This week wasn’t marked by any breaking news items, but there were a few tends to be spotted. This may be have been a new week, but netbooks were still all the rage, with several items on our front page. We also had lots of news on Windows 7, and OSNews’ very first game review. An uneventful week, but some interesting discussion nonetheless. This week’s My Take is about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release.
Week in Review
I’m sure some of you are getting a bit fed up with all the netbook news by now, so I’ll get those out of the way first. Early in the week we had the Ubuntu Mobile team who stated that they may look beyond GNOME for their interface needs – more specifically, they might look at the upcoming LGPL release of Qt 4.5. You (you, as in, OSNews readers) greeted this news positively, although discussion arose over whether or not EFL may be a beter solution than Qt.
In the meantime, more information became available on Intel’s planned upgrade to its Atom platform, further raising the question whether or not the nerds’ darling of the chip world, Via, will ever make a serious dent in Atom’s popularity. To finish it off, at the end of the week, Acer took the wraps off the successor to the world’s most popular netbook, the Aspire One. Sadly, no pricing or operating system information was given out. And lest we forget, El Reg had a hands-on video of the Sony Vaio P.
Moving on to the next trend, this week – again – saw lots of news surrounding Windows 7, whose beta is so popular Microsoft keeps on extending the deadline. First, we reported on a limited but interesting benchmark regarding Windows 7’s performance on SSDs. Microsoft also gave us an insight into the Windows Experience Index, and Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth praised Windows 7, touting it as a “great product”. Despite the positive buzz around Windows 7, Microsoft had bad news as well: the company is going to cut 5000 jobs.
It was also inauguration week in the United States, with Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. The live webcast was broadcast across the internet using Silverlight, to the ire of many Linux users. To make sure everyone could watch the webcast, Moonlight and Microsoft developers worked hard, and in one afternoon came up with a working solution for Linux and Mac OS X PowerPC users.
OSNews also ran its very first game review this week, which may have raised some eyebrows here and there, but it will be a recurring topic on OSNews from now on – although in a limited fashion, and always clearly marked as being a game review, so the on-topic police (as David so fittingly put it) can easily skip the game reviews.
My Take: KDE 4.2
Coming Tuesday, January 27th, is the set release date for the next iteration in the KDE 4.x series, KDE 4.2. This will be the first release aimed at not just developers and enthusiasts, but “normal” users as well. Responses to the test releases have so far been very positive, and I personally was blown away by the increase in quality between KDE 4.1 and KDE 4.2 RC.
In preparation of our Tuesday KDE 4.2 coverage, I’ve installed the KDE 4.2 release candidate on my Kubuntu installation. My experiences with KDE 4.0 and 4.1 weren’t exactly pink ponies and rainbows, so I was a little sceptical at first. However, when I had everything up and running, I couldn’t help my jaw dropping on the floor. It’s absolutely amazing just how the overall user experience, quality, looks, and functionality have increased between KDE 4.1 and 4.2 – it’s almost like a new desktop environment.
Sure, it’s not perfect yet, and there’s still enough to complain about, but I couldn’t help sending an email to KDE’s Aaron Seigo, complimenting the KDE team on the impressive progress between the two releases.
We’ll have detailed release coverage on Tuesday, with a few first impressions of KDE 4.2, as well as a short interview with Aaron Seigo. In any case, I can advise you to take a look at KDE 4.2 RC right now – especially if you’ve been bitten by KDE 4.0, 4.2 is going to be the perfect moment to give KDE4 another chance.
Honest words. I like it.
KDE 4.2 is really quite nice, but I think the first Qt 4.5 based KDE will be point where it all will make sense. Konqi will get a webkit engine with flash support and Nepomuk might see more use. Kmail etc. will use Akonadi and most apps will finally be ported to Qt4.
Plus so much more.
So 4.2 is already good and maybe “The Answer” for all those still on 3.5, but the hype is not really stopping .. and Linus will be back
Didn’t Linus say: running a kernel with KDE is like sucking a thumb without having a blanket?
oops, my bad, I meant *without* KDE …
Who cares what Linus says?
Second that. Quite right.
Over the years I’ve seen tons of people misspell “complement” as “compliment”. This is the first time I saw someone do the reverse.
Thanks, fixed.
English is not my native tongue, errors are bound to occur
.
Tsk. What a lousy excuse. The spelling differences are exactly the same in Dutch, while the difference in pronunciation are much greater.
Edited 2009-01-25 20:31 UTC
Isn’t the Frisian language a sort of bridge between Dutch and English?
@Thom
Maybe you could write your articles in Frisian for the “benefit” of the spelling Nazis?
Not really, at least not in every respect.
Afrikaans is the closest thing to English you’ll get, as for the syntax.
BTW, Dutch don’t use “complement”, except in maths and in phony (marketing) speak.
I kind of doubt Thom, like the vast majority of Dutch people, knows more than a few words of Frisian. The only person I know personally who speaks Frisian is an Israeli.
I’d love to see some articles in Afrikaans, though. 😉
Tsk. What a lousy thing to complain about.
