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.

Comments

Re:KDE

[shutdown -p now]

A lot of people flocked to KDE after Gnome 1.4->2.0 switch.

Now that KDE is also breaking things left and right in the search for their mythical holy grail, many of those same people don't know where to switch.

Me, I was fine with Gnome 2.x, but then I saw the screenshots of the mess that will be "Gnome Shell" in v3, and figured that I don't want to wait for that rug to be pulled from under me. So XFCE it is, for now, and hopefully for a while.

KDE4 ruined it for me.

[kiwieater]

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...

Buggy pile of sh**

[SlightOverdose]

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.

Re:YUCK

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I'm on 4.4 now. I switched from kde 3.5 yesterday on this laptop. Its just as fast and just as useful. I am quite happy with it. However as someone who was using 3.5 till yesterday, why do you need them to give it back to you? Can't you just install it? ;)

Or are you a Gnome user that fells a little trollish....

ps I have nothing against gnome users.