Submitted by Over the weekend, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4 beta 1. “Today, KDE has released a first preview the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), 4.4 Beta1 The first beta version of KDE SC 4.4 provides a preview and base for helping to stabilize the next version of the KDE Desktop, Applications and Development Platform.”
Here’s a couple of videos I did showing the new features.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEuapaLJF8g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrcIUkQnYjk
It’s pretty awesome so far and the final version should be a fine release.
Thanks for the awesome videos. They really show how far KDE has come.
I was in complete awe. I honestly believe there is no platform right now that can match the fluidity, elegance and flexibility of what I have seen on those videos.
KDE 4.4 really seems to be a game-changing release. I am following closely Akonadi and Nepomuk and hope that they become mature enough to be usefully visible on the desktop soon. How´s that coming along?
I agree, I’m so impressed by KDE SC 4.4. 2010 will finally be the year of linux.
That* was a thing of beauty.
* The videos/KDE 4.4 (not the choice of music ;^)
Thanks!
Waddaya mean you dont like the music ?? Jarre rocks 🙂
With the new KDEprint and now the ability to bind the application menu to a mouse button, this will finally be the version that reaches feature parity with KDE 3.5. Right now KDE is almost rock solid, maybe an occasional crash due to a rogue plasmoid that kills the entire DE, but restarting plasma-desktop fixes that. Can’t wait for this new version.
This may be the release of KDE that has me switch BACK from Gnome. (I used KDE3 for a few years) KDE 4.4 looks wonderful and intuitive. Although I am REALLY hoping that the Gnome developers will “get it right” when they release version 3, KDE4 looks like a nice alternative for me. I also like seeing the tremendous progress the KDE developers have made since the start of KDE4. Outstanding!
I hope so too – I was happily using KDE until 4.3 & Karmic. We really, *really* need an ultra solid KDE for Lucid Lynx, or KDE will miss a huge opportunity at corporate desktop.
If you’re a true KDE fan, do yourself a favor and try it on something else other than Ubuntu/Kubuntu. In fact, I beg you to do it. Even if you cannot afford to switch distros – not everybody can or is even willing to – you might enjoy the experience on a secondary machine or VM. The difference is like night and day.
Apart from KNetworkManager, that’s really on a bad shape right now and k3b that never seems to get out of its alpha status – it has yet to let me down since version 1.69.0~alpha4-1, though – KDE really shines. /me thinks that you will find improved stability that way. Not perfect yet but much better than what is given with Kubuntu.
K/Ubuntu gives KDE an undeserved bad reputation. I realize that some people might think that I am beating a dead horse but it just makes me sad to see the number of posters here that judge KDE based on their experience with K/Ubuntu…
Edited 2009-12-07 23:21 UTC
Believe me, I’m seriously considering switching until Lynx is out; but, I’d like to remain in the Debian ecosystem. What’s a deb based distro that does KDE4 right? “Debian Sid” is not an answer ;-).
Well, if Debian is what floats your boat I really was going to suggest Sid. It is not so bad as the name implies. In fact, I only had two major headaches with Sid in the long time that I decided to use it on my laptop and both were related to NetworkManager. As soon as I identified the problem, I downgraded it to the previous version – aptitude rules! – and then apt-pinned it to that version so that apt would not try to upgrade it again. Then I would check every two months or so if whatever was wrong was fixed and only then I upgraded it.
The good thing about Sid is that it is not only pretty much up to date overall but if you’re willing to live on the edge just to try the latest and greatest toys, you can enable experimental and then toy around with KDE. That’s where my KDE4 version of k3b comes from and it is working just fine. It does require some manual tinkering yes, but I think that it is worth.
I never used it but I hear that sidux is a nice way of getting your feet toes wet with Sid without having to get your hands too dirty if you don’t want to. You may want to look at that.
And finally, although I have close to none experience with that, I suggest Arch as I have many friends using it and they say that KDE is top notch over there. I know that it does not fulfill your criteria but it may be worth a try…
I actually am running Sid at home (alongside Karmic). I can tolerate occasional breakage at home.
At work, I’m less tolerant about it. I’ll probably have to move to Lenny & KDE 3.
I’m using a mix of Sid/Testing and Experimental at home too, and I’ve never encountered any breakage since I installed apt-listbugs.
Maybe you know this little tool but for anyone interested, its role is to analyze every packages you are going to install and watch if there are grave bugs reported against them.
If it’s the case, it’s not too late to decide not to upgrade the package.
