KDE Software Compilation 4.11 Released

jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.11 of Software Compilation, which is dedicated to the memory of Atul 'toolz' Chitnis, a great Free and Open Source Software champion from India. This version of Plasma Workspaces will be supported for at least two years, and delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling. KWin window manager incorporates first experimental support for Wayland. This release marks massive improvements in the Kontact PIM suite, giving much better performance and many new features, like scam detection and scheduling e-mail sending. Kate text editor improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin file manager became faster, and the educational applications bring various new features. The Nepomuk semantic storage and search engine received substantial performance improvements." The performance enhancements to nepomuk (KDE's semantic desktop engine) are particularly welcome. This release of the Plasma desktop also marks the end of Plasma version one; primary development focus will now switch to updating KDE for Qt 5. There should still be more updates to KDE 4, however. Also released recently by the KDE team was the first RC of Plasma Media Center 1.1.

Comments

Good to see the progress

[MBGMorden]

I've since switched to XFCE since Gnome went batshit crazy, but if I had to choose between the major DE's KDE ain't half bad. I used to use KDE 2.x way back in the day and switched away from it when KDE 3.0 came out (though I still install it and try it out every now and then), but recently developments have proven that while I don't like the direction KDE took, it certainly could be a lot worse.

Re:Good to see the progress

[oodaloop]

I've since switched to XFCE since Gnome went batshit crazy

Why didn't you just use Unity?

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he isn't using Ubuntu? Or maybe he wanted a smaller memory footprint/fewer features?

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Unity is as batshit crazy as Gnome 3?

Re:Good to see the progress

[AliasMarlowe]

Maybe he isn't using Ubuntu? Or maybe he wanted a smaller memory footprint/fewer features?

And many of us who were using Ubuntu (since Warty days), took one look at the ghastliness of Unity, and promptly migrated to XFCE a couple of years ago (the Xubuntu flavor for us).

Re:Good to see the progress

[Metrol]

As someone who also moved to XFCE via Xubuntu a while back I've certainly got a few reasons...

I want to be the one who decides which mouse button does what, without having to alter source code and recompiling.
I want to be the one who decides where minimize and close buttons go on the task bar.
All things Email are tied into Evolution, which can't even manage to put deleted mail into an IMAP trash folder.
Nautilus... ack!
XFCE does most of the things that Gnome used to get right, while doing none of the crazy that Unity pushes.

In all fairness, I was never a long term user of Unity. Configurability was a huge enough issue for me that I couldn't give it the time. I was a regular user of KDE into the 4.x days. After seeing one too many "Plasma Desktop Crashed" errors I went looking for an alternative.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

That abomination of that top-bar autohide nonsense was enough to kill it for me. Just adds unnecessary delay floating beautifully in and out in and out in and out.

Yes. That was enough.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is not so bad as functionality, however it is the biggest memory hog out there. You can do much better with any other desktop.

I installed Kubuntu on an old windows XP computer for a friend, the thing was visibly slower than XP. It took my friend 10 minutes to give up and reboot the computer on XP partition, never to come back.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please explain to me why this is modded down?

Re:Good to see the progress

[Teun]

Rubbish, since years KDE is easier on memory than (the) other complete desktop environments, one reason is the from get-go integration of it's applications.

Re:Good to see the progress

[jones_supa]

I installed Kubuntu on an old windows XP computer for a friend, the thing was visibly slower than XP. It took my friend 10 minutes to give up and reboot the computer on XP partition, never to come back.

This has started to become the problem lately: the biggest flagship desktops (KDE, Unity and GNOME3) are slower than Windows. To compete in the same ballpark, in Linux you have to downshift for example to XFCE (which is actually an excellent DE). But you have to trade off all of the 3D desktop eye candy. Not all people need those candies, but Windows can run them smoothly even on an Atom netbook or a crusty Pentium 4 box. On low-performance machines the graphics stack of Windows is just a winner. I don't know if Wayland or Mir makes an improvement to this, but I hope so.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the nice things about linux desktops is that all the components are generally interchangeable - I've been using the XFCE desktop and panel, with the KWin window manager, and some other GTK apps. Basically combining all the individual programs I like from different DEs. With a little patience it's possible to make it all look good, too! Worth remembering if you're frustrated with any particular environment.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Steve Max]

I installed Kubuntu

That is your problem right there. Kubuntu is a terrible KDE distribution, possibly the worst out there. You'd get better performance, memory usage, features and stability from any other KDE distro.

