“KDE 4 is seen by many to be the next big step on the free software desktop, while others think releasing 4.0 in its current condition was misleading and a mistake. Either way, it’s an innovative release and inline with Fedora’s goal of providing the