're on the topic, does anyone know if/when KDevelop4 will be released?

Re:KDevelop4?

[Vectronic]

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.

Re:making progress

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:making progress

[pyrico]

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.

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[WaywardGeek]

Well, "words" are a bit fuzzy. Openoffice reports this text as 925 words. This is an mp3 of Orca reading it, which lasts 120 seconds. It's fun to listen to. I'm on my 7th novel in 4 weeks, which I play in the car, at the doctor's office, or anywhere else that's normally down time.

I Ran KDE4.2

[mpapet]

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.

Re:making progress

[StormReaver]

It's a matter of opinion, as I see GTK and Windows looking ugly and clunky, and Qt/KDE looking beautiful and polished.

KDE vs Vista vs 7

[Enderandrew]

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?

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[0racle]

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.

Karma burning for fun and profit

[Enderandrew]

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

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[moonbender]

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.

That could also be due to the fact that *buntu is the most popular distribution (I'd guess by a fair margin these days), particularly among newbies who tend to get stuck (and, sometimes, give up) easily.

Re:Karma burning for fun and profit

[Kalinda]

The problem, as ever, is that Kubuntu gets the seriously short end of the stick. I used to use it (before I switched to Arch with KDEmod/Chakra) and it worked alright before KDE 4 came out. However, since KDE 4 it's been generally slow and the developers have taken longer than other distros to get new KDE releases or beta/RCs out. And then there was the idea of forcing KDE 4 on all their users in version 4.1 when it wasn't ready for regular use. I see they've since realized the error and are offering both KDE3 and 4, although KDE4 has is now pretty damn good.

I'd put this down to the vast majority of *buntu users using Ubuntu/Gnome. It also gets more press than the other variants.

That's not to say the developers haven't made good contributions to the KDE community. Like making OpenOffice 3 work with KDE file dialogues.

Re:making progress

[Enderandrew]

What gets me is that while there as some Plasma devs working on a Netbook containment for small screens, we haven't seen a widget theme/overall theme designed for small screens.

Between mobile phones, netbooks and smartbooks, you think Nokia/Qt would be all over this. If not, then perhaps the KDE devs themselves would come up with a good solution here.

Re:Per-desktop activities assignments

[davidsyes]

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...

Save me from the polish

[Burz]

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.

Re:Save me from the polish

[dotancohen]

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.

Such as what? State some examples so that the ball can get rolling. If it is a ball that KDE needs to get rolling, I'll file the bugs but I need you to tell me what is missing. Thanks!

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent KDE distros

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

Re:That's cool and all.

[pseudonomous]

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.

Re:making progress

[Narishma]

I'd recommend Pardus, Mandriva or Arch Linux.

Re:making progress

[david_thornley]

You know, bigger margins and padding are why I ditched the Aero look on Vista, and selected an earlier, uglier, but denser style. Criticize my aesthetics if you will, but I like displays that give me more information in a given screen area.

(Reminds me of a woman I knew in college, taking a "Physics for Poets" class and complaining about the two-sheet limit on exam notes, which really didn't allow all that much with beautiful handwriting and large amounts of whitespace. I compared it to a 3"x5" card I'd been allowed for a serious science course.)

Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[RogueSeven]

As a windows user for my entire life making the switch to Linux over the summer of 2007, I was nothing but thrilled with the looks, functionality, and personalization (through customization) KDE 3.5 had to offer. At the time, I wrote off Gnome as too different from what I was used to. After several months of falling completely in love with my OS/KDE, I began to strongly evangelize the use of Linux on the desktop, convincing a small handful of friends (doing my part for the whole "Year Of.." thing).

I went with the flow when KDE 4 took over. Although I was pretty disappointed with a lot of things (removal of a ton of Konqueror functionality that Dolphin sure as heck didn't replace/replace well, plasma crashing all the time, list could go on but I'm not trying to bash KDE or anything here), I kept patiently waiting for the promise of a stable, beautiful, better-than-3.5 desktop. When even 4.2 didn't fix a lot of the things wrong with my system, I finally decided to switch desktops until they got their act together.

