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A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1

Posted by timothy on from the delicious-candy dept.

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."

4 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. For the lazy: by X0563511 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    1. Re:For the lazy: by TopSpin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
  2. Re:Slashdotted already... by Bobfrankly1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:Well by QCompson · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.