What's Coming In KDE 4.4

buzzboy writes "If you're wondering what the folks over at KDE have been cooking up for the next major release, KDE 4.4, well, quite a bit as it turns out. In a lengthy interview, KDE core developer and spokesperson for the project Sebastian Kugler details the myriad changes that are coming with the 4.4 release — the fifth major release since KDE 4.0 debuted to much criticism nearly two years ago. The project has closed about 18,000 bugs over the past six months and the pace of development is snowballing. The 'heavy-lifting' in libraries and frameworks for 4.0 is now starting to pay off. Perhaps the biggest change is in the development of a semantic desktop. According to Kugler, 'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?' There is also a picture gallery of KDE 4.4 (svn) screenshots so you can see what it will look like."

Comments

Labelling.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is a pity that KDE 4.0 wasn't really ready to be a 4.0 release, and the controversy wasn't wholly undeserved; but I've actually been pretty pleased at how KDE 4.X is shaping up.

Had prior 4.X releases been 3.9X releases, with 4.0 coming soon, I suspect that the mood would have been largely positive.

Re:Labelling.

[ericrost]

Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.

Re:Labelling.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Fair enough, that would certainly make more sense.(though I'm pretty sure that I have seen, from time to time, the "start at previous major version number, add .9, then asymptotically approach target major version number until you are ready" numbering scheme used. It isn't horribly ambiguous as long as releases of the previous major version number never made it as high as .8(as in the case of KDE, where 3.5 is the highest release of 3.X).

Re:Labelling.

[ByOhTek]

Yeah, I felt like all the jokes about people who buy a MS OS prior to the first SP1 being the "paying beta testers" would have been appropriate for KDE4.0 and 4.1, at least if they charged.

4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.

My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if 4.4 is going to be finally stable, or will it be 4.5 or 4.9.

4.3.3 is still broken in multiple ways.

Plasma crashes sometimes and still has troubles properly resizing and drawing its widgets.

Akonadi fails to start even on a pristine configuration, and its sophisticated "why can't I start" diagnosis fails to identify the problem. (I googled out that I had to comment out a line in its config file.)

Phonon works worse in 4.3 than it did in 4.2 for me. Its xine backend suddenly can't open my soundcard, while its gstreamer backend doesn't open vorbis files. (Other xine based programs work fine, gstreamer has all required plugins installed.)

KWin has a tendency to crash with compositing enabled (and more rarely without), on a geforce 7 series, which generally has worked rock solid for years.

Kopete crashes sometimes, Akregator used to crash in 4.2, haven't tested in 4.3 since I migrated to Liferea.

You could probably find a lot more warts, I don't use that many KDE apps. Bottomline is, even in 4.3 they still haven't gotten such basic functionality as a stable window manager and solid desktop widget drawing and resizing. Instead they're working on ever more features, ever more APIs and deamons that work as centralized points of failure...

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right about there being quality problems with KDE up until 4.3. But keep in mind that even their most broken releases were still much, much better than GNOME.

GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.

GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.

On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.

Re:Labelling.

[Bralkein]

IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros. So KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for prime time, too bad. So why the hell were certain distros inflicting it upon their users if it wasn't ready? Couldn't they have tested it, noticed that it wasn't ready, and waited before deploying it? I really don't know what they were thinking. My distro of choice (Arch Linux) waited til KDE4 was done before rolling it out, and Arch mainly aims to be on the bleeding edge most of the time. In fact I installed 4.0 anyway, because I wanted to try it out, but I really appreciated Arch's common sense in handling the matter. Not so for too many of the other distros though.

I don't think you need to be worrying about KDE 5.0 for a little while, but even if it does turn up sometime soon-ish, there's no reason why it needs to be as painful as 4.0. For example, the change from KDE 2 to KDE 3 was pretty smooth. Even if this hypothetical 5.0 release was a major change from the KDE 4 series, I would imagine that the KDE devs might learn from past mistakes (gasp!) and do things differently this time around.

Re:Labelling.

[MrHanky]

Question: Are you using Kubuntu? I tried it a bit on a friend's Ubuntu install, and it was utter garbage. Debian's KDE is infinitely better. I can't remember having Kopete or Akregator crash on me, and I use those all the time. KWin might crash when using compositing with poor drivers, but X.org is currently in a state of flux -- it was stable until my latest update.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

or KDE4 version 0.1

Re:Labelling.

[sim82]

The real problem was that most large distributions (fedora in my case) dropped KDE 3.5 support entirely as soon as 4.0 came out. This forced me to completly skip the FC9 release, and eventually to move on to a distribution without the continuous half-year release terror.

Re:Labelling.

[Interoperable]

I think they need to get away from the 4.x series, it's a great desktop now, but a lot of people still have a bad taste in their mouth from only having tried 4.0. Similarly to how Vista SP3 is called "Windows 7," KDE should abandon 4.x and jump on the 7 bandwagon (Windows 7, Intel i7) and release 4.4 as KDE7; possibly KDE8 just for good measure.

Disclaimer: I am aware that Vista SP3 is distinct from Windows 7.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, gentoo x86_64. Without any fancy compiler flags, just -O2, -march and -g.

Re:Labelling.

[QCompson]

GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.

Oh please. The new gnome-shell is already usable and mostly stable. Just because the KDE team made their transition into a new release a massive trainwreck doesn't mean every software project will follow in their footsteps.

Gnome hasn't stagnated, it's a mature and stable desktop environment. Because of this, Gnome is often the preferred choice for enterprise desktops. KDE is obsessed with shiny objects and web 2.0 garbage, which is why it has taken so very long for the 4.X series to be merely usable.

I'm not claiming that KDE is down for the count, just that the desktop environments seem to have taken a different development strategy as of late.

Re:Labelling.

[Jurily]

4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.

I *hate* it. At least the 3D stuff can be turned off now, but there's still a noticeable lag with keyboard input randomly. I mean, seriously. I have a 2x2,4 GHz processor and you tell me you can't display the key I pressed under 0,1 seconds?

Oh, and please don't try to find and animate every possible program on the run dialog until I actually finished typing the relevant part.

Re:Labelling.

[BlackCreek]

As a former user of Kubuntu and KDE, I agree with what you say: Kubuntu IMHO sucks.

I believe that that is big problem for KDE. Ubuntu has become the standard "easy and ready to use" Linux desktop. It is not perfect, it has a large share of problems but it has become the standard. As most new users will try out KDE through Kubuntu, and have a bad experience.

Add to that the KDE4 fiasco, and you get as a result KDE's popularity nowdays, a mere shadow of what it was years ago (when it was the preferred choice of more than 2/3 of the folks voting at LinuxJournal yearly poll).

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

The KDE team has already said that KDE5 will be a small API break, like KDE2 to KDE3. The whole point of the major changes between KDE3 and KDE4 was to have a modern framework that would last for years to come.

Re:Labelling.

[RiotingPacifist]

4.2 wasn't bad, and I actually *like* 4.3, I can easily set it up to do what I want/need easily.

My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?

I called it some time ago
4.4 = all 1st party tools pretty much finished, 3rd party tools there but not polished
4.5 = 3rd party tools good to go

then somebody will release dbus/kross/plasma malware and they will realise that the whole DE has to be redone from a security perspective!
5.0 = an entire re-write with some concept of security and threading (kross for example runs in the same thread as the parent app)
5.1 ....

6.0 = port to qt 5?

Re:Labelling.

[Neil Hodges]

I'd consider a CFLAGS including -g to be "fancy." Adding the debug symbols can actually cause problems, at least in my experience.

Actually, if you don't disable strip, a lot of the debug symbols will be removed anyway.

Re:Labelling.

[molnarcs]

It's completely useless to list all those problems without identifying the distribution you use... If it happens to be Kubuntu, well, no surprise there. But on Archlinux, I haven't seen any of the problems you mention, and I haven't seen user reports on the forums either. Most recently some of us had problems with the latest xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 ugprade, but it was solved in a few days...

That's the problem with posts like yours - all the evidence is anecdotal. Although I had the occasional (still, quite rare) kwin crashes in 4.2.x, I had none since I updated. No idea what the widget-resize problem is, everything's smooth as silk here. Sound works like a champ, I use xine (with pulse enabled), plays everything smoothly. I only have the gstreamer backend installed because it's needed by a DVD authoring app (devede I believe). I haven't had akonadi installed on my setup until about 10 days ago. Since than, it has been running without any problems..

On a final note, Arch's packages are pretty much vanilla packages, and they rock solid (no pun intended). There was a brief period during the xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 update (they all happened at the same time on arch) that caused problems for many users, specifically those who have nvidia cards.... but all problems have been solved in less then a week. Again, if KDE works fine here, works fine on Mandriva (at least that's what I heard), then your distro's implementation is to be blamed, not KDE...

Re:Labelling.

[RiotingPacifist]

The 3D stuff could always be turned off. I have no input lag (on QT apps, i have a few lag spikes in firefox, but i don't know who to blame for that) on 1x2Ghz that is usually running at 800mhz, i suspect it's something to do w/ your graphics card, but then again im only running a Radeon Xpress 200M with radeon drivers.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. I built and installed GNOME 3 this past weekend, and it's nowhere near being comparable to even KDE 4.0. It's nowhere near as stable as you're making it out to be.

And you're wrong about it being the "preferred choice for enterprise desktops". That had nothing to do with quality or usability. That just had to do with it having a more corporate-friendly licensing scheme than KDE did, mainly because of Qt. So vendors like Sun and HP tried to adopt it. But since Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech, and their subsequent relicensing of Qt, that's no longer an issue.

And finally, you're wrong yet again about the direction KDE is taking. It's not about "shiny objects" or "Web 2.0", it's about them making better use of the hardware resources of modern systems. While some demos have been put together showing OpenGL-accelerated effects, the main benefit has been with the desktop being more responsive as a whole, due to better hardware acceleration.

KDE 4.3 is extremely responsive, while GNOME 2.28 on the same system is clearly less responsive.

Re:Labelling.

[lambent]

As noted above, the problem really lies with the numbering scheme. Most distro maintainers knew that KDE 4.0 was completely unsuitable for anyone. However, the clamouring userbases only cared that 4 > 3, and as such, in general demanded that 4.0 be provided to them. And they got what they asked for.

Re:Labelling.

[icebraining]

It's a problem with open vs closed mentalities. People are not used to the "release early, release often", as it's not very common with proprietary software.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of Windows 4.9 (ala Windows ME)

Re:Labelling.

[ThePhilips]

GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.

Ubuntu crowd would disagree. Project can only be declared dead if it has no users.

Slow release cycles are fine - as long as software delivers what users do expect. Though I'm personally Gnome hater, some folks are pretty happy about Ubuntu and its default UI.

On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.

"Much richer" in what way? And how do you define "useful desktop environment?"

Those are silly questions to ask of "desktop environment" whose sole purpose in life is to allow its user to browse for a file and to start application. Applications are the meat of the desktop, not the desktop environment.

N.B. Likewise most of early complains about KDE4 were "where the hell the applications for it?" - KDE4 might have been ready already in KDE 4.0 times, yet applications using KDE 4.0 were few and unstable.

Re:Labelling.

[ByOhTek]

Not really a "distro" problem for me as I'm a FreeBSD user. I chose to install 3.x and 4.x simultaneously.

After putting a lot of effort into 4.0 for a week, I said "fuck it", and went back to 3. The same happened with 4.1.

I missed 4.2, and ended up with 4.3 on an Ubuntu Live CD I was experimenting with. My first thought was "Wow, they did some nice tweaks to this to make it play nice with Ubuntu. I wonder what it's like on FreeBSD?"

I went back and installed it on FreeBSD and it was just as nice as it was on Ubuntu.

I went back and found some 4.2 releases, and they didn't seem so bad either. My old 4.1 release still wasn't pleasant though.

Re:Labelling.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros.

Really?

IMO a think all of the blame lies with KDE. If it wasn't ready for prime time, then don't mark it as a release.

Re:Labelling.

[RiotingPacifist]

Yeah I kept hearding that so i went for a meander around debian and fedora and TBH i'm yet to see what people are talking about, there are differences but KDE in kubuntu is not significantly different from that in debian (kde3 vs kde3) or fedora (kde4 vs kde4).

I haven't run openSuse or mandriva yet so perhaps they are truly better but Debian's KDE is not significantly better and in fact lacked tweaks that had not made it upstream yet, so I'm starting to suspect it's just more generic ubuntu hate or as a result of ubuntu seeing more work on gnome, because I'm at a push to see any real difference.

Re:Labelling.

[EvilNTUser]

While I don't know if this will help in your particular situation, I've found random sluggishness like that much reduced after I got an Intel SSD.

Re:Labelling.

[pantherace]

KDE has always used X.9x... as development releases for the next major version, be they betas or rcs, since pre 2.0. (Usually .90 +) So he's saying exactly what you are.

(I seem to recall some 0.9 releases, but that's long enough ago, and it wasn't what I was using then, so I'm not sure.)

Re:Labelling.

[MrHanky]

No, it's the fact that several things Simply Did Not Work in Ubuntu's KDE. Amarok playing mp3s, for instance, despite all other mp3 players working fine. The lack of tweaks doesn't bother me at all, what I want is the expected features to actually work, and programs to run without crashing. Which is what I get from KDE when it's not Kubuntu, but which I didn't get there.

A KDE that's stable and functional. That's all I ask for. Debian's got it, and so has Arch.

Re:Labelling.

[Bralkein]

Well actually I don't think they should have marked it as release, I think it's hard to argue any other way seeing how things turned out. However, upstream software providers can screw things up. Distros should act to shield their users from these screw-ups, by judiciously selecting the package versions that will give the best experience for their users. In the case of the KDE 4.0 release, I think the distros completely failed to do this. So I think they deserve some share of the blame.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do agree with your last statement but the KDE team did say that 4.0 was for early adopter and developers and not ready for everyday use.

Re:Labelling.

[maxume]

That's like blaming the butcher when a restaurant under-cooks your chicken.

Certainly, KDE used poor meat handling practices.

Re:Labelling.

[Random BedHead Ed]

Except that you can't really label major API and design changes as a point release. It SHOULD have been 4.0_ALPHA_01, 4.0_BETA_01, and 4.0_PROD coming soon.

I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?

Where KDE4 really fell flat for me was feature parity between the new core apps and their 3.5.x predecessors. My experience is that these crucial apps regressed or substantially changed in many ways. My work flow in photo image processing more or less died with the new Gwenview, which changed its feature set and behavior substantially, and I hear a lot of complaints from users of Amarok, which was a stellar music player in KDE 3.5. IMHO, the real "KDE is ready to use now" release (call it 4.0 or whatever) should have been the one where the core apps had at least 90% of their previous features, if not full feature parity.

Me, I'm still on KDE 3.5 and wondering where to go next. I love the new libraries and the overall look of the new desktop ... but that's the problem: it's a new desktop. Whether I leap to KDE4, Gnome, or something else, it's the same amount of work to me, and that's where the KDE project screwed up.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

This forced me to completly skip the FC9 release....

The first thing reading this made me think of was 'this guy enjoys making himself suffer...'

Re:Labelling.

[RAMMS EIN]

``It is a pity that KDE 4.0 wasn't really ready to be a 4.0 release''

Which raises a good question: What to call the releases leading up to what will be the next major release?

There are several schemes in common use, but I haven't seen one that really strikes me as the right way to go.

For the software that I develop, I simply don't make a release until I feel it is usable. Intermediate versions can be referred to by the identifier assigned to them by the version control system. For actual release numbers, I use the major.minor.micro scheme, where major version changes indicate changes that aren't backward compatible, minor version increases indicate added features, and micro version changes indicate bugfixes.

This works, because the software I develop is simple, and I can put together a new stable release in limited time. But for a project the size of KDE, doing a major overhaul and getting it stable can easily take years and require a lot of communication and testing. You probably do want intermediate versions to be packaged and easily installable by end users, because you want those users to try it out and give you feedback. So you will want to make releases that aren't your new major version yet. But how do you label them? Obviously, calling them X.0 is not the way to go ... but what is?

Re:Labelling.

[segedunum]

Why? It happens all the time in the open source world. The developers decide when their objectives have been met. It's up to the distributors to decide if it is good enough to go in fron to users, and the majority of distributors have proved that they are merely version bumbers and packagers with no thought about the overall. It's a large part of the reason why the Linux desktop is totally stillborne.

Re:Labelling.

[AvitarX]

worth noting that gnome had become very polished too.

I know Ubuntu (7.04) was the first time I had tried gnome in years.

I have to say as a desktop it just felt right. With compositing now to stop bluring on window drag, I am thrilled with it. KDE3 was no longer on my radar.

Re:Labelling.

[QCompson]

While I don't know if this will help in your particular situation, I've found random sluggishness like that much reduced after I got an Intel SSD.

Now that's a ringing endorsement. KDE4: it won't be sluggish if you use a SSD!

Re:Labelling.

[SomeKDEUser]

See, nobody forces you to update.

Sometimes, in the life of an app, the devs find that it is not possible to better it without making some radical changes. This only means that the older version becomes the older version instead of being the current version.

It stays the same app.

For the developper, this is the occasion to correct major design mistakes, rethink how the apps should work, etc. This is crucial so the set of functionnality of the app continues to live.

Of course some users are unhappy.

But I would never give up my KDE 4.4svn for the latest KDE3. It is _so_ much better. Alt-F2 was great, it is now insanely great (unit conversion on the fly? an actual calculator? remote controlling amarok and the volume? live search of wikipedia?).

I have been a KDE user since 1.0. And never a transition was so ambitious, and yielded such insanely great results. And yes, never a transition had been so painful. But even in the 4.0 days, it was clear that it would be worth it. From the start, it was clear that it would be more integrated, more beautiful, and yes, more powerful.

Simply, it took time to add the features back, but this time around, not only do you get the features, but they also are not a drag on the devs, who can then bring their apps to the next level.

Is it perfect yet? No. Is it the best DE bar none? yes. (Sorry mac-addicts).

Re:Labelling.

[monoqlith]

That's a good point. Kubuntu now comes with 4.x releases, but when I started using it it didn't seem finished enough to warrant the entire distribution changing versions...I use 3.x at work and the difference in terms of functionality was rather stark. There is nothing wrong with taking a couple of point releases to polish off this software, but the distribution probably should have kept 3.x officially until at least the 4.4 release.

Then again, the number of bugs that were spotted because of being released on such a wide scale probably did help accelerate the repair process...Is the benefit of wide release enough to outweigh the risk of having the entire brand tarnished?

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian actually has a great team and has had a rock stable KDE4 release. For me, stability and performance have improved over 3.5.10 when I upgraded to 4.1. Mandriva and Slackware are said to provide a good experience as well. Part of the problem (it's all over the mailing lists) is that Kubuntu and Suse tend to backport from trunk too much. It introduces features as well as bugs not found in other distributions.

Re:Labelling.

[ericrost]

Which is exactly why there should be ALPHA_XX, BETA_XX and PROD labels. We use them for our releases, and they tell my customers what to expect. Alpha means I'm developing functionality and you should only use it to test what I'm giving you, not to support your testing. Beta means that I want you to exercise this and it should be looked at as feature complete but there will be bugs, Prod means that we've tested all spec'd functionality to the level of confidence required by our customers.

Open source apps (and I'm a F/LOSS advocate) tend to have devs that treat their users like crap when it comes to this type of simple to implement, easy communication. I shouldn't have to dig into your dev or user mailing list to determine if I should pick up a version. That's what labels are FOR.

Re:Labelling.

[SomeKDEUser]

just a minor nitpick: a project is dead when it has no devs, not no users.

But as long as it has users, one might become a dev...

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

I actually liked 4.2 too. The only thing I kept "back" from KDE3 was Amarok (which is semi-independent of KDE releases, but somewhat connected.) Amarok 2.0 was awful - horrible error handling for streams, and inconsistent collection performance (although much of that is likely just crappy Gentoo packaging.)

Gentoo continuing to have KDE 4.x masked as unstable even well into the KDE4.3 release cycle is why all of my new machines run Kubuntu, and I have even started doing reinstalls of machines with existing Gentoo installs. It's just ridiculous that the only KDE release marked stable by a distro (3.5.x) has been unsupported by upstream for months.

KDE 4.3 on Kubuntu systems is excellent, I LOVE it.

Re:Labelling.

[HermMunster]

I use KDE 4.3.x on all my computers that run linux (approximately 13 of them). There are still some very annoying yet obvious bugs that one would expect them to have resolved some time ago (one example is a scrollbar on the right hand side of the desktop window (folder view) that shows up on virtually everyone of my computers when the desktop loads). There are many others too. It's almost as if they are treating folder view as a red-headed stepchild--whereas frankly I can't imagine them even considering their other view as a viable product design choice. It's the fact that they made the desktop view's desktop folder a full screen folder that causes the scrollbar. It was a bad design choice and it will bite them in the ass as KDE 4.3.x gains momentum.

