A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1

dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."

Comments

Slashdotted already...

[alfredos]

Sad... First post, and already:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Wonder what will happen to that poor server in just a couple of minutes? Will it beg for mercy? Resign and open a beach bar in the Caribbean?

Re:Slashdotted already...

[Bobfrankly1]

A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1

Wow, it was so quick I missed it on the way to the Service Temporarily Unavailable page.

For the lazy:

[X0563511]

What’s New? The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.
These are:

• A reworked notifications area;
• Window tiling;
• Webkit in konqueror;
• Stability improvements.

One of the big upgrades that was scheduled for KDE SC 4.5 was porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1. This is a little disappointing given that Akonadi has been full of promise for quite some time, with no real user visible outcomes. It would have been nice to see what Akonadi will bring to the party. However, it’s better to wait until all the kinks are ironed out. But unfortunately, it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.

That being said, there are a whole bunch of little improvements that I’ll talk about later on in this article.

Re:For the lazy:

[Anonymous Coward]

4.4 Beta 2 is already out and aviable for example in the Archlinux Repos from the Release Minute

Re:For the lazy:

[Anonymous Coward]

``For me, Nepouk's ability to index my files is a nice feature. It's also one I currently have turned off due to personal preference.'' -- Aaron Siego.

should I laugh or cry?

http://pim.kde.org/development/meetings/osnabrueck4/roadmap.jpg

look out, Zimbra! look out, GOOG! psscheerowwk, Akonadi is coming 4 u. all pheer the imminent release of MILESTONE 1. :(

Re:For the lazy:

[TopSpin]

The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.

...porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1...

KDE 4 has had five releases since Jan '08. It wasn't until 4.3 in August '09, 19 months after 4.0, that the thing became tolerable. Prior to then it was very unstable, amazingly memory hungry and lacking features that 3.5.x had had for years. If the only thing 4.5 and all future 4.x releases accomplish is stability enhancements, bug fixes, even less memory use and recovering those few missing features that vanished with 4.0 then the KDE developers deserve our praise.

As far as I'm concerned they can take all that PIM stuff, Akonadi whatever and shovel the lot into 5.x. Do as you will with Konquerer's HTML engine but, with respect, DO NOT FUCK UP THE FILE MANAGEMENT functionality. Linux already has several good browsers so Konquerer's ability to render web pages has little or no actual value any longer.

it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.

Whatever. If they are working on stability and efficiency they do the lords work. 4.x should be rock solid, fast, efficient and feature complete. The rest is damage that belongs in 5.x, which needs to start existing sometime soon and then bake for a good half decade or more.

Re:For the lazy:

[Trogre]

...
Stability improvements.

Underwhelming? I think not - this is exactly what KDE needs, and fewer "feature" additions. Even KDE 4.4.3 still has major stability problems, at least for me.

Re:For the lazy:

[Anonymous Coward]

They've already been trying to shove the file management capabilities into Dolphin.

Sadly, it looks sort of like an old version of Nautilus - all bare and not KDE-like.

Re:For the lazy:

[adamofgreyskull]

fewer "feature" additions

I'd settle for zero feature additions and 100% feature retention.

Re:For the lazy:

[lanner]

Like this guy, I have nothing good to say about the KDE developers and their current desire to remove code and replace it with new, less functional, more buggy, code that just happens to have their names on it. It's like they just want to check in stuff with their name to get credit in the community ("I wrote most of KDE, all by myselfs!").

Had I posted this on a KDE forum, it would have been deleted before morning.

Re:For the lazy:

[visualight]

I can't understand why they want to deprecate the best file manager ever and elevate the worst browser ever.

Re:For the lazy:

[arcanumas]

You're mistaking this for Gnome. KDE does not drop features (unless they are being replaced by more awesome features)
Any missing features from 3.x versions of KDE are almost always due to lack of time/effort by developers. Not because it was decided to drop them.

Re:For the lazy:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya lousy trolling youngstehrs, you don't even know what ye talking 'bout.

KDE is the greatest free DE ever. Trolling around here means you don't know a tad shit about KDE 4 development.

KDE4 was needed because KDE3 was falling behind the developments of other OS'es/DE's, so they came up with a prominent solution. Not everything was a rewrite,
but what was rewritten, will last for a decade or longer.

We don't need another DE from previous millenium, aka GNOME.

Re:For the lazy:

[soppsa]

I'm not sure you understand what drop means. It doesn't imply a reason, it simply says they were... dropped from the release. Design decision, lack of time, lack of interest, lack of voodoo magic, it doesn't matter. Dropped is dropped.

Though if people care enough for their ill maintained features, they are certainly more than welcome to commit code to KDE!

Re:For the lazy:

[Grishnakh]

It doesn't do much good to come up with a supposedly wonderful rewrite that'll supposedly last a long time, if the process causes everyone to switch to GNOME and render all your work irrelevant. This is the danger that KDE is facing today. There aren't many distros that use KDE any more, and even SUSE has been trying to move to GNOME.

Well

[Noitatsidem]

When I tested KDE 4.4, it wasn't the most stable desktop I'd used, let's just hope they've been working on that... I honestly have to wonder why they keep adding features, they have plenty as it is, and from my experience KDE hasn't been the most stable desktop as of late, I really think it should be a high priority to make/keep the desktop as stable as possible, with new features as an afterthought.

Re:Well

[Dragoniz3r]

From what I've seen of the KDE devs, you'd be exactly wrong on that front. New features are always prioritized because they're exciting, while bugfixes get ignored. I don't have the link handy, but awhile back I saw a bug report regarding (iirc) icon opacity, that had stagnated for years. From everything I've seen, the devs aren't as interested in making sure everything works flawlessly as they are in being progressive.

Re:Well

[Noitatsidem]

I really think at this point in KDE4 that they need to work on bugfixes, sure new features are exiting, but what's the point if they don't work? There's a reason why I don't use KDE as my main desktop, it just sits next to my gnome/xfce/e17/whatever desktop, and every once in a while I boot in to KDE to play with it.

Re:Well

[QCompson]

On a related note, Aaron Seigo had an interesting post on his blog (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html) where he struggled (mostly in vain) to explain to people why akonadi and nepomuk were needed or even useful. A lot of comments were similar to yours... basically, just give us a stable KDE desktop to run apps and stop messing around with whizzbang buggy features and eye-candy.

Re:Well

[clang_jangle]

In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a DE really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.

Re:Well

[shutdown -p now]

This was a very enlightening blog post (and comments) to read. It does explain a lot about why KDE4 is the way it is.

That said, what are the options? As far as widget toolkits go, I much prefer Qt - it's miles ahead of Gtk from programmer's perspective, and it's faster as well. But I'm not aware of any DE (not WM, DE - with file manager and so on) written in plain Qt, with no KDE4-style reinvention of the desktop wheel, and useless bells and whistles.

But okay, I can stick to GNOME for the time being, especially since I don't really develop for Linux full-time, and who cares what widgets apps use under the hood? All well and good, except until that relatively recent announcement of "Gnome Shell" to come in 3.0, with those awful screenshots. Oh. My. Fucking. God! It's like GNOME devs looked at the trainwreck that is KDE4, became envious, and devised their own cunning plan to mess up their clean and usable desktop, and overall screw over existing users as much as possible, for the sake of pushing through some brand new bright UI design and usability ideas. I suspect this will go about as good as their "spacial file browser" did in the past, except that one was relatively minor and could be trivially disabled; whereas Shell design has far-reaching implications for entire desktop, and even third-party apps.

I had preventively moved to Xfce for now, which seems to be free from that "reinvent the wheel again, our own special way" disease mentality (so far). It's okay, but I'm still open to alternatives. What other options are there? (again, DEs, not WMs, so please don't suggest OpenBox etc).

Re:Well

[JackieBrown]

That said, what are the options? As far as widget toolkits go, I much prefer Qt - it's miles ahead of Gtk from programmer's perspective, and it's faster as well. But I'm not aware of any DE (not WM, DE - with file manager and so on) written in plain Qt, with no KDE4-style reinvention of the desktop wheel, and useless bells and whistles...... It's okay, but I'm still open to alternatives. What other options are there? (again, DEs, not WMs, so please don't suggest OpenBox etc).

This might be what you are looking for:

Antico: a Qt4/X11 Desktop/Window Manager"

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

it may not have been communicated like this yet, but kde 4.5 will be the first release since 4.0 that has the priority on bugfixes. At least for the plasma desktop. I work in the kde bugzilla and know what i'm talking about

Re:Well

[Noitatsidem]

When I read his post I was about to search for that link, then I saw yours-- hasn't development stopped for Antico though?

Re:Well

[armanox]

LXDE is well on its way to being a good DE.

Re:Well

[JackieBrown]

It's been forked - latest change was 4 days ago

http://github.com/gustavosbarreto/antico

Re:Well

[JackieBrown]

And honestly... once you make that desktop, you may as well as stop all development except for bug fixes, otherwise people will complain that it is turning into the next KDE.

Re:Well

[Kjella]

The comment by Ron (emphasis by me) is the best and deserves a +5, Funny:

I'm surprised to see so many people claiming Nepomuk gives them no added value. Personally, I find the promise of Nepomuk, KDE 4 and semantic desktop enthrilling. Unfortunately this has been so for the past 2 years.

Development seems to me to be heading in the right direction - semantic desktop sounds the more natural way to deal with entities in the computer. But people are used to the traditional way of interaction with the machine, the switch to a novel way is hard to make. Moreover, Nepomuk services are now being developed, and immediate benefits are not apparent. Until the framework and services become more stable and reliable, and the benefits become more prominent, objection to Nepomuk will stay. The point is, at this point of time Nepomuk may be a nuisance, but it is injustifiablly wrong to judge it now. If Nepomuk development fulfills the dreams presented here and elsewhere, these critics of today might find they have been wrong all along, and by a long shot - they might find out that semantic desktop interaction is the right way of doing things. It feels attitude towards Nepomuk now is as has been to KDE 4 in the beginning. That it is immature and present creates problems, that would subside as it matures and the advantages become more present.

Productively, it seems that there should be a better (i.e. more apparent) UI to disable Strigi and Nepomuk - perhaps as a question dialog at install time or when the computer is under heavy load/RAM usage because of Strigi. That people have to actively seek the system settings option might be a fault in this case.

KDE is not free of problems - in fact I can't use it right now. I was greatly disappointed in finding that Kubuntu 9.10 on an old machine with 512MB of RAM is hardly usable. Battery life on my laptop is not satisfactory, and I can't install KDE on Windows for some reason.
But the promise, and the hard work of all involved keep me assured that one day I'll be able to use my computers to their fullest using KDE (on Linux. And not any other DE). So this is thanks and keep up the good work.

Gee, no apparent benefits, if fact it's so resource hungry you can't use it, but you wonder why people don't like it... really?

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech hater n anti-innovation cm 2 mind after reading ur post..i suppose the devs shldv just left kde/gnome alone as soon as u felt cmfortable with ur DE...i kno this is gna cm as a sholck 2 bt ur not the only user of kde/gnome n othr ppl appreciate the innovations in open DEs...

Re:Well

[impaledsunset]

I have no intention of reading blog posts that are trying to convince me that the biggest pieces of crap in computing were *needed*. They are there because the KDE developers want them, and think they are cool. And they don't care that they are slow, annoying, broken and take the system and its functionality together with them. When you're trying to convince me that software, which only feature is to annoy the user, is useful, you need to shut the fuck up.

Re:Well

[Warbothong]

In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a DE really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.

