Tuesday, we reported that the KDE project had released the first beta of KDE 4.1, the release that is supposed to be ready to replace KDE3 on normal users’ desktops. The information and marketing speak in the press release sure was promising, so Ars decided to take the KDE 4.1 beta out for a spin.Ars is quite pleased with the improvements in panel configuration and the new and rather odd resize/move dialog, but did note a regression in that it appears to be impossible to adjust the height of the panel, something which was possible in the previous, more standard dialog. Still, “this is a big improvement over the previous configuration system which consisted of a simple dialog window.” In KDE 4.0, it was impossible to change the size and position of the panel at all.
Another interesting move is the elimination of desktop icons. In previous incarnations of KDE4, Plasma turned any items in your desktop folder into Plasmoid launchers, which Ars noted was rather inconsistent with the Plasma paradigm. The KDE 4.1 beta eliminates desktop icons altogether, favouring a Plasmoid which simply lists and labels the contents of any folder – which raises the question if a specific ~/desktop folder is needed in the first place.
Ars concludes:
Many of the components in beta 1 are extremely unstable and subject to frequent crashes, but the overall level of polish and functionality in the environment is increasing at an extraordinary pace.
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
wow, those shots are ugly as sin! They really need to hire a good designer or something. It looks like Vista and OSX’s love child with autism.
And what is with all the wasted space in the window borders and such?
ew.
I don’t know about that. I find it very soothing looking. Nothing brash looking takes over the screen, and the looks that they’ve chosen just seem to flow. I’ve been using 4.0 for a while, and many people who have never used Linux are impressed with its looks/usability. With 4.1, the artists seem to be making the tweaks necessary to really make KDE pop (in my humble opinion) If it really does seem that bad to you, maybe you could help with the creation of some themes (the KDE site had a contest not too long ago for Plasma themes). I’m not much of an artist myself, so I couldn’t do it (on top of that, as I’ve stated, I like the way KDE 4 looks, especially 4.1). Anyway, to each his own. Take it easy.
The only thing that looks remotely like Vista is it’s black plasmoids and UNLIKE Vista they are what make the desktop.
I’m liking this review from Ars, I’m not desperate for 4.1 and it’s reviews like this that make it worth wait.
Edited 2008-05-29 19:25 UTC
This especially:
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/scaled/…
Is it just me or did we get happy with our up/down right/left arrows to the point that every textfield has one whether it needs it or not and the scrolling needs it on both ends.
Add the fat footer it really looks bad.
yeah, exactly. There is far too much wasted space. It’s terrible looking.
Better be careful. If you slaughter on KDE too much you will be categorized as a hater and elitist.
Then of course people will proclaim this is all for free when it’s all for building a resume, job hunting and creating career paths while corporations leverage and use these programmers to get work done.
What is clear to me is that the Keith Ohlfs of the world are few and far between. They understand minimalism and separation of concerns you can’t explain from a curriculum or certificate programs.
It’s an eye for balance that is desperately being ignored in KDE, GNOME, OS X and Windows.
Keith should have said f*** it and taken the lead GUI job back at Apple when us NeXT folks merged. I guess he thought Microsoft would continue to be a huge stock leader–his main reason was oh so many stock options at the time unvested.
He’d be worth more at Apple and we wouldn’t have such aborrations across the industry.
UI design is becoming obese, redundant and clearly obsessed with making a collection of actions for every possible keyboard equivalent visible in the Mouse driven UIs.
You seem bitter.
Those aren’t textfields but comboboxes or drop-down selections. It is quite customary on all platforms and widget styles to use an arrow to hint at this drop down option.
Those aren’t textfields but comboboxes or drop-down selections. It is quite customary on all platforms and widget styles to use an arrow to hint at this drop down option.
I think he is talking about the ugly and stupid looking group of 4 arrows in the bottom right corner. I have to agree with him, it looks very silly. Either add the arrow at both ends of the scrollbar, or both arrows at either end. Not both solutions.
