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