KDE 4.8 RC 1 Now Available
jrepin writes with this quote from an article at Phoronix: "Just in time for some holiday testing, the KDE SC 4.8 Release Candidate is now available. The final release of KDE 4.8 is about one month away, but now the release candidate is available to ensure it shapes up to be a solid release. Among the features of KDE Software Compilation 4.8 is support for Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, quite visible improvements to the Dolphin file-manager, KSecretService is now available as a shared password storage pool, and there's many performance improvements. Lots of bug fixes (measured in hundreds) can also be found in KDE 4.8."
Serious Question
Which major distributions still come with KDE as the default option. There used to be Mandrake/Mandriva, but that's pretty dead now. I guess Fedora and RedHat still use it, but RedHat is mostly for servers, so the desktop doesn't really matter that much, and I don't hear much about Fedora anymore. Seems like KDE is still very actively developed, but you have to go out of your way (Kubuntu) to even use it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As usual, KDE has something working for years, then gnomies create something from scratch (with 100% more DBUS or whatever buzzword is popular that week), stick it on freedesktop and start screaming for KDE devs to switch, because this is now "standard".
It was KDE4 that started my migration away from Linux after fifteen years of hardcore Linux use, advocacy, development, etc. (The pending arrival of GNOME 3 sealed the deal, but it was KDE4 that happened first.)
I still miss Linux, sometimes—the ethic, the openness.
Too bad things didn't work out and Linux didn't ever "arrive" at the same UI quality level as Mac OS or even Windows. But I still have a very soft spot in my heart for Linux and I am continually tempted to install the latest Fedora release in a VM just to have it around. No particular need though—don't actually know what I'd run in it—so I haven't yet.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW