KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Released

appelza contributed a link to Tuesday's announcement of the next step toward KDE 4.1: "The KDE Project is proud to announce the first beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 1 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 1 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in July 2008." I haven't used KDE much for the past few years, but the screenshots of a "grown-up" plasma are enough to make me correct that.

Re:Ob

[pak9rabid]

Does it run on linux?

More importantly, does it not rely on KDE3 apps anymore?

At least its getting updated

[pacroon]

I think that besides whats already been stated about the obvious nifts 'n gigglez with eyecandy, it looks a little less "overdone" than the previous ones. I'm not a big KDE fan myself, but in this particular period in time, I'm mostly happy that large free applications are being updated at all. :)

I dunno....

[mpapet]

My concern is not so much the desktop environment itself.

How many KDE3-guified apps are going to switch over to KDE4? I don't expect to see very many this year, but next year should be very telling regarding the desktop's popularity.

Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[ryanisflyboy]

I am not a window manager guru by any stretch. I use Gnome since that is what a lot of my friends use, and at the time I made the choice KDE didn't seem as capable. Now I look at KDE and get the impression that Gnome is falling behind in breadth and depth of features, configurability, and ease of use. Is that an accurate view of the situation? If so, why isn't Gnome able to keep up?

Re:Nothing new

[Tubal-Cain]

x.5 has more features than x.0 or x.1. Who would have guessed? 4.x will eventually outdo 3.5's features. Just not 4.0 or 4.1.

Not that you shouldn't stick with 3.5 if you feel that best serves your needs.

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I look at KDE and get the impression that Gnome is falling behind in breadth and depth of features, configurability, and ease of use.

It always had been. I'm a GNOME user who remembers the years of file chooser abuse by the GTK devs. I'm using GNOME because the whole thing feels more "solid", I like nautilus better than Konq, and that Firefox uses gtk.

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[Frekko]

As a long time KDE user I can tell you that this is not true. Not that KDE 4 isn't very impressive (I love, that's why I use it) but these two projects are developed in parallel. They watch each other as hawks and most of the features are in fact quite similar. Yes, there are some differences, but hey they are different products.

Love the fact that we have competition on the desktop on Linux. It's our greatest blessing!

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[Chineseyes]

Taking the lead of what exactly? Gnome has followed a trend of removing features and giving users few options while KDE has been giving users more features and more options.

Some people feel that completely removing options is a good idea because they are looking to target corporations and limiting options makes support easier, but I have always felt that KDE's approach is much better. Give the users all the options they could imagine and then let them decide what is best. With KDE's approach you can always have some sort of locked down "corporate default" setting that would make support easier but with Gnome's approach what do you do when a user wants a feature that has been removed?

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[Hoplite3]

I use KDE, but I don't think Gnome has fallen behind. I'd say both are about at the same level.

If anything, the big tragedy is all of the stuff that's now done by KDE/Gnome that should be done by non-X related systems. Wifi association, laptop power stuff, suspend/resume functionality, and so on... all of these things are now handled through Gnome and KDE subsystems to some degree, rather than handled by a non-X related program that communicates to some graphical widget.

There's been a big loss of separation between parts. It's a shame.

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[theJavaMan]

I would say it's the design philosophy. Gnome says "Do this our way, because it is better" (see the ok-cancel button debate). KDE says "You can do it this way, but you can also configure your own way".

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[cozziewozzie]

The KDE team has been rewriting/porting basically everything over to Qt4, which was a gargantuan task.

During this time, they used the opportunity to fix some long-standing issues and redesign some key components. Things were broken and in development for a long time, while the stable release 3.5.x went into bugfixing mode. Gnome was making steady improvements to their 2.x codebase this entire time.

KDE is only now starting to reap the fruits of this effort. The real power of the platform will become more obvious in the coming years.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:why dont most distros use kde?

[clampolo]

Gnome has a reputation for being more stable than KDE. On the downside it doesn't have as many features as KDE. (I'm on Gnome, I'm jealous of those sexy screenshots.)

