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KDE GUI Software Linux

KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th 300

Posted by Zonk from the cogs-start-turning dept.
VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."
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KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th More

KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th

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  • Sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)

    by TBerben ( 1061176 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:32PM (#21553515)
    Sounds like the Vista launch, pushed back a little further with each test version. Maybe its better for the KDE team to set a date like July 2008 and surprise everybody when they are ready to release it in January?

    • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Informative)

      by CarAnalogy ( 1191053 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:40PM (#21553597)
      That's not really correct, IMHO.

      The difference with Vista is that the KDE team really has some major interesting new technologies now, though most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective. This will change over time. I assume KDE 4.1 will be more about applying/improving those underlying technologies, rather than introducing them.

      Aside from the desktop itself, a large number of applications have also vastly improved.

      • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jotok ( 728554 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @03:04PM (#21553809)
        ...most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.

        As a common user, I care about
        1) eye candy
        2) rendering times

        The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xtracto ( 837672 )
          As a common user I care abouy:

          1) Stability

          The last time I used a KDE based distro (Kubuntu 7.10) it was a joke. Applications crashed (Konqueror, amaroK, RKWard, among others) very often and the system overall felt fragile compared to Gnome and yes... even to Windows XP.

          I hope the KDE developers get it right this time and make KDE 4 stable. It is really shameful that when you are showing someone how "cool" amaroK is, it suddenly crashes after playing the play button without any reason (after having played ot

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Your problem is NOT KDE. It's Kubuntu, as half the interwebs know.

        • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @06:55PM (#21555343) Homepage
          The rendering times should have improved, so has the potential for eyecandy but IMO that's minor. The area where KDE is improving the most is when it comes to the framework. For example, take Phonon which is a multimedia wrapper API for backends like xine, mplayer, gstreamer etc. What does that mean for you? Well, it means the application developers will spend a lot less time dicking around getting sound and video working and instead provide more end-user features. It means that if you got it configured right once, a different KDE app won't work because it's trying to use some other backend that doesn't work. It's not like it's going to rock your boat, I mean having this working is pretty basic right? Well, for the most part KDE is about making the basic things simple. There's a lot of "basic" functionality that can be really complex and waste application developers' time with few tangible results. It they still can't manage to make something flashy and cool with all the time that's freed up, well that's not really KDE's problem.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Crazy Taco ( 1083423 )

        The difference with Vista is that the KDE team really has some major interesting new technologies now, though most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.

        That's not a difference between KDE and Vista. Actually, KDE and Vista are very much the same in this regard, and the main point of Vista is a slew of new changes under the hood that aren't immediately visible to end users. In fact, that's the main reason users are griping; they don't see too much difference between XP and Vista

        • available on XP (Score:3, Informative)

          by HeroreV ( 869368 )

          WPF, WCF, DirectX 10, and WF are all very useful for developers
          Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) are part of the .NET Framework 3.0, which is available for Windows XP. No matter how nice they are, they're not going to convince anyone to move to Vista.

    • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Informative)

      by Verunks ( 1000826 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:53PM (#21553693)
      well i think that kde 4.1 would be more suitable for the end user because a lot of great kde applications like k3b aren't yet ported to qt4, but kde 4.0 should be released soon so developers could port and test their apps in a stable kde4 desktop

    • No need for a hard KDE ship date (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:54PM (#21553715)
      KDE is already great. There is no burning business need to release an update. No shareholders to let down and start a class action.

      For me, KDE is already good enough. I'd rather wait until KDE4 is really solid than ty get it out on some arbitrary ship date.

    • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02, 2007 @03:10PM (#21553839)

      Close. KDE 4 was set to be the next Vista. What happened was that right when KDE 4 was first being planned, they hyped one particular aspect, Plasma, as being as revolutionary as icons were when they were first introduced, before any code was written. Unfortunately, this technology was MIA for a long time, and it was introduced at a very late stage. The real problem is that it replaced lots of stable code that is absolutely critical to the user experience - the panel, desktop, etc. This really shouldn't have happened, but it was a core developer's pet project. The result is that it's still unfinished, despite them already having released a "release candidate" (which everybody else expected to be basically finished). And anybody pointing out how screwed up the release schedule was got attacked by fanboys.

      So it was set to be the next Vista. But thankfully they actually managed to keep their egos in check and put off the release until the code is in a better state. This is a positive thing. I was seriously considering switching to GNOME until I heard about this.

      • It gets worse (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02, 2007 @04:34PM (#21554501)

        There's been a particularly heated exchange going on in the developer's blogs which started with someone describing the new desktop/plasma as "useless crap [blogspot.com]." Aaron Seigo (the above mentioned core developer) then replies in the comments "i'm tired of this shit".

