KDE 4.5 Released

An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.5.0 has been released to the world. See the release announcement for details. Highlights include a Webkit browser rendering option for Konqueror, a new caching mechanism for a faster experience and a re-worked notification system. Another new feature is Perl bindings, in addition to Python, Ruby and JavaScript support. The Phonon multimedia library now integrates with PulseAudio. See this interview with KDE developer and spokesperson Sebastian Kugler on how KDE can continue to be innovative in the KDE4 age. Packages should be available for most Linux distributions in the coming days. More than 16000 bug fixes were committed since 4.4."

Comments

W00t

[bcmm]

Now we can have a thread with KDE haters AND PA haters in it!

Re:W00t

[bcmm]

Seriously though, phonon has pluggable backends, and this does not mean the PulseAudio is going to be compulsory for KDE users, any more than its DirectShow integration makes MS Windows compulsory for KDE users.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

Frankly, not supporting PA well has been the most ridiculous shortcoming in KDE (after networkmanager). It has been the "no audio desktop environment" lately, but this appears to be fixed now.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

Seriously though, phonon has pluggable backends, and this does not mean the PulseAudio is going to be compulsory for KDE users, any more than its DirectShow integration makes MS Windows compulsory for KDE users.

I really appreciate this feature. Instead of just hearing sound from speakers, I find it tremendously important to be able to "plug my own backend" to hear it, you know, somehow differently.

Re:W00t

[Anonymous Coward]

Or your distributor can plug in the best backend on your OS (yeah, they really might be different on Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac) so that you can get sound from your speakers.

Of course if you're an obsessive tinkerer or your distributor ships you a broken version of a particular backend then you have the option to fix it yourself too.

Stu J (who can't be bothered to register and account)

Re:W00t

[Richard_at_work]

It does amaze me, as someone who tried the 'modern' Linux desktop several times over the past 15 years and always came away shaking my head, that audio support within Linux is still a topic that prompts regular discussion - when I am on Windows or OSX, I don't even know what the audio subsystem is called because its never been an issue, Ive never had to tinker with it. Hell, for the past 5 years I haven't even needed to install drivers and its still produced beautiful sound.

I can't comment on the rest of the Linux UI experience (my Linux knowledge is firmly positioned in the headless server region), but come on - audio is something that shouldn't even be on a users agenda for worrying about these days.

Re:W00t

[Tapewolf]

To be fair, I did have to do this once. Kubuntu shipped with one that was broken by default, at least on my system.

Re:W00t

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even know what the audio subsystem is called because its never been an issue, Ive never had to tinker with it. Hell, for the past 5 years I haven't even needed to install drivers and its still produced beautiful sound.

Yeah, that's been my experience with GNU/Linux as well.

Re:W00t

[Mystra_x64]

Why not? Compiling to change an option is not user-friendly.

Re:W00t

[zsitvaij]

I've been using KDE since 4.2 with PA, often using the ability to output to another PA instance on the network, reliably, on Gentoo and Ubuntu, mainly using Amarok. You are trolling hard and fast.

Re:W00t

[Runaway1956]

Personally, I love the new OSS. What I don't love, is the pain in the ass procedure to get it installed. I'm no guru, but I'm no dummy either. It took me about 3 hours to get OSS4 installed. Yeah, it was GREAT - but it was just to much sweat. Every once in a while, I do another search for a distro that ships with OSS4 instead of PA/ALSA. No luck so far.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/list-of-distributions-that-have-oss4-in-their-repos-683617/

Re:W00t

[Tyler Eaves]

Wait until you need something like SP/DIF output to work, or want to actually make it run natively at 44.1KHz instead of the abomination that is 48Khz.

Re:W00t

[JohnFluxx]

I guess you're being sarcastic, but some people do want to use network-transparent audio systems, for example.

Re:W00t

[bcmm]

I gave the example of MS Windows especially so that people would realise that different types of computer require audio to be output using different systems. I can't tell whether you're implying that KDE developers getting to use a unified audio API across different operating systems complicates the user experience in some way, or that you are somebody who pointedly doesn't care how things work internally, in which case I'm not sure why you bothered replying.

Re:W00t

[bcmm]

This is a rather flawed argument: it's in the "Computer Administration" section, which is obviously not for playing with randomly as one might with "Look & Feel". If you go there without knowing what you're doing and break things, you were going to break your computer anyway.

In general, I would rather that developers keep obscure options available, (with sane defaults, and under an "Advanced" tab or similar) than remove them in case idiots play with them. If you don't agree with me, you're welcome to use Gnome, which has a tendency towards removing potentially confusing things, or indeed to buy a Mac, but it's not really fair to criticise KDE for allowing power users to mess with stuff if that's what they want to do, since an awful lot of KDE users like the configurability, and the rest just avoid clicking "Advanced >>".

Also, the Phonon KCM provides useful features other than backend selection, such as specifying priority of audio devices ("use my USB headset if it's plugged in, otherwise use my sound card").

Re:W00t

[diegocg]

Linux sound works perfectly for me now that Pulseaudio is stabilized. And it is great, I no longer use the system volume like I did in the past, I have a pulseaudio plasmoid which shows a volume bar for every app streaming audio and I tweak the bars as I like. I still see many people who like to bash Pulseaudio, but most of them seem to talk about the Pulseaudio of one or two years ago. In the latest releases of Ubuntu and Fedora I did google for any review that would talk about pulseaudio or any kind of sound problems. It turns out I found several reviews talking about how the new release had fixed the audio problems they had in previous releases, and only one talking about new audio problems. So it seems to me that Linux audio has got fixed and greatly improved with PA, but I don't think the PA haters will admit it.

Re:W00t

[Elektroschock]

Well. audio support is no KDE4 issue. They did everything right with Phonon.

Re:W00t

[V!NCENT]

I have never needed to tinker with my audio for the last 8 years with Linux.

I've had a Pentium 2, an AMD 2800 and currently a Phenome 9950 X4. My Eee PC 900 (Celeron version) was also just working. An Pentium Dual Core Dell office pc and a Dell Precision with a Core 2 Duo...

Audio problems? Linux? I know some Alsa drivers are truly crappy. So crappy and buggy that PulseAudio doesn't work. But PulseAudio never failed me, except once with that Dell Precision for the first two Ubuntu releases that shipped PulseAudio but after that the driver got fixed.

I have been not installing drivers for all my computers in 8 years with Linux.

I suggest you always do your homework before you buy your new computer, instead of afterwards. Saves you a whooooooooole lot of trouble.

Re:W00t

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I think you will find that pulseaudio is able to quite a lot more than just play sounds. E.g, you can have one program play in your speakers and another in your usb headphones. The mainstay of the discussion is whether anyone needs this, and whether pulseaudio is bugfree enough for everyday use. The bit you mention has been solved by ALSA for a long time now.

Re:W00t

[marcosdumay]

It's KDE. Any change is a reasonable change for a user to do. That's why I use it.

Re:W00t

[walshy007]

Frankly, not supporting PA well has been the most ridiculous shortcoming in KDE (after networkmanager).

I am puzzled at what this networkmanager problem you state is/was? been using kde since 2002 and networkmanager has been around at least five years plus on my fedora system.

In regards to kde and PA, ever since PA graced it's ugly head some years ago (fedora users are always first for every new system, yay for bugs) it's been no more buggy than under other window managers.

Professionals use jack for their whole sound system anyway.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

Sorry about redundant posts. Slashdot web backend seemed to be failing badly.

Re:W00t

[TheSunborn]

I never managed to make the audio system in Windows XP behave as i would like. I have 2 sound output devices(Headphones and an usb headset) and I never managed to
control which software did output to which sound device. And I also miss a Windows application to control the sound level on an "per application" level. And features such as redirect audio to other computers.

So part of the reason the linux audio system is still in a bit of a flux is that it is designed to do so much more then windows, thus making it much more difficult to design and implement. The other reason is that because there have newer been a single audio system/api different apps use different apis and this causes each sound system to add api emulation for the other sound systems which is quite a mess, and the emulation is not always that god.

Pulse audio is quite good until you use an old legacy app which only support oss. Then it will use the oss emulation api in pulseaudio-oss which atleast for me causes more then 1 second audio delay because the audio buffer is not flushed until it is full.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

Compile-time? Why? Phonon is designed so that *all* backends that work with your OS can be provided and users can change backends in run-time without any applications having to handle anything, or even needing to be aware that anything has changed. Why should it be "unreasonable" for a user to select backends?

How often do windows/mac users change their audio backend?

Re:W00t

[Anonymous Coward]

1) That option IS in gnome (in gstreamer-properties )
2) Even with that option, gnome (by default on ubuntu at least), is "use PulseAudio or no sound* for you" (I don't remember exactly, but I think the "fix" is to remove libpulse-mainloop-glib0, and install a SDL version that supports alsa/oss/whatever you are using to replace pulseaudio ).
3) The KDE audio backend option is a godsend if you use wine (I had problems with (no) sound in games when using PulseAudio that went away by disabling it)

Note: I actually like pulseaudio, but (in my case) until wine starts to work with/around pulseaudio and/or viceversa, or until mayor distros start packaging osspd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/osspd ), pluggable audio backends are a good idea. And (probably) will still be a good idea for people that uses OSSv4.

Re:W00t

[Andy Dodd]

I think he's speaking about the fact that networkmanager integration in early KDE 4.x releases was EXTREMELY deficient.

If I recall correctly, Ubuntu had to pretty much write their own NM interface for KDE 4.x, and on my one remaining Gentoo box, I had to run the KDE 3.5 networkmanager applet for quite a while to have any sort of networkmanager functionality.

Re:W00t

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found this to be incredibly useful. I can play a movie that only I can hear on my headphones, while still playing music for whoever is in the vicinity.

Re:W00t

[Andy Dodd]

I don't know if it is Phonon or Amarok-specific, but I can tell you that for whatever reason, AmaroK completely screws up my system sound every time I use it.

Music played within Amarok will play fine, but everything else becomes silent until I fire up MythTV and watch something, as Myth seems to do a pretty thorough reset of my system's audio output settings once it finishes playback, while AmaroK seems to leave them hanging in a wacky state.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

I can't tell whether you're implying that KDE developers getting to use a unified audio API across different operating systems complicates the user experience in some way, or that you are somebody who pointedly doesn't care how things work internally, in which case I'm not sure why you bothered replying.

Phonon in KDE *is* a user-visible entity. You have to priorize different backends, etc. You can also enjoy nice error messages about Phonon backends not working when running KDE programs inside Gnome.

Re:W00t

[MrHanky]

If something completely screws up your system sound, it's the system sound's fault. No app should be able to do that, no matter how broken.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

I've been using KDE since 4.2 with PA, often using the ability to output to another PA instance on the network, reliably, on Gentoo and Ubuntu, mainly using Amarok. You are trolling hard and fast.

Nice that it worked for you.

With freshly installed Ubuntu, I could hear sound from Gnome, but not KDE. Well, KDE 4.4 works ok.

Clearly it was not the fault of KDE - perhaps I should have called a computer repairman?

Re:W00t

[AvitarX]

It was very easy for me to route an application to my bluetooth with pulse too.

