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Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5

Posted by timothy on from the one-moment-in-time dept.

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.

9 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. I try every new KDE4 release, but... by QCompson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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?

    1. Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... by MrHanky · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What? Windows 7 (Windows NT 6.1) is very good, but it followed up on Vista (Windows NT 6.0), which was received with ridicule and loud complaints after years of hype and abandoned technologies (WinFS, etc). Vista was released early 2007, Windows 7 was released October 2009. KDE 4.0 was released January 2008. If KDE 4 were to have its "Windows 7 moment", it would be right about now. Well, if the KDE project had Microsoft's resources, that is.

    2. Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... by moogsynth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Plasma desktop doesn't crash for me. Maybe you need to check with your package maintainers about that. But you know what? The bitterness about 4.0 comes up in every single goddamned KDE thread. But it just doesn't matter any more. Seriously. KDE 4.4 is stable enough, and it looks like 4.5 is going to be even better. It's okay. You can let go.

    3. Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... by QCompson · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It took Google less than a second to turn "kde sc branding" into http://dot.kde.org/2009/11/24/repositioning-kde-brand

      I already understood what they were trying to accomplish with their silly renaming... and gawd, that convoluted explanation only makes it worse. Why is the KDE team spending so much time creating arbitrary new naming conventions? No one cares. IMO it comes off as pompous. Similar to when they were insisting that a .0 release signifies extreme beta or alpha quality software.

    4. Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... by victorhooi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      heya,

      Mod parent up.

      He's absolutely right. At the end of the day, the KDE 4.x series moved as quickly as it did, probably because of broad user feedback. nothing beats good quality user feedback, or having people rant on their blogs about how software X should have feature Y etc.

      And look, they weren't exactly unclear about it - they stated fairly openly that it was a beta-ish release, and they were trying to get user feedback. It's an open-source project, release early, release often.

      Put it this way, if you can install KDE/Linux, I'm sure you can put up with a bit of quirkiness in your desktop manager, or file a bug report.

      (Actually, ironically, I've worked with a lot of non-technical users, and for some things, they seem to just ignore/accept changes, weirdly enough - they just assume it's part of the "magic" of this black box. Weird but true).

      Cheers,
      Victor

    5. Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... by syousef · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You get emotional about software you didn't even write? Honestly, take a good hard look at your life.

      When your business or hobby relies on it, what do you expect|? And honestly if the same people are in charge, how can anyone let it go? There's every chance they'll do something equally daft in the near future.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  2. Re:YUCK by MrHanky · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "We"? Are you a self-centered moron or what?

  3. Re:YUCK by HBoar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's funny, because I (and a lot of other uses) am perfectly happy with KDE 4.4 and wouldn't go near gnome with a 3.048m barge pole...

  4. Get off my lawn. by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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