A couple more would be the slowness of kwin (though it is getting better it is still very slow) and the fact that when I save a file to the desktop icons frequently don't appear, but if I open my home folder then the desktop folder I can see those icons. Another would be that when you hover over a folder the contents are displayed in a popup window and there's no way to turn that off--often it gets in the way of the copy or move process and shows up in the wrong place on the desktop. Another is that when you try to use KDE to share a folder using the folder sharing facility it doesn't work and never has. I could go on. Maybe some of you others have experienced this stuff too. Maybe some of you have answers for us. But, it is messy and needs refinements more than we need more features. They should focus on refinements for the next few releases and then add features after that.

I like the implementation of KDE. Overall, aside from the annoying obvious bugs it is a killer desktop manager, especially on a wide screen display. On a fast computer it runs very well. On a somewhat slower computer that's another story, but without kwin it runs decently. For the life of me though I can't understand why a modern desktop ignores the screensaver aspect and why the power management is so poorly designed. I have to go to no less than 4 screens to adjust power management (or turn it off).

I like dolphin but when I try to rename a file and the characters of the name are highlighted I can't right click on them to choose to cut, etc. Instead it pops up the normal context menu for that directory entry. Though, I do like dolphin. It has nice features, is relatively fast and simple and can be customized with many options.

I think they should implement jumplists like Win7. That'd be a nice addition to the mix.

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

I have seen nothing like what Jurily complains about even on an Asus Eee 1000HE (Single core Atom, Intel GMA950).

That was even with Ubuntu 9.04, which was known to have SERIOUS performance issues with Intel graphics.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

Except that goes against the FOSS mentality of release early, release often.

It was necessary to get the KDE 4.0 release out and into people's hands to see the new frameworks so they could start developing around them. KDE's websites clearly labeled that 4.0 was a fresh rewrite that did not have feature parity with KDE 3.

What did KDE do that was dishonest? When distros forced the switch when it wasn't ready for everyday desktop use for most people, that was the fault of the distros.

Re:Labelling.

[Kjella]

I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?

For one, because the distros didn't seem to hear or pass on those warnings. The KDE-centric distros pretty much all went "and now we're upgrading you to 4.0" as if it was the most natural upgrade path in the world. And I dare you to find any place in the release announcement that gave you any hint that's it's not for everyone. You hear "Wait for x.1" about every x.0 release, so you expect the general warnings of "this is a major new release, expect bugs" but still have certain expectations. They would have to come with much, much more explicit warnings that said "This is NOT what you normally expect from a x.0 release, it's much, much more incomplete and buggy than that. Maybe they did but it was a whisper compared to the fanfare it was introduced with.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

Compiz effects in kwin were ALWAYS optional, and were not turned on by default unless your hardware supported it. They could always be turned off with a single keystroke (Ctrl-F12? Can't remember) as well as within System Settings. That has been there since the very first beta releases I tested.

I've never seen an input lag, even running on an 8 year old crappy laptop. I do turn off Strigi/Nepomuk to cut down on HDD access. I'm curious what distro you were running.

Re:Labelling.

[shutdown -p now]

It's completely useless to list all those problems without identifying the distribution you use... If it happens to be Kubuntu, well, no surprise there.

I keep seeing this on Slashdot, and every time it surprises me. I haven't ever used Kubuntu, so I'm not familiar with it, but what could they possibly do with KDE to make it crash regularly? Properly written software should be able to handle, say, messed up config files correctly - and I sure hope that KDE4 does that. What is it, then? Do they apply some broken distro-specific patches to it? Compile it with Gentoo-like ricer optimization flags? Or what?

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

I have had no such problems with Kubuntu. It's been quite stable for me.

You mention in a later post you're using Gentoo - No wonder, Gentoo does a SHIT job of packaging KDE 4.x. KDE 4.x on Gentoo is an epic crashfest, and even minor system upgrades are often a weekend project due to the fact that 4.x is still ~x86 and ~amd64 (or at least still was as of a month or so ago.)

It's why all of my new distro installations are Kubuntu and I reformatted and reinstalled my main desktop (from Gentoo to Kubuntu 9.10) last weekend. File server is next up, probably this weekend if I get a hard drive from Newegg to back up my MythTV recordings with in time.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

I can attest that openSUSE's KDE packages are considerably more stable. Kubuntu KDE packages are twelve shades of broken. I just don't understand it.

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

I've never had problems with Amarok playing MP3s on any of my Kubuntu machines, I started with 8.04 or 8.10. Did you forget to install the kubuntu-restricted-extras package like you installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package? (Otherwise you would not have had any MP3 functionality at all in Kubuntu or Ubuntu...)

The KDE NetworkManager plasmoid was a bit funky in 9.04, they fixed it in 9.10 by moving back to a notification tray applet that works very well.

Re:Labelling.

[flabordec]

I prefer KDE 6.9, it's more sexy.

Re:Labelling.

[shutdown -p now]

GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.

Are you seriously making your argument from a version number? I wonder what you'd say about Emacs, then...

(By the way, just to remind everyone, GNOME uses the oldschool versioning scheme with even numbers for stable releases, and odd ones for betas; so 2.28 is the 14th stable release of 2.x branch, not 28th).

In any case, the claim that GNOME "has stagnated" and "is barely maintained" is trivially debunked by looking at overview of changes for every release. There are definitely fewer of them than there used to be, but there are still quite a few; and, on the whole, I find GNOME desktop today to be much more thought out and polished compared to either version of KDE, without looking dated. I would imagine that developers similarly appreciate API stability.

Ultimately, you've got to wonder why most distros today, especially "enterprise" commercialized ones, go with GNOME, and have been doing that for several years now.

Re:Labelling.

[HermMunster]

The problem with the opposite of the "release early, release often" is that products with bugs stay full of bugs for a long time and the customer doesn't realize there are bug fixes when they do arrive.

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

It's the choice of enterprise desktops because it fits with the mantra of locking down the user and preventing them from doing anything useful. With Windows you need bigbrotherware to do it. With GNOME, the functionality has simply been removed in the name of usability as part of Havoc Pennington's reign of terror.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

Shuttleworth has made several comments about wanting to see a future Gnome built in Qt, and said a few times that he felt the real innovation was happening in KDE-land. I often wonder if he regrets hitching his wagon to Gnome.

I think Ubuntu is the primary reason that Gnome is still being pushed along as much as it is. However, GTK+ was not designed initially to power a desktop. Given that Qt ships out of the box with a Clearlooks engine, and that Qt is a better multi-platform framework, I don't know why there hasn't been some serious discussion to perhaps move a future Gnome to Qt.

You gain all the benefits of a modern Qt framework, yet you can still design with the concepts that Gnome is supposed to be based on (sane, simple desktop). You can follow Gnome conventions and perhaps just deliver a BETTER Gnome experience.

Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.

Re:Labelling.

[Mystra_x64]

then somebody will release dbus/kross/plasma malware

Gnome and others are not using DBUS now?

Also, how do you intend to make this malware and will it be any different from simple shell script / binary malware you can get now?

Re:Labelling.

[Idiomatick]

9.10 was supposed to make kubuntu less shit (havent tried).

Re:Labelling.

[HermMunster]

None of my machines (13 of them) demonstrate the lag he describes while typing. An SSD won't solve the problem for him. And to QCompson, that's not an endorsement. That guy was listing a unrealistic option most people would never choose.

Re:Labelling.

[Idiomatick]

You can turn the shiny off...

Re:Labelling.

[Kjella]

My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?

Highly unlikely unless Nokia decides to release Qt 5.0, which isn't on any roadmap yet. Everything that's happened with KDE can be traced back to the release of Qt 4.0 in June 2005, which was a major breaking change in the underlying toolkit. The result was that porting something from Qt3 to Qt4 was fairly big rewrite of the UI parts, and of course once you're rewriting everyone wants to add those compatibility-breaking changes they've wanted for so long. No doubt the new way is superior to the old, but the changes were extremely basic. Quoting the WP page:

Trolltech released Qt 4.0 on June 28, 2005 and introduced five new technologies in the framework:

• Tulip - A set of template container classes.
• Interview - A model/view architecture for item views.
• Arthur - A 2D painting framework.
• Scribe - A Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing low-level text layout.
• MainWindow - A modern action-based main window, toolbar, menu, and docking architecture.

To me those basics look very solid, so I think the 4.x series will be a long lasting one. That's not to say KDE might want to do changes on their own, but there's nothing forcing them from the bottom up to rewrite things that are essentially already working. And particularly not all at once, because clearly 4.0 was too much to swallow all at once.

Re:Labelling.

[ArsenneLupin]

See, nobody forces you to update.

Not entirely true. I don't know how the KDE team managed it, but at some point in time, long before KDE 4 was actually something I'd call stable, most distributions (Fedora, Kubuntu, ...) dropped KDE 3 support.

So, if you wanted to upgrade your distribution (in order to get new version of other programs, not related to KDE), you were pretty much stuck with KDE4.

Re:Labelling.

[PitaBred]

The apps weren't there because the API was new. You're playing both sides of the fence. You claim to have understood what the KDE 4.0 meant, but you then bitch about the apps not being complete despite those features depending on significant redevelopment in light of the new API's and such in KDE4. I mean, really... the apps weren't/aren't complete because they changed all the underpinnings from 3.5, and the app developers have been working to reimplement many things.

Re:Labelling.

[RiotingPacifist]

While DBUS can be secured that doesn't mean it is, i don't know if the gnome devs pay attention to dbus security (and don't really care), but from what I've played about with kde's dbus binding were not restrictive (makes developing easier, but also means an exploit in a plugin can do stuff like change your network settings).

Also, how do you intend to make this malware and will it be any different from simple shell script / binary malware you can get now?

Nothing but you are not encouraged to run arbitrary scripts/binaries while you are encouraged to download plugins and no matter how careful the guys at kdelook are somebody could always slip some malware into the next stask plugin or plasma-facebook-applet or even just a theme (maybe kde does check themes for code but AFAIK it doesn't)

kross is supposed to present an API for plugins to work with, but because my code is run in the same thread with the same privileges as the app, my bugs can not only crash the program but also remove all of a users files. Users should be able to download a plugin for kmail without worrying that it can
1) crash plasma
2) delete all their files

Also it was mainly a joke, i mean i think there is some truth to it, plugins should be locked down a bit so an exploit/bug in a plasma widget can't compromise all of a users data, but it was mainly a joke that once everything is finished the KDE devs will find an excuse to start over.

Re:Labelling.

[SomeKDEUser]

Bad distro? Change distro.

Re:Labelling.

[PitaBred]

How do you get app developers to start developing to the new version if you don't mark it as a release and a stable API?

Re:Labelling.

[pjt33]

As most new users will try out KDE through Kubuntu, and have a bad experience.

I've been using Debian + KDE since about 2004, so I'm not exactly new to Linux or KDE. Bought a new computer last week, and since I spent twice as much as I usually do to get recent hardware I thought I'd switch to Ubuntu, which has a reputation for better driver support. KDE4.3 is driving me nuts.

Starting an application via the KMenu now takes 4 clicks where in KDE3 it took 2. While trying to lay out the task bar as I want it I lost the task manager. In fact, the UI for laying out the task bar is completely insane, and I'm starting to think that manually editing ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc would be easier than using the GUI. I have a system temperature monitoring widget which shows an icon of a CPU and doesn't appear to display a temperature anywhere. The digital clock changed its margins when I turned on displaying seconds, even though the line underneath with the date is wider.

How much of this nonsense is Kubuntu's fault, and how much is KDE's? Right now I'm seriously considering using Kubuntu with KDE3.

Re:Labelling.

[j_sp_r]

I switched back to OpenSuse with the 10.3 release (after they removed the horrible .net package manager), The KDE build service is really nice and polished. Everything just works.

Re:Labelling.

[ThePhilips]

Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.

I think difference between Gnome and KDE is bit deeper.

Pure technically, Gnome supports C (not only C++) and allows for some backward compatibility what is generally regarded as a better fit for commercial binary-only applications.

And compatibility with commercial binary-only applications (and licensing, Qt in past was GPLed) played one of the first roles in past why Gnome was picked by many vendors as their primary desktop.

The choice of Gnome over KDE sounds laughable now - and was so in past since Qt quite quickly gained the ground as strong multi-platform GUI library and is (and was for quite some time) one of the most popular among ISVs.

Now for many (RedHat, Ubuntu) it is simply way too complicated to change all that overnight. RedHat in particular has the pathological case of NIH syndrome (not that desktop played any role in RedHat's business plan) and Ubuntu is simply too small to manage such task on its own.

But even then, the simpler and more primitive Gnome desktop is easier for companies like RedHat to support commercially, what is a prerequisite for any large workstation deal.

Re:Labelling.

[Fallingcow]

What does Gnome not do that you want it to?

People always complain about this, but what are these awesome features I should be using that Gnome won't allow? I'd honestly love to know, 'cuz there must be all kinds of great workflow-enhancing, appearance-improving shit out there that I just don't know about and that Gnome won't permit me to use.

The only time I've run in to this was the spatial folder view crap, but that was trivial to turn off even then and IIRC they saw the light very soon after and made it a checkbox in an options dialogue.

Re:Labelling.

[Wonko the Sane]

I use Gentoo but decided to ditch the versioned packages and just rebuild the the live packages every week or so. It seems to be working so far.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you surprised? Fedora and Kubuntu are two of the shittiest Linux distros around. Especially Fedora. That's the shittiest UNIX-like system I've ever had to deal with.

Re:Labelling.

[DrXym]

Traditionally part of KDE's problem has been that it overloads the UI with far too many settings, mixes the simple settings in with the advanced / esoteric settings and is generally an attractive desktop which just has far too much going on. Usability has always played second fiddle to kewl effects and eye candy for KDE.

I think if KDE put their usability folks front and centre and actually listened to them, they might make great strides in recapturing their popularity. GNOME might not have all the bells and whistles but its simple to use, has well organized simple configuration / preferences and does what a good desktop should which is get the hell out of the way and let you do stuff. Of course this may change in GNOME 3.0 which runs the risk of going full retard with GNOME Shell, but we'll have to wait and see.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't necessarily know if an SSD will solve the GP's issues with KDE but, I got an X25-M about 2 weeks ago and the kick in the pants it gave Gnome is nothing short of jaw-dropping. You can't click on icons fast enough to faze this thing. It basically renders the entire, "I'm using this or that app because it starts up faster" paradigm completely moot. I realize I'm gushing and I'll stop here in a second but there is absolutely nothing you can do on a modern system that will make a bigger difference. Anybody reading this that cares at all about performance, do yourself the favor. One caveat though, after using a quality SSD, everything else will seem like molasses. My brother has a Phenom II something or other and I have an older core 2 duo and my box leaves his standing still. It's just ridiculous.

Re:Labelling.

[HiThere]

Stick with KDE 3.5 as long as you can. KDE4 is headed in a very different direction. Usually it's *possible* to do the same things in either desktop, but the things that KDE3.x make easy aren't nearly as optimized in KDE4.

(KDE4.3 is a lot better than KDE4.2, but after using it for awhile I still switched over to Gnome, because it would be difficult for me to install KDE3.x while keeping some of the libraries that I need.)

N.B.: The next version of Gnome also looks as if it's going to be de-emphasizing getting common things done easily in favor of allowing newer and fancier things to be done at the OS level. But it looks like we're spared that for almost another year. By that time perhaps KDE4 will have started making more concessions to practicality.

Re:Labelling.

[Filip22012005]

You're right. In fact, the reason KDE didn't choose Compiz for compositing is that the new KWin degrades gracefully to non-3D effects if necessary, instead of completely giving up.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

You nailed it. I had the same experience: I tried gnome years ago, decided it was lacking, and spent the better part of a decade with KDE. Then 4.0 hit and everything went to hell. I am now a very happy user of Ubuntu. It would take a huge f*ckup along the lines of KDE 4.0 for me to even think about switching back. A desktop, IMHO, should stay the hell out of your way, not inflict random, buggy, slow crap on you.

Re:Labelling.

[Ian Alexander]

You shouldn't feed the trolls. It only encourages them.

Re:Labelling.

[awshidahak]

GNOME is a pretty decent desktop, but there is one thing that bugs me (and yes, KDE did it right): Backgrounds on multiple monitors. Why does GNOME think that when I plug an external monitor into my laptop I want my background to be stretched. I'd rather have my background be repeated across my screens like KDE and Windows do it. It's seriously annoying. GNOME developers, please get this right. I like your desktop but I want to be able to plug in an external screen and not have my background stretched.

Re:Labelling.

[TemporalBeing]

Highly unlikely unless Nokia decides to release Qt 5.0, which isn't on any roadmap yet. Everything that's happened with KDE can be traced back to the release of Qt 4.0 in June 2005, which was a major breaking change in the underlying toolkit. The result was that porting something from Qt3 to Qt4 was fairly big rewrite of the UI parts, and of course once you're rewriting everyone wants to add those compatibility-breaking changes they've wanted for so long. No doubt the new way is superior to the old, but the changes were extremely basic.

A good number of the changes between Qt3 and Qt4 were pushed for by KDE. They needed Qt to make the changes before KDE4 could even really be started.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

There are much bigger differences between Gnome (such as design philosophies and primary languages) but my point is that Gnome could be developed with Qt while maintaining many of those Gnome differences.

Many Gnome apps have been utilizing Mono for newer features. Qt has Mono bindings. The language barrier isn't what it once was.

You can maintain a traditional Gnome widget appearance given that Qt ships with Clearlooks out of the box. And you still write your various Gnome libs to maintain various Gnome conventions.

RedHat, Ubuntu and the like can still ship Gnome as their default. And older GTK+ apps wouldn't be forced to jump over to Qt and newer Gnome libraries because you can still run both side-by-side.

Again, there appear to be tangible benefits. The major drawback is the time invested to make the change, but over the life of the project I think it would be easier to jump to Qt 4.x now than develop and support a GTK+ 3.x in the future.

Re:Labelling.

[Barsteward]

IMO a think all of the blame lies with KDE.
bollox, its was labelled by KDE as a developers release to encourage the porting of applications to KDE4. If people/distros couldn't read/understand that then its their problem, not the KDE team. People shouldn't blame others for their own shortcomings in reading and comprehension. Its a yawn to still read this sort of crap excuse from posters. I read reasons the KDE team put out, understood them and didn;t install 4.0 as a result.

Re:Labelling.

[TheModelEskimo]

>What does Gnome not do that you want it to?

It always has something to do with visuals - GNOME wallpaper, GNOME themes, GNOME treatment of multiple desktops, etc. The fact is, KDE users are used to a higher amount of customizability, but of course all of it can be worked around in GNOME.

Re:Labelling.

[Blakey Rat]

"Release early, release often" basically translates into:

1) Give your users a terrible expectation, by starting them out on unfinished software
2) Constantly annoy them with trivial changes until they say "screw this" and move to your competitor

I've never been convinced that it's a good idea.

Re:Labelling.

[ericrost]

And to add to my previous reply, this stymies adoption rates. I know when choosing between vendors, if I can trust their release numbers and labelling, it makes MY life a lot easier and goes in the MAJOR plus column in the cost/benefit ratio. If I can trust you, I don't have to test as thoroughly when you hand me something stable. If I can't, I have to scrutinize every little point release and go to fine grained detail to avoid breakage.

Re:Labelling.

[QCompson]

You can turn the shiny off...

I know, but I can't turn some features and stability on!

Re:Labelling.

[reub2000]

I have no idea, except to say that Kubuntu 9.04 was very unstable, with plasma and kwin crashing regularly. I could also depend on amarok to crash at least 5 times a day. However, karmic koala has been working much better, even when it was just an alpha.

Re:Labelling.

[kimvette]

I'd rather they look at ways to integrate compiz-fusion and the emerald decorator. The KDE versions of those features are something I really dislike. The cube is half-assed, there is still no emerald-like features (including no "glass"), compiz and emerald are endlessly configurable (making kwin's effects resemble gnome's non-configurable nature in comparison) and performance is quite a bit slower than compiz-fusion. As far as degrading gracefully is concerned, I don't mind how compiz-fusion works when managed by the fusion-icon applet; starting a different window manager or changing rendering modes is just a context menu away.

Re:Labelling.

[HermMunster]

A project is dead when it makes no advances or no significant advances.

I've seen gnome 3's screen shots. I'm unimpressed with their whole direction. For me that direction is a total loss.

I stopped using gnome when kde 4.2 came out. I am glad I made the switch. I'd used gnome for 3 years prior. I haven't looked back since.

Re:Labelling.

[ThePhilips]

And older GTK+ apps wouldn't be forced to jump over to Qt and newer Gnome libraries because you can still run both side-by-side.

One can think about it, but generally mixing two different message dispatching systems (and both GTK and Qt have their own: no standard of sorts exists) would be hard as hell... That's I'm telling you as software developer.