Allegedly that was the purpose of Phonom, but I couldn't get KDE to recognize my headset.

Re:W00t

[0100010001010011]

Draco Linux is OSS only.

Re:W00t

[0100010001010011]

Sorry State of Sound in Linux.

He wrote an update in 2009.

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi.

Re:W00t

[ultrabot]

Windows Users don't have multiple workspaces, or window transparency (at least I haven't encountered it in Windows 7), or a package manager.

Which of these is relevant to audio?

Re:W00t

[qortra]

Linux sound works perfectly for me now that Pulseaudio is stabilized.

It has certainly gotten better, but there are still plenty of issues with audio in Linux, at least out of the box. Some of them are driver related, some are still PA related, and some are related to poor default Alsa configurations. I can give several current (Ubuntu 10.04) examples of audio issues in Linux.

• Some HDMI sinks tend to run at 48khz regardless of the source frequency (another poster here mentioned the 48khz madness). Moreover, Alsa doesn't seem to re-sample the audio properly by default in these cases, creating the chipmunk phenomenon. I'm fairly sure this is an Alsa-script fixable issue.
• In certain situations, applications seem to lock the sound device causing all kinds of consternation. This shouldn't happen (software mixing ought to always kick in). This is most likely because those applications don't use Pulseaudio (which isn't yet appropriate for all tasks, and probably never will be). As with above, I'm sure this can be fixed with Alsa magic, but it shouldn't have to be
• M-Audio 2496 internal audio card doesn't play well with Pulseaudio (to be fair, I last tried this with 9.10, never with 10.04). Apparently, it didn't have the kinds of Alsa controls that PA expected.
• When plugging external speakers into my laptop (a TimelineX), the sound on the internal speakers would turn off, the but the external speakers would not get the sound. Eventually fixed by upgrading to 10.10 alpha.
• As another poster mentioned, getting s/pdif to work properly is often non-trivial. Alsa is pretty good about offering raw access to the sound card controls, but it isn't always obvious what combination of control settings are compatible with digital audio out. In some cases, it is a single switch, but in other less fortunate cases, 3 or 4 controls need to be set properly before it will work. To make matters worse, there isn't a lot of documentation about what settings will work properly with a given audio interface. Usually, it's 15-20 minutes of forum reading before I can find some obscure reference to the information I need.

Re:W00t

[zsitvaij]

I don't recall having to configure anything to get sound working for KDE under Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04. On Gentoo, you need to configure everything yourself, but it was just setting up the PA device and making it the default in .asoundrc, which worked for everything trying to use ALSA, until Phonon gained the option of direct PA output. Which happened before 4.5, since this is the setup dialog under 4.4 in Lucid. The new work in 4.5 is just better integration, so maybe you won't need padevchooser from now on to connect to network sinks.

Re:W00t

[icebraining]

In foobar2000 in Windows 7 you can choose Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI), DirectSound or ASIO/Kernel Streaming, and each has different advantages.

Re:W00t

[Dog-Cow]

In 2001 (XP's release), you couldn't do that on Linux either. Both Vista and Windows 7 support these features.

Re:W00t

[quantumphaze]

plug my own backend

I find that plugging the sound in my backend, the deep bass really helps me loosen up.

Re:W00t

[icebraining]

You don't need to standardize on a single backend: you can use OSSv4 with the ALSA API. Just get all apps/sound libraries to use that API, and then you can switch backends without any problems.

Re:W00t

[icebraining]

My problem with OSSv4 is it didn't detect when the headphones were plugged in, with the HD-Audio drivers. Now I'm using ALSA+dmix, it's easy to set up and I don't need per app volume (most apps have their own slider) nor network streaming (my media player - MPD - can stream music anyway).

Re:W00t

[ebuck]

Back in KDE 3.x days, NetworkManager was just getting started, and Unbuntu shipped a very bad snapshot of it which prevented network connections.

At the time Unbuntu shipped this broken copy, the KDE NetworkManager group had already shifted dev work to the 4.x series, but Unbuntu didn't ship a 4.x KDE until much later. As a result, Unbuntu's poor QA and packing practices led most people to think that NetworkManager didn't work under KDE, rather than the correct conclusion, which is that Unbuntu didn't do proper QA with its packaging.

The end result for that Unbuntu release was that most KDE Unbuntu users either switched to Gnome, stayed on the previous release, or changed distros to see a working NetworkManager in KDE.

My experiences with this may be anecdotal; however, they are anecdotal as personally experienced at the Houston LUG with literally eight to ten people dragging in broken Kbuntu distros monthly over a period of four or five months.

Re:W00t

[ebuck]

Not to mention that I'm about to play with the Linux Terminal Server Project. Network booting remote dumb terminals now use the network transparency of PulseAudio to play sound at the dumb terminal. Thank you PulseAudio, as previously it was a bit of a mess to do so (to make a major understatement).

Re:W00t

[tepples]

Linux sound works perfectly for me now that Pulseaudio is stabilized.

Games using the Allegro library, one of SDL's competitors, are silent with PulseAudio in Ubuntu 10.04. Instead of producing sound, they raise an error message when they call install_sound(). I forget the exact wording of this error message, but it was something like no compatible sound output driver found. Do you want me to install such an app again on my Ubuntu box (from which I have since removed Allegro and all apps that use it) so that I can quote the error message verbatim?

Re:W00t

[bjourne]

Yes, finally PulseAudio doesn't *add* an problems when I install it. On the other hand it doesn't provide any features I didn't already have over bare ALSA. When it comes to playing music, Linux is almost at the "just works" stage. However, recording is another chapter altogether..

PulseAudio doesn't have a gui for setting the audio input devices (that works) so you still have to muck around with alsamixer and /etc/asound.conf. Furthermore, you can't set the mic gain so recording with professional microphones means the sound becomes useless low. And there is no interpolation of the input sound which means the quality is much worse than in windows where the sound system performs smoothing. I tried doing some recordings as lately as a few months ago on a Dell laptop. Even asked in the #pulseaudio irc channel for advice. The helpful people there had no idea, except that my sound driver might be faulty. Going back to purse ALSA solved it.

Re:W00t

[TheSunborn]

How do I as a user choose that? Or do the app guys need to rewrite part of their app to use a new api?

Re:W00t

[Teun]

Untill about a year ago the Knetworkmanager did for example not support WPA.

Today it might work or at least for a while.

When you depend on wifi for net access your best bet is still to install wicd.

Re:W00t

[tehcyder]

Pardon?

Re:W00t

[pr0nbot]

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi

Bloody latency, the 'o' still hasn't arrived.

Re:W00t

[LWATCDR]

Really?
Our support department has had a number of issues with Windows audio over the years. We have 10,000 plus users and there is not a day that goes by without at least one audio issue and a lot of them have to do with drivers.

Re:W00t

[CannonballHead]

Window transparency is in Windows 7. I'm not sure if you can exactly turn it on and off or change it, but the functionality is there. They just figure most users don't want to configure it themselves, so they do it on certain actions.

Package manger? Windows has had a "package" manager for ages, what are you talking about? No, you can't INSTALL from it, but it keeps track of what you have installed and allows you to remove it. How well it works is, of course, a different discussion, though it seems to work a lot better in 7 than it has in some previous versions.

Multiple workspaces? You have me there. Then again, I have never heard most people wish for that.

Re:W00t

[chill]

You don't game much, do you?

Game sounds go thru speakers. VoIP (TeamSpeak or in-game) go thru headset. At night, when people are sleeping, both sets of sound go thru headset.

Re:W00t

[Ornedan]

Multiple workspaces? You have me there. Then again, I have never heard most people wish for that.

Those people probably have never used a multiple workspace -capable window manager. The benefits only show when you've adjusted to having a large number of open windows being feasible. Once you do keep enough windows open that it's not sensible to keep them in a single workspace, you can organize them by purpose. For example, on my work computer my default configuration is email and browser in one workspace, IDE and other dev tools in another, testing environment in a third and a fourth workspace that gets used for whatever tasks I don't want cluttering up the other workspaces but aren't big enough things to create a new dedicated workspace for.

Now, I could make do without multiple workspaces, but then my single workspace would be somewhat cluttered and I'd have to close programs I'm not constantly using to keep it from getting really cluttered. And that adds overhead as I then have to reopen the programs and either wait for them to restore their state - if they even can - or manually set them back up.

Re:W00t

[Blakey Rat]

I never managed to make the audio system in Windows XP behave as i would like. I have 2 sound output devices(Headphones and an usb headset) and I never managed to
control which software did output to which sound device. And I also miss a Windows application to control the sound level on an "per application" level. And features such as redirect audio to other computers.

When XP came out, could you do that in *any* OS? XP is really, really, really old... I'm kind of getting sick of reading posts like this, that basically treat XP as the end-all, be-all of Windows.

Microsoft added that for Vista. PulseAudio was close-behind, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft got the feature out the door first-- and definitely in a more stable form, considering how buggy PA was until recently.

Re:W00t

[Lunix Nutcase]

I never managed to make the audio system in Windows XP behave as i would like. I have 2 sound output devices(Headphones and an usb headset) and I never managed to
control which software did output to which sound device. And I also miss a Windows application to control the sound level on an "per application" level. And features such as redirect audio to other computers.

So the best you can do is bash a 9 year old operating system for being unable to do something that Linux couldn't do at the same time either? Are you fucking stupid or what?

Re:W00t

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't even know what the audio subsystem is called because its never been an issue, Ive never had to tinker with it.

Not even when you want to play the sound output from a program on your netbook on your living room dvr's speakers?

Re:W00t

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Try opening Xine and going to Preferences -> Audio and changing "ALSA" to "Pulseaudio". That should make the Xine backend for Phonon pipe through PA now. The PulseAudio device shows up in the Multimedia configuration (provided you add "pulseaudio -D" to your ~/.kde/env directory to run before KDE starts), but I guess even if you output to that device it still tries to go through Xine, which could be hitting OSS or ALSA. (And I suspect that since the PA server is using the ALSA device already there is no sound unless you happen to have hardware mixing. That's all just speculation, but it seems reasonable.)

Of course, Xine+PA broke for some reason with the 4.5 update on Lucid. Supposedly it's fixed in Maverick, but won't be backported to Lucid. I spent a day trying to get DMix set up and reverting everything (Xine, VirtualBox, etc.) back to ALSA. Very irritating.

Re:W00t

[H0p313ss]

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi

Bloody latency, the 'o' still hasn't arrived.

Wh*t do y** mea* ... f*ne h*re.

(I love linux but pulseaudio in an Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade made me want to pull my hair out... clean install of 10.04 fixed it but then I retired the machine and replaced it with a macbook pro to play with the iOS SDK)

Re:W00t

[Kjella]

Bah I got one simpler:

1. Buy a Asus EEE 1001PX
2. Install Ubuntu 10.04
3. Play something on the speaker, that'll work
4. Insert headphones. The speakers will mute but no sound. And yes, I did check that the volume wasn't muted and all that.

That and wireless didn't work until I did a manual kernel update via cable. Sigh. I heard upgrading to 2.6.34 would break the webcam though, but maybe that's been fixed - I haven't checked. And it's still unstable if the wireless will come back after a suspend, sometimes there's no signal at all afterwards.

