Submitted by The KDE team has released the first beta of KDE 4.2, slated for release coming January. Quite a lot of new features have been added, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This release also makes a lot of strides to feature parity with KDE 3.x, by adding those small little features that KDE 3.x users are barely aware of, but which were missed in KDE 4.0/4.1, such as taskbar grouping, multiple rows in the taskbar, panel auto-hiding, a traditional icon desktop through ‘full-screen’ foderview, and so on.
It looks very impressive. Here’s to hoping that this is the one that I can actually recommend to clients and friends.
I am currently using kde 4.1 and the main missing feature for me is that kde and/or xorg are incapable of using a laptop with an external monitor in clone mode with each screen retaining its respective native resolution and the interface being scaled appropriately for the native resolution of each screen.
My netbook (medion akoya) has an intel graphics card where this works ok in windows. It’s the only part of the laptop experience where it works better in windows. Everything else from suspend to boot time to general responsiveness works much better in Mandriva with kde 4.1. Here’s to hoping that this will soon be fixed.
If anybody has a laptop and an external monitor working in the setup I have described, I would love to know how you did it.
I know this isn’t want you want to hear, but with the nVidia graphics card on my MBP, external monitor is quite painless. Not through anything that KDE does, but nVidia’s configuration tool, it can be quick and (relatively) easy. It still has to be set manually, but no restart of X or anything is required. I was actually rather impressed – pessimist that I am, I did not expect it to be that seamless. It still falls short of the plug and play of doing it under OSX, however.
Good luck with that intel chipset.
So you are actually able to have one resolution on the laptop and a different one on the external monitor? If this is the case, and if I can´t solve this in the next couple of months, I will look for a laptop with a built-in nvidia chip.
I like the fact that my netbook did not need one single proprietary driver to function, so I am actually hoping that this can be fixed as otherwise I really like the hardware.
Thanks for your input
Well, very good news and looking forward to January. However, I don’t think I’d call the complete absence of power management, among other things, a “small little feature”. It’s a crucial component of any modern DE. Of course from one POV this doesn’t matter, if you treat KDE 4.1.x and 4.2.x as works in progress and beta, which is very probably how one should even though one might have had to stick with KDE 3.5 or switch to Gnome to get day to day stuff done reliably. But the problem is that the world seems not to see it like that and so far, anyway, I’m rather worried that KDE 4’s rather uncertain birth may have tarnished the project’s image.
Well you’ll doubtless be pleased to learn that KDE 4.2 does come with power management facilities. I have just installed the beta, and the capabilities seem pretty complete to me, which is all good news for me and my laptop!
You sound like you’re a bit concerned about the future of KDE, so I’d recommend taking a look at the beta – it’s very compelling stuff!
I think he’s just referring to the boondoggle with regards to releasing the 4.0 release with a stable release tag/number instead of beta release tag/number.
There are still many who are not happy with the KDE community decision to release beta software with a stable release tag, which the early releases of OS X still receive criticism for.
I don’t think anyone really doubted that the KDE4 series would turn out alright, many just don’t like having naming conventions violated. I’ll admit I am one of the critics of their decision and I think that they made a mistake by not releasing with Developer Release tags instead and that this release should be the KDE 4.0 release but I guess that is water under the bridge now. KDE 4.2 is going to be the first release to really show the KDE 4 series potential. I think most everyone agreed about that last year even. KDE 4.3 will probably be the first release capable of Enterprise class stability, although many will probably wait until the KDE 4 series is completely stable which won’t happen until late 2010 (4.5)/early 2011 (4.6).
KDE 3.5.x still seems to work well for most people.
I guess I can be considered of being somewhat critical, but I was critical about it because some things did not work as adviced, and it would have been more upfront to LESSEN the hype about KDE4 done by some KDE developers.
The problems and bugs get lower and lower by each release but it still feels not 100% ready. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer the KDE approach any time over Gnome, but I think aside from the pointless comparison to other projects the KDE team should have be more self-critical.
Being self-critical is a good thing.
Are you lying on purpose? PowerDevil http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/PowerDevil?content=85078 is there and works very well — even in KDE 4.1 (I use it with openSUSE 11.1). Starting with 4.2 it’s officially part of KDE.
Throwing around accusations of this kind is pretty immature and never helpful. I have KDE 4 on Debian and there is no power management worth the name. There might be tomorrow, but not today. Your OpenSuSE 11.1 has been unavailable for about 99 per cent of the time since KDE 4 series was launched so I am unclear what point you are trying to make.
Yes, Power Devil is well known to be the future but it has not arrived yet. Google around and you’ll see that power management features either absent or not working (via trying to bodge the 3.5 stuff on 4) on KDE 4.0.x or 4.1.x has been a frequent hassle.
