KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1

A few days ago, the KDE project shipped the first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release. Reader dmbkiwi submits a link to a rundown of what 4.7 looks like, snipping from which: "Previously it was Gnome that was the steady plodder making minor incremental changes through the 2.x series, building stability and only adding minor features. However, with the recent releases of both Gnome Shell and the Unity desktop on Ubuntu, the Gnome/Ubuntu side of the desktop linux equation has made radical and controversial steps away from the well loved Gnome 2.x series, leaving KDE 4.x as the 'steady as she goes' option."

Comments

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[seyyah]

People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar.

Where does this notion come from? I've see in it before and I doubt it has any merit.

In fact, I would expect that the majority of people coming from Windows use Gnome since it is the default DE for Ubuntu and other popular distros.

Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much

[Risen888]

I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).

You were deprived of a proper desktop as a child. You know nothing of multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations is beyond your ken. It's like you were raised in a cage.

I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps.

I think you're out of your mind. Okular is the best document viewer I have ever seen. Show me a pdf reader that does a third of the things that Okular does, and does them half as well, and I will eat my hat. Kontact is absolutely gold. Even the file manager has been doing things for three years that Windows Exploder still can't even imagine doing. Marble...well, I was gonna say Marble's the best at what it does, but actually, it's the only application that I'm aware of that does what it does.

why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel

Yeah, we got that. We've had it for years. Have you looked? No you haven't, have you?

KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be.

"foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.