KDE's problem is that my original plan has changed. I've gotten so acquainted to my new environment, that I can't see myself switching back to KDE anymore. It's not just inertial that's a factor here, I genuinely like my current setup. I used the word problem there not because I believe a single user matters to KDE, or any other F/OSS project for that matter, but because I wonder how many people are just like me: Hopped off the KDE bus, originally planning to get back on a few stops down the road, but have now opted for a different mode of transportation altogether (do I get points for bad car analogy here??). To boot, I am relatively young, and a sworn lifelong Linux user; there are many years of my life of Desktop Environment usage left.

At any rate, when Linus slammed KDE months ago, I was still on the fence. Now I'm pretty much in full agreement with him, minus the whole flamewar thing.

Here's the part where I'm pouring out champagne on my floor. "Thanks for the memories, KDE". I loved you, and I'll miss you.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[atomic-penguin]

I cannot believe the parent was modded troll. I have been a desktop Linux user, going on 12 years now. I've used many other window managers, Fvwm, twm, WindowMaker, Blackbox, Fluxbox, CDE, xfce, and even Gnome. So I have tried many different window managers, and have been able to easily adapt to different GUIs with relatively little pain. KDE has been my primary desktop for the last 5-6 years, that is until KDE 4.x came along.

I gave KDE 4 an honest test drive, that lasted less than a week. Much of the KDE 3 functionality you would expect to be included in KDE 4 is gone. A good example is the KDE regular expression editor which comes as a standard KDE utility in KDE 3. The desktop wasn't really a traditional desktop interface at all. The desktop somehow became this ill-behaved widget container. My right mouse button wouldn't do anything, at least not what I wanted it to do. The worst part was the customization which has been part of every window manager I have ever used; customization was gone. There was no way to make KDE 4 work in a way which I want to use. Those are a few examples off the top of my head. I used KDE 3.5 until April, it was still available in the main repository of Hardy, as well as having KDE 4 available as a choice from the same repository.

I upgraded to Ibex in April, and tried out KDE 4.1; it is still not what I expect. I switched to Gnome for maybe a day, and couldn't get it to handle multiple desktops with Xinerama the way I want. Finally, I switched to xfce. It works the way I want, I can change the behavior if I don't like it. I have been using xfce all summer. I will undoubtedly give KDE another try. I have to wonder how many hours of productivity has been lost on frustrated KDE users not able to adapt to the radical changes presented in KDE 4.

Why is it that the two most divisive window managers, KDE and Gnome, seem to be immune from forking especially when their most loyal users are dissatisfied? Why is it that the KDE developers insist on radical changes, even when critics and loyal users claim KDE 4 is on the wrong track? I, for one, would much rather have ugly 2-D widgets in a useful environment and fully functional interface. As opposed to 3-D compositing and widgets that are pretty, lack any practical use, and result in a half-working interface.

Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus

[ion.simon.c]

*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"

Re:Folder Sneek??

[stilborne]

> I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.

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

You can check it out on Windows too

[oneandoneis2]

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.

I speak Japanese, but thought "Caizen" = Chinese

[zooblethorpe]

I'm fluent in Japanese; I earn my bread and butter by translating Japanese documents into English. But this "Caizen" silliness had me scratching my head wondering what Chinese word it was supposed to be. "C" followed by a vowel is the usual romanization from Chinese for a "ts" sound plus a vowel. Meanwhile, unless someone's trying to get cute, the hard "K" sound in Japanese words is always romanized as a "K". Given too the KDE project's tendency to use "K"s in software titles, the deliberate non-"K"-ness of "Caizen" made me think they must be trying to spell something pronounced without a hard "K" sound.

Silly me; silly them.

Cheers,

Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?

[Trogre]

I looked at your post for some time before deciding to reply, but I'm curious as to exactly what your point is.

Are you suggesting that the very act of picking up a book, smelling the paper, pausing at the turn of each page, and finishing each chapter with a brandy is the only way one can properly assimilate a literary work?

Some people might really want to read novels but might lack the time for dedicating a day and a half to staring at nothing but inky markings between meals and cigars. I'm all for taking time to smell the flowers, but prefer taking the time myself rather than having it forced upon me by artificial limitations.

Personally I have no problem with listening to audio-books, once I've gotten used to the voice as the OP mentioned. Then again I also don't mind listening to pre-recorded music *without* being in the presence of the original band, so what do I know?