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KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look

Posted by timothy on from the looking-sharp dept.

dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."

16 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Even with each minor release of KDE, GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. Like this release proves once more, we see KDE improving and innovating, while GNOME just sits there spinning its wheels.

    It's time to abandon GNOME. It was useful for a short while during the 1990s, when Qt's licensing was problematic, but that's no longer an issue. GNOME has stagnated, and is of little value these days. KDE is offers more features, better performance, greater reliability, and just an overall better experience in every way.

    1. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by paulatz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm a long-time KDE lover, but I have to use gnome at work and I do not dislike it too much.

      At the moment I do think it is lagging behind, but I know that Gnome 3.0 is on the way and it may be the revolution and modernization it needs. We will see.

      --
      this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
    2. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by rqg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, this might depend on personal experience: mine with KDE has been... unpleasant. KDE might offer more features, but they're crammed into the interface in a manner that makes their use unintuitive. Moreover, I would not say KDE offers better performance as all the installs of it that I've seen have been slugish to say the least (compared to Gnome on the same machines). Also, if it's so much better then Gnome, then why so few distro's use it as their default DE?

    3. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They seem to be planning changes. But I don't like their plans:

      http://www.deansas.org/blog/2009/09/24/first-impressions-of-gnome-shell/

      One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity "overlay" and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn't really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.

      Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I'm not likely to forget the name of an application I've started.

      http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00030.html

      Just wanted to share a personal experience with GNOME Shell. One of its new and unique attributes is not having the window list or any sort of persistent widget that shows running apps or opened windows. This has benefits, in theory, like helping the user focus on the foreground task.

      It's just worth noting that one of its potential downsides is it violates the user's mental model, which makes it undesirable, even if it *may* help increase productivity. With a window list, it's clear to the user where the window goes when it's minimized and how to show it again. In GNOME Shell, the only clear way to tell if a window is minimized is to check if it can't be seen in the workspace, but it's shown in the Overview or Window Switcher (alt+tab). Teling which windows are minimized or not may not have real benefits, but it may be too disorienting for users.

      Personally I think they've lost their marbles. How does that help productivity at all? Especially in the cases where you need to use more than one window to do your work?

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    4. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The killer feature for me -- seriously, the reason I use KDE rather than Gnome -- is the ability to make the panel vertical. It's the only reasonable way to work on a widescreen netbook.

      (Yeah, Gnome kinda has vertical panels as long as you don't mind them looking horrible and lots of things breaking. No, I do not want to read sideways text, Gnome. And when I looked at some "make vertical panels work properly" bugs, the basic message from Gnome devs was "we don't use vertical panels, go fuck yourself".)

    5. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by Nerdfest · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'd even be happy reading the sideways text, but there are several widgets (indicator widget?) that are 150ish pixels wide and do not even rotate sideways, meaning they're useless. I finally gave up and started using the panel at the top with Docky at the bottom, but perhaps it's time to have another look at KDE.

    6. Re:GNOME keeps falling further and further behind. by udippel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I understand your point.
      But that's exactly what I have been trying for the last half year: I set my KDE to 'no panel', even 'no border'. And - loving it!
      This is not to talk up KDE (which is very lousy in places) or talk down Gnome. It is the paradigm that took me some time to get used to. But now you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers ...

      Only if someone is interested: I have the Dashboard on a mouse edge, which now takes in principle the task of the panel, except that it is 2-dimensional instead of a line (== more space, no doubt).
      Another mouse edge does the 'Desktop Grid', so that I can move to another desktop, while yet another one presents all windows of the current desktop. And it is just beautiful to have all real estate 100% for the applications; with a 'panel' (desktop==dashboard) directly underneath; instead of invading the screen.

      I have no clue if this will accepted by the majority (I think not); but something will need to be done against those ugly, overloaded, panels. From where one needs to drop sub-panels with sub-menus, because the total, primary, real estate is just the screen width.

  2. 4.x KDE releases failed to impress me by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've played around a bit with KDE 4.x (don't remember exact version) in Ubuntu 10.04, but I wasn't very impressed. It look very slick, gives a feeling of advanced tech under the hood, but:

    After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.

