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Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5
omlx writes "KDE SC 4.5 is in feature freeze right now. Therefore, I decided to share some early screenshots with you. In general there are no major changes; it's all about polishing and fixing bugs. There are a lot of under-the-hood changes in libs, which as end users we cannot see. KDE SC will be released in August 2010." Note: you can also try out a beta of the release now, if you'd like.
Give us back 3.5 with Konqueror.
Will we see Quanta Plus 4 being feature complete in KDE?? Many of us are still waiting for progress on KDEs development flagship.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
In case you are wondering too, SC stands for Software Compilation. Not a bad name (for a crappy dance remix).
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
There is a lot of under-hood changes in libs which as end users we cannot see.
Define "cannot see". So it's no more stable than 4.4? No faster? As an end user, I'm sure these are things I'd be able to measure.
After loathing 4.0, and 4.1, and 4.2... I finally gave the newest release a shot. It was worse than ever! KDE seems to be going backwards. In the end, KDE will do nothing except being about to rotate an analog clock.
Generally I like the KDE look and feel, but those folder icons look a little odd--almost disproportionate. And I realize it's abstract, but what is that default background? Looks like a beam of light is shooting out a bunch of photons, but only along the curved paths. I do like the hover effect on the folders, and generally the whole thing looks pretty clean.
Why are you using linux at all?
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
As far as I recall, there's Summer of Code project dedicated to getting Quanta4 going. Basically, most of the things that quanta3 did can now be implemented as some sort of chrome on the kdevplatform (the framework that also backs the recently released new version of KDevelop). http://milianw.de/blog/gsoc-revive-quanta-brand-for-kde-4 has more details about that. Milian is also the guy who has implemented pretty awesome support for PHP in kdevelop, by the way.
Dumb troll is dumb.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's called sarcasm. And it was copied from TFA: http://linuxcrunch.com/content/sneak-preview-coming-kde-sc-45#comment-770
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
...I still (still!) have a bad taste in my mouth from that horrible trainwreck of a 4.0 release, and how Aaron Seigo and other KDE devs defended the release strategy. And still do to this day! I think that debacle really hurt the KDE project in the longterm. Big software projects like google-chrome still aren't flocking to QT and KDE.
It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later. I understand they needed the lay down the framework initially, but shouldn't that framework have at least been somewhat stable before worrying about all the translucent crap and literal bells and whistles? Plasma is still prone to crashing last I checked (4.4). I know, I know... different contributors want to work on different things, and many prefer to work on the eye-candy junk. But to me that just points out how terrible the KDE project has been in managing and organizing KDE4.
And this "SC" crap? Who possibly thought that was needed, or was even remotely a good idea?
I'm waiting for 4.6.
Just keep swimming.
so geeks dislike kde. /., I guess.
my time to leave
Seriously - have they fixed konsole so it doesn't "misremember" the default window size? Seriously - what moron decided that it would be a good idea to make a terminal window open at random sizes?
Brilliant = "hey, let's take a feature that everyone uses, and remove it, and any way to emulate it!"
Will this version finally handly dual monitors? I keep having to use Gnome , which also handles them badly, but it's not as braindead as KDE. They have the app that is supposed to configure it, but it never works. For me it doesn't seem to remember the settings. I've filed a bug many versions ago, supplied files they asked for, and it remains b0rked (as of whatever version comes with latest Ubuntu). Am I the only one that uses two monitors under Linux, or do I just happen to have the two monitors that don't work?
I'm glad you pointed this out. I wasn't aware that KDevelop 4 had finally been released, and I'll have to go have a look at it. I was beginning to think that it, DNF, and OSSTMM3 were in competition for last release date.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
As a GNOME user, I don't like this at all, and I have no idea why anyone would want to use KDE. I can't stand a desktop environment where I'm able to choose how to configure it, or worse, where others can configure their desktops differently from mine. That's why I like GNOME: it removes all these confusing options, and just gives me the minimum. Desktops need to be as simple as possible, so that users like me aren't confused, and extra options goes against this. KDE is just too complicated, and I can't understand it.