Also in GTK many things happen in global context. Message handlers (targets for message dispatching) are in global context. In Qt - global context doesn't exist and everything is tied to an object.

Yes, rewrite from ground zero is possible. No, highly likely no backward compatibility of any sort would be possible. And that is a barrier.

Do not forget, GTK implements in C its own OO system (even inheritance), completely orthogonal to C++: in GTK you can send a random message to a random object (or from higher level: call a method, identified by name on a random object). And all that in C. Qt uses and heavily extends C++'s OO system to achieve similar effect, but in a different manner. And some things GTK does and relies upon simply not present in C++. Conceptually, it is easier to rewrite Qt in GTK, than other way round: in GTK implements and manages OO system on its own - in Qt it is predefined by C++. (And the flexibility is one of the reasons why writing applications in GTK is magnitudes more complicated compared to Qt.)

Re:Labelling.

[pagaboy]

What does Gnome not do that you want it to?

Cancel caps lock with shift. The option disappeared a couple of years ago. Even Windows allows you to do that.

Re:Labelling.

[turbidostato]

"I shouldn't have to dig into your dev or user mailing list to determine if I should pick up a version."

While I'm with you about your overall message, I can't agree with the above sentence. You (as an end user) shouldn't go to the devs' mailing list *at all*; that's the distribution packagers' work (or yours, only if you happen to be a developer/integrator). For them it's easy (and kind of an obligation) to find what a release is meant to.

Where you really need to put the culprit (if anywhere) is at the distribution level since it's at that level where the decision of including or not including a given software/version is taken.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

However, the issue isn't rewriting GTK in Qt to operates as GTK exists today, because GTK wasn't designed to run a full desktop initially.

The issue is taking Qt and developing a GTK replacement that better suits what a Gnome of the future would really need.

The debate over GTK 3 and Gnome 3 already suggests that you will hit that at some point. Fear of replicating the KDE 4 launch has people continuing to limp along on old conventions, but a larger rewrite probably still looms in the future.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

Kwin was always going to be the window manager and decorator. I thought they should have tried to support the compiz-fusion plugins for effects, but I guess the reason they didn't was because compiz-fusion doesn't have a stable API for those plugins.

I thought it was going to take forever to recreate all the functionality, but in the end, I'm fairly happy with the end results.

I prefer compiz-fusions' wobbly windows effect over the kwin one, but I'll live.

Re:Labelling.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I was a little too harsh with KDE team, and I agree that the distros do deserve some of the blame. However, I do believe that the majority of the blame still belongs to the KDE developers for rushing to announce a KDE 4.0 release.

Nothing prevented the KDE team from adding another word to the title and called it a "KDE 4.0 release candidate" or even "KDE 4.0 beta"

Re:Labelling.

[Fallingcow]

See, that's the kind of thing I'm looking for.

I didn't know about that and might actually start using it (in Windows, at least)

Re:Labelling.

[Mystra_x64]

I meant that DBUS is already a standard so there is nothing much you can do about it's existence.

As for plasma applets it's still comes down to user's will to install something new and potentially dangerous. [well, you said that]

I don't think they'll need any excuse. The 'new and better framework version' works just the same IMO.

Re:Labelling.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

More like blaming the butcher for selling the restaurant tainted chicken.

Re:Labelling.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

When it is released to early:

"Release early, release often is our mantra"

When it is not released yet:

"We have no artificial deadlines - it's released when it's ready"

Re:Labelling.

[turbidostato]

"So you will want to make releases that aren't your new major version yet. But how do you label them? Obviously, calling them X.0 is not the way to go ... but what is?"

ODS: The Odd Numbering Scheme. On major and minor, Odd means unstable; pair stable. Extra is only for bugfixes in pair releases and doesn't bear any special meaning on odd branches. So you know at a glance what to expect from a software release even without knowing about the project: 3.7.8? Eigth bugfix iteration on the stable 3.7 branch, where 7 is the fourth stable launch from the 3 branch. 2.x.y? The first strong rewrite towards stable version 3. Within the 2. branch, maybe 2.3 is quite usable since 3 is an odd number, but it's up to your bleed-edge liken to test it. At lest it has *some* features already stabilized. 3.4.7? A minor development version towards stable 3.5.

For whole desktops, they should abandon the idea of launching it as a whole since apps will live their own lives (so you can have Amarok 3.5.7 -stable for KDE 4.0.3 -highly unstable or for 3.5.10 -highly stable).

So, first KDE stable would have been 5.1.0. It might happen that while a stable desktop not a single app would have been developed for it yet (quite a different issue but still perfectly acceptable as any Windows customer would recognize: OS, desktop and zero productivity apps is what comes in the "Windows whatever box") but given the nature of KDE as an open collaborative project a bunch of "in core" apps can be develop on par with desktop releases (more or less like now but accepting that if you call kmail "a core member of KDE" then you can't call KDE-anything stable unless it comes with a stable plentily functional kmail version too).

Now about "cooling" periods. In the open source world, when an app would be considered stable enough? Easy when no critical bugs are opened and no critical bugs are filled within a given (maybe per-project stablished) period of time. Just give valour to the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" motto. Open source means not only that we are gifted with the code but that responsibility is shared with users too. If no one is able to find and fill a bug in, say, 60 days for a new major version or 15 days for a minor one then it must be considered stable for all practical means. This would counter Torvalds' argument about why he abandoned his "soft" ODS (nobody wanted to test unstable so when we published stable there was a high spike in bugs): if you did your homework (cooling, say the to-be 2.4 for 60 days without major bugs filled) then no one has the right to fingerpoint you for after-the-fact found bugs. This would mean that major projects would get a better user-leveled QA because being cooling for the same time-span than a minor project more eyeballs would look at it, exactly as expected and needed.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, I'm still on KDE 3.5 and wondering where to go next. I love the new libraries and the overall look of the new desktop ... but that's the problem: it's a new desktop. Whether I leap to KDE4, Gnome, or something else, it's the same amount of work to me, and that's where the KDE project screwed up.

I tried switching to Gnome when I started on Ubuntu (after years of Slackware as my main distro) and found it impossible to get on with. So then I used 3.5 but very soon switched to, the just available, KDE4. The difference between KDE3 and 4 is like the difference between XP and Vista IMO and is not as big as the jump from KDE3 to Gnome which is more like jumping to Mac from MS Windows.

Re:Labelling.

[icebraining]

That's because you don't understand the process. Just because it's released, doesn't mean you should use it on your production server/main computer. It's meant both for bug tracking as well as indicate the direction they're headed. In the end, it's a way of producing better software, by having much more beta testing, and more envolvment of the community.

See the Debian Development Process. A packages version is early released to unstable. As its main problems get fixed, it migrates to testing. Then it spends some time until its mature and all (or almost) the bugs have been squashed, and that's when it is ready for inclusion in the next stable release.

Just because it's release, doesn't mean it has to be ready-for-production. Also see the Agile methods: in some, you can distribute snapshot of your software to the clients every two weeks. It's not a full product, it's a way of getting the client to understand how is the development progress going, and where is it headed.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandriva and openSuse are both distros that specifically aim for a good KDE experience. For example, Suse offered the new split K menu (with tabs for things like Recent, Programs, System, etc.) well before it was a standard feature. Mandriva's desktop of choice has always been KDE, and they have the resources to put a lot of effort into ensuring an excellent experience. These are the obvious choices for seeing the best of KDE.

By comparison, Fedora has long defaulted to GNOME, and even though KDE is present on the install media it appears all they really did is replaced the K menu icon and default background. I haven't tried Debian, but even back when KDE was vastly more popular than GNOME, Debian users were more likely to prefer GNOME (possibly out of lingering distaste for the licenses QT used to be under). In both cases, much like Kubuntu, the KDE packages are probably installed largely un-modified and with no particular effort to integrate them. It should come as no surprise that they won't give you the best experience that KDE has to offer.

Re:Labelling.

[socceroos]

Not really. 9.10 was the beginning of change in the way that KDE4 is done. Project Timelord has been initiated with the purpose to radically change and improve the way that Kubuntu handles releases and quality assurance. I don't think we'll really be reaping the benefits of this project until 11.04.

Re:Labelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

All variants of Ubuntu IMHO suck, two most hated 'features' of Ubuntu:

* Forced release cycle often left broken packages or broken software in the supposed to be stable release.
* Ubuntu is damn ugly (Gnome is already quite ugly - and not so useful), not to mention their brown fetish.

I hope Linux has something better to represent it.

Re:Labelling.

[ericrost]

+1, I'm to used to dealing with integrators as my customers that I forget the end user view of it sometimes.

Re:Labelling.

[kayoshiii]

Actually I am experiencing somewhat the opposite - I have used Kubuntu for a conciderably amount of time and I am trying out Arch along with kdemod.... Kubuntu has been pretty much solid for me as far as basic desktop functionality is concerned (I know a lot of the extra software is crap)... But I am getting strange behaviour on Arch at the basic window managment level.

I do like what arch is doing and like the idea of being on a rolling distro again...

Re:Labelling.

[Ensign Nemo]

NEVER go full retard!

Re:Labelling.

[kayoshiii]

There are two pieces of information you are forgetting or are not aware of.... Gnome and KDE both use the same intra application messaging system DBUS... KDE moved from it's own system DKOP when it moved from 3 to 4...

  The second thing is that QT runs glib's (that is the bottom most library in the GTK stack) event loop as well as it's own.

But yes, apps may have to be significantly rewritten. But you could also mix qt and gtk apps in the same system and the user would find it different to tell the difference.

Re:Labelling.

[Ensign Nemo]

While I do use KDE4 daily, (I build from svn at least once a week, and submit bug reports), I would not call it extremely responsive. For example, clicking to the K to bring up the menu, takes over a second. Then clicking on any of the menu items to bringup the submenu takes about one second, every time.

Re:Labelling.

[tuxgeek]

I made the jump from 3.5.x to 4.2 a while back. 4.2 was the first usable release.
It has had some problems and caused me to flop from Kubuntu Jaunty to Lenny/KDE 3.5 and back again.

I found 4.2 to have many features superior to 3.5, but 3.5 somewhat more consistent & stable.
Right now running Kubuntu Karmic w/ 4.3.2
This is one sweet desktop IMO
I prefer it to 3.5 hands down

Re:Labelling.

[kayoshiii]

Doesn't the fact that you have a scrollbar just mean you have too much shit in your desktop folder?
If the scrollbar wasn't there - how would the desktop deal with it. I know how Mac OS X deals with it... and that is to stack the extra icons on top of the existing icons. I know which behaviour seems less of a Pita to me.

Your point about icons not showing up is valid though the problem is plasma taking it's sweet time rather than any slowness in kwin. As for the other Desktop containment (the default one) not being a valid design decision. I like having my desktop unobstructed the rediculous amounts of garbage that seems to accumulate on most (windows users) desktops. I prefer to have my files organised so I can find them easily and I like the ability to add multiple folder views to the desktop that way I can quickly get to the files I actually need access to (if I am working on a particular job I will have a folderview on my desktop containing the files for that job)...

I haven't been able to get the share function to work either. As far as the powermanagement goes adding the battery plasmoid to your desktop or panel will give you quick access to your power settings. Most distros load this plasmoid by default. from this it becomes one click to manage the most common settings and two to get the full control panel.

With the name editing - I do agree that this could be done as you specified, however you can set dolphin not to do renaming inline and it will work as you suggested. Just not as nicely as doing it inline.

Re:Labelling.

[baileydau]

I agree totally.

I thought the KDE team went to great lengths to communicate that 4.0 was a DEVELOPER release and the 'mainstream' should stay with 3.5. Obviously many people chose to ignore what the KDE team was saying and make up their own story.

I was most certainly aware that the KDE team were saying the majority of people shouldn't consider the 4.x series usable on a day to day basis until 4.2 or so.

I was very surprised to learn that some distributions had dropped 3.5 very prematurely. I tested 4.0 and 4.1 but I stuck with 3.5 as my primary DE. I went to 4.2 full time and I'm very happy with 4.3.

Re:Labelling.

[Risen888]

How the KDE team managed it? I'll tell you how. By telling everyone very loudly "Hey everyone, this is not ready for prime time, we are putting it out for testing and feedback, it will eat your babies and make your daughter worship the devil!"

Seriously. Everyone was warned. No one was ignorant.

Also, wrt Kubuntu, that should in no way be taken as indicative of the quality of KDE. In fairness, I haven't tried 9.10 yet, but since KDE 4.0 shipped, I have found every successive Kubuntu release to be unbearably bad. I have since switched to Arch, which has a thriving KDE community, and have not looked back.

Re:Labelling.

[CarpetShark]

I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?

Because it was never about the number. When people release a .0, other developers want to release their new .0's of related software. For that, they need APIs to be in place, the groundwork to be laid, etc. None of that was done. So not only did you get a horrible release, undoing the good reputation gradually won with 3.x releases, but the whole community around the platform was fractured and unable to work. That was only aggravated by the KDE core developers being unwilling to listen to their community, taking down sites that had design documents, etc.

Re:Labelling.

[CarpetShark]

No, the API wasn't NEW. For Python developers, and probably others, it was NON-EXISTENT for a long time.

Re:Labelling.

[CarpetShark]

My only worry is that... with 4.4 out, are we going to be subjected to KDE5.0 soon?

It would fit the pattern. 3.x only started becoming usable around 3.3/3.4, and when it was really good (around 3.6/3.7), 4.0 was committed (in the criminal sense, not the version control sense).

Re:Labelling.

[CarpetShark]

Now that's a ringing endorsement. KDE4: it won't be sluggish if you use a SSD!

Careful now. He said an Intel SSD.

Re:Labelling.

[ArsenneLupin]

No one was ignorant.

Except the distributions. Who somehow got the impression that KDE 3.x was no longer supported, that they had to upgrade to KDE 4, and that any bitching about KDE4's premature inclusion was just a "pet peeve".

How come that distributors were so much out of phase with the KDE developpers? Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors? Especially since more than one distribution (at least Fedora and Kubuntu) made the same "mistake"?

Re:Labelling.

[IrquiM]

Why didn't other people?

Because other people are stupid.

I changed to 4.X when Slackware changed, and it works. There's nothing I miss from 3.5 anymore (on 4.3.3 at the moment). Amarok has gotten a noticeable makeover too. If you want to change to Gnome, you'd better wait as they're in for a makeover as well soon.

Re:Labelling.

[the_womble]

Kubuntu is the worst KDE distro I have tried. Mandriva or Mepis is FAR better.

It may be worse than you think. Not only has KDE suffered relative to Gnome, but I suspect many users whose first experience of Linux was Kubuntu will have been disappointed as well.

Ubuntu should drop support for Kubuntu, or do it properly.

Re:Labelling.

[yet-another-lobbyist]

I saw the same keyboard lagging with kubuntu intrepid (8.10/KDE 4.1). It was horrible. And it happened with all effects turned off on a state-of-the-art laptop at that time (the Dell Latitude which was just released in August 2008). It was so bad that you couldn't even use the terminal (konsole). Sometimes it was not there directly after rebooting, but after a few minutes using it, it suddenly kicked in.
In my case, this was really, really, horrible. I was really used to kubuntu, and I wasn't a very experienced linux user, yet. However, there was NO way for me to continue using kubuntu on this machine. It needed a recent kernel to get the new hardware supported; so using kubuntu hardy (8.04), which still offered KDE3 was not an option. I had no choice but go shopping for another distro, which was a lot of pain and work at the time. I ended up using Mandriva, where I could use KDE3 and KDE4 simultaneously. So I made my switch to KDE4 gradually, until I had figured out how to get everything working. After some time, I switched back to kubuntu. I just liked the repos and some other things better.
Still, remembering this entire story causes me a lot of pain. Would it really have been sooo difficult for kubuntu to keep supporting KDE3?

Re:Labelling.

[segedunum]

It doesn't make any difference to Ubuntu or other distros. They have a beta release of Firefox in their LTS.

Re:Labelling.

[Blakey Rat]

I'm not a retard, I understand the theory behind it. I just think, in practice, it doesn't work.

It is possible for me to both understand it, and disagree with it. You do realize this, right?

I'm being flamey, but I've already been modded down in this thread (God knows why), so WTF.

Re:Labelling.

[EvilNTUser]

I don't know what you're implying there, but it's well known that Intel beats the crap out of all the other manufacturers. By now it's probably ok to buy a few of the other products, but I don't know which they are.

Re:Labelling.

[Andy Dodd]

There's no good workaround for GNOME's complete lack of edge flipping.

Having to move your mouse down to the bottom of the screen or remember a hotkey to change desktops is nonintuitive. Dragging the mouse to the edge of a desktop to go to the next one is.

It's understandable that if the feature is enabled by default it could confuse a user that has never touched multiple desktops before, but in KDE it is disabled by default. In GNOME, it is just plain disabled and Havoc refuses to add it. Next step for GNOME is complete removal of the multiple desktop paradigm, since without edge flipping there isn't much point to multiple desktops.

There was a workaround for a while called Brightside, but it crashed frequently and ceased being maintained 2-3 years ago.

Re:Labelling.

[RichiH]

I think we need to get over this misstep. I totally agree that they played the version number badly, but they also released plenty of warnings about what 4.0 meant and that it was different than a traditional point-oh release. I read these warnings and knew not to take 4.0 seriously. Why didn't other people?

Because people are people. And while KDE warned, no one else did. This was painfully obvious _before_ KDE 4.0 was released, but back then, it was disregarded.
Yes, once KDE 4 is as good and stable as 3.5.10, people will start to get over this.

But that people point out one of the biggest mistakes in FLOSS history (yes, IMO it is _that_ bad) is only natural. And it serves as a warning to others.

Richard

PS: The KDE 2 -> 3 was almost as smooth as silk. I loved KDE 3 pretty much from day two.

Re:Labelling.

[Fallingcow]

Next step for GNOME is complete removal of the multiple desktop paradigm, since without edge flipping there isn't much point to multiple desktops.

While you're right that there's no reason not to include a feature like that, I hardly think removal of multiple desktops follows. I've never used edge flipping and love multiple desktops (I just use ctrl+arrow to switch)

Re:Labelling.

[Draek]

Given that Qt ships out of the box with a Clearlooks engine, and that Qt is a better multi-platform framework, I don't know why there hasn't been some serious discussion to perhaps move a future Gnome to Qt.

Perhaps because Gtk is a better multi-language framework, and the F/OSS community loves having a diversity of programming languages. Sure, Qt works great with C++, not so bad with Python and Ruby and there's even some Java bindings floating around somewhere, but what about C#? Pascal? Lisp? PHP? Lua? hell, even pure, unadultered C?

And that's leaving aside all the problems inherent to a complete rewrite of a desktop enviroment, which are problematic despite whatever Shuttleworth may wish for.

Re:Labelling.

[Enderandrew]

KDE 4 has official bindings for C++. Python, Ruby, and C# that are considered stable and mature. I've read developers rave about how easy development is with Python and KDE.

There are also official bindings for PHP, Lua and Basic.

KDE ships with scripting frameworks like KScript, Smoke and KCross which make it easy to develop for KDE using Lisp, Java, Javascript, etc. Then there's KDevelop, which is a fantastic IDE.

Re:Labelling.

[zander]

most distributions dropped KDE 3 support.

They did, and they did that because their users screamed at them. Which is entirely silly to listen to, I mean, would your car dealer remove the doors if you really loudly asked for it? Hmm, maybe they would.

I'm just saying that the distros did this *against* the wishes of KDE.

Re:Labelling.

[Rysc]

People who were surprised when functionality went away with 4.0 apps clearly do not remember the horror of GNOME 2.0.

GNOME 1.4 was featureful. Many say ugly, hard to fathom, riddled with UI problems and so forth... but it had a ton of stuff and lots of nice features hidden in this or that nook and cranny. When 2.0 came out I found that basic things were just gone, most apps had serious holes in them that their previous versions had had, etc.. It was a lot like KDE 4.0 but without the "wow, this is something new and interesting" feel to it. It was slower, had fewer themes, fewer features and a lot of arbitrary, bad UI convention.

If GNOME ever goes to a new, incompatible toolkit it will be KDE4 all over again but so, so much worse.

Re:Labelling.

[icebraining]

You can disagree, but those arguments where stupid. You don't tell your clients they should use those releases, so they won't get pissed. Just because some people are bad at implementing stuff doesn't mean the system is broken.

See my example. No one in their right minds will install Debian Unstable in a production server (it's in the fucking name!), but they can do it in a test-bed.

Re:Labelling.

[Risen888]

Except the distributions. Who somehow got the impression that KDE 3.x was no longer supported [launchpad.net], that they had to upgrade to KDE 4, and that any bitching about KDE4's premature inclusion was just a "pet peeve".

Wow, is that bug report yours? Because if it is, you're a fucking asshole.

Anyway, there were two fairly sizable bugfix releases to 3.5 in the six months directly after 4.0 came out. But if you're expecting the KDE development team to continue support two entirely different and non-compatible desktop environments, each based on different toolkits (Qt 3 and 4), indefinitely, well... Tough shit, I guess.

