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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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

[Elektroschock]

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

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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?

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: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".

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: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:KDE vs GNOME

[Viski]

The most popular option is never the highest quality.

Dunno, Ubuntu is pretty popular.

Exactly. So is Windows.