'In truth, graphics and sound are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a shell really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own shell functionality around bash shell than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.'

Should Free Software really be playing a game of catch-up to proprietary software? The two main proprietary OSs are Mac, which defaulted to a GUI in 1984, and Windows which did the same in 1985. KDE and Gnome, the two main Free Software GUIs, came out around 1997 and 1998, 13 years later.

Now, GUIs were new fangled way of interacting in the 80s. What's the new fangled equivalent at the moment? One candidate is Internet-accessible services/databases/RDF/LinkedData/SemanticWeb/etc. At the moment these are almost entirely Web-centric: everyone's solution to interoperability and ubiquitous access seems to be to dump more stuff on the Web. Let's see how that might pan out:

Success: Everything is now done in the browser. The desktop paradigm dies, taking projects like KDE with it, and everything becomes the browser tab.

Failure: It doesn't work out properly. We're left with a mess of incompatible, buggy sites that make trying to get anything done a nightmare. It's all thrown out as a bad idea because it didn't work on the Web. We move back to the desktop, which has none of the networked-database goodness.

Now, what happens if a desktop like KDE integrates this technology into itself? In the success case that the Web takes over, KDE does not die. It becomes even more useful since it can interact with all of these Web equivalents because it's all standard. No more "doesn't work with Linux/BSD/etc.", because everything's on the Web, and KDE is an extension of that Web outside the confines of HTML and the browser.

In the failure case that this Web migration breaks down then not all hope is lost, since this stuff is still available in every other application that doesn't happen to be Web-based.

In reality, of course, there'll be a middle ground. However, you can bet that in the next few releases of OSX and Windows there will be equivalents to Nepomuk turning up. Of course the Windows one will look like a combination of Exchange and the registry, such that small database updates can break the system, and nobody sans Microsoft can interact with it. The OSX one will probably be more standard, stable and useful, but the database will only allow updates from the iTunes Data Store. Do we really have to wait for such crippled systems to cement themselves in place before we realise that we want one too, or do we grab some EU funding now and try to do it right?

It doesn't stop you from using KDE4, or KDE3, or sitting in a console and doing your image editing via Emacs on an XPM file.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to spell first, thanks.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Calm down Mary, no-one said FOSS shouldn't have sound and graphics. Jeez, hallucinating much?

Re:Well

[ChienAndalu]

... written in gtk+

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Xfce used to be good when it was trying to be a better CDE, but it's been going steadily downhill for several versions since they decided to start being a worse Gnome instead. I gave up on it when an "upgrade" (4.6?) meant that the menu system went from being nice and easy to edit to being only editable if you manually hacked XML files.

In fact, I switched to KDE ...

Re:Well

[clang_jangle]

Yes that's all well and fine, but my point is that that particular functionality has no business being an integral part of the DE. Why is kde4 trying to be an OS? Just provide the DE, or at least make it properly modular so that all this extra crap isn't a requirement. It's too much like Apple or MS, they're trying to stuff this notion of "the kde way" down everyone's throats.

I guess it's just one more example of how mainstream Linux has lost sight of the UNIX philosophy.

Re:Well

[thsths]

> In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources.

I agree completely. I switched to KDE 4 at 4.1.8 or so, and it was terrible. 4.2 was usable, but still not great.

Now I am playing with trinity, and while it looks a bit dated, it is really nice to use. Plus it responds a lot faster, even on a state of the art PC with 8 GB of RAM and binary 3D drivers.

Re:Well

[richlv]

i think the problem is... priorities.
i believe nepomuk is cool. akonadi is cool, and useful. and we need those two.
but AFTER we have solid foundation to use every day.
don't get me wrong, i'm a kde user since... a looong time ago. i recently set up a laptop with kde4, and it indeed has progressed a lot since the first few releases, and is mostly useful. some features are very cool and i sometimes consider upgrading my main computer, which is still 3.5.10... but it's the little things and lots of them that annoy me.

let's see... no right-click menu for konsole tabs, no (easy ?) way to see exif timestamps in konq/dolphin (in kde3 it's just a mouseover an image and i see the exif timestamp - massively helpful), gwenview panel size is not remembered between two runs...

and there's lots and lots more. that's kde 4.3.5, so maybe some of these are already resolved... but it's the damn 4.3.5 ! it's not 4.0 anymore.

to be fair, none of the kde4 problems has annoyed me as much as gtk file dialogs do :)

Re:Well

[Noitatsidem]

I'd personally tend to disagree. I think it's very much like comparing gnome to XFCE. Then again, Antico doesn't even use KDElibs so they'd have to try really hard to make it even close to as heavy as KDE.

Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest problem with KDE is its massive memory usage and poor performance on low-end hardware. It's much worse than GNOME not to mention the actual lightweight DE's.

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is low-end hardware? I use KDE 4.4 on a 450MHz P3!!!
KDE should be more bloated than a light-weight DE since it is NOT a light-weight DE.
That's like complaining that Win7 or OS-X doesn't run on a 386 or 68000.
If you want a light-weight DE, then use a light-weight DE.

Re:Will it perform better?

[seyyah]

I don't know about that. With a default install, logging into KDE 4.4 (with preloaded Konqueror, compositing, file indexing, etc) clocks in at a shade under 400mb. That's 400mb, not just for KDE, but for the whole system which runs apache, mysql and so on. Obviously Fluxbox is much less resource hungry, but calling KDE a "massive" memory user is not all that accurate.

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sorry, you really don't. Kindly leave the discussion to those of us who are serious and have a clue, kthxbai!

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't that it's massive off the bat, but that it leaks like a freakin' PB oil spill. Within days it's in the gigabyte+ range.