Kind of makes sense that with most of the money coming from business they would rather have something more solid than feature-rich. But this is just a guess on my part.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:other ob.

[carnalforge]

Yes, having an unix underneath a nice graphical desktop environment.

obvious response:

[spazdor]

Does Apple?

Re:KDE mature enough to drop the annoying K prefix

[Just Some Guy]

Drop the stupid K prefix.

iThere iAre iTwo iOther iCompeting gschools gof gthough, i'll grant iou.

Re:Important Caveats

[SanityInAnarchy]

Was there somewhere or someone that said otherwise?

Only the convention of a "dot-oh" release since the beginning of... since forever.

If it was meant for bleeding-edge adopters, it should have been called alpha or beta. If it was meant for application developers, call it a release candidate, or split it into two projects and call this one "kdebase 4.0".

Calling it "KDE 4.0" was a mistake.

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[__aabvlw4075]

I've been using linux since 1999, and in that time I don't recall there ever being a moment when it would make any sense to say that KDE didn't seem as capable as GNOME. Some people prefer GNOME's appearance, design philosophy, or set of apps to KDE's -- and vice versa -- but when it comes to capabilities, KDE has always (at least since '99) been the clear winner. In fact, lack of capabilities is GNOME's selling point -- less capabilities means a simpler interface that many people prefer.

Bloat = many apps on a desktop, with few libs

[CarpetShark]

KDE is absolutely not bloated. A modern desktop SHOULD provide a wide range of services to apps --- including net IO, a web browser component, rss, clipboards, drag and drop, color management, printing, contacts, emailing, calendaring, multimedia, threading, event passing, IPC, tagging, database access, URL shortcuts, launching, file management, thumbnails, etc. Many modern apps use these these things, and it makes absolutely no sense for them all to have dis-integrated separate implementations.

If you want to see bloat, look at the apps for any popular desktop that DOESN'T provide a solid, modern, complete core. Run any modern workflow, like quoting a webpage and editing photos to embed in your spell-checked word processor document, to email to someone whose name is all you can recall. Compare memory use, workflow, and integration, AFTER getting used to each desktop for a few months and learning all of the little integration features provided by each solution. I challenge anyone to do it on linux and find a desktop that beats KDE.

Re:Debian Lenny How-to kde4

[cheater512]

It might be a Gentoo patch but my KDE 4 uses .kde4.0 and .kde is a symlink.

Re:4.1 -- Now with no desktop icons!

[digidave]

"I completely disagree. I put many frequently used icons on my desktop as it speeds up my access to them."

The desktop is covered by one or more windows most of the time, so how is it easier to move or minimize windows to launch a program or browse a directory? Any time one important thing is covered by another important thing, it's broken. That's why I hate desktop widgets, desktop icons, and windows that cover each other (not that I have a better idea for that last one).

From my perspective I think KDE 4.1 should put a lot more focus on Krunner (the run dialog). First, they should give it a quicker shortcut so it's easier to launch. I use ctrl-space. It's a better program launcher than icons on the desktop or the K menu because I just start typing the name and after a few letters I can hit enter and it launches. It handles web site bookmarks as well. If it worked that easily for directories and previously connected ssh sessions I'd be all set.

Re:Is KDE Taking the Lead?

[10Ghz]

KDE 4.1 has completely removed the ability to put files or icons on the desktop [blogspot.com].

No they haven't, and claiming that they have only makes you an idiot. For starters, the new method is more flexible and powerful. Previously, you had a desktop-folder that had all the stuff that was in your desktop. This new way allows you to have several such folders which contents is displayed on the desktop. You can also have filters that only show certain type of files, instead of shoving all the files in the folder.

In the future you could have an automated system that changes according to the app you are using, You could have a plasmoid that displays a contents of a folder. Then you fire up a video-editor (for example), and the plasmoid switches to showing your video-files, or your project-folder or something like that.

The old way (which is still used by other systems) is really about "you can do it this way, and only this way".