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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!
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
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!
Never trust a statistics that you didn't falsify yourself...
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.
"I hear complaints about size + complexity and hence about insecurity, but no more specific rationale given for them yet. "
That's because the complaints are unfounded.
The libraries are the same size or smaller than their 4.x counterparts. Very little new functionality was added, as the focus was on modularity and Qt5 support. The 4.x development cycles were about adding necessary *missing* frameworks, while 5.x is about refinement. So size is a bogus measurement, particular as many pieces were upstreamed into Qt5 to reduce duplication of code.
Complexity is actually lowered. Before we had libraries that had complex internal interactions and were conglomerations of multiple topics. "core" is not a great definition for a library. ;) With each library now focused on specific tasks and with each library having well defined dependencies, the complexity of each library has greatly *lowered*.
So people making the size/complexity comments (which is news to me, actually :) are simply not sufficiently informed.
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.
KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around
LOL, the only reason C++ is tolerable is Qt and only if you avoid screwing with resources yourself and let QObjects handle the mess, it's still full of leftover ugly from the 70s that neither Java, C# nor Swift choose to handle the same way. The problem is that creating a good language, a good compiler and a comprehensive system library (practically a must today IMO) is a huge job and without a big company like Sun/Oracle (Java), Microsoft (C#) or Apple (Swift) backing it you'll never get off the ground.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, what you're saying is... the project is a basket case?