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KDE GUI BSD Linux Technology

Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5 249

Posted by timothy from the one-moment-in-time dept.
omlx writes "KDE SC 4.5 is in feature freeze right now. Therefore, I decided to share some early screenshots with you. In general there are no major changes; it's all about polishing and fixing bugs. There are a lot of under-the-hood changes in libs, which as end users we cannot see. KDE SC will be released in August 2010." Note: you can also try out a beta of the release now, if you'd like.
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Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5 More

Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5

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  • YUCK (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Give us back 3.5 with Konqueror.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by agm ( 467017 )

      Or at least get an accelerated triple head setup working as it can in 3.5. This is the one reason I won't upgrade - it's a huge missing feature.

      • Seconded! (Score:3, Informative)

        by aussersterne ( 212916 )

        The multi-display support in KDE 4.x is almost nonexistent. Needs to be fixed before I can even give KDE releases a periodic test drive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tyrione ( 134248 )

      Give us back 3.5 with Konqueror.

      You'd think with all the GUI work done by Apple, Microsoft, even Google, and other folks one might expect the KInfoCenter right column would have an one icon for the CPU [single slot systems] and a clean list of # of Cores, Extensions, etc and not an Icon for each Core. If you have multiple slots and thus say, 2 Quad Core CPUs then fine, put two icons. The rounded rectangle Border is hideous and how they can't get and inset look boggle the imagination.

      Even something freshly KDE 4 that organizes intellige

    • AMEN !

      Bury the Plasma deep. I dont want it's widgets. I want the icons I had on my Desktop to work as they did earlier.

      I'm now very near switching to Gnome, after many years on KDE.

    • Re:YUCK (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheTurtlesMoves ( 1442727 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @02:09AM (#32358812)
      I'm on 4.4 now. I switched from kde 3.5 yesterday on this laptop. Its just as fast and just as useful. I am quite happy with it. However as someone who was using 3.5 till yesterday, why do you need them to give it back to you? Can't you just install it? ;)

      Or are you a Gnome user that fells a little trollish....

      ps I have nothing against gnome users.

  • Will we see Quanta Plus 4 being feature complete in KDE?? Many of us are still waiting for progress on KDEs development flagship.

  • SC=? (Score:5, Informative)

    by fph il quozientatore ( 971015 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @05:21PM (#32354276)
    In case you are wondering too, SC stands for Software Compilation [wikipedia.org]. Not a bad name (for a crappy dance remix).

  • Aesthetics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bi$hop ( 878253 )
    Generally I like the KDE look and feel, but those folder icons look a little odd--almost disproportionate. And I realize it's abstract, but what is that default background? Looks like a beam of light is shooting out a bunch of photons, but only along the curved paths. I do like the hover effect on the folders, and generally the whole thing looks pretty clean.

  • I try every new KDE4 release, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QCompson ( 675963 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @05:50PM (#32354604)
    ...I still (still!) have a bad taste in my mouth from that horrible trainwreck of a 4.0 release, and how Aaron Seigo and other KDE devs defended the release strategy. And still do to this day! I think that debacle really hurt the KDE project in the longterm. Big software projects like google-chrome still aren't flocking to QT and KDE.

    It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later. I understand they needed the lay down the framework initially, but shouldn't that framework have at least been somewhat stable before worrying about all the translucent crap and literal bells and whistles? Plasma is still prone to crashing last I checked (4.4). I know, I know... different contributors want to work on different things, and many prefer to work on the eye-candy junk. But to me that just points out how terrible the KDE project has been in managing and organizing KDE4.

    And this "SC" crap? Who possibly thought that was needed, or was even remotely a good idea?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by brennanw ( 5761 )

      I like KDE 4.4 (which is what I'm using now) -- I like it a lot -- but I'm right there with you about the bad taste in my mouth. The way they handled 4.0 was stupid and they deserved all the crap they got for it and more.

      4.4 is a completely different beast and I mostly love the featureset. However, based on my experience with 4.0 I'm a little afraid of 5.0.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sznupi ( 719324 )

        4 -> 5 will be most likely about ironing it out; big changes they felt are needed were made quite recently after all, they have foundations they wanted.

        Major versioning of KDE simply follows major versioning of Qt.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by victorhooi ( 830021 )

        heya,

        You know, I don't think it was that bad.

        Look, fine so it was a bit unpolished, but it's much more polished now. I have a feeling that it wouldn't be where it is now if they hadn't had the exposure they had, or if people hadn't gone on long rants on blogs on what they thought should change. Those comments helped get us to where we are now.

        Sure, they probably could have been clearer in the communication, but I distinctly remember they saying that this was a "beta" release in many ways, and they just want

        • Yeah, I have been staring at a lot of these posts and have been thinking roughly the same thing. I am not a KDE user, but I am sympathetic to there having to be breakages every once in a while to stop atrophy. Windows has it. Mac OS has it. Gnome has it. KDE has it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I don't think there needs to be a KDE5, at least not in the way there was KDE4. The differences between Qt3 and Qt4 were huge, and more or less demanded a huge rewrite. Since then Trolltech/Nokia has been extending it for many years, and while I suspect some things will be depreciated in Qt5 I haven't seen any signs of it needing the same kind of overhaul. When and if Qt5 comes - which there's no hint of yet - I think most of Qt4 will live on which means KDE won't need to rewrite much either. And of course

      • The biggest problem with 4.0 was that it was a developer release. RedHat etc should have done more internal testing an shipped with kde 3.5 as default (as Slackware did). By 4.2 is was half decent. 4.4 is great and quite an improvement over 4.3.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MrHanky ( 141717 )

      Oh, shut up, or start complaining about OS X 10.0 every time there's something new about Apple. You know that OS X was only half-way to beta quality on release as well?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by QCompson ( 675963 )
        And Windows 7 was mostly polished on release, and has received a very good reception. Which example should software projects follow?

        If the KDE team wanted to temper down expectations on the release of KDE4.0, then they shouldn't have had a big google release party and been extolling KDE4's virtues for months before. Yes, we're still talking about the 4.0 release, because frankly, it took the KDE team a long time to limp to a somewhat usable 4.2.

        • Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @06:27PM (#32355032) Homepage Journal

          What? Windows 7 (Windows NT 6.1) is very good, but it followed up on Vista (Windows NT 6.0), which was received with ridicule and loud complaints after years of hype and abandoned technologies (WinFS, etc). Vista was released early 2007, Windows 7 was released October 2009. KDE 4.0 was released January 2008. If KDE 4 were to have its "Windows 7 moment", it would be right about now. Well, if the KDE project had Microsoft's resources, that is.

          • Then there's a simple solution. If it's blatantly obvious that your software project won't be stable for day-to-day use for at least 6 months or more (as was the case with KDE4.0), then classify it as a beta. Don't tarnish the brand itself (as both MS and KDE did).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrHanky ( 141717 )

              Evidently that doesn't hold true, as you just held Windows 7 as a shining example of doing something right, Vista all but forgotten. People are still harping on about KDE 4.0 whereas OS X 10.0 was forgotten with 10.2, Windows Vista with Windows 7, Gnome 2.0 (oh boy was that a disappointment!) sometime around 2.6 or so (and they still haven't fixed the file selector). There are more examples of poor .0 releases than good ones, but KDE 4.0 still gets more complaints than any other release, even though KDE evi

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by armanox ( 826486 )
              KDE 4.0 was stable. It lacked many features and programs that people wanted.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by shutdown -p now ( 807394 )

            If KDE 4 were to have its "Windows 7 moment", it would be right about now.

