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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."
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
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).
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.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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.