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KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative
jrepin writes "KDE released the first beta for its version 4.9 of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 include, but are not limited to: Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, many improvements in Dolphin file manager, deeper integration of Activities, and many performance improvements. The KDE Community is committed to improving quality substantially with a new program that starts with the 4.9 releases. The 4.9 beta releases are the first phase of a testing process that involves volunteers called 'Beta Testers.' They will receive training, test the two beta releases and report issues through KDE Bugzilla."
I was recently forced into installing GNOME 3 (who knew printing required removing GNOME 2); after trying for a while to get Sawfish working again in the deprecated fallback mode, I gave up and tried KDE again. I have to say that I was surprised: KDE 4.5 was unpolished and painful to use whereas 4.7 is pretty slick. With the GNOME 3 developers catering to some seemingly mythical user, it's nice to see the other major desktop using user feedback to make design decisions.
Hey! The GNOME 3 team DOES use user feedback, you insensitive clods! After they print them out (which requires GNOME 3, as you've seen), they shred them and turn them into fine bedding for their various rodent pets! And the rodents, in turn, whisper great design ideas to the developers!
I am so glad that KDE has finally discovered that new "beta testing" thing. It is sure to improve the quality of future releases.
That is one option. There are hundreds more, including using synaptic or apt to download and install kde (assuming that you already use 'regular' ubuntu). Or on the other end of the spectrum you can also create a linux-from-scratch 'distro' and compile the whole packet. That makes for days on end filled with joy and fun, and it is very educational as well!
I dont know what the options for Amiga are btw...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
I would love KDE if it would just stick to being a window manager. But everything related to that semantic desktop nonsense is perpetually buggy and knotify refuses to live with anything less than 100% of the CPU. These problems come and go with different releases, but they never entirely go away.
I have used KDE for many years on many computers, but I finally had to give up on it this year. Like so many open source projects, the bloat drove me away.
Yeah, Fluxbox is more 1337. You don't get that with functionality.
If you want a pile of unstable crap then yes.
You're better of with Fedora, because it's the Red Hat backed distro that is bleeding edge, but upstream. As raw and original as it gets. It also has the latest open source drivers.
If you want to live in the world of closed and patented crap (can't blame you as it's all around us, everywhere) then you can get away with RPMFusion, which is a repository (app store thing) full of borderline illegal (as in against lobbied laws) stuff like automatic DVD 'copy protection' cracking on the fly, MPEG codecs, patented stuff and what have you? You can simply enable that with the browser.
Don't try it out on virtual setups; it runs best bare metal. In fact; its very nature is to be close to the metal.
Don't expect the bleeding edge KDE spin on the bleeding edge Fedora Linux distro to be a ccomplete polished ride, but even though the learning curve is a little steep (in OS enduser terms); the hill is very low, so to speak. Once over it, then it becomes second nature and you'll start to wonder why the hell more popular OS's are so full of crap in the way they do things. But it's not as smooth as Apple's OS from the start, so bare that in mind! ;)
Here be signatures
When the announcement is about the new release of KDE 4.9?
Bizarre.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Not to mention Opensuse is a very good distro with full KDE support. (They do Gnome and other flavors as well).
I happen to think Opensuse does KDE better than anyone else, but that's just my opinion.
Having long ago gone the "educational" route, I'm perfectly happy to start with a well thought out distro these days, and have 4 of them on this machine, in (Virtual Machines), including some pretty old school ones running nothing graphical.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If I want to try KDE I just download the kubuntu distribution?
Shore answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Yes, but by default, Kubuntu 12.04 doesn't use KDE 4.9 yet, it uses version 4.8.2. That's in a long term stable release for Kubuntu, so it seems like a pretty safe bet that the October release of Kubuntu (12.10) will go on up to at least 4.9.0. Really, I'm at least slightly impressed that Kubuntu's board feels a version of KDE that's only a few months from cutting edge is fine for an LTS release.
Who is John Cabal?
I abandoned Ubuntu when Unity was foisted on users, moving over to Mint.
With the Maya release (aka Mint 13) they've left behind Gnome for a choice of MATE or Cinnamon. I installed the latter, and I'm liking it a LOT.
Lots of good, simple usability, and a decided lack of annoying flash and gadgetry.
Nonetheless, I'll likely give the new KDE a look.
Three Squirrels
Volunteers called "Beta Testers." Wow. I wonder if this will catch on with other development groups? Sounds like a pretty neat idea. I'm surprised no one else has done that...
If I want to try KDE I just download the kubuntu distribution?
