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KDE Announces 4.9 Releases

Posted by Unknown on from the shinier-than-ever-before dept.

jrepin writes "KDE announces 4.9 releases of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. Version 4.9 provides many new features, along with improved stability and performance. Some of the highlights include, but are not limited to: more thorough integration of Activities throughout the Workspaces, ability to display metadata (ratings, tags, image and file sizes...) next to file names in Dolphin file manager, Mercurial versioning system support in Dolphin, detachable tabs in Konsole terminal emulator, support for MPRIS2 protocol in various places, ability to store and print PDF annotations from Okular document viewer, Okular can also play videos embedded in PDFs, Lokalize translation tool supports Qt's TS translation files, Kontact PIM suite gains ability to import data from Thunderbird and Evolution, Pairs is a new memory training game added to KDE Education package, and Marble desktop globe includes Open Source Routing Machine and support for bicycle and pedestrian routing. This release is dedicated to the memory of recently deceased KDE contributor Claire Lotion."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Activities? by colin_faber · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I love KDE but I don't understand activities. Am I "doing it wrong" ? I can't seem to find a use for this feature.

    1. Re:Activities? by icebike · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Activities have always been something of a niche feature, with most people being perfectly content to use multiple desktops
      which have been available since the Pleistocene. Having tools on the desktop in the form of widgets or switching the entire look and feel based on when you stop work and start relaxing were just about the whole selling point of activities, but none of these were problems to begin with.

      Unfortunately, the KDE team let one small group of designers (two people, as best as I can figure out) run away with the desktop for several releases trying to foist Activities on the userbase. In later releases, the bitch level got so high that the rest of the KDE team have pretty much got those individuals under control, and sanity has returned. You can pretty much avoid activities now entirely, or at least make them sit silently in the background managing nothing but wallpaper.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. Re:Seems like too few by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    KDE 5.0 is being worked on, but it is not called KDE 5.0, it is called KDE frameworks. One of the main points of KDE frameworks is get rid of the distinctions betwen Qt and KDE applications, so many KDE features are being ported into Qt now that it is under open governance, and the rest will be made to work well at Qt components that anyone can add to their application.