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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.
I for one Love KDE, I use it every single day for Real work. I am using KDE 4.4 right now and it is the best kde ever.
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.
so geeks dislike kde. my time to leave /., I guess.
Is this implying geeks should love KDE? If so, why?
I'm using KDE 4.4.3 on debian sid and konsole remembers the window size just fine.
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
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
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 did do this. I did it before I even replied. It works.
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.
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.
If true, this puts a Very Bad Taste in my mouth. I expected better from KDE (and open source in general).
Meanwhile, Gnome is a set of clean, consistent C libraries,...
Never would I have thought to see those words strung together in that way. The end is near. (Or you're delusional. This being Slashdot, odds are the latter.)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
Let's not spread disinformation here.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Interesting... I don't recall doing anything of the sort, nor anyone else of the administration/moderation staff. We only ask users to uphold the Code of Conduct. We don't delete messages if we disagree with them.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
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.
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.
Please learn to read Linux application memory usage correctly.
My KDE desktop has been running constantly for 15 days and the total SYSTEM memory usage is only 585MB ram + 261MB, by your reckoning I should be out of memory and the kernel should be killing random processes.
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.
On Debian sid? KDE 4.4.3? Because that's what I'm using, I just tested it (because I rarely enlarge terminals or open more than one, so I didn't know if what the OP said was true), and the second terminal opens with the size of the second, not with the default.
Obviously, I meant "with the size of the first", and not "with the size of the second".
KDE has nothing to do with your multi screen woes. I've had the same problem with Gnome - the issue is that the way that X works has changed since 3.5 KDE was all over the place. Using Xorg.conf files is out. Most utilities that manage multiple screens would simple fix Xorg and replace your current session. That doesn't work so much. There is a new command, xrandr that manages this. xrandr is your friend for dealing with two monitors. I'm sure we'll see better support soon in KDE, but until then, learn a little about xrandr - it's not that hard and gives you a level of control you've never had over how X uses multiple desktops.
KDE does remember your widget setup - you can assign an activity (basically, a desktop, complete with unique widgets and panels) to each monitor. Hit the cashew and create a new activity. When you only have one screen, you can hit the cashew and zoom to the activity you want or you can put an activity tab widgent in a panel for one click access to your different activities.
Second, most KDE4+ distros have the "get icon themes" enabled in system settings, so new icons are pretty close. Most KDE icon sets are very nice, but most do have a very trendy gloss to them.
Oh, and if you want a simple widget theme, try sKulpture. It should be a yum or apt-get install away. It's pretty, simple and clean.
-- $G
It works exactly right. If you need to resize window to fit your need, it is logical that new window is following your definition. Not the developer or distributors idea.
If you want to have a default what gets followed. Then make a KWin rule for the initial size. Then you are happy and EVERYONE ELSE are happy with the current.
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..."