Google:

plasma memory leak
or
kde 4 memory leak

For starters. There are thousands of complaints including ones using words like, "Epic" :)

Don't get me wrong I love KDE and can't stand where they've taken gnome. I just wish they'd spend some time improving the damn memory leaks. My system becomes unusable within about 1 week of using the KDE desktop unless I restart plasma.

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. I do use KDE on a P3-450. Sure it is slow, but it is tolerable as the spare computer in the garage. KDE in general is not the problem -- javascript is the problem.

Turn off javascript and konqueror and firefox are both usable web browsers.
It works well for taking notes and checking some websites.

For years I used KDE 3.4/3.5 on a 1GHz P3 laptop. It was awesome, though the boot time was kinda slow with dm-crypt.

All my machines use KDE on ArchLinux or Gentoo, as Kubuntu is dog slow in comparison, even on the Core2 Duo.

Re:Will it perform better?

[commodore64_love]

Precisely. I had heard KDE would work better on low RAM systems, but in practice it seems to be worse than the default Gnome desktop.

Now I want to try LXDE (Lubuntu) to see how it performs. Supposedly it only needs 160 MB RAM

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. You're deluding yourself. Load up your desktop, with all the applications you need/use like rss reader etc in KDE. Now do the same with your "lightweight" environment. If KDE doesn't win hands down, you don't need a DE anyway, you are probably just using a bunch of terminals and console applications. IOW; for instance Amarok + Akregator + Kopete + KDevelop + Kmail + Okular use way less resources than Banshee + Rssowl + Pidgin + Eclipse + Evolution + Evince.

Re:Will it perform better?

[TheCycoONE]

I still have the latest KDE installed, but generally I just use openbox wm + a few light tools to get what I need done. If you have a low end system a light window manager might be your best bet.

Re:Will it perform better?

[walshy007]

I use kde for months at a time before rebooting, with fairly constant use except for when I sleep. and I notice none of these memory leak issues that you speak of.

If what you are saying is true I'd be hitting swap within a week. Free indicates my amount of free ram remains pretty constant even with months of usage.

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice for you, but just because YOU don't see a bug doesn't mean the thousands of other people who see it actually don't. I can supply link after link with other people who see the same as I do.

The bug is real, it stops a lot of people from running KDE for extended periods, and it NEEDS to get addressed. I say this as a huge KDE fan, mind.

Re:Will it perform better?

[fast turtle]

less resources than Banshee + Rssowl + Pidgin + Eclipse + Evolution + Evince.

and the reason why is because of Evolution. It's simply bloated beyond belief comparted to Slypheed, Pine or even Kmail. Yes I've used Kmail with Fluxbox along with Konq and Kwrite. Much smaller footprint even having to load the KDE binaries ontop of fluxbox then what I ever got with Evolution.

Re:Will it perform better?

[impaledsunset]

You meant poor performance on all hardware. I'm using it on a Intel Core 2 Q6600 with 8 GB RAM and it is slow as hell compared to KDE 3.5 on my old Athlon XP 2100+, and even GTK+ on the same Athlon XP. And I badmouthed GTK+ about its slowness then. How wrong have I been?

Re:Will it perform better?

[Haeleth]

Really? I recently switched to KDE from the supposedly-light-weight Xfce on my tiny underpowered netbook, and I honestly have not noticed any speed difference at all, even with most of the bells and whistles enabled. Haven't run out of memory yet, either, even with Firefox and KDE running.

Gnome might be faster. I wouldn't know because its interface design makes it unusable on netbooks. But if Gnome is faster than Xfce then there's something seriously wrong with the world.

Re:Will it perform better?

[Anonymous Coward]

LXDE is a lightweight desktop environment based on Openbox, so you are telling him to try what he said he was going to try, talk about redundant.

cashew fixed!

[dasacc22]

well at least they finally fixed having to click the cashew twice to close it after making various changes.

Re:cashew fixed!

[QCompson]

The only way to truly fix the cashew is to enable a way to remove it (not just in opensuse). Have they done that yet?

Re:cashew fixed!

[X0563511]

The ? What?

Re:cashew fixed!

[Tapewolf]

KDE4 has an icon in the corner of a desktop shaped like a cashew nut. It allows you to add and remove desktop widgets. Kind of like pressing F12 on the MacOS.

Re:cashew fixed!

[morgan_greywolf]

It's a goofy little icon thingy in the upper right corner of the screen that brings up a toolbox. Many KDE users find it extremely annoying; I personally don't use KDE as my primary desktop because I see it as too immature at this point, but having played with it, I definitely concur.

Re:cashew fixed!

[X0563511]

That's a cashew? I thought it was a fireball thing.

That's the plasma widget thing. Doesn't bug me at all.

Re:cashew fixed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install I HATE the Cashew. That way, you aren't annoyed while waiting for an actual fix. It's available from the Fedora repos, not sure about other distros.

Re:cashew fixed!

[QCompson]

I tried to install that a while ago on kubuntu and it didn't work for whatever reason. Yes, yes I know, kubuntu sucks, every other kde4 implementation is perfect. Regardless, it didn't work. I just wish there would be a simple option to disable it, like opensuse has added; it makes no sense to me to have it on my desktop when I can just right click and get the same functionality.

IMO it's a prime example of the stubbornness and inflexibility of the current KDE dev team.

Re:cashew fixed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I agree completely. I figure the cashew should just be another plasmoid which you can add/remove at will. Just thank your lucky stars the KDE devs aren't as stubborn as the GNOME devs.

Re:cashew fixed!

[oakgrove]

I'm not sure which version of Kubuntu you were using but I had very little difficulty installing IHTC in Kubuntu 10.04 and getting rid of the darn cashew.

Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 does

[agm]

The only thing holding me back from upgrading to KDE4 on my primary work computer (from KDE 3.5.10) is that I need an accelerated triple head display. From what I can tell this is just not possible with KDE4, while it is working fine with KDE 3.5.10.

4.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks, I'm waiting for KDE 5.0, aka the next x.0 alpha release.