        Now, one of the complaints leveraged was the lack of familiarity a KDE3 user would have with the alien and unfinished Plasma desktop due to a lack of migration path from the familiar kicker/kdesktop/kmenu. After a few [blogspot.com] more [blogspot.com] exchanges (which are displayed in all their sordid glory on Planet KDE [planetkde.org], Mr. Seigo then announces [blogspot.com] that he already had some code written to implement a more traditional menu system, but in light of being pissed off by people pointing out some pretty glaring flaws, he will not work on it anymore. Classy.

        The whole thing is just childish and immature on both parts and doesn't really fill me with confidence, especially in light of the unfinished and buggy RC.

        But again, the only problem with the KDE4 platform so far seems to be Plasma, and it's unfortunate since the project as a whole really seems ready to shake up the Linux desktop. Unfortunately the most visible part of it isn't up to snuff.

        • Re:It gets worse (Score:4, Funny)

          by stilborne ( 85590 ) on Monday December 03, 2007 @12:43AM (#21557433)
          urg, first, please just .. .aaron. not "mr." i hate that.

          however, you missed the point of why i said what i did. it was, quite specifically, to not reward negative community behaviour. if i was a "take my ball and go home" sort of guy, i would've been gone with a lot more than a menu a long time ago.

          i'm sorry you (or the grandparent poster) don't like how plasma has come around. i wish it could've gone a different way. perhaps when you try to do something really interesting that's a non-trivial amount of work that tends to push at pretty much every boundary in the frameworks (from x on up) we can have some fun story swapping sessions. until then ...

      • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Informative)

        by lbbros ( 900904 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @05:09PM (#21554705) Homepage
        For heaven's sake, don't spread FUD! That "stable code base" you talk about was a mess to mantain (note that Aaron J. Seigo, the Plasma lead developer, was also kicker's mantainer) and to add new features you broke others etc. Plasma it is not by any means aseigo's pet project: there are quite a number of developers involved in developing and polishing it. It matures at an amazingly fast pace, even.

        The "fanboys" you talked about were people rightfully ticked off by the constant, uncostructive and negative attitude on the part of the complainers, which did not bring any improvement and only demotivated the developers. Those people did not even bother testing later revisions (right now there's a daily VM image floating around), report bugs or even offer *constructive* criticism.

        • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02, 2007 @06:28PM (#21555153)

          For heaven's sake, don't spread FUD! That "stable code base" you talk about was a mess to mantain

          It was a feature-complete, stable mess to maintain. Sure, it's a good idea to replace it with a better design, but not immediately before a major release when the rest of the desktop is pretty much finished and not if you can't finish it on time.

          The "fanboys" you talked about were people rightfully ticked off by the constant, uncostructive and negative attitude on the part of the complainers

          Those negative attitudes didn't come from nowhere. The initial criticism was reasonable, but it was met with stone-walling and blowing people off. Then they kept releasing beta after beta that didn't work right, continually telling people to wait and that they were trolls for complaining. It is that which really kicked off the flaming you see today.

          which did not bring any improvement and only demotivated the developers.

          If you're echoing the complaints that people aren't "constructively" criticising, I think you're wrong. When you take something that works and totally breaks it, it's your responsibility to fix it, and you shouldn't complain when people point out it's broken and want it back the way it was. There really isn't anything more to elucidate on when you tell somebody that they just fucked everything up and you want it back the way it was.

          Those people did not even bother testing later revisions

          Can you blame them? "Here's a beta". "But it's totally broken!" "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's another beta." "This one's broken too." "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's a release candidate." "Nope, still broken. Aren't release candidates supposed to be at least feature-complete?" "Stop complaining! It's not supposed to be ready until 4.1!"

          When you continually feed somebody shit, eventually they are going to realise that the next spoonful isn't going to taste any better. Not testing later betas is completely understandable in light of how the stability has been misrepresented. The devs already know what they need to work on, they don't need testers to tell them. The real WTF is that if they already knew what the problems were and that it wasn't finished, why did they tag a "release candidate" that had absolutely no chance of becoming 4.0?

          • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Informative)

            by stilborne ( 85590 ) on Monday December 03, 2007 @12:52AM (#21557487)
            > but not immediately before a major release when the rest of the desktop is pretty much
            > finished and not if you can't finish it on time.

            so, we didn't do what you shouldn't do ... good.

