KDE 4.8 RC 1 Now Available

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Posted by timothy on Thursday December 22, 2011 @09:21AM from the many-thousands-of-hours-of-work dept.

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."

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Serious Question by CastrTroy · 2011-12-22 09:28 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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1. Re:Serious Question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 09:31 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Slackware uses KDE as default
2. Re:Serious Question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 09:34 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  OpenSUSE uses it as the default desktop. That is probably your best bet as many KDE developers are using that distro.
  I prefer the Fedora KDE spin as the nicest distro, but I am partial to yum.
  Other notable distros using KDE by default: Pardus, Chakra, Slackware, PC-BSD.
3. Re:Serious Question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 09:35 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Slackware uses KDE as default
  Yep, Slackware threw out the window GNOME many years ago, all the while keeping those 3-4 GTK+ useful applications.
  The best decision they ever took. A pity some major distros never followed suit.
4. Re:Serious Question by icebike · 2011-12-22 09:35 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  OpenSuse, Kubuntu, and several others not cloned off of Ubuntu come with KDE. Some have it as the first choice, but not all are so single minded as to not offer a choice like Ubuntu.
  You don't have to go out of your way, you just have to expand your horizon beyond your little Ubuntu world.
  
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5. Re:Serious Question by Outtascope · 2011-12-22 09:36 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Kubuntu is hardly going "out of your way to use it".
6. Re:Serious Question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 10:13 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Because "nobody" knows about KUbuntu. People getting into Linux for the first time pick Ubuntu, because that's what they've heard about, and they have no idea that Kubuntu even exists, let alone what it means, what Unity is, what KDE is, what Gnome is, or anything else that you take for granted.
  The end result is that people are getting an exposure to "Linux" thinking "Linux = Unity", and by implication, "Linux sucks - this is garbage". They could, instead, be getting exposed to KDE, which does not suck, but the Ubuntu maintainers are too proud to admit that they have made a mistake, even with overwhelming feedback from the community.
  Don't take YOUR level of linux knowledge as representative of everyone's. Most people have no idea that unlike most OSs, you can pick different desktop environments like KDE or Gnome or XFCE. It isn't something they necessarily even want to understand. If it's more complex than "Push this single download button" on your distro's download page, then in a very real sense people DO have to go out of their way to get KDE. And they don't know that they can, by and large.
7. Re:Serious Question by Kjella · 2011-12-22 10:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Some have it as the first choice, but not all are so single minded as to not offer a choice like Ubuntu.
  sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE. All the *buntu variants actually point to the same repositories, you pick one during download but if you want more they're an apt-get away. I'd call it one less confusing step for a new user, how should he know how to answer? Give him the defaults of what he downloaded and trust that power users can use 30 seconds on Google to find out...
  
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8. Re:Serious Question by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-12-22 10:58 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I agree with Kjella. Ubuntu does offer a choice, and it's called Kubuntu.
  
  And if you install regular Ubuntu with Unity and don't like it (and most people don't, I think), then install KDE and you're good to go in a few short minutes.
9. Re:Serious Question by icebike · 2011-12-22 12:19 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Some have it as the first choice, but not all are so single minded as to not offer a choice like Ubuntu.
  sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE.
  
  Reading comprehension 101:
  Offering a choice means being given a selection of desktops to to install when you are installing.
  Suse does it.
  Slackware does it.
  Fedora does it.
  Ubuntu can't be bothered.
  I find it condescending how you suggest offering "no choice" at install time is somehow protecting the new user.
  The new user may be years away from doing an apt-get. But they can pick from a list, because they have all been to a Restaurant in the past.
  
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10. Re:Serious Question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 12:40 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Judging by how Unity turned out, I think they felt that Gnome 3 wasn't crippled, frustrating, or slow enough.
11. Re:Serious Question by Belial6 · 2011-12-22 13:41 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You have the choice both before and after installation. If you know before you do the install, then you just use the Kubuntu install disk. If you decide after the install, you run the apt-get command. Having only two point that you make the choice instead of 3 doesn't mean there is not choice.
12. Re:Serious Question by unixisc · 2011-12-22 17:17 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  PC-BSD. Version 9 is the first that offers one a choice of GNOME, KDE, LXDE and XFCE as fully integrated DEs, while Awesome, Enlightenment, IceWM, ScrotWM and WindowMaker are available, but not fully integrated - one probably has to use the CUI to run the BSD utilities on them. But aside from that, those too will work.
  
