Linked by Rahul on Mon 20th Oct 2008 22:31 UTC
PolishLinux site takes a look at KDE 4.2 based on the latest subversion branch and concludes: "As it can be seen, the KDE4 development is running at full throttle. KDE4.2 will include much enhanced functionality and versatility than KDE 4.1, but still a lot of work has to be done in many areas, especially when it comes to the stability of the applications." Hopefully some of the long standing stability and maturity issues with KDE 4.x branch are resolved before the GA release.
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RE: Feature freeze just happened
by MamiyaOtaru on Tue 21st Oct 2008 23:19
in reply to "Feature freeze just happened"
Member since:2005-11-11
you already have some nice alternatives if you want to spice up the KDE apps themselves
I'm still partial to Polyester myself ( http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Polyester?content=27968 )
Is there any reason behind not switching to WebKit and keep working on KHTML besides, you know, the fact that you made it?
Not just made it, control it. And because webkit isn't just something that gets dropped in, as explained by someone who is working on it ( http://zecke.blogspot.com/2008/01/joys-of-debugging-webkit.html ).
On the plus side, a bunch of great features and improvements went in (Jingle support in kopete, for instance ...
That would have been nice a couple years ago. Jingle support was first added to the source at least as far back as December 2005 ( http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-pagehistory.php?page=Kopete%20Jabber~*... ) but was not enabled by default. I got sick of waiting
It was to me unfortunately typical of things I would love to have working in free software but which for whatever reason, don't. I'd love to have a mediated VPN (ala hamachi), voice/cam chat (ala Skype), many to many voice comms (ala Teamspeak or Ventrilo) but there are no alternatives with the same ease of use. Sure there's openVPN (no third party mediation), jingle (finally in Kopete), and Mumble ( http://mumble.sourceforge.net but nowhere near as easy to set up and much more bandwidth intensive), but they are not as polished/easy/workable.
Obviously people working in their spare time (or to kep Tyrione happy, for large companies interested in selling hardware or services) can't be expected to make whatever users may want, and it's really out there to expect a free software program that uses for mediation a central server with all its bandwidth costs, which makes a free software Hamachi unlikely. Regardless, it's frustrating.
Free software is doing a great job putting out superior browsers, passable office suites and desktop environments that pretty much work. But when it comes to communication I've found myself stuck with proprietary apps
Growing up I always changed my own oil because I had more time than money. Now I let someone else do it because I have more money than time. This holds true with software as well. As much as I love the idea of Free Software (seriously, check my posting history here), I find it impractical anymore to use it for everything. I don't have the time to wait for jingle to be enabled, for KDE4 to regain all the functionality of KDE3, etc. I'm glad those two things have happened (or are happening, still waiting on full khotkeys functionality), but it took long enough
So, that was a little OT for a preview of new version of KDE. Maybe I'm grumpy today. The proper response to jingle support should be "yay" not "took them long enough, and here's other stuff that's bothering me". I'll try and find a livecd for KDE 4.2 and see if it's good for me.
Member since:
2007-02-05
For anybody who reads the article and decides to try it out right now, the soft feature freeze just happened and a bunch of major changes have gone into svn. It'll take a little while for all the new things to get settled. On the plus side, a bunch of great features and improvements went in (Jingle support in kopete, for instance, a python dataengine in plasma). So if you want to try it out, consider waiting a week for things to settle down.