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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

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: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.

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.

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?