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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.

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. SC=? by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. 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 sznupi · · Score: 5, Informative

      Google Chrome is your example of "big software projects still not flocking to Qt"?
      It's a separate thing from KDE, and a great toolkit. Chrome was mostly ill thought out as a single platform app initially, and afterwards - perhaps the team was more used to Gtk+; or they convinced themselves that Qt makes sense "only" when it would be used across all platforms (and with huge work done already on Win version...)

      Here, a short list of apparently "not big" software projects using Qt: Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Google Earth, Symbian, MeeGo, Opera, Skype, VLC, VirtualBox, Adobe Photoshop Album, , Last.fm Player, Scribus, Xconfig; not very exhaustive, too.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
  3. KDE4 ruined it for me. by kiwieater · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...