Oh, and as a sidenote…I seriously, seriously hate that panel. It’s way too big, and black is such a horrible color. I am planning to try KDE 4.1 out when I get it installed but I will definitely change that panel immediately.
Wow,it sure took long for KDE4 fans to mod me down
Hey, modding me down doesn’t make the issues go away 
It would be nice if one you actually posts the screenshot URL
You realize it was rendering to a screen that was 800×600? You also realize that if any other Desktop OS were rendered like that these days it’d also look huge? Windows using the classic theme probably being the exception. Then again I can make the panel smaller… and it looks nice on a big screen as it is.
Then again, you don’t even really need a panel in kde4. Its not a requirement. You don’t have to have it. You could even go write your own in javascript if you wanted if you feel like its that crappy. Instead all I see is the usual whine drones.
I have a feeling you’ve never actually bothered using it (the beta) but just had to throw your two cents in as usual.
Listen, if your going to criticize something people have put years of effort on it would at least be kind to try it, have an open mind about it, and be a little more descriptive then “its fugly.”
Its not very hard btw to make or grab a new theme. The default was always programmer art from what I recall. At least for plasma.
Why should they? You can tell if a UI sucks with a quick glance in most cases. The amount of effort put into making it does nothing to guarantee it won’t be crap, especially if the defining vision involves bad ideas.
IMO, in KDE’s case, the main bad idea is to just play catchup with OSX and Vista.
Agreed. The taskbar is absolutely horrible. I really hope it gets some love soon!
I didn’t like the default theme either. It felt very dark and just didn’t appeal to me. But it was the easiest thing in the world to pick a new one. 5 or 6 come by default, more are a single click away (there’s a ‘Get New Themes’ button that integrates really well with kde-look.org and will help you download new ones. Here are a couple screenshots of the theme I use and how to pick a new one:
My desktop (with a folder view plasmoid showing the desktop folder):
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=reldruH&aid=52058971…
The theme selector with all the default ones:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=reldruH&aid=52058971…
The default colorscheme (I forgot I had changed it):
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=reldruH&aid=52058971…
The screenshots may look a bit ugly at first, but when you switch to the Elegance theme, and get a decent wallpaper, kde 4 looks better than ever. Makes you wonder why the don’t switch to that theme as default ..
The only problem i have with the KDE4 user interface is the incredibly small fonts they use. Huge dialogs with huge unused empty spaces, which are caused by these small fonts. It makes the dialogs hard to read, and they are confusing..
Other than that i like KDE4’s modern looks, and it seems like it will be great some day for KDE fans. I’m still using Gnome though, but that is a personal preference.
t looks like Vista and OSX’s love child with autism.
You truly have a gift for words. That line cracked me up. I don’t know if I like the new direction of KDE either. It looks like the old gel craze in UIs that was popular in 1990. It is concerning that people are saying a lot of the components are unstable. I wouldn’t dare use it for production use.
…hence the “Beta” tag…
I agree – the buttons still look very ugly and unpolished – even looking at the window edges, they are unrounded and rather “sharp”.
KDE really needs to fix these minor things to really make their desktop environment shine imho. It has a long way to go from the usability point of view…
Dave
Yeah, I too do not like the default KDE 4 look.
Luckily, there are enough of artists taking care of that.
Look at Skulpture or Bespin on kde-look.org.
Probably plenty more will show up once KDE 4.1 is out.
Skulpture looks pretty good to me.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Skulpture?content=59031
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=3&id=59031&file…
At this stage, that is what I would probably choose.
By the time KDE 4.1 actually gets released, doubtless there will be a wider choice.
Personally, if I wanted to use OSX or Vista, I’d just install one of them. But, I guess there will always be a demand on the “other” end of the *nix user community that wants to copy off of the mainstream OSes. I remember back when FVWM95 was the default RedHat window manager.
However, I find this recent obsession over widget toolkits to be rather silly. Not only does all this work have to keep being redone over and over, but the end results are ugly and often less functional. If we were making progress towards some UI nirvana, then it’d be great, but I’m pretty sure such a state doesn’t even exist (though tiling WMs are close). I just want my UIs to not waste screen real estate or get in the way.