But let’s not get hooked up on power. The crux here is that the difference between a DE (or anything else, in fact) which is usable and one which is not can be surprisingly small. Often all it takes is one to two missing features and bang, you’ve lost a chunk of your userbase because those users rate some features much more highly than the devs assume. That’s one reason that careful research into users and their wants/foibles is so important. You need to know what matters and what doesn’t, not just to you but to your users too.
That’s Debian’s fault. PowerDevil has been posted to kde-apps.org in July. It works on KDE 4.1. It’s the distributor’s responsibility to package and distribute apps.
My point is that PowerDevil is here since July. SUSE is capable of bundling it. When Debian does not bundle it with KDE 4.1, it’s not KDE’s fault.
It has arrived months ago: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/PowerDevil?content=85078
About the first line on that link states:
“PowerDevil is part of kdebase from 4.2 on”
We are not yet at the point of an official release of KDE 4.2. Nor, clearly, do all distros yet have PowerDevil. Saying that PowerDevil is out in part and on some platforms is a long way from saying it is fully available, out of beta and generally reliable, and has been since July. I’d suggest, on the contrary, that this won’t really apply till 2009 and until then this aspect of KDE 4’s functionality has a question mark over it and in some case it is absent. If you want to play around with definitions or show that you’re so leet with an 11.1, that’s fine by me. But it really alters nothing. Most users are not beta-testers or devs and, besides, most don’t run SuSE anyway. They’ll use what their distro comes with, or doesn’t.
And you clearly failed to grasp what the parent said, that PowerDevil is out and released in full. That the stable application will get bundled with the next KDE release does not change the fact that it has been avaliable since July.
That some distributions fail to include it are plainly a distribution issue, like all other software they fail to include.
So how exactly is it KDE’s fault that some distros do not include any of the available power management solutions that DO exist for KDE4?
It isn’t KDE’s fault and no one has claimed it is. But if we could leave aside the religious maniacs who always turn up whenever KDE and Gnome are mentioned on OSNews, the original point is that the hitherto absent “small little features” claimed in the summary are in fact quite large features in some eyes, including mine. It’s the use of the airbrush that bugged me. A photoshopping of reality.
Nor am I inclined to fall for the baloney that because Power Devil has been available to some people, in some state, therefore it was been available, finished and stable generally. It has not been, period, and insofar as it’s been available at all, it’s equally clear that on some distros this has only happened very recently.
As for the distro I use, when I last updated, about two weeks ago, there was no power control stuff for KDE4 which actually worked, at least on my PC, and there never has been. For that reason, I don’t currently use KDE4. I’m a user of KDE normally, and this really shouldn’t turn into another case of KDE windbags being unable to handle the remotest suggestion that all is not perfect in the garden of earthly delights that is their particular DE. Except that on OSNews, it so often does of course. Nothing more to say, so here endeth my tale.
And is this part of an officiel kde* package?
No?
This reasoning you can INCLUDE ALL OF THE KDE-APPS MAN.
This is an insane reasoning. Do you claim that ALL the kde apps have the same quality?
It really makes no sense at all if they are external towards the KDE core team!
Or panel autohide. Apparently almost nobody is using it, but for those of us who do, it is pretty important to have a bar that isn’t shown the whole time(hear this GNOME?) and that will come up by moving the mouse to wherever it should be.
The only thing I’m mussing now is true transparency in konsole.
There is if you edit the profile and you need composting, yes you DO need composting.
Just to clarify the above post – you need compositing enabled and working, then you open konsole and do Settings menu -> edit current profile -> appearance tab -> edit… -> change background transparency slider and apply. This also works for the Yakuake drop-down console. Nice 🙂
This is true transparency which I do not like. Browser (Opera, Konqueror) as konsole’s background looks really bad.
Er… settings/edit current profile, select Appearance tab, select a scheme, click Edit button, drag transparency slider to the right.
Proper translucency in Konsole is there in 4.2 beta 1:
Settings -> Edit Current Profile
Appearance Tab -> Click on the Edit button the Color Scheme section.
Move the opacity slider …
Depending on the phase of the moon, you may need to restart Konsole for the translucency to kick in.
But it is there, and it does work. Huzzah.
Installs Kubuntu KDE4.1
Opens browser, opens dolphin
Opens another browser… freezee…..
reboots
repeats steps above
installs ubuntu
You missed the bit where you helpfully reported the bug so that it can be fixed! 😉
Nah, he missed the flame from a KDE fanboy saying KDE is stable, its the linux distro’s faulty packages of KDE which are unstable.