  Then there are all the other distros mentioned above. And typically, while Gnome may be the default, most distros, during installation, offer one the option of installing KDE instead.
13. Re:Serious Question by DrXym · 2011-12-22 22:43 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I find it condescending how you suggest offering "no choice" at install time is somehow protecting the new user.
  How the hell is a new user supposed to know or care why there are bunch of different desktops, all of which do more or less the same thing but in different ways? How the hell is a new user meant to pick apart the war of words that has been going on for over a decade over which desktop is supposed to be the best.
  The sensible thing for any dist is to pick one desktop and be done with it. If someone is in any way informed on the matter they will choose a dist which matches their preference, or will know how to install an alternative post-install.
  So yes it is protecting the new user since it relieves them a question that they don't know the answer to, and of downloading a larger iso file. Arguably it also protects the dist since they don't have to waste time & resources supporting multiple desktops with all the overheads in support and bug fixing entailed by that.
Serious Reply by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · 2011-12-22 09:31 · Score: 5, Informative

OpenSuse.

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1. Re:Serious Reply by AliasMarlowe · 2011-12-22 09:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  PCLinuxOS has KDE as its standard, although versions with LXDE, E17, etc. are also available.
  
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2. Re:Serious Reply by NotBorg · 2011-12-22 15:50 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Note that by "default" they mean that the OpenSuse installer has a radio button with KDE selected by default. If you just keep hitting "Next" you get KDE. You can install Gnome instead with one extra well placed mouse click.
  However, the odds of clicking it at random are apparently low enough that the OpenSuse team doesn't consider it a bug. :O
  Ohhhhh it's funny because it implies being able to pick Gnome is a bug!!!
  
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Re:KSecretService by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-22 09:45 · Score: 4, Funny

What an ugly name. I'd much prefer the tagline: With KDE, KGB protects you.
Re:KSecretService by qbast · 2011-12-22 09:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

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".
Re:Release candidates. by qbast · 2011-12-22 10:09 · Score: 5, Informative

Pass -DKDE4_BUILD_TESTS=TRUE to cmake while building and then run 'make test' . Better googling next time.
I *really like* KDE by cadeon · 2011-12-22 10:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

I like KDE. I don't hear that said often, though. So I figured I'd say it, and relate my excitement and thanks for all the hard work that's gone into this impending new release.
Thanks, devs.
Re:Printing by smash · 2011-12-22 12:39 · Score: 3, Informative

People who do actual work often need to print, yes.

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4.7 KMail == Total Fail by nonmaskable · 2011-12-22 12:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

I've been a KDE fan since 1.x, but one of the worst pieces of OSS I've ever used was in KDE 4.7 -- KMail 2. I thought it might just be me, but a little research showed that every distro shipping it has had many angry users. For me on OpenSUSE it's been an endless source of lost incoming and outgoing mail, performance problems, and generally horrible bugs. Totally broken development process -- the problems were widely reported during at beta, but ignored since KDE leadership insists on pushing the buggy/leaky Akonadi-Nepomuk stuff regardless of what it means to end users. I'll give KMail in 4.8 another chance, but I don't hold out much hope -- it's been years since Akonadi was introduced and everything associated with it has been a disaster.
The rest of KDE 4.7 is absolutely terrific though.
1. Re:4.7 KMail == Total Fail by claus.wilke · 2011-12-22 16:20 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  I just switched to KMail 2 in 4.7.4, and so far it's working out nicely---definitely better than the old KMail. I was quite apprehensive, because I have a complex setup, with multiple IMAP accounts, local mail storage, several identities, and so on, and I had read all the issues people have. But it's working like a charm, and even mail folders with several thousand mails are snappy.
  I think there has been a lot of progress since the first official release of KMail2 in 4.7, so I'd definitely give it another try.
  Some of the most annoying bugs, like KMail IMAP not surviving a sleep-wake cycle or a brief network outage, are finally gone.
Re:Printing by rec9140 · 2011-12-22 13:23 · Score: 3, Informative

Hmmm.. Works GREAT!
Sharp MX4501N
Sharp AR620M
HP C7280's
HP 4500W
HP 7500A
All via network...
And HP makes it stupid wintard easy to print, scan and fax with their HP printers or AIO's.
sudo apt-get install hplip-gui
DONE! Print, scan, fax.
XSANE works great to scan via the network.
What was your point?
Oh still trying to use non PCL or PS printers in Linux, good luck.
Hell, even my beloved Kodaks have been set free, free at last with c2esp, scan and fax is still not supported, but you can at least print!

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