Another thing that annoys me about KDE is that there’s now all these K-apps out there that you have to be careful to avoid. Installing them will drag in a mess of KDE/Qt dependencies and bloat your system. The majority of these projects disappear so fast that by the time you really get used to it, development has ceased. But then, you can take one look at KDE and rightly assume that it’s an environment that draws in ADD-afflicted latest fad-chasers.
I ran a Linux-only desktop from 95-96 back in the days when FVWM was king and Linux distributions fit on a few floppy disks. Since then, it seems that desktop Linux has been stuck in that nasty place between novelty and mainstream.
With KDE 4, we’re finally starting to see a real effort towards providing a well designed and coherent cross platform desktop framework. I’m genuinely impressed with the work that has been done and with the foresight of the KDE developers. I do have a few aesthetic complaints about KDE 4, specifically the visual disconnect between Plasma and Oxygen, but I’m sure that can be corrected by themes provided by the various distributions.
That said, after 12 years, KDE 4 has finally made me reconsider Linux on the desktop.
I was a KDE fan from the pre-1.0 days. Remember FVWM95 and Another Level? KDE was a quantum leap forward from those. I’m more a Gnome fan now, but am delighted that KDE’s unique qualities attract you, and others, to our OS today.
Edited 2008-05-29 19:16 UTC
I was also quite fond of TWM. KDE (and Gnome shortly after) was a response to the realization that Linux users needed something more than just a window manager. But I was out of the Linux desktop scene by time KDE and Gnome became popular.
I do like Ubuntu and, as a user, I would prefer Gnome right now. As a developer, however, I have a strong aversion to the Gnome libs and especially to GTK+. I’m hoping that the KDE interface will evolve into something cohesive and beautiful and then we’ll have the best of both worlds.
Is it just me or does KDE4 seem to be progressing in a manner similar to OS X during its initial releases. 10.0 had most of the underlying technology in place but was almost unusable, 10.1 was usable but a lot of people still booted into Mac OS 9.x, and then 10.2 was the release that everyone used and its just been getting better every release.
This is so exciting to me because KDE4 is progressing very rapidly. KDE 4.1 is looking good and usable, but I can’t wait for KDE 4.2 and all the goodness and maturity it will bring. I wonder how long the rapid development phase of Plasma will continue? Is the new KDE search technology going to make it into KDE 4.1? Also how are the Windows and Mac ports coming?
To resize the height, just grab the top border of the resizer thingy and drag it.
I haven’t had a single crash in quite a while now.. Maybe debian is doing some additional patching in their packages…
Let’s hope they didn’t introduce any major and embarrassing security issues like they did with OpenSSH and OpenSSL.
Edited 2008-05-29 20:16 UTC
Spelling ERROR plasma =! plas,a
You are a dvorak typer!
Private Message from diego
sent on Thu, 29th May, 2008 16:05
YOU ARE A f–kING IDIOT
GET THE f–k OFF, GO KILL YOURSELF
————
I just love reading reactionary dribble from stunted minds. Engineering, which Software Programming surely isn’t–it’s unfortunately and fortunately just an Art–is better served being criticized and refined then glad-handed and flocked for the drones to praise.
Yes, there are some wonderful people (note sarcasm) in the world. Ignore them.
Dave
seems like kde is a touchy subject here.
4.1 looks really interesting and i haven’t used kde on a desktop in at least 6 years. Given that i’m sure a lot has changed, (plasma is very intriguing.) maybe now is the time to try it out again.
it would at least put me in a better position to critique gnome.
Novel is managing slowly to get Microsoft hooks into GNOME via Mono and Moonlight. There are a number of GNOME desktop applications such as Beagle search, Tomboy notes, FSpot, Muine which are written in Mono, and hence have Mono dependencies.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080528133529454
The aim would appear to be eventual control over distribution.