Re:Good to see the progress

[0123456]

No, you just install MATE (aka Gnome 2).

Re:Good to see the progress

[jones_supa]

MATE is slower than Windows too.

Re:Good to see the progress

[ScottyKUtah]

Just curious, what makes Kubuntu the "worst" distribution, in your opinion?

I like KDE, what do you recommend for another distribution that integrates KDE better than Kubuntu?

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch or OpenSuse, although Kubuntu has gotten a lot better in recent years/releases.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Barsteward]

Not the windows i use occasionally. Win 7 was ok for a week or two and its getting progressively slower with the disk thrashing almost all the time

Re:Good to see the progress

[jones_supa]

I agree with that. Windows hits the HDD much more than a Linux desktop.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Impossible to tell.

He said Windows XP computer ( that could be anything from a Pentium II, to a Quad core intel Core 2 and 256 mb of memory up to 4Gb)
He didn't say which version of KDE ( its performance in the early days of 4.x weren't very good)

Re:Good to see the progress

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I look at what KDE devs use. None of them are on kubuntu. Kubuntu itself is kind of in peril due to Ubuntu moving to Mir and KDE moving to Wayland. It may not be based on Ubuntu for much longer at which point, I'd imagine they'd change their name to Kebian.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Dcnjoe60]

Actually, KDE 4, including the Kubuntu distribution, can be made to run quite well on older hardware. Much of it depends on the settings. Since XP was designed for such hardware, it doesn't stress it. Kubuntu, on the otherhand isn't really designed for XP hardware (2004 - 2007), so it's default settings are expecting something a little beefier. You can, however, turn off the blur effect and the file indexing and a few other tweaks and you run quite comfortable on XP class hardware. A fair comparison would be running Windows 7 or 8 on the XP hardware and see how it performs out of the box compared to XP.

Speaking from personal experience, you can make Kubuntu/KDE4 run quite well with an atom processor and 1GB of ram and an intel onboard video. Would I want to do video editing on such a system, no, I would not. But then I wouldn't want to do them on an XP class machine either. BTW, none of this really has anything to do with Kubuntu. Any KDE4 distro can be made to work on such minimal (by today's standards) hardware. Out of the box KDE is set to work with more modern hardware, but it only takes adjusting a few settings to make it functional on older hardware.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Nerdfest]

4.10 is my main desktop at home and at work and it's very stable these days.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me right up until I found they were using RPM. I had far too many RPM database corruptions and circular dependencies to even consider using any distribution that uses it, ever again.

Re:Good to see the progress

[PAPPP]

Nope. As nice as recent KDE is, it is still a demonstrable resource hog: http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/
His semi-scientific experiment matches up with my experience. I have a KDE 4.10 box and a XFCE box (both on top of Arch, so I'm reasonably aware of how they are configured) that I use regularly, and KDE is incredibly more resource intensive than XFCE, even factoring in some things I have disabled in KDE and added on to XFCE.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither of them are crazy, in fact both are very usable DEs.

While they're different from legacy UIs like WXP and OSX, they're far more usable than something like W8x and are improving much faster. Try using them for long enough to understand the workflows before slinging fud.

These are both very efficient DEs when you use them the way they are designed.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Fyzzler]

You had me right up until I found they were using RPM. I had far too many RPM database corruptions and circular dependencies to even consider using any distribution that uses it, ever again.

I broke my arm once turning the crank on my Model T Ford. The experience was so horrible, that I will never purchase a Ford again.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Patch86]

Biggest surprise of that linked blog post was that MATE is less memory intensive than XFCE. Pretty embarrassing for XFCE's "light-weight" cred. Although of course both are miles and miles better than any of the big boys (KDE, Unity, Gnome).

