Submitted by Five weeks later than planned, the KDE project has released KDE 4.0 Beta 1. “The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications.” Update: Screenshots.
http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/
btw. that LiveCD was released the day before the announcement, sure it’s with the latest beta version?
it seems like the beta according to the filename/desc:
KDE-Four-Live.i686-0.3.iso
01-Aug-2007
636M
KDE 4.0 Beta 1
The sources have been tagged a week before the announcement to given interested distributors time for packaging and download/repository mirrors time for syncing.
Not to mention giving the promo people time to collect all the infos from the module developers and distill it into the press release.
I’m there!
I am not there yet……
I am a Gnome user first and foremost, although on a few machines I have KDE. I have noticed over the years that KDE has been getting bigger and including more and more stuff, (bloat maybe??)…..
But it is getting faster with each release.
Hopefully KDE4 will keep up this trend and we get a really fast desktop experience.
I wouldn’t call it bloat, if it keeps getting faster
can’t wait to test the great thing
As a GNOME user, I’d like to congratulate KDE team for their best efforts. They’re really building a nice foundation of libraries for their new release.
It’s nice to know that there is some competition that gives people choices, and helping keep desktop development at its current pace.
Thanks,
A GNOME User
Edited 2007-08-02 13:53
Another Gnome user here. What sukru said! 🙂
And when KDE 4 is released, I’ll be checking it out. I’m particularly excited about the usability improvements.
Then don’t get too excited about KDE 4.0. The main goal for 4.0 is to have a stable foundation. The real polishing will take time until 4.1/4.2.
Yes. I understand that 4.0 is mainly infrastructure and not *use* of that infrastructure. Or are you saying that the usability improvements are waiting for 4.1/4.2, as well?
In which case, I should take that into account when evaluating 4.0. 🙂
It’s not that anyone is waiting with usability improvements. In new applications and fully ported ones, you will see the benefits of the usability work that has been done.
However, the ultimate usability test is real users working with the software, so there will probably be some substantial changes in 4.1/4.2 based on the feedback of real users instead of usability best practices.
Also, there are quite a few applications that won’t be fully ported until a few months after 4.0 is released, so they will be the same as in KDE 3.5 for a while longer.
Even with the upcoming final release of KDE 4.0, that release will be mostly targetted at developers (3rd party apps, Plasmoids, etc.).
KDE 4 is the biggest leap in KDE history. The KDE devs had to draw the line somewhere. It won’t be perfect and some planed features will have to wait.
Pardon? Where is the evidence for that?
4.0 will be a release, and like all x.0 releases, it’ll have bugs, possibly big ones – with that being said, there will be 4.0.x releases afterwards that will address those issues.
Remember, this is a beta, and unlike the commercial world, things can be merged later on on the development as the development can occur independently off the maintree then merged back once that project has stablised.
Regarding 4.0 – This will be the *first* official release of KDE which will have Solaris x86/SPARC as an officially supported platform – so hopefully a few months after 4.0 has been released we’ll see KDE available for Solaris (be it GCC compiled) and maintained along with the Linux versions.
For Solaris users, its a big step forward – the choice of desktops, applications and improvements in hardware support not only will help these desktops but *NIX over all and providing a viable alternative to Windows.
“””
Pardon? Where is the evidence for that?
“””
Pardon? What in the *world* does your response have to do with my question?
Excuse me, you said:
To which I asked where is the evidence to suggest that?
So we should judge the progress of KDE upon the 4.0.x cycle rather than waiting for the 4.1.x cycle?
OK…
Really? This is not the good thing to do. Lots of people have big expectations with KDE4. They want a new GUI to play with. Most people don’t care about under the hood stuff.
Honestly, I think a all-in-one release would be far more interesting 😉
“””
Really? This is not the good thing to do.
“””
I would say that it shows that the release plan is controlled by people with good engineering sense, and not by the marketing department. Which means that they need a good PR department to prepare the rest of us for the fact that KDE 4.0 is only laying down the solid infrastructure to be built on later.
I think it is a *very* good thing to do.
Edited 2007-08-02 14:47
It’s good that you wrote ‘KDE4’. Because there is a difference between KDE4 and KDE4.0.
Yeah possibly. As a KDE developer I wonder whether it’s better to wait. But then when do you draw the line and actually get a release out? Also the longer you wait, the harder you make it for app developers. You also don’t get the same number of testers etc.
I think the advantages of releasing early and releasing often outweigh the disadvantages. Hopefully the criticisms will be constructive and help us make a more polished 4.1.
I know that personally I am keen to see how people like my app and look forward to constructive criticisms and comments.
Most free software desktop users will first encounter KDE4 when their distribution gets it sufficiently integrated, which might take until next summer or even later for the commercial distributions. In the meantime, it will get a decent amount of exposure among enthusiasts backed against experimental repositories.
It will be a mixed bag. Remember GNOME 2.6, when they basically ripped everything out in a massive KISS initiative? It was a bit spartan with some glaring feature omissions, but most users realized that this purge would pay off in the long run. GNOME entered its golden age, coming to dominate the commercial distributions.
I expect KDE4 to follow a similar pattern. There might be some rough edges and missing features. But the underlying framework overhaul will pay off in the long run. I think we’re about to enter KDE’s golden age, and given the overall progress since the last desktop revolution, this could be a bigger bang.
Perhaps more importantly, the KDE community is firing on all cylinders. This is a healthy community with a good combination of leadership, vision, creativity, and passion. They demonstrate good taste and style in the way they design and develop software. The result is high-level abstractions, lots of code reuse, and tight integration. Free software through and through.
It’s hard to think of a free software project, past or present, that functions better than today’s KDE.
Thankfully, the developers have the better attitude:
build a strong foundation for app developers to build on first (all the new technologies and frameworks in KDE4)
then build the exciting apps on top after (all the apps that get ported/updated to use the stuff in KDE4, and all the new apps built using KDE4 stuff)
Personally, I wouldn’t want it any other way. You need a strong foundation to build on, or you end up with strung together hacks that rely on chewing gum, hay wire, and crazy glue, with nothing more than a fancy plastic cover.
That’s enough to make me excited
-JAGU
Just Another Gnome User
Well, one of the pittfalls in software engineering is to assume that, given a good architecture and infrastructure, everyting will fall into place. I’m not saying that KDE4 will not be an improvement, I’m just somewhat reluctant to presume that KDE4/4.1/4.2 will be a huge improvement thanks to just the infrastructure.
Well, one of the pittfalls in software engineering is to assume that, given a good architecture and infrastructure, everyting will fall into place.
Well believe it. KDE has always focused on architecture, and if you provide it people will make use of it. Just look at current KDE. Consistent spell check, keyboard shortcuts, transparent network access, password storage, various components like text editor widgets or html rendering are the same in all apps, etc etc. These features are all only possible because the architecture was developed first and then application developers took advantage of it.
It will be the same with KDE4. Phonon, Solid, the new spellchecker (forget the name), Plasma, Decibel, etc. are the pillars for a new generation of programs. Amarok is already using Plasma and Phonon, and KCall is already using Decibel, so you can be sure that these technologies will be heavily used.
I had a wierd feeling reading that, because given that there are still probably more KDE users than Gnome users, I’d expect the reverse to be said from a KDE user
Having said that, KDE is much (much) more than another project giving competition and the possibility of some other choice. It’s always been. What is chaning with the coming of v4 is that even fanatic kde-deniers begin to take it a bit more seriously.
As a long-time kde user (and gnome, and xfce) all I feel is pure joy when I see where kde4 is going.
As an outsider, who never really contributed anything to kde besides a few articles about kde apps, all I can say is congratulations and wish them strength to try to keep the pace.
i’ve tried to compile kde4 using svn and it worked liked a charme no libraries hell no pain nothing.
those things makes KDE the best framework.
I look forward for the KOffice apps, especially KWord. I ‘ll dump OO2 Writer in a heartbeat, if it loads most ODF (no doc support needed) files correctly.
It might load ODF better than OO.o, which has bugs as well. Of course, this won’t improve interoperability. Luckily, both teams are closely working together to improve the OO.o specification and implementations.
I did not try it yet but I did try the last alpha and it was really alpha. It would crash after a minute of usage. Now, is this beta more stable? I hope so 😉 Honestly, I think some people forgot the meaning of beta (maybe becaue Microsoft introduced the term release candidate?).
In my book, beta = almost everything is there, and stable enough to use while testing. Rough edges are what you get with beta. The goal of the beta test is to eliminate the rough edges. Release candidate = final. It must be final in developers heads. Tho, the public may find thats not final yet. That’s the whole point of having release candidate.