It isn't about being "confused" or somehow not smart enough to use KDE. It's about lacking the time/patience to make a bunch of crappy, poorly thought-out software bearable by spending an inordinate amount of time in baroque Options dialogues for every new program they open.
I don't know why KDE is going down this PIM road. Who is going to keep contacts, appts, etc... locally?
No one I know.
Why do I need to care about activities? Why are my aplication not showing up in the tray? Why my desktop icons have windows around them? What's with modern KDE getting in the way of my applications?
But... the future refused to change.
The multi-display support in KDE 4.x is almost nonexistent. Needs to be fixed before I can even give KDE releases a periodic test drive.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I can't get it working with dual monitors in the way that I would like. For all the claims about GNOME being less configurable than KDE, KDE4 appears to me to be significantly less configurable than GNOME. I can't quickly/easily:
1. Get a setup that automatically detects one or two monitor mode
2. Get a setup that shows me one plasma bar per screen automatically in two monitor mode
3. Find any professional-looking widget themes (no transparency, eye candy, raytracing, etc.)
4. Find any professional-looking icon themes (simple graphic design, not photorealism, not crazy high contrast, and not stylized unicolors)
Basically it seems that KDE4 has focused on flash and features and completely given up on usability. I downloaded and compiled KDE beginning with 1.0, and scoffed when GNOME 1.0 was released (it was an unstable disaster, for anyone that remembers back that far). I was a die-hard KDE user all the way through 3.x. But now the tables have turned, and though I keep KDE installed and updating on my F12 system, every time I log back into KDE4 intending to "really give it a shot this time," I find myself logging out in disgust a few minutes later feeling like I've wasted my time (and the KDE developers have wasted theirs).
I just want a graphically unremarkable, stays-out-of-my-way business desktop without any "innovation" in it. I want stability, predictability, and enough flexibility to get the desktop working my way, rather than having to adjust my work habits to correspond to the desktop way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Now that KDE4 is as stable and polished as the 3.x desktop was, it has to be getting close to time for a rewrite of the core again!
I had been using kde since 1.x. Like many other long-time kde users, I can't stand kde-4.x so I've been looking for a kde-3.5 replacement. The best replacement, by far, that I could find was the ancient (but still maintained) Enlightenment e16. It's taken a little while to learn and configure but I'm actually happier with e16 than I was with kde-3.5. After a day or two of tinkering I made it my default desktop and never felt the urge to go back to kde-3.5.
/usr/share/e16/config/fonts*.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that (those) file(s) to increase the font sizes. Copy /usr/share/e16/bindings.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that file to make the key/mouse bindings more like what you are used to. Copy wallpapers to ~/.e16/backgrounds/ or make that directory a symlink to a directory that already contains your wallpapers.
Learn to use eesh which is used in e16 like dcop is used in kde-3. Read the fine documentation and play with the settings. Install a lightweight panel to replace kicker. Enjoy.
The default configuration for e16 is bland as bland can be, with tiny fonts to boot. Get version 1.0.2 (or later). Download some themes from http://themes.effx.us/e16 . Copy
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
or don't stick.
Unpredictable results when moving from two displays to one and back to two again (i.e. ejecting from a dock with a second display). Constant reconfiguration of the panel and displays every time I log in. Sometimes no panel appears. Sometimes multiples on a single screen. Now you log in with one screen and it thinks you have two and the panels are on the "other" one (that isn't connected) and this desktop is simply bare, so that you have to start a Konsole, reconfigure everything all over again.
No thanks. "KDE4 is configurable" is fine. "KDE4 requires complete reconfiguration every time you dock or log in" is not so fine.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I learned C on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS loaded from DC6150 tapes. I installed Linux for the first time in '93 and still have boxes of floppies containing every Slackware release up to 4.0.
I started using KDE with beta3, before 1.0, and didn't stop until 3.5.
Don't give me this "go back go Windows" shit.
Saying "it works for me, therefore there are no bugs" is precisely the sort of half-ass response that has been holding Linux adoption back for a decade.
Look around you. Every time there is a KDE4 story, there are posts here complaining about it.
Filing bug reports is fine, but some of us have real work to do, and draw the line at filing more than one or two bug reports a month. More than that = switch to another platform.
Funny that GNOME seems to be able to manage multiple monitors in a predictable fashion, while on KDE4 every other reboot, dock, or undock leads to the loss of desktop state in one way or another, requiring reconfiguration or just a total removal of KDE dotfiles and starting over from scratch (which can be much faster).
KDE4 chased away a lot of longtime KDE users. They're not coming back so long as GNOME works better. Call us names if you want. I don't care, I have no vested interest in using KDE. I also have no vested interest in using GNOME and it looks like I will be switching to XFCE with the GNOME 3.0 release because it's looking not-so-good. My time is too valuable to spend it "trying to make XYZ work," whether XYZ is KDE, GNOME, or anything else.
If it isn't bulletproof obvious at the first go, it's a fail. This isn't 1995 any longer. This is 2010, and there are plenty of examples of spectacular and spectacularly usable user interfaces around that require zero maintenance or "figuring out" by their users.
The Linux desktop world is starting to feel like a place where TWM is once again top-of-the-heap.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
All this has the feel of a silly little boys club in a primary school so I thought I'd contribute something in the same vein. My suggestions for what SC stands for:
Silly Crap
Stupid Crap
Softer Constipation
Soggy Cranberries
Super Crunchy
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As a long-time KDE user, I have to say to ever damn software update that KDE has released in the last, I don't know, three or four years: DO NOT WANT.
KDE4 was like Vista. In fact, I think they were trying to outright copy Vista in style, features, and bugginess. They were very successful in all three areas, except features. They had to remove features to fit new bugs in.
Every damn k app they go and touch loses features. The only thing I have anything good to say about is Dolphin, which is pretty decent.
Criticism on the KDE message boards is, for the most part, deleted by admins, so we have to go to other websites to vent and discuss why we don't like what the batty KDE devs are doing.
I upgraded my office workstation to KDE 4, but the thing holding me back on my home PC is the state of Amarok 2.x. I have an iPod Classic--a gift from my brother--and Amarok 2.x has a distinctly crippled feature set vis-a-vis v1.4. "Various Artists" does not group in a similar way--most are scattered about in single file albums. Worse, podcasts cannot be copied to my iPod. At one point I was able to use a Gnome tool for this, but that is no longer working for me, either. I have a hard time understanding where the upgrade is when the features I want are missing.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I ran Linux on the desktop for many years - full-time since 2003/4. I've actually - possibly temporarily, possibly permanently - moved to Windows, namely Windows 7.
I used to love KDE. Everything worked nicely, everything felt well-placed. The system made sense. KDE3.5 was pretty much my ideal desktop - I may have become used to different things since then, but at the time - it felt perfect. It was quick, nimble, stable, reliable, packed with decent features. But my main appeal... Amarok. It didn't start out this way, but Amarok 1.4 was a damned good player.
What happened? KDE4 was buggy. It was lacking. It was cosmetically challenged. As the releases went on, things did improve - but I still find I have less features and less usability now than I did in 2007. Even now(at least when I checked a couple of months ago) - why can't I set the clock from the taskbar to sync with an nntp server? How hard can they make it for me to mess with multiple monitors? Why make it so hard for me to put some files on my desktop? Having to manually deactivate all the sounds apart from the one or two I actually _want_?
It is still _my_ desktop, right?
Amarok... needs little discussion. The crux of it for me is I liked the earlier interface. It made sense. It's now completely different, almost catching up in terms of features, but I hate the layout. All I wanted was a list of albums on the left, double click to add albums to the list of stuff playing on the right. Let me move the buttons. I don't care for lyrics, nor the artwork, nor buying music from whatever place they've added as a default. I just want the damned UI that made much more sense than anything else at the time.
I miss Linux. It's rock-stable for me, easy to keep up to date. It's widely configurable, has pretty decent hardware support these days. I like being able to try a new distro on occasion.