How come that distributors were so much out of phase with the KDE developpers?

I don't really know what to tell you. Everybody knew what the fuck was going on. Lots of distributions handled it very well indeed. As far as (k)ubuntu goes, I personally think they were on the right track for a minute there with 8.04, having the two versions in two separate trees, but they jumped way too soon, when not only was KDE 4.1 not ready for public consumption, but the Kubuntu team didn't have any sort of graceful upgrade path in place. I mean, for fuck's sake, whose fault is that?

Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors?

I have no idea how it could have been. I mean, I can sympathize with some users who felt a little misled by the version number, but distro packagers should at least be able to be relied upon to read the fucking release notes.

Especially since more than one distribution (at least Fedora and Kubuntu) made the same "mistake"?

Way more didn't.

Re:Labelling.

[ArsenneLupin]

Wow, is that bug report yours? Because if it is, you're a fucking asshole.

What is this? Running out of arguments and feeling the need to make this up with a foul mouth or what?

Anyway, there were two fairly sizable bugfix releases to 3.5 in the six months directly after 4.0 came out. But if you're expecting the KDE development team to continue support two entirely different and non-compatible desktop environments, each based on different toolkits (Qt 3 and 4), indefinitely, well... Tough shit, I guess.

Maybe not indefinately, but at least long enough until KDE 4 was mature enough for production. But maybe, if I'm already going to switch to a different and non-compatible desktop, it should rather be Gnome...

I don't really know what to tell you. Everybody knew what the fuck was going on.

Many probably knew what was going on. But for some weird reason many others seemed to believe that the KDE development team would not continue to support two entirely different and non-compatible desktop environments, each based on different toolkits (Qt 3 and 4). If somehow distributions got the idea that the Qt3 based KDE 3.x is no longer supported by upstream, they would understandably drop their own support.

Lots of distributions handled it very well indeed.

I'm sure Yellow Dog Linux or Blue Kitten and many other distributions handled this extremely well. However, the problem is, that the two most popular distributions didn't...

As far as (k)ubuntu goes, I personally think they were on the right track for a minute there with 8.04, having the two versions in two separate trees, but they jumped way too soon

Indeed, as you say, 8.04 was still fine: you had a choice. But they really should have waited until 9.04 (or even better: 9.10) until they dropped KDE 3. Forcring KDE 4 in 8.10 was way too premature (and I skipped this release for exactly that reasion, and was still disappointed by KDE 4's state in 9.04)

but they jumped way too soon, when not only was KDE 4.1 not ready for public consumption, but the Kubuntu team didn't have any sort of graceful upgrade path in place. I mean, for fuck's sake, whose fault is that?

Kubuntu's fault, surely. Too bad Fedora did exactly the same mistake.

Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors?

I have no idea how it could have been

Maybe start by acknowledging the problems, rather than label any reports about problems as being made by "fucking assholes".

I sincerely hope that everybody involved here learned the lesson, and won't repeat the same mistake for KDE 5.0...

Re:Labelling.

[HermMunster]

I completely understand it. The opposite process is inferior. You have to be kidding us with your worthless diatribe. Release often and early is fantastically superior to the closed source way.

Re:Labelling.

[MightyDrunken]

I prefer KDE 6.9, it's more sexy.

Totally agree KDE 6.9 is much better then KDE 4. Plasmas are hot and highly charged, Caramba! I could fiddle with them all day, overall it is a right cutie.

Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[Jacques Chester]

They have the trifecta of crummy website behaviour: excessive pagination, click-through ads and lazily regurgitating other people's content.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[CheeseTroll]

Not to mention sloow, only to reward visitors with blurry screenshots.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[Yvan256]

Not to mention the limited bandwidth of Australia.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[impaledsunset]

Don't worry, they are already slashdotted. That's what you get for requiring multiple requests to read a single article.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nothing to do with Australia's bandwidth and more to do with their host's. I live in Australia and this site is dreadfully slow for me as well. The page has been loading for two and a half minutes and so far just one thumbnail is visible aside from the limited text. The rest of the site is equally slow.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[NervousWreck]

Second that. Sloooooooooooww.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[Yvan256]

I wasn't implying that Australia's bandwidth was the only source of the problem. I'm just saying that if most clicks come from Canada, U.S.A. and Europe (given the current time), then it's all non-local bandwidth that must go overseas through what I guess must be a limited pipe compared to what we have in America.

Re:Can we stop posting links to cio.com.au?

[bcmm]

I'm still waiting for the damn site to load, so lets all just read the KDE 4.4 Feature Plan instead.

Manually semantic != semantic

[geschild]

I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.

Other people may be better at this than I am, but I can't even be bothered to tag my e-mails, let alone each and every file. Granted, this system does some 'auto-tagging' but to call it a semantic desktop because of that is a bit rich. YMMV and I like to be persuaded to look again.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[betterunixthanunix]

It would nice if we could exchange tags -- I should be able to email a picture to you, with semantic information, and you should be able to use that information. Of course, the issue here is that sometimes you will send data that should have been kept private...

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[RiotingPacifist]

Don't you need manual before you can go automatic, this provides the framework for automatic tagging. With something like kross making it simple to add plugins (Python, Ruby, JavaScript and Java on the way?), it shouldn't be too hard to get the add automatic semantics (ofc the tricky part is writing generic auto-tagging code that works)

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Barring the advent of AI, or at least uncannily clever automated systems, there really isn't much alternative to manual tagging(outside of a bunch of specific, though admittedly useful, special cases like facial recognition tagging for images, or origin tagging that makes it easy to distinguish between "files I received as email attachments" and "files I downloaded from the web" and the like).

In my (admittedly lay) opinion, what makes "semantic desktop" 'desktop' is the fact that there is some consideration given to making tagging data meaningfully useful across applications and the desktop environment, rather than just inside one particular application(as has historically been the case with MP3 player programs, photo organizers, and similar). Demanding that it solve this problem and somehow automatically tag the untagged seems unfairly dismissive of a useful incremental step.

What would be helpful, in terms of increasing the amount of already tagged stuff; but would open up a giant can of worms, partly in terms of legacy dealings, but mostly in terms of inadvertent information leakage or malicious tag pollution, would be making the transfer of tags along with the file they describe from system to system easy. ID3 tagging, for instance, is largely manual; but works quite well because, for any given MP3, the odds are pretty decent that somebody has bothered to do the legwork properly and the tags migrate with the file(because they are inside it) and files with proper tags are considered more desirable than those without. Were that state of affairs more general, there would be a lot more tagged files without much more work by any particular individual. Of course, given that many tags are far more sensitive or subjective than ID3 tags tend to be, some rather deep thinking would be in order to make that actually work properly.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Abcd1234]

I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.

Umm... so? Last I checked, you had to manually organize your various files, documents, etc, into folders, and given that tags are just a superset of the functionality provided by folders, I don't see why one wouldn't expect to have to do the same with tags.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[JustinOpinion]

Don't you need manual before you can go automatic

I think that's right. Many efforts at semantic "stuff" (on the web, on the desktop, ...) don't gain traction because of "chicken and egg" problems. No one wants to tag because it's useless; but it won't be useful until many things are tagged, so that a search returns useful results, and relationships between objects can be automatically discovered.

In this case, I agree that manual tagging is a necessary precursor to more automated tagging. Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible. For instance text and word processors should be doing word frequency analysis and tagging with appropriate topics; code editors should tag with the language name; image editors should be doing crude image analysis and tagging (e.g. if it detects people in the image, this information should be saved somewhere; if the user applies red-eye correction, the location of the eyes/face should be recorded somewhere). Once this meta-data becomes more common, it's easy to see the utility. (e.g. Search: "A picture I edited last week that has three people in it...")

Even with manual tagging, the system can be fairly useful. You don't need to tag every single file for it to be useful: if you tag some group of files as "taxes 2009" then you'll be able to later find them, even if you haven't tagged much else. The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context. For instance the tagging in Apple's iPhoto is neat--but I quickly lost interest because I knew none of the tags would carry-over elsewhere. If I tag meticulously, I can search within iPhoto but nothing shows up in a desktop search using spotlight (at least the last time I checked; maybe they've since added that functionality?)... and the tags don't persist if I move the files to another system. For the user to feel like tagging is worthwhile, the tags have to be widely accessible, so that searching for them is actually useful.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[dargaud]

I DO NOT want semantic tags. The reason is simple: they are LOST when you copy or do anything with the files. If you have important info about the file: put it in the filename. Or inside the file (exif tags for images, ID3 tags for mp3s, etc). Or in a txt file with the same name next to it. The rest is no better than putting varnish on a turd: it works only as long as you don't get too close.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[molnarcs]

I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.

Not entirely true...Nepomuk works with three types of metadata. One is simple metadata stored in files (mp3 tags, timestamps, document texts - we can already search for that. The second is metadata created by the user - this is the one you're talking about. Now dolphin makes it extremely easy to tag files... basically you can assign 1-5 stars with a single click - of course this is something new, takes some time to get used to, but once you get into the habit of tagging your important files like that, it can become quite handy... But the most interesting part for nepomuk is metadata that is usually lost, yet can be still extremely useful:

The most interesting type of metadata is, however, the kind that cannot be extracted easily by an indexer and is not generated by the user manually. This includes for example the url of a file that is downloaded from the internet. Once saved on the local harddisk this information is lost. The same goes for the (rather popular) example of email attachments: Once an email attachment is saved to the local harddisk its connection to the email and with it the connection to the sender is lost. These are just two examples relating to the source of files. There are many more. http://nepomuk.kde.org/node/1

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Wonko the Sane]

I DO NOT want semantic tags. The reason is simple: they are LOST when you copy or do anything with the files. If you have important info about the file: put it in the filename. Or inside the file (exif tags for images, ID3 tags for mp3s, etc). Or in a txt file with the same name next to it. The rest is no better than putting varnish on a turd: it works only as long as you don't get too close.

Maybe we should devise a method to attach arbitrary metadata directly to a file in a way that requires little to no modification of existing unix programs while also making it accessable to any program that can deal with files and directories.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Gromgull]

Actually, in KDE4 inotify is used to listen to file changes, so if you do move or copy a file, the annotations are moved along. Although - clearly it still breaks if you copy it to a USB key and move it a different computer, scp it, attach it to an email, etc.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[hey!]

Well, I dunno. Training some kind of Bayesian algorithm seems to work well enough for spam filtering.

I think the real problem is knowing the significance of some piece of information to us will be *in the future*. As user interfaces become more "semantic", I doubt they will be as usable as a stable way of organizing data.

We can take a lesson from physical filing systems. There are really only three methods of file organization that make sense: alphabetical, chronological and by physical size (this sucker won't fit in the cabinet). I once worked for a guy who insisted on organizing the company files by category: Hot, medium, cool, cold, interested in product X, interested in product Y, vendors of A, vendors of B, related to project M. The problem is that these categories aren't stable or mutually exclusive. Some files would languish in "Hot" long after the prospects lost interest. Sometimes a cold prospect would become hot, but its file wasn't in cold because it fell into some other category. Every time you had to file something, you were faced with dilemma as to which of the many possible categories might apply.

What was worse is that he would come in on weekends and reorganize the files. Accounting went *nuts* because invoices would disappear from files and they had to guess where he might have put it. This demonstrates that the semantic significance of an artifact depends on its context (e.g., sales vs. accounts receivable, or current self vs. future self).

One function of a record keeping system is to impose some stability on information in a world that is constantly changing world. Semantic metadata is most welcome, but it's no good as a stable organizing principle for information.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[donatzsky]

The text file sounds like a good idea: If the system detects that the file is being moved to a location that does not support meta data it then asks if it should include it as a text file.
Likewise the destination system can detect this text file and ask if it should be imported.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Tanktalus]

I had that at one time. Then I moved to Linux. And, no, I wasn't using Windows. OS/2's Extended Attributes were awesome for this. They could only total 64KB per file, IIRC, but that's still an awful lot of meta data you could stuff in there. And all OS/2 programs that wanted to use attributes were aware of them, including the zip tools for OS/2, meaning that I could send a file to someone else running OS/2 and they'd have my metadata.

It's one of those features I still miss from OS/2.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Z34107]

This "semantic desktop" sounds suspiciously like the Vista/Windows 7 start menu search. Type in a date, you'll get pictures taken on that date. Type in a name, it'll pull e-mails from outlook, Word documents with that author, etc. Type in an artist, you'll get mp3s. Etc, etc.

Is this really just Windows Search?

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[maxume]

iPhoto apparently has at least rudimentary support for iptc data now (so keywords, captions). I don't use it, but I do recall seeing something where someone was peeved that their tags didn't end up as keywords, so it isn't shocking that it got fixed.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Enderandrew]

I think you could have very useful automatic tags.

For instance, I receive an attachment from you in an email titled Project Foo.

The file gets auto-tagged with your contact info from Akondi, as well as Project Foo.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Enderandrew]

The Nepomuk project has been around for over 3 years. I'm not sure when Microsoft started working on their start menu search.

However, Microsoft was working on such concepts even in the 90's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

They just kept shelving them.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Hatta]

You sort your files into directories right? Directories with meaning? What's the difference between putting a picture into your "vacation 2009" and tagging it with "vacation" and "2009"?

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Joe Snipe]

I always felt that the only way to properly handle tags (since the advent of ID3), was at the file system level. I mean that's basically what names and extensions are, you know?

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Late Adopter]

Linux supports something called Extended File Attributes in most of its file-systems, going all the way back to ext2. Any program can write and read name/value pairs for a file via system calls in attr/attributes.h. These follow the file when its moved, copied, etc. There's still the downside that the information doesn't follow the file when you send the file by email, HTTP, or FAT USB key, so it's not a perfect solution. But it does follow file moves, copies, etc, and can be read by any program that wants to.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Chainsaw]

Yes, my pictures from the vacation 2009 might end up in the "vacation 2009" directory. It only becomes a problem when you also want to find all pictures from your vacations where James is present, or the beach pictures in 2009 and 2007 that has your wife in them and that you would rank 4/5 or higher. One solution is to have a silly amount of directories, and doing hardlinks of images. That isn't very wife friendly, though. The tagging that KDE implements is a easy solution.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[mister_playboy]

BeOS did this with file "attributes", which were designed to be usable by the entire system and all applications.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Z34107]

Interesting. Not that I wanted to say "Microsoft copied KDE!" or "KDE copied Microsoft!"... It just seems like "semantic desktop" is a much more exciting term than "Windows Search 4.0" or "searching NTFS metadata."

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Anonymous Coward]

Reiser4 was originaly intended to have this feature, but development has hit an unexpected snag.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Hatta]

Exactly. If you're happy with the features directories provide, tags provide the same features with no extra work. If you want more features, it'll take a little extra work to tag them. But "tags are too much work" is really no reason not to implement them.

OTOH, is the desktop environment really the right layer to implement tags? What If I want to ssh in and use the tags? Can I do that? What if I prefer to cp and mv my files around from the command line instead of with dolphin? Will KDE preserve the tags?

This is a problem with lots of the advanced features of KDE. Kioslaves are really cool, but if I can't pass the path to mplayer or imagemagick it really doesn't do me any good. I fear the same problem with these tags. If it's not well integrated with the command line environment, I can't see myself using it.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[spitzak]

This is exactly what should be done. But not with "metadata" as people are saying. We need "metadata" embedded directly into the files. Then it is preserved when the file is copied, archieve, or stored on a system that has a different concept of metadata.

The normal implementation of "metadata" would then be used to cache the metadata read out of the file. For the best example of how this works, imagine the "thumbnail images" that some systems are storing. These are stored in the file system in some way, but are completely figured out from the original file. If the thumbnail metadata disappeared it would get repliated again later. What I would like to see is all metadata is produced from the file contents in this same way.

The way to do it is to make up some rules for how to find it, based on the file types. This does require a program that understands a lot of file formats, but that would be an actual executable program, not a "library" and thus easy to expand and for any program to call. It would for instance understand how to extract jpeg comments. For text files it would know how to recognize comments and then rules could be made up for patterns in the comments to indicate the metadata.

I could see this eventually replacing all "metadata" including long-standing things such as the name, modification date, and even the protection bits of the file (the actual protection would be the intersection of some guarded protection and what the file says, but a program with sufficient privledges could update the real protection to match the file data).

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Wonko the Sane]

Someone was building a filesystem that could do all of that naively. If only he hadn't been batshit crazy we could have had this five years ago.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[spitzak]

What's the difference between putting a picture into your "vacation 2009" and tagging it with "vacation" and "2009"?

The difference is that if you then decide to tag half of them with "summer" then that half are no longer in the "vacation 2009" directory.

Symbolic links can make this somewhat work, but as soon as you have a number of tags that form intersecting sets the number of directory entries grows to m*2^n (where m is the number of files and n is the number of different tags). This is far larger than the m*n space needed by tags even with a stupid implementation.

I do however believe a working system can be built where POSIX file api still can be used. A tag is a directory, and a whole tree of them is just a directory listing the files in that. So ./vacation/2009/ and ./2009/vacation/ would both have the same files: all the ones tagged with those. ./vacation/2009/summer would have files tagged with all three.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[honkycat]

I think asking is a mistake here, unless the "ask" is an option that you need to actively seek out, rather than just a dialog popping up.

The problem is that it is bad for the many users who won't have a clue what the question is asking. Mac OSX does a similar thing when you archive files -- it adds a bunch of .__MACOS (or similar) files in the structure that contain the metadata. It does this by default and AFAIK there's no way to turn it off. While this was annoying to me when I first found it, it's probably a reasonable compromise. People who care about this will be capable of getting around it, while for most users, things will just magically work whenever the receiving system understands the convention.

It runs into trouble, of course, when you go to a system that neither understands the convention nor the method for marking a file hidden. Then the recipient wonders where all these funny looking files come from......

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[JesseMcDonald]

One might note that category-based filing would work much better if you could place a file into multiple categories simultaneously—as is actually possible when the files are digital.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Carnildo]

Organizing is easy: my photos are categorized by location, then sub-categorized by date. My emails are categorized by sender or by mailing list. My music is categorized by artist, and subcategorized by CD. All this is done automatically, with very little effort on my part.

Now, what about semantic tagging? I've got 54,000 photos. Manual tagging would take months: I'd need to inspect each photo to figure out what tags to apply ("daylight, clear sky, bald eagle, ponderosa pine...now, do I also want to tag it to indicate that the eagle is flying rather than perching? Do I want to distinguish the fact that it's soaring from photos of birds taking off, flapping their wings, diving, or landing? If I tag it as 'soaring', do I want to indicate that it's riding thermals rather than ridge lift? It's in a wilderness-style city park: do I tag it as 'urban', or 'wilderness'?") This is a slow process, and it's not clear that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Abcd1234]

my photos are categorized by location, then sub-categorized by date. My emails are categorized by sender or by mailing list. My music is categorized by artist, and subcategorized by CD. All this is done automatically, with very little effort on my part.

Ah, but that's very different. In the case of photos and emails, the metadata is created at the moment the content comes into existence, and so what that argues for is more power on cameras and so forth which would allow the user to assign metadata at the time the content is created (geotagging is an excellent example of this).

As for music, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but someone manually created that metadata for you. You just get to benefit from their labour.

Now, what about semantic tagging? I've got 54,000 photos. Manual tagging would take months: I'd need to inspect each photo to figure out what tags to apply

Yeah, and it would take a long time to properly organize 54k images into folders, too. But, of course, you'd never do that. Every time you took a batch of photos, you'd assign the metadata at that point, and so you'd amortize the effort over time.

This is a slow process, and it's not clear that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Well, now that's a separate question. Perhaps, for you, it wouldn't be. But the simple fact is, at least in the near-term, computers will simply be incapable of automatically deducing metadata based on the content itself, so manual organization is really the only option, and I don't think most people would expect anything else.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[AniVisual]

I have this idea on tags. Basically they're organized hierarchically like folders in a file system. A file can have multiple tags. You can drag 'n drop files onto tags or tags onto files so that it's not much effort to tag a file. You can use logical AND OR, XOR etc. statements to display the groups of tags/folders you want to view. Multiple tags can be implemented on a UNIX filesystem through hard links.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[kayoshiii]

if you are talking about what I think you are talking about - I was relatively suprised to find out that a certain filesystem might making it into linux proper sometime next year. It appears that it not as dead as I originally thought afterall.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[swilly]

Or manage your files using a command line. That right there is a deal breaker for me.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[geschild]

Replying to you, belatedly because of time difference, as you make the two points that interest me most:

"Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible."

"The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context."

I think you're right on both counts and it makes me think again. As with science, immediate usability isn't always what counts most. I guess I was a bit too cynical and dismissive at first.

I'll take a wait-and-see stance for now. The problem that remains is, if anyone will use it untill it's been worked out to a point that it'll 'just work'.