Now, I will test this beta 1. Tho, I think it’s not just beta yet 😉
Anyway, screenshots before I test? 😉
No, Nothing is stable Enough, its Beta because Libraries are frozen.
Performance increases, performance increases, tra la la la la!
And hopefully less memory usage too!
For a comparable app, a KDE4/Qt4 one is faster. But Qt4 and KDE 4 introduce so much functionality, I can’t promise it’ll be faster overall…
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
http://img403.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture25ei7.png
http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture26hd6.png
[http://img521.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture27fj0.png
http://img521.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture28th6.png
http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture29np8.png
http://img294.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture30pf3.png
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture31ws4.png
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture32hf5.png
http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture33bs6.png
http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture34hz3.png
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture35ez0.png
http://img295.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture36pu6.png
http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture37fs2.png
http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture38ga0.png
http://img404.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture39tf0.png
They are from the day beta 1 was tagged (one week ago)
Wow :O I’ve been a GNOME fan for ages but just those screenshots make me wanna switch
I wish Nautilus would also show information about the currently selected files etc…
http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture26hd6.png
The Split view, left column for Dolphin has a PC Floppy mount reference, yet the icon is clearly a HDD.
Stuff like that I hope gets visually mapped to the right type of icon.
I won’t even comment on the contrast issues in that Dolphin screenshot.
I look forward to both GNOME and KDE moving forward.
Amarok music player 2.0 is fantastic
and the file manager Dolphin too
Konqueror now uses dolphin into kparts to display files
great
[OT]
it’s fun to note that the kde news has many comments rather than gnome thread….
what that would mean ?
I think mostly that people have been waiting a very long time for KDE4 and that GNOME’s releases have been faster.
Thats because KDE 4 is a major release that have many many new features. While GENOME is stuck in the 2.19.x series providing bug fixes and stff. I hope this KDE release make GENOME devs wake up and prepare something great for GENOME 2.5 or even 3.
Nothing, except that people respond more positively to a release announcement with pretty pictures and human-readable explanations of what is new than to a post on a developers mailing list with no details.
Esp if the post is about a bugfix release, and the other one riddled with new and great technology
😀
It simply means that there’s so much hype surrounding KDE4 that there are IMHO just two possible outcomes of the release:
a) a previously unseen public backslash against KDE because everybody will be expecting an incredible number of mindblowing improvements and they’ll receive no more than another good DE
b) a previously unseen amount of public jubilation, because when all those people will receive just another good DE they’ll be so ashamed for having being fooled for so long and having bought all the hype that they’ll refuse to admit that they’re disappointed
i dont think so.
KDE has always been of the higest quality, i don’t expect it to be any different now.
maybe hype is from the other desktop…
GOD 😉
Anyway, we have always been telling PPL it’s about the KDE 4 series, not KDE 4.0. And 4.0 will have enough in there to show ppl what great things are and will be possible, so I don’t worry.
c) KDE delivers.
Until now, it seems to be going in the direction of c). I’m sorry (as you seem to prefer the first 2).
Things are looking really nice in KDE 4, I’m specially more exciting about plasma, but is the Oxygen style already completed and integrated there? I would like to get a prettier task bar in the end
The style and windec are going through a rewrite, due to some coding style issues/discussion… Not a great thing, sure.
The taskbar is being changed daily, I think they’re trying stuff 😉
And I think the taskbar, or rather the whole panel, in this Beta is still Kicker.
Plasma based panels probably in the next one
Yeah, I was talking about the plasma taskpanel from playground 😉
the final thing will it be a task bar (like kicker) or a dock (like the Mac OS X dock)?
Well, that’s not clear yet. In any case, the taskbar will be a separate plasmoid. It might be able to do both, dock to a kicker-like structure on a side of the screen, or work more ‘stand-alone’, as a dock like OS X has.
damn wtf is that lol
I am fanatic KDE user since 3.3 or something, and I love it for good reasons. But whilst I am really looking forward to the kdelibs framework, all the genius APIs getting introduced, the GUI keeps on disappointing me. Not only the lack of contrast (and distinct borders) in the oxygen style, the folder icon (not tilted a bit) and this grouped view in the system settings (and elsewhere, I HATE it.. why not tree views? tree views are *incredible* cool – I loooove tree views.. … hmmm.—- … .. hey wait a tree view with no root and only one level of children.. ah nevermind *g) utterly remind me of non-1337 OSs… and aaron seems to really adore his panel mouseover effect, in favor of whihc all others were removed (*grrrr*) … well good this stuff is all customiz- and hackable.. I’d rather have seen to have KDE go 3117stream instead of lamestream, but hey all users are brainless zombies and therefore each button must AT LEAST take half of the screen..
well seems after my SoC project and end of this semester I need to get a bit of involved in hacking KDE code.. should pose no real difficulty after having finished coding for WINE..