I use it on my desktop, and my parents do because I fix any stupid shit, but I'm still not recommending it to anyone else without strong geek-fu.

Re:W00t

[ultranova]

Or your distributor can plug in the best backend on your OS (yeah, they really might be different on Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac) so that you can get sound from your speakers.

In other words, Linux and BSD are going to have different audio backends. Until BSD adopts ALSA, at least.

Not that any of this matters on modern processors. Sorry, Creative Labs, but the time of separate sound cards is long past, and Winamp seems to be taking 0 percent on my 4-core Intel i5. And, in fact, Ubuntu Linux works just fine through VirtualBox and Windows 7.

Re:W00t

[ultranova]

For example, on my work computer my default configuration is email and browser in one workspace, IDE and other dev tools in another, testing environment in a third and a fourth workspace that gets used for whatever tasks I don't want cluttering up the other workspaces but aren't big enough things to create a new dedicated workspace for.

I see your 4 workspaces and rise to 12. All of which I'll have as soon as Linux has a native (FOSS) Radeon 9550 driver...

Yeah, Windows 7, you don't have any native multiple desktop support, now do you? Just a pathetic window grouping support. I dream of being free of you, just for that, I really do...

Re:W00t

[HermMunster]

What he's saying is that the network manager applet in KDE (up until a couple recent releases of Kubuntu) was horrid. And he's right, at least as far as wireless went.

He's also saying that pulse audio was also an issue. And he's right. It was horrendous also, often not working, stopping, locking up programs, etc. For instance if you had pulse audio loaded and tried to use XBMC it would lock and you had to terminate XBMC by opening another session and terminating it at the CLI. Most of the posts from various sources indicated that the Kubuntu folks hadn't set PA up properly.

As of the current release of Kubuntu and KDE 4.4.5 it is working well, though I often get messages indicating that the audio subsystem isn't working for some reason or the other. Usually running a multimedia program resets it and it works again.

So, no, he's not trolling.

Re:W00t

[HermMunster]

I've heard people say they've tried Linux over the years. I too had tried Linux over the years. But, seriously, there's more to this than "trying". What gets people is the "trying", (mostly) trying it with the mindset of a windows user. Attempts consist of a few weeks, but never a real commitment to trying. Put Windows aside for a few months, say 6, **and take the time to learn it** (you didn't learn Windows over night) while always keeping in mind that you should forget your Window's mindset. Granted there's a lot in common. Until you really try it you are just essentially "batting an eye" at it (so to speak) without the commitment to the relationship.

Linux has had sound issues, though these days minor and almost not related to the Linux OS. It's all in how the distribution put things together. For instance, K/Ubuntu put together a half hearted attempt at Pulse Audio. But other distributions did it very well and their sound issues were uncommon. Sound technology has changed. In Vista you can adjust the sound properties on a per application basis. The modern sound systems in Linux are doing the same thing. The nature of Linux is to have new and inventive technologies created that compete with the existing ones. I think few people would say that's the case with Windows and directx/direct sound. In Linux if someone finds a better way they can create it. This is sort of antagonistic to the other pre-existing technologies, yet in the end we end up with much better more flexible easily programmed, cross platform technologies that benefit everyone.

Windows had some very bothersome issues with the High definition audio bus. Finding a way to get that working at times was near impossible. The point is that sound issues exist(ed) in Windows (until not long ago).

What this article is saying is that sound issues are mostly non-existent today even so, they are spending more time and research on putting together even better ways that are more friendly to the user. You are reading it wrong. The point of the article wasn't to say sound sucked, but to say it's great and even so, here you go, we are making it better with this new capability.

And, in case you didn't understand it, KDE is a desktop manager that runs atop the GUI that runs atop the OS.

Re:W00t

[HBoar]

I've also been using KDE with PA since then, and up until recently I hadn't had any problems either. However, since installing Kubuntu 10.04 on my laptop recently I have been having no end of trouble with audio. PA does seem to have been working in most cases, but there are (have been?) issues, so I don't think the parent's comment was a troll at all...

Re:W00t

[Spugglefink]

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audio.

He doesn't even mention JACK in any of this. JACK is the fly in the ointment for most Linux users who try to do anything the slightest bit non-trivial with audio. I hate Linux audio, and go for months at a time with my speakers turned off. It's easier that way.

Re:W00t

[idle12]

Great! Show me a 10 year old Linux distro that does that?

Hell, show me a 10 year old Linux distro that has support for modern sound cards.

Re:W00t

[ultranova]

Microsoft added that for Vista. PulseAudio was close-behind, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft got the feature out the door first-- and definitely in a more stable form, considering how buggy PA was until recently.

PulseAudio was worse than Vista? That's harsh!

Re:W00t

[walshy007]

You have an m-audio 2496, therefore I assume you care about sound.

What the devil are you doing using pulseaudio instead of jack?

Re:W00t

[walshy007]

I still see many people who like to bash Pulseaudio, but most of them seem to talk about the Pulseaudio of one or two years ago. In the latest releases of Ubuntu and Fedora I did google for any review that would talk about pulseaudio or any kind of sound problems. It turns out I found several reviews talking about how the new release had fixed the audio problems they had in previous releases, and only one talking about new audio problems. So it seems to me that Linux audio has got fixed and greatly improved with PA, but I don't think the PA haters will admit it.

Pulseaudio plain and simply should not have been made. Instead of standardising on a single audio api they chose to buggily try to support every api known to man that was currently in use.

Now we have a divide between those who take audio seriously (those who use jack) and those who don't give a damn but want audio (pulse users, everyone else). When there was no reason for pulse in the first place.

Upon investigating what pulseaudio developers had to say on the matter, they essentially said they didn't like the cpu overhead of jack, yay a whopping maybe half percent overhead for extremely low latency professional audio.

The reason there are still PA haters out there is because there was and is a better solution that is far more tested and far more capable, but all the distros flock to pulse

and for professional audio use PA could not ever hope to replace jack unless there were serious changes.

Re:W00t

[Richard_at_work]

I've heard people say they've tried Linux over the years. I too had tried Linux over the years. But, seriously, there's more to this than "trying". What gets people is the "trying", (mostly) trying it with the mindset of a windows user. Attempts consist of a few weeks, but never a real commitment to trying. Put Windows aside for a few months, say 6, **and take the time to learn it** (you didn't learn Windows over night) while always keeping in mind that you should forget your Window's mindset. Granted there's a lot in common. Until you really try it you are just essentially "batting an eye" at it (so to speak) without the commitment to the relationship.

Except I'm not approaching it with any mindset - I am already competent in both the major alternative desktop OSes (Windows and OSX), plus I did spend a heck of a lot of time in various older desktop environments on Linux prior to about 2000, including Window Maker for about 2 years solid. Why are you assuming that I approached it with a Windows mindset?

People should stop assuming that simply because I'm not using Linux front and center as my main desktop that I'm not competent enough to pass a judgment on it when I do use it.

Linux has had sound issues, though these days minor and almost not related to the Linux OS. It's all in how the distribution put things together. For instance, K/Ubuntu put together a half hearted attempt at Pulse Audio. But other distributions did it very well and their sound issues were uncommon. Sound technology has changed. In Vista you can adjust the sound properties on a per application basis. The modern sound systems in Linux are doing the same thing.

Windows had some very bothersome issues with the High definition audio bus. Finding a way to get that working at times was near impossible. The point is that sound issues exist(ed) in Windows (until not long ago).

Which actually highlights my point - when there was an issue with sound in Windows, it got discussed. When it got fixed, it stopped being discussed. Windows sound is not topical these days because its not a problem.

But discussions regarding quite a few topics on Linux can be guaranteed to bring up heated discussion on the pitfalls and troubles of the various options that currently exist for sound - they are still topical for discussion because they are still relevant issues.

And that is my point - mainstream OS sound systems should not be topical these days, they should be solved problems that sit in the background silently doing their job (no pun intended).

What this article is saying is that sound issues are mostly non-existent today even so, they are spending more time and research on putting together even better ways that are more friendly to the user. You are reading it wrong. The point of the article wasn't to say sound sucked, but to say it's great and even so, here you go, we are making it better with this new capability.

And, in case you didn't understand it, KDE is a desktop manager that runs atop the GUI that runs atop the OS.

The article can say whatever it wants, the discussion on the topic paints an entirely different picture...

Re:W00t

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm confused by your story. You seem to be mixing 2 unrelated topics in your post:

1. "NetworkManager"

Back in KDE 3.x days, NetworkManager was just getting started, and Unbuntu shipped a very bad snapshot of it which prevented network connections.

2. "KDE 4.x not being released by Ubuntu soon enough for you."

At the time Unbuntu shipped this broken copy, the KDE NetworkManager group had already shifted dev work to the 4.x series, but Unbuntu didn't ship a 4.x KDE until much later. As a result, Unbuntu's poor QA and packing practices led most people to think that NetworkManager didn't work under KDE, rather than the correct conclusion, which is that Unbuntu didn't do proper QA with its packaging.

The end result for that Unbuntu release was that most KDE Unbuntu users either switched to Gnome, stayed on the previous release, or changed distros to see a working NetworkManager in KDE.

I can't say much about the network manager, because I don't use it.

But I believe the reason for the slow adoption for KDE 4 was the fact that KDE 4.0 was released as a poorly labeled bug ridden beta version.

Re:W00t

[Risen888]

Wow, the same 3 year old article and 1 year old article that someone posts every time anything vaguely related to Linux audio comes up. How very +5 Informative of you.

Re:W00t

[Risen888]

Yep, ditto. In the 6+ years I've been 100% GNU/Linux on all my machines, I've never had a problem with sound. Never ever ever. Actually, on my laptop, the sound is noticeably better with GNU/Linux. Multiple applications, multiple audio sources, mixer, everything not only Just Works (tm), it works beautifully.

Re:W00t

[Andy Dodd]

The problem is that the app changes settings in the card related to digital output, and then fails to undo those changes when playback stops/the app exits.

Other apps expect the sound system to be in its default state, so the way to fix it is to use an app that performs the same initialization AmaroK does, BUT unlike AmaroK, cleanly *undoes* the settings changes when done.

Re:W00t

[MrHanky]

Have you tried running mplayer (in some xterms) with the -ao alsa option on a few mp3s at the same time? And then, while the others are playing (the system should mix them just fine), adding one with -ao oss for oss emulation? On my system, that fucks up the other streams. Obviously a driver bug (I had no such problem with my previous mainboard).

Re:W00t

[ebuck]

I can't say much about the network manager, because I don't use it.

Well, NetworkManager wasn't really necessary for most people, but it is ideal for Linux laptop users. It basically does the grunt work of the wireless card configuration to detect and allow for the easy connection to WiFi networks.

So for one release cycle of Ubuntu, you had a choice. You could use the standard Gnome version and have working wireless on your laptop; or, you could use the KDE 3.x desktop and not be able to use your wireless card to access a wireless network.

It wasn't that the wireless card didn't work, and you could configure the entire system manually; however, the user facing front-end wouldn't correctly communicate with the underlying (working) wireless setup on the laptop.

