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KDE 4.10 Released, the Fastest KDE Ever

sfcrazy writes "The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments. With 4.10 KDE users can experience a much more sane global-menu like implementation without interrupting their workflow. A list of improvements is available here." This release makes major steps toward further Qt Quick/QML integration (more plasmoids are written using QML, you can create animated desktops using QML, etc.). KWin's configuration applet also supports fetching extensions from KDE Look. Perhaps the best improvement is a new indexer for Nepomuk, with claims that the semantic desktop is finally usably fast (after suffering through a multi-week indexing on my laptop, I have to say Nepomuk is really cool, but having an unusable system for that long is not so I for one welcome our new indexing overlords).

26 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Nice! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I hear both KDE users were super excited

    1. Re:Nice! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I hear they were so excited they went over to the sole remaining Gnome user's house to gloat.

  2. Juicy! by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Funny

    So the question: Why does Ubuntu stick to Gnome?

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    1. Re:Juicy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The better question is why do you care? Use Kubuntu, or one of the many other distributions that default to KDE

  3. Nepomukrewr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just to clarify for people, the new Nepomuk indexer was COMPLETLY and UTTERLY rewritten from scratch and shares ZERO of the old code. IT uses 2 pass indexing just like OS X-- pass 1 is just file name and location so that basic search works. Pass 2 is when it starts figuring out music tags or director tags for movies , things like that.

    One of the reasons the old indexer was so slow would be because you could search by content WITHIN the files, unfortunately it would scan every file, even those without any useful content for indexing like movies or music. This does mean some reduced functionality but it also means a lot more stable and quick system.

    Also STRIGI has been completly thrown out so thats not an issue anymore.

    1. Re:Nepomukrewr by flyingfsck · · Score: 4, Insightful

      OK, so you are saying that I don't have to turn the bladdy nepomuk thing off anymore as the first step after an install, since it may actually work now?

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    2. Re:Nepomukrewr by pesho · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well this is some seriously good news. The bloody thing was not only completely useless but was sucking the life out of my desktop. It should have never been enabled by default.

    3. Re:Nepomukrewr by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I weep for the mountains of coal that have been burned for the millions of nepomuk indexers that nobody ever used or knew to turn off.

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  4. Re:This is the year of Linus on the Desktop! by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    I suppose Linus on the desktop is better than Linus on the laptop, he would probably break it.

  5. Re:This is the year of Linus on the Desktop! by Mister+J · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, a new version of this image, then...

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  6. Ubuntu switching to KDE by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is actually a legit question. Mark Shuttleworth has repeatedly praised Qt. He has forked away from Gnome. The new Ubuntu phone interface is apparently written in Qt, and he is encouraging developers to write Qt/QML apps for his new phone platform.

    I bet Ubuntu could recreate their Unity interface in Plasma/Qt easily enough. But the really interesting aspect of that is that they could create one device that could easily change UIs/shells based upon how it was used. A tablet could default a touch interface, but switch to a more traditional interface with paired with a keyboard. A phone interface could change to a desktop interface in a dock.

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    1. Re:Ubuntu switching to KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As I understand it the original Unity was on Qt. But now they are rewriting it to run on top of an extremely thin OpenGL wrapper instead. I know it sounds idiotic to reinvent a LGPL licensed wheel but this did seem to be their direction 6 months ago when I investigated helping out the UbuntuTV project (which is built on Unity of course).

      Ubuntu should switch to KDE. But they laid off their last paid Kubuntu maintainer some time ago. They are focused, which is good; but they are focused on the wrong suite of technologies, which is not so good.

    2. Re:Ubuntu switching to KDE by Knuckles · · Score: 3, Informative

      AFAICT it was a licensing issue for the longest time. Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform. Of course, today the available licenses from Digia also include LGPL, but that came pretty late.

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    3. Re:Ubuntu switching to KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Thank goodness Canonical jettisoned Kubuntu. The project has been faster and leaner and more productive ever since. During the age of Canonical's "guidance" the monthly updates released by KDE were released weeks later in Kubuntu. Now, KDE updates are released in Kubuntu's updates and backports PPA almost the same day or within a couple days maximum.
       