Compare http://www.flickr.com/photos/19616885@N00/2991042741/ to http://www.flickr.com/photos/19616885@N00/2991047111/ and see for yourself that Kubuntu ships broken KDE packages. It has also been acknowledged by a Kubuntu team member that the KDE packages are at least partially (and I quote from https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/292473 ) “crippled”.
Thanks a lot. See you on openSUSE — offering the “best KDE 4 experience” (quote from ArsTechnica: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080620-first-look-opensuse-1… ).
Yes, I’d got the impression that Ubuntu had been forcing their own methods like Rosetta on upstream code for quite a while. I feel for Harald Sitter, because he obviously knows the situation is a pile of hurt. I have no idea at all why Ubuntu thinks that doing their own translations in favour of the upstream ones is a good idea when l10n testing and development is at a premium anyway. It makes the upstream translators look bad as well, and probably wonder why they bother.
So who cares.
People who are young should stop using dumb distributions like debian, ubuntu or opensuse.
Seriously. Adopt Gentoo, Archlinux, Gobolinux or if you want to go more mainstream simply ABANDON ANY _BIG_ DISTRIBUTION THAT IS UNABLE TO KEEP UP WITH DEVELOPERS OF BIG SOFTWARE PROJECTS LIKE KDE.
I will never understand why people be so dependent on distributions who in return often go their own ways, causing confusion.
Everyone read tuomov rants. He is not always correct, and he is too aggressive, but he has some rock-solid points which are entirely accurate.
Thanks for that hilarious blast from the past. I thought your species was extinct in 2008:
http://funroll-loops.info/
Edited 2008-11-30 01:57 UTC
You realize the article is about 4.2, and you’re way OT, right?
And you found this a better route than installing ubuntu-desktop, since they’re essentially the same distribution?
Says much.
I have to use Kubuntu on my PC at work and while I see it every day that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.1 release is broken (graphical glitches on Plasma components while OpenOffice is open, incomplete translations, broken systray icons), I didn’t experience the stability issues you claim to have.
KDE 4.1 works very well on my private PCs (desktop PC and laptop). Both PCs don’t have Kubuntu installed, however.
BTW: I don’t think that Kubuntu is even offering KDE 4.2 packages at this point.
Edited 2008-11-28 09:25 UTC
a traditional icon desktop through ‘full-screen’ foderview
They aren’t joking about it being their truly first stable release of the KDE 4 code base.
The amount of times some f’n plasma applet has hit the crapper and forced a kde4 crapout on Debian Sid far exceeds the sum total of crapouts I’ve seen in all of 3.5.x branch.
4.1.3 is far more stable than the 4.0.x branch. Like OS X 10.1 it wasn’t ready for prime time. Here is to hoping KDE 4.2 is as stable as 10.2 at the user level.
For anyone running openSUSE, the 4.2 packages are available from the KDE:/KDE4:/UNSTABLE repo. I’ve been running them for a few days, and the refinements are impressive. YMMV, so take this with a grain of salt since it’s still developmental, but the packages are pretty solid. It’s a shame that the upcoming release of openSUSE 11.1 missed the 4.2 freeze, but at least it will be easily available when released.
And for some others, dozens of “minuscule” features made switching a showstopper. Good news is, new releases evolve at the speed of light, quite unlike some other similar projects.
Careful with the cockiness. Last November people were saying that KDE4 was just around the corner. And it’s been a year of embarrassment and back-pedaling for KDE4 fans whether they admit it or not. Speed of light? It’s November again, and people are saying that KDE4 is just around the corner… again. Maybe 4.2, with its year’s worth of additional work, will be up to standard. But “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” is usually good advice. I haven’t spent years waiting for my desktop of choice to become ready. It’s been most satisfactory the whole time. So like I say. Careful with the cockiness.
Edited 2008-11-28 08:56 UTC
Everything is relative.
Features are indeed re-appearing (and new ones appearing for the first time) in KDE4 at the speed of light compared to the rate at which the same features appeared in KDE3, or KDE1 or KDE2 for that matter, or equivalent features appear in GNOME, or indeed in OSX or Windows.
KDE4 is far more of a re-write than people realise. It is like a whole new desktop, only it is emerging far, far faster than any desktop project before it that I am aware of.
Personally, I think this speaks volumes as to the quality of the underlying supporting code.
Thanks for helping make my point. 😉
Apparently that’s only true when it is convenient from a PR perspective. Because 10 months ago in this very forum, when I referred Aaron Siego to this:
http://tinyurl.com/4gus
he said:
“…except that the article doesn’t particularly apply to what we did. the vast majority of the code base did not see a rewrite (don’t like new names like ‘okular’ fool you, for instance), most of the new code was filling in gaps that were never filled in the first place…”
So yeah. I guess when it comes to KDE4 PR everything *is* relative, in a way. Spin aside, yes, KDE4 really was a rewrite. And Joel’s advice has proven to be right, again.