That might make me rethink my next "revive old hardware" install. MATE is certainly the more visually appealing of the two. I wonder how they compare in other performance areas?

Re:Good to see the progress

[jones_supa]

But that's exactly what I was talking about: you have to switch off stuff to make it work. Windows works out of the box with all effects (with the Aero blurry glass effect and all) and file indexing turned on, on an Atom machine.

Re:Good to see the progress

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Exactly. I use a 2GHz/1GB Pentium M Thinkpad, and it's fast & stable under a typical KDE install in SimplyMepis, with its average load looking like this:
System Settings, QMMP, Konsole, a few Dolphin windows, TEA text editor, KeepNote
+1-3 of these: Firefox (15-25 tabs, approx 30 extensions), OpenOffice with 20-300Kb Writer file, Calibre, GIMP

I do have to note that some of it is because SimplyMepis tends to have better performance & hw compatibility than other distros I've tried, though ymmv and all that.

Re:Good to see the progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Are all you guys mad????? Why in hell would any sane person install a whole new distribution just to change the desktop environment?????? Is not XFCE in the repositories???? Cannot be those repositories be added????

Would you install a brand-new Windows because it has a different theme???? or would you install that theme in your CURRENT windows?????

Re:Good to see the progress

[Dcnjoe60]

But that's exactly what I was talking about: you have to switch off stuff to make it work. Windows works out of the box with all effects (with the Aero blurry glass effect and all) and file indexing turned on, on an Atom machine.

It doesn't on an XP class machine. If you have a computer capable of running Windows Aero, then KDE should work fine on it. But the AC has commented on his (her?) machine was an old XP class machine. That would mean a single core processor with 512KB to 1MB ram. Windows Vista/7/8 might install on such a machine, but it won't run well on it. KDE will install on it and will run well, once you configure it for a low resource machine.

Re:Good to see the progress

[rdnetto]

I've been using the latest version of KDE on a Centrino with 768 MB of RAM - complete with the designed for XP sticker. (My previous laptop died and this one is a temp until I get a new one.)
All you have to do is change a single setting to disable Desktop Effects and it runs fine.

Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[msobkow]

Excellent! It's about time -- not only Dolphin but the file browser widgets used by KDE applications have always been dog slow and tend to have synchronization problems between the file/directory tree and the file list panes.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Teun]

I've been using KDE since it came about and like many experienced the teething problems when KDE 4 came out.

But it was easy enough to continue using KDE3.5 until the worst was sorted and so I did.
As a long term user I am really surprised by your observation of Dolphin and it's widgets having been slow, as a matter of fact I feel you are outright trolling or at least spouting flamebait...

And what do you mean by synchronisation problems, that you might have to reload the tree in one application after you've edited things using another?

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

open /usr/share/doc
or /usr/bin

tell me what the response time is before you can see or click anything

now take back your "the man's trolling comment" and apologise to him.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[msobkow]

The most problematic is K3B, but to be honest I don't know if it's a problem with the underlying widgets or not.

I browse to a folder, burn off a pile of files, then delete the files that were successfully burned. The file tree on the left goes insanely out of sync with duplicate nodes, blank nodes, and sorting problems. As far as I know KDE uses messaging to synchronize file changes amongst it's widgets, so this should not happen.

As to the speed issue. C'mon, man, it takes like FIVE SECONDS to open moderately large folders. No other OS or desktop I've used on this hardware takes more than 1-2 seconds to do the same thing.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me any file manager of a similar class that can perform better and I'll take back my +1 of Teun's comment.

Dolphin may not be instantaneous but it's still the fastest of all file managers I've tried, and I've tried Thunar, PCManFM, ROX, etc...

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[marsu_k]

I don't know which distribution you are using - but at least on my laptop (which runs Arch and KDE SC 4.10), I just tried to open /usr/lib (Arch recently moved everything to /usr/bin and /usr/lib, everything in the "old" locations are symlinked there) - according to Dolphin, 3491 files and 169 folders totaling 1.8GB. It opened instantly. Granted, this is on an SSD, but I've never seen Dolphin take that long (apart from opening folders via SFTP, for obvious reasons). Also granted, many distros do a really half-assed job with KDE (keep it vanilla, let the user configure it).

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[AaronW]

I just opened /usr/bin and /usr/share/doc in Dolphin. It opened up instantly (under a second) in KDE 4.10. Of course I'm also running XFS with a SSD.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Teun]

A fraction of a second (0.25?), as I could have missed something I did try your 'test'.
/usr/share/doc/ contains 1935 directories, /usr/bin/ has one directory and 2157 files.

To complete the story, this is on a 18 months old Lenovo W520 laptop, with an i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.4GHz and with 8 GiB of RAM.
Obviously this is a reasonably powerful computer but even on a 4 y/o HP mini it works just as snappy as I could wish for.

Yes my rating of the OP still stands.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[rastos1]

In my experience the smb:// kioslave crashes often and fish:// (i.e. ssh) kioslave is quite slow to read directory content.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Shade Everdark]

I have trouble understanding how Dolphin is taking 5 seconds to open anything on your machine. As a counter-anecdote, to open any of the largest folders in my filesystem in Dolphin on my laptop takes perhaps a full second. Dolphin taking 5 seconds on anything is, in my humble experience, absolutely unheard-of. Even accessing large network shares takes only 3-4 seconds.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Teun]

I just opened one directory with 13,550 files and another with nearly 16,000, it is literally done in a split second. (KDE 4.10.5, Dolphin 2.2)
Your folders must be absolutely gigantic.

I haven't tried the K3B scenario you describe but as a keen reader of the forums I've never seen such or similar complaints.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[msobkow]

The problems had been showing up with Ubuntu 12.04.

I've since upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04 and haven't retested to see if the problems were fixed or not, because they were only annoyances, not show stoppers.

Overall this latest edition of KDE is much snappier than 12.04's had been.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[msobkow]

The KDE release with Ubuntu 13.04 fixes the problem (which had been opening /usr/share/java that used to take 5 seconds.)

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems here either (also on Arch & 4.10), and I'm using a laptop with a 500Gb sata drive

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Teun]

I must say there are faster file managers, KDE's own Krusader is one and the venerable Midnight Commander (mc) is another.

For options and user 'friendliness' there's possibly nothing worse than the Windows File Manager especially on Win7, luckily it's only available on one OS.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[msobkow]

K3B still exhibits the synchronization problem under Ubuntu 13.04.

As I said, it's an annoyance, not a show stopper. But it's been a rather long-lived annoyance.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[marsu_k]

Somewhat off-topic, but I figured there'd be some KDE users reading this - I've always wondered what's the difference between using fish:// and sftp://. I always use the latter, and in my experience it is somewhat reasonably fast, once it's able to negotiate a connection. Initially, when opening a remote location or doing something after a long period of inactivity, it can take some seconds.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recall correctly you need some special software on the server to run sftp://, fish:// sends a little script through ssh which then acts as your interface to the other machine.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[marsu_k]

Thanks, that makes sense. (FWIW, sftp support is included with OpenSSH, which I guess is the most popular implementation, but there are probably some admins that disable the functionality)

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I said "of a similar class" - mc is not in the same class as Dolphin, Thunar, et al.

I had never heard of Krusader though, I have to check that one out.

You also get a +1 from me on Windows 7's file manager being a PITA.. I personally have a hard time believing just how bad it is whenever I have to use it. I didn't even know it was possible to get something THAT wrong. Heck, I still don't know how it is. Some parts almost look like sabotage there.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

file browser widgets used by KDE applications have always been dog slow and tend to have synchronization problems between the file/directory tree and the file list panes.

Yes, I have been painfully aware of those synchronization problems for years. Have you seen any information that suggests that this problem has finally been fixed in 4.11?

For me, this has emerged as KDE's most severe, long-standing, unfixed bug. Put simply: Dolphin doesn't show the correct list of files in certain cases. The only workaround is to hit F5 every single time you care about seeing the correct list of files. This bug was first reported in 2008, and was still unfixed in KDE 4.10.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[jones_supa]

I have trouble understanding how Dolphin is taking 5 seconds to open anything on your machine.

I don't see his comment that unbelievable. Maybe there really are some machines on which a performance issue shows up in Dolphin.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had performance issues with local network mounts (SMB or NFS) that is apparently not CPU or network related. Some kind of timeout maybe...

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Dcnjoe60]

The most problematic is K3B, but to be honest I don't know if it's a problem with the underlying widgets or not.

I browse to a folder, burn off a pile of files, then delete the files that were successfully burned. The file tree on the left goes insanely out of sync with duplicate nodes, blank nodes, and sorting problems. As far as I know KDE uses messaging to synchronize file changes amongst it's widgets, so this should not happen.

As to the speed issue. C'mon, man, it takes like FIVE SECONDS to open moderately large folders. No other OS or desktop I've used on this hardware takes more than 1-2 seconds to do the same thing.

/. isn't a support forum and there isn't enough info to diagnose your problem anyway, but there is definitely something wrong with your setup if that is what you are experiencing. Probably the best thing to do would be to hit the forum of your distro and ask what is going on. I can open folders with 2,000-3,000 folders and files in it in less than a second and unlike others, I don't have an SSD. Opening and scanning remote shares does take a lot longer, though.

Dolphin's response is about the same as any other gui file manager I use on this system, with the exception of remote shares.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

About 0.25 second for /usr/share/doc, about 0.5 second for /usr/bin.

...or click anything

How about "It was fast enough that by the time I was ready to move the mouse to click on something, it was there"?

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's a problem with your system configuration? I'm running Kubuntu 12.10 on a 1TB drive, I've no problems like that at all. I've also got Kubuntu 12.04 running on my media centre/file server (which has a 5.25 year old CPU) and there's no problem there, either. Although, I haven't tried K3B on it, as it doesn't have an optical drive.

Re:Improvements to Dolphin performance?

[egr]

Just tried out of curiosity. Takes the same amount of time to spawn any window. If opening in an existing window it takes less then a second by far. Test was done on Fedore 19 in VM on standard 5400rpm HD. So yeah, I think the man either trolling or got some ancient piece of hardware.

A Note about Plasma

[CajunArson]

The Plasma Desktop, which provides the basic desktop experience for KDE (start menu, taskbar, widgets, etc.) is now going into long-term maintenance while the developers focus on Qt 5 & Qt Quick 2 for the new KDE frameworks. (P.S. --> This upgrade path will be massively less intrusive than what happened with the KDE 3 -> 4 upgrade so thankfully we should avoid the massive drama that happened during that transition)

Programs that are associated with the larger KDE project will still get upgrades and you'll see a gradual transition from Qt 4 to Qt 5 over time. It doesn't have to happen overnight and Qt 4 and Qt 5 applications can coexist just fine.

Basically: KDE is still being developed, but the plasma component of KDE 4 is now in maintenance mode while new developments shifts to Qt 5. The good news is that it is very mature software at this point, and there will still be bug fixes as needed.

Re:A Note about Plasma

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know if this has been built for Precise? Couldn't find the amd64 kubuntu build on launchpad yet.

Re:A Note about Plasma

[Tailhook]

This has the appearance of being planned by adults. Put a bow on Plasma and shift resources to the Qt 5 port, refactoring oversize bits and reducing interdependence.

At least it makes sense. Sometimes GUI/DE people fail to do that. Make sense, I mean.

Compilation

[Anonymous Coward]

Because releasing only uncompiled source would be too complicated for most users.

Re:Compilation

[Teun]

What about: for most user cases self-compiling is completely unnecessary?

Trinity seems to be kickin' as well

[jones_supa]

For anyone who's interested, the other day I noticed that Trinity Desktop , the KDE 3.5 spinoff, is also still alive. Just got a new release this summer. :)

Re:Trinity seems to be kickin' as well

[armanox]

Wait, they finally updated? I'm going to install that on my work machine (Fedora 18) on Friday (out-of-office tomorrow). KDE 3.x is still my favorite DE.

nepomuk can fuck right off

[X0563511]

I don't want integrated search and indexing. I know where I put my shit, because I put it there and can manage organization on my own. I don't need memory and CPU cycles wasted on crawling through my data.