            > when people point out it's broken and want it back the way it was. There
            > really isn't anything more to elucidate on when you tell somebody that
            > they just fucked everything up and you want it back the way it was.

            hm. see, here's the issue. you think nobody was aware of the regressions at any given point in time? so to have people annoyed, in your face and even asking the same questions several times a day with no real constructive input when there is complete awareness of the situation is not only galling, it's a waste of time. thanks for playing, but unless you have something useful to add to a conversation ... go find someone who isn't me to have it with.

            i know how counter that is to the way those raised on slashdot have come to think about interacting with others online. it's also common sense.

            the worst part was that at every stage as we added things that needed to be there ... approximately zero people who were the endless whingers about that specific thing would take any note. they'd just settle into the improvements silently at best and whinge about the next most obvious thing (often which we were already working on) at worst. criticism is fine; heck, one could view every patch that changes something fundamental in your code as a "criticism" of the existing code if one was petty enough. what makes criticism bad is when it is empty of content that moves the process towards the goal lines.

            dealing with the skewed mindset of many of the users of free software is probably the most horrific thing about working on something in the open. it's amazing to me how so many people see it as some sort of right to be able to make developing in the open as difficult, demoralizing and time consuming as possible.

            so i finally just said, "i've had enough, you people start showing some basic responsibility as participants in this process, communication being part of that process. otherwise, you can go somewhere else because i'm not going to take part in that abuse of the process."

            i wish more developers would do the same. maybe then the fanboi whingers (on all sides, around all projects) would start to smarten up just a wee bit and we could get on with a much happier development cycle.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by andersa ( 687550 )
              Sending out a release candidate thats obviously broken is not very clever. Just tell people the truth. Say, "Look, we would really like to send out KDE4 with this and that feature done and working. We will not be able to do that within the current release schedule, therefore we are delaying the release of KDE4 for an unspecified time. It may be half a year, it may be a year. In the mean time please test our work and provide constructive feedback. Thank you."

              See.. Not difficult.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by w000t ( 1141427 )
        what a load of crap... the early release of KDE 4.0 was meant to provide a stable API for people to start porting their apps. it obviously had nothing to do with developer egos, which would be completely ridiculous (why the heck would they insist on releasing, according to your own view, a shitty product?).
        i thought anonymous cowards trolling and talking from their asses weren't supposed to be moded +5 informative...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by bcmm ( 768152 )
        If you think Kicker was a stable codebase you don't use KDE.

        It was great once, but it's been modified so much since KDE 2 without any real cleanup or rewrite, and is now a bloody mess, especially in not threading the applets.

        It's the program that crashes most on me.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 )
      Well, yes. The difference is that Microsoft is a company that gets 50.000$ millions per year and shouldn't need to delay projects. If KDE 4 had the resources that Microsoft has, it would have been released before 2008.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 )
      Personally, id rather a company push back a product release data if after a test release shows its not yet ready. And with something this complex, its bound to happen.

      The alternative is they release garbage, and piss everyone off.

  • KDE File Manager (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Drasil ( 580067 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:54PM (#21553707)

    Konq was the killer app for me, I have to confess I'm a little worried about Dolphin becoming the default file manager. I've not used Dolphin much yet, but it will have to be pretty damn good to match what Konq could do. Will I still be able to have terminal, web and file panes all within the same tab? How about dragging images from a website to my /home within a single window, or middle clicking a file or link to open it in a viewer in a new tab? Konq allowed me to keep the amount of open windows to a minimum. I guess time will tell and I should start playing with Dolphin.

    I should note that I bloody hate Dolphins (my ex loved the damn things). They aren't as cute as you think, they smell of fish and have attempted genocide [wheelock.edu] on porpoises and even attack humans [scotsman.com]. Why is it that every crystal swinging hippie who lives 1000 miles from the sea wants to be a marine biologist? Dolphins!

    • Re:KDE File Manager (Score:5, Informative)

      by abigor ( 540274 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @02:57PM (#21553741)
      Konqueror isn't going anywhere, and it will still be the preferred file manager/etc. for power users. Dolphin is included as a simpler file manager with a different design philosophy, that's all. But you don't have to use it if you don't want to, as the same old Konq (KDE4'ified, of course) will still be a click away.

      • Re:KDE File Manager (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02, 2007 @05:31PM (#21554841)
        "A click away"? That doesn't sound like the KDE I know and love.

        It should be exactly 17 clicks away: menubar -> Preferences -> Options -> Settings -> File Manager Settings -> ... something about a platypus ... scrolling list of Latvian surnames ... -> ah, the Dolphin/Konq switch.

        Usually we don't get the tiniest little feature without 49 new checkboxes to control every last aspect of it. If they manage to add a whole new file manager, but allow you to switch back with *one* click, they've already lost. I might as well use GNOME.

    • Re: Dolphin Attacks (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do the researchers believe the attacks were porpoiseful?
    • Will I still be able to have terminal, web and file panes all within the same tab?

      Terminal, yes. Web, no.

      How about dragging images from a website to my /home within a single window, or middle clicking a file or link to open it in a viewer in a new tab?