Edited 2008-11-28 09:39 UTC
Well it depends on what you see as major rewrite. Thing is if you look into the core codebase of KDE, that it is one of the best and cleanest codebases I have ever seen in my life. And that says a lot for a C++ based system which are inherently awful.
The core mechanisms were excellent from the beginning. One of the reasons why kde is so much faster targetting new grounds than Gnome, they got it right from the beginning. Gnome still suffers from the fact that they are in C instead of an OO language and they try to make everything different than KDE and then come up with a similar solution.
So the major issues in KDE4 are probably some cleanups in the frameworks which were overdue, the sound system for instance, and the complete change of the desktop metaphor. Why should they change things like the component model etc… when they are perfectly viable and flexible!
KDE probably currently still is the best desktop environment from a software engineering perspective with NextStep/OSX being second!
Whoa, there! Aren’t you overlooking the topic at hand? Namely that KDE4 is taking so freaking long to become usable? What is it? Three years? One year after its highly premature 4.0 release? It may *target* new grounds quickly. But it certainly has not *reached* those grounds at all quickly. And that is a verifiable, empirical fact.
Edited 2008-11-28 10:32 UTC
That seems to be grossly unfair.
KDE4 will have three standard releases before its first year is up, which is way faster than at any time before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kde#Release_cycle
KDE 4.0 was “usable”. It was a desktop, with menus, a taskbar etc, etc … it wasn’t feature complete but this is the way that open source is developed.
You don’t release open source only after its all finished … instead, with an open source project, you “release early, release often”.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/stories/2002/12/01/understandingTh…
http://osdc2005.cgpublisher.com/proposals/18
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar…
If you are going to write opinion about open source projects, it perhaps wouldn’t hurt you to read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and perhaps find out something about open source development practices.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Edited 2008-11-28 10:58 UTC
I guess it is safe to assume, that steve grasps the concepts behind the cathedral and the bazaar.
What we are still discussing is, whether a project
a.) is allowd to formulate a set of (probably non-traditional) milestones
b.) optionally change/adapt/reformulate this milestones during development
c.) communicate the (final) requirements, feature matrices, etc. resulting from these milestones
d.) release the software when they *think* they have reached the required level of completeness and
e.) slap a label like “4.0” on the resulting code / product / whatever.
KDE 4.0 was communicated to “eat your children”. KDE 4.1 was released backgrounded by “early adopters can now start to switch to it for everyday work”. I don’t think that we should mandate all (FOSS) projects have to agree on the same criteria for major releases.
EDIT: Just in case this was not clear from my comment:
I think the KDE devs did the right thing to get the thing out of the door early. And I have dealed with too many .0 releases in the past to have any illusions left about “if its .0, it is gold”.
Edited 2008-11-28 11:06 UTC
we have been over this before, but I think kde 4.0 is a great example of how the origional catb ideas were only half complete, and the other half came with the agile movement a few years later.
open source says shipping everything in a perpetually broken state is ok, so long as you do it alot. this leads to stuff like kde 4 being released while it was still in heavy development, or pulseaudio getting picked up by every distro even though even the author had no confidence in the readyness of the code.
Agile says do quick iterative release cycles, where every release focuses on the small, manageable piece of functionality that will provide the most benefit to the users. Every iteration evaluate what comes next, and stay flexible in future requirements based on what the users say after they actually start using the software.
My personal favorite process is an agile process called SCRUM, which goes further by saying that current standards of code quality are completely unacceptable for an engineering discipline. For us to say that something is done it has to have a full suite of automated unit tests and integration tests, have been signed off on by a tester who manually runs through a suite of scenario tests and regression tests. Near the end of the iteration (or “sprint” as we call it in scrum) we test the deployment and upgrade tests, and do performance profiling/optimization. Only then is something considered “done”, and shipped to the clients.
If it were my team putting out KDE, 4.0 would have been considered an epic failure (as would the .0s of leopard and vista). Releasing half baked code early to developers early is a good idea, which is why MSDN and ADC exist for windows and apple developers to get their stuff working on before it ships. Releasing half baked code to users is inexcusable. The rest of the programming world has moved forward in the last 11 years. Release early, release often may have been innovative thinking back then, but if that is where it ends that is what we call “cowboy coding” nowadays.
Unless the project gets completely bogged down and spins its wheels for three years, like Debian Sarge did. Then the same people, having completely dropped the “release early and often” mantra are singing praises to the wondrous benefits of “it’s ready when it’s ready”. FOSS PR, like PR in general, is very situational in nature. Like Lemur2 said… it’s all relative. 😉
Edited 2008-11-28 19:21 UTC
Honestly, PR is completely irrelivent to anyone but the analysts when it comes to this stuff, especially when talking about open source teams.
