Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
They have the trifecta of crummy website behaviour: excessive pagination, click-through ads and lazily regurgitating other people's content.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.