KDE 4.4 Released Alongside Website Redesign

Cryophallion writes "KDE 4.4.0 has finally been released, along with a redesign of the KDE.org website. New features include tabbed windows, improved desktop search and social desktop features. 'Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented.' A feature guide is also available."

Comments

Is it time to look yet?

[Concern]

I used to love KDE. I turned a lot of other people onto it.

After 4.0, 4.1, 4.2... After what they did to Amarok... After the pathetic state of the last several Kubuntu releases... The question is, should we even bother to look at this release? Or are they still digging their hole deeper?

Yes, I am aware of the fascinating debate about who is responsible for these disasters. From 10,000 feet above it, it looks like the KDE leadership went to the dogs after v3. But I don't know, and what's more, I just don't care. The point is, the KDE brand is ruined right now. I know I am not alone in thinking this. Remember Linus? This Linus?

He switched to Gnome too. I held out a lot longer before I gave up. I loved KDE3 so much. And I really hated Gnome. Look at Mono for fuck's sake. But you know what? The KDE team beat all that loyalty out of me, crash by crash, regression by regression, blog post by blog post.

And you know what else? Somewhere a long the way they cleaned Gnome up, sanded down the worst rough edges, made it launch fast, and look pretty. It works. My Mom could use it. Unlike KDE4+, last time I looked. Which was months ago, because it was so bad I didn't even want to look anymore.

If I were the "KDE Team," I would lay very low, clean house, and labor until I had something amazing - something that would wow people again. Something original. Something worthy of their legacy.

Is this that release?

Or is it just another bandaid on the broken mess I've been watching unfold?

Re:Is it time to look yet?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

I agree with what you said about amarok.

amarok 2.x is simply godamn awfull. makes even iTunes look good.

the interface is confusing, can't get rid of that ridiculous area in the middle, the playlist area is overcrowded, several functionalities were lost...

I ended up pinning apt-get on my debian box to grab 1.4.x from debian stable then locked the stuff to prevent upgrades to 2.x. I'll keep that way untill someone shows me an alternative media player for linux that's not an iTunes ripoff, is not amarok 2.x and have all the great functionalities of amarok 1.4 (like the flexibility in managing the copy/move songs to the library, flexible configuration of portable media players, etc.) with a nice interface.

I'm also getting pissed at dolphin either. the old konqueror browser|file manager was pretty decent. dolphin OTOH plain sucks, from the way it displays stuff in detailed view, the impossibility of reordering the columns, how the tree view pane keeps moving the directory tree left and right by itself. again, any sugestions of a replacement that looks/feels more like the old konqueror will welcome.

just one description of my desktop environment: it's a windowmaker (remember that ?) GUI with KDE4 apps thrown in, since the openstep stuff is even more awfull than gnome's ones.

i still want (and for FSMs sake, WILL!!!) keep windowmaker. but i'm willing to give a try to other stuff to replace the kde things i use most (music player/jukebox, file manager, instant messaging, etc). even gnome stuff if they fix that horrible GTK file chooser.

so, any sugestions ? please ? guys ?

Re:Is it time to look yet?

[Concern]

KDE specifically stated that 4.0 should not be used in production,

Yes, I remember that canard. But they created that confusion by calling it v4.0 and making a big splash, hyping up what they had accomplished too much. All those distros didn't start up their KDE4 support on a lark - they were all fooled. Meanwhile people do development releases all the time without getting burned. It's not rocket science.

It's what happens when ego is at the wheel. Remember Reiser? That guy would argue his filesystem was production-ready till he was blue in the face. Meanwhile check his bugtracker and you can see out the other side of his mouth when you report that his his consistency checker is dumping core, he'll tell you "yes that's not finished yet" Oops.

If you think KDE playing the same games isn't as serious, you'd be right, although I'd also suspect you weren't watching the open issues for KMail. Or maybe you just don't mind losing email.

People need to get over their egos and just be honest about what they're releasing. Warning labels, conventional use of version numbering - no green stop signs - or what should they expect? And what's the harm in underpromising and overdelivering? Why is that so hard?

That said, I'm glad it seems to be finally coming under control. The world needs a real alternative to de Icaza's brainchild.

Oh that's easy to explain

[Concern]

For the same reason that you do not take a buggy, unfinished mess and call it "v4.0."

When you write software for free, you cannot be held responsible for your code's quality, or your manners, or anything. No one can whine to you that you did not do enough for them for free. There is really only one thing you can do wrong.

And this is set the wrong expectations.

When you see people with their app v0.23beta (that everyone's been using in production for 4 years) - that's setting expectations conservatively. That's saying: "guys, I am not bringing a corporate QA department to test this. It may be awesome, but caveat emptor." This is How It Is Done. I mean, it's very easy. No one's saying you have to do big amounts of work and make something done. Just don't make big claims that it's done either. Or imply it. Or do things that other people could believe are implying it. In fact, if in doubt, just put a warning label. :)

When you say "New! Improved! Awesome! v4.0!!!" and then it fucking sucks, you are committing the only real sin in free software/open source: tricking people.

And even that's OK in the scheme of things. You're only ruining your own reputation. You just shouldn't expect people to keep coming back and wanting to use your code, or work with you, if you do that.

Hence, "lay low." KDE4 was a development branch. It should have been labeled as such, instead of "KDE4." With tiny fine print after you wasted your time and had a horrible experience saying "yeah we know it sucks, wait for 4.1." And with 4.1, rinse, and repeat.