Rapid release cycles are vital for all projects for the simple reason that disappearing for <n> years and coming back with a completed product often means that things which are completely unnessicary and/or unwanted are done, things that the users would consider vital are not done, and things which would have greatly improved the users experience and were simple, low hanging fruit have been code complete but not released for those n years.
In addition to that, in the open source world (at least traditionally), a large part of your user base are also contributers. If you get those cool bits into their hands early enough, they will be more motivated to work on the project. If you don’t have those early not feature complete releases, it will be hard to drum up the community support that is nessicary for a non commercially funded open source project to be successful.
Now, all that is cool, but that does not mean you are excused from following basic practices to ensure a good standard of quality in what you are releasing, no matter if it is propriatary or open source. If you are open source and want to be pushing out bleeding edge nightlies, make sure you make sure this is communicated downstream that what you are releasing is for developers and testers only, and not ready for public consumption. If you say something is done, just because you are open source does not abdicate you from all basic levels of responsibility when it comes to the quality of your work.
Not all open source projects do this, and neither do all commercial systems. The difference that I see is that when MS releases something like Vista, they turn around and take a good look at the internal processes that allowed them to ship something which did not meet acceptable standards of quality. Their marketing department may say otherwise, but when you talk to their engineers, there was alot of changes around process and management for windows 7. Whether those changes are good enough or not is irrelivent, at least there was an admission of a problem, and a level of introspection to attempt to fix it that happened. When the KDE team pushed 4.0 out the door, they turned around and told everyone that their standards of quality were fine, it was everyone elses that were too high. That is both disappointing and unacceptable for any developer working in any capacity that cares about the quality of his work.
If that comes out a bit overly strong, that is because this is one of the things I care the most passionately about, the state of programming as a whole, and how to bring more maturity to the discipline of software engineering. I actually like KDE and Qt a heck of alot, and the project should be lauded as one of the few in the open source world with a strong sense of vision, and the leadership to actually act on it rather then spinning their wheels for years arguing about where to take things, or squabbling over pettyness.
Is there a group somewhere that cares more about spin and PR than OSNews readers? 😉
Washington D.C.. that’s bout it though.
Edited 2008-11-29 15:01 UTC
“Namely that KDE4 is taking so freaking long to become usable? What is it? Three years?”
It’s been less than a year since the first release, Plasma itself started taking real shape maybe 6 months before that, with the time leading up to that being spent working on the Qt4 porting, kdelibs organization and merging things like Solid and Phonon.
your negativity and purposeful positioning of things in the oddest ways just to be harsh is really disturbing.
you were a huge critic, i know, and maybe it’s a little galling to watch things actually come together. i mean, now you’re bitching about how long it’s taking? yeesh.
and yeah, go look the Plasma changelog for the last four months and then maybe consider backing off from the chest pounding just a little bit.
As a long-time KDE3 user and a now short-time KDE4.1.x user I want to share my experience with KDE4 here:
I use Fedora 9.
Installation was quite OK, no big issues there.
I wanted to configure KDE to my likings, and knew it would be DIFFERENT to KDE3. I have no problem with that.
So off to the kicker setup: I found the configuration panel, but no color there. I go to the KDE main configuration utility, change some colors there, but nothing I did changed the kicker color.
I complained about this in a forum, and I even got an answer from Aaron Seigo (thanks, Aaron, good work!).
Now for all who want to know how to change the KDE4 kicker background color:
You need to install (!) a theme (!) which actually respects the KDE4 global window background color settings (!!!).
You know, I hunted this thing down for more than a week. And I really felt pissed off. Because that is exactly the reason I don’t like Gnome. The standard settings are not to my liking, and to change them you have to hunt down how to change them for a week. If the Gnome standard settings are to your liking, you will be fine with Gnome, it is a good desktop after all, but if not, you are in a hard place.
This experience made KDE4.1.x feel like an early beta. If they had either provided a separate color and transparency variable in the kicker configuration dialog, or had made the standard theme use the global color settings, this would have been a non-issue. This still leaves the road open to other themes which ignore the global color settings, but it avoids confusing users.
For configuration of something there are some human interface principles which explicitly are NOT transferable when it comes to application design:
1) You have to be able to learn it fast, at best it is self-explanatory. GUIs are faster learnable than a config file.
2) Something which is in principle configurable needs a possibility to be changed from the GUI config utility. It is faster to search through GUIs than to search through config files. Effects of changes can be visualized immediately in a GUI.