</rant>
anyways, good to see this finally happen, keep up the good work boyz!!!
i dont really agree with your love for tree views
but
you are more than welcome to code for kde !
this is more than a desktop , is a framework! things are being set so that artists , desktop developers, etc all can improve kde into their likings !
i think most ppl only see the flashy button or cool animation, but to me kde is a marvellous architecture and framework to work and develop.
it has almost endeless possibilities ! this is just the beginning …
I am totally your opinion (except of the tree view thingie
KDE4 is the greatest application framework of all times, on all areas. But the GUI – those people who happen to be the driving power behind the development at the moment, they design stuff for the ‘normal’ brain-depraved user. But I love KDE as a desktop which has increased my efficiency greatly in the past (the few weeks after switching from XP I constantly went ‘*wooow* it’s that sane?!’). I can use power features and I do want an advanced interface with as many configurable settings as possible – quite contrary to the current development mantra to ‘simplify’ stuff. And yes, stuff does even get removed during that process. I’d love to implement my vision of KDE myself, but unfortunately there are not only time constraints (student of engineering) but also lack of QT/KDE coding skills, the first being the much bigger one. So instead of taking stuff into the “right” direction myself, that’s why I rather keep up voicing my opinion. But I guess if all goes well I’ll be on board for KDE4.1 and contribute code instead of cheap talk 
Don’t worry, it’s definitely not our plan to make KDE less powerfull – the opposite, actually. But we’re also working to make things more discoverable and easier to use. Yes, often it’s possible to have them both.
I can understand you don’t like some things – like Dolphin. But Konqi will still be there (and I won’t use Dolphin either). Same will go for most other things. And if you don’t like3 the style (and we can’t help that – taste is hard to discuss…), use another one… Plastik is still there, and of course other styles will be written.
Dear Superstoned,
I know that, and I appreciate it. Still I feel that this ‘best GUI of all times’ should expose it’s power to ALL users from the beginning on, not hide it. Just make it easy for a user to know how to USE it, not hide it, because if stuff is hidden they’ll never discover it. If the default is as gnom/macos like as it looks today and one has to customize stuff a lot until efficiency is as great as possible (=directly exposed functionality, IMHO, see this shot: http://www.planet-zuriel.de/tmp/kde-pimped.png). People who don’t like messing with config settings will never experience this power and thus will be stuck with an unefficient way of using their desktop forever. I know this is highly subjective, but I feel it’s better to pack as much functionality as possible *as SANE (=usable) as possible* into the default interface because it is much easier for distros to take out stuff than to expose more features and have it usable. That’s why I’m scared of the direction the GUI has been going, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get it all sorted out.. at the very latest, KDE 4.2 will rock everybody and their mother, too!!
You’ve got a pretty packed desktop there 😉
Anyway, let me explain KDE’s position on ‘dumbing down’: hiding functionality isn’t what we are trying to do. We want to put it in the interface in such a way that it’s still accessible, and above all discoverable. But this is not always possible.
So yes, KDE will in such cases have a ‘bias’ for simpler interfaces. The reasoning behind it is simple: powerusers can much easier add functionality than beginners can remove it. Making the interface simpler and smarter not only makes it easier and more efficient for beginners, but also for powerusers (you don’t have to process as much information, allowing you to be faster).
Of course, we will allow you to have your interface like you want it, cluttered or not. But the default will be less cluttered than it was in the 3.x series, and clean up even more over time.
And we don’t want to rely on distributions making KDE usable… Many don’t alter stock KDE, and why would we want to give them more work?
I understand what you say. Nevertheless, I have f.e. never seen in any distro a kicker configured like mine, which points to my issue here.
I think most people rather don’t try ALL settings there are to customize stuff to their needs. They shouldn’t have to of course – the default interface should be sane and functional, I agree with that. But there are so many features and possibilities hidden in KDE – which most users will never notice simply because they never get confronted with them. I think KDE provides more efficient ways of doing stuff – which should not be forced upon the user, but at least more prominently exposed.