Apparently KDE SC 4.5 has this in store for us

[syousef]

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

New feature: KDE can now be slashdotted.

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, KDE and x.org both peaked a while back and have been in decline for about 2+ years now ...

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a triple-head display on KDE 4.4 with Xinerama. Accelerated OpenGL and video works, but I sacrifice compositing effects & vdpau. (Though new beta drivers may support vdpau with xinerama)

Great performance on games in the center monitor, but I can also stretch games across all three (X-plane, Nexuiz-GLX) at playable frame rates.

(main monitor on nvidia 9600 GT video card, side monitors on nvidia 9400 IGM video)

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 2 was released today

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 2 is now out.

Information about the new beta may be found at the following urls:

http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.5-beta2.php

http://kde.org/info/4.4.85.php

Re:Please tell me its better.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 4 has been just as good as 3.5 for awhile now. Dolphin will do whatever you were doing in Konqueror most likely. I disliked Dolphin at first, but when tabs were implemented (several years ago), I wasn't able to discern any functional difference really. Amarok 2 however does suck ass and I haven't found a good replacement.

Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[victorhooi]

heya,

You know, I'm curious how many of the people complaining about bugginess and memory issues are running say, Kubuntu?

I'm on Arch Linux, and the KDE 4.x branch has been quite stable for me - the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.

And it's performed very well on my desktop, much more snappy/responsive than Gnome.

There's a lot of distributions that have done terribly, half-done jobs of packaging KDE. Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.

Arch has been stable for me, and openSUSE was quite good for KDE as well. Don't know about other distributions, but I've heard that outside of those two, the rest are pretty much a joke - they just do a bad job of packaging KDE, or adding their own half-done patches, and pushing out low-quality KDE desktops.

Cheers,
Victor

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[shutdown -p now]

I was having various stability problems with KDE4 (up to and including 4.4) on pretty much every distro I've tried - Kubuntu was on the list, but also OpenSUSE and Mandriva.

I do run Arch now, and 4.4 seemed to be better in that in terms of stability. But the whole thing still feels so unpolished coming from either KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.x that I can't be bothered.

It feels like KDE4 developers are chasing the uber vision of the desktop of the future (which is totally unlike the desktop of today) that they have in their head, and KDE4 releases that we see in the meantime are stepping stones on that road. So they're neither here nor there, and it is not clear when the road is going to end (if it is going to at all, which I'm starting to doubt at this point).

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[carlmenezes]

Mod parent up. I was on Kubuntu for the last couple of years. You would think that on a distro whose sole reason for existence is to give people a KDE based version of Ubuntu, that you would be able to get anything done without logging in to GNOME. No dice. Ok...maybe we'll show some tolerance here. Maybe GTK apps would at least be themed to look like they fit in on KDE? Nope. OK...getting harder to stomach this distro. At least, something as frequently used as Firefox would be themed correctly in KDE - file dialogs, menus and all? No dice. In summary, its not a KDE distro - its KDE bolted on to a distro. I finally grew tired of the constant tweaking required to get things to work right and the constant additional tweaking required every time some update was released. Time to jump ship. Looked around. There were reports of OpenSuse doing a good job. Tried them out. Paradise in comparison. Stuff just works. I can actually administer any part of the system from within KDE. Firefox is themed right - I didn't have to think about it. Guess what? I don't have GNOME installed, because I don't need it. Package management works beautifully and the fact that I can do a one click web install is pure icing on the cake. What do I miss from Kubuntu? Probably the software ratings. However, here is the important bit - has KDE broken once since I installed OpenSuse? Nope. I'm on KDE 4.4. and in 5 days, will be upgrading to OpenSuse 11.3 for some KDE 4.5 goodness. See, the OpenSuse guys proved to me that a nice enjoyable, stable KDE experience is possible and that by the time I start salivating about the next KDE release, there's a new version of the distro that is ready to release. I'll wait for the distro because I trust them to iron out the kinks for me. They've already done it once. I'm sure they will do it again. Look, if you're a KDE user and you're on Kubuntu, do yourself a huge favour and at least try out the OpenSuse live CD. A lot of effort has gone into that distro and it shows.

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[at_slashdot]

"I'm on Arch Linux, and the KDE 4.x branch has been quite stable for me - the odd crash here and there"

Funny, I haven't had any crash on Kubuntu.

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think that on a distro whose sole reason for existence is to give people a KDE based version of Ubuntu, that you would be able to get anything done without logging in to GNOME. No dice.

In all the years I've been using Kubuntu now, the only time I've actually needed to use Gnome is when I was installing it on my iBook, and that's only because there is no Kubuntu PPC live CD, so I had to grab the Ubuntu one. The first thing I did after installing was to install KDE and remove Gnome. No problems so far.

Ok...maybe we'll show some tolerance here. Maybe GTK apps would at least be themed to look like they fit in on KDE? Nope. OK...getting harder to stomach this distro. At least, something as frequently used as Firefox would be themed correctly in KDE - file dialogs, menus and all? No dice.

Those are certainly nice to have, but hardly worth declaring it the worst KDE distro ever for not having them. And in any case, 10.04 did do something about Firefox integration. You will need to install the package they use for this if you already had Firefox installed or didn't use the Ubuntu Firefox installer, though.

I finally grew tired of the constant tweaking required to get things to work right and the constant additional tweaking required every time some update was released. Time to jump ship. Looked around. There were reports of OpenSuse doing a good job. Tried them out. Paradise in comparison. Stuff just works. I can actually administer any part of the system from within KDE. Firefox is themed right - I didn't have to think about it. Guess what? I don't have GNOME installed, because I don't need it.

Are we even talking about the same Kubuntu? I haven't had to do any significant tweaking on upgrades or have Gnome installed.

However, here is the important bit - has KDE broken once since I installed OpenSuse? Nope.