      Dragging images will still work (AFAIK). Dolphin does not have multiple tabs. Of course Konq still does.

    • I should note that I bloody hate Dolphins (my ex loved the damn things). They aren't as cute as you think, they smell of fish and have attempted genocide [wheelock.edu] on porpoises and even attack humans [scotsman.com].

      I'm confused... are you talking about dolphins or about your ex?

  • just release it when it's done

  • But that means (Score:5, Funny)

    by joeflies ( 529536 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @03:20PM (#21553903)
    That it will miss the all-important Christmas Shopping season! Just think of all those disappointed kids who wanted KDE4 from Santa.
    • I'm one of them :(
    • At first, I was thinking "Wow, it would be cruel if that was all you got for christmas..."

      But now that I think about it, this would make a great gift for the whole family, and would be rather cheap. Thanks for the suggestion!

  • who might slip the release date? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by icepick72 ( 834363 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @03:29PM (#21553973)
    the release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release.


    One simple question: Why can Microsoft not slip release dates without getting flack, but it's okay for open source projects? Both are slipping for the same reasons.

    • Slippage (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tony ( 765 )
      Simple: because most open source release schedules slip by weeks. Microsoft often slips by years [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by zlogic ( 892404 )
        I remember that in early 2006 KDE 4 was promised to be released about the same time as Vista, or even earlier. But at least the KDE team didn't spend three years writing stuff and then completely dumping it and starting from scratch!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        Except Debian sarge, which slipped by a year and a half and Vista is an exception too. And if you want to talk about roadmaps slipping and features being pushed to later release, try this one: "For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support. Implementation of this plan was continually put off from 2000 until October 2006, when developer Øyvind Kol

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jackuess ( 1121253 )
      Because people at /. are simply much more enthusiastic about KDE4 than Vista. Hell I even bother to compile KDE4, and Vista: well I'm not even prepared to pirate it! That's by the way another explanation for peoples forgivingness: you can at any time check out the svn and try it (discovering that it's not ready for release yet). People who are enthusiastic about KDE get full insight, Vista enthusiast get/got mostly nothing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pembo13 ( 770295 )
      You pay Microsoft. You don't pay KDE.
  • I don't use either KDE or Gnome (if I can help it), since they are both so damn slow. My systems mostly run IceWM with Rox Panel and Konqueror as the file browser and of course Firefox as the web browser.

    KDE can do whatever they like to their system, but if they don't improve the window manager, then it is all still a waste of time.
    • I love rox. I wish it were the default FM for all of the environments. Why KDE and GNOME require so much crap running in the background is beyond me. Rox is elegant, and does all the GUI stuff you'd like a file manager to do (XDND, XDS), while giving you flexibility to interact with pretty much any program, even those that don't use any special communications pipes (ie, your selected files all go into the cut buffer automatically). The really nice thing is that you can very easily script the thing (for

  • Excellent news for old-farts. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by B5_geek ( 638928 ) on Sunday December 02, 2007 @04:47PM (#21554571)
    I love the KDE backend (dcop, kio-slaves, et al.); {I am a little worried that it might provide an avenue for malware in the future a-la Windows}.

    Good news: the memory footprint of 'Strigi' is supposed to be lower then Beagle
    Great news: You can install/use KDE4 without 'Plasma' (KDE 4 eyecandy)
    Awesome news: KDE-based apps should work on Mac & Windows (properly ported)

    Firefox has done an awesome job of weening people off Internet Explorer as "The Internet", as more killer-apps (Amarok I am looking at you) become available on Windows it will be easier to get folks to switch.

    I use Fluxbox as my WM with KDE-base and KDElibs for my backend. Conky is as fancy as it gets for my eyecandy. I look forward to KDE4 because of all the good stuff that I can make use of. I just hope to $deity that they keep the eye-candy as optional. I am not looking forward to their whole concept of active-desktop/"its where you work dude"/make it an experience that people can interact with.

    Rule #1) The DE/WM is HOW you access your programs, and should be invisible to the process.
    Rule #2) Just because the median processor/ram is 42-times more powerfull then it was x-years ago does not mean that your programs can be 42-times more bloated.
    Rule #3) Keep everything optional. Just because you think that everybody on the planet is stupid for not wanting something, does not mean everybody actually does want it.
  • I really don't care about any new features in KDE. It is already fast and packed with enough power to get my work done. All I want is for the KDE team to fix one annoying bug that has been in Konqueror for years. If you use the most compact view available, listing the icons from top to bottom, long filenames are drawn incorrectly, leaving artifacts all over the window. To reproduce the bug, use the small icons (from top to bottom) or list mode of Konqueror or Dolphin, navigate to a folder with lots of files
  • When will KOffice (supporting ODF) run on Windows?

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