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

[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: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.

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.

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: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...

Re:making progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent KDE distros

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

Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"

[evanbd]

What? No blessed +2 silver dragon scale mail?

Re:making progress

[Narishma]

I'd recommend Pardus, Mandriva or Arch Linux.

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

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.

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"

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?