Can't say I've really had KDE break on me since I installed Kubuntu either.

Look, if you're a KDE user and you're on Kubuntu, do yourself a huge favour and at least try out the OpenSuse live CD. A lot of effort has gone into that distro and it shows.

As long as I can do Debian-style package management with aptitude, I might.

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[massysett]

the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.

Yikes, that's why I stopped using KDE. I can't have an odd crash here and there of my terminal emulator. That might take with it an email I've been working on, or a long-running file download. Stability is critical.

The ancient xterm that I now use has never crashed on me, not once.

Re:Stability Issues - is it your distro?

[victorhooi]

heya,

The early 9.X releases were dogged by constant crashes in Plasma.

That as well as serious issues with Intel display drivers (I experienced these first-hand, as I have a Lenovo X200 tablet, and before that a Fujitsu T4215, both with Intel graphics).

I also heard that there were issues with the Nvidia display drivers, but I didn't experience these first-hand, as I don't have any Nvidia systems.

Perhaps you're very blessed, or maybe you just don't tweak/use systems to the extend that I or other users do. Either way, I encourage you to read this on Ubuntu's own forums:

View Poll Results: Should Canonical devote more developers, time and resources to Kubuntu?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1462668

I mean, seriously, it's like everybody in Ubuntu/Kubuntu's community either hates KDE and thinks Kubuntu shouldn't exist, or just doesn't think Kubuntu is worth using anymore...*sigh*. It's really sad to see.

Cheers,
Victor

Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Wee]

Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.

Their packages are in the same place, in fact. And you can even buy commercial support fro Kubuntu from Canonical. It's not one guy maintaining a port.

Did you have any real, actual examples of areas where they've done so poorly, or do you just have an axe to grind? I've been using Kubuntu for years at home and work, and couldn't be happier.

-B

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[walshy007]

He is probably just indicating that those with the most issues seem to strangely be coming from the kubuntu camp, fedora, opensuse etc seem to treat kde as more a first class citizen than second.

Then again it could just be typical ubuntu users are more from the newer to linux camp and thus complain more in general.

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[JackieBrown]

Then again it could just be typical ubuntu users are more from the newer to linux camp and thus complain more in general.

I think it is this. I had more problems using Debian's KDE 4.x branch (in relation to polickit action at least) than I have with kubuntu. I should give arch a go, though. I have plenty of time to mess with it at work.

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[JackieBrown]

Is there an arch kde dvd or cd? I don't usually have an internet connection.

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there an arch kde dvd or cd? I don't usually have an internet connection.

http://chakra-project.org/

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[victorhooi]

heya,

Hmm, I really hope you know what you're talking about, and aren't just talking out of your rear-end...lol. Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've been a KDE fan since the 3.5 days, and a Ubuntu fan from around those days as well. So it was a natural progression to use Kubuntu. I've basically tried every Kubuntu release since 7.04, until around 9.10, when I basically gave up on it. The 8.x branch, from memory, was particularly patchy for me. I've also tried openSUSE for some time, and spent a bit of time with Fedora. Of these, Arch Linux, either with it's stock KDE packages or KDEmod has been the best, and Kubuntu by far has been the worst.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "in the same place", but they most certainly aren't the vanilla KDE packages - part of the whole point of Ubuntu is they add their own patches to the vanilla packages.

Look, if you don't believe me, take a look at these two articles, and in particular the comments on them:

Kubuntu Gets Some Love
http://www.osnews.com/comments/22113

http://www.osnews.com/comments/22348

Comments like this one:

"Kubuntu has always been a little unstable in my experience - even with KDE3, but since the switch to KDE4 it's been nearly unusable. openSUSE and Mandriva, for example, have the resources to work through a lot of the issues that have come up with KDE4, and I think on a whole both have done a great job. Kubuntu seems at a disadvantage, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone as a good distro to showcase KDE or even linux. It's just too buggy and frustrating. I have a lot of respect for the Kubuntu developers and their efforts, but they have a steep hill to climb."

Or this one:

"That's an appropriate comparison. I have to use Ubuntu at work and it's as if they go out of their way to damage KDE, so that people will get so disgusted with it that they'll switch to Gnome.

The problem with Kubuntu is not that it's being intentionally broken - it's just their shortage of resources. Blaming Kubuntu is stupid, because it's only so much a few guys can do.

It's a shame, really. It would be in KDE upstreams best interest to see that Kubuntu works well, because that's the distro they are going to get the majority of the users from. If you have a company policy specifying "Ubuntu", that's what you are going to use - and install kubuntu-desktop metapackage to get the kde environment."

or this one:

"Your attitude towards Kubuntu might be unfriendly, but it is kind-of deserved imho. Esp if you're a translator I can understand the frustration. I know and respect the two KDE-canonical employees (Aurelien and Riddell) but agree that Ubuntu puts less work in Kubuntu as it's user base would justify."

And there are more. As you can see, my views on Kubuntu's lack of polish is a fairly common one. Perhaps it's improved as of Lucid, I'm not sure. But the one time I did try the Lucid (Beta, mind you) Kubuntu live Cd, it refused to boot (IBM Lenovo X200 Tablet), and when I tried a later RC, it was horrible and broken (particularly plasma).

Cheers,
Victor

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use chakra live dvd (chakra-project.org) which has live cd/dvd. Unfortunately it is still alpha.

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Ash-Fox]

As you can see, my views on Kubuntu's lack of polish is a fairly common one.

I went out of my way to do a few google searches, here is just a short sample of them:
Ubuntu unpolished
Kubuntu unpolished
Vista unpolished
OS X unpolished

Seems the view of all software lacking polish is a fairly common one. I also did more than just look at the first page of results.

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[victorhooi]

heya,

Lol, I don't think you've actually proven anything there.