But I'm still stuck on the desktop. KDE3.5 is going nowhere. KDE4 spent years as a beta, rolled out with deceitful version numbers indicating it should be good. Even as of 4.4, whilst much improved over the abomonation that was 4.0, it's feeling buggy and incomplete.
I lost interest in Gnome years ago. KDE offered - to me at least - a better experience. I couldn't go back to Gnome, having decided all those years ago that KDE had much more going for it.
What now? I've got Win7 running. I've installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Foobar2000(brilliant!!) and VLC. I genuinely have less criticism for this than I've had for KDE for a long time now. To the point where I'm actually giving serious thought to paying for it. (Yes, I know that's bad - but it really has only been installed for ~10 days. After all these years without touching anything MS, I had no idea whether I'd even still be able to navigate the OS properly.)
Way to go, KDE. Way to go, Amarok. I spent years singing your praises, converting people(not many, but a good handful) from the mundane. Now I've pretty much lost interest in you for the forseeable future...
I was disappointed with 4.0 through 4.2 As a result i ran Slackware current for the first time ever. I never had a reason to bother before. It has been a difficult time and i did not want to live with 3.5 when all development was moving forward. I have been using 4.4 for a couple months and i am very happy with 4.4 stability, finally. I do understand the complaints being made here and have agreed at some level with most of them. However QT and KDE are making making massive progress in cross compatibility and KDE IS innovating. I'm excited. Kdevelop is solid again. That "stuck in the middle with you" feeling is fading. KDE on Slackware is good right now, coming onto excellent. wheres my pipe? praise be to BOB. Amen.
Some fucking asshole trolled this insightful comment. I will reproduce it here.
Some fucking asshole trolled this insightful comment. I will reproduce it here.
KDE jumped the rails the day they wasted time hatching the stupid SC and other naming crap.
KDE is KDE. Stop farting around.
I'm was a time KDE user up to and including version 3.
When KDE4 came out I used it for several months before finally giving up due to severe bugs that made it almost unusable.
Since then I keep trying it under the assumption that they've had time to fix the bugs- but it seems they just keep adding on more unusable features instead of stopping and cleaning up what they've already got.
I'm not a big fan of the gnome desktop, but at least it's stable.
The second screenshot in TFA shows broken ALSA in a notifications popup. Hopefully the sound subsystem will be fixed by release. Still, I'd have gone for a different screenshot.
Thanks for dropping the line about that program! I had never checked it out before, and it is amazing!
Yes but will Kmail finally support html editing, you know like every decent graphical email client has since the turn of the century.
KDE 4.anything leaks memory like it's going out of style. Plasma starts out as using ~100 MB, but in days it's over 500 MB, and in weeks, it's measured in GB.
It isn't just me - googling around turns up hundreds of forums with thousands of posters complaining about horrible memory leaks in KDE. It isn't suitable for using as a desktop unless you log out each day and restart X, which just seems unprofessional.
That being said, I *do* like how the 4.x series is coming together, and KDE is my fav desktop. I just wish it was more polished, not just having more eye candy. It's downright embarrassing when my Windows co-workers stay logged in for weeks, but I have to restart my session every few days.
Come on guys! KDE is my desktop of choice. But pay some attention to quality, not just features.
Aside from the actual code, the ugly user interface, the dropping of Konqueror, the missing features, and everything else wrong with KDE 4, the real problem, it seems, is that the KDE developers are defensive and in some cases downright obnoxious towards their user base. I wonder if this is a new generation of KDE developers, because the generation I was familiar with was wonderfully helpful.
I keep hearing all kinds of excuses from the KDE team, and no real soul-searching about how this utter mess happened in the first place.
1. The move from Qt3 to Qt4 required a complete rewrite.
Please quit BS:ing us. We are developers, too, and you can't pull this one over on us. If you cannot evolve the system one piece at a time and keep a stable release, put the code down and step away from it.
2. Everyone thought Konqueror was garbage until we ditched it.
No, most people thought it was amazing, they just didn't gush on your forums or send you personal e-mails extolling its virtues. The retards that hated it had no idea how to use it. Now the retards have what they want, and the rest of us are stuck wondering how to continue working.
3. The KDE3 design was wrong so we had to create the right design.
This happens to everyone at least once in their development careers, but it should happen sooner rather than later. You should have known better. There is a wrong way to design something, but there is not a right way. KDE3 was not wrong, it was like any sophisticated project, full of areas where the core design was not always coherent. KDE4 will be no different.
The KDE team completely underestimated the number of users they have and the degree to which so many people depend on KDE.
You now have two camps, guys. Your user base effectively split, and you are dropping one side. A few years back I could not have dreamed this mess up under any sane circumstance.
Oh gods, when will they realize it's not the most hip and fashionable Photoshop filters that make a good desktop experience. Drop shadows can be a good thing for depth perception with windows and panels, but drop shadows and highlights and glow filters everywhere, rounded corners like it's a an IKEA catalog and soon to be that copied-to-death reflection effect everywhere - that does not make a computer desktop. They have 10 graphic designer per 1 programmer probably. Figures, it's one thing sliding sliders in Photoshop, and another methodically going over thousands of lines of code. Still, that does not mean this is second coming of Jesus. It's the good old KDE, wrapped in fancy packaging again, rest assured. What they need to do is completely isolate the looks from the walks, and don't tout updates to the former as anything newsworthy. If they indeed value their "skinnability" that much, then the looks shouldn't really matter, should they? They should read about MVC too.
GNOME may be stupid, and I have my gripes with it (if anything it seems the whole idiocy with overused effects and translucency has smitten GNOME as well), but at least they do some work on the less shall we say obvious things, but things which support the entire desktop foundation - single configuration interface, consistency, at least at the top of the vendor pyramid, etc.
KDE still appears to be like a spare time college project, and i don't mean it as a good thing.
As the GUI application for controlling the screens didn't work for me, I wrote two scripts to swap between two screens and laptop only:
~/bin/screen_on:
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1400x1050 --output VGA-0 --mode 1600x1200 --right-of LVDS
~/bin/screen_off:
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1400x1050 --auto --output VGA-0 --off
It's trivial to create keyboard shortcuts for these and I guess one could create a Plasmoid toggle button, too.
Works on plain Kubuntu.
After being hit with all that useless and counterintuitive KDE candy in my Debian testing, I happily switched to fvwm. Has it improved by the time I was with KDE! It is FAST and just one click from xterm. An easy keyboard switch for my favourite languages would be a bonus.
At least for me, since I tried one of the first versions of KDE in my desktop and I saw how broken it was.
Everytime I see a new relase in slashdot, I test the brand-new KDE 4.X release inside a virtual machine.... and until now everytime I giggle at the brokeness of the thing. I am a happy camper with Win7 and Gnome. But I REALLY enjoyed the KDE 3.x releases and I love (with all my heart) QT (it is an graphical API done _RIGHT_!).
But meh, I will continue testing KDE in my virtual machine and will continue laughing at how broken it is.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I dunno. I like KDE. I like it more than gnome. Flame on.
When the YotLD comes, it will be because of KDE. I can put a terminal emulator in every program on my desktop!
Not on 4.5, but its coming very soon. KDevelop 4.0 was released last month and it has very nice PHP support. However, its filled with CPP-based menus and stuff and now there is a SoC project about bringing back Quanta. Its going to be build upon KDevelop4 and its PHP plugin.
My big gripe is Konqueror always losing cookie policies. It seems that every time Konqueror crashes it loses all cookie policies. It's like it deletes the rc file on startup or something. This wouldn't be quite so bad if it were not the fact that Konqueror crashes ALL THE TIME! I don't care how crappy the page or the plugin is, crashing is an unacceptable response.
I should be able to reject all cookies from a site ONCE, instead of having to tell Konqueror over and over and over again.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You may all go to hell, but I will...
...continue to use fluxbox.
All the customization I need is a vim session away. You just *can't* beat text files. Spare me the "But grandma can't even use emacs!" arguments. I'm just using what _I_ like. (Which, coincidentally, does not involve Ubuntu, or whatever the hell Mandrake evolved into.)
Peace.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."