This applies to whatever Gnome has for it, MS' desktop search etc just as strongly.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't just tell you where you put your "shit", you know.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[Teun]

That's one very good reason to use KDE, because (?) KDE is not a Microsoft, Canonical or Gimp product so the user is free to configure to his liking, like in your scenario you can simply disable the indexing.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[Teun]

Oops, Gnome, not Gimp :)

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[geek]

Oops, Gnome, not Gimp :)

Easy mistake since Gnome is now gimped.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[kbrannen]

I totally agree. Worse, you have to install nepomuk when you install KDE. Why? Shouldn't that be optional? If not, why isn't there a stub that does nothing?

So my normal prodedure when installing a new machine after it's up and running is to go to /usr/bin and "sudo chmod 000 nepo* akonadi*" and then reboot.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[Anonymous Coward]

So my normal prodedure when installing a new machine after it's up and running is to go to /usr/bin and "sudo chmod 000 nepo* akonadi*" and then reboot.

Heh. That's a nice idea.

I use Gentoo. One of its greatest strengths has been the semantic-desktop USE flag. Disable that, and goodbye Nepomuk. (You still spend hours compiling KDE, but at least Nepomuk, Akonadi, and friends are not in the mix.)

The sad thing is that the Gentoo KDE developers have said it gets to be harder and harder to support the semantic-desktop USE flag with each successive KDE version. They want to drop it in the future, but there's a movement afoot among several Gentoo users to keep the semantic-desktop USE flag available for KDE 4.11.

Re:nepomuk can fuck right off

[fast turtle]

Disabled does not keep it from wasting CPU cycles though. I'm using Gentoo and just installed KDE 4.10 and built it w/o nepomuk or the semantic-desktop crap. Hell the only reason I even installed KDE was for kate and ark. Nice tabbed text editor and a usable archive manager as Gentoo no longer includes the 7zip GUI tool.

Or...

[warrax_666]

.. better yet, buy an additional 2 or 4 GB of RAM. Given the prices, complaining about RAM usage(*) is absurd these days.

Btw, I'm impressed with how quckly the OP was able to try out 4.11 given that it hasn't reached most distributions yet...

(*) Unless you are are on a truly embedded/minimal platform.

Well put.

[warrax_666]

Hats off to you, Xir!

(*) Xir = gender-neutral Sir... I think?!?!

KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[Dimwit]

I've tried for years to like KDE, and I just can't. It's too *busy*. It's the first desktop I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use right away - I clicked on a button, and up popped "Activities". Creating a new activity left me with a blank screen and nothing to do. Everything is animated and glowing, with huge distracting icons and drop-shadows.

GNOME is all right. GNOME 3 might be weird, but at least it's trying to do something other than emulate Windows or Mac OS X. It's just too buggy for my tastes.

XFCE is all right too, but I was turned off by how haphazard and...unprofessional Xubuntu was. I didn't like having to explain to my eight year old nephew's mother why he was asking what "Gigolo" did, for example.

Unity, despite its many faults, comes with Ubuntu. Despite *its* many faults, Ubuntu is the only open source OS I've used that actually seems like an integrated product. With Unity on Ubuntu, you don't get things like "Gigolo" which is just stupid or "lxrandr" which is inscruitable. You don't get a million different ways to customize things down to where you can make your desktop look like an angry fruit salad. That may or may not be a good thing.

Also, say what you will about Mir but Ubuntu is at least trying to make an integrated system. The other desktops are really poorly integrated with the rest of the system, resulting in my having to explain to my father "No, you're using Debian" "I thought I was using Linux" "You are, it's the Debian distribution" "Why is this called GNOME Terminal then?" "That's the desktop environment" "This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.

I hate to say it, but the non-baseline-Ubuntu distributions are not really doing a great job of making a desktop operating system. Like was said the recent thread on Fedora Core's newly-proposed model: they're just a bunch of products from different people thrown together into one mass. I appreciate the amount of effort the distributors go to, but Ubuntu has gone just a little bit farther and made something that feels like a modern, unified operating system. Some people don't like that, but a lot do.