Yes, people criticise every OS release, but the funny thing about the Kubuntu criticism is that:

1. It's dogged it from release to release - from the 6.X days, right through to the current 10.X days. You compare that against the criticism from say, Vista to Windows 7, or say, OSX 10.0 to 10.6, or heck, ironically, even KDE 4.0 to 4.4/4.5. Kubuntu has sucked, I regret to say, from day 1, right through to today, and unless Canonical suddently decideds to devote more resources to it, will continue to.
2. Everybody seems to be claiming the same things - it's not their little pet peeves, like how "Windows XP looks plasticky", or "it runs slow on my ". There are a number of persistent bugs that have dogged it - now, some of there were hardware driver related, but there were consistent show-stopping bugs (i.e. would not even boot) dogging the entire 9.04 and 9.10 releases (alpha, beta and right through to RC). Showstopping bugs in a RC does not bode well.
3. Even the Kubuntu developers themselves know they're under-resourced.

And if you need further confirmation, here it is straight from the horse's mouth. Ubuntu forums:

View Poll Results: Should Canonical devote more developers, time and resources to Kubuntu?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1462668

Gee, the top voted options were "Yes, Canonical should devote more developers/time and resources to Kubuntu.", or "No, Gnome is and should be Canonical's focus."

And coming in third was "Definitely, Kubuntu isn't living up to its potential.".

Coming in fourth, "No, there's simply not enough resources to go around and Gnome deserves priority."

And all the way down in position five was "No, I like Kubuntu the way it is and/or am not significantly affected by bugs or usability issues.", at a pathetic 5% of votes.

I think that pretty much sums up the sentiment of the Ubuntu/Kubuntu community - either they don't care about KDE, or don't think any effort should be given to Kubuntu, or they've basically written off Kubuntu as simply not a KDE distribution of choice.

Cheers,
Victor

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to check this out:

http://chakra-project.org/

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[JackieBrown]

I went for straight arch since I had an internet connection. I read that chakra will not be compatible with arch when their final release is out and did not want to be stuck on a smaller distro.

It is definitely a different experience and chakra's live cd worked so well I was surprised at how difficult arch was to get going.

I have to read up on abs or ports to get the latest kde beta since there does not seem to be a repo for it.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97899

I finally got network manually up and am trying to get networkmanager working so I can go back to having a secure wireless connection (I turned off wireless security and have my router only excepting specific mac addressed.)

Re:Kubuntu is part of Ubuntu, not "one guy"

[Wee]

Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've used Kubuntu for years, both at home and at work. Before that, I used KDE on Red Hat at home. When they went off into Fedora-land, I switched to Debian and GNOME, with a little CentOS thrown in on the work side (used KDE on CentOS). Hated GNOME with a flying passion, went to Xfce. Along comes Ubuntu and then Kubuntu. Been using it ever since, and have been quit happy with it.

I understand what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider the writers nor the commentors at osnews.com a valid source for ANY information in regards to KDE. That site has always been heavily slanted to GNOME.

Sounds like you've had bad luck with it, so move along and try another variant. There are plenty of them, and that's the beauty of the thing. But Kubuntu has and probably will continue to work fine for me.

-B

What's Not New

[zaivala]

What isn't new? KDE is still slower than a virus-infected Vista installation.

Re:What's Not New

[Anonymous Coward]

If is slow why I can play video and to have open Firefox with some tabs in an old Pentium 4 at 2GHz, 1.5GB of RAM and a Nvidia FX5200 with 128MB and it runs snappy?

I was forced to use that hardware configuration 2 months ago by emergency and my surprise was that KDE 4.4 wasn't the "heavy thing" that few people always repeat... that can be called FUD against KDE

and why my netbook Asus 1000HE only takes 190MB of RAM with KDE 4.4 & compositing enabled and is snappy?

Re:Please tell me its better.

[FeepingCreature]

I've been using Quodlibet as a player. It's no Amarok1.4 but it measures up pretty well.

KDE 4.5 Beta 2 came out today

[TheCycoONE]

Interesting timing on this story. KDE 4.5 beta 2 was released today.

http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.5-beta2.php for the official announcement

Re:KDE 4.5 Beta 2 came out today

[MirzaD]

Quote from release announcement:

Over the last two weeks, roughly since the first beta, 1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we're witnessing a lot of stabilization activity right now. More testing is in place, however, while the restless developers continue to create a rock-stable 4.5.0

Really nice to see much work being put in to stabilization, even if it means few less features :)

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[agm]

No compositing effects and/or no compiz fusion are show stoppers for me. I could run one of the monitors with a different DM, but that's hardly desirable.

Re:Please tell me its better.

[Anonymous Coward]

i use debian with kde4.4.3 from experimental, i migrated the system since 4.2 and pinned the experimental repo, http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html getting new release from time to time, at first it was raw, crashes, leaks. it is very stable now at least in my configuration (amd64 3800+, geforce7600). Amarok2 do the job for me, i say, try it (with lastest video drivers) and pin the repo so you can get frequent updates.

I do want the PIM finished

[Lord Juan]

I know that the vast majority of people don't care about it, but I honestly want the PIM finished, if they are going to integrate akonadi with it, then fine, but finish it already...

Other than that, it was about time to make a big release with mostly bug fixes in it, maybe it's me but I don't find it as unstable or as memory hungry as people are claiming here, it was some versions ago, no argument there, but now it's pretty decent, for me, what is left are mostly annoyances, and I have suffer a lot of them, but I keep the faith, I like the way it's going.

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[JackieBrown]

Assuming that it works on compiz (which I assume is what you are comparing it to) you can change the kde window manger to compiz in the settings screen/

Re:Please tell me its better.

[JackieBrown]

You can use Konqueror as a filemager. It uses the dolphin backend but that is as transparent as all the kio and other backends that kde 3.5's Konqueror used.

Re:Please tell me its better.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 4 has been just as good as 3.5 for awhile now.