Meanwhile, Adobe is opening up the specifications for Flash, and Gnash has reached enough functionality to be more useable on a Linux machine than is Adobe’s own player.
Other interesting points to note are that: (1) KDE and Qt are licensed under GPL v3, and (2) KDE 4 (and all of its applications) can run under Windows and become an alternative to Microsoft’s desktop.
So it looks as if at least a part of the Linux desktop ecosystem will escape proprietary encumbrances going forward, and competition against Windows will continue.
Hence there is automatically a number of “KDE is rubbish, KDE is ugly” comments posted against every KDE report there is … often posted by people who have not even tried KDE for themselves.
… do the maths for yourself.
Lemur, sometimes a rose is just a rose. Conspiracy theories just make us look silly and diminish our credibility. Some people like KDE. Some people do not. Some don’t care. You can’t pigeon-hole those who criticize KDE the way you are trying to do and still retain trust.
That is your conclusion. That is exactly what I asked you to reach.
As for my conclusion … there is no doubt that Microsoft are trying desperately to exclude the GPL entirely, and at every mention of interoperation with FOSS software they always talk about “for non-commercial purposes”.
E.g. I note that there are a number of vendors almost falling over themselves to try to bring out an EEEPC competitor this month. The “sweet spot” seems to be a 9 or 10 inch screen and utilising an Atom processor. Most of these vendors seem to be offering a choice of Linux or XP.
It all seems fine on the surface, but …
… the Linux versions offered so far amount to Xandros and SuSe. Hmmmmmmmmm. What is it about those two names … Xandros and Suse … aren’t these two the exact two sell-out distributions?
Coincidence, you think? You really think?
I note that no vendor yet has offered the same model, same configuration of RAM, Disk, CPU & other bits … but a choice of Linux or Windows, side by side, same machine, only a different OS … so that a direct comparison can be made.
No Ubuntu variant is offered, or Debian, or Fedora, or even Mandriva (who incidentally went out of their way to make their distribution work with the EEEPC).
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
The MSI Wind 10-inch is a classic. You can have Suse on a model with a 3-cell battery, or Windows on a model with a 6-cell battery and Bluetooth. No “mix and match” is offered.
I wonder why exactly all this is … exactly who is afraid of a full Linux desktop being compared with their product on an even-playing-field basis, do you think?
Edited 2008-05-30 05:07 UTC
that’s a really interesting article. legalese confuses the hell out of me though.
do you think that they are trying to create a higher dependency on moonlight in GNOME? I’m not using anything with mono dependencies right now but would this be a push to try and reduce the use of GPL toolkits in GNOME?
Just from the article I’d be rather use QT or GTK+ over mono just for Microsoft being in the licence.
As far as it affecting my use of KDE or GNOME in the short term, I’m going to play around with 4.1 and see how much better it is from last time.
I think they are trying to create a dependency on Silverlight in order to do “web surfing”. That much is clear.
Moonlight is only a subset of Silverlight, and it depends on Microsoft’s largess to give you a binary codec for your platform, and Microsoft seem every much to be trying to insist that if they give a binary codec to Novell, and Novell give it to you … then that is OK, but no fair giving it any further downstream than that.
PS: Ubuntu is “based on Debian”. Any number of small distributions are either “based on Debian”, or “based on Slackware”. A very few are based on Gentoo or on Fedora. PCLinuxOS was based on Mandrake (predecessor to Mandriva). I have never found any distribution “based on SuSe”. Hmmmmmm. What was that about “downstream” again?
GNOME (the project) itself would insist that it has no dependency on Mono and Moonlight … and that much is without doubt true. It is also true to make the note that most of the GNOME desktops you can actually get ship with Mono libraries, Mono programs and I’m sure that Moonlight will be a part of Suse.
I’m just looking at the writing on the wall. I can see a day coming when Gnome itself will be on the hook with Microsoft dependencies. It is not there yet … but it sure seems to be on a very slippery slope right now. It also does seem to be on some people’s agenda to start it down that slope …
Edited 2008-05-30 05:28 UTC
I’m no huge fan of Mono, but you are aware that Gnome doesn’t depend on Mono aren’t you? There are Gnome apps, which don’t ship with the Gnome core distribution, that use Mono, but they’re not part of Gnome.
Edited 2008-05-30 09:41 UTC
Yes, I said that.
Nevertheless, the GNOME distributions I have tried (Ubuntu, SuSe, Fedora) have all shipped with Mono applications, and the attendant libraries, as part of the base install.
SuSe is especially keen on them … I think it had each one of FSpot, Beagle and Tomboy installed by default. Doubtless the latest release will now include Moonlight.
The GNOME desktop itself does not require these to be present, and hence it has no such dependencies, but there is nevertheless a strong chance that GNOME users will come to expect them to be there.
Does anyone else find it a little sad that half the comments here are about how KDE looks ugly, and the other half are about how MS is evil and trying to take over GNOME?
Does anyone have anything to actually say about the beta?
Is it really going to be the version that gets people to upgrade from 3.5 like it’s supposed to be, or are there still enough raw spots that we’ll have to wait for 4.2?
I tried KDE 4.03 at one time … it messed up my KDE 3 desktop. KDE 4 a KDE 3 applications kept stepping on each others toes and I ended up with a fair number of duplicated libraries.
So I am going to try out KDE 4.1 beta in a virtual machine.
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=609503
This will take me a while to achieve. I am downloading a KDE 4.1 Virtualbox image right now, but it is 650MBytes or so and it is only 70% complete.
I won’t comment myself until I’ve actually run it.
You might want to take a look at this post if you use the VirtualBox image, as there appear to be some networking issues:
http://dot.kde.org/1211789022/1212003398/1212016629/1212106579/
(I’ve not had a chance to test the VirtualBox image myself, yet.)
I’m posting this from the Virtualbox image right now.
There is indeed an issue with networking.
$ sudo su
password:
$ ifconfig eth1 up
$ dhclient eth1
… fixes it.
KDE 4.1 is not ugly. It could do with a simple way to reduce the size of the menu bar at the bottom, and the default theme isn’t the most fantastic … but is it ugly? No.
As I posted earlier: Right click on the panel, choose panel settings, then drag the top edge of the thing that pops up. Just like resizing a window.
Got it now, thanks. It looks just fine when you set it to about half of the default height.
I changed the background to “Fields of peace”, and I set the task bar to about half height and it looks way better now. The only jarring thing left is the odd missing icon.
PS: I found a bug, I think. The “quote marks” and the @at symbol@ seem to be transposed on the keyboard map.
Edited 2008-05-30 15:32 UTC
A technical nit pick. This is redundant. Do either:
$ su
passsord:
$ ifconfig eht1 up
$ dhclient eth1
or
$ sudo ifconfig eth1 up
$ sudo dhclient eth1
sudo let’s you run a single command at a time as the super user and can be configured to do so without a password prompt
su let’s you become the super user and doesn’t need to be called via sudo. It’s best to use su – or just set an alias in your shell config file for it so that you inherit root’s environment.
the thread references kubuntu, which has root disabled by default. I will avoid debating the relative merits of sudo vs su but you can not use su alone on *buntu distros.
I would generally discourage doing “sudo su” but it is a way to get a root shell using root’s settings in a system with root disabled.
A practical nit pick:
You have given two alternate ways which will work depending on whether or not there is a root account enabled.
My way works either way. If the “sudo su” fails because sudo is not installed, then su will work on its own.
If I don’t know the details of the distribution, as was the case for the KDE 4.1 Virtual machine that I was using at the time … then my approach is more universal.
Being universal makes it better for posting on forums.
Edited 2008-05-31 05:03 UTC
That sucks. Sounds like your distro packages are quite poor. In debian all KDE4 settings go in .kde4, and can easily co-exist with kde3 apps.
Leos, you always blame the distro. Over and over again, any time anyone criticizes KDE. If it really is the distro’s fault each time (all those many times), then points to a significant problem with KDE’s release system. Or more likely, with their lack of attention to it.
It reminds me of a quote from a Harland and Wolfe employee in reference to their policy of not christening ships which they built:
“We just builds ’em and shoves ’em in.” he said.
My impression of the KDE devs is that they, too, “just builds ’em and shoves ’em in”.
If the KDE team cared enough to create official packages, themselves, for the most popular distros, this could all be avoided. (Assuming, for the moment, that your assertion that these problems are all due to poor packaging is valid.)
BTW, the specific ship the H&W employee was referring to had sunk.
Edited 2008-05-30 14:54 UTC
Well, that’s exactly how the “open source development model” is supposed to work: release early & often and let users (“downstream”) modify the software to their needs (and hopefully users also send their improvements back to developers). Your KDE4-related comments suggest that you’re a great admirer of the traditional proprietary development model. That’s OK, but your frequent criticism that KDE doesn’t follow the proprietary development model misses the point completely, because KDE is not a proprietary project.
Well no, you just made that up on the spot.
As you see, this was one very specific complaint (settings being overwritten) that is absolutely not a problem in the Debian packages. I’m just observing that the problem is a packaging issue.
I don’t see it as many times. If you want to talk release process and packaging issues, how about Slackware dropping Gnome entirely because it was too hard to package? Packaging stuff is not trivial. It’s a global problem in OSS. (See the Iceweasel debacle)
I cannot help your strange impressions.
No one does this. Look around the big open source projects. They almost all just release source and depend on third party packagers (often distro employees) that know the intricacies of the system much better.
All these problems? I was talking about one very specific issue (overwriting settings).
“Is it really going to be the version that gets people to upgrade from 3.5 like it’s supposed to be”
Not for people who need to use a proxy
Edited 2008-05-30 10:28 UTC
I downloaded the openSUSE based livecd a few days back, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I got around to loading it.
First impression: the panel is HUGE. It looks bigger than 48px high, although I couldn’t really measure it. The ability to resize it is gone (again), or it’s been moved somewhere else from previous builds. I thought that dragging the preferences panel up and down would make it smaller/larger, but nothing happened. Very annoying on a 1024×768 screen. On a panel that huge, a default should at least be to stack the taskbar two rows high, but I couldn’t find that option either.
I am still trying to understand the point of plasmoids. I don’t use widgets in Opera, or in Vista, or with Google Desktop. I don’t use gdesklets or SuperKaramba. They only seem useful if I want to put a bunch of clocks, comic strips, and sticky notes on the desktop, but besides that? Actually, my whole KDE experience came to a krash when I tried to add a plasmoid to see what the fuss is all about. The wallpaper, desktop icons, and panel all disappeared. I’ll try again later.
KDE 4.1 has the ability to be a sleek and sexy desktop, but I’m finding that the whole experience comes off a bit unpolished. I know, it’s still a beta, but should a beta leave me feeling like I got done using a UI designed in the mid-90’s? I feel like for all these plasmoids, we’ve regressed to the user friendliness of FVWM95, showing off an xplanet (or xsnow) background with xeyes in the corner. Maybe a bit harsh, but it’s just my general feeling. I thought that the 3.5x series was superb, an experience as enjoyable as OS/2 was in the day, and I really can’t see myself leaving it, at least not now, not for this.
To resize the panel, click on the “cashew” at the right-hand end of the panel. There pops up a “setting” bar above the existing bar, with triangular coloured “handles” on the left and right with which you can adjust the panel’s width. There are three iccons which allow you to set the panel to the left edge, to the right edge, or centred.
Finally, to make the panel height smaller, click on the grey border at the top of the popup settings bar, and drag it downwards to re-size the height of the panel.
My suggestion is to make it about half its original height … this seems to me about right, and far more reasonable than the default.