Again my kicker example: I love all the functionality crammed into this few pixels, and I think a lot more people would find it useful. Still I have never seen any screenshot, be it from private users or distros, that shows kicker configured as functional as mine. This is indeed highly subjective, but having stuff like weather, system monitoring, volume controls, newsticker in there can’t be something not useful to many more users. I feel that if KDE would strive for a more advanced interface in this manner, more users would probably rationalize their way of working with computers. It’d be easy for distros to throw stuff out and provide a simple interface. But otherwise round, experience shows it simply does not happen: I know of none distro putting all the functionality onto the screen like I have it here. Maybe a lot of people would be dazed and confused by my setup (initially), but also it seems to me many miss something without knowing?
well, advanced does not mean unusable, does it?
result: users never experiencing features they might love
Well, this has been proposed some times before: advanced and simple presets
it should not be more work, so probably a better approach to customisation (f.e. a tool where you start with all functionality enabled and simply click on widgets you don’t want?)
there’s a solution to any problem.. as said, wait until I find the time to kode I’ll show you what I mean
The fact you love the functionality crammed into your kicker doesn’t mean all people do. Most don’t need that many applications. Personally, I don’t use the Kmenu more than once a month, yet I only have 5 quickstart icons on my kicker, and Konqi configured to my WWW button on my keyboard. I use alt-F2 for the rest. Your setup would be less efficient for me, as the buttons are smaller, thus harder to target.
So, for who should we configure kicker? for you, or for me? That’s the point here. You might need and want much stuff, and find it efficient. For others, it’s a visual mess, slowing down their work. Not helping at all. And it happens to be YOU who can easily change your setup, so we optimise more for people not as advanced as you are. Sure, we think a lot about how to make things more discoverable, but when it comes to a tradeoff between even more buttons in the interface, or hiding the stuff in the menu’s – we often go for the latter.
You know the 80/20 rule? In this case, I’d say for 80% of the things you do, you only need 20% of the interface. So we optimise that 20%. If you would optimise for the other 80% you rarely use, you’d make that more important 20% harder to use!
I guess you’re a programmer. So your brain is better at identifying complex patterns and at thinking in concepts. Most people aren’t programmers, so even though it seems unlikely to YOU, they would be seriously hampered by your interface. And not only initially. You spend a lot of time behind your computer. Much more than others. Most ppl wouldn’t ever get a chance to get comfortable with such a setup…
My point is: You think your interface would benefit others. It won’t. Which is why you didn’t see many screenshots with such a configuration…
“tree views are *incredible* cool – I loooove tree views”
I would seem the KDE people don’t share your love for tree views.
“utterly remind me of non-1337 OSs”
Thank god for that.
“I’d rather have seen to have KDE go 3117stream instead of lamestream”
You seem to confuse 3117 with cool when in fact 3117 is incredibly lame.
i guess this is what i’ve been waiting for the last 12 months since I heard what they were going to be putting into KDE4, well this IS the moment i have been waiting . KDE4 Beta , which is close to the finished product , then why am I so apprehensive about it ? It’s funny , i should be happy ,a closet KDE fan wearing a gnome suit waiting for a chance to move back, but I am almost scared to download the livecd and play around with it, for the simple reason that i do not want to be disappointed , they did “promise” a lot of things and i quietly doubted that it was possible to in the time frame said … so i think i will just wait this one out , read the reviews and take the plunge further down the road ….. :-p I hope you all enjoy and tell me what I am missing …. 😉
Well, thy promised a lot of things for the whole KDE4 series which will probably last for a couple of years. Some people in the KDE community are really trying hard to teach people about the distinction between KDE4 and 4.0 but I fear that this detail gets lost too often as many people probably don’t follow the development of KDE very closely and expect most, if not all, features in the initial release plus a finite and complete redesign of each UI piece of the desktop.
And if you fear to be disappointed don’t download the Beta. It’s buggy. Alot. Which is to be expected for the first Beta so if you’re expecting The Second Coming(TM) wait at least for 4.2.
I always found KDE to be quite ugly, actually. Sure, there’s a lot of good stuff in it and I like the ideology of it, but it just means ugly fonts, ugly, weird, metallic-like interfaces, ugly icons, it’s really unpleasant looking form a design point of view. I thought that’d kinda change with KDE 4.0, but these screenies here are pretty much ‘yuck!’ again.
