The KDE project has released the first release candidate for KDE 4.2. “The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of “Cilense”, (a.k.a. KDE 4.2 Release Candidate), the only planned release candidate for the KDE 4.2 desktop. Cilense is aimed at testers and reviewers. It should provide a solid ground to report last-minute bugs that need to be tackled before KDE 4.2.0 is released. Reviewers can use this release candidate to get a first look at the upcoming KDE 4.2 desktop which provides significant improvements all over the desktop and applications. It is not recommended for everyday use, however.”
The Answer
Wouldn’t that be only 10% of the answer to the ultimate question?
You know when in Maths class your not paying attention, then the teacher puts you on the stop to answer the question? Well 2 is always my answer and I have been correct twice
Mandriva is supposed to release today 2009.1 beta1 with KDE 4.2 RC1. Cant’ wait to install it.
Nice, I’ll try out.
The only thing that bothers me with mandriva is their qt style. It’s much more unpolished then Oxygen
It would be much better if they made a Oxygen for gtk rather then a totally new theme for Gtk and Qt. Much more work and with not so nice results IHMO
The version will be “alpha 2” instead of “beta 1”. I guess that the reason is that it cannot be used to upgrade a 2009.0:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_Alpha_2
Tom
For those of you who are eager to try out the new KDE in your Debian SID + Experimental box (I suppose you already have KDE 4.1 from Experimental), there’s an unofficial Debian repository at http://kde42.debian.net/ hosting svn builds of kde trunk. Those packages are built by the Debian KDE packaging team.
Instructions to install the packages are given on the page. The repository will be updated until KDE 4.2 is released, at this point it is very likely KDE 4.2 will go into Experimental.
Fedora 10 + KDE 4.2 RC LiveCD Torrent:
http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/torrents/
Perhaps I will be willing to try out KDE 4.5.9 – until there, I will prevent myself and others to delight a sea of bugs and mentally ill features.
You’re loss.
I personally find it very stable and love the freedom the features provide.
Perhaps if you actually tried KDE4.x before commenting, you might realise how grossly inaccurate your comments are.
Edited 2009-01-17 15:19 UTC
Unlike the OP – that somehow takes pride in not trying KDE 4.x before commenting, I’m currently using KDE 4.2RC1 (Fedora RPMs from the KDE Packaging project) and thus far, I’ve yet to experience problems / bugs / crashes. (Beyond one or two minor issues.)
While I still miss a couple of KDE 3.5.x features, compared to KDE 4.2 on my Fedora 10, KDE 3.5.10 on my CentOS 5.2 machine does look outdated and missing a number of useful features. (E.g. Multiple folder separate views per desktop, krunner is better than katapult, etc)
– Gilboa
I’m with you: 4.0 <= KDE < 4.2 sucks. I tried them and every time I went back to 3.5.9/10.
I’ll try 4.2 in a few days. It seems from the screenshots and reviews that it is getting better with every release. Perhaps 4.2 is the one for me
neither kde3.0 or kde2.0 were any better than kde 4.0.
kde 4.2 is a huge improvement. i hope you like it.
but if you dont, please , just dont say it sucks on news sites. you can add a report on bugs.kde.org and explain you problem with it.
you will find that the devs are ( at least on my experience ) very helpfull and eager to improve kde for everyone. probably the next version wont have that problem for you ( and others ) and you can enjoy using kde.
This will take longer, sorry for that.
Firstly, it is imho never a good idea to label somebody as troll in a replying comment but that is just me. On the other hand, comparing users to “curved eyed donkeys” isn’t an indicator of good manners where I come from, but perhaps this is only a light hearted joke and the punchline was lost (to me) in translation.
Nevertheless, I’ve to admit that I’m a little bit frustrated myself, given that you choose not to respond to my attempts to engage in a serious discussion a few days back (cf. comments to story
http://osnews.com/story/20758/KDE_4_2_Progress_New_NetworkManager_P… ), fair enough.
But since you bring no new arguments for your “Vista wanabe” assesment along with your comments in this thread, I can – at least – understand why some users may interpret your contributions as trolling.