Imaging telling people who love KDE, and love Ubuntu that they could shift to Gnome and have easy to use wireless connections; or, they could keep their KDE desktop and manually configure their wireless connection on the command line each time they wanted to connect to a wireless network. In short, it wasn't pretty.

Usually the most difficult people were the ones that would refuse to give up the KDE desktop and refuse to switch distros. In their mind, Ubuntu perfected the nightmarishly unusable Linux, and they couldn't image shifting to a distro that didn't have windows or supported the archaic and confusing command line.

The irony in the above paragraph was intentional (but not my own), that's how messed up some of the Linux newcomers are after being exposed to Ubuntu's marketing department.

Re:W00t

[Fri13]

Well at last you have not suffered from the windows audio subsystems. But me and all my friends have.

The combination to get Skype, Teamspeak, Games own VoIP and mediaplayers (WMP, iTunes, VLC etc) work together with external speakers and headset causes lots of problems. Even when not using rear and front jacks differently but just rear jacks.

The audio quality can change very much in VoIP. Especially Skype has own problems what does not touch this at all. You can reboot computer and next time you login, your audio settings are changed to something else than default or what you configured. Sometimes it is even enough to just plug the headset (switching from speakers) or mic to cause that windows takes own sound configurations in use (not depending the drivers!) like muting the mic or specific device or even disabling the soundcard.

Almost 80% change that me and one of my friends with who I talk a daily, have problems what demans spending 1-10 minutes to solve problems from our computers. Sometimes windows does change her and sometimes my settings. Was it windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 in use.

I would not call that Windows soundsystem is perfect or even near that. But I would not say it is totally rubbish.
Many say that PulseAudio (PA) is rubbish and does not work. But we have noticed that it depends very much what distribution you use, because the default settings can be (and usually are) totally wrong made. I could say that 90% problems is caused by wrong configs (done by distributor). And especially with Ubuntu, the PA is totally rubbish. But in Mandriva, it has worked always as wanted, perfectly. Same thing with openSUSE. With ArchLinux it has been harder to configure but has worked as well perfectly after the installa and the configuration. All, games VoIP's, Skype, mediaplayers, mediacenters and mediaplayers streams have worked perfectly. No config changes or suddnely lost devices etc.

But I would not call Linux soundsystems perfect neither, or rubbish. Because all depends so much from so many combinations that there just is not correct one. Not even Windows system by OEM with preinstalled Skype.

Re:W00t

[Fri13]

All your examples are based your experiences from Ubuntu what is one of the worst distributions what use PA by default. Most, if not all, are caused by Ubuntu, not by PA.

Re:why would you not just use dwm

[ultrabot]

if i wanted to get raped by a mouse i would just go to a pet store, buy one and shove it up my ass

So you have a pluggable backend too?

notifications

[Anonymous Coward]

i like the new notification system, but it still feels hacked together.
if you close tabs or subwindows in your notification it resizes in a jerky way.
doesnt feel really smooth and looks unprofessional.
it would be nice if you could make the notifications "transparent" in front of
certain windows (the way its done with the ubuntu notifications).
it annoys me to no end having notifications pop up, while you are gaming.
but i hope they will fix that in later releases.

Re:notifications

[SpooForBrains]

"but i hope they will fix that in later releases."

This is basically now the KDE mantra.

I remember when I used to be excited by new KDE releases. Now I just greet every new one with a sense of dread at what they've broken this time.

Re:notifications

[SomeKDEUser]

* Stealing focus. No, never stole focus: they are and have always been passive.
* Colour scheme: same as that of the plasma theme.
* Various expletive: you are a troll. But not a very good one.

Re:notifications

[Risen888]

Oh yeah? What have they "broken" this time? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:notifications

[Risen888]

stealing focus every time

You're full of shit. I have never had a Plasma notification steal focus. I don't even think you can "focus" on a Plasma widget (unless you're in dashboard view, I guess, but that's kind of the point of it).

The color scheme doesn't follow any theme settings

You're full of shit. I'm looking at it right now.

Lame troll is lame.

Re:notifications

[Fri13]

"now they're forcing everyone to use this ugly broken pile of shit for all file transfer progress notifications."

Right click Notification widget -> Notification Settings -> Information (left side, default) -> unmark the "File transfers and other jobs" tick and click OK.

Now you do not have file progress shown by notification widget... nice isn't it? And that is not new feature, it has been there from the start....

"The color scheme doesn't follow any theme settings anywhere in the whole system I can find "

I have totally controlled color schema. But I use plasma theme what follows the color. But you can make a small hack to get any theme to follow your color schema if wanted, not just Aya or few other themes.

"stealing focus every time and completely interrupting whatever you're doing"

They do not steam my focus at all. Not mouse or keyboard focus. You must be using broken package or configuration for such function. And can you please tell what is notification what does not notify you?

And for tip to you, there is coming a feature that notifications follows your activity and current tasks. Like when you are watching movie, you do not get unimportant messages (new emails or IM's or what is happening in IRC etc) but only the important ones (your battery is ending before the movie ends, the video stream got disturbed so your online rent movie is going to have problem soon. Or important message have received by email).

What comes to look... I agree littlebit that there is still polishing...

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck KDE. Seriously, who wants a desktop with a smelly foot on it?

smelly foot = Gnome

Bug fixed

[VincenzoRomano]

More than 16000 bug fixes were committed since 4.4

I'm not really sure whether this is a good thing or not.
At least for code quality.

Re:Bug fixed

[betterunixthanunix]

What I am left wondering is if we are going to see more of the same: 16000 bugs fixed, more than 16000 new bugs introduced.

Re:Bug fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

More than 16000 bug fixes were committed since 4.4

I'm not really sure whether this is a good thing or not.

At least for code quality.

KDE SC does contain a lot of code. 16000 bugs may sound like a lot, but combined over all the different apps and subsystems it really isn't.

Re:Bug fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it's good, only (G_64)-16000 left!

Re:Bug fixed

[Elektroschock]

KDE Code quality is high and they have a KDE review board

Re:Bug fixed

[marcosdumay]

It's a huge codebase, and it seems it is getting stable just now. Some tens of thousands of fixes more and I can even start thinking about switching to KDE 4 :)

Re:Bug fixed

[Kjella]

Just because it complies with some formal coding styles and formatting doesn't say anything about the actual content and sanity of the structure. Very many systems seem to get do-overs on a regular basis.

Re:Bug fixed

[Zocalo]

I'm not sure either, but probably not for the same reason. Mine is that it's a totally meaningless metric without some context, it's like a farmer saying "five of my livestock died yesterday", without knowing how many animals they have (tens, hundreds, thousands...) and how they died (age, disease, predation...). You need to know the "what" and the "out of how many" to understand the statement.

It's probably fairly safe to assume that each of those 16,000 bug fixes represents a code check-in that closed off an open issue on KDE's bug tracking system. However, having seen the kind of things users will log as a bug and how many times an issue will get logged as a new problem that figure of 16,000 might not bear any resemblance to the number of actual coding flaws that were squashed. So, probably far less than 16,000 actual bugs fixed, but in how many lines of code? If there are tens of millions of lines of code (quite likely), spread across hundreds of applications and libraries then that's not all that bad going really.

Re:Bug fixed

[gbjbaanb]

review board isn't about code styles and formatting. Its about seeing what the changes were to the code. Sure, you can use reviewboard for style-based code reviews, but its trivial to also use it for potential code issues. Its really there for an experienced developer to cast his eyes over the changes, and to make sure it doesn't do anything he knows is wrong.

If you're using reviewboard solely for style reviews, its because your development processes havn't yet been printed out, rolled up and shoved into your development manager.

Re:Bug fixed

[Teun]

With such an attitude you'll never become a C*O of anything.

Why do I need KDE?

[Viol8]

I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.
Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[nOw2]

Just for point and click file management really. KDE 3.5's KTerm is quite good but doesn't require the whole desktop running.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[mystik]

Because for every one of you, there are 10 (or more) folks that are not techy's and appreciate the richer UI.

You can probably get by w/ e16/fvwm/fluxbox, and be extremely productive. Users who have used Win32 will appreciate a similar UI to help them ease into the power of a linux desktop.

KDE is more than just a desktop Environment, it's a whole programming library and philosophy that unifies a family of applications, so they can interoperate, exchange data, and work together as well as you do.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[WankersRevenge]

In your case, it sounds like a solution in search of a problem. You seem quite able to do your own thing and having to do similar things in KDE's framework might prove to be a stumbling block for your workflow.

That said, for a lot of people who might not be so technical inclined, the KDE desktop *becomes* linux. Sure, in reality, it's just a desktop manager, but for those who choose to avoid digging deeper, KDE for all purposes becomes a metaphor for linux itself. For other people like me (mind you, I'm an OSX user), I don't shy from console work, but I do enjoy the benefits of working with a well designed user interface as it makes my life easier (kind of like using an IDE to write code instead of using vim or a barebones text editor).

The funny thing ... I used to love KDE back in the day. I rode the KDE wave from version 2 to 3.5 and I grew to love tools like Kate and Quanta. I loved all the different settings and figured once I got around to C++, I'd be making code contributions. A year ago, I tried a couple of live CDs and I found myself really liking GNOME over KDE (this was when KDE 4.1 was just released) which gave me a kick. In my absence, I realized I had grown tired of tinkering with a UI and wanted something that just got out of my way. While I have some issues with GNOME, I found it to be pleasant drive around the Linux block. Each to their own, I guess.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your needs. If you are running on a notebook, for example, common things that you might need are:

• plug&play usb drives
• battery indication and automatic change of performance profile
• easy network management
• plug&play different with types of screens
• you'd like to have a notified notification system, with support for reviewing the recent history (for those times when you ask yourself "what was that thing that just appeared and disappeared before I could read?")
• you might like to have some useful small informational panes to see at a glance relevant information (network state, cpu/memory/disk load, climate forecast, calendar)
• you might want/need an indexing system
• you might want to be able to change between an overlapping window and a tiling window management system
• you might want some bling-bling on your desktop

All that and more, is provided with sane defaults with KDE4. You can also get that with other DM, or you can manage a small collection of small applications, following the Unix Way (tm), but sometimes it's just easier to have a cohesive and integrated package.

Me? I got tired of having to remake my scripts that did all those things whenever I made an update on my rolling release distro (Arch) breaks them. It didn't happen as often as it might sound from that sentence, but it happened often enough to bother me. KDE's defaults where always appealing to me, but could easily change them if I wanted to. Just by reading the KDE GUI Guidelines, and its focus on a clean interface I decided that that was what I was going to use going forward.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[JBv]

I use KDE for the same reason I use eclipse instead of emacs: It is functional, integrated and easy to apply my work flows to it. KDE is comfortable and comfort if very important when you are using the desktop hours on end every day of the week.

I hate to use MacOSX or Windows because I lack empathy to the way Mr Jobs and the whole MS & Partners think I should interact with my desktop. I annoys me and instead of getting things done, I get the feeling of fighting the computer. I also dislike plain window managers with overlapping xterms, because they feel very hard-edged to the user, even after editing a 10-page config file written in obscure script, they still feel not quite right.

With 4Gb of ram and a dual core chip with an intel x3100, KDE 4 works fairly well, even with a galore of firefox windows and eclipse running on the background. When this system bogs down, it is usually firefox's fault :)

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[IrquiM]

Because for every one of you, there are 10 (or more) folks that are not techy's and appreciate the richer UI.

Do not forget techy's that like using rich UIs too.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Ragica]

The reason I use Kubuntu on every desktop I can, rather than other more interesting distros (or FreeBSD), is mainly because I see it as the only distro that has any chance of gaining general acceptance in my place of work as a windows replacement. Hence, I put up with some of the choices of Canonical which annoy me, for the sake of hoping to have a better and saner over-all environment in our office someday... KDE tends to impress visually everyone who sees it.

That being said, I actually do love KDE even though I barely use any of its components these days, and it's just mostly a lovely looking desktop. The main KDE app I use is Konsole (which is awesome)! One way to look at it is bloat: another way is that KDE is an amazingly engineered environment, which I really appreciate the design of under the hood. There's just loads of technically interesting goodness in it. I often half hope that one day I'll crack open KDevelop and start hacking on it at lower levels. But I never have time for that.

And I always keep Fluxbox handy for a backup environment if something goes wrong terribly with KDE... but this is very rarely used anymore.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Urkki]

I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.
Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.

If you start integrating things like GUI file manager, GUI system configuration/control panel, and a desktop widget system (application launch menu, volume control, network/WLAN status&control, printer status&control, application notifications...), you quickly end up with something very much like Gnome or KDE.

KDE and Gnome are also a set of application libraries. It saves memory and simplifies updates when all the applications use the same libraries, not to mention unified look&feel of applications.

Desktop environment is also a set of default applications that somebody else has tested and made sure the whole more or less works. That's great if you don't want to spend time finding the application for your need, and tracking each application for updates if you want to stay "current".

Desktop environment is something, where somebody else has done all the hard things for you. If you want to use a WLAN or check printer status, click on the icon in notification area that is there by default. If you want to launch an application, just find it in the menu. If you want to change some system setting or just desktop option (like title bar style and color), just open whatever "control panel" the desktop environment has.

If you don't want or need these things, then you can easily get by with slightly "configured" (by which I mean, change the source and recompile) tinywm.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[bcmm]

Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine?

First of all, if you really aren't trolling, you should know the difference between a window manager and a DE. It's about as irritating as saying "Ubuntu is a terrible window manager, sorry - distribution".

As to why you need a DE? You don't. Some people like using them, others don't. A few examples of things I use KDE for:

• most importantly, a well-integrated suite of applications with a consistent look at feel (and not just in terms of appearance: for example, the dialogue for configuring keyboard shortcuts is always in the same place in the menu structure in a KDE application). This includes an office suite, web browser, basic utilities and so on. Example of integration: dragging a link from a web page to a directory (both open in konqueror) saves the file there rather than creating a shortcut or something.
• if you don't care about disk space and do a full KDE SC install, you have a matching set of utilities such as a calculator, basic text editor, magnifier, volume control, clipboard manager (very useful), etc.
• you get some integration between the WM and the rest of the system: applications will not have keyboard shortcuts that conflict with your WM, for example.
• various user daemons: reminders of calendar events, graphical display of messages sent with wall(1), etc.
• an easy way to mount and unmount removable media

KDE also has some very nice features for application developers, such as the kparts system, which further improves consistency. For example, kate (an advanced text editor), kwrite (a notepad-style editor), Kile (a LaTeX IDE) and kdevelop (a software development IDE) all use katepart for text editing, which gives their text editing widgets the same appearance, keyboard shortcuts, indenting options and so on.

I've only scratched the surface here, but it's still perfectly reasonable to use a simple WM with some kind of launcher instead, or to switch between them.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[pointbeing]

I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.
Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.

I made the switch from GNOME to KDE about a year ago and had the same question but managed to answer it for myself.

On my 32-bit netbook I've slimmed KDE down considerably and my machine uses ~180mb of RAM at idle. That's about 30mb more than LXDE or XFCE and I have desktop effects enabled. I use compiz instead of kwin because of its smaller footprint and increased functionality - so my netbook has my favorite emerald wallpaper and a proper desktop cube - and still uses only ~180mb of memory. For me the increased functionality is well worth the additional 30mb of RAM or so that KDE uses and to be honest this thing never pages to disk anyway - so all it costs me is a couple extra seconds booting the machine.

I'm running KDE 4.5 RC2 on the netbook and just upgraded my 64-bit desktop to KDE 4.5 final.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[tokul]

KDE is more than just a desktop Environment, it's a whole programming library and philosophy that unifies a family of applications, so they can interoperate, exchange data, and work together as well as you do.

That philosophy is flawed. It prioritizes eye candy instead of guarantying desktop usability. KDE4 is not desktop environment. It does not have desktop. Only some file manager plasmoid that pretends to be desktop.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[srobert]

If it was just me I could get by with fluxbox, fvwm, etc., but I think KDE running on Kubuntu was an essential component to getting my wife to use Linux on a computer that we were sharing. She doesn't miss Windows now.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[binary paladin]

I didn't know a "techy" was supposed to be uninterested in aesthetics. I like a good-looking clean UI. I also like good anti-aliasing on my fonts.

And as said, KDE is more than just some fancy, shmancy visuals. A desktop environment is all about libraries that allow for major code reuse and the ability for applications coded to them to work together seamlessly. It goes far beyond a simply widget library.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Hatta]

KDE is more than just a desktop Environment, it's a whole programming library and philosophy that unifies a family of applications, so they can interoperate, exchange data, and work together as well as you do.

But in doing all that, it does too much. The UNIX philosophy is "do one thing, and do it well". KDE has some great features, like KIO-slaves. But the GUI layer is exactly the wrong place to put such a feature. It's completely useless to any command line application.

That's a problem that keeps me from using KDE. If I get hooked on KDE specific features, I'm locked in to KDE. If I use modular, stand alone software that follows the UNIX philosophy, I'm good to go whatever environment I find myself in.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[mystik]

That philosophy is flawed. It prioritizes eye candy instead of guarantying desktop usability

While that may be debatable, I'm alluding to (IMHO) brilliant technical achievements of kio-slaves, kparts, dcop (which worked really well before dbus was widely adopted), and so on. The component architecture of KDE, when fully embraced, is a great modern interpretation of the old unix philosophy "Each tool should one thing, and do it well"

If they've lost sight of that, then I too would be saddened.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[mystik]

This is marked troll, and we may be too far off topic here, but poster's point is valid.

Would you rather have one image editor that contains everything you need? Or 520 different filters applications, all in different applications, all of which need to pipe data between each other? (Hint: the first one is superior in every way.)

I'd rather have both. One is far easier to script with standard issue tools since it's forced into a specific programmable interface. Can you imagine the insanity if every major application used their own method of scripting to control operations? --- No, you don't have to imagine. MS Office uses VBA. Flash uses Actionscript, What does Photoshop use? it's own scripting language/system? Autocad? it's own language again.

Think of a task like this, and how many different programming systems are needed:

Write a script that for each of our 1200 technical drawings creates a pdf with the drawings, includes highlights and text about the part, requirements + specifications, include a 3d render of that part, and puts a company logo watermark. Can this be done so a human only needs to say "GO?"

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Etriaph]

I seem to keep having this conversation. :D

I often find it difficult to describe my love for KDE. I've used GNOME, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Xfce and even CDE for a time. KDE will suck on your RAM more than the others will, most likely, but on a modern PC the only time I would need a GUI and all of my RAM for my PC to be responsive is if I were running VMs configured in a cluster on it. KDE is a pleasant environment that allows you, more than any other environment, to configure your workspace precisely to how you want to do business with your PC.

On a typical day on my PC I'm running: Firefox, Konqueror (for google searches, via krunner), Yakuake (always in memory, drop-down console), Eclipse, Kate, Dolphin (often on multiple desktops), Kopete (IM client), Konversation (IRC client), GIMP, OpenOffice/Kword (depending on what I'm doing), Amarok (music rules), VLC, Kontact (groupware software, mostly for KMail), etc., etc.

I have a 3.2Ghz processor and 4GB or RAM which I don't even fully use (32 bit Ubuntu, I suck at making the big leap) and some kind of Nvidia card that plays WoW well (and I run that via Wine with -opengl) that allows me to have crazy desktop effects that run as smoothly as the first time I ran WindowMaker on my P133.

Times are changing, the desktop is on Linux now too. I don't think it will ever be for everybody but Linux has the best UI configuration capability, in my opinion, over any other PC interface I've ever used; here's the kicker, it's because of KDE for me. GNOME has always kind of had ups and downs with respect to philosophy regarding applications and how the UI is laid out for each. All KDE apps, unless the author took the pain to build it piece by piece themselves, are pretty much uniform in presentation and usage. GNOME can't claim that and everything else is pretty much just a window manager.

Robustness is not bad if you feel you actually need it. Stick with what works for you, KDE works for me. Open source is about options, too.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Gavagai80]

You need KDE so you can ditch resource-hungry OpenOffice for the drastically faster KOffice.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[the_womble]

The distinction between a window manager and a desktop environment matters: I use KDE with Open Box because Open Box works better on my hardware (Kwin uses lots of CPU).

KDE is heavily customisable (good for productivity and for saving space on laptops etc.), it is customisable in the GUI (I like Open Box by itself, but cannot be bothered with customising in config files), if you use a lot of KDE apps you might as well use a KDE desktop - and there are a lot of very good KDE apps as Kate, Konqueror, Dolphin, Kile, Akregator, Ktorrent and many more.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[DMUTPeregrine]

"Do one thing and do it well" depends strongly on your definition of "one thing."

You can have that "one thing" be "resize images" and another one be "draw lines in images" and another be "draw bezier curves on images" and so-on, or you can have that "one thing" be "edit raster images in an easy to use, fast, and powerful environment." KDE's "one thing" is "be a complete desktop environment on top of the Linux Kernel and GNU tools, such that a person can accomplish most or all normal daily tasks." This is subdivided into other projects, there are libraries, KDE games, KDE PIM, KOffice, etc, etc. Each sub-section has one well-defined task, which is sometimes subdivided into other tasks.
Lest you think this is silly, even GNU Ed (as of v1.4 at least) does more than one thing, since it can both read and write to files, as well as search through them with regular expressions!
Truly following the "UNIX philosophy" would require a microkernel. Since most UNIXes don't use true microkernels it's pretty clear that this philosophy has been somewhat stretched.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Fri13]

1. KDE is the community what together release different softwares under the "KDE Software Compilation" at same time.
2. The priorisation is in usability and features, not in the eye candy. Only non-tech people see the eye-candy and usability, but techpeople see the technology.
3. KDE SC has never had desktop, it has workspaces. Desktop is dead, it is useless file dumpster for most people. It is unintuitive and against usability by all ways for applications and files.
4. GNOME's desktop is drawn by Nautilus, a GNOME's filemanager. It try to pretend to be a desktop while it is not.
 

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Fri13]

If you want KDE application, you need KDE Platform to run them.
If you want KDE application run on the way as developers suggest, you need one of the many KDE Workspaces (Desktop/Netbook/Mobile/MediaCenter)
If you want to develop KDE applications, you need KDE development platform.

You do not need all KDE Applications to get some, you do not need KDE Applications either to get KDE workspace. You can use GTK+ applications as well.

In KDE SC (old name was KDE4) series you got modularity what allows you to have one software for one tasks.

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Fri13]

KDE is more than just a desktop Environment, it's a whole programming library and philosophy that unifies a family of applications, so they can interoperate, exchange data, and work together as well as you do.

It is hard to try explain what KDE is when using it the old manner what it was in 3.x series. Now in 4.x series, the technology has changed and as well the branding. There is no more KDE what would mean software. The KDE is name for the community.

Then there are KDE Platform, KDE Workspace, KDE Applications and KDE Development Platform. Those brands are the key technologies what KDE manufactures. Together they release a compilation every 6 months, hence the name KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC).

Every release gives new features and fixes to those brands.
And to be even easier discuss the technology, now it is not needed to say "KDE is this and that". You can just say "KDE development platform is ________" or "I Like Plasma Desktop more than GNOME" or "I think Plasma Netbook is needed for Netbooks to get good UI but for fullsize laptop it is not so good".

All what you need to run KDE applications, is the KDE Platform. You can forget KDE Workspace (Plasma Desktop/Netbook/Mobile/Media Center) because it is not needed. You can run all wanted KDE applications in systems where KDE Platform is available. Like having a Kate or Konversation in Windows 7. You can still take KDE workspace and replace Explorer with it so you get the same workspace as you would get otherwise. Instead running Linux/FreeBSD or other Unix clone OS, you can run NT and run all Windows applications with that. It is just too bad that you can not replace the Windows windowmanager with KWin.

 

Re:Why do I need KDE?

[Fri13]

I would take alle 520 different filter applications +1 what would integrate all them to one UI. Wait... GIMP already does that! You do not need to use itself separated programs, you can have a program what use them. That is the modularity.

If you want to fix or improve one filter, you do not need to touch anything else. If one filter does not work, it does not affect other filters. Bad thing just is that if the UI app crash and does not work, you can not do your job unless you know how to use those 520 programs.

KDE is great

[Elektroschock]

I really like KDE and I believe that it needs to be supported better by distributions. Kubuntu is a mess.

The investments of KDE in code quality and design will pay off. Unfortunately runtime quality was lacking, esp. reg. Plasma crashes in earlier versions. KDE is now in a state where it maturates. Here the SC split in three components really makes a whole lot of sense.

Re:KDE is great

[nOw2]

I agree Kubuntu is a mess, I installed it recently to try KDE 4.4 and was completely turned off it. Mandriva seem to get KDE right. But I'm still not coming back, not just yet.
I really liked KDE 3.5. KDE 4 turned me off Linux desktops completely - I'm now a Mac user. It'll be years before KDE regains the users lost due to early KDE 4 versions.

Re:KDE is great

[tokul]

Kubuntu is a mess.

KDE was always a mess on Debian.

Re:KDE is great

[MrHanky]

Funny you should say that, since OS X 10.0 was barely beta quality as well.

Re:KDE is great

[andrewd18]

I really like KDE and I believe that it needs to be supported better by distributions. Kubuntu is a mess.

I've been running KDE on Arch Linux since 4.1, and it's been great.

Re:KDE is great

[nOw2]

Exactly exactly exactly. Hence those wilderness years I spent with Windows XP.

Re:KDE is great

[buchanmilne]

I really like KDE and I believe that it needs to be supported better by distributions. Kubuntu is a mess.

Then support distros that support KDE better.

Re:KDE is great

[Tubal-Cain]

That makes sense. I got sick of it on unstable (mainly due to akondi, nepomuk, and the notifications), so I switched to e17.

Re:KDE is great

[MrHanky]

And Mac users still, at the time, bragged that it was totally superior to Windows 95. Which no MacOS was, before OS X 10.2.

Re:KDE is great

[Elektroschock]

They add a testing infrastructure and KDE becomes rock solid.

This is odd

[Windwraith]

I am still getting massive RAM usage from plasma-desktop after moving from RC2. I understood it being higher in RC2 but 174mb in Plasma, in the stable version, is extremely odd. Anyone else getting it this high? Not using many plasmoids here, just a pretty standard set of clock and taskbar and such.
Anyway this release is strangely disappointing. I am not even sure of what I was expecting with it but feels the same with a new notification system (still bothersome when doing anything fullscreen, too). Oh well, much better than the old for sure, I think. At least you don't lose notifications forever if you fail to see them (due to being out of the room or doing something fullscreen).

Re:This is odd

[SomeKDEUser]

How do you measure RAM usage? not with top, I hope... Because most of the plasma memory is in fact the pixmaps which are counted thrice (once for the app, once for the xserver, and an extra time in the videocard for the double-buffering)

See, plasma runs on phones, so clearly it is not that heavy (not that phones are not pretty powerful these days, but still)...

That's all nice

[overshoot]

but it would be even better if the robustness were more of a priority.

KDE is doing a Miguel de Icaza lately and imitating Microsoft's "total integration," including their own version of the Registry: akonadi. Which may be nice, but it's also terribly fragile for something that's supposed to hold all of your data. See, for instance, bug 244250.

Re:That's all nice

[buchanmilne]

including their own version of the Registry: akonadi.

Akonadi tries to solve real problems that users of KDE 4.4 (like me) currently experience. kmail taking up the most memory on my laptop most of the time is one of them.

Coolest feature yet...

[orzetto]

I use the Marble globe with satellite images as a background for my KDE desktop. After upgrading to 4.5 yesterday, I noticed clouds were added to it. "How pretty", I though. It turns out that clouds are not placed randomly for scenic effect, they are actually downloaded images of the current state of clouds all over the planet. Yes I checked yesterday, and today the image is slightly different and still consistent with satellite imagery from weather websites.

Call me easy to impress, but that blew me away.

Re:Coolest feature yet...

[tokul]

they are actually downloaded images of the current state of clouds all over the planet

let's hope that someone does not replace those cloud images on remote sites with goat something.

or maybe they can also add purple monkey from Windows to KDE. That would definitely improve computer usability.

Re:Coolest feature yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is in bad shape if that's the coolest feature yet...

Re:Coolest feature yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see that working great in a non home environment, hey Ted the network is slow, well Bob there is 124 computers updating clouds from the net

more fluff, more toys to keep you from getting stuff done

Re:Coolest feature yet...

[tackat]

Maybe you're even more impressed if I tell you that the stars in the background aren't random stars. They show the positions of the real stars. So if you look above the earth's north pole you can spot the big dipper and polaris.

Re:Coolest feature yet...

[razzzat]

Man that is cool....I also use Marble as my desktop. But I still have to wait for kde 4.5 ....Hope Slackware 14 comes out soon

Konqueror and Webkit?

[TheNinjaroach]

I always thought Konqueror was based on KHTML, which was Webkit by another name. Guess it's time for me to go figure this out.

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple forked KHTML, making Webkit. Webkit advanced, was open-sourced, and became popular (Safari, Chrome), but there were some hard feelings between Apple and KHTML before it was open sourced (which is probably why KHTML still exists separately).

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[xrayspx]

KDE + Konqueror gave us KHTML. Apple took KHTML and extended it and gave us WebKit, which ended up being hugely popular, powering Chrome, Palm's WebOS browser, and now Flock as well is switching.

Strangely, WebKit integration back in Konqueror has never been particularly "robust".

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[SpooForBrains]

It's not KHTML by another name, it is a fork of KHTML.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

Webkit has had Apple developing for it in the 8 or 9 years since they created it. It also has a much larger userbase than KHTML since it is used as the basis for Safari, Chrome and many mobile browsers (notably those on Symbian and Android, and of course iOS).

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[SomeKDEUser]

Integration is not simply about having an extra widget (which has been there for some time). Integration is about saving sessions, integrating with kwallet.

It is also about providing the API which is used by other applications for purposes other than displaying web pages. All these things, KHTML does, and does well (as well as displaying the web pages), but the webkit kpart needed much development.

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[Peach Rings]

If I recall, there was a plugin that let you use Webkit to render a single page, but when you browsed anywhere it returned to the KHTML renderer.

My experiment with running KDE ended quickly when I couldn't find a decent web browser. I liked Konqueror a lot (it's really really good now if you haven't used it in awhile) but the default renderer is awful.

Re:Konqueror and Webkit?

[xrayspx]

Instead of "Integration" I should have said "Implementation", by which I mean "Rendered like shit" when selected as the renderer in Konqueror. You could set WebKit as the default engine, but a lot of things rendered badly. Looking at the front page of /., it would render all the nicely rounded corners on the story bumpers as straight diagonal lines, for instance. They were still messed up as of the 4.5 update two days ago, but differently so.

It's not a matter of WebKit integration into KDE, but more WebKit implementation in QT. For instance Arora had the same rendering issues though I haven't used it in a while.

Safari, Chrome and Palm all render this kind of stuff just fine, so I'd say it's a QT/WebKit issue. Sorry for being imprecise.

not quite yet for kubuntu...

[pointbeing]

The 64-bit binaries have been released, the 32-bit haven't yet - at least not on the beta ppa.

I upgraded my 64-bit machine over FreeNX this morning and it appears to work fine.

Re:not quite yet for kubuntu...

[blackpaw]

32 Bit binaries are there now.

Re:not quite yet for kubuntu...

[pointbeing]

Yeah - my bad. I had beta ppa enabled on both machines but backports was only enabled on the 64-bit box.

cheers -

16,000 bug fixes

[wvmarle]

16,000 bug fixes committed.

That's a lot of work, really.

But I don't know whether it's something to be really proud of, as it also means that there were at least 16,000 bugs in KDE 4.4. And no matter how you look at it that's no small number!

Re:16,000 bug fixes

[3vi1]

'Bug fixes' can be just as much about missing code than it can about broken code. Considering that KDE is 6+ million lines of code and the Qt base is even bigger, I don't find this number surprisingly large.

Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[Nighttime]

I hopped off the KDE4 train at 4.2 when Akonadi required MySQL as a dependency. IIRC, it can now use PostgreSQL as well, but the point stands: Why do I need a RDBMS to run a desktop?

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[mikelieman]

And if you do, why not just use Sqllite?

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[diegocg]

Because Akonadi needs a RDBMS to do what it does.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[SomeKDEUser]

Because I have tens of thousands of mails with way too many attachments. And some people have ten or a hundred times as much.

So nothing short of a RDBMS will in fact cope with that volume. And I should also add that whining about is is a purely knee-jerk reaction as in most cases it will use very little resources (way less than your browser). I guess you are an old hand who remembers days when servers would be dedicated to running these beasts. Well, that still happens, but only for very, very large datasets. Desktops (in fact, even smartphones -- akonadi runs on the N900) are so powerful these days that the DB will not even register.

So your complain is in fact utterly silly. It is not even "wahh, it uses too many resources", it is "wah, it uses something I believe uses too many resources, but clearly I never checked in the last 20 years".

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[pinkushun]

I hear you buddy, it feels overkill. I feel the same about mono, while I'm a (full disclosure) .Net dev at that.
Unless the paradigm in the future shifts so that RDBMS' become the new file system. shudder.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[Nighttime]

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Where_does_Akonadi_store_my_data.3F

    Where does Akonadi store my data?

