KDE 4.8 Released

jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.8 of their Free and open source software bundle. The new version provides many new features, improved stability, and increased performance. Highlights for Plasma Workspaces include window manager optimizations, the redesign of power management, and integration with Activities. The first Qt Quick-based Plasma widgets have entered the default installation of Plasma Desktop, with more to follow in future releases. KDE applications released today include Dolphin file manager with its new display engine, ..., and KDE Telepathy reaching its first beta milestone. New features for Marble virtual globe keep arriving, among these are: Elevation Profile, satellite tracking, and Krunner integration. The KDE Platform provides the foundation for KDE software. KDE software is more stable than ever before. In addition to stability improvements and bugfixes, Platform 4.8 provides better tools for building fluid and touch-friendly user interfaces, integrates with other systems' password saving mechanisms and lays the base for more powerful interaction with other people using the new KDE Telepathy framework."

Comments

Re:LALALALALA

[justforgetme]

No, it doesn't. It actually rocks. I really have become bored of all that desktop environment hate going on
in semi knowledgeable circles (cough... /. cough....) . KDE has always been a powerhouse of a desktop
environment and a feature complete one at that. It definitely can become option heavy but this is exactly
what a user that needs a productive environment wants.

The only thing that I don't like about KDE is that whenever I touch an "out of the box" implementation of it
I feel like using an overpolished windows NT machine. But that is only the KDE aesthetics not being my
kind of soup. Software wise it still is a top notch environment.

So how's the Windows version coming along?

[hairyfeet]

Last time i tried it it piled on the dependencies and I couldn't uninstall it without restoring from disk image but if its gotten better i wouldn't mind giving it a go. i have a ton of off lease XP machines piling up and can't stand the XP Fisher price UI and I give the KDE guys credit for having a nice UI, so how's it coming along? Great, good, lousy? How easy is it to install and uninstall? How easy is it to switch back and forth?

Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?

[hairyfeet]

Yeah if its one i'm actually gonna keep i get Aston and put on it, its what I run on my XP nettop and is quite nice. of course i'm not gonna blow $30 a pop on some off lease boxes i'm selling but hate dealing with that Fisher price UI (And nooooo, switching to the fugly as fuck Win98 UI isn't an improvement, thanks ever so) so it looks like I'll be hacking MSStyles.dll and putting on a nicer theme. And no you're not alone, many of use can't fricking stand the Fisher price UI, I like the Win 7 UI, Vista Black was okay (too bad the OS attached to it blew chunks) and KDE had a nice silvery look, but that blue is just fucking horrible to look at for any length of time. Whomever picked that shit out must have been color blind!

Watch me get hate for saying this next part, but fuck if I care, i just wish the Linux community would get all on the same page, quit all this damned rivalry and 50 bazillion distro crap, and actually make an OS usable by the masses, is to too much to ask? I need a rock solid OS that is as easy to use as Win 7 or OSX and gives a minumum 7 years support without dealing with that apt-dist-upgrade clusterfuck as I've yet to see a machine actually upgrade without having drivers broken. I know you will never get a stable ABI as long as Torvalds has a pulse but can't you either make a REAL LTS or find a way not to shit all over the drivers during an upgrade? Hell there isn't even a 'find drivers" or "rollback drivers" button and Windows has had that for a decade!

Look, this is your chance geeks, for the first time in history all the stars are aligning, the XP dieoff is filling shops like mine with insanely overpowered laptops and desktops, Ballmer is gonna shoot MSFT in the head trying to turn Windows into WinTab, most people only care about online stuff now, you've never had a better shot, all you have to do is accept the fact the world isn't a bunch of damned programmers and get rid of the fiddly bullshit and CLI wanking off, that's all. you wanna keep the wank fest in server fine, all well and good, but you ain't never gonna sell that Bash crap to the masses. you gotta "think different' to steal a line, think iOS and Win 7, call it dumbing down if you like, just give us something simple, easy to use, and supported 7 years. Make it so my grandma could run it with ZERO help from me,lots of big icons and pretty pictures and wizards. Hell my 71 year old clueless dad installed his own Win 7 and everything ran OOTB with ZERO input from me, that is what you need to shoot for, an OS that even the clueless can run.

You've got most of the basic parts already, KDE is VERY pretty and consistent, you've got most of the guts and drivers written, you just need to put it in a friendly package and stop updates/upgrades from tearing the thing apart, that's all. you have until Apr 2014 but the sooner the better as all us shops are scrambling for Win 7 Start CALs simply because we can't find a Linux that fits the bill. give it to us and you'll have a support network that makes the Apple stores look like a bad joke. We WANT you to succeed, we really do. But with the mess you have now literally we'd go broke trying to support you. you could use the XP dieoff to take a HUGE bite out of MSFT's ass, you just gotta want it and be willing to change, are you?

New in konsole

[vlm]

I'm guessing konsole will get a lot more use with this crowd, that, say, Marble. I'm not sure this feature list is worth the effort of upgrading, but here it is:

http://konsole.kde.org/changelog.php

Noteworthy:

        Before any window is opened, make sure pty device has right size before starting the terminal process.
        Allow an image to be set as the background in the terminal window.
        Close session reliably when the session process doesn't die with SIGHUP.
        Don't show the default profile in menu New Tab list when no others are listed.
        Add "Select All" action for selecting the whole history of this session.
        Add popup menu for drag-n-drop operations using KonqOperations::doDrop.
        Bidirectional text support is on by default.
        Left-To-Right direction will always be used in the terminal area even when the language is Right-To-Left.
        Add support for Unicode decomposed characters and in general better unicode displaying.

Re:New in konsole

[danomac]

Hey, I actually like that idea. I can have ssh sessions open for up to five different machines... I'd definitely find it useful to attach different backgrounds to each one so I immediately know which machine I'm currently using. It would prevent me from entering commands in the wrong session, which I've done multiple times before with somewhat disastrous results...

Re:LALALALALA

[ByOhTek]

Just because someone doesn't like KDE 4.x doesn't mean they haven't tried it.

Mind you, I've tried, IIRC, 4.1, 4.2 or 4.3 and 4.4 or 4.5 and haven't liked it in any of those, over 3.5

Different people have different tastes.

Re:Pause after click fixed?

[mx b]

Probably. I am running KDE 4.7 (actually just updated to 4.8 today, so haven't much experience with the updates yet), and it goes swimmingly on my old dell laptop (about 7 years old, maxxed out the RAM at 1 GB). No real hang ups or delays. Runs just fine. I think a lot of the hangups were the older versions of Nepomuk/Akonadi and friends, but the last few releases have really dramatically improved performance and integration, to the point where you don't even notice they exist (as far as resource usage; I'm growing to appreciate the semantic tags on files more and more as time goes on).

Re:LALALALALA

[danomac]

For me, I initially hated 4.x. However, I did grow to like some things about it.

I actually had to use 3.x last week on one of my old machines I'd forgotten to update, and everything just felt so damn backwards.

Re:LALALALALA

[Enderandrew]

Opinions are subjective?

That being said, I think it stands head and shoulder above the competition. It is the most feature-rich desktop on the planet. And if you don't like how something looks or operates, you can customize it to look and operate exactly how you want.

And honestly, given the choices of a Windows 8 (Metro) desktop, Gnome Shell, Unity, Lion, and KDE 4.8 as modern desktops, only Lion and KDE are particularly appealing to me. And sadly Lion seems to be slowly morphing OS X into iOS. I'm beginning to think that perhaps only the KDE devs understand it is about having the right interface for the right hardware.

With KDE the same stack can easily switch between a Netbook interface, a traditional desktop shell, a more modern desktop shell, and a tablet interface. They don't force one interface for every situation.

And the Regressions?

[TheNinjaroach]

I love KDE and have used it exclusively since the 3.2 days, but damn am I getting tired of the regressions. Things that used to work beautifully are suddenly bugged beyond use. I expect that to happen with early revisions of major releases, but the trend that started in 4.1 continues through a clean install of 4.7.2 that shipped with my distro.

In any case, thanks for the best desktop environment I've ever used. KIOSlaves (if they are still called that) are awesome, and we should all be thankful for KHTML, which laid the foundation for Webkit-based browsers everywhere.

Dump akonadi

[blackpaw]

Its a fucking disaster. I used to blame kmail2 but came to realise its a decent frontend, its the back end that drags it down.

4.8 RC2 Gmail imap account, working fine for weeks. Nothing changed, then I get that perpetual rotating wait icon, followed by the
"Unable to fetch job" error when trying to access sub folders. Reboots don't make any difference.

I know the deal - the only reliable way to fix it is to delete the virtuoso/nepomuk databases and all kmail configs and recreate the account from scratch, but you know what? I just can't be bothered any more. Tired out and fed up. I've been a good boy, I given up hoping for a search that works, I don't attempt to integrate with google calendar or contacts any more, I don't expect address expansion to work reliably. Theres bug entries ate bugs.kde.org related to this months old with no dev attention, not even to confirm or reject then.

Its just easier to use my webmail or Thunderbird. At least it always works, even if its not as integrated with the kde desktop.

So one less reason to use KDE at all.

Re:Dump akonadi

[qbast]

And let's not forget about mysql + virtuoso + maildir akonadi resource + kmail2 taking over 1GB of resident memory whenever they feel like it. When KDE 4.7 came out, I switched to Thunderbird. Later when buying a new laptop I noticed that almost all applications I run are multiplatform anyway. So now I run Windows 7 as my main OS. It needs some getting used to after using Linux/KDE for last 10 years.

Re:LALALALALA

[monkeyhybrid]

I couldn't agree more. KDE 4 is solid, full featured and for me at least, very quick. It's also very pretty if you're into that sort of thing.

I understand people having their own preferences but if your view of KDE 4.x was jaded by the first few releases, please look again and give it some serious playtime. I don't miss KDE 3.x any more and Gnome feels very basic in comparison. It's great!