    I don't have time for this crap, a desktop environment is just one of many things you have to configure when customizing an OS, it shouldn't take a day to wander through its configuration. This wouldn't be a problem if defaults are chosen well enough that you're done with changing very few things from the default, but that's not the case. From what I understand, SuSE offers one of the best out-of-the-box KDE experiences, but hey I'm not changing distro's just to have nice defaults on the desktop environment.

    To me, it comes across as a typical case of too much unnecessary complexity - users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time. And where they can easily find the most important settings. Beyond that, additional complexity just wasts memory, CPU cycles & developer time. Which is really a shame given all the effort that goes into a project like KDE. Disclaimer: that's just my current impression, maybe these things are much improved in later releases like the one reviewed here...

    1. Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me by Teun · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Neither am I a n00b.

      And that's exactly what pisses me off in Gnome, there is so little to configure, except for a theme you more or less have to accept what the developers gave you.

      But the people who's private computers I keep running are quite happy with the configurability of KDE, the standard set up is OK and some of them get quite adventurous once they understand the power of the right-click.
      They have mainly older single processor machines with a max. of 1GB RAM and even then it is a beautiful and responsive desktop without the weaknesses of Windows.

      More than once visitors who saw some of the options I showed them (especially in Dolphin) asked how to enable them in Windows 7 :)

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    2. Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Users do not - but professionals do.

      Yeah... you know... I'm gonna have to call BS, here.

      What *exactly* does KDE offer that a "professional" will find shaves *that* much time off their day-to-day lives?

      Hell, the "professionals" I come across often want the exact *opposite* of KDE... things like xmonad, awesome, and so forth, are an attempt to get the DE the hell out of the way so we can just get on with our jobs, already.

    3. Re:4.x KDE releases failed to impress me by Zarhan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What *exactly* does KDE offer that a "professional" will find shaves *that* much time off their day-to-day lives?

          Well, I count myself as professional, and one of the nicest features for me is that I can easily configure attributes for specific windows. I remember back in the 90's having to manually edit .fvwm2rc. Now, I can just put rules right-click title bar and pick "special window" or "special application" settings. My firefox always starts up on Desktop 2. My VirtualBox always on Desktop 6. My Konsole sessions on Desktop 1. My file manager on Desktop 5. My IM applications on Desktop 4. And so on...

          And that's just the easiest part - beyond that, for example, I don't want usually any windows to steal focus. However, if my VPN goes down, I want KVPNC to definitely steal focus immediately to bring attention to it.

  3. I have not liked KDE for quite a while by metrix007 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I stayed away from the 4.x serious in particular. not least because of all the Akondai stuff. I think a DE should be as minimal as possible...provide a shell, file browser, and maybe some basic applications. KDE seems to want to manage everything, and there is so much stuff running in the background that I have no idea what is needed and what is not. I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey.

    I should note that I am arguing from ignorance here about my knowledge of the workings, just my brief experiences. But, that is the impression I got. Is there any truth to it, and if there is, why has the KDE team gone down that road?

    It seems to be less about configurability and themes and more to do with how much you think your DE should be responsible for.

    --
    If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
    1. Re:I have not liked KDE for quite a while by Cwix · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey.

      Yea and Microsoft should stop naming things like Windows DVD Maker, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Media Center.

      Wait.. whats your point again?

      --
      You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
  4. Re:Strong Opinion != Troll by TitusC3v5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The technology behind KDE4.x is certainly several steps ahead of Gnome, but in terms of stability, I've yet to use KDE4 for any period of time without dealing with multiple application crashes. Whether this is a KDE problem or the applications themselves, I'm not sure, but it keeps me tied to Gnome for the time being for my day to day needs.

    --
    And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
  5. Still using KDE 3.5.X... by roubles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    because KDE 4.X was _not_ designed to work over VNC: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea90400

    1. Re:Still using KDE 3.5.X... by oddfox · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I honestly think if more people knew about NX they would never use VNC unless it was absolutely the only solution available, period. VNC just blows chunks way too bad, and NX makes things so easy when bandwidth is important. Anyone who has not tried NX and uses VNC should seriously give it a try because the difference is night and day.

      --
      "We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates