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KDE Releases Frameworks 5
KDE Community (3396057) writes The KDE Community is proud to announce the release of KDE Frameworks 5.0. Frameworks 5 is the next generation of KDE libraries, modularized and optimized for easy integration in Qt applications. The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application.
Version five of the desktop shell, Plasma, will be released soon, and packages of Plasma-next and KDE Frameworks 5 will trickle into Ubuntu Utopic over the next few days. There's a Live CD of Frameworks 5 / Plasma-next, last updated July 4th.
Congratulations to all the contributors, and thank you for all your hard work on this project!
Sounds like more security holes and opportunities for malware to hijack your app. Think OpenSSL.
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:KDE_repositories#KDE_Frameworks_5_.26_Plasma_5 has the links to install KDE 5
KDE 4 is fucking sweet. It was the nicest desktop env I've ever used. But then I tried KDE 5 this morning, and it isn't just fucking sweet, but it's fucking A, too. It makes KDE 4 look like shitty shit shit. KDE 5 is fast, it looks fab, and the apps are amazing. I haven't tried GNOME 3 in a long time, so I installed that today, too. Jesus H. Christ, it's still fucking horrible! It's slow, it looks like shit, and some of the apps would crash on me each time I tried to use them. I haven't had a KDE 4 app crash out on me in four years. I had GNOME 3 apps crashing on me every few minutes! The KDE krew can get shit done, and they get it done right. They don't piss on their hands like the GNOME peeps do. GNOME 3 sure as fuck isn't getting any better, and now that KDE 5 is out there, GNOME 3 looks even worse now. GNOME 3 is the shitty shit shit, while KDE 5 is the best there has ever been.
That's the question I ask every time I see a new release of software these days. We seem to be going backwards fast.
Capture: screwed
How appropriate.
You clearly don't know how the Linux desktop market is organized.
KDE 4 is the big player. It has 57% of the Linux desktop market.
Unity is next. It has 14%.
Xfce has 9%.
Cinnamon has 5%.
MATE has 5%.
GNOME 2 has 4%.
LXDE has 2%.
The remaining 4% is spread among GNOME 3, CDE, WindowMaker, enlightenment and other minor players all with under 1% share.
So as you can see, KDE basically is the Linux desktop market. Most Linux users today are using it.
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_desktop_environments
Fine. Piss off. I'll enjoy a well designed, well factored and actively developed platform.
I hear complaints about size + complexity and hence about insecurity, but no more specific rationale given for them yet. Maybe the designers have taken this into account and the design incorporates new features for safety and security?
The least we should do is ask. Of course, if there are no such design features and safety + security are based entirely on "We don't make mistakes" wishful thinking, then you'd be right. But they should at least be given a chance to respond.
1. Excitement that a big change is coming to my favorite DE.
2. Nostalgia for days gone by when a direct link to an ISO on slashdot would have caused a server outage.
Not likely. KDE is actually getting things right these days.
I remember the first time I compiled it at version 0.6.3 - It was a hopelessly pathetic win95 clone. I was sure it would go nowhere. Then the 1.0 release came along and it was clear it had a future. I don't much care for KDE myself, but I do note it's contribution.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around, because the best apps and GUI frameworks around are built using C++. KDE 5 is fast, it's stable, and it just plain great software to use, all thanks to C++.
Then there's Gnome. They're still pissing around with C, JavaScript, and their homegrown Vala poopfest. And Gnome is a total disaster these days! That's what happens when you use inferior languages instead of a professional language like C++. C++ means your code is good, which means that your libraries and apps are good. Other languages mean that your code is bad, which means that your libraries and apps are bad.
There's one lesson here and that is to use C++ if you want to have the greatest software known to humankind. C++ is where it's at, baby!
If the share is 0.2% does it matter? There are more reading this than using that.
What's the market share of a Bugatti Veryon" Or a Lamborghini? You "market share" drones need to move to Idaho, so you can get a license plate that brags about "Famous Potatoes" to put on your Toyota Corolla.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
KDE is probably the least dumbed down desktop environment there is.
It's really massively customizable in ways suitable for power users.
It is a shame the KDE team don't make a bigger fan fair when announcing something like this, maybe some nice crisp screenshots of some of the graphical changes or a screencast (yes I have seen some of the youtube ones by others). Just a thought!
KDE is customizable. If you want simple (some will call it "dumbed down") you can do it. If you want all sorts of options, you can do that as well. If you want social media integration, go for it. If you want a terminal and some text files to edit, you can do that as well. Want it to behave like Windows, Mac OS, or even iOS? You can do that too.
Customization is KDE's biggest strength. It can be anything and everything you want.
What's been removed,dumbed down,made incompatible?
You know this is a release of the Frameworks, right?
Nothing has been dumbed down, kde3support is gone but other than that KF5 is mostly source-compatible with kdelibs4.
Capture. You mean Captcha? The thing that's as relevant as tea leaves and astrology?
That there is no more meaning than the one you imbue?
That random, unrelated, almost always irrelevant word jumble to which some posters ascribe meaning out of feelings very similar to religion and winning the lottery?
Is that what you meant?
Where does one acquire these things that are given away, made by few, and in basements or 2nd story lofts? I heard Italy is in Hard Times, but even Charlie Chaplin had to pay people. UA for a!!
So will I. Let me know when one arrives.
Never trust a statistics that you didn't falsify yourself...
source: Debain Popularity Contest (popcon)
Gnome Shell: 32% (https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnome-shell)
XFCE: 12% (https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfce4)
KDE: 10% (https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=kde-baseapps)
MATE: 1% (https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mate-desktop)
Cinnamon: 0.3% (https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=cinnamon)
Of course this is biased for many reasons, first and foremost because many Debian installs don't use a desktop. Mint and Ubuntu (both Debain derivatives) are much more popular than Debian itself. But those are the best "hard" numbers I could come across.
My own wild guess, based on observation of the people around me, would be something like
Unity: 60%
Cinnamon/Mate: 20%
XFCE: 5%
Gnome: 5%
KDE: 5%
Others: 5%
But don't quote me on that.
Exactly, I recently needed some files from an old hard drive and found myself in a KDE 3.5 installation. It was absolutely brilliant: fast, stable, no 'usability improvements' that removed features. Apps like Basket that never had a stable release in KDE4. I honestly don't know what it is that we have gained with KDE 4. Rotating widgets? Anyway, I still love KDE 4, and KDE is still (IMHO) the best desktop out there, but was it worth the transition to 4?
I've tried a lot of desktops over the years and always returned to KDE as the most able to be useful when I need it to and stay the fuck out of the way the rest of the time. (Unity, despite its reputation, is good at that too.) But the love was no longer really there. Like a favorite old workhorse that you just no longer really ride for the pleasure of it alone.
So I've not kept track of KDE 5 developments, and honestly I expected to be way underwhelmed. It was, after all, supposed to be mainly a port of the same old thing to the new Qt 5.
But I just tried the live CD linked in the article and, uh, whoa. It looks so *tidy*. Full of that orderly neatness that Gnome, for all its faults, has generally been better at than KDE. And I find myself excited for the first time in a long while, and that's a very nice feeling to rediscover.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Hmmm...
1) No (working) color management
2) Taskbar overinflates icons when its vertical (no more ability to control it since 4.x) and doesn't care what the panel's max icon size is set to.
3) Taskbar switches between grouping and non-grouping, from minute to minute
4) Very loose UI design leaves me less able to anticiapate how KDE will react to my input, and I can't tell it, for instance, to underline single-click widgets.
5) Activities - A huge waste that detracted from bug fixes and design consistency, and even scared away a lot of the technical users.
6) The pretense that Dolphin is anywhere near as flexible as (the old) Konqueror.
7) Can't control keyboard layout from login screen
8) Can't control trackpad speed
9) Decreasing stability.
I have to use KDE every day. Quite frankly, it only has the "Special Window Settings" really going for it. I'd trade all the rest of the KDE features for a Unity that had Dash replaced with a launcher menu.
I did enjoy KDE3/4, even grew to like Unity until I had to abandon it because of the spyware. Now on Gnome Shell and it's surprisingly nice once you've added a couple of extensions. However this is a very interesting release. I love the modularisation. It would be nice to be able to install a KDE app without it pulling in half the desktop libraries. This could make it the framework to write cross platform and cross distro apps in. Put a Python wrapper around each library and it could make things super simple to write desktop apps. Almost as nice as being able to drop into BASIC on the Acorn Archimedes and write a desktop GUI app in minutes.
Phillip.
The reason Basket never saw an updated release had nothing to do with Plasma and everything to do with the difficult of moving from Qt3 to Qt4. Qt4 was a massive change and not all applications, particularly complex ones with few developers working in their spare time, made the jump.
Blame the right things for your complaints.
"I honestly don't know what it is that we have gained with KDE 4."
A better "run command" dialog, a much improved window manager with amazing compositing, better screen management, bluetooth support, network management that didn't suck, hotplug device support, a more configurable taskbar that also includes launchers ('pinned' apps), pervasive search, shells for small-screen devices .. I could go on and on .. and that's only Plasma. The libraries also delivered huge improvements all over the place.
Of course, for people who have made up their minds to rag on the 4.x series will make ridiculous claims like "rotating widgets were the only new thing". Get with reality, even if it .. no, ESPECIALLY if .. it runs counter to your pet ideas.
Sure, using mature, well-tested, well-supported, widely-deployed libraries from a reputable source is always going to be less secure than writing your own code...
I just hope KDE 5 doesn't ruin the KDE desktop like Gnome 3 and Windows 8 ruined their desktops. KDE is the last, bright, shining hope for getting work done on Linux!
The word plasma was never mentioned in my comment.
Sorry, I had most of this stuff in KDE 3.5? Yes, it was under different apps, some of them not part of KDE, but worked fine for me. And if all of this is so much better, why does it work so much worse?
Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!
However, one thing I want to make clear, I have been using KDE4 for years exclusively (right up to this day), I have liked it a lot despite all the shortcomings. I went to the conferences, I contributed to KDE Look (remember that? That actually had good content back when there were still users), etc. And only now that I've been back to KDE 3.5 for a bit, I realized just how shitty KDE has become compared to what it was.
Every new addition to KDE gives me one more reason not to use it.
It's interesting if you look at the amount of people using KDE, they probably aren't complaining, only a small group of people, who are never happy are complaining. On Gnome there aren't that many who complain, because most people don't use it. Only this gives a false impression as if gnome would be better. But I think it would be better, if gnome had never been designed, Diversity of course is nice on the linux platform. But it is one of the reasons linux has such a low usage on the desktop...
Lets hope they cleanup in "KDE" 5 series then...
Basket is an interesting case. I'm not sure it was ever an official KDE app or even developed within the KDE community. The old website is still hosted on KDE, but the code now seems to be over at Github and untouched for a few years. They do seem to have a working Qt4 port though, they even had beta releases, but I guess the devs ran out of motivation. That's one big reason to develop apps *within* the KDE community, anyone with a KDE developer account could then offer to take over maintaining the project to move it forward. Perhaps someone will get motivated to contact the last author and offer to take over and move it into the KDE infrastructure.
1) No (working) color management
Not sure what you mean by this. I've never found an issue customising my desktop colours. I stare at a screen all day so making sure the desktop doesn't blind me is one of the first things I change on a new installation.
2) Taskbar overinflates icons when its vertical (no more ability to control it since 4.x) and doesn't care what the panel's max icon size is set to.
Just tested this, and my icons didn't change size at all when I switched the taskbar vertical
3) Taskbar switches between grouping and non-grouping, from minute to minute
You can change the grouping behavior in the taskbar settings. Again, once set I've not noticed any bugs in this
4) Very loose UI design leaves me less able to anticiapate how KDE will react to my input, and I can't tell it, for instance, to underline single-click widgets.
I've never even considered doing this (I just change things to be double click as that's my preference). Have you asked a KDE dev if you might just be missing an option somewhere?
5) Activities - A huge waste that detracted from bug fixes and design consistency, and even scared away a lot of the technical users.
I'm not really sure what this has to do with anything. Are you still referring to KDE 4.1 or something?
6) The pretense that Dolphin is anywhere near as flexible as (the old) Konqueror.
Dolphin isn't Konqueror, so that's a bit of a silly comparison. Konquorer still exists as well. I also find dolphin to have lots of features that are very hard to trip over unless you know what you're looking for, so it may well be that bad UX in dolphin is more the issue here than feature set.
7) Can't control keyboard layout from login screen
Never tried, so I'll take your word for it
8) Can't control trackpad speed
Never tried
9) Decreasing stability.
This is just silly and makes it look like you may be trolling. The stability is pretty darn good now and has been getting better and better since 4.2 came out.
Where does one acquire these things that are given away, made by few, and in basements or 2nd story lofts? I heard Italy is in Hard Times, but even Charlie Chaplin had to pay people. UA for a!!
Some times you just have to sacrifice in order to bask in the glow of using the popular thing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm completely serious.
I HATE KDE4. I still use Trinity wherever I can because that was the KDE that I liked.
I don't care about what whiz bang technology went intro this. I don't care how many man years were invested. I don't care who else likes it. I will reserve judgement until I use it myself. If it's not as good as KDE3.5, I'll stick with Trinity.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If it could just mount network shares on the fly like Gnome do it would be perfect. I'm tired of getting these "You can only select local files" in non-KDE applications like LibreOffice and I can't beleive this issue is still not fixed. And if you're lucky to have a native KDE application that supports network files, instead of working directly on the remote server it makes a local copy in a temporary folder and when you're finished it uploads it on the server. (quite annoying when it's a 2gb file)
Of course there are workarounds, I use smb4k and most of the time it works great. But in 2014 I shouldn't have to use this kind of workaround for something as simple as accessing a remote share in my desktop environment, it should work out of the box.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253547
As a user of FreeBSD, I can safely say that by the time they incorporate this person into their "ports system', Frameworks 7 will have been introduced.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
So, what you're saying is... the project is a basket case?
Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!
If that's the case, then why is everone - Apple and Microsoft included - copying what KDE did in KDE4? KDE is still extremely relevant and really on the forefront of the tech.
On top of that, they're still the only ones that have targetted multiple kinds of devices with a unified programming experience and able to deliver customized UIs for each device type (e.g. netbook vs desktop vs tablet...)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
1) Color management refers to controlling the color accuracy of the display. Typically this will involve importing an ICC file, or performing a manual calibration sequence. KDE has a not-half-finished module (not included in the core package) for System Settings panel, whereas gnome and unity are fully functional and included by default.
2) You're probably not setting the DPI to match your display and using the default that results in text becoming tiny on higher-res displays.
3) It occurs when the setting is on "group when taskbar is full". It will switch back and forth when there are a few dozen windows on the desktop.
4) You can switch to double-click (as I usually do), but then you have a situation where, for instance, the icons on the main System Settings panel are doulble-click, but going down a level, say into Application Appearance, gives you another set of icons that are presented the same way but are single-click. Sometimes this switch shows up *inside* applications, making the overall UI feel goofy and inconsistent. On the one hand, single-click everywhere can be inconvenient and risky, whereas their implementation of double click is VERY unprofessional. They could simply show an underline on mouseover if the object is single-click and be done with it, but meaningful ques for the user are not this project's strong suit.
5) Yeah... really they should give people a way to get that sh!t out of the way; Better yet, choose a sensible default and leave it disabled so it isn't sticking wacky-useless icons everywhere.
6) The last time I tried, the new Konqueror's kio integrations were broken. The fact is that they trashed their two best-loved apps: Konqueror and Amarok.
[...]
9) Having used KDE since 2000, I'd say the project has a general problem with deterioration. They used to be the most reliable desktop, but lately it seems more like Gnome2.
Woohoo! Long live that which is not GNOME. Long live that which gives me more widgets for my Qt apps. Love live KDE!
LOL, I hate to be pedantic but I LOVE cars. Lamborghini is not a car, they are a manufacturer. They have several models, some are over a million, some can be had for slightly under 200k if you look carefully.
Bugatti makes a Veyron, not a Veryon. Current models are going for over 1.5m IIRC. Easy typo to make but it is what put me into pedantic mode. The market share thing with a model and then just a manufacturer is what threw it over the edge. Nothing personal. We all do silly things like that. I probably made a few mistakes that pedants can get me for in my correction of your post. :P
Have a nice day. Heheh. :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Suitably smitten, I accept my comeuppance!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Suitably smitten, I accept my comeuppance!
No no no! It was not a comeuppance and you should not feel smitten. It was just a friendly helpful reminder. BTW, your point in your original post was perfectly valid and I agree with it. :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen