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.
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Member since:2005-07-06
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
Member since:2005-11-05
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.
Member since:2008-04-04
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!
Member since:
2005-11-05
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.