Anyway, sure it doesn’t matter all that much how your interface looks, I use Windows classic and Ubuntus standard interface normally, but they’re at least nicer to look at than your default KDE Theme.
It’s a matter of taste
gnome without Firefox seems just an empty plate.
you can’t do anything a part open a black terminal and launch some scripts.
The framework is a joke many things like bonobo or gnome-vfs are dead and nobody want to touch this mess.
It’s not a case that now gnome developers trying to leverage XUL framework (pyro) or do vaporous Online Desktop with python bindings (where is c GObject guru are they estints ? )
KDE is not ugly instead of gnome KDE is a complete desktop.
Let’s avoid the flame war please, or move that to other topic, let’s focus on what KDE 4 will give us instead.
pierino has now made 3 posts on this article. All three were designed to start flamewars. Thankfully no one took the bait the first two times, and hopefully everyone will ignore this last post as well.
Edited 2007-08-02 18:35
“””
pierino has now made 3 posts on this article. All three were designed to start flamewars.
“””
In V3, we have “friends” and “fans” lists. Perhaps OSNews V4 will give us “enemies” and “detractors” lists. 😉
i didn’t start the topic “KDE = ugly” i’ve only responsed to a gnome zealot.
I agree, thomas’ comment wasn’t very nice, but yours didn’t help either 😉
Next time, just tell him it’s silly to dismiss KDE just because it doesn’t fit YOUR taste – after all, not everybody drivers the same car or wears the same clothes either.
gnome without Firefox seems just an empty plate.
you can’t do anything a part open a black terminal and launch some scripts.
Oh, please! Do a favor to us all and spare our precious bandwidth if all you have to say is this crap!
The framework is a joke many things like bonobo or gnome-vfs are dead and nobody want to touch this mess.
bonobo is being deprecated and everything now use dbus, gnome-vfs is supposed to be replaced soon, probably in gnome 2.22 if not in 2.20
It’s not a case that now gnome developers trying to leverage XUL framework (pyro) or do vaporous Online Desktop with python bindings (where is c GObject guru are they estints ? )
So because 5 people launched a couple of unofficial and not-yet-discussed projects now Gnome is dead? BTW, it seems to me that you have no idea of what you’re talking about. Probably you just don’t care to know, it is more pleasant to revel in prejudices.
Well as always beauty is in the eye of the beholder: I don’t find KDE ugly.
The only problem that they had was font rendering, which is very important of course and I hope that they have improved this point..
The screenshot of KOffice in the PR has obvious artifacts (the y in Kylie), but this may be caused by a resizing, or because it was made to show another feature..
What does KDE have to do with fonts anyway? Don’t they use some underlying library to do all font rendering regardless of whether you’re running GNOME or KDE? fontconfig or something like that? Maybe I’m wrong about that, though.
that guy is simply a moron. he either just totally moronicly assumes kde does not have font settings, or he doeent care, and concludes kde is ugly because he does not like the default settings..
Awesome, I’m a moron now for stating my opinion. Internet discussion forums, gotta love them.
I’m doing 3d art for a living and if my eye says ‘yuck’ to something, then it’s hard for me to see the coolness in it. Of course you can customize KDE, I’m just talking about the general look and feel, about how it’s designed.
To me, Gnome always felt a lot smoother and just made a better appearance, whereas KDE always felt like amateurs designed it.
As an example, lets take a look at the SUSE Defaults:
KDE: http://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/clanky/tesar/suse-10-2-01-livedvd_kd…
Gnome: http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6441/screenshot1dv.png
I don’t want to start any flamewars here, but saying that KDE 4.0 doesn’t look as snazzy as I hoped it would isn’t an evil deed, is it?
I use KDE on majority of the desktops, mainly for its applications. And IMO it needs a serious facelift. Whatever theme I choose or whatever settings I use, for me it looks unpolished. Its panel and icons really need some artwork improvements.
KDE 4.0 isn’t finished and even 4.0 will be the beginning of th KDE 4 cycle.
Just because the Suse PPL gave KDE apparently smaller fonts makes KDE look horrible?!?
Whatever.
To be honest, I agree most Gnome distro’s look better than most KDE distro’s, but again – that’s a matter of taste.
Wait, you’re talking about the ‘general look and feel, about how it’s designed’. Now what the heck are you talking about then? You mean most Gnome styles have larger, space-wasting widgets, giving Gnome a cleaner look (and making it impossible to use on my 800×600 laptop screen)? Or do you mean Gnome has less icons and an empty desktop? Using a 800×600 KDE screenshot versus a 1024×768 Gnome one makes the first one look more crowded anyway, you know…
you know, it REALLY would be a lot more convincing if you werent posting a screenshot of a suse bastardized kde…
no, im afraid ill jump back to my original conclusion, you are a moron, and now i have another reason, for not even realizing the stupidity of this particular comparisin.
The difference (if i remember at all correctly) is that gnome by default will use 96 dpi for font rendering, regardless of what the X server reports for the dpi. KDE will use the value reported by the X server.
Many computer displays send incorrect data, which X then uses to compute the displays dpi. In that case, unless the dpi is adjusted manually for the X server, for example by using the -dpi option on the command line/in the startup scripts, the fonts will be rendered at a wrong dpi for the screen. This can look a bit off 🙂
At some point in the KDE font settings the option was added to override the font dpi just because dpi calculation was broken on so many systems.
You do realize its a beta, no they’re not done… hell plasma isn’t even in the beta.
Wait until plasma comes out and all the artwork is done, then say something.
Even then, people will be able to make it look however they want, kde4 sounds like it will have a limitless ability to look however people want it to.
looking forward to 4.1 :p
KDE did a complete Switch from CVS to SVN and from autotools to Cmake from kde 3 to kde 4
QT3 to QT4 and DCOP to DBUS
this was major work
I have to confess having tried KDE 4.0 beta 1, it no way comes under the expectation of beta software, or alpha for that matter. I respect the work and effort that has so far gone into KDE, and understand most of the work is under the hood. But c’mon, this is no way near beta software.
I am use to beta software being at least usable, and this is not the case with KDE 4.0 beta 1. People will expect the beta to be similar to the end product and almost stable, with exception of a few bugs. I think this live CD does KDE 4.0 and injustice.
Well, you have to take into account that this is a Beta of a major release with a complete architecture overhaul. For such major releases early Beta releases like this one are rather typical (I remember the very first Beta of KDE 2 was in a pretty similar shape).
Of course you’ll rather be disappointed if you expect it to live up to the Beta quality of a minor release.
I suppose you are right, and maybe I am being a bit harsh – didn’t think of it that way. I do really like the way KDE is going, and I support them 100%.
The problem is that you’re assuming a beta means “almost ready” when it doesn’t according to KDE. They’ve called this a beta because they’ve finally stopped accepting breaking changes in the library api’s.
This means that Beta 1 is actually likely to be more buggy than the alphas because of all the people who rushed to get their last feature into the libraries right before it was locked. All those last minute changes are going to be full of bugs and the user apps still haven’t gotten their full attention yet. Hopefully by beta 2 most of the bad bugs will have been fixed.
There are big changes in this release of KDE, so it’s OK for this beta. I remember Vista in it’s early days – also unstable.
http://img247.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kde4fc1.png
My single favorite feature of KDE is that the applications share keyboard shortcuts. This ought to be expanded upon. For example, I really like making sure that all tabbed interfaces have the same key to circulate between tabs. It makes for a power user’s dream.
It’s no replacement to have custom keybindings in a desktop environment if applications don’t use them. Try keeping meta-keys consistent in Gnome with Firefox or Epiphany. It seems like this has been overlooked there in favor of a pretty mouse-oriented interface.
You either need fairly careful UI design like Apple has or good architecture, and KDE has the architecture. I’m really excited about 4.x. I hope this is the time when all that great stuff under the hood really pays off on the surface.
Gnome and others are very welcome to catch up.
Maybe some folks should check out screenshots of KDe 3.0 and compare them to the current 3.5.7….that should give you a better idea of how things work.
This http://www.kde.org/screenshots/kde300shots.php compared to this http://www.kde.org/screenshots/kde350shots.php should give people an idea.
Speaking as a new KDE developer of the KDE community working on a Plasma engine/applet (the Weather Engine), I think everyone should not expect KDE 4.0 to be a ‘full finished desktop’ by the release date. There is a lot of things still left to do. I can say one thing, KDE 3’s kicker will not be in be in your distro’s KDE 4.0 release.
Thanks,
Shawn.