Edited 2008-05-30 15:48 UTC
From what I understand everything above KWin (the Window Manager) is now a plasmoid including the task bar, icons, etc. Plasma is a new way of doing things and the goal is maximum flexibility. Eventually people will be able to make their own menus and organize icons and workflows in new and creative ways, at least that is the plan. Plasma is still not fully flushed out and probably won’t be until KDE 4.2 at the earliest. Not to say that it is unusable but it’s full power is not yet exposed because it is still incomplete. Right now everyone is suffering through the transition but in the long-run things will be better for it. The main focus right now seems to be rapid development of Plasma to make it complete and then they will focus on defaults later. Plasma will likely require a lot of tweaking going forward because the concepts it incorporates are different from every other system I currently know of.
This is a major transition for KDE but it will lessen their pain later down the road when later switches occur. KDE is attempting to abstract as much as possible to make sure that major re-writes such as the one they are now experiencing do not occur as often in the future or are at least less difficult. They are future-proofing now at the expense of a difficult but hopefully successful change.
I don’t understand why everyone must have the latest and greatest when it comes to stuff like this. Why not just use the KDE 3.5.x series or GNOME until you feel that KDE4 has matured to your desired level? Even in KDE 4.1 many will not consider Plasma and perhaps other sub-systems and applications production ready and if you are one of those who do not consider KDE4 ready for a production system then stay with the stable and mature platform you are currently using. KDE4 will probably not be what most would consider Enterprise/Production ready until 4.2 or maybe 4.3 depending upon your standards. But you do not have to transition yet. As far as I know bug and security fixes are still being provided for the KDE3 series and will be for sometime.
I believe they are still finishing some subsystems such as Decibel, Akonadi, and NEPOMUK which is fine during such a major transition. Many applications will not finish being ported over until after KDE 4.1 is released. Even once they are ported over many will likely not take full advantage of the new sub-systems and technology until the KDE 4.3 timeframe. These things take time. Even Mac OS X took several years after the 10.0 release to mature. And Windows XP had severe problems until SP2 and it was mostly just Windows 2000 with a few new features and a new theme. It wasn’t a radical overhaul that’s why it’s version number was NT 5.1.
That’s what they said about 4.0, 4.1, and now 4.2. I imagine that will extend to 4.3, 4.4, 4.5…
I’m thinking back to the claims that once KDE 4.0 came out the other desktops were as good as dead… and laughing.
The KDE 4.x series will eventually be impressive. But they took it out of the oven way too soon. Tastes like raw chicken.
Edited 2008-05-30 17:19 UTC
Welcome to the world of open source development, and indeed, any kind of software development. Plasma will probably be OK for a lot of people by 4.1, much, much better by 4.2 and will have turned into something pretty compelling for everyone by .3, .4 and .5 as they gain experience with previous releases.
Considering what’s been involved in KDE 4, from getting a new development platform in Qt 4, to reorganising the libraries, refactoring kdelibs, the progress that’s been made between releases and the fact that you can see they have something to build on – there’s every reason to believe that your laughter will be pretty short-lived. Enjoy yourself while you can, because I don’t see anyone else coming up with anything terribly exciting ;-).
You know, it’s astonishing the number of people who don’t get and understand how open source development works. Even after all our experiences with all kinds of software, some people still persist in believing that you can still throw out alphas, betas and release candidates and make a perfect .0 release – which they will still complain bitterly about anyway, because that development model simply doesn’t work.
Hence me only ever using KDE4 from a LiveCD. I understand that the openSUSE 10.3 release will at least be supported for a few more years after 11.0 is out, so a forced upgrade is still some time off. And so long as FreeBSD virtually has *no* support for KDE 4.x whatsoever (where are the PC-BSD guys?), I don’t see a forced upgrade down that path either. I still use the liveCDs from time to time, so that when I do upgrade (probably when Amarok 2.0 and KOffice 2 are out), I won’t be completely lost.
The KDE 3.5.x series is still a supported option in openSUSE 11.0, so a forced upgrade is still at least 2 years off. Longer if it is still present in 11.1.