Many here will argue that Fedora or openSUSE will give you a much better KDE experience, out of the box. My personal experiences with Kubuntu's take on KDE4 have not been positive, unfortunately...
Random question - How come Ubuntu 12.04 has a 5 year support system instead of the usual 3 year cycle?
12.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release. This means that it will be supported and patched for a longer period of time than their regular incremental releases, and this works well for people who don't feel inclined to go through the upgrade process every six months. It tends to be the more stable route for those who just want to work and don't want to have to fiddle with their computer more than they need to. It is also possible to upgrade directly from one LTS to the next. Every two years in April, they release a new LTS.
/* No Comment */
"if the desktop bling gets in the way of a smooth user experience then the deskop is not doing its job."
Agreed, which is why KDE is the only desktop I'll use. Everything else has had too many features ripped out mercilessly to be a productive environment. KDE is the only thing left for power users, it seems. It lets me, from the GUI without having to fart around with some obscure desktop-specific config tool:
* Control which desktop newly opened windows go to as a function of the app. E.g, all email windows go to desktop 2, editors and shells to desktop 1, and so on.
* Provide regex-based configurable clipping behaviors when selecting text from any app.
* Provides an extremely rich set of GUI-settable key mapping and key macro prefs, such as mapping caps lock to control (a necessity for touch typists), where this requires some xmodmap stuff in most desktops. In KDE, it's just a checkbox. Or the key bindings *I* want for changing between virtual desktops.
* Provides keyboard controls for everything.
* Is endlessly configurable, for adding new task bars, putting what I want in them, and having them where I want them to go.
And so on. Sure, somebody is bound to say, "hey, but you can do that one in this desktop!" but it's missing the point. Any time I've tried another, it's inevitable that sooner or later I look for some feature which just isn't there. KDE, what I want has always been available.
While KDE is solid and a very good looking GUI, I prefer LXDE as it's got 99% of the features I need and it's quick in my VM.
If you want "bleeding edge, but upstream", then nothing beats Arch.
OpenSUSE: Linux for grownups that earn a living in Linux.
I tried. I really, really tried to cope with Gnome 3 on Ubuntu. When that failed, I reverted to Gnome 2 and found it neglected; things that should work, things that worked when Gnome 2 was Ubuntu's desktop, don't.
Back to OpenSUSE. You might need to beat akanodi and nepomuk into submission and the current release installer gets NVidia wrong, but those are simple problems for competent users to overcome. Once squared away you're left with a usable, feature complete desktop. Protip: replace the distro Flash with the Adobe's RPM.
I must agree 100% with the 'mythical user' jab. As distributed by Ubuntu Gnome 3 offers only pain and frustration for power users. Maybe Mint fixes it. I don't know. Burned enough weekend time getting to where I'm happy so I'm sticking with OpenSUSE.
I'm not an Ubuntu hater. I absolutely love Ubuntu Server (which amounts to regression tested Debian) and use it for several production systems. I'll give it a few years, hope for some sort of upheaval among Gnome developers and then try again.
Dear Mark Shuttleworth,
You're product is being hurt by Gnome. Designing exclusively for novices and causal users will not work. Things that succeed emerge from the power user. Make them happy first. Then hide the things they need and love behind a simplified interface. Macs do not lack features or capabilities, they just avoid bothering lusers with complexity. That's why OS-X simultaneously pleases both grandma and Joe Programmer. Please Mark, you're smart enough to understand this. Stop suffering these Gnome guys and their tragically bad design. Linux really needs you to figure this out at some point.
I'd pay a license fee for it. I swear.
Your's sincerely,
The Grownups.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
So far with Fedora 16 on my laptop I've seen a kernel update that didn't like my wifi nic. By enabling the updates repo on fedora you get many of the disadvantages of a rolling release like the possibility of things breaking, without advantages like not having to reinstall.
Vote for a command line feature from KDE 3 (and X in general) that was never implemented in KDE 4 -- "--geometry"
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165355
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I found both Kubuntu and Fedora to be incredibly bug-ridden. In my experience, the best KDE-based distros today are Arch and Debian. So I'd suggest Arch, since Debian probably won't have KDE 4.9 until 2013 or so (they just upgraded unstable/testing to 4.7 and I think 4.8 has is entering the experimental branch).
If you want to live in the world of closed and patented crap (can't blame you as it's all around us, everywhere) then you can get away with RPMFusion, which is a repository (app store thing) full of borderline illegal (as in against lobbied laws) stuff like automatic DVD 'copy protection' cracking on the fly, MPEG codecs, patented stuff and what have you? You can simply enable that with the browser.