I used to use apt-listbugs but it can be too intrusive sometimes, specially in larger updates – people that update Sid on a bi-weekly basis or less frequently will know what I am talking about – so I stopped using it but I remain a huge fan of the tool nonetheless and recommend it in those cases where you have to be certain that Sid won’t break apart during an upgrade.
If they can’t trust distros to package the dang thing, the let them make an installer for it. And package it themselves. If not, they should stop complaining.
Couldn’t agree more. I am beginning to realize that while the KDE platform has excellent technologies, integration, and innovation to it… the Distributions are really falling flat on their faces in packaging and configuring it well for their users. Kubuntu and even SuSE need to ‘try harder’.
KDE should be “polished” and made attractive to not only power users (who love delving into every minor crevice of configuration options) but also the standard user (who maybe wants to change a wall paper every now and then). That means we need more sane defaults (a shared responsibility b/w the distro & KDE).
My pet peeves with the aesthetics/design of KDE4’s UI:
1.) Too much wasted space…
– “Devices Recently Plugged-in” initial pop-up size is HUGE.
– “System Settings” window full of empty white space
– Toolbars/menus adding unnecessary height to my window while neglecting effective use of its (empty) width.
Some windows should expand as needed to accommodate the content they present (a la KRunner). (Speaking of KRunner—why does it allow you to resize and add empty unusable space, when the program takes over resizing once you start typing shit into it?!?!)
2.) The screen is WAYYY too busy. Many useful items are essentially rendered largely unused because of all the junk around them; nothing attracts my eye to ’em because of distraction from all of the surrounding items.
3.) Some animations are poorly implemented in certain instances. For example, I absolutely abhor the selection highlight box’s lagging behavior. Take a look at the KDE SC 4.4 Preview (Part II) video, around 0:38-1:22 (URL linked in an above comment). The highlight box (gradually) follows your cursor, and moving the mouse across the entire span of selections increases this apparent lag. The highlight should follow my mouse tightly or just not be there at all; it leaves an ‘unpolished’ feeling for the user.
Despite my criticisms, I do follow the KDE 4 release with great excitement. =)~
I’m trying to think of a time that I’ve *ever* heard anyone say “Boy, distro X really failed to package Gnome well!”, or “Gee, distro Y sure didn’t configure XFce well for its users!”, or “Oh Jesus! Distro Q sure bungled up their ‘E’ desktop!”
These “blame the distros” claims seem the exclusive domain of KDE4 advocates. And one can scarecely find a KDE-related thread that is not absolutely steeped in distro-blame. And this despite the fact that KDE 4.0 was released prematurely in order to allow the distros to start integrating it early.
Could it be that KDE4 is simply a turd that can’t be polished? Is it that it’s just still too soft? Will giving it a little more time to harden help? Or will it end up just crumbling in the maintainers’ hands?
Edited 2009-12-08 00:54 UTC
Could you do everyone a favor and just leave all KDE related stories for good?
Every somewhat regular OSNews reader already knows that you hate KDE to death.
If you don’t like KDE, why do you spend so much time talking about it? Just don’t use it and let everyone live in peace.
You mean, like Slackware stopped packaging Gnome because it was too horrible to build? Actually, I don’t have problems with the KDE packaging of Kubuntu, but that may be because *buntu doesn’t support my laptop well enough to make it worth running.
I almost mentioned Slackware in my comment. It is a salient and relevant point. KDE is, by Patrick’s account (which I agree with, BTW), *easier* to package than is Gnome. Which puts all these folks who claim that the distro packaging is to blame for KDE4’s woes on somewhat less solid ground. Slackware is a one man show, for $DEITIES sake! The blame for any woes that KDE4 has lie upstream with the KDE project. The KDE project consistently refuses to get involved with packaging at all. Which tells me that they don’t really think that is where the problem lies.
Edited 2009-12-08 16:09 UTC
And her you hit the crux of the matter, but manage to make the totally wrong conclusion(based on your prejudice I presume).
Slackware, is as you say (mostly) a one man show, and Patrick’s preference has always been to use unaltered upstream sources. So when he continues to produce a much a better more robust user experience of KDE, compared to some distributions that heavily alter and patch KDE. It then obviously makes sense, that it’s the upstream KDE project where the problem lies.
When did we agree upon that?
Anyway, this is actually getting interesting. Because Slackware is a very old-school and geeky Linux distro. (My move from Unix to Slackware began with Slackware ’96 back in Fall of 1996.) And I have always maintained that KDE is a very geeky DE. It may very well be that raw, upstream KDE is a good fit for “modern” Slackware users.
It may be that “polishing” for less rough and rugged users only hurts KDE. Hence the “polishing” analogy I used earlier. Some things are only made worse by polishing. Feel free to pick another example if you don’t like mine.
