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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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. :)

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.