Illegal in USA, but not in most of the rest of the world. All the stuff you mentioned in pretty much legal in most countries.
Fedora isn't really bleeding edge:
Debian is very very stable and usually lags behind.
Arch is really bleeding edge.
Fedora is somewhat in between both.
Right click the title bar, go to "Advanced -> Special Application Settings" or "More Actions -> Special Application Settings" and then under Size & Position check "Desktop" and use "Force". In 4.9 you can do the same with Activities, by the way. In addition, this can also be configured through "Window Rules" under "Window Behaviour" in System Settings. In fact, the above method is just a shortcut for this.
Wayland support is still ongoing, but has been put at a lower priority since Wayland itself is hardly stable yet. As for Qt5, it's supposed to be released somewhere at the end of summer. KDE will likely only start switching with Qt 5.1. Presumably it should take relatively little time to port to Qt 5, at least not nearly as much as Qt 3 to Qt 4. Of course, for KDE there is also the KDE Frameworks 5 work to consider. In the end, I am not sure what the impact will be. We will just have to wait and see when it is released.
...yet the article poster's commentary, the first post and most of the discussion threads seem to focus on GNOME 3 and other competitors.
I gave up using KDE pre-4.x and haven't really given it serious consideration since the reansition to 4. I know I've missed a lot of changes, improvements and so on so I am profoundly disappointed with the tone of discussion here. Not only is the first readable post an anti-GNOME troll/joke, at the time I read this it is rated "informative". What in God's name are the moderators here smoking? It is a JOKE--yes I do find it very funny but it is 100% information-free. Let's hear about what people LIKE about what is in KDE and what is coming. The signal-to-noise ratio is low even by /. standards of late.
If KDE designers rely so much on "user feedback" then where is the user feedback here? Is the only place to go for a lucid discussion of this desktop environment somewhere in the bowels of the kde.org website? If that is the case then they aren't really getting effective user feedback--they are getting "fanboi feedback", which over time might prove just as effective as "rodent pets [whispering] great design ideas to the developers". What does it have to offer to people to make it worth migrating from GNOME, or Unity or Xfce or LXDE or Enlightenment? In the case of ALL those alternatives if you talk to advocates they will lead off with the virtues of their chosen platforms (GNOME extenstions are a really cool concept, Xfce and LXDE are lightweight and present a familiar interface, Enlightenment brings eye candy to lower powered devices and so on).
Well, sorry, flaming GNOME is about the least effective way to get converts. When GNOME 3 came out and a good chunk of the user base went looking, KDE was NOT where they went. By and large, they chose to try Xfce over KDE and even to fork GNOME 2 or re-spin GNOME 3 with extensions. That users looking for an alernative would "re-invent the wheel" over flocking to KDE speaks volumes about either the lack of awareness of KDE or the lack of appeal of KDE itself, doesn't it?
Do KDE fanbois really not remember when KDE 4 came out how dreadful it was? It is essentially the SAME discussion that GNOME 3 detractors are having right now, right down to Linus Torvalds himself totally slamming it and publicly abandoning it for another desktop! And guess when so many people stopped really considering KDE? So if KDE 4 really IS so much better now that it is up to 4.9 please elabourate out there KDE fans. Stop telling me how much GNOME 3 sucks. I KNOW how much it "sucks" because I USE it (consequently I know how much it *rocks* in other ways). Well me why on my older desktop I should stop using Xfce...is KDE really an option there? Xfce seems like a nice transition for "GNOME 2 refugees" like me. Is KDE 4.9 going to be disruptive? If KDE is "too different" from GNOME 2 then I might as well keep using GNOME 3, or try MATE or Cinnamon or use Xfce more often. What are KDE's merits these days?
The only real impression I get is that KDE is a "tweaker's desktop"...that it is very featureful and can be tailored to do many things. However this doesn't convince me because:
* GNOME 3's extentions capability seems to have all the potential to enable tweaking a user needs (POTENTIAL...if/when the library of exensions grows it could be really good)
* I am not a desktop-tweaker. A dektop is to me an app launcher, consequently I don't miss many features. I kinda-sorta miss minimise buttons in GNOME 3 but I actually am surprised how rarely I actually used them (and there are extensions/settings to enable them anyways if you really need them). About the only things GNOME 3 still seriously need are some tuning of the default user experience and an "expert mode" control panel for those who DO like to tweak a bit more or for people to initially set up their environment in a new install. Overall I do not want to be aware of the desktop--I want it to stay out of my way.
So, is my opinion of KD