3) Something which is in principal configurable, and has a config item in the config GUI, has to react to this setting, under any and all circumstances. Otherwise it will be experienced as a BUG, be it one or not in reality. Best example of this NOT being respected are the various login themes of the various distros. They all override the settings which are given in the KDM settings dialog. Horrible. Hunting down where to switch off the theme takes a week for Debian 4.x.
For Fedora 9 I have still not found out where it is. This is also one of the reasons why “Linux” is “difficult” for windowsers. I do not know a single desktop item in Windows which does not react to the corresponding settings dialog. In Linux, there are several such instances, all of them having a good reason why they don’t react, but this still does not help the user who knows nothing of the internals.
Wow, sure is funny what sets people off. I can’t imagine what kind of early beta you think Windows is, since you can’t change the taskbar color at all! Rather than going into desktop settings and changing the theme, a process which hardly requires 5 exclamation marks.
What are you talking about now? Given that the desktop theme can be set in the GUI, this has no relevance to your previous complaint.
I agree the distro customization which breaks this stuff has to get fixed, but lets not forget that in windows it isn’t possible to change the theme of the login screen at all, so there is no direct comparison.
In Windows 98 (yes, you read that right):
1. Right-click on the desktop; select “Properties”
2. Click the “Appearance” tab
3. Click the drop-down box under “Scheme” and choose one.
4. Hit “Apply” or “OK”
Or, for more control over fonts and colors, use the drop-down box under “Items” instead, and tweak away…
It seems like it’s been an eternity since I’ve used Windows 95, but I’m pretty sure you could do the same in that OS, and it worked in pretty much the same way. In other words: Yes, you CAN change the color of the taskbar in Windows, and have been able to for years.
XP added a few extra themes as well (with the classic ones still available and modifiable), though I just always used the uxtheme.dll hack and the third-party BSRoyal theme. I will admit, it’s pathetic that it requires a hack or third-party software to use custom themes, though. The free NeoWin UXTheme Multi-Patcher does work, and simplifies the patching process, while being free.
Edited 2008-11-28 23:35 UTC
My guess would be…because it is effectively a beta.
Uh…yes? That’s what you use the settings ui for.
The words, they are in English but they make no sense.
If it takes you a week to figure that out I’m afraid the problem is not with KDE.
Well, to some extent, Aaron Siego was telling it like it is.
There are parts of KDE3 that are unmaintained, and are “creaking at the seams”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARts
So the article you linked to, “Things You Should Never Do”, claiming that you should never re-write working code:
“The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive.”
That really didn’t apply in the case of KDE. The audio subsystem in particular was getting decrepit … not because the arts server itself was “acquiring bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive” but rather because it was static and KDE audio applications were beginning to require more than it could deliver. A KDE3 system often ends up with multiple sound servers … arts, parts of alsa, gstreamer, xine, SDL, maybe Jack as well, and possibly pulseaudio … doing slightly different but overlapping things, and often stepping on each others toes.
This type of architecture problem in KDE3 needed to be fixed. Phonon fixes it in KDE4.
Since the underlying architecture was “crumbling” under the weight of modern desktop applications, and it needed to be fixed in multiple, fundamental places such as this … why not take the opportunity to sanitise and refactor the whole desktop architecture and remove the development roadblocks such as this?
The fact that the KDE team did remove such millstones is now reaping its rewards, and KDE4 development is now happening at a far, far faster rate than any desktop before it.
This, I truly believe, is because the underlying support for the KDE4 desktop was designed, rather than simply evolved like every other desktop system currently in use.
We’ve been hearing this for years. Since long before the fiasco of the 4.0 release 10 months ago. Saying it over and over does not make it true. We’re still waiting for KDE’s Great Pumpkin to rise out of the pumpkin patch.
Development at the speed of light? Development at a faster rate than any desktop before it? Unsubstantiated claims with the balance of the documented evidence clearly against them.
I have no argument with the assertion that KDE4 might, finally, be almost ready. It’s the ridiculous, and clearly inaccurate fiction of its rapid rate of development that I object to.
Wow. Sorry, but you are way, way off the mark here.
KDE 4 is a very healthy open source project, following closely the “classic” development model of open source, and doing it very nicely.
Just because this development model may not be what you are used to doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work … it clearly does.
The Bazaar works quite well. In the case of KDE, they have even kept the older version around for you to “use in anger” while KDE4 is being built.
Well, it does have a faster rate of development than, say, GNOME but that’s largely due to the fact that they are in different stages of their life. GNOME is in a stage where the main focus is fine tuning and bug fixing and adding to an already solid foundation, while KDE4 is in a stage where you rapidly add features and code in order to get a solid foundation. It doesn’t mean one is better or more “revolutionary” than the other.