The best chance for that, is if the tools allow people who already do tag simpler ways of working and tagging information is made portable. In other words, the KDE people may be on to something but I didn't get that impression from how the presentation I saw.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Wonko the Sane]

I think your right but I'm pretty sure it isn't going to include the "files as directories" metadata storage.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[arcanumas]

That doesn't seem correct. inotify works on a kernel level and should send notifications to the listening application regardless of how you moved your files (using the CLI or some KDE application) . Maybe i'm missing something that you know?

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Carnildo]

As for music, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but someone manually created that metadata for you. You just get to benefit from their labour.

It took me about 20 seconds per CD to type in the CD title and artist name. The computer then did the heavy work of ripping the tracks, converting them to FLAC, and sorting them into the correct folders. Not exactly hard.

Re:Manually semantic != semantic

[Abcd1234]

So why did you say: "My music is categorized by artist, and subcategorized by CD. All this is done automatically, with very little effort on my part"? Clearly that's a flat out lie. Your computer did none of that automatically. You did it yourself by manually entering the metadata, just as you would for any tag-based metadata system.

Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?'

Well, actually, I don't care either way. Just as long as it works, and works consistently.

Already slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't find a version on google cache. So here's the full text:

The final release of KDE 4.4 is due in early 2010, and not since the arrival of KDE 4.0 two years ago has an open source desktop environment been so highly anticipated by the free desktop community. Unlike the anti-climax that was the first KDE 4 release, however, KDE 4.4's developers say this new version will actually deliver on many of the original promises of this next-generation desktop environment -- and then some.

If maturity is the measure of a desktop environment then KDE 4.4 will have a lot to live up to, as it represents the fourth major release of the KDE 4 series.
Many small things that make the user's life easier have been done. . . Those changes might not be significant on their own, but they add up to a system that feels really well rounded
-- Sebastian Kugler, KDE spokesperson

With the feature freeze for KDE 4.4 looming in November 2009 -- after which no new features will be added and only bugs will be fixed -- we decided to take a look at what KDE has in store to lift the free desktop to a new paradigm.

Features, updates and bug fixes

Like any major version increase, KDE 4.4 will include numerous feature enhancements, updates and bug fixes.

According to KDE's developers, 4.4 will have an immediate advantage over previous versions by leveraging the latest Qt 4.6 toolkit, which brings a new layout mechanism in QGraphicsView and improved performance, among many other additions. In fact, KDE 4.4.0 was delayed by two weeks until February 2010 to make it possible to release on top of Qt 4.6.

General enhancements include improved desktop search, better privilege escalation, remote controllable Plasma widgets and more polish to the existing code base.

KDE developer and spokesperson for the project, Sebastian Kugler, says it's difficult to determine exact numbers of features, but for 4.4 it would be a very high number.

"4.4 is a significant release that brings many new features. We have new applications, for example Blogilo, a local applications for writing blogs, allowing for offline editing of articles," Kugler says. "There's is a new network manager (living in the notification area right now, a plasmoid for it is planned for later). Also applications that are not directly shipped with KDE are maturing now. Amarok, Digikam, Konversation and all those applications that are well known from their KDE 3 version are now available in a KDE 4 version."

The desktop look-and-feel has also received a makeover. The new Air theme for the Plasma desktop shell is more polished and has added subtle animations to improve the user experience.

"Many small things that make the user's life easier have been done, sometimes something as small as giving feedback from the buttons in the quick launch area of the panel," Kugler says. "Those changes might not be significant on their own, but they add up to a system that feels really well rounded and well done."

A more visible development in Plasma is the new netbook interface, which will also debut as part of KDE 4.4. Plasma-Netbook will sport a mobile computer form-factor for desktop Plasma widgets.

Kugler says there are plenty of interesting changes behind the interface, too. KDE 4.4 will ship an authorization framework based on PolicyKit, so applications and the desktop can elevate privileges safely, and administrators can specify exactly what a specific user is allowed to do.

KDE's developers have also made the desktop more social and "connected". There is a Plasma applet that shows answers to questions from the KDE knowledge base, with the aim of making it easier for new users to find help.

KDE 4.4 will also make it possible to drag content from Web sites onto the desktop. For example, a picture can be dragged it from the Web browser onto the desktop and a Plasma applet showing this picture is added to the desktop where the file was dropped. The wallpaper can also be set this way or from any remote URL.

I

Kugler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ, even the developers' names...

Re:Kugler?

[katz]

Some fans and groupies, too, apparently.

Re:Kugler?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean: Jesus Krist

Re:Kugler?

[shaji]

Did you mean to say Jesus Khrist?

Re:Kugler?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Did you mean to say Jesus Khrist?

I'm not sure. Let me look it up in KBlasphemy.

Re:Kugler?

[Eberlin]

Arrr! May you come to see the light and be touched by his GNUdley appendage.

Hint for choosing default colors

[hansraj]

Don't pick the ones that look like somebody threw up all over the screen!

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[RiotingPacifist]

As much as i love KDE i have to say generic Grey goo everywhere looks retarded, fortunately, they ship a host of sane themes. I mean grey window decorations around a grey window, with all the widgets in pretty much the same grey, why not just render a grey screen and be done with it! I'm no designer but transparent black or light blue would look considerably better.

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[Yvan256]

The non-interactive elements need to blend in, so yes they have to look "boring" and grey is a neutral color. The widgets, on the other hand, should pop up a bit (not Fisher-Price, plastic toys Windows XP-style pop though), so they should have some color to it.

I can't see the screenshots, the website is already slashdotted.

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[RiotingPacifist]

I would say that window decorations:
1) have to look nice, I know this is slashdot but if the default GUI looks ugly, normals will drop your DE without trying it out). A lot of people moved to around the time that emerald was released this wasn't a coincidence.
2) Are interactive elements, you drag/resize/maximise/shade a window using them. They also give import feedback as they indicate which window is active (this window should stand out)

example, you can barely tell which window is focused. IMO KDE3 had the window decorations right (for the time anyway), but if those are the default buttons (i never stuck with defaults and can't remember) then they needed serious work. I'm not sure what buttons should look like, but kde3=stand out too much and are too ugly, kde4=when not hovering over them are barely noticeable.

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[bickerdyke]

in BLUE?

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[Andy Dodd]

What distro?

In both Kubuntu and installations of KDE 4.2 and 4.3 on Gentoo systems, I would best describe the default KDE 4.2 and 4.3 themes as "blueish". Definately not grey.

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[RiotingPacifist]

I was going from the screenshots in TFS, (soemthing like this, while the background and panels might be blue, on every default kde install i've done, the theme was oxygen, which leaves grey windows and grey dull grey widgets

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[Anonymous Coward]

You most be looking at an ubuntu screenshot and not the onces in the article.

Re:Hint for choosing default colors

[Al Dimond]

I'm OK with grey widgets and stuff. They're easy to read from and don't distract from the content of what you're doing. The Oxygen widgets, overall, are among my favorites on any platform (most platforms' default widgets are pretty good these days, although I don't like the gradients in some Clearlooks elements and Windows stuff).

I think the Oxygen window decs are inane, though. It's important (especially with multi-monitor systems or mouse focus) to be able to distinguish the window with focus from others, and the Oxygen decs follow Microsoft and Apple in the direction of making it hard to distinguish. FVWM has great defaults in this regard... Windows 95-2000 were pretty good too.

Full text

[JohnFluxx]

It was slashdotted, so:

The final release of KDE 4.4 is due in early 2010, and not since the arrival of KDE 4.0 two years ago has an open source desktop environment been so highly anticipated by the free desktop community. Unlike the anti-climax that was the first KDE 4 release, however, KDE 4.4's developers say this new version will actually deliver on many of the original promises of this next-generation desktop environment -- and then some.
If maturity is the measure of a desktop environment then KDE 4.4 will have a lot to live up to, as it represents the fourth major release of the KDE 4 series.
With the feature freeze for KDE 4.4 looming in November 2009 -- after which no new features will be added and only bugs will be fixed -- we decided to take a look at what KDE has in store to lift the free desktop to a new paradigm.

Features, updates and bug fixes

Like any major version increase, KDE 4.4 will include numerous feature enhancements, updates and bug fixes.

According to KDE's developers, 4.4 will have an immediate advantage over previous versions by leveraging the latest Qt 4.6 toolkit, which brings a new layout mechanism in QGraphicsView and improved performance, among many other additions. In fact, KDE 4.4.0 was delayed by two weeks until February 2010 to make it possible to release on top of Qt 4.6.

General enhancements include improved desktop search, better privilege escalation, remote controllable Plasma widgets and more polish to the existing code base.
KDE developer and spokesperson for the project, Sebastian Kugler, says it's difficult to determine exact numbers of features, but for 4.4 it would be a very high number.

"4.4 is a significant release that brings many new features. We have new applications, for example Blogilo, a local applications for writing blogs, allowing for offline editing of articles," Kugler says. "There's is a new network manager (living in the notification area right now, a plasmoid for it is planned for later). Also applications that are not directly shipped with KDE are maturing now. Amarok, Digikam, Konversation and all those applications that are well known from their KDE 3 version are now available in a KDE 4 version."

The desktop look-and-feel has also received a makeover. The new Air theme for the Plasma desktop shell is more polished and has added subtle animations to improve the user experience.

"Many small things that make the user's life easier have been done, sometimes something as small as giving feedback from the buttons in the quick launch area of the panel," Kugler says. "Those changes might not be significant on their own, but they add up to a system that feels really well rounded and well done."

A more visible development in Plasma is the new netbook interface, which will also debut as part of KDE 4.4. Plasma-Netbook will sport a mobile computer form-factor for desktop Plasma widgets.

Kugler says there are plenty of interesting changes behind the interface, too. KDE 4.4 will ship an authorization framework based on PolicyKit, so applications and the desktop can elevate privileges safely, and administrators can specify exactly what a specific user is allowed to do.

KDE's developers have also made the desktop more social and "connected". There is a Plasma applet that shows answers to questions from the KDE knowledge base, with the aim of making it easier for new users to find help.

KDE 4.4 will also make it possible to drag content from Web sites onto the desktop. For example, a picture can be dragged it from the Web browser onto the desktop and a Plasma applet showing this picture is added to the desktop where the file was dropped. The wallpaper can also be set this way or from any remote URL.

In addition to new features, Kugler says the KDE team has been busy fixing bugs and improving the overall quality of the existing code.

"We've closed about 18000 bugs over the past 6 months -- so if we match the bug fixing frenzy before 4.3 (I'm quite sure we will), we'll probably h

Sure

[Lord Lode]

Oh yeah, and I really believe that they'll fix all annoyances I have had with KDE 4. I'm a happy KDE 3.5 user. They screwed KDE 4 BY DESIGN, so I suppose the bugs they'll fix now again are just some bugs of fancy unneeded things, and not UI problems with important base components, such as the file manager, the terrible not useful search function of Kate (with its different search term per file instead of sharing them), the extremely hard way to drag a box with the mouse around files in the file manager, etc..., there were so many glitches, I worked with KDE 4 for 2 months, but switched back to 3.5 almost exactly a year ago and probably forgot most of the things that made me angry back then. Oh yes, here's another one: the inability to make two rows of taskbar at the bottom.

Re:Sure

[ArcherB]

Oh yes, here's another one: the inability to make two rows of taskbar at the bottom.

Actually, I think this is possible now. Although, I agree that the rest of KDE4 makes me not want to use it either so I can't confirm at the moment. I do go back to it every now and again to check it out and see what's new. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with remote desktop programs like vnc or freenx so I can't confirm that multi-row taskbar at the moment.

Wait, here we go:

When you configure your panel ( Right Click on the Panel bar-->Arrangement->Size-->"Custom" ) so that the size is less than 34 pixels, it will display as a single row.

When it is more than 34 pixels but less than 52 pixels, it will display as a double row. When it is greater than 52 pixels, it will display as a triple row.

(You can also choose "Tiny" or "Small" and it will be a single row, whereas "Normal" will display as a double row, and "Large" will display as a triple row.)

Re:Sure

[TeXMaster]

Like you, I was extremely skeptical about KDE4.x, so I sticked to KDE3.5 for quite a while, even after the packages were not available anymore in the Debian unstable repositories. However, I have switched to KDE4 in the early days of September, and I must say that I'm rather satisfied. There are still a few bugs and limitation that bite me from time to time, but they are more than compensated by the plethora of new functionality available. (BTW you can set the number of rows in the task manager in 4.3)

Re:Sure

[RAMMS EIN]

``I'm a happy KDE 3.5 user. They screwed KDE 4 BY DESIGN, so I suppose the bugs they'll fix now again are just some bugs of fancy unneeded things, and not UI problems with important base components ... ''

With so many people expressing that sentiment, I'm curious: has KDE 3 seen any significant development since the release of KDE 4? You'd think there would be a lot of people even among the developers who thought they way KDE 4 was handles was a disaster, and continue to improve on KDE 3 instead (perhaps in a differently named fork). Has this actually happened?

Re:Sure

[Lurching]

I agree. I just started using KDE 4 (OpenSuSE 11.2) and absolutely HATE Dolphin. The major reason I have picked KDE over Gnome was the crappy file manager (Natilus) in Gnome, and now I find that KDE has chosen to emulate the same crappy interface. If I am looking for files I don't need to see icons for everything! If I am saving a file I don't want to have previews on for everything, and no choice to go to a list mode - or anything else without giant icons.

Re:Sure

[SomeKDEUser]

Are you kidding? Bitching in forums is wayyyy more fun!

Re:Sure

[transwarp]

I agree with some of that. Personally, I'd like to have both a global and local search in Kate. It looks like the only way to set up a global search is to do it yourself with the external action plugin :(

the extremely hard way to drag a box with the mouse around files in the file manager

I've seen a lot of people say that, but I don't understand. Dragging a box works normally, ctrl+dragging works, what's broken?

Re:Sure

[transwarp]

Maybe I don't understand what you want, but there's a slider in the status bar that controls icon size, another in the settings that controls default icon and preview sizes, and settings for whether to replace icons with previews. And the file dialog uses a list mode and has the icon slider at a minimum by default. What is your desired behavior?

Re:Sure

[Kjella]

With so many people expressing that sentiment, I'm curious: has KDE 3 seen any significant development since the release of KDE 4?

From what I gather, basically none at all. Nobody's really questioning the way forward, so I guess those who do develop just fix their own itches in KDE4 and live with it.

Re:Sure

[j_sp_r]

There is a button in the menu bar that makes it like a list mode. You can then zoom out and it's just a normal list mode. You can also remove the places pane. It's 4 clicks or so to make it look like you say.

Re:Sure

[PitaBred]

Naah. The complainers just don't like change, or expect something that's not there. Same kind of thing as people moving from Windows to Linux. "Why can't I just download Photoshop and install it? Linux sucks!" They just aren't ready for a shift in thinking.

Re:Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE3 is officially dead. It is not anymore developed. It got it's last versions with security fixes and that's it.

And no... the KDE3 really is old one. Hard to program and it is not flexible to current computers anymore. You can even get from KDE4 more easier to use and smaller by memoryprint than KDE3 was. The code is very nice and modular. Wihout even mentioning the technological level what it has. KDE4.0 was such step that it can not be counted as KDE 3.5 >> release. But total new project what just copies ideas from KDE3.

Re:Sure

[Lord Lode]

Back when KDE 4 didn't exist yet, I also hated Nautilus. But actually currently Nautilus 2.28.1 seems quite OK to me, there's nothing about me that irritates me (except a few things and that is that you can't drag a box around files to select them and that you can't get the right click menu with "create new folder" and "open in terminal" if the file list is as big as the screen because it only opens the file right click menu then, but that's just a minor irritation because the options are also in the File menu). It's much less irritating than both file managers in KDE 4. Either Nautilus has simply become good over the years, or I'm just more tolerant after having seen KDE 4.

But I'm very scared for what they're going to do with Gnome 3. Also ruin everything one is used to and create a new, irritating, user interface that tries to be innovative, but destroys all handy little things that one is used to after years and years of graphical OS usage?

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Yvan256]

Apart from modding offtopic, is there anything else we can do?

And no I won't read at a higher threshold because of moronic moderators who bury other people's opinions with troll and flamebait mods.

System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

I work on the "System Activity" thing (pops up if you press ctrl-esc. Like Task Manager). It's hard to get feedback about it.

So if you're a KDE user and use this, let me know what you think, how you find it, suggest any improvements/features etc. UI designers, code documenters etc also welcome to give feedback :-)

I often see people posting about how KDE/Gnome never listen to UI designers, Usability people, etc. But I've personally never had any feedback or bug reports about that sort of thing, ever. So do feel free to file such bugs - us developers are listening.

Re:System Activity feedback

[betterunixthanunix]

I stopped using it a long time ago, because it tended to accumulate errors over time. I have been using top for a long time now.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't even aware that such thing existed. Maybe I am old school, but if my box feels unresponsive, I open 'top' in a terminal... Will take a look when I get home, where I have a KDE4.something running (Debian Squeeze).

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, try htop, it's much better.

Re:System Activity feedback

[hierofalcon]

I wasn't aware it existed, but tried it and it seemed modestly useful.

It looked like it had most of the needed options. I almost always am working in a konsole window though, so htop is what I usually use.

I would think an option in the kill process screen to select the signal to send would be the one item I missed most. I usually prefer to send SIGHUP or SIGTERM to allow a graceful shutdown rather than kill. This is particularly useful for the ever present mysqld daemon that starts for things like Amarok or kopete or whatever it is that keep NFS shares mounted long after the user has signed off. artsd is also frequently one that needs to get shot.

Ask and thou shalt receive...

Re:System Activity feedback

[Mike_01_01]

Not sure if this has been fixed yet, but I'm using KDE 4.3.1 and I've never been able to sort the columns in that 'thing'. I'd probably use it a lot more if I could sort, but instead end up falling back on opening up htop in a konsole.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Please add "What's this" help entries to your widgets.
2. Find a way to cram in an "About" button if you want some feedback. There is no easy way for the user to find out who the developer is and how to get in touch with you.
3. megabyte and gigabyte units for the memory usage might help make it a bit more readable
4. Otherwise: great work. ;-)

Re:System Activity feedback

[Lemming Mark]

I use it occasionally and I like it. I particularly like the graphic improvements in the task list, such as the integrated bar graphs. I used to find that it took too long to appear to really be useful but - for some reason - it's really quite responsive on this system now, so that's better. I used to find it confusing that it resembled the system monitor app so closely and yet I couldn't add sheets to it, etc. It now looks like it's own app, so I think that's an improvement. I suppose it might be nice if there was an option / command to jump me to the full system monitor (or a configurable so that that would appear on Ctrl-Esc instead, I guess).

But generally I think the task manager thingy has improved a lot for KDE4 and I really like it - nice work!

Re:System Activity feedback

[thepotoo]

+1 for displaying megabyte/gigabyte.

Also, if it would be possible to display total memory usage, and CPU usage on each core that would be cool. Graphs for CPU and memory usage over time (total) would also be nifty (I know there's a plasma applet for that, but I'd prefer to see it integrated with system activity).

Is there any way to show network and disk usage (read/writes)? IANA programmer, but if that would be possible it would be awesome. I suspect that a lot of the slowdown I'm seeing comes from the hard drive or network, not CPU/RAM.

Although, really, its quite a fine little tool. I use it on occasion, but since KDE has been pretty stable recently, I find myself using it less and less.

Seriously, 10/10 good job.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it, it's nice. However I wonder why it's not merged with the System monitors so anyone can access the list of processes *and* graphs by using Ctr+esc ?

Re:System Activity feedback

[RiotingPacifist]

I think thats because most of us switched to htop because the kde3 version did a lot and as a result was slow to launch.
regarding ctrl+esc, i think it's pretty good however i need keybinding, something like
/ = move focus to quicksearch (great tool btw)
f9 / k = kill
f7/f8/r = renice
s,h,i,t,c,1,2 = send signals stop, hup, etc (not needed but while your at it why not)

Also nice would be policykit integration to launch the system monitor with a -ve niceness

The system monitor is much more buggy (crashed while i was look at it here, crashes if i change the monitor background color for networking):
1) it seams to take a lot of cpu, is it drawing graphs even if that tab is in the background and can that be avoided?
2) the graphs don't have enough settings (for example opaque fill instead of translucent (or no fill, or no smoothing on the lines)
3) You can't remove the default 2 tabs (if i make a better tab for monitoring my system settings i shouldn't waste resources on yours)
4) ksysguardd seams to run all the time and i can't find out where to disable it (might be a fedora packaging issue)
5) status bar info could contain number of running processes
*) no way to hide the menubar (i consider this a bug in any kde program that doesn't implement it)

anyway thanks for ctrl+esc it looks like a good GUI alternative to htop, just add some keybindings and i would use it over htop

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

I find myself having to kill a process now and then or report a bug in which I needed the PID - rather than hiding this info in a tool tip on mouse over it would be nice to see it in it's own column. Other than that it's been very useful. Thanks!