That is all in reference to KDE and Slackware, in general. Of course, Slackware did not move to KDE4 until about 3 months ago. Apparently Patrick did not feel comfortable with the state of the KDE4 upstream for the first year and eight months after KDE 4.0. Which works out to about 86% of the time from the release of KDE 4.0.0 to the present.
So whether or not we agree that KDE4 in Slackware is good today… I’m not sure that it has anything to do with the 1.7 years that Patrick didn’t feel that it was good enough to be included even in his very geeky distro.
And none of this suggests KDE4 as a good DE for less geeky users.
Edited 2009-12-08 16:55 UTC
I feel like I am feeding the troll here because you’re obviously derailing the conversation based on some very dubious claims to support your shaky position that KDE is not suitable to less geeky users. Slackware, although a geeky distro by many accounts, is also a very conservative distribution, has very few resources and as such it makes a lot of sense that they would wait to adopt KDE after the developers had a chance to iron most of the showstopper bugs out. But you know that. And the fact that even if KDE4 is a brand new platform, Patrick would rather package that as the official DE for Slackware than get involved with GNOME again tells a lot.
I also find it very hard to believe that KDE is hard on its users because my 03 and 06 yrs old daughters can use it just fine to play their online games and mess around with TuxPaint so it obviously does not take a college degree to use it.
This is what I don’t get on your response and warranted this reply. Kubuntu does not receive nearly the same amount of attention that Ubuntu gets from Canonical, to put it mildly. And you have acknowledged that in the past. Several times, in fact. So I don’t think that it is unreasonable to assert that Kubuntu does a less than stellar job as a KDE distribution then.
As a previous poster said, you clearly has a bias against KDE and it shows so I think that you should refrain from commenting on KDE threads as you don’t look at it objectively. You obviously no longer has valid complaints and keep rehearsing the same old, same old stuff as if we would listen to you THIS TIME.
Some people on this thread have criticized it with legitimate complaints. You should try that.
For one you will not see those bugs that are regularly referred to, and commented as distribution and packaging problems. Incidentally you more or less get the same improvement if you compile pristine KDE sources on the distributions getting blamed for bad packaging.
From my experience I say that you are wrong, as it has shown me that that when given a choice, non geeky users prefer KDE to alternatives. And if you look the level of “polish”, is not so extensive that that the term “raw” would even apply, making that a non issue for Slackware and other distributions.
Nonsens, as the KDE team themselves continuously improve KDE for all users, without most of the bugs and problems.
This also sounds like nonsens, even more clear if you look at the level of the so called “polish”. I’d say the cause of the problem that the distributions try to do more than they have time to decently implement and QA, with to little resources and skill to pull of whit in the allocated time frames.
Which only proved that Patrick not only understood the communications from the KDE developers, he also acted as a responsible distribution and made the decision to best serve his user base. Rather than just uncritically package up the latest releases and ship it, like some distributions seem to do. As for the 1 year 8 months, that is not correct as you have to account for the Slackware release cycle. It was added 2008-08-13. And he also showed that there was no problem maintaining it along KDE 3.5, that some other claimed.
Well, if I did not knew that you are above such things, I would have to accuse of quote cherry picking or other dishonest practises, but most likely this is just an misunderstanding because I’m a rabid KDE4 fanboy 🙂 . For what it’s worth here is the reality according to me (e.g. somebody who, while having switched from Slackware to Archlinux for most machines, still follows the developments in my favourite all-time distro quite closely)
The main reason why KDE 4 was not in the default lineup of Slackware 12.2 was, that Patrick et al. (it is not a truly one-man-show, although Patrick certainly shoulders the major part of the workload and responsibility and has the last say) felt uncomfortable about bumping KDE3 -> KDE4 and including a major revision of Xorg (among other changes) in a point release, cf. http://lwn.net/Articles/309374/
Contrary to popular belief, Patrick Volkerding had a lot of nice things to say about both the intial release
(
http://slackblogs.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html )
as well as the speed and direction of development around the time 4.1.0 was released:
source: http://slackware.linux.or.id/pub/slackware/slackware-12.2/testing/p… )
Note that the former quote was from a time (e.g. Jan 2008) when everybody and their aunt Hettie was either reaching for the lynch mob gear to show those snarky KDE4 devs what happens to bad boys and girls that treat release numbers not as the holy things they are or was preparing to pack the whole stuff in the upcoming release as the replacement for KDE3. But then, Pat is a geek and is obviously in posession of geeky superpowers that enabled him to either test the public releases prior to 4.0.0 or to at least communicate with the developers about the roadmap.