While the whole “4.0 isn’t really ready but we’ll release it anyway” thing didn’t bother me perhaps it would have been wiser to have waited one more year for 4.0.
That said, I like both GNOME and KDE (Ubuntu and Kubuntu in my case). GNOME is at this point definitely the more usable one for the average users but I find myself liking KDE4 a lot more than I did 3.x. It’s actually what I use for everyday work right now.
(And before someone says I should use openSUSE for KDE4, shut up. I don’t care)
Edited 2008-11-28 11:22 UTC
Do you code at all?
I’d like to see you make a whole new desktop API and finish it in time and feature complete in your spare time(you didn’t pay for it to be done ontime do you?).
4.0 was just a start, only uninformed people made out 4.0 was some kind of finished work of what they had planned. Also people think they could somehow copy/paste KDE3.x features into 4.x, this is just laughable, completely different API, Qt4 had a major overhaul.
BTW, was it not you who said fighting will harm opensource and Linux?, your words are doing more harm than good.
Edited 2008-11-28 13:13 UTC
Yes, the audio system needed to be fixed, but there was never a convincing argument for the Plasma mess except that developers likes shiny new toys..
In the meantime when Arjan Van de Ven selected a desktop for its ‘fast boot’ PC, he used XFence not KDE..
Not to mention moving to the Qt4 programming model required a fairly substantial change in the underlying libs.
So instead of bending Qt4 around kde3 they chose the more sensible path of remaking kde libs around Qt4. It also doesn’t mean that programming principles were lost, and algorithms and code couldn’t be reused.
I know that there is – lets put it diplomatically – a little bit of tension between you, some KDE devs (namely aseigo) and some of the more vocal KDE4 supporters / advocates / fanboys / … . I really appreciate your insights, your experience and your tell-it-like-it-is attitude in your comments. I really do. You have some beef with KDE4 and/or the impression that was created (by whoever it was) what it would be like when it was about to get released, I get it.
And I will not go into details and forth-and-back argumenting, that the parts of KDE4 that were more or less rewritten from scratch were things like plasma (which gets the lion share of public critism) or phonon that introduced new functionality in a way incompatible with the old code base, while other components (like the mentioned okular) were more or less only adapted to the new Qt4 framework.
I would have expected from you the courtesy to include a link to the quote from aseigo, especially since you did not include it in its full length and context
(I will take the liberty to do this, cf
http://www.osnews.com/thread?295910 ).
We will have to agree to disagree on a lot of things in that context, which is Ok. Everybody should be allowed to have one topic where he or she has not to be rational all the time (you decide to whom of us this applies here 🙂 )
What I object to is the dogmatic adherence to the “never rewrite from scratch” mantra from joel (who I also have a lot of respect for, rest assured).
It’s not a law of nature, it’s a rule of thumb. And it’s a good rule of thumb, don’t get me wrong. Like the “a good chess move has at least three positive effects” rule of thumb I got teached when started to play the game.
Code bases that are written and maintained with future challenges in mind and kept up do date in general show no sign of bit-rot and offer indeed little incetiative to rewrite. But there are situations, when doing a rewrite *is* the sensible thing to do.
Plasma started out because there was a desire to decouple the “visible” parts of the desktop from the code base of KDE itself (KDE devs, please correct me if I’m wrong). The code for kicker was not fit for decoupling, it was not even easy to maintain. I can understand why they decided to seize the opportunity to rewrite the presentation layer of the whole desktop to get a fit-for-the-future code base for KDE4 and KDE5. Especially, since KDE3 is (and will be for at least the next year) still maintained, rock solid and workable.
Recently there was this guy on (i guess it was aseigos blog? Funny …) who stated that plasma was a poor quality code base because “it uses dynamic_casts” all over the place. He was not able to produce a single file/line instance where he could demonstrate the abdundance of unnecessary casting (or even better a way to avoid those casts), it was just that following the ( in principle sensible and good, but still not as good and less general as the “never rewrite from scratch” ROT ) “never do (dynamic) casts, they are the evil” ROT religiously left him with no other choice but to condemn code.
It’s one thing to know your rules of thumb by heart. It’s an entirely different thing to apply them in the right context and acknowledge that scenarios exist where they don’t appy.
It probably is worth clarifying a bit on that. My objections lie solely with the frequent (and annoying) hyperbolic claims made by them regarding KDE and its development, examples being evident in this very thread. I was a KDE fan and user up through 2.x and moved to Gnome when I switched back from Mandrake to Red Hat 8, back when Red Hat finally started caring about the desktop. I do not reject, out of hand, a move back to KDE. Although the KDE guys and I do apparently have different tastes when it comes to UI. But that is a different topic.