            Hopefully so, because, so far, it seems that KDE4 is still at "Vista SPn" stage, rather than at "Win7" stage, so to speak.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by oogoliegoogolie ( 635356 )
        Oh dear, OS X 10.0 was at least usable, and it replaced an aging OS that needed replacing. KDE 4.0 was unusable, unstable, immature, and about as configurable as my alarm clock, and replaced a simple and better desktop that did not need any replacement.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrHanky ( 141717 )

          It was a memory hog like nothing seen before it, exceptionally slow, and full of bugs. It was certainly a lot less usable than OS 9 at the time (or any other major desktop OS, including Linux and BeOS), and Apple got the same complaints that KDE got: this should have been marked 'beta'. The response was that they needed testing and feedback, just like KDE. Apple: good guys taking your money. KDE: bad guys giving you things for free.

    • Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by moogsynth ( 1264404 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @06:38PM (#32355170)
      The Plasma desktop doesn't crash for me. Maybe you need to check with your package maintainers about that. But you know what? The bitterness about 4.0 comes up in every single goddamned KDE thread. But it just doesn't matter any more. Seriously. KDE 4.4 is stable enough, and it looks like 4.5 is going to be even better. It's okay. You can let go.
      • Wish that were true. KDE 3 ran perfectly fine on my macbook pro (last year's model). Then I finally switched to KDE 4 and found the simplest damn apps stuttering and hogging the CPU.

    • Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by sznupi ( 719324 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @06:51PM (#32355322) Homepage

      Google Chrome is your example of "big software projects still not flocking to Qt"?
      It's a separate thing from KDE, and a great toolkit. Chrome was mostly ill thought out as a single platform app initially, and afterwards - perhaps the team was more used to Gtk+; or they convinced themselves that Qt makes sense "only" when it would be used across all platforms (and with huge work done already on Win version...)

      Here, a short list of apparently "not big" software projects using Qt: Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Google Earth, Symbian, MeeGo, Opera, Skype, VLC, VirtualBox, Adobe Photoshop Album, , Last.fm Player, Scribus, Xconfig; not very exhaustive, too.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by QCompson ( 675963 )

        Here, a short list of apparently "not big" software projects using Qt: Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Google Earth, Symbian, MeeGo, Opera, Skype, VLC, VirtualBox, Adobe Photoshop Album, , Last.fm Player, Scribus, Xconfig; not very exhaustive, too.

        I think opera moved off of QT in its latest release. But point taken.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sznupi ( 719324 )

          Supposedly Opera uses "now" (still in beta version, as far as current one for Linux goes; they concentrated on Win probably due to browser ballot) both gtk+ and Qt, depeding where it runs, in the place where Qt was exclusive previously; something like that.

          And IIRC their general UI/etc. has some common roots; I seem to remember they were basically across the street from Trolltech, took Qt as a starting point and refined it over the years for their needs...something like that.

      • Granted, but it does seem both amusing and frustrating as a user to find that KHTML has now become Webkit, which is now used in Chrome, with gtk instead of qt -- but Chrome is faster in every way than Konqueror, including launching faster, even on KDE.

        So while I'd love to port it -- after all, the crown jewels of Chrome are WebKit and V8, neither of which is GTK-specific -- I don't know that it'd buy much.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later.

      And usability never. KDE 4.x is a dog's dinner of a user interface. There is too much going on, too many esoteric buttons & settings all mixed with the common ones. The control panel is particularly atrocious with a pseudo-Mac like front end giving way to dialogs with tabs with more dialogs with tabs and even trees of dialogs of tabs wit

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by segedunum ( 883035 )

      ...I still (still!) have a bad taste in my mouth from that horrible trainwreck of a 4.0 release, and how Aaron Seigo and other KDE devs defended the release strategy. And still do to this day!

      Because it was correct. It was no different to any other .0 release for any other piece of open source software. Unfortunately, distributors simply have no idea what to put into their distributions other than to compile the latest release and then bitch and moan about it. That's probably why desktop Linux has failed r

  • Will this version finally handly dual monitors? I keep having to use Gnome , which also handles them badly, but it's not as braindead as KDE. They have the app that is supposed to configure it, but it never works. For me it doesn't seem to remember the settings. I've filed a bug many versions ago, supplied files they asked for, and it remains b0rked (as of whatever version comes with latest Ubuntu). Am I the only one that uses two monitors under Linux, or do I just happen to have the two monitors that don't

    • KDE has been working fine with dual monitors for me for about nine years now.

