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

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:

[adamofgreyskull]

fewer "feature" additions

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

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.

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

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