As it stands Aaron Siego are still right, and your point is not made as you miss some rather large part of the equation. The KDE source code, the over 4 millions line of it. It all boils down to simple facts, not twisting by PR spinning as try to put it.
With the huge amount of code that is KDE, even what you usuall can call small rewrites like 1-10% of the codebase, it will amunt to lot of code. But it will still be far short of a total rewrite.
Hmmmmm, no it wasn’t, and you misunderstand Joel Spolsky’s meaning if you think KDE 4 was a rewrite. It wasn’t, and there are pretty large examples of existing KDE3 code that have been added to and refactored, because that’s what has happened here. Stuff like Plasma is indeed new code, so it can’t have been rewritten…….because there was no code before.
Joel gave an example of Navigator 5 (which became 6) which was a complete rewrite of everything. That’s why it took so long, and why we didn’t even get a 5.0 version ;-). If KDE 4 was a rewrite then we would have seen nothing at all for years as happened with Navigator – and that was only a browser, not a desktop! 😉
Edited 2008-11-28 17:28 UTC
Lets all take some time and remeber the old belowed 3.x series. 3.0 “sucked balls”, and 3.1 was “widely hated”. At 3.2 it actually got useful, but it wasn’t really until 3.4 that it became what we now expect from kde.
4.1 really exceeds 3.1 stabilitywise, and I really have hope for 4.2. The only thing I really missed in 4.1 was powermanagement (powerdevil) and a networkmanager frontend (which will probably find it’s ways into the ubuntu repos). It looks like it will be a great release.
Ah, how quickly we forget the past, eh? I’d mod you up but I have already posted in this thread and thus obviously not able to distinguish bad from good.
Edited 2008-11-28 16:07 UTC
I guess I should of picked ‘better’ version of KDE4, however Ubuntu has not crashed on me once; I probly wait until KDE10 comes out
Well I never thought I was gonna say this but I finally think KDE is starting to look good. I like the way they have their taskbar in that first screenshot but the start-like menu needs more work. Still looks a bit dull but this is the only thing I complain about now — the start-like menu – that’s all. I like the theme they are using and the window manager decoration looks really good. Is there a pre-built distro/live ISO for this release? Kubuntu normally does this?
Edited 2008-11-28 12:16 UTC
well , if that is the only thing then there is Lancelot in kde 4.2
in the future , there will be raptor.
by the way , this is my desktop :
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/kde+4.2+beta1?content=93961
( all kde , that is not compiz )
Just add a Lancelot Menu plasmoid to the panel, and drop the default menu if you don’t like it.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/screenshots
I find it strange that the release announcement doesn’t even bother to mention that the key bindings, which you can configure in editing the application launch menu, actually work now. This is a huge improvement for the usability of KDE4 in my book. So now in KDE 4.2 beta 1 you can bind keyboard shortcuts to quickly launch your favourite applications. I use the key combination Shift + F1-F12 to start 12 of my most often used applications. This way I rarely need to use the application menu to start programs.
I’m still disappointed that Konqueror doesn’t yet seem to support easy drag-and-drop bookmarks editing. Hopefully KDE developers will add this feature before KDE 4.2 goes gold. In most other respects this beta release suggests that the final KDE 4.2 release will win many new friends for KDE4. The desktop itself seems stable and fast, and it looks really polished and beautiful. There’s the “spinning cube” desktop switching effect for those who like it, although I personally prefer the grid view for showing all the desktops or all the open application windows.
Go KDE! Based on my experiences in trying out this beta 1 release, I think KDE 4.2 might well be the first fully functional and stable KDE4 release that people have been waiting for.
This is very good news. With working keybinding it looks like 4.2 covers all the major missing features that prevented me from trying to use KDE4 as my main desktop. There are still things that I dislike about the KDE4 branch but nothing that would prevent me from using my computer/desktop in the way I like. The multi-monitor support through xrandr worries me a bit but we will see.
4.0 was released too early in the opinion of many but let’s try and get past that and look at where KDE4 is now and judge it by its current capabilities.
Perhaps 4.0 should have been a developers release and not a public one. Perhaps power management should have been there all along. Perhaps the developers should have communicated better and earlier about what 4.0 was. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I am not alone in having crossed words with the KDE team in general, and Aaron in specific, over the choices and history of KDE4. But regardless of my feelings on the subject the KDE coders have done a super job at buckling down and adding the features that many (including me) felt were needed to give the new KDE a fair shake.
So let me say thank you to all of the KDE team for working so hard to make KDE4 live up to the ambitious vision it was concieved as and keep up the great work.
Keeps getting better and better. No complaints here just a joke. KDE 3 Xp KDE 4 Vista.