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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."
No, it doesn't. It actually rocks. I really have become bored of all that desktop environment hate going on /. cough....) . KDE has always been a powerhouse of a desktop
in semi knowledgeable circles (cough...
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.
-- no sig today
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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).
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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.