Re:System Activity feedback

[Ragica]

I just popped it open, noticed the "monitor input & output" context item, wondered what it would show me, so I turned it on for firefox. I got a a bunch of blue accented u characters slowly appearing, one red 8, more blue u's. As I wondered what this might mean, my desktop completely locked up. Problem? I managed to get control back by going to console (ctrl-alt-f1), logging in and killing firefox, then ctrl-alt-f7 back to desktop. But I think it'll be a while before I try "monitoring input & output" again now. Sounded fun in theory though.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it. Renice feature is good. I dont need to do it from command line.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Doug Neal]

Is there any way to show network and disk usage (read/writes)? IANA programmer, but if that would be possible it would be awesome. I suspect that a lot of the slowdown I'm seeing comes from the hard drive or network, not CPU/RAM.

Seconded, and yes it should be possible, at least on newer Linux kernels.. it's all in /proc!

$ cat /proc/`pidof someprocess`/io
$ cat /proc/`pidof someprocess`/net/netstat

While I'm here, some more suggestions for JohnFluxx (thanks!):
* An option to show recently-terminated processes - you know the annoying ones that appear, steal some resource, and terminate all before you can pin them down and find out what's going on.
* Functionality to visualise much more detail about process when right-clicking on them - would be very nice to have some of the data in /proc presented visually
* lsof-like functionality on a per-process basis would be awesome, especially if it shows network connections too.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Andy Dodd]

Here's my feedback:

You're not getting feedback because the thing you're working on is well hidden. I didn't know it existed until I read your post.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Andy Dodd]

One thing I forgot to mention:

Like many others, I'm oldskool/hardcore and almost always have a terminal open, and when something "odd" seems to be happening I fire up top.

I guess the real "acid test" will be if my system ever becomes so wonky I can't fire up top and then type "kill", but hitting control-esc to bring up your app works.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some feedback: It never once occurred to me to ever press ctrl-esc, so even though I've been using KDE for years, including playing with all the 4.x releases (and using 4.3 in production on multiple systems) I had no idea that the "System Activity" thing existed.

So, I dunno, maybe put "discoverable interface" on the to-do list.

Now that I've seen it, I'd suggest putting some separation between the "kill process" button and the search box. As it is now, I might suspect that I'd type a process name or number into the box and click "kill process" to kill it, when in fact I'd need to select it in the list below to kill a process.

In fact, I'd just get rid of the "close" button on the bottom and move the "kill process" button down there instead. The window already has a close box on the title bar; having a redundant close button doesn't really add anything, and might lead people to think that selecting a process from the list and clicking "close" would close the selected app, not the system activity window.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Great functionality, no useless frills; seems like a good (h)top replacement. Thank you for your work.

If you want a suggestion:
* memory size "human readable" option, so automatic per-line kB, MB, GB choice to always have values in a range 0.25 to 249 or some such (what convention do other programs use?); and perhaps make that KiB, MiB, GiB...; perhaps use that as a replacement for the K, M, G options (who could ever need those? ;-)).

I've been using htop until now, but your app is so natural and easy to use, that I think I'll switch.

Re:System Activity feedback

[crazycheetah]

This "thing" has that in the right click menu, when you right click on a process in the table. Just opened it up and found that out. :)

Re:System Activity feedback

[stilborne]

"rather than hiding this info in a tool tip on mouse over it would be nice to see it in it's own column"

you can right click on the table headers and select PID as a column. it's not shown by default, true, but it is there.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Balinares]

Oh, brilliant. Thank you for the opportunity.

First, the positive: the System Activity app is excellent, one of the pieces of KDE that doesn't piss me off of late. I was particularly impressed when I noticed that System Activity takes note when I strace a process and adjusts its display accordingly. It's the small details.

Now, on to the feature request: more detailed memory displays. Based on the mouseover text for the memory column I am not sure if the calculation is made based on the contents /proc/<pid>/smap (Shared_* and Private_*) or guestimated from RSS and VSZ as used to be traditional. A way to group processes by library loaded and (private) memory allocated for those libraries would also be great. No big deal if you find it too much trouble to implement, though: SysAct is already pretty damn fine and I like it.

Re:System Activity feedback

[urbanRealist]

Thanks for your great work. I've used the "System Activity" thing for monitoring memory and CPU usage of different processes and to kill unresponsive ones. I really like the graphical display, but often resize the columns to get it just right. You should consider lack of feedback a good thing. Yours is an application that does its job well, and I have not found any bugs in it.

Re:System Activity feedback

[hierofalcon]

Point taken... I'd missed that, and that's handy.

Now that I've seen the right click menu, I won't have that problem again. But as a brand new user, I went through this thought process... I want to try to signal a process. There's that big kill button at the top that is insensitive. There's also way too many tasks to find what I want easily, so I start typing in that handy search box. I search for a process, knotes in this case. It finds the process but of course the kill button is still not sensitive. Aha! I think. I must highlight the process. If I click on the process the kill process button is made sensitive so I hit it and get the dialog. On that dialog there is only the option to kill the process.

I'll accept as a given that the button does say "Kill" and not "Signal", and that's what the dialog gives as its option. Yet if you need to send some other signal, and don't think of right clicking, you're just going to go "Bah! Yet another attempt to replace the command line with a GUI that doesn't do everything I need!" and use htop or the like where sending a signal is right there in the menu. It is very nice that ksysguard and this use the same menu (and perhaps the same complete widget) to do the heavy lifting as I note the options are the same in its process table as the one on the desktop. Of course if a system is thrashing, I'm probably going to be using a command line on a normal console to try to have the best and quickest chance to kill the offending task that is probably using up all available memory instead of trying to bring up any GUI that will be competing for whatever resource is scarce.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like you're getting a lot of positive feedback, so here's something negative:
Ctrl+Esc is supposed to bring up the main menu (Alt+F1 in KDE IIRC), as seen in Windows and Xfce4! Which reminds me why KDE is so damn annoying... Not only did they assign all the shortcuts wrong, they also decided it would be funny to make some shortcuts that are obviously of interest to regular applications do random other stuff, causing them to either do two things, or only the KDE thing (can't remember).

Re:System Activity feedback

[fritsd]

Nice. didn't know it existed. Makes it easier to kill pulseaudio when it misbehaves :-)

Re:System Activity feedback

[fritsd]

Maybe it's an idea to put it in the "computer" tab of the application launcher, between "system settings" and "run command". Also, it would be nice if the keybinding was displayed next to it, i.e. "show running programs control-escape" "run command alt-F2" I mean, how is a beginning user going to ever find alt-F2 ??

Re:System Activity feedback

[fritsd]

Could you be more specific (not all of us use MS Windows or XFCE4 on a regular basis): are all the shortcuts wrong because they're inconsistent within KDE, or are they wrong because they're different from usage in other GUIs? I mean, bye "regular applications" do you mean "regular KDE applications" or "regular VM/CMS applications" ;-) ?

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

I never knew about the "System Activity" thing. It's actually quite helpful. Thank you.

Re:System Activity feedback

[amRadioHed]

I've seen tickets about the System Monitor applets and they were closed with won't fix saying if we wanted more features we should install some third party applets. Pretty weak, I'd be happy with simple stuff like having niced processes a different color in the CPU monitor.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

1. Will do that.
2. Hmm, maybe in the bottom left hand corner I could add one of those Help drop-down buttons that has Help and About?
3. Right click on the top of the column and chose megabyte/gigabyte. I'm not sure how to make that more discoverable?
4. Thanks :)

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

Memory graphs are in the "full" app. (Run the program "ksysguard"). I'm still not sure how to show graphs in the "lite" version, UI wise.

Disk usage info is already there - right click on the column headings, and chose "Show column 'I/O'".
It's a pretty new feature, so distros might not have it just yet.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

I've implemented /io already, so it's in the very newest versions of KDE. Adding /netstat support would be interesting indeed.

* How would showing recently-terminated processes work UI wise? Maybe a context menu option. One possible program would be when a large number of processes are created/destroyed - e.g. when compiling. It might kinda 'flood' the display.

* I've started on adding scripting support (using javascript). I can add it for almost free (in terms of memory) since it's already loaded by KDE. I just need to write (or get others to write!) some scripts for it :-) This functionality should be in KDE 4.4

* That would be good :) Maybe done through the scripting support.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

Well, the System Activity thing is always loaded. Also the UI should be quite clean and not look like a desktop app. I'm looking for suggestions on how they could be merged and still look pretty :-)

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

I like the shortcut ideas - especially "/" to jump to the searchbox. I don't think using "k" for kill etc works, because typing "k" already causes it to jump to the process starting with the letter "k".

> The system monitor is much more buggy (crashed while i was look at it here, crashes if i change the monitor background color for networking

Heh, I get reports about that crash _daily_, despite fixing it months ago. :) I never realised so many people changed the background color. Maybe I need to fix my defaults.

> 1) it seams to take a lot of cpu, is it drawing graphs even if that tab is in the background and can that be avoided?

It doesn't draw graphs not being shown. The processes page takes around 3% CPU on my laptop (dual core 1.8Ghz AMD). About half the time is fetching all the info, and half for drawing. I'm running Qt 4.6 though, which is a bit faster.

> 2) the graphs don't have enough settings

Hmm, you'll hate me then :-D I just removed the custom-set colors thing, and instead set the colors based on the current KDE color scheme. People were complaining that the colors weren't set by their KDE color scheme.

> 3) You can't remove the default 2 tabs

Yeah, that's intentional :-D People accidentally delete them otherwise and then end up with a non-functioning app. You can manually unlock them - in ~/kde/share/apps/ksysguard/*.ksgrd and set "locked" to be 0.

> 4) ksysguardd seams to run all the time and i can't find out where to disable it (might be a fedora packaging issue)

It's being run by plasma, to provide data to its engines. It's only running when actually used, so maybe you have a CPU monitoring plasmoid thing?

> 5) status bar info could contain number of running processes

Trouble is, the more I put in the status bar, the wider it makes the window :-D I'll look into it.

> 6) Hmm, I'll look into that too.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

I didn't like the look of automatically changing between KB/MB/GB per line because then you can't instantly see how much memory it is using. This way, the larger the text is displaying the number, the more memory.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

> A way to group processes by library loaded and (private) memory allocated for those libraries would also be great.

How would that look UI wise?

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this guy, he's nice. :-)

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the tabs in the full app are quite nice :) It also gives the advantage of maintaining only one app I suppose. I was quite confused to find out there were two apps doing the same thing with almost the same UI. Let me know if you want to discuss this further, I can give you my email. And thanks for the good work by the way :)

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

In KDE 3 I tried to maintain the applets, but I simply did not have the time to do a decent job.

In KDE 4, I don't maintain any plasmoids, but instead rely on others to do that, and hopefully the better ones will float to the top.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

Actually I agree with you - but changing global shortcuts is hard - too much momentum :-)
If I changed them, then we'd next have posts about how KDE is so damn annoying because they keep changing the global shortcuts..

Re:System Activity feedback

[PhilDin]

I hope you'll take it as a compliment when I say that I've never considered the usability of the system activity applet. I suppose I don't use it very often but across many different linux installs and many different KDE versions, it just works and doesn't give any nasty surprises. It's possible that this is a rare case of a software project being *done*.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

2) the graphs don't have enough settings (for example opaque fill instead of translucent (or no fill, or no smoothing on the lines)

Yeah and a color dropdown for the lines, with RGB and HSV options. And line thickness. Maybe the option to change the background color, and the alpha of any solid parts of the graph. Would be good to choose different smoothing options, and different line caps too.

You should be able to save & load different sets of graph settings. Maybe have an auto loaded so they can change at different times of the day. Perhaps link it to a weather widget so it can change if it starts to rain.

Oh - background images! Yeah you need background images displayed in the graph too. Maybe let us tint them & distort them.

Idiot.

Re:System Activity feedback

[kaitos]

It seems natural, to me anyway, that I should be able to hit Ctrl-Esc and see what is using all my bandwidth, so, be able to sort it by network using rate, just like I can for CPU and memory, etc. Every program I've seen that does this needed root privileges though, but maybe it can be done with the PolicyKit framework?

Re:System Activity feedback

[amRadioHed]

Yeah, I'm hoping. There still isn't anything as flexible as the old system monitor applet in 3.5. Between all the separate applets I can almost get what I used to have but not quite.

Anyway, thank you for your work on KDE4. Overall I love it. Since 4.3 it's been stable and a pleasure to use. I can't wait for 4.4.

Re:System Activity feedback

[quantumphaze]

I like it, and many of the suggestions posted here would improve it (especially key bindings, modifiable like the rest of KDE).

I personally use it as a quick to load alternative to htop as Ctrl+Esc is as fast as it gets.
My sugestion is to make the context menu customisable so users can put commonly used signals one click away instead of in the nested menu. At the moment there is only kill in the top level context menu and not all signals available in htop are available in the sub-menu.

I often use STOP/CONT to hard pause apps (like Firefox when playing a Flash game that takes up 60% CPU at idle) and it would be nice if it took less time to do that.

I also managed to reliably crash System Monitor when making the Network History horizontal scale 1 px, the other two plots worked fine.

Re:System Activity feedback

[drago177]

I'm not in front of Vista, 7, and have never used KDE, but those task managers have a button to monitor hard drive usage, and since Gnome doesn't offer something similar, I'm wondering if your Activity Monitor does. If not, that's my suggestion. Its so annoying to be looking at a bunch of processes not taking any CPU, but the HDD light is solid on. Throwing darts can resolve the issue, but it's just annoying.

Re:System Activity feedback

[thepotoo]

OK, that full app is perfect. How can I make it so that when I hit Ctrl+Esc it brings up ksysguard instead of the lite app? (It almost seems like that should be the default anyway.)

I don't see I/O in my distro (Kubuntu latest), so I'll wait for the next update.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

You can't, because the start up speed of the full version isn't acceptable - especially when the system is under full load.

I'm looking at trying to merge the two, but still unsure how exactly.

Re:System Activity feedback

[Merritt.kr]

I /love/ the system activity monitor from KDE. No complaints, at all - maybe that's why you don't get too much feedback, it works and works well! :) Great job!

Re:System Activity feedback

[marcosdumay]

That is a great app! I didn't know it, but I liked to have ps on a GUI. Now, is there a way to become superuser? (I'm probably using a very old version of it, the one that comes with Debian Lenny, so I understand that there may already be an quite evident way on newer versions.)

Also, it is quite well hiden. It should come with some .desktop shortcut (I don't know if it is done by the distros or by you).

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

It is, of course, a bad idea to run an app as supervisor.

Instead, when you try to kill or renice a process that you don't own, it will pop up a dialog box asking for the root password.

In older versions this was done with kdesu (using sudo) and in newer versions this is done with policykit.

I suppose it's possible that you have a really old version that doesn't have either though.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

For now, I added a tooltip saying that you can right click for more options. I'll try to improve the dialog box at some point.

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

You left-click on the column heading to sort. Is it not working?

Re:System Activity feedback

[JohnFluxx]

> 1. Please add "What's this" help entries to your widgets.

This is now done, just in time for the string freeze (Tomorrow!).

When you finally use 4.4, please let me know if you have any improvements for the the WhatsThis entries. ( johnflux at gmail dotty com)

Re:System Activity feedback

[hierofalcon]

Excellent! Keep up the good work!!! If the people running the big apps like konq and kmail were as responsive to their bugs as you are to yours, Microsoft would be history....

Re:System Activity feedback

[Mike_01_01]

Not for me it isn't. Mine always shows the username column selected for a descending sort (the column is highlighted and the column header has the arrow to the right). It isn't actually sorted by username or any other column, and clicking on any column header makes no difference (username remains selected, no sorting occurs).

Re:System Activity feedback

[Balinares]

You'd have to ask Celeste, or another one of our fine usability experts. :) Maybe a pop-up accessible from the right-click menu could let you see the loaded libraries for the process in question, with their respective memory usage? And from that pop-up you could select the library you want per-process usage for.

Or maybe the process list could open in tree mode, with the libraries and their memory usage as children nodes of each process node.

The above should already reveal interesting behaviors, such as, for instance, that Konqueror never unloads a library after having needed it once to display a KPart.

What do you think?

KDE is really heading in the right direction but

[Interoperable]

they'll run out of version numbers in the 4.x series before the series reaches its full potential. I'm really looking forward to using 4.4 but, since it will be the first release that really starts developing the ideas that KDE wanted to implement in the 4 series, the .4 increment seems a bit high. Still, 4.3 already does what Windows 7 and OSX only hint at moving towards so 4.4 will be interesting.

Last piece

[molnarcs]

KDE 4.3.3 is brilliant, stable, feature rich ... there is one last piece missing: printing options. I've been happy with KDE 4.2.x except for this last piece. I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.

Also, the semantic desktop concept is shaping up nicely. I was weary of enabling nepomuksearch with strigi, because in the early 4.x releases they were extremely buggy. Then I went ahead with 4.3.3 (on Arch), and now strigi seem to work fine. It uses minimal resources, indexing is automatically switched off when you switch to powersaving mode (useful on a laptop), otherwise CPU usage is barely noticable. It still uses a shitload of memory, but with KDE 4.x you have plenty to spare. I have 2 Gb in my laptop, and without nepomuk/strigi memory usage after startup is 15%. That includes all the daemons necessary for a modern desktop (including cups), 2 desktops with different wallpapers and widgets, wicd. After running it for days without reboot, memory usage stabilized around 30% including ktorrent running in the background. After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does. Which reminds me, nepomuk (on my setting at least) works in dolphin (just start typing in the searchbar), not in the normal Find files option accessible from KMenu.

Re:Last piece

[Abcd1234]

After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does.

What on earth can it be doing such that 400MB of RAM is justified? AFAICT, it's nothing more than a glorified metadata database. Sounds like the precise opposite of "lean" to me...

Re:Last piece

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but it still won't properly set up my Panasync S110 monitor. Xorg issue or not, I hate installing a KDE desktop only to be greeted by 640 x 480 or 1024 x 768...

Re:Last piece

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming by weary you meant wary?

Re:Last piece

[pavon]

I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.

That is strange. I am running KDE 4.3 on Debian Squeeze, and that option is there. I use it printing documents from Okular all the time. The printing does have many other issues though. It doesn't have even/odd page option so I can do manual duplexing, and setting page margins has me completely befuddled. When I print a document from Kwrite it doesn't have any margin settings of it's own - and the margin settings for the printer (which I am told are really there to define the unprintable areas for the printer) reset to the defaults each time I change them.

My biggest problem with KDE 4.3 is the fact that SSL is completely broken. I've stopped using Konqueror altogether because of this, and it causes annoyances in KMail as well. I can't believe they released with a bug that serious.

Re:Last piece

[Bralkein]

In the article it is mentioned that nepomuk will be moving in 4.4 to a new backend, which offers improved performance. Perhaps this will include a reduced memory footprint. Anyway, if you don't like it, it is very easy to turn off: System Settings -> Advanced tab -> Desktop Search -> The first checkbox.

Re:Last piece

[lbbros]

Indeed, AFAIK the Virtuoso server backend, which is what is used with Nepomuk for 4.4, uses a lot less RAM than the current working backend (Java-based Sesame2).

Re:Last piece

[molnarcs]

Well, I'm not sure it needs all that RAM - most of it can be due to caching to reduce disk access, which makes a lot of sense actually. This is pure speculation, but based on the behaviour I saw, it may read in data from a lot of files at the same time (say when disk access/io is law/nil), then it crawls the data to extract the information it needs... It certainly doesn't seem to be in a hurry ;) Took it a day to index everything on my laptop, but as I said, the performance hit during this operation was negligent, except the increased RAM usage (which didn't impact anything, 2Gb is more than enough for linux+KDE4.x).

Re:Last piece

[molnarcs]

For me it's either all pages, or I can define ONE range (say from 19-22), but I can't do pages 5, 7, 19 or 3-6, 34-39 - that's what I mean. These options were not available on Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora either (KDE 4.2.x).

Re:Last piece

[cecom]

Printing is my major beef with KDE 4. A "desktop" without printing? WTF were they thinking? One of the primary functions of a desktop environment is to provide printing - page selection options, including odd/even, etc, is an absolute must. To me it is inconceivable that a non-alpha release of a mature desktop environment was released without full printing support.

It is even more inconceivable because KDE 3.5 is pretty awesome in that respect. Thank god I am not being forced to upgrade to KDE4 yet because I am using Debian. (Debian's slow cycle has its advantages :-)

Anyway, to me this speaks of a significant disconnect between the KDE developers and their users. I am a huge KDE fan, but this has caused me to lose confidence. (Well, some other things too, like KMail's non-functioning IMAP, or the inability to compose HTML mail - functionality which, like it or not, is a must for a modern desktop, esp. in a business environment. May be that is fixed in KDE4? I would love to move back to KMail from Thunderbird).