Re:Oh that's easy to explain

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact remains that what he said is true though. KDE keeps repeating this same suicidal formula with every release and now they have utterly destroyed their own credibility. As a former KDE user I've tried every single release of 4.x in multiple distros, and guess what? It's just fucking horrible, up to and including 4.3. Then you get all those idiots saying "I'm using it and it's just fine in [$DISTRO], so I do a test install of that distro and it turns out either those people are liars or maybe all they ever do is check email and browse the web. Who knows? Who cares? All I know is I'm finished with wasting my time checking out the next KDE "release". What a bunch of fucking morons, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as they did! XFCE and Gnome (and maybe soon E17) are the only desktops left for those of us who demand a full-blown DE.

Re:Oh that's easy to explain

[drinkypoo]

Years down the line you're still bashing a bunch of nice and hard-working people.

In this world, all you really have is your reputation. Nobody ruined that for KDE, they did it themselves. Users discussing their failure is a natural consequence of that failure. When you release a product without "alpha" or "beta" on the end of it, people expect it to at least mostly work. KDE4 was rushed out the door with a boatload of known issues and now KDE is known for that failure of judgment. It's not too late to turn their fate around, but denial doesn't help anyone.

Re:Oh that's easy to explain

[Concern]

You'd be wrong. And I think I made my point pretty well about why you shouldn't feel so bad not to live in a world where positive opinions are the only ones allowed.

I'm glad you said what version you like. It's good to know.

Gnome 3

[JoeSixpack00]

Anyone else on here notice the video of Plasma Desktop on the release page? It looks awfully similar to the proposed Gnome Shell for Gnome 3.0. I don't believe in that KDE vs GNOME fanboy nonsense, but I think it's more than fair to compare them from a technological standpoint. The primary feature pushing Gnome 3.0 was Gnome Shell, but KDE has almost completely duplicated its functionality 6 months before 3.0's release date - assuming it won't be as buggy as Plasma was when it started out.

I wonder how this will affect the future of KDE and Gnome.

Re:PS

[borker]

wow, a little ass-hurt there aren't you?

But is it good enough..

[dbcad7]

to be the default desktop in a distro ?

When ever I use KDE since 2x days

[G00F]

When ever I use KDE since 3x days I can't help but feel like I am playing a badly designed computer game. You know, the games where every button feels like part of a picture that you can only find by trial an error? You know the games where you find out that some part of the display is actually part of a menu by the manual?

Back in the day Corel had done a nice implementation of a desktop with KDE, seams that was lost until Ubuntu came out. which other distros are now implementing a more simplistic GUI approach. Except KDE tries to make their GUI feel like a computer game interface or a teenager with an identity crises. With none of the base themes having buttons that look and feel like buttons. Clickable things need to stand out as something you can click on, and not everything about the OS needs to be animated.

Not to mention the whole "thats a feature not a bug" attitude. (example: disable password needed under the screen saver options)

And then reading about it's integration with "social networking" makes me cringe. But maybe I am just getting old . . . .

</rant>

So, I use gnome for most of my desktop linux needs, dispite it being behind the curve, and needing many KDE apps and libs.

Really?

[Concern]

So calling it v3.9Alpha would have been asking too much?

What was it, do you think, that made them reject this alternate version number, and go with v4.0 instead?

Surely not a respect for common practices of version numbering.

They made a green stop sign. The disclaimers, IIRC, were not so prominent until after they had already sunk their own reputation with the (totally avoidable) confusion over who their audience was for that release.

Re:Really?

[Concern]

No, that wouldn't have worked, that would have implied it was a continuation of the 3x series.

I fail to see how... if they said it wasn't.

See how your logic breaks down? You might have argued that version numbers are meaningless and don't imply anything - that would also have been wrong, but at least it would have been consistent.

There was NO confusion over who their audience was.

So obviously there was - as you make clear, the version number implied something. In this case, what it implied threw off many users, including Torvalds. It wasn't their only problem - they did not make their warnings as clear as they wish they did in retrospect, I'm sure.

And what about all the distros, by the way - why did they package it and send it downstream to KDE3 users when it wasn't done? Should all these people "end it?"

in the old days, there was no such thing as alpha, beta, and rc1, rc2, whatever. It was "here's branch # such and such"

I'm aware that they explain their (wrong) rationale for numbering in that way. It didn't make anyone any less surprised.

I guess you're saying they did all they can to warn people off. But given the huge mess that this way of thinking made for KDE, I would hope they might be admitting some fault and looking for ways to communicate better. It's not like they were doing anything wrong by having a development release. Teams do it all the time without much of an issue. Communicating this is not rocket science.

But you see the problem is ego. Some folks didn't want to shout out that it was alpha or beta. They didn't want to call it v3.9 or "v4.0 PRERELEASE" or give it a milestone or alternate name, or any of the many things you see every day. And for the same reason, some folks don't want to hear or accept what damage they did to KDE's reputation. I have a guess - that somewhere within the KDE organization, there are stats on how their userbase shrank, perhaps from one or another of their various web services, and they tell the moral of this sad story. But I guess once you start with the denial, you can come up with an explanation for anything, and blame anyone.

Re:Amarok 2.x

[ArsenneLupin]

How do I add one more song into an existing playlist (without having to redefine the entire list from scratch).

How can I prevent amarok from hiding my playlists near the bottom whenever I start it up?

And is there a way to enable it to share the audio device with other apps (mplayer, firefox, ...).