Akonadi merely acts as a cache for your data, the actual content stays where it has always been, .ics/.vcf/MBOX files, local maildirs, IMAP- and groupware servers. There is only a limited amount of data stored exclusively in Akonadi:

        * Data not supported by the corresponding backends, such as email flags in case of maildir/mbox. This is comparable to KMail's binary index files stored alongside these files in pre-Akonadi times.
        * Internal meta-data used by application or resources, such as information about the last synchronization with a backend or translated folder names.
        * Data that has been changed while the corresponding backend has been offline and has not yet been uploaded.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[12357bd]

Insane. And it looks like the KDE devs are not even considering making the whole Akonadi and associated daemons mess optional. What happened to good old Kmail?

INSANE.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[BlueLightning]

And if you do, why not just use Sqllite?

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Why_not_use_sqlite.3F

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[gbjbaanb]

I disagree about the 'waah, it uses too many resources' as there's plenty of times code is written as cheaply as possible (for the developer, that is) leaving the users to pick up the tab. The cost-basis of coding *should* be the other way round, but I guess that's just my ideal.

However, in this case it looks like Akonadi has used a DB to store its cache instead of a simpler, internal, construct. Or a sqlite DB, which is very suited for this task. Whether the developer didn't know about serialising a key-value collection, didn't know about sqlite, needs something in MySQL that no other app provides, or just didn't care remains to be determined. Either way, MySQL is probably an inefficient use of resources that could be better dealt with. Let me put it another way, the developer could have mandated Oracle instead of MySQL, you wouldn't be happy then!

The problem with 'you have so many resources, so who cares' gives you the Windows syndrome - fine, your 1 app works (once its loaded all its bulk into memory), but once you start doing more than one thing, possibly at the same time, you start to realise why you want each of those fat apps to be a bit leaner and efficient.

The goal of more efficient use of resources, rather than whatever happens to be easiest, is something that needs to be kept at the forefront of developer's minds. It won't always be used, won;t always be appropriate, but we need to keep reminding ourselves to try harder.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[Tubal-Cain]

Which is...?

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[3vi1]

Provide an unified, application agnostic, data store for all of your PIM apps without running slow as shit.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[Ant P.]

I have one of those already. It's called Google.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[12357bd]

False, bloat IS a problem.

I do video processing, KDE 3.5 worked fine (90% under load, two streams doing real-time processing). KDE 4 is unable to do a single stream without losing frames.

Why do I have to buy a more powerful machine to run KDE 4 and do the sane task I am alraedy doing in KDE 3.5?. That's BLOAT

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Why do I need a RDBMS to run a desktop?''

I don't know what you felt when you found out that you now need a RDBMS, but I can tell you that I felt disbelief and outrage. Especially because earlier versions of Kontact had been working really nicely for me, but the new version just didn't work at all. So not only are they giving us more bloatware, it is also completely unusable!

On the other hand, I think a RDBMS makes a whole lot of sense for a lot more applications than we're currently using them for. I've done my fair share of application development, design, and use by now, as well as system and application administration and maintenance, and I can't tell you how many times I wished people (including myself!) had just used an RDBMS instead of inventing their own wheel without proper ACID properties. It's hard to realize the importance of having your data be consistent, stay consistent, efficiently accessible and searchable, and easy to back up and restore while maintaining consistency. An RDBMS can give you all that, and more.

If you consider how many things on your computer are really databases which need to stay consistent, with references intact and all that, RDBMSes start to make sense. All these XML files that GNOME and KDE apps use for configuration? There are plenty of things that can get messed up there. /etc/passwd? The group ids there had better refer to groups that actually exist. My mailbox? It would be much quicker to open if doing so would just require a query over 10000 records instead of looking at 10000 files. Backing up your files? I sure hope that your backup won't contain any inconsistencies, but I'm afraid there's no guarantee.

After having thought about the issue, I'm all for using RDBMSes in more places. And it would be nice to have transactional semantics with ACID compliance in our programming languages, too. The same issues with atomicity and integrity that exist for data on disk exist for data in memory, too.

Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?

[Abcd1234]

Yeah, there's nothing about that that requires an RDBMS. It's certainly *a* solution, but it's hardly the only solution, or even the best solution.

Notification System?

[yet-another-lobbyist]

OK, I didn't check this rigorously (Why should I? This is slashdot!), but it seems to me that every single one of the past five releases of KDE/Kubuntu and Ubuntu featured a significantly improved/totally reworked notification system. Each time I was expecting some breakthrough experience, and it just always looks like a more or less OK notification system. And this is one of the top 5 highlighted features? Was it so broken to begin with? Did it really get so much better? Am I missing something here?
I definitely appreciate very much the developers fixing bugs and making the system more stable and polished. Thanks! However, if some trivial things get sold in an exaggerating way, this may actually not help the image of KDE (GNOME, Linux, etc.). After all, one of the reasons I am using FOSS is because I am really tired of stupid bullshit advertising crap.

Re:Notification System?

[SomeKDEUser]

the notification system is hard: applications like to embed little applets in the tray, for one thing, and interaction with these in a clean, consistent way is not easy. Notifications are also hard to get right: you want all the information, you want it non-obtrusive, you want to know what is happening, you want to be able to respond to them in a timely manner.

Basically, it is a very small part of your desktop which can cause immense amounts of grief: a lot of the bad rap vista got was from the popups from there...

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[petrus4]

For me there never was a war. It's KDE, hands down. The most popular option is never the highest quality.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
-- Matthew 7:13-14

Re:Get his name right

[Shoe Puppet]

Or Kuegler, at least. Don't just replace the ü by a u.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[bluefoxlucid]

Dunno, Ubuntu is pretty popular. So is Debian.

KDE is like Ford!

[yet-another-lobbyist]

Yep, that's right! I am still not buying Fords since their disaster model Pinto in the early 1970s. And it'll take them many more decades to regain my trust!
I am not stubborn or anything, but if KDE made a mistake once, they can never be trusted again! Ever! Especially in the software business, where hardly anybody takes any wrong decisions these days.

Re:KDE is like Ford!

[ebuck]

Somehow I doubt that KDE has prior knowledge of its bugs, has the known cost to fix them, ha the estimated costs of a legal defense in wrongful death suits, and has decided to let people die because it is cheaper.

While I share you opinion that one misstep or bad release in the past doesn't ensure a bad product in the future, your example fully sucks.

Re:KDE is like Ford!

[nOw2]

That's a somewhat appropriate car analogy.

Another: The Austin Allegro was not a good car. It took fifteen years before an equivalent was available (the Rover 214 Mk2) which would pull me back from Ford. 15 years after that, the whole native industry went bust and now there are only foreign cars.

Re:KDE is like Ford!

[yet-another-lobbyist]

I thought my comment was stupid enough to make it obvious I was joking. Sure enough, this is ./ so someone comes along and moderates this "insightful". Priceless.

A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[MMC Monster]

I've been using Gnome on Ubuntu for about 5 years.

I know that Kubuntu is not as polished as Ubuntu. What would be a good KDE distribution to give a try, to see the desktop environment for all it is?

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[Anonymous Coward]

openSUSE

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[at_slashdot]

"I know that Kubuntu is not as polished as Ubuntu." -- how do you know that? In what respect is not as polished?

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[scorp1us]

SUSE is the champion.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[aaaantoine]

OpenSUSE supposedly has one of the better implementations of KDE, but I've never tried it so I can't tell you how it works.

If you want the most up to date version and don't mind getting your hands dirty, Arch Linux offers a vanilla KDE experience.

Further Reading: 8 of the best KDE Distributions

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[pxc]

Ubuntu gives a lot of love and care to its Gnome configuration, as well as adding their own addons. Kubuntu ships something closer to vanilla KDE, and there have been a few releases which have been a bit broken in the past. That said, I'm using Kubuntu currently, and I rather like it.

So, to GP: Why don't you just "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" on your current Ubuntu installation, switch GDM to log you into KDE, and explore a bit? You should be able to remove kubuntu-desktop and the unwanted KDE packages afterward. If that doesn't satisfy, then go ahead and play with a more KDE-focused distro.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[IrquiM]

KDE in slackware works perfectly out of the box. Might not be the latest version they're using, but it's most likely the most stable one.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[at_slashdot]

Well, I for one I'm happy that they didn't start to polish it by moving the window buttons God knows where.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[Ragica]

Even though Kubuntu (I am a user of it) does have some rough edges, I'd stick with it. It is a lot better than it used to be.

The main reason I'd suggest sticking with it though is just familiarity. You can switch back and forth between GNOME and KDE pretty effortlessly running the same distro.

That being said, I hate to discourage exploration! Download live CD's for every distro that sounds interesting! Try them all! (-: Maybe you will like one better... after all, with Linux even switching an entire distro isn't all that big of a deal (if you have time), as long as you save your home directory somewhere safe...

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandriva, openSuSE, ArchLinux, PC-BSD

Mandriva and openSuSE are both examples of what can be done with a little bit of integration work. Arch's is a great example of how great KDE is by itself, they don't tinker with the packages, you are getting (for the most part) the exact KDE that the KDE team released. PC-BSD is just awesome.

Kubuntu feels like a secret Gnome plot to make everyone think KDE sucks, it's just a pathetic turd of a clone.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[alexmin]

Mandriva 2010.1

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[nitro322]

openSUSE is generally regarded as the flagship KDE distro. I've heard good things about Mandriva as well. Either one should give you a decent KDE experience. Personally I run stock KDE (on Gentoo), as I think the default theme and configuration is quite slick on its own, but most distros tend to add certain themes and enhancements to make it more accessible for newer users.

Of course, package management, system administration utilities, etc. are all somewhat unique to each distro, and will probably be different from what you're used to with Ubuntu, so do keep that in mind when comparing KDE vs. Gnome. Eg., if you don't like using YaST to configure your network settings, that's a knock against openSUSE, not specifically KDE.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[pxc]

With KDE it's actually pretty easy to change window button arrangement. In fact, I'm using a custom configuration right now.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[webheaded]

Try ArchLinux. I've used Arch for a while now and I love it. I went to Arch after I got tired of compiling everything by hand in Gentoo. You'll get your updates muuuch faster than Ubuntu as well. Rolling software updates are SO much better than the retarded release cycle that Ubuntu does. Arch is also pretty nice to use and it's flexible. I like that. I can install it minimal like I did Gentoo or you can have a nice installer CD with bells and whistles if you don't feel like dicking with it.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[SheeEttin]

Er... You're going to get about the same experience no matter what distro you use. About the only thing that'll change is the package management system.
You're already using Ubuntu, so why not just install KDE and give it a try? Just install one of the "kde-" packages and it'll pull in everything it needs (that you don't already have). I recommend "kde-standard", as it includes the base KDE applications. (Although 99% of GTK+ apps work under KDE, and the same is probably true of Qt apps under Gnome. So you can use apps you're familiar with in KDE.)

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[H0p313ss]

SUSE is the champion.