What’s the deal with the default window decorations? They stick out like a sore thumb. They’re ugly, look really out of date, and totally do not fit in with the rest of the interface. I like MacOS X because the interface is clean and polished and attractive. KDE4 is looking like it will meet or exceed that aesthetic. (Although there are still way too many UI features, at least by default, that resemble Windows too much.) Except for the window decorations that are totally inconsistent. Yes, I’m sure you can change them, but why put up your screenshots with something so out of place?
The thing that’s great about KDE4 is that it’s exploring new paradigms. It’s not totally revolutionary, but it’s no longer just playing catch-up to Windows and the Mac. It’s got some creative concepts all its own.
I quite like the window decorations. There aren’t any others like it that I know of…
I’ve fallen in love with the Skulpture style for KDE 4.0 (there’s a theme and a window style). It’s got this retro look, without being corny or outdated. It’s really pretty.
Now, if only there was a Plasma Skulpture theme…
yeah,
Skulpture is nice (using it atm too)… I’m currently using Plateau plasma theme, it’s nice, simplistic and modern.
If I have time I might dive into the lava pit that is Qt widget styling and create a nice flat style (the kind that you find on sites like customize.org)
Instead of making users skip over the game reviews (and other topics they’re not interested in), why not add the ability to set up filters so that only the topics one is interested in will be displayed?
Then you can get rid of this ‘Page 2’ thing where, as it stands now, half of the interesting content is off to the side so that people are bound to skip right over it.
Because whatever implementation we would choose, it would be too much work. It would be HELL to bugfix it. It would be HELL to find a decent implementation. On top of that, it would lead to people submitting stuff that’s already on the frontpage, but they missed it because it got filtered out. Etc. Etc.
You already have a filtering mechanism. It’s free, works on all websites, all browsers, all platforms, and can even be used in dead tree media, television. In fact, you can even use it on real world objects and people!
It’s called a brain, and your sensory input system. If you think you’re not going to like an article based on the headline and teaser, just SKIP IT.
Grmbl.
Though I’m one of the few users of KDE that has gone on with it since 4.0, I can say quite frankly that kde 4.2 does bring a lot of polish. Maybe even kde 3.x users won’t feel so disappointed if they try it on kde 4.2.
Another good thing is that KOffice 2.0 beta 5 was released around 10 days ago. I remember using KOffice when I was running KDE on FreeBSD many years ago and it was my favourite office suite from the point of view that it had all the features I need and yet it was also light weight enough in size that it didn’t weigh down the system.
KDE 4.x will hopefully be appearing on OpenSolaris (via bionicmutton (which is unfortunately down at the moment)) but with that being said, I hope they integrate things in nicely so that the new wireless widget can make using the wireless devices on OpenSolaris easy for the first timer (or just people like me who know what needs to be done but are just lazy
)
Maybe this year will be the year of ‘significant growth for *NIX on the desktop’ – most of the people I’ve shown KDE to are excited about an awesome desktop like that – and is free. Lets hope that as more people are exposed they’ll realise that they don’t have the beholden to the duopoly that exists
visit Osnews.com, then scroll down.
Ok, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I downloaded the nightly builds. Surprised to find that its 4.3, but a very early build so I doubt much has changed.
Things I like
+Very clean feeling.
This is something that was always bothering me about kde and why I never used it, and feels fixed.
+Desktop effects look and feel polished. This is something compiz needs to do, but I doubt it will happen. One example is how the switching of virtual desktops, it is quick not jerky and what you would expect without effects on.
+Customization is very well done. Cant say more, you will just have to try it.
++Uniqueness, it just feels very unique. I really feel when I am using it that it isnt windows mac or anything done before.
Now for a few negatives
-some apps such as Amarok dont feel polished. For example when trying to play a radio stream it will sometimes crash, and most of the time not do anything. But this could be from the 4.3 download, so I cant say until I download a stable release.
-Takes some time getting used to. But heck I Wouldnt have ever used Linux if this was a big deal to me.
Overall the desktop feels great, and I can see myself using this in place of Gnome. Really a big surprise for me, since I really have never liked kde, and would always go running back to gnome. I really suggest if you want to give it a quick go just download the nightly build, but be mindful that it isnt the rc. Just do a quick google to find it kde-nightly for ubuntu.
Just for reference it was build 4.2.60
It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between KDE 4.1 and 4.2. For the first time, it feels like a complete desktop. All the little pieces are starting to come together, and everything’s starting to make sense.
I just wish nVidia would fix their drivers.
KDE 4 has always been fast on my laptop (Intel GMA something-or-other), and pretty much everything works. Even KDE 4.0 worked OK.
On my desktop machine (nVidia 9600GT), even though the latest drivers sped things up a lot, I can’t use KDE 4.2 for more than a few minutes without X crashing. Since it just dies somewhere inside the driver, there’s no way to work out what’s caused it or why.
Since I’m running Ubuntu on that machine, that leaves me stranded in Gnome, probably until Ubuntu 9.10.