I would still be interested to discuss these matters with you, especially since I think that the foundation for some of your arguments is either incorrect (for example your earlier statement about KDE4 and Slackware which seemed to imply a stressed relationship between the KDE project and Patrick Volkerding, which is demonstrably false), or to be – for my taste – a littlebit too far fetched (e.g. the only possible explanaiton for the default black color scheme in oxygen is because the KDE4 devs tried to create a Vista clone, kickoff – which was created originally by Novell / the SuSE folks for KDE3 and was only used as default in KDE4 because it was ready when needed – is only a blatant Vista menu ripp-off without merrits on its own, etc. ).
—
Regarding your
statement: Is it so unlikely that some people are not anoyed by KDE4 in its current incarnation? I use it since version 4.0.3, and pretty much exclusively since 4.1 and have yet to stumble upon a show-stopper. Some things were not as nice as KDE 3.5.10 was/is, but unusable is a pretty hefty word and in my opinion not warranted for anything past 4.1.3.
With respect to porting KDE3 to Qt4: Interestingly enough, whenever this topic comes around, nobody steps up to do the heavy lifting, e.g. coding. Not back when a collective failure to read past the headline of a blog caused the
“no-more-icons-on-a-desktop-how-dare-they!” tumult, not whenever somebody declares to fork KDE4 because of insurmountable differences with the direction of the development, and most likely also not this time, when a straight port is demanded in a forum on OSNews.
Don’t get me wrong, porting KDE3 to the Qt4 infrastructure would have been a great service to the community, especially if it would have started a year ago or so. But since most distributors seem to have decided that KDE4 is good enough for their future (a little bit too early for my taste, but this is not the fault of the KDE4 devs, if there is blame to spread at all), the main incetiative to do this is gone (e.g. providing a KDE3 version based on current technology so that long term support and coexistance with KDE4 gets easier).
I can relate to the frustration of long-term KDE3 “power users” that feel left out by the current developments. I was a GNOME user who took some pride in configuring the hell out of my desktop and was extremly unhappy with the direction GNOME took when they made their 1.x -> 2.0 jump. At version 2.6, I decided that I was at this point in time unable and unwilling to follow my (up until then) preferred desktop environment any further. My memory of this time is already a little hazy, but I really hope that I did not vent my wrath on the GNOME devs back then, because if I did to them what some folks did in the past year on various occasions with the KDE devs, I owe some folks a late appology :-).
GNOME seems to have done rather well without me, btw. I used it for the first time in years last summer and while I prefer now KDE4, it was a rather nice (and above all) feature complete experience. So perhaps not all hope is lost 🙂
Regards
Martin
EDIT: Finished that dangling Vista-menu sentence
Edited 2009-01-17 21:41 UTC
Hi Setec. My previous post has been removed by *the-site-wannabe-owner*. I didn’t mean to be that mean with that expression. I tried to translate that expression but what I wanted to say is about fanboys who won’t accept *whatever-they-use* failures.
Sorry if I did not respond that thread, I did not have time to go through it. My comment about KDE 4 not shipped as default is no way indication that I imply a feeling of discomfort between Volkerding and KDE. Anyone is smart enough to know that he wouldn’t do such a thing after dropping the entire GNOME desktop, he would have no one to go after that?
The UI between Windows 95 all the way through Windows Server 2008 did not change. This is what I am saying here. Although these two operating systems are completely different, they did not hammer the user with new learning curve in each release. You have seen 95 dawn, 98, ME, 2000, the merging technologies born as XP and until today the most used and widespread operating system around. What I am saying is that a project like KDE or GNOME should consider these things. Why change the whole concept of a desktop, Vista is there to explain what everyone business is: No change. More productivity, and minimal changes.
If you admit that you feel the pain about power users being left out in KDE3 to KDE4 transition, then you just validate the criticisms around the web. It’s not only me. And shame on GNOME for not eating KDE’s lunch… Still can’t lasso files in Nautilus in list view! Some of the stupidiest things still happening on GNOME, maybe because of a latent lazyness. KDE4 may recover… But for these two to overcome and become competitive against commercial OSes, it will take a hell of a time, making the same mistakes one after the other.
First of all, thanks for responding. I take it that I misunderstood your figure of speech then, please appologise my limited knowledge about colloquial English.
And – at the risk of sounding patronising – I have to say that this is the first time I believe to actually grasp the direction of your argument, which is either an indicator for my poor parsing skills or perhaps part of the explanaition why your comments were received so negatively so far.