Mod up parent. If I wanted people to try KDE I would recommend SUSE for the out of the box experience. (But I'm a Ubuntu/gnome guy... short, friendly and mostly brownish)

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[xiong.chiamiov]

There is also KDEmod, which I'm told is an even nicer way of enjoy KDE on Arch. I haven't used it myself.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[xiong.chiamiov]

Er... You're going to get about the same experience no matter what distro you use. About the only thing that'll change is the package management system.

While you would think that would be the case, the versions of KDE packages included, as well as the patching that many distros seem to enjoy doing so much, can make the experience quite different.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[fatbuttlarry]

> I know that Kubuntu is not as polished as Ubuntu. What would be a good KDE distribution to give a try, to see the desktop environment for all it is?

Kubuntu, unfortunately...

"Polished" is a tough one... I still have to type '&gt BR &lt' on slashdot for new lines. But it's the best I've found for it's purpose, and I keep coming back to it... :) SuSE does have a lot of cool features that you may like (that will be in Kubuntu a few months later).

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[the_womble]

Mandriva (which I currently use), and PCLinuxOS are good. So is Mepis, but it has an older KDE 4 version. SuSe is supposed to be good but memory hungry.

I found Mint KDE better than Kubuntu, and it is still closer to what you are used to, but probably not as polished as the others.

If you want something more geeky, then Arch, Slack, or Sabayon.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Also, remember: the default configuration of KDE on Kubuntu may stink, but there's no reason you can't customize it to be fine. Try an OpenSUSE LiveCD, install the Kubuntu-Destkop package on your Ubuntu system, relog to Kubuntu, see what differences you like and which you hate. Change it to suit your needs.

Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...

[RAMMS EIN]

``Er... You're going to get about the same experience no matter what distro you use. About the only thing that'll change is the package management system.''

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, I think the package management system is a big deal. No other package management system has been as painless for me as Aptitude. Yum is close. If you are stuck with a system that doesn't do dependency management, or if the package manager, the packages, or the dependencies break often (I have this problem with RHEL), things can quickly get painful. I've even used upstream source code in preferences to the package manager on some distros. The number one reason why I've settled on Debian after years of using different operating systems as that the quality of the packages, the package manager, and the upgrade process make it so low maintenance.

As for KDE, your distro also has a huge influence here. Obviously, package management is also an important issue here, because there are many packages that make up a full KDE system. But even aside from that, distros can make or break the experience. They often make various changes to the upstream sources, and this can improve or degrade the quality. I have had horrible experiences with KDE on Ubuntu, where the software as shipped by the KDE project was actually really good. IIRC, Red Hat used to pretty extensively modify KDE and make it look like GNOME.

I would say that if you want to get the real KDE experience, go to the KDE project. Either ask some developers what they use, and do the same, or use packages provided by the KDE project, or, if you can't use those, compile KDE from the official KDE sources. If you want a good distribution with KDE, I can recommend OpenSUSE. It's not pure KDE, but it has KDE and it's good. I also have good experience with KDE on FreeBSD: less of a hassle than going through the compile process yourself, but still pretty pure. I reckon the same goes for Arch LInux, Gentoo Linux, and Slackware.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[SomeKDEUser]

which basically tells us something about how mature fans of each desktop are...

Re:Phonon-VLC-backend

[pxc]

It appears there isn't a package for the backend in Ubuntu Lucid currently. But I'm actually using it, using a package I made and store in my KDE-related PPA. I also have a package for the MPlayer backend. Here's the link, if anyone is interested:

https://launchpad.net/~pxc/+archive/pxc-kde

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[pinkushun]

Never a war for me too. I used both, each has a different what-ya-ma-call-it... fuck, blank... philosophy! Each has their own philosophy towards the user experience. You gel with the one, or the other, and some folks can switch between the two and not care about the differences.

Kinda like being bisexual, a double adapter, open-minded to exploration and pene... [cut explicit rambling here]

Which backend works for your hardware?

[tepples]

I'd rather have just the working backend; not as a default, but as the only option.

How is the distributor supposed to know, in advance, which backend is the best working backend for your particular hardware? The options are there in case automatic detection fails, so that you can at least have sound for the six months between when you install a distribution and when the distributor releases the next version that may or may not correct the defect in automatic detection of your particular hardware.

SQLite

[tepples]

Unless the paradigm in the future shifts so that RDBMS' become the new file system.

SQLite has helped this shift happen.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[Viski]

The most popular option is never the highest quality.

Dunno, Ubuntu is pretty popular.

Exactly. So is Windows.

Re:why would you not just use dwm

[TheReaperD]

But, just because it isn't, doesn't mean you can't claim it is.

Just another version of "I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame you."

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[LWATCDR]

Not really fair.
For me I use Gnome but I do not hate KDE. I have not used KDE 4 much.
For me it adds a lot of features I do not really feel the need for. In someways I feel it is getting too complex.
However when it comes to customizing my desktop I go to the EAA website once a month and grab the new wall paper.
That is about it.
I move between Linux Gnome, OS/X, XP, and Windows 7 every day.
None of them feel that much better than the other to me.
Linux is probably my favorite because it works well and I do not have to worry about cruft creeping in.
OS/X I am still new too but I like it. It could be that since I have used so many OSs and desktop environment over the years that I can adapt to most anything.

I will say I have no use for flame wars between Gnome and KDE users.
They are just desktop environments. Guess what folks they don't care if you insult them. Frankly I do not care to hear the noise.
If KDE does something great then share it.
If Gnome does something great then share it.
Otherwise get a life folks.

Oh come on, I have to put in a subject?

[ChrisGoodwin]

Yes, but have they made it not suck yet?

(KDE 3.x user here...)

Re:Oh come on, I have to put in a subject?

[3vi1]

Yes. It quit sucking at about 4.4.

Re:Oh come on, I have to put in a subject?

[Risen888]

-1 Shut Up Douchebag

Ahh my old friend

[carp3_noct3m]

*nix: The prime example of a love hate relationship in geekdom.

It's the thought that counts

[overshoot]

Akonadi tries to solve real problems that users of KDE 4.4 (like me) currently experience.

And this is aided by having your data in a fragile repository ... how?

Try pulling the plug on your system. You don't have to be using KMail, it's OK if it's been sitting idle for hours. See what happens.

Nope, tried 4.4.

[aussersterne]

Still sucked, at least on Fedora. I'll try again once 4.5 comes down the updates pipe. As someone that was a die-hard KDE user from KDE 1.0 pre3 through KDE 3.x, I keep KDE installed to keep tabs on it, in hopes that it'll start to work again.

So far, though, it hasn't. Unstable, incompatible, inconsistent, lacking features, kludgy, hacky, sloppy (can't even remember settings half the time, missing half of its plasmoid icons), etc.

Maybe it's Fedora's fault, maybe it's KDE's fault. Don't know, and GNOME 2.x is good enough that I don't care.

Re:Nope, tried 4.4.

[paulkoan]

I have been using KDE 4 from 4.1 and it has been decreasingly sucky and increasingly stable since 4.2. And a far better experience than 3.5 imo.

So, if you found that you didn't like 4.4, 4.5 isn't worth your time.

Re:why would you not just use dwm

[xMilkmanDanx]

If you do it by yourself it's not rape.

Tell that to the mouse.

KDE 4.4 doesn't suck? Which version are you using?

[KWTm]

Yes, but have they made it not suck yet? (KDE 3.x user here...)
Yes. It quit sucking at about 4.4.

Well, it sort of quit sucking enough for me (a KDE 3.x user) to use, but that's only because it was in Kubuntu 10.04 which is a LTS, promising support for the next three years. Hopefuly it means Canonical will put some more work into it.

However, I continue to encounter ways in which it sucks, and in fact I am building up quite a collection of screenshots showing errors and such. For example:

- kmail doesn't work. Took me a while to figure out a workaround. If I suspend or hibernate my laptop and then resume, then it stops getting mail from my IMAP account. The solution is to exit kmail and then restart, but it's not as simple as it sounds: exiting the kmail program leaves behind about a dozen sleeper processes which all have to be killed, to the point that I had to write a script to identify all the child processes of kmail and kill them one by one. Can you imagine a non-technical user doing this!?
- the eye candy is too flashy. The pretty little icons on the "system tray" change their position and appearance under certain circumstances. For example, the "device notifier" is this shape with the USB symbol. When you plug in an external hard drive (for example), it changes to a checkmark and shifts downward a few icons (my system tray area is a vertical one against the right edge of the screen). It always takes me a few moments to look for the icon, and then remember that it is now a checkmark (or an exclamation mark). I mean, why can't it be a checkmark overlapping on the original device notifier symbol? It took me FOREVER to figure out what was happening.
- when widgets like the weather applet put up little dialogues saying "Error --we can't connect", you can't get rid of the dialogues. Yes, it's probably a bug with the widget, but a good DE should be able to get rid of the dialogues. I mean, what's the point of eye candy if you can't even manage your own widgets?
- the power management system is SOOO WONDERFUL that it even manages your screen brightness for you! For example, if your laptop is not plugged in and has only 4 hours left on battery, it goes into Powersave mode and automatically dims the screen for you. When you raise the brightness again, it has this COOL feature where it automatically detects that you raised the brightness (you bad boy!) and dims it for you again a few minutes later. Thank you, KDE, for knowing better than even myself what it is that I want.
- Krunner is a system where you can type in the name of a command, and KDE tells you what you really want to run. For example, simply type in "kru", and KDE knows that you want to run "Krusader in Root Mode". (Geez, does ANYONE run Krusader in root mode?). If you continue typing 4 more letters "krusade", it still offers to run "Krusader in Root Mode". But if you type the final letter "krusader", then it says, "Oh, you want to run 'Krusader'!" (not in root mode, which is what I actually want). Ummmm..... why???
- They have this COOL NEW notification system where messages pop up in little dialogues to tell you "Hey, I finished copying those files you told me to copy 2 seconds ago, okay?". Unfortunately, they fail to expand to make enough room for long messages, so good luck trying to read long error messages.
- the taskbar has its own ideas about when and how to show which programs are running. Sometimes the taskbar entries overlap, so there will be a two separate areas which correctly show Program A and Program C are running, and then overlapping them to make them unreadable is an area showing that Program B is running.
- KPackageKit fails to find packages that obviously exist; e.g. it tells me there is no such package as OpenOffice Calc in Ubuntu!?

There are too many others to list in detail, but I'll give a list of what screenshots I've collected. These are images of the screen, entitled:
- Does Not Highlight GIMP Though Focused.png
- Fi

Re:KDE 4.4 doesn't suck? Which version are you usi

[evJeremy]

Yes, I am aware that there is a significant component of this that is Kubuntu and not KDE itself.

An understatement, to say the least. I haven't encountered a single one of those bugs on Debian Squeeze.

Perl Bindings

[acid06]

It's very nice the Perl bindings were updated and are now included in KDE.
It makes me itch to start playing with KDE again. :)

Re:derp derp

[ebuck]

Unbuntu is a misspelling of Ubuntu. Kbuntu was a marketing term Ubuntu applied to their default KDE desktop version of Ubuntu. Your ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome the occasional typo or errant remark is surprisingly low.

Tank ewe, four de point of my occusanial fallt. it creates everything gooder four de Ethernet.

Too bad Slashdot hasn't figured out a post-submit edit feature. Oh wait, it's only 2010; I should be more patient.