Re:Last piece

[PeterBrett]

My biggest problem with KDE 4.3 is the fact that SSL is completely broken. I've stopped using Konqueror altogether because of this, and it causes annoyances in KMail as well. I can't believe they released with a bug that serious.

That is strange. It works fine for me on Fedora. Have you reported the bug to your distribution?

Re:Last piece

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 4.3.3 is brilliant, stable, feature rich ... there is one last piece missing: printing options.

How about a scanning program that's installed by default? I had to do multiple google searches to find out that Kooka had been replaced and what the replacement was, because the default installation of Kubuntu 9.10 seemed oblivious that I had a scanner.

The descriptions of HP's all-in-one printer drivers could use some work, too. After I switched to one that sounded more appropriate, I found out the default one really was the correct driver, even though it didn't mention it supported scanning or my model of printer.

Re:Last piece

[pavon]

I is this bug, which is currently the fourth most hated bug in KDE. There were originally several problems with SSL in KDE, including shipping with CA Root Certificates that KDE/QT libraries reject as having invalid syntax. I think most distros have fixed this bug, but it cropped back up for a while again when 4.3 landed in Debian. This caused KDE apps to reject about 3/4 of the SSL sites on the internet as having bad certificates.

While that appears to be fixed now, I still haven't been able to load my own certificates for the website and email servers I run.

Re:Last piece

[quantumphaze]

I'm using Gmail with KMail's IMAP right now and it works fine. You have two options with creating IMAP accounts whether you have one that caches the mail or one that doesn't. Choose the one that does cache them (Disconnected IMAP) unless you like having to redownload each message when you view it again.

Make HTML messages by Options->Formatting (HTML) in KMail Composer.

Re:Last piece

[metamatic]

Printing is my major beef with KDE 4. A "desktop" without printing? WTF were they thinking? One of the primary functions of a desktop environment is to provide printing - page selection options, including odd/even, etc, is an absolute must.

I'm afraid you need to get a more up-to-date major beef. KDE 4.3 has full printing support, with collation, banners, cover pages, headers and footers, etc.

Re:Last piece

[cecom]

Well, I am not running KDE 4 and won't be until it gets in Debian Stable, bit this is what the GGP said - that in KDE 4.3 you still "can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges".

Re:Last piece

[cecom]

About HTML mail, take a look at this bug (from 2004, no less): http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86423

Briefly, the problem is that you need to be able to reply in HTML to HTML mails you receive.

This is a real shame, because ignoring these two problems (though I will try IMAP again per your suggestion), KMail is hands down the best darn e-mail client I have ever used.

Re:Tags? It's called meta-data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much all web services use "tag", so you don't have much of a case -- it's a good thing you added the insults to hide that obvious fact.

18,000 bugs?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

They closed 18,000 bugs?!? Seems too much, to me...

Re:18,000 bugs?!?

[Erik Hensema]

Probably just tickets. They're often confused with bugs.

Re:18,000 bugs?!?

[metamatic]

They closed 18,000 bugs?!?

Maybe it's like Firefox and they don't actually fix them, just close them.

its a pity people/distros cant read

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone paying attention knew that 4.0 WAS NOT ready for general use yet like children on Christmas eve, they couldnt wait.

But of course we are in the home of the 'cant be bothered to RTFA', so id have more chances explaining fellatio to Ellen Degeneres than to convince this lot to read something first.

The funniest thing is when 4.0 came out, you could still use v3.5 which was updated twice that same year but some people were sooooo incensed that 4.0 was exactly what it was (incomplete) that they decided to NOT to go back to 3.5 even though nothing stopped them from still using 3.5.

Its times like this you realize that people are idiots.

Re:its a pity people/distros cant read

[daveime]

So, will the children be ready for general use by Boxing Day ?

You *do* know you're missing a comma that puts the sentence into a whole other context ?

Re:its a pity people/distros cant read

[hansamurai]

Anyone paying attention knew that 4.0 WAS NOT ready for general use yet like children on Christmas eve, the developers couldn't wait to label it as a stable integer release.

Re:its a pity people/distros cant read

[Anonymous Coward]

Please. Get. Over. It. Now.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

What I miss, What I want.

[Icegryphon]

When you could just add the list of images to Kview from the Command prompt.
(i.e. kview *.jpg)
Poof, they would be loaded into the Slideshow for Kview.

Re:What I miss, What I want.

[icebraining]

It can't? That's lame.

feh 3. You can even do "feh -D 5 *.jpg" to define a time delay between automatically changing slides.

Re:What I miss, What I want.

[simcop2387]

this has been mostly replaced with gwenview

gwenview *.jpg #or for an immediate instant slideshow; gwenview -s *.jpg

Re:What I miss, What I want.

[Icegryphon]

Interesting, if that is the case can you run multiple copies of gwenview?
Why the hell do they keep kview then?

Re:What I miss, What I want.

[stilborne]

gwenview is the default image viewer in the KDE 4 software distribution, and the only one included as part of it. other image viewers are available as add ons as part of KDE Extra Gear.

Please: No More Vertical Text

[iamnotaclown]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.

Thanks.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary.

Abso-fucking-lutely! Whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot at dawn.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[devent]

I'm using Kate all the time and I have mostly 10 to 20 or more documents open. A tab panel on the side is really good with the 16:9 screens that now everybody has anyway. But if you think it's wasted space, why you don't click on "Documents" to hide it?

Kate is one of the very best text editors. Big thanks to the KDE4 developers.

The vertical text is very space save, too (which is good). In Kile there is like 4 panels to open with the vertical text, very use full. But what I don't understand is, why can't I move the panels to a different location, like to the sides. In Kile is the output panel on the bottom side, but I wish I could move it to the right side.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[AtomicDevice]

As far as I am concerned kate is the best text editor in unix today. It's syntax highlighting is far and away the best (the only thing that compares is scite, which is designed to demo the same editor class kate is based off), it does everything. I can open up stuff on an ftp server and edit it as if it were local, I can edit any text file with any extension and get correct highlighting, I can do all my building and testing in the terminal.

And, the loveley vertical text makes options easy to see and not space consuming. The only thing I wish is that gnome would get their act together and make something as complete as kate so I could have everything looking gtk.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.

Thanks.

Please MORE vertical text! at least make it configurable. I have no problems reading vertical text. the files in the "wasted space" of the above pictture should be stored in vertical text.

but what I'd really like is vertical titlebars on the applications.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're dumb. Click on "Documents" to collapse the pane. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F or deselect from View -> Toolbars to hide it completely.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Uncheck 'Show Documents' in View -> Tool Views

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that the space you call wasted is meant to be hidden?

And what is the problem with horizontal scrolling on text longer than the width of the text area? Not everybody wants their text to be line wrapped, I do so I just enable it.

What Windows Vista or 7 ideas are they aping? The critique of the horizontal tabs have existed since at least the 3.x days, long before Vista or Windows 7, so it can't that you are referring to.
The accusation that KDE is copying windows have existed even longer, but I've never seen someone actually point to a feature that is a copy.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.

Thanks.

If you find that your text editor has to much wasted space, and you don't like frilly visuals, perhaps you should try the next generation of editors

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.

Thanks.

Agreed. If I wanted to use Windows, I'd go out and buy Windows 7. The new desktop feels like something that fell off the back of the Vista lorry. Also, 3D effects have their place; generally in movies where you wear funny spectacles. You don't need 3D to read an e-mail or write a word processor document. And as for the plasmoids... perhaps they would have been better termed spasmoids, would give a new user a hint of expected performance that way...

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[pbhj]

I like the vert text, the "files open" pane closes if you click the "Documents" side-tab again. Simple.

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that kate also has an optional vim input mode.
Just for those users who claim vim is the best ;)

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Grizzlysmit]

Dear KDE devs,

Please rethink the vertical text that has infected KDE4 like so much ringworm. It's hard to read, hard to use, and completely unnecessary. Also, please stop aping Windows Vista and 7. Or at least stop copying their bad ideas.

Thanks.

I personally love vertical text and have no trouble reading it :D long live vertical text, but yeah don't copy windows or that OSX of apple their crap

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

jedit... java but it has kitchen sink

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[dargaud]

I like kate too, but there are many features I miss from my fav Win editor, NoteTabPro. For instance, how do you sort a selected block of text in kate ?

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it really do everything that vim can do?
And can it do all that magic over a slow, high latency network connection?
And does it come (sometimes in vi form) preinstalled on any UNIX/Linux box from ~1980 onward?
Does it work on virtually any OS there is? (http://www.vim.org/download.php#others)
Is the amazing syntax highlighting there for FORTRAN 77 - Fortran 2003, ADA, Lisp, *insert obscure language here* - I would not be surprised if there is syntax highlighting for Brainfuck and Whitespace in vim.

No to any of those points? I guess I'll be sticking with vim, then...

Re:Please: No More Vertical Text

[Anonymous Coward]

I also find the vertical text annoying, so I _turn_it_off_.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Yvan256]

That, or Slashdot could add a new moderation choice: spam. Also make the spam count add up (i.e. don't prevent people from moderating someone spam just because he's already at -1, let the spam count add up).

If a spam moderation counter is above a certain value, editors could look it up, decide if it's real spam or not, and disable the account/warn the user his account has been taken over/whatever.

Video thumbnails in dolphin/konqueror?

[QCompson]

Will this basic file-manager feature be available in 4.4? And no, I don't want to install mplayerthumbs; it's horribly slow and CPU intensive. It should be integrated into the file manager like nautilus and explorer.

Re:Video thumbnails in dolphin/konqueror?

[iris-n]

Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.

But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.

Re:Video thumbnails in dolphin/konqueror?

[QCompson]

Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.

Weird. I think nautilus does a great job with video thumbnails, and they allow me to quickly and easily differentiate between video files.

But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.

I'm not sure how nautilus does it, but I never have black thumbnails. Again, I find them quite useful, and it seems to be a very basic feature present in most file managers. Didn't konqueror in 3.5.x have video thumbnails? It would be nice to at least have the option of video thumbnails built in.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Inda]

Add moddifiers to insightful, interesting and informative posts. I have a +2 on funny posts and Slashdot is a much more comical place as a result.

Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since KDE 4.2, they claim that "now" it is ready for general consumption, but at each new version they still claim to have fixed thousands of bugs.

If that 18000 number is to believed, doesn't that imply that 4.3 was a horribly buggy release?

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[0racle]

A number of these bugs are ones that were entered as KDE4 regressions, so closing them happens as KDE4 regains features that KDE3 had, also I believe that closing wishlist items is included in their bug count. KDE is a large project used by many people with different requirements and usage patterns, it's not that surprising that there are a large number of bugs found and reported.

As for 4.x is good for general consumption, each time they said that, at least in release notes, there was a phrase along the lines of 'unless you need X feature.' For 4.3 it was ready for general use, unless you used multiple monitors as that support, while there, had not fully been exposed.

I found 4.2 too be too much of a pain to use, mainly coxing it to run on 2 monitors, but 4.3 hasn't given me any problems ... unless you need to print.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[evanbd]

It depends how they use the tracker. (I don't follow KDE development, so this is mostly speculation.)

A lot of projects (open source or otherwise) put lots of things in the tracker. This would include 4.3 bugs, but also bugs introduced and fixed during 4.4 development that never made their way into a release. It might include feature requests for 4.4 that were implemented. It might include random discussion topics ("we should do this" followed by some discussion, closed as "no we shouldn't", or perhaps closed as "not doing this, but doing some other related idea that occurred to us while discussing, see this other bug"). It probably includes bugs about things not being sufficiently documented, or otherwise missing some polish — things users notice, but don't normally classify as "bugs".

I suspect that the 18000 number says more about how they use the tracker than it does about how buggy 4.3 was. That means it has some connection to how much work has been done, but doesn't really distinguish "fixing" from "adding features". A missing feature is just a type of bug of omission, after all.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Andy Dodd]

"bugs" being entries in a ticket tracker DB like Bugzilla or Launchpad.

Such DBs tend to be known for dupes.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Blakey Rat]

Windows 2000 was famously released with 65,000 bugs (or items, at least) still in its bug tracker: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/11/1840225.shtml

And yet it's almost universally considered one of the best Windows releases ever.

I'm not saying anything about how buggy KDE 4.3 is, but simply counting the number of bugs doesn't really indicate much.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Anonymous Coward]

N op robl 3m so FAr . ..

I w@#itDing fro mi t.

It` s q Uit3 st ble

&-)

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[andersa]

When they got KMail running on the akonadi backend, it will be ready, imho.. Until then, it's just a toy.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know that KDE has more LoC than Linux OS (== the kernel) has?

And from 18 000 bugs, most of them are wishes, changes and questions about localisations. Not only bugs what made it crash. We do not separete those differently but count everything as bugs.

Re:Every time it is thousands of bugs...

[Anonymous Coward]

at each new version they still claim to have fixed thousands of bugs

As someone coming from the proprietary software world, you have to understand that proprietary software makes thousands of little changes and fixes to their software with each release too -- the difference is that proprietary software vendors won't tell you about it. They give you the carefully-prepared executive summary, and keep the details secret.

With that said, "thousands of bugs fixed" is a good thing. It doesn't just indicate progress; it means that the development community is active and very interested in continuing to work on this project.

The metadata problem

[Wonko the Sane]

At one point there was a very promising idea for a universal metadata storage system that would free metadata from a particular program and make it available to every part of the OS.

Too bad the main programmer had some personal problems and couldn't finish the job...

Re:The metadata problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean he came to his senses???

Re:The metadata problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on your point of view that statement is true, or false, on more than one level.

Network Manager + Hidden ESSID

[Lusixhan]

Have they fixed the maddening inability of plasma-widget-network-manager to connect to a hidden wireless ESSID? Maybe this is just a Kubuntu problem, but since 9.04 (7 months ago) the KDE network manager has had issues off and on connecting to non-visible ESSIDs, even after explicitly giving it the name. It's especially frustrating because GNOME's network manager has no such issue, so it's not a driver problem.

Re:Network Manager + Hidden ESSID

[Andy Dodd]

If you read the summary, networkmanager has been moved back to a tray applet for the time being.

The NM plasma widget was, to my knowledge, never an official part of KDE 4.x upstream. It was a Kubuntu-specific thing.

The NM applet in Kubuntu 9.10 is far better.

Re:Network Manager + Hidden ESSID

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction:

I developed the plasma applet for openSUSE 11.1 but it was not good enough come release time, so we shipped KDE 3 KNetworkManager with KDE 4.

Kubuntu shipped the plasmoid anyway because they can't install multiple KDE versions in parallel.

Neither the plasma applet nor the tray applet were part of KDE releases, since they have not yet been officially released. See http://dot.kde.org/2009/11/07/introducing-kde-4-knetworkmanager for more details.

Will Stephenson

White Screen of Death

[mrpacmanjel]

Has the "white/black" screen of death been fixed yet?

I currently run Slackware 12.2 & 13 on my laptop (ati r300 graphics card).
Although all the KDE (4.3.2) apps work, when I start the KDE environment I get the splash screen then....a blank white screen appears instead!

As far as I understand if Phonon (or plasmoids?) has *any* issues (e.g. compositing, missing libraries) it freaks out on shows a white screen. It just seems a bit "brittle"!

Got me completely stumped and stops me from using KDE. I've used Gnome for many years and just wanted to try something different - not to mention that Gnome switched over to pulseaudio and depreciated the "Volume" applet - wtf?.

I've tried every fix I can Google but still the same thing.

I think KDE 4 has come a long way and generally really impressed with it.
Gnome 3 is due next year and I get the impression that the "re-design" seems a bit muddled.

Re:White Screen of Death

[quantumphaze]

Looks like Plasma is crashing on start. That will usually leave you with the black/white screen with the cursor still running about, hopefully Kwin should also be fine. Alt+F2 should still work and give you KRunner where you can open Konsole to find any startup messages when running plasma-desktop.

Often the fix is as simple as removing plasmarc and friends from your .kde4 folder.

Re:White Screen of Death

[mrpacmanjel]

Thanks for the advice - You're right, Plasma is indeed crashing on start.

However, I have tried removing stuff from my .kde4 folder but it does not seem to help.
I have tried Alt+F2 but nothing seems to happen - it is as if any windows that do open they are obscured by the "white screen".

When I get some spare time I'll investigate further.

The annoying thing is yes Plasma is crashing but why show a useless white screen - that is lame fallback behaviour! Would it make sense to alert the user that something "bad" has happened and show a "basic" desktop or launch a default application instead - or even some kind of "safe mode"?

Most of the other kde components run fine under a different desktop environment (e.g.fluxbox) so why show a white screen - it is completely unhelpful!

KDE for Windows

[KDEnut]

I also love the windows port they're doing: http://windows.kde.org/ Works great for those who're stuck on windows boxes at work.

What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about...
  - manual duplex printing?
  - (fully) working bookmarklets?
  - kate plugins?
and many of the other useful features that KDE 3 had that were ditched by the developers so they could spend more time on things like making the trashcan on the desktop resizable/rotatable?

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[daveime]

I'd have suggested a URL blacklist, but it takes so long already to post a comment, I really don't want to make the process any longer.

Anyway, the site sucks. Have you read his "Rivacy Policy", perfect Engrish, and nothing whatsoever to do with privacy.

1. About product
All of our products are the best quality AAA quality,brand new in original box with retro card,paper work and certificate logo.Famous Branded Goods

2.what is the return policy?
after you receive the package,if there will be something badly damaged or wrong,take pictures for that,we will reship the good when you next time order or return you half of products money,because if you send back cost much in shiping,it is not reasonable.

3.Is this a legit website?
This is legit website,We are selling the items displayed on our website. We have sent many packages to different countries. we have many year business,we are serious to do business,we take the most safe payment, it is most safe way payment,we have own facory, we can promise our quality, please do not worry about that.

So they send you damaged goods, and then refund only half your money, because you will lose anyway by having to ship it back to the Chinese sweatshop yourself. Sounds like the perfect scam.

Best way to stop losers like this is post derogatory comments about his "business", and hope Google associates them with his website.

KDE4 =~ Vista

[otis wildflower]

Actually, worse than Vista, more like a bastard stepchild of Vista and OS X 10.0 (aka the paid beta)... Have missing features from 3.5 finally been implemented in 4.x? Last time I touched it (4.2 IIRC) it was still buggy as hell and almost all the stuff I had known from 3.5 was gone. Heck, can kpanels (or whatever they are) stretch across xinerama/twinview screens yet?

BTW, has KDE4 finally gotten the useful 'run command' in whatever they call kpanel now? One that hooks into konqueror shortcuts so you can fire off URLs, man pages, shortcutted searches, commands, etc? At this point I'm limping along with deskbar-applet but it's not nearly as good.

ps: Missing features are not wishlist items. They are bugs.

Re:KDE4 =~ Vista

[stilborne]

"Heck, can kpanels (or whatever they are) stretch across xinerama/twinview screens yet?"

no, and since screens can be different resolutions, there's no plans to do so either. this feature in kicker broke on many people's systems and gives no real benefit over a panel per screen, though it did mean more config UI.

"BTW, has KDE4 finally gotten the useful 'run command' in whatever they call kpanel now?"

the panel is part of Plasma Desktop (and it hasn't been called kpanel since KDE 1; where have you been the last 10 years?). anyways, alt+f2 does a lot more than KDE 3's "run command" ever did, including all the things you mentioned. it's also integrated into kickoff now too. there isn't a stand-alone Plasma widget that's included, though writing one shouldn't be very hard. just takes someone motivated to do so. there are a lot of things that are possible, but they all take a little bit of effort. thankfully, less effort than they did in KDE 3, but still some effort.

Re:Tags? It's called meta-data.

[Will.Woodhull]

Tags are one specific type of metadata, intended for a narrow range of uses.

Extended Attributes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called extended attributes. It already exists. Few programs use them.

Re:Extended Attributes

[Wonko the Sane]

The whole point of the "file as a directory" concept was that regular programs wouldn't need to be modified to use a new API.

What Reiser should have done is to allow metadata to be accessed through his new interface and also via the extended attribute interface instead of arguing about how much better the new way was.

Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[mi]

Unless there is an upgrade path for the current users of KDE-3.x, I'm not interested. I wish, somebody were to simply fork the project an picked up the 3.x branch, porting to Qt-4.x (easy) and merging fixes (tedious), but maintaining compatibility with the existing installs.

Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how...

If, as some KDE-apologists claim, version 4 is a "whole new desktop environment", then KDE-3.x is abandoned and I may as well consider Gnome or something yet different for the future. If KDE-project wants old users to trust them, they need to make their new code backward-compatible. In fact, if they are really good, they'd try to keep compatibility going both ways — so that you could go back to KDE-3 (such as when sharing home-directory with a system, that does not have KDE-4 installed) and things will work as much as possible. For example, the format of KNotes has not changed at all and the data can be shared between old and new versions of the application...

Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[stilborne]

"porting to Qt-4.x (easy)"

i can see you haven't done much porting to Qt 4, at least not of any apps with serious amounts of code in them.

