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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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

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.

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?

[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?

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[shaji]

Did you mean to say Jesus Khrist?

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

[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: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.

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

[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

[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).

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

[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: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.)

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

[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.

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.

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...

[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.

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.

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

[Will.Woodhull]

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

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?

[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: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?

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: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.

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.

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.