Only if you're very, very high. Put away the bong, and I think you'll find that KDE4 quickly loses its appeal.

Dolphin will do whatever you were doing in Konqueror most likely.

It does not even come close to matching what I use Konq for.

I disliked Dolphin at first, but when tabs were implemented (several years ago), I wasn't able to discern any functional difference really.

This is known as "Putting lipstick on a pig".

A previous post summed it up very well as "the trainwreck that is KDE4". Here's a concept for the KDE devs: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If you guys wanted to implement the Next Big Oooh Shiny, you should have started your own fucking project that could die a miserable flaming death on its own without dragging my stable, unobtrusive, and extremely usable desktop along with it to the graveyard.

Thank the gods I was able to find a working KDE3 repo after installing openSUSE 11.2 for the first time recently. I've had to do a little tweaking but I've nearly got to the point where I've got my customary desktop back, no thanks to you brain-dead morons. If/when that's no longer possible, I'll go back to WindowMaker.

--Zontar The Mindless (9002), posting anon because KDE4 is not worth logging in for.

Re:Please tell me its better.

[JackieBrown]

Dolphin will do whatever you were doing in Konqueror most likely.

It does not even come close to matching what I use Konq for.

It is really sad they cannot make it work better for you especially since you provide such useful and detailed complaints.

I am looking forward to the response "It will be complete when it does what KDE 3 Konqueror did" which is just as useful and non-vague.

But still no good printing, SSL cert management?

[GeekDork]

From the bug reports, it seems like KDE still can't handle silly things nobody ever uses, like persistent printer settings or SSL certificates. Both of those are regressions from KDE 3.5, and it seems like KDE tries to mimic Mozilla when it comes to usability.

But yeah, we totally need more UI bling. Not like there was work to do.

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[agm]

...not if you're running the Xinerama extension to get 3 desktops as one. Compiz requires the composite extension, and composite doesn't work with xinerama, more's the pity.

So it was an accident?

[Rix]

That's really not better.

Re:So it was an accident?

[arcanumas]

Since you were modded insightful i think i should answer.
It really *is* better.
You see GNOME actively drops features and then the drop itself is presented as a new feature. The dropped features will not come back. The developers think its actually better that way. (Its a whole philosophy)
KDE has had some features missing due to the change from 3.x to 4.x. In the beginning quite a bit of features were lacking, but gradually most have been re-introduced. If any are still missing (and it might be the case) then this is considered a *bug*. And it will be fixed in the future (shortage of manpower or developer interest non-withstanding obviously).

Personally, i don'd miss a single feature anymore that i used in the 3.x era and there are quite a few new awesome stuff.

So, yes, it is much much better. KDE does not drop features because it assumes the user is an idiot. There simply was a period that some went missing due to a significant architectural change. The vast majority have been re-implemented and the remaining are a matter of time.
It can't think of a simpler way to put this and i thought it was pretty obvious but apparently some mod disagreed.

Re:So it was an accident?

[Rix]

You really think dropping features for years at a time in a stable release is ok if you just call it a bug, effectively meaning there is no stable release?

All your hyperbole aside, the Gnome strategy is at least honest. There's no reason they couldn't opt to put back whatever features they've dropped in the future, but they're being up front that they're not going to now.

Re:KDE is redundant bullshit with Nanny-features

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I once had to use OpenSUSE with KDE for awhile, and it pretty much just acted like Windows. It even had those terrible popup alerts from the taskbar. Wmii only for me.

Re:Please tell me its better.

[Haeleth]

How can it possibly be wrong for KDE to follow the lead of Apple, the acknowledged masters of desktop design?

(Ask any old-time Mac user how they feel about the OS X Finder ...)

Webkit in konqueror;

[assertation]

"Webkit in konqueror"

If a browser uses webkit does that automatically make it compatible ( javascript, CSS, etc ) with other browsers that use web kit?

Re:But still no good printing, SSL cert management

[soppsa]

UI bling and TWITTER integration!!!1

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[Doug Neal]

Xinerama needs to die and the driver vendors need to start taking RandR 1.3 support seriously (I'm looking at you Nvidia).. I found a triple-head Xinerama setup using two Quadro NVS 295s had such bad 2D performance (especially in KDE) that it was unusable.

Re:Please tell me its better.

[12357bd]

Amen!

I just hope someone in the KDE project hears users and backtrack to KDE 3.5.

Just port-it (and desktop applications) to QT. 4 and star anew KDE 3.6.

Many people stays with KDE 3.5, they/we deserve an alternative; otherwise GNOME people will get a lot of new users, and KDE (and maybe even worse, QT) will fade into oblivion as of 'what once was a great DE'.

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[agm]

Yes, indeed I agree. I also think that for the >2 output cards that Nvidia make, it would be good if TwinView would work across all outputs - at the moment I understand it present 2 TwinView "screens" each spanning 2 outputs. Not very useful. Ideally it would be a "QuadView" spanning all 4 outputs.

Can you do an accelerated triple/quad head setup with 2 Nvidia cards in any Windows flavour? If so, then what's holding Linux/xorg/KDE back?

Re:Please tell me its better.

[JackieBrown]

I messed up my quote tags. I was not complaining about konqueror but based on how I screwed up on the quotes tab, it sure looks like i was.

Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d

[Doug Neal]

Can you do an accelerated triple/quad head setup with 2 Nvidia cards in any Windows flavour? If so, then what's holding Linux/xorg/KDE back?

Years of neglect during the XFree86 days, basically. Xorg is still playing catch-up to Windows which had these concepts nailed years ago. It also doesn't help that Nvidia and ATI, as the two main vendors of graphics hardware, tend to ignore the Xorg architecture and implement things like multiple displays in their own way. The whole mess is an embarrassment, and one of the few major problems holding Linux back as a desktop OS :(