As I said, fair enough, replys are not mandatory. It was just a little bit irritating to see your comments in this thread going in a similar direction without adressing the counter arguments in the previous occasion.
Just to be on the safe side: GNOME was not dropped from Slackware due to their approach in the UI department or their strict adherence to their HIG. It was dropped, because it was a tad more complicated to build and the resulting workload was too intensive for Pat et al. Slackware is one of my favourite distros because it represents a very good compromise (version management-wise) between bleeding edge distros like Fedora and Debian stable. KDE4 will make it, when Pat feels that KDE4 is ready (from what I have read this criterion is probably already met) and when Slackware is ready for KDE4.
As I said, I can now see your point, although I have to disagree with the premise to your argument here:
Currently, we are approaching a situation where a “one-desktop-fits-all” approach is starting to show its limits. Users expect functionality from small form factor devices like smart phones, UMPC/MID/Netbook/whatever-they-are-called-nowadays and set top boxes operating large plasma screens
that was so far reserved for stand alone desktop machines. Touchscreens will become a comodity feature in some of these device classes in the long run too, requiring a different approach to interact with the UI in the middle to long run anyway. Up until now, the typical approach to solve the resulting issues was to slap a different UI ontop of the existing DE, usually written in a dynamic language and totally inconsistent with the “usual” interface.
KDE4 decided to seperate the presentation from the underlying “desktop pillars”, allowing the design of custom userinterfaces from the same building blocks as the regular desktop and strenghtening the role of the distributor by allowing them direct controll of the result in an unpredecented way. I have no idea what the situation is in MS Windows XP / Vista or Mac OSX land, e.g. if you can enjoy a similar level of code-reuse and flexibility on these systems too, but for me this sounds pretty inovative and uhm, interesting.
I may be going out on a limb here, but the *main* problems with Vista were not the unfamiliar looks (luna in XP was already a big departure from Win2000 and Vista has a “classic look” too, IIRC) but the general impression of bugginess, slowness and the constant anoyance that UAC seems to be for some folks.
On the other hand, Mac OSX was a rather big departure from OS 9, with problems and feature regressions lingering throughout 10.0 and 10.1, yet people seem to praise it today as the hallmark of usability and user friendliness. (I have a somewhat more nuanced opinion on that topic, but that belongs on a different discussion board).
No change, more productivity and minimal charges sound great. It is somewhat difficult to implement, when you operate from a code base that is dragging along old baggage from the KDE2 ages, have a limited amount of developer-manpower (so that you simply can not work on the new exciting stuff while dedicating a similar amount of time to improving the old code base) and plan to break the API only at major revisions, preferably not again ( at least not on this magnitude) until KDE6 is due.
I say I can *relate* the to the pain, yes. I don’t feel it, because I’m a rather usual desktop user with common enough use-patterns to be within the (widening with every release, btw.) scope of the KDE4 devs. A colleage of mine used DCOP to bend KWin to his particular workflow over the years, and until the DBUS bindings allow him to reproduce his way of doing things (or until he sits down and implement them on its own), he will not switch. There may be other reasons not to switch (multimonitor setup seems to be a common area for problems nowadays) and it is a pity that so many distributions jumped to KDE4 while it was labeled to “eat your children” for their main branches, but that is water under the bridge.
I’m just not convinced that a slow gradually introduction of the (imho long overdue) reorganisation and restruction of the inner workings of KDE would have led to better results. GNOME is currently on its way to work toward an evolutionarry 3.0 release and I wish them all the best for their work, really. The prime example of what happens if you don’t release software early on and let (third party) developers get their hands on them is Enlightenment 17. Three, four years ago, the features of e17 were exciting and unpredecented in the FOSS world. Today, while still a very nice desktop environment, the excitement (and motivation, probably the main ressource besides manpower for FOSS projects) seems to have moved elsewhere.
Damn, another over-lengthy post, I must sleep more, my comments tend to get shorter then 🙂
Regards Martin
Setec, yes, you are right, GNOME was not dropped because of UI but because of what you said… the heavy work load, I myself would have dropped it. I understand your view on the desktop concept, I may reply this later, because right now I have my wife talking & talking at my ears, I can’t do both things. LOL
Oh, I still find very irritating that I have to install almost the entire KDE3 to have K3b working! I think KDE3 should do the move to KDE4 just like KDE2 did to KDE3. Smooth.