Because KDE4 is not a incremental change from KDE3. Going from 3.5.8 to 3.5.9 and eventually 3.5.10 a user has a reasonable expectation of capabilities and interface. KDE4 changes the game though. There are new features that give you additional options and abilities. On the other hand there are also some lost features and design changes that may be negative in nature depending on the user. Now, early in the development, is the best time to experiment and let the KDE team know what you like and what you do not.
I will continue to use the 3.5 branch as my day to day environment. But as new releases of KDE4 come out I will try them with an open a mind as I can. Hopefully with time KDE4 will gain a feature set that makes it a reasonable replacement for KDE3 on my desktop.
At the moment I am writing this from KDE 4.1 beta as a plan of posting my opinions:
1. You can’t change how the panel looks like. Only it’s size. I find a black bar at the bottom of my screen seriously ugly and it doesn’t go well with any of my wallpapers. In general, black is not a pretty color in desktop environments.
2. The thing in the top right corner bothers me. It’s there and I can’t remove it in any way. I do understand that it is there so you could add those plasmoids to your desktop, but heck, why can’t one remove it and select the tool for adding plasmoids from f.ex. the K-menu?
3. Folder view plasmoid. Well, it shows the contents of a folder. But you can’t make it full-screen, you can’t hide those borders, and you can’t make it transparent so that you could see the background behind it. What use is a background image if you can’t see it? Besides, one thing that I dislike about it is that it won’t show any connected storage devices nor can you arrange the icons in a grid.
4. There’s this New Device Notifier thingie in the panel. So, I clicked on it and found there my 2 ntfs partitions. The problem? Both are just listed as “Volume (ntfs)” with nothing else. I can’t know which one is my C: and which one is D:. If it even stated the size of those volumes then I would know, but it doesn’t tell me anything at all. Oh, and you can’t drag and drop files directly there, you have to open Dolphin for that.
I am very used to storing to my desktop any files and documents I need often or which I will shortly use so a plasmoid similar to that folder view is an absolute essential. But since it doesn’t display any newly added USB disks or any other (writeable) removable media there I will have to always open a new window in order to drop any files there. It hinders my workflow.
EDIT:
Forgot to add number 5: The thing you get when you right-click on the panel and select “panel settings”..Has anyone seriously ever thought about it? It is absolutely NO WAY user-friendly or intuitive! I learned how to resize the panel just by accident when I moved my mouse around and noticed it changed itself on the top of that new window…It would be more logical if it was resized by dragging the top of the panel, not the new window, and even then it wouldn’t be good.
Edited 2008-05-30 18:29 UTC
Of course you can! Right click on the desktop and select Desktop Settings, there you can change the Desktop Theme.
And always with KDE when it’s infrastructure is used, you get more. Notice the New Theme button, it gives you access to all Plasma themes on kde-look.org.
So not only can you change it’s look, with three clicks you get direct access to the growing number of themes avaliable at kde-look site.
Of course you can!
Actually, I logged to #kde on freenode after I had left this comment here and asked is there any way to change it. They told me that there a regression in 4.0.80 packages so that the panel won’t update the looks before you resize it. Though, the regression is already fixed in svn.
I was also informed that in the future desktop plasmoids and panel can have different background settings. So, that kinda fixes some issues I had with KDE4, it just still won’t work for me unless folder view plasmoid is extended to also show the connected devices and to have the possibility of right-clicking on the files and folders (can’t delete them or anything if you can’t right click them, so..)
It needn’t be black … I think you just need some themes.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Glassified?content=81388
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=81388&file…
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Aya?content=76197
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=76197&file…
http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=76
While you are there, check out some Plasmoids:
http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=70
I like the look of this one myself:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/QuickLauncher+Applet?conte…
Here is something that looks like it might help to integrate GTK+ applications into a KDE 4.1 desktop:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/gtk-kde4?content=74689
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=2&id=74689&file…
Finally, what I personally would really like to see is someone to kindly turn this:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Tasty+Menu?content=41866
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=41866&file…
… into a KDE 4 plasmoid.