"and merging fixes (tedious), but maintaining compatibility with the existing installs."

that part would be doable, yes. some people want others to do it, nobody wants to do it, however. funny that.

"Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how... "

i honestly doubt that your desktop is so customized, given what was possible with KDE 3, that a transition would be painful. your shortcuts on the desktop will show up in folderview just fine; your keyboard shortcuts will continue to work; your panel layout will need to be re-worked. in the meantime you get a whole lot of new functionality. many of the apps in KDE 4 are also mostly or completely backwards compat configuration wise. we kept compat in our dev branch for ~8 years with KDE2 an KDE 3 (note that KDE 2 was a similar break with KDE 1, though); in some places in the infrastructure it was time to move on so we could achieve things we needed to rather than be held hostage to old design choices.

in any case, mountain, meet molehill.

Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[mi]

i can see you haven't done much porting to Qt 4, at least not of any apps with serious amounts of code in them.

I have done that, and it is much easier, than, say, porting to Gnome — which people do undertake on occasion in their own apps.

some people want others to do it, nobody wants to do it, however. funny that.

I'm not forcing anybody to do it — I'm just warning, that I will not switch — nor advise my users to switch — to KDE-4, until some sort of "upgrade wizard" is available.

i honestly doubt that your desktop is so customized, given what was possible with KDE 3, that a transition would be painful

I tried it, and it was painful. I am not trying again, thank you.

many of the apps in KDE 4 are also mostly or completely backwards compat configuration wise.

Yes, they are. And yet, the decision to keep all settings in a brand new ~/.kde4 killed all the compatibility possible. At the very least, you should've implemented some sort of one-way copying of stuff from the old ~/.kde to the new location — updating and changing what old settings are replaced by new values. But you chose not to.

in any case, mountain, meet molehill.

If that's how you feel, then you are simply reinforcing my impression of KDE's arrogance towards users. Screw you, folks — by the time I'm done upgrading everybody and myself, you'll have a shiny new (and dysfunctional, if 4.1's history is any guide) KDE-5.1, that will be just as incompatible as 4.x. Have a good one...

Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[amRadioHed]

Yes, they are. And yet, the decision to keep all settings in a brand new ~/.kde4 killed all the compatibility possible. At the very least, you should've implemented some sort of one-way copying of stuff from the old ~/.kde to the new location — updating and changing what old settings are replaced by new values. But you chose not to.

What distro are you using? I thought that default KDE kept using .kde for the directory name, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, there is a very easy way to copy .kde to .kde4.

Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[cbhacking]

QT3 and QT4 have substantial API differences - the amount of effort to port a KDE3 app to QT4 would be far above what you are implying. While I agree with the intentions of your post, and strongly support backward compatibility, you might as well be asking for GNOME to be ported to KDE4. It could happen, and there are people already considering going about it, but it's a massive undertaking that won't bear fruit any time soon and will only ever see the light of day in enough people care (which right now, they don't... KDE4 apps, even in the 4.3 release, do lack some things that 3.5.x has... but they also have some things 3.5.x lacks, and most 4.3 users seem fairly content with their feature-sets).

Re:Upgrade path for 3.x users?

[Risen888]

Yes, KDE 3 is abandoned. It was made very clear at the time of the final 3.x release (3.5.10?) that that was in fact the final release.

If KDE-project wants old users to trust them, they need to make their new code backward-compatible.

Well, for one thing, speak for yourself, a whole lot of "old users" (this one included) are really happy with the direction and momentum of 4.x. These days I refuse to consider distros that still only package KDE 3, as a matter of fact (or still insist on putting 4.x into Unstable, Gentoo!.

For another, the bottom line is that no one wants to do it. I mean, God knows I wouldn't. Do you want to do it?

And the reason no one wants to do it is because KDE 3 is eight years old and the code's a fucking mess. Take a look at Windows if you want to see where that "backwards compatibility uber alles" mindset leads. It's not pretty, and I do not want. Actually, that kind of leads me backward in your post to this...

Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how...

See that? That oh-so-delicate system of kludges and workarounds you've so cleverly and painstakingly erected? (No offense meant by that at all, I'm sure it is clever.) That's the problem. There's no such thing as an "upgrade path" from that sort of nightmare.

Am i the only person...

[Viol8]

... who simply wants a desktop GUI to launch applications and provide a convenient view into the computer? I'm pretty sure we reached this state of affairs 15 years ago so someone tell me what , other than eye candy , is the point of all these endless new desktops?

Re:Am i the only person...

[TeXMaster]

I use KDE for that. I have a very clean desktop and clutterless panels, launch my apps with Alt+F2 instead of wading through menus, and do most of my stuff in Konsole. (I also have a 'quix' X start up script that doesn't load KDE and only provides me with some bare essential X tools)

Re:Am i the only person...

[Draek]

Satisfying anybody else who wants more than you do. But that ought to be obvious.

Re:Tags? It's called meta-data.

[bickerdyke]

Tags are a subset of metadata.

EXIF Rotation or resolution are metadata, as are caption and size information of a pdf. But neither are "tags"

I've always been a Gnome man...

[plazman30]

But 2 nights ago I decided to take the plunge and installed openSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3.1. So far, I'm really liking KDE. I never really liked KDE 3.x, and 4.0 left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried 4.2 out and it was OK, but I left it for Gnome.

But I think I'm going to stay with 4.3 for quite a while now.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from modding offtopic, is there anything else we can do?

Yes! Do not reply to the damn thing and thus give it extra visibility after it's been modded down!

Most people will never see this spam unless you help the spammer by replying.

How to remain sane and happy

[Cajun Hell]

What on earth can it be doing such that 400MB of RAM is justified?

Tip of the day: don't think in terms of megabytes, megahertz, etc. Think in terms of money.

$75 worth of RAM should be enough for anyone. $90 of disk space is enough for MythTV, though $270 of disk space works a lot better. AMD's $60 CPU is better than Intel's $60 CPU, but Intel's $300 CPU is better than AMD's $300 CPU. And so on.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[Anonymous Coward]

Run out of numbers? Uh, where did you learn math?

I'm guessing they'll have something worthwhile before KDE 4.9999999. Or maybe not, this is the Kids Desktop Environment we're talking about (I mean how much cartoon goodness can one take?).

cashew

[Anonymous Coward]

The most welcome improvement is that there's finally a checkbox to hide the retarded cashew thingy. Woohoo!

Re:cashew

[QCompson]

The most welcome improvement is that there's finally a checkbox to hide the retarded cashew thingy. Woohoo!

Can anyone confirm that this will be available as default in 4.4? AFAIK it is only available in Suse installs.

I was under the impression that aseigo would rather sacrifice his first born than remove that stupid cashew from the desktop.

Re:cashew

[Hatta]

gesundheit

My Experience with KDE 4.3: Not So Great

[RAMMS EIN]

Although I haven't really used KDE since the 2.x series, there are a couple of KDE applications I used until recently. Among those are Konqueror, Okular, and Kooka.

I switched to KDE 4.3 from KDE 3.5 when replacing my Debian installation with Ubuntu karmic, and while I liked some things, I eventually quit using what few KDE apps I had been using, because there were just too many annoyances. For example, being unable to copy text out of Konqueror, occasional crashes, and Kooka having gone missing altogether.

My question is: Are the problems I've been experiencing problems with KDE 4.3, or are they specific to the Ubuntu version I have been using?

Re:My Experience with KDE 4.3: Not So Great

[Lemming Mark]

I've heard it said various times that the Ubuntu implementation of KDE 4 is not great. My Ubuntu install is too hacked about to provide a very fair comparison but I haven't had great experiences with KDE 4 so far. With Mandriva I've found the KDE 4 desktop, though there were a couple of annoying glitches, to be very professional and slick. I've been using Mandriva 2009.1 but am intending to upgrade to 2010 once it's had a chance to be shaken down a bit by other users - my understanding is that it's shaping up to be another quality release.

Re:My Experience with KDE 4.3: Not So Great

[stilborne]

"Kooka"

skanlite is what ships with KDE 4, and there recently was work started to ressurect a full "scanning workflow manager" type app (kooka+ style). aside from batch processing and OCR, skanlite does what kooka did with a rather more streamlined interface.

Re:My Experience with KDE 4.3: Not So Great

[RAMMS EIN]

I did eventually find skanlite. However, I couldn't set a paper size (other than maybe by selecting it with the mouse). Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I figured it wasn't worth my time to learn a new program. I already know how to use scanimage, and that gets the job done just fine. I just used to use Kooka because it gave me previews.

Too much?

[B5_geek]

Am I the only one who thinks that GUI design/usage peaked with Fluxbox and all else is lipstick on a pig?

KDE == GNOME???

[filesiteguy]

Is it just me, or is KDE looking more and more like GNOME?

I jumped ship from KDE to GNOME when I swichted - after four years - to Ubuntu from openSUSE. Having used KDE 3.x and hating gnome, I finally accepted GNOME as viable (though I still hate the file open/save dialogs) and noticed KDE 4 apps seem to look very similar.

yet Gnome is now much more popular than KDE

[BlackCreek]

and yet Gnome is more popular than ever....

Most users use only the most basic features of KDE/Gnome. Gnome gets those right, KDE (at least until 4.2) had the most basic desktop stuff riddled with stability problems.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like coolforsale.com damaged goods bad refunds scam chinese sweatshop?

Been using Ubuntu.....

[p.rican]

with kde-desktop and Kubuntu on another computer and I don't think that the desktop is that bad. I know this is offtopic, but I really wish they'd (Ubuntu) chuck pulse-audio. Have nothing but problems having an on-board sound component and a SBLive 5,1 PCI card. I didn't have any of these issue with ALSA.....sorry for the rant.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Eevee]

Apart from modding offtopic, is there anything else we can do?

Yes, read at a higher threshold.

And no I won't read at a higher threshold because of moronic moderators who bury other people's opinions with troll and flamebait mods.

So what you're saying is you want to look in the muck for pearls, but are offended by the muck? Tough. If this post can be deleted, then those pearls you're looking for will be deleted in just the same way.

Why? Why why WHY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people submit stories with links to sites that they know (if they have a single synapse, that is) can't handle the traffic that a /. story will send?

Yes, by all means, let's tell everyone on /. about a screenshot page -- a page full of images -- running on a slow link. Genius!

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I snagged coolforsale137... that should block this spammer out. /me struts around.

Administrator mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

4 major releases and 2 years in, and yet there is still no administrator mode when logged in as a normal user. Logging out and back in as root isn't an option sometimes.

Drop the semantic garbage

[AtomicDevice]

although I've recently been tending towards gnome, I really love a lot about KDE. I just wish they would forget about certain features for now and focus on stability and quality every-day features.

Specifically the "semantic desktop" I've used kde for years and never used it. Why the hell would I waste time tagging all my files? I have a sensible directory hierarchy which works just fine. I never find myself spending hours searching for stuff on my computer, because I know where all the things I need are, because I use them all the time. If I didn't know where something was that would imply I never use it, in which case, why am I spending time to tag things I never use? Just in case I might need it?

What I do need is for firefox to pick up on my application preferences (what opens up a zip, etc), for drag and drop to be snappy and accurate and always work, for ark to not suck so hard, for my folderviews on my desktop to always be up to date, look good, not pile up icons in weird ways, etc, etc.

I like that kde is very forward thinking in their features, but sometimes I'd like them to live a little more in the present. If you had an awesome super-intelligent automatic tagger that would let me search with vague queries and get exactly what I want, that'd be great, but spending your time on a dressed up database that tracks all kinds of stuff I have to put in by hand is a waste of everybody's time.

Re:Drop the semantic garbage

[stilborne]

"What I do need is for firefox to pick up on my application preferences"

OpenSuse has this; hopefully other distros will pick this up, or maybe even firefox itself will.

"for drag and drop to be snappy and accurate and always work,"

lots of improvements have been made in various places for d'n'd.

"for ark to not suck so hard,"

it actually works very nicely in 4.4

"for my folderviews on my desktop to always be up to date, look good, not pile up icons in weird ways"

if your folderviews aren't up to date, then there's a bug in the IO plugin (or it simply doesn't support automatic updates; some network IO plugins don't)

piling up icons in weird ways sounds like a bug; hopefully you've submitted a report for it with details.

as for the semantic desktop, don't use it if it isn't useful to you. it's that simple. however, with apps starting to use it behind the scenes, you'll likely be using it without even knowing it. you'll just be finding that things work nicely and wondering how all that information gets shuttled about. an interesting use case is the groupware system (akonadi) is now using the semantic framework (nepomuk) extensively.

Re:Drop the semantic garbage

[QCompson]

as for the semantic desktop, don't use it if it isn't useful to you. it's that simple. however, with apps starting to use it behind the scenes, you'll likely be using it without even knowing it. you'll just be finding that things work nicely and wondering how all that information gets shuttled about. an interesting use case is the groupware system (akonadi) is now using the semantic framework (nepomuk) extensively.

This raises a red flag for me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but are you saying that metadata will be attached to some of my files without my knowledge/permission?

Dolphin shows raw pictures in thumbnails

[Duketape]

I hope Dolphin can show raw images and especially the Nikon NEF format in the 4.4 release, else I have to wait a year before I try again. and yes every 10 minutes a different background is cool!

Buy a decent video card

[Perl-Pusher]

KDE 4.3 works fine for me. Add an ATI or NVIDIA card, it works perfectly. You can't blame KDE because other cards aren't releasing Linux drivers. You can get a decent one for less than $100. If you buy a system that can't support the OS and desktop you want to run on it, you don't give the manufacturer any incentive to release proper drivers for you. I won't buy a laptop that uses anything else for the display. I'd go MAC first.

Mac

[fulldecent]

Mac support.

I'm waiting.

Kuickshow fixed?

[RiffRafff]

Soooo...does this mean Kuickshow will work now? As in, show thumbnails?

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[tibman]

Couldn't they just go to 4.10 and up? I know there are many different standards for versioning numbers but they look like 'Major.Minor' with no '.Revision'. N/M they do use .Revision? I'm currently running KDE 3.5.9. 4.10.x should still work though, right?

KDE 4.3 and above is great, but

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 4.3 and above is great, but I switched back to GNOME due to psychological reasons. I used some of the native KDE apps such as Kmail, konqueror, etc. Quickly I found that I liked FireFox, Epiphany with webkit, evolution, Xchat, pan and Banshee better. These are GTK apps which are always open on my desktop. I just couldn't bare the fact that KDE had become just a pretty window manager for my GNOME apps.

I haven't researched this topic lately, but does running these GNOME apps use a lot more cpu/memory? I would be running two Desktops essentially, right? Oh but wait there is that one program that runs under KDE that themes GNOME apps.

Can someone tell me that this is psychologically okay and that these GTK apps would consume no more CPU/memory than its native KDE counterpart?

Thanks.

Re:KDE 4.3 and above is great, but

[tpwch]

Running a gnome app on kde would consume a little more memory. This is due to the fact that it also has to load the gnome libraries. However libraries are shared across all applications that use them, so if you have 10 gnome applications open the libraries doesn't take up more memory than if you had one open. Assuming that the gnome apps and the kde apps are equal otherwise, I would guess that you would be using only about 20-40mb more. So small enough to be negligible. If you like the kde desktop and gnome apps then run the gnome apps on a kde desktop.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[Interoperable]

Sub-version numbers higher than 9 always bug me. In my mind 4.10 = 4.1 thanks to the decimal notation. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel that going above 9 should be avoided. Once it's mature (4.5ish), adding a sub-sub-version might make sense (like 2.5.9) because fewer major changes would be made and the new versions would reflect smaller refinements. The move the Qt 4.6 definitely warrants a full decimal in my mind thiugh.

Process explorer features

[vdboor]

As for my feedback, I'd like to see more features from process explorer available. The tool provides _a lot_ for detailed information about a process:
- the tcp/ip connections the process has open.
- the libraries it has loaded
- the environment variables the process has.
- the security context of the process (think selinux)
- the strings the process contains (both image and memory)
- the threads it has open, including their starting point.
- the cpu and memory usage per process.

See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127728

Oh and other nice features of it:
- killing an app by pressing delete
- a brief highlight of a row on process creation and destruction.

Could you consider some of these points? It would be yet a reason less to open a terminal, and rival `top` :-)

Re:Process explorer features

[JohnFluxx]

I've been working on adding scripting support, so that these sorts of things can be added easily for other people, and done without increasing the memory footprint for those who don't use it.

If you're up for doing writing a bit of javascript to get all this information and display it nicely, I'll be happy to include it. Most of the work would be writing a nice UI using HTML or Qt Designer. (The scripting support supports either).

This support will be in KDE 4.4.

Re:Process explorer features

[vdboor]

Awesome news, thank you for your work on this area!

I'm unfortunately short of time to do my share part, but perhaps others would be able to if they know about this feature. :-)

Does this really work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this really work?

Most important question: can you switch it off?

[aix tom]

'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?'

No. If I put a street in an address info I also don't want it showing up when I search for a recipes. I only want it showing up when I search for streets.

For the last couple of years the main factor in choosing a desktop environment was the possibility to switch things off I don't want.

Re:Best quality, Best reputation , Best services,l

[cbhacking]

Mark poster as Foe (the little silver orb takes you to the Change Relationship page). Set a modifier on Foe (-6) that guarantees they'll never appear at over -1, and ignore any post with the little red orb. If you want, you can even adjust the modifiers so that any other post will never go below zero, and then only read things at 0 or above.

Yes, it enforces a "no tolerance" policy for people being completely out of line. I don't see this as such a disadvantage.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[Anonymous Coward]

After 4.9 comes 4.10, then 4.11, then 4.12 . . .

I don't think they're going to run out of anything, except perhaps patience with their users.

keyboard lag and worse

[Ensign Nemo]

I run a 1.6G amd turion64 x2 with 1GB of RAM. I have keyboard lag ALL THE TIME. What really sucks though is if my comp is busy, keystrokes get DROPPED.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[quantumphaze]

Still, 4.3 already does what Windows 7 and OSX only hint at moving towards so 4.4 will be interesting.

The 6 month (give or take) release schedule does help them implement some of the fresh ideas sooner rather than later, whether 'inspired' by the competition or not.

When they inevitably reach 4.9.x in mid 2012 I bet they will use it as an excuse to break some backwards compatibility and make a 5.0. It will be an improvement but no where near as radically different as the 3.x to 4.x transition was. A Vista to 7 transition as opposed to XP to Vista.

flyout menu is still clunky

[bsdhacker]

I still can't get over that clunky fly-out menu that dwarfs each icon I mouse over. KDE 4 in general looks very attractive - much more so than a default Gnome instance... but it just seems to get in my way constantly. Maybe it's just my workflow.

Re:KDE is really heading in the right direction bu

[IrquiM]

how about KDE 4.10 ? or 4.100 ?

Running out? Don't think so. I'm looking forward to running KDE 4.55

GNOME "has stagnated"... if only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is working up to the most absurd change yet with version 3.0 due to deliver a whole bunch of all singing, all dancing windows and desktops sliding around the, err, desktop every time the user wants to do anything. Forget stuff remaining in one place while you open another application. Say hello to the conjurer's sleight of hand as he dazzles your eyes and frazzles your brain to leave you wondering where the hell you put that window.

"Gnome has stagnated." I only wish it would.

It's the other way around

[brunes69]

Pretty much every new feature in Windows 7 and Vista was in KDE for at least a year prior. Things like the previews when you mouse over the taskbar in Windows 7, all the Aero FX in Vista/7, etc. That all is stolen from KDE. I can't think of anything KDE took from Vista or Windows 7.

Did you think of the consequences?

[yet-another-lobbyist]

Yeah, Apple is going to release a KDE-vs-Mac ad, ".... KDE 5 is not going to have any of the problems KDE 4 had."
That's it. Then we're toast. In one category with our friends in Redmond.

You got that wrong.

[RichiH]

> A packages version is early released to unstable. As its main problems get fixed, it migrates to testing.

unstable means the package set is moving (as in, the contents change) quickly. It does _not_ mean the packages themselves are unstable. That is what experimental is for.
Of course, you run a higher risk using unstable than, say, testing. But I run unstable on all my client machines (testing on servers) and I have not had a major bug that made the system unusable in _years_.

Re:You got that wrong.

[icebraining]

It doesn't necessarily, mean that the packages are unstable, but they are "virtually untested" (quote) when they are first uploaded, so the probability of having bugs is much higher. Stuff like this can happen...

Re:You got that wrong.

[RichiH]

Of course it is. But the general assumption is that new packages will not break your system. Obviously, you need apt-listchanges and you need to be willing & able to fix your system if it goes down the drain.

But the general assumption that running unstable leaves you with an unstable system is simply not true.

Seriously new

[DanielSmedegaardBuus]

Once you start to understand http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/some of the things in the pipeline for KDE beginning with 4.0, you start to get that tickling sensation in your stomach. There's no other desktop out there with that kind of potential.