KDE Archive

The KDE team has released KDE 4.2.1. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Cream", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.1), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop." You can wait for your distribution to package it, or download it yourself.

The release of KDE 4.0 was not a smooth one, and left a number of users a bit disgruntled. Still, the release showed so much potential that it was oozing out of every pixel. KDE 4.1 improved significantly in many areas of concern, but it wasn't yet ready for everyone. With today's release of KDE 4.2, the KDE4 vision is ready to face not only developers and enthusiasts, but every users. We have taken a look at the release candidate for KDE 4.2, and we have a short interview with KDE's Aaron Seigo.

When KDE 4.0 was first released, it was met with quite some criticism. Even though people saw the huge potential, the lack of functionality and stability, as well as quite a few bugs detracted from the experience. The KDE developers continued to work on implementing their relatively radical vision, and with the release of KDE 4.2 creeping ever closer, it seems they're well on their way.

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.

"Krusader is a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager. If you dislike bloat and prefer minimalist windows managers like XFCE or Fluxbox, the good news is that Krusader will run without KDE, provided you have the necessary libraries installed. If Dolphin isn't cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you've been looking for." Here is the download page for Krusader, give it a spin and share your comments.

KDE's Aaron Seigo has published a blog post in which he details how Nepomuk and the semantic desktop can be beneficial to users. He introduces the concepts of "context" and "context switches" - possible states are "writing an OSNews news item", or "posting a blog entry", or "editing your MySpace page". When you switch from one of these contexts to another, it's called a context switch, according to Seigo. "What happens with the rest of the software running on your computer when you switch contexts?" Seigo answers his own question. "Pretty much nothing. At least not automatically."

It's been a couple of days since Akademy 2008 started, and a steady stream of news is coming through the KDE.news site. The general day 1 article described the atmosphere and two Keynotes. The first keynote was about increasing community involvement, and the refreshing ideas in there really set the tone for Akademy: innovation and integration. The second keynote was about Nokia, who discussed their long-term commitment to Qt and KDE. Tuesday, Nokia gave away 100 N810 internet devices to KDE developers to prove their point, and there is also an article about Nokia and Mozilla doing a Firefox port to Qt. Finally, there is the Embedded and Mobile day going on right now, with very interesting talks. Separate news articles started to appear, covering the many improvements in Qt 4.5, work by the KDE-PIM hackers, JOLIE bringing service-oriented computing to the Free Desktop, and an overview of what was discussed and decided upon during the meeting of the legal organizaton behind KDE, the e.V. During that meeting, the e.V. quarterly report was released, and it was decided to endorse the new Community Working Group, and a Code of Conduct.

Here is an interesting discussion of the changes KDE 4.x (via Mandriva Linux 2009 pre-releases) brings to desktop interaction. The article argues that KDE 4 might very well be the next big thing in computing, as it finally tries to steer away from the Xerox desktop metaphor we've all been using since the glory days of disco. While I personally don't really believe KDE 4.x to be revolutionary (I see it more as evolution with pepper in its butt), the article details many of the new things in KDE 4.x, and might make the lives of those first confronted with the new desktop just that little bit easier.

Groklaw has interviewed KDE about some recent misconceptions about KDE 4. "There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed."

KDE 4.1 is supposed to make everything right with the recently troubled desktop. Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was -- and whose -- is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything. More here. Also, Tectonic published an article titled "Beyond the desktop with KDE4", while the now well-known for its sarcasm 'Linux Hater' blog has something to say too (warning: some profanity).

"After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate."

Probably the most often misunderstood element of KDE4 is Plasma, the extensive widget engine that replaces the normal desktop and the Kicker panel from KDE 3.x. The entire KDE4 desktop is built up out of Plasmoids (yet another term for desk accessory), including the panel and the desktop itself - and it is the latter that has been causing quite some confusion. Where are my desktop icons? Update: Aaron Seigo has published a screencast showing how the FolderView Plasmoid behaves as a normal desktop, and how to make it so.

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.

KDE 4.0 was released to mixed reviews; more or less everyone recognised the enormous potential of the still young platform, but some doubted whether or not the KDE project had made the right choice by releasing KDE 4.0 as, well, 4.0. The KDE developers were clear: just you wait for KDE 4.1. They released the first beta of KDE 4.1 today.