    • I have dual monitors set up and it was literally plug-n-play with full 3d acceleration etc. But that's on intel graphics. Do you, by any chance, use shitty proprietary graphics drivers?
    • I've never been able to configure dual screens via KDE's own utils. For the Multiple Monitors system settings module to become active at all, I have to have set up Xinerama already, either through xorg.conf or by using Nvidia's own handy-dandy nvidia-settings GUI tool. (However, I vastly prefer TwinView to Xinerama -- which sort of does the same (one desktop, dual screens), only with Kwin's compositing enabled. (Compositing doesn't survive turning off the second screen on the fly, though. Don't know why tha

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armanox ( 826486 )
      I don't remember ever having much luck with monitor configuration in KDE3. Last time I ran KDE 4.x on dual monitors (KDE 4.2.2 on Slackware 13 IIRC) it worked with out any hassle (only configuring I had to do was say which was left and right).

  • Get out of my way! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Requiem18th ( 742389 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @07:00PM (#32355442)

    Why do I need to care about activities? Why are my aplication not showing up in the tray? Why my desktop icons have windows around them? What's with modern KDE getting in the way of my applications?

    • My apps show up in the tray just fine. My desktop icons don't have windows around them, unless I make the folder view small to group them or something similarly silly. One of KDE's advantages has always been configurability, have you even tried to configure it?
      • Ubuantu and apple should have taught you that no, most don't want to configure anything, they don't want to customize, they don't want to have a choice (kde or gnome or xcfe etc). They just want you to tell them what to click on.
  • I had been using kde since 1.x. Like many other long-time kde users, I can't stand kde-4.x so I've been looking for a kde-3.5 replacement. The best replacement, by far, that I could find was the ancient (but still maintained) Enlightenment e16. It's taken a little while to learn and configure but I'm actually happier with e16 than I was with kde-3.5. After a day or two of tinkering I made it my default desktop and never felt the urge to go back to kde-3.5.

    The default configuration for e16 is bland a
  • I upgraded my office workstation to KDE 4, but the thing holding me back on my home PC is the state of Amarok 2.x. I have an iPod Classic--a gift from my brother--and Amarok 2.x has a distinctly crippled feature set vis-a-vis v1.4. "Various Artists" does not group in a similar way--most are scattered about in single file albums. Worse, podcasts cannot be copied to my iPod. At one point I was able to use a Gnome tool for this, but that is no longer working for me, either. I have a hard time understanding

    • Amarok is seperate from the KDE releases, you can just run Amarok 1.4 in KDE4. Try banshee though, even though it's Mono/GTK it's actually quite a good app, and works fine in KDE.

  • KDE4 ruined it for me. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kiwieater ( 1799016 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @09:01PM (#32356874)

    I ran Linux on the desktop for many years - full-time since 2003/4. I've actually - possibly temporarily, possibly permanently - moved to Windows, namely Windows 7.

    I used to love KDE. Everything worked nicely, everything felt well-placed. The system made sense. KDE3.5 was pretty much my ideal desktop - I may have become used to different things since then, but at the time - it felt perfect. It was quick, nimble, stable, reliable, packed with decent features. But my main appeal... Amarok. It didn't start out this way, but Amarok 1.4 was a damned good player.

    What happened? KDE4 was buggy. It was lacking. It was cosmetically challenged. As the releases went on, things did improve - but I still find I have less features and less usability now than I did in 2007. Even now(at least when I checked a couple of months ago) - why can't I set the clock from the taskbar to sync with an nntp server? How hard can they make it for me to mess with multiple monitors? Why make it so hard for me to put some files on my desktop? Having to manually deactivate all the sounds apart from the one or two I actually _want_?

    It is still _my_ desktop, right?

    Amarok... needs little discussion. The crux of it for me is I liked the earlier interface. It made sense. It's now completely different, almost catching up in terms of features, but I hate the layout. All I wanted was a list of albums on the left, double click to add albums to the list of stuff playing on the right. Let me move the buttons. I don't care for lyrics, nor the artwork, nor buying music from whatever place they've added as a default. I just want the damned UI that made much more sense than anything else at the time.