      Now that Kubuntu is sponsored by Blue Systems rather than Canonical, the project has improved noticeably. An example of my first point is that 4.10 was released by KDE today (Feb. 6th), and it is already available in Kubuntu the same day.

  7. well by drankr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just upgraded and luckily my heavily customized setup from 4.9 is intact. KDE's been snappy on this notebook anyway and completely problem-free for months (well only Firefox in conjunction with Google Docs freezes like once a day... but that's an FF bug) frankly I wouldn't use it if it was slow, so I don't see any particular change in speed.. and I was running the indexers and whatnot before. The only thing that was using a lot of resources (imo) was Amarok, but then I removed all services, plugins and stuff I don't use, and now it never goes over 70 MB after playing music all day.
    I've been using KDE for less than a year but all in all I like this desktop.

  8. Re:This is the year of Linus on the Desktop! by drankr · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shame on you! You seem to be making fun of the fact that he is what they call a "full-figured, plus-sized, real man".

  9. Re:Fastest Ever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is KDE 4.10 really faster than KDE1 and KDE2 on the same system?

    Yes. It's quite unbelievably faster, in fact. You know those features in KDE1 and 2 that didn't exist until the 4.x series? Instead of waiting around fifteen years for them to work (and be developed), now they work in a few seconds on average. That's a considerable speed increase.

  10. Re:This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No offence... but isn't it time we stop complaining about 4.0 every time there is a KDE story?

  11. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll stick with Windows 8, thanks.

  12. Re:Left KDE Because of Nepomuk and Semantic Deskto by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Eh? You're comparing a complete desktop environment to a window manager.

  13. Re:This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No offence... but isn't it time we stop complaining about 4.0 every time there is a KDE story?

    I totally agree. I switched to KDE just last year, so for me the experience was awesome from the beginning. Continually hearing about old bugs from 2008 that were fixed long ago is like listening to people who are still bitter about Windows ME. Give it a rest already.

  14. Re:This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 4, Informative

    " And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice."

    Bullshit. I have one of the nicest looking WM setups I have ever seen, and people who are used to Windows always do a double-take and ask me what software I am using to get such an awesome look. I don't even have this latest release and my 4 year old laptop is already blazing fast with KDE. Anyone who complains about performance or a look they don't like is either trolling or ignorant and/or incompetent.

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  15. Re:OK button on the right by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 4, Informative

    in .kde/share/config/kdeglobal, you can change the value of

    ButtonLayout=1

    This will change the button order. This is one of those things that should never have a GUI option :). But this is KDE, so an option there is!

  16. Re:OK button on the right by JCholewa · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's apparently controlled by the "Widget style". If you use the "Bespin" style, for instance, then one of the things you can configure in "Input/System" is called "Dialog buttons layout". They offer four choices: Windows, OS X, KDE, and Gnome.

    So, yes, you can put the OK button on the right in KDE dialogs.

  17. Re:This is the year of Linus on the Desktop! by PerfectionLost · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh man, I think that is almost not work safe.

  18. So is KIO still going to truncate and hose files? by pecosdave · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been a KDE user from 1.x but KIO and Nepomuk have been enough to really make me consider moving to something else. I use Midnight Commander for all my big/important file moves, not because I LIKE to use it better but because I've had way too many occasions where anything that uses KIO just royally hoses up my files. I've actually lost data to how poorly that performs. It hasn't been limited to just one system either, it's been multiple computers over the years. I really want to use Konqueror, Dolphin and Krusader but for the integrity of my files I avoid it.

    Akonadi seems to be rather a pain also.

    Get rid of Nepomuk, Akonadi, and KIOslave hosing up your files KDE is rather nice. But is it really KDE anymore?

    Just to be clear, I've been on KDE from 1.x until now, I'm not a hater, I've stuck with KDE through when I first toyed with Redhat, to SuSE, to Debian, and now Kubuntu, I'm certainly not a hater, but where there's flaws the flaws are grand.

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