Furthermore, I would urge you to apply the same metric ( long time until Slackware adapts a major release -> epic fail, probably won’t revocer from it ) metric to other projects too, because – again, IIRC – it took literally *years* for Slackware to move away from linux 2.4.* because 2.6.* was considered to not be ready yet. Also, it occurs to me that Slackware was the last of the major distros to make the jump to the Apache 2.x
branch, due to similar reasons.
Side remark:
It is the job of the distro to know it’s userbase and to shield it from stuff that goes against the interests and needs of said userbase. So while I prefer my distros to be raw and “unpolished” (or, as I like to think of it “as close to upstream as possible so that my bugreports are useful and I don’t have to go through the it’s-an-upstream-problem-no-it’s-a-distro-packaging-issue dance everytime something ‘interesting’ happens”), I can perfectly understand that there are scenarios where distros like Ubuntu are the sane and logical choice.
But if you read the problem fields identified by the kubuntu devs themselves for project timelord, it seems to me – card carrying geek and KDE4 fanboy that I am – that there is a not too small line between “polishing” and/or trying to shoehorn a complex and – from the perspective of a distro/community that is tied to something completly different and about as complex like GNOME – alien into existing procedures and habits that require larger deviations from upstream than necessary while not having the adequat ressources to handle the resulting work load (replacing the default way to report bugs upstream with something that interfaces launchpad without having the manpower to triage and handle the onslaught of bugs and insisting on doing the translations decoupled from upstream using rosetta are among the more obvious reasons why kubuntu has a less than stellar reputation when it comes to packaging KDE4),
results in something you only find funny if you don’t have to support somebody who uses the final result.
I’m afraid that people will continue to waive the “distro x sucks at packaging KDE4” flag until somebody can explain why distros like Slackware, Archlinux/Chakra, etc. manage to deliver a pleasent working environment and while distros like openSuSE or even pardus (which strays rather far from trunk with heavy backporting and most distro managing tools being developed ontop of KD4/Qt4) show that it is possible to “polish” without rubbing away all of the surface.
Edited 2009-12-08 21:01 UTC
I agree with the sentiment if not the trollish spittle enveloping sbergman27’s post.
As a distro guy (the one with the geeko, if you weren’t aware) I know it’s next to impossible for distros to polish every area of a desktop. Distros just don’t have the manpower – if they try to they end up neglecting other, IMO more important distro jobs like quality packaging, or becoming a Linux desktop development company – that’s not a distro.
As far as I’m aware, distro packagers do a good enough job at packaging and default-configuring their desktops. There are a few questionable customisations which seem to be mostly about being able to say “Look Mom, we provide a value add over vanilla KDE” to their product managers or communities, and I hear frequent complaints about broken translations from one of our esteemed competitors.
What Fusion’s post was about was overall levels of polish, not packaging and configuration, and this is something that is best addressed upstream at KDE. How lame would it be if openSUSE or Kubuntu started carrying a mass of patches that fixed the unaligned widgets, the useless wasted space, the extra borders and other graphical pimples and started promoting themselves as ‘the polished KDE experience’ without putting these back upstream? The maintainers would deserve to drown in the swamp of unmaintainable patches this would create, and a couple of releases down the line the overall quality of the distro’s KDE would suffer.
Distro people have a role to play in this, which is giving high-quality feedback that upstream developers know reflects the opinion a significant number of users, not just one crank, and tells them that polish is important. This way, hackers will pause after bashing out a feature, take a step back to look at it with users’ eyes and polish it a bit.
We can also help by organising and empowering users with easy entry-points to upstream development so they can contribute fixes themselves. Trying to do it all at distro level is pulling on the wrong end of the lever of open source development.
Must be some sinister forces (aka total morons) at work because you got modded down for absolutely no rational reason.
1.) KDE is not tied to Ubuntu’s release cycle.
2.) At least before Kubuntu’s “Project Timelord” initiative, KDE was horribly broken on Ubuntu. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/19616885@N00/sets/72157608562200171/ for proof. The first “Project Timelord” release will be 10.04. Maybe Kubuntu will be bearable then.
3.) KDE works really well under openSUSE since 4.2.
Does anyone know where I can get these space/planets wall papers (exactly the ones in the video)? What are their names?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEuapaLJF8g (From 4:00)
Edited 2009-12-08 08:53 UTC
Ask SlackerJack, I guess. I agree, they are quite beautiful.
You can get them from various places.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/wallpapers/
http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/tags/205/scene/space/
And I think I got some from http://browse.deviantart.com/digitalart/
Thank you