    I miss Linux. It's rock-stable for me, easy to keep up to date. It's widely configurable, has pretty decent hardware support these days. I like being able to try a new distro on occasion.

    But I'm still stuck on the desktop. KDE3.5 is going nowhere. KDE4 spent years as a beta, rolled out with deceitful version numbers indicating it should be good. Even as of 4.4, whilst much improved over the abomonation that was 4.0, it's feeling buggy and incomplete.

    I lost interest in Gnome years ago. KDE offered - to me at least - a better experience. I couldn't go back to Gnome, having decided all those years ago that KDE had much more going for it.

    What now? I've got Win7 running. I've installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Foobar2000(brilliant!!) and VLC. I genuinely have less criticism for this than I've had for KDE for a long time now. To the point where I'm actually giving serious thought to paying for it. (Yes, I know that's bad - but it really has only been installed for ~10 days. After all these years without touching anything MS, I had no idea whether I'd even still be able to navigate the OS properly.)

    Way to go, KDE. Way to go, Amarok. I spent years singing your praises, converting people(not many, but a good handful) from the mundane. Now I've pretty much lost interest in you for the forseeable future...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • why can't I set the clock from the taskbar to sync with an nntp server

      I'm assuming you mean an NTP server, not a USENET news server (NNTP).

      Have you ever been able to do this anyway? You can't set the time on a Linux system without root, and ntpd usually runs as a system daemon anyway. It doesn't make much sense on the taskbar clock applet. This kind of stuff belongs in the distro-specific control panel / customizations, since different distros configure ntpd in different ways.

      • 'scuse me... on my Hardy Heron KDE desktop, right click on the clock in the panel, a dialog appears, click on the "adjust date & time" option, a window comes up asking for password and then on succesfull verification, you are in the KDE control module for date & time where you can specify an ntp server to automatically adjust time with... that's what he wants with the clock in KDE 4.x... it doesn't allow him that freedom... it's gone backwards in functionality...

        ps. I have KDE 4.whatever running o

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Wild Wizard ( 309461 )

          'scuse me... on my Hardy Heron KDE desktop, right click on the clock in the panel, a dialog appears, click on the "adjust date & time" option, a window comes up asking for password and then on succesfull verification, you are in the KDE control module for date & time where you can specify an ntp server to automatically adjust time with... that's what he wants with the clock in KDE 4.x... it doesn't allow him that freedom... it's gone backwards in functionality...

          Say what?

          Slackware 13.1 w/KDE 4.4.3 here and I can do the exact same thing.

          Maybe if these anti KDE / pro GNOME distro's stopped trying to kill KDE and actually gave the users the full experience you might have something different to say about it.

          As for stability this KDE session has been running since May 12, today is the 27th, so 15 days of up time for KDE itself is pretty good.

    • Thanks for dropping the line about that program! I had never checked it out before, and it is amazing!

  • Buggy pile of sh** (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SlightOverdose ( 689181 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @10:31PM (#32357558)

    I'm was a time KDE user up to and including version 3.

    When KDE4 came out I used it for several months before finally giving up due to severe bugs that made it almost unusable.

    Since then I keep trying it under the assumption that they've had time to fix the bugs- but it seems they just keep adding on more unusable features instead of stopping and cleaning up what they've already got.

    I'm not a big fan of the gnome desktop, but at least it's stable.

  • Yes but will Kmail finally support html editing, you know like every decent graphical email client has since the turn of the century.

  • Oh gods, when will they realize it's not the most hip and fashionable Photoshop filters that make a good desktop experience. Drop shadows can be a good thing for depth perception with windows and panels, but drop shadows and highlights and glow filters everywhere, rounded corners like it's a an IKEA catalog and soon to be that copied-to-death reflection effect everywhere - that does not make a computer desktop. They have 10 graphic designer per 1 programmer probably. Figures, it's one thing sliding sliders

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