Re:KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[jones_supa]

GNOME is all right. GNOME 3 might be weird, but at least it's trying to do something other than emulate Windows or Mac OS X. It's just too buggy for my tastes.

GNOME3 with the program "Maximus" (maximizes each window and hides the title bar) is brilliant for a simplistic one-window-at-time desktop. The Ubuntu GNOME Remix works great for this purpose. Also Mutter seems to be slightly faster than Compiz.

Re:KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree about KDE, but it's a matter of taste. I like my desktop (and apps in general) being "busy". It's the computer equivalent of "Ooh, lots of buttons, look! It's shiny!".

But I agree wholeheartedly about nerds in general being terribly bad at making polished operating systems. What's worse, they seem to criticize any effort to do so - Ubuntu/Canonical have brought it upon themselves with some of their actions to be fair, but I couldn't believe it when I read all the crap everyone threw on elementaryOS when the news arrived here... I'm like: Seriously? So what if it's inspired on OS X? Does NOBODY here give a crap at all about having a proper, well integrated design?

Re:KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'm having no trouble with KDE, but I am keeping an eye on RazorQT/LXDE-QT, which will likely be my preferred "alternative" DE for constrained-resource systems.

Re:KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[Dcnjoe60]

KDE does have the reputation of being busy. But, it also has the ability to be reconfigured to however you want it to be. Think of the KDE desktop as a canvas with a suggested interface. You can alter it to look an act like Gnome 2 or 3, or XFCE or Unity, or Mac OS X or Windows or some combination of them or just about anything you want. You can also turn off things you don't want. Don't like activities, don't use them (remove the widget). Likewise for all sorts of features. It really is a very flexible and powerful system.

But like any tool, particularly a powerful tool, to use it well requires a learning curve. KDE is usable as it is right out of the box, but that "experience" isn't ideal for most people. Rarely is a one size fits all solution the right solution for most people. The problem is because of this, many people drop KDE before they have a chance to discover what it can really do for them.

To be fair, I've seen some really hideous desktops created with KDE, but they weren't for my use. The users who created them did so to fit the way they wanted to work. That is probably the number one advantage to KDE, it gives the user the power to create the desktop exactly how they want it to fit the way they work instead of having to change they work to fit the desktop. Of course that power comes at a price. KDE is more complex than other desktops, or at least it seems that way at first.

Re:KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and Unity

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

First: you should try a KDE-specific distro like SimplyMepis or OpenSUSE, as they focus on integrating & polishing -- Debian deliberately leaves environments in their default state for users to customize/integrate. Debian is also famously *not* for newbies; if you want your father to give Linux a try, put him in front of a distro that specializes in the environment, is user-friendly and has a newbie-welcoming community. (SimplyMepis again is what I strongly recommend for KDE 4 -- you'd have to ask around for suggestions regarding other environments.)

90% of your rant didn't actually apply to KDE (I'm not even sure how much it applied to recent releases of the other environments)... However, the only reason "Activities" popped up because you evidently clicked on the wrong button. (That I feel is the KDE team's fault; I did the same thing, since they have it in the corner and the normal menu off by one space.) That said, when I did a new install to test SimplyMepis 12 a few months ago, I noticed the "activities" icon in the panel alongside the normal menu, deleted it, and moved on.

Looking at my desktop, which is pretty standard for KDE 4.5+, it's no more complex or confusing than Windows 7 is: all of the windows follow the same visual theme, icons are consistent; the programs/windows have the same sorts of titles that they would in any OS: System Settings, Firefox, Open Office. You won't find anything different from Windows 7 or OS X in that department. LXRandR isn't in KDE -- we control our monitors through System Settings, and optionally can run a utility specific to KDE that lets us do it from the system tray if we want to.

*Any* operating system or environment a person sits down to that's markedly different from the one(s) they're used to is going to require some degree of adjustment & learning new terms. That said, most of your reported conversation with your father could just as easily apply to Ubuntu/Unity:

"...you're using Ubuntu." "I though I was using Linux." "You are, it's the Ubuntu distribution." "[What is Unity, then?]" "That's the desktop environment."

