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

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

[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: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:

[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.

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.

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.