"This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.

Average/non-geek users of KDE 4 don't know about it either, because terms like "X-Windows" don't appear -- just ones like "display" or "monitors." Relatively few technical terms appear these days, for that matter.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "modern" as you claim the term applies to Ubuntu when colorful looks have been trending. Similar for your use of "unified," considering KDE, Trinity, MATE, etc each apply a color scheme & theme to virtually all windows. (Snarky aside: "unless by 'unified' you mean all users locked to the devs' preferred look?") Just as importantly, they let their userbase share themes regardless of what distro we're in, helping ensure that all users of an environment can have the desktops be as modern, retro, colorful, or drab as we wish... After all, we're all Linux OS users first & foremost, and which distro (customized copy of Linux) we use is and should be secondary.

I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I've become increasingly disappointed in KDE's failure to fix bugs and annoyances, and emphasizing new flashy things instead.

Every single day I am affected by the failure of Dolphin to automatically update its file list when changes occur (in some situations -- it's a flaky bug). I've seen many different reports of this bug as far back as 2008. The bug keeps getting closed and then reopened over and over and over. (Google "dolphin doesn't automatically update".) As of Mint 15 KDE (released in July), it's still broken.

Yes, I've long since learned to hit F5 every time in Dolphin. But after years of this bug, I am really looking forward to the day when I can have such a basic feature working correctly. I hate seeing all this work being done on new stuff without clearing the backlog first -- especially for bugs that cause the tools to report incorrect information. How is that not a critical emergency bug?

Re:I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[jones_supa]

This is another example why in my opinion Linux desktops should cool down reinventing themselves and focus more on quality assurance. Actually Unity and KDE 4.11 are right now quite stable platforms -- keep it so and fix the bugs. :)

Re:I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[marcroelofs]

I recently did my yearly tryout of KDE (Kubuntu) but was struggling with the same issues as last times. These are old problems:

- multimonitor setting do not stick. You have to compose a shellscript with xrandr commands yourself and autostart it.
- panels on multimonitor do not stick. I could get it to work but is was complicated and forgot how I did it.
- font rendering in Firefox is ugly as hell. This too is an old problem, might be Firefox' fault but only KDE has this problem.

Now on XFCE

Re:I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. I'm beginning to think that one reason that I'm a happy KDE user is that I have no use for Dolphin. I get at files with the likes of vim, less, grep, and find. If I want to view a file with some kind of GUI application like okular, gwenview, or konqueror, it's almost always through the Bash prompt. No Dolphin, no worries. I never saw the point.

Re:I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[armanox]

1 & 2 I have not experienced (running KDE 4.10 on Fedora 18 right now at work with dual monitors, and change the arrangement every now and then)
3 - Firefox is built against GTK, not QT. Check your GTK settings.

Re:I'm increasingly disappointed in KDE quality

[Anonymous Coward]

font rendering in Firefox is ugly as hell. This too is an old problem, might be Firefox' fault but only KDE has this problem.

I finally figured out the secret to good font rendering in KDE:

System Settings / Common Appearance and Behavior / Application Appearance / Fonts
Use anti-aliasing: Enabled
Use anti-aliasing / Configure...
Use sub-pixel rendering: RGB
Hinting style: None

The key is to set the Hinting style to "none". That suddenly turns all the font rendering from sucky to good.

KDE is still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see that the KDE community is still updating the software. I played with KDE once. maybe I should try running KD and Linux in a virtual machine now that I have a 2 GHz desktop computer with 2 GB of RAM. i know, the computer is slow by today's standards. lol. i have a hard time playing most MMORPGs that came out in the past few years. but that topic is for another thread.

ok, later everyone

May have been true

[Dcnjoe60]

I installed Kubuntu

That is your problem right there. Kubuntu is a terrible KDE distribution, possibly the worst out there. You'd get better performance, memory usage, features and stability from any other KDE distro.

Various reviews of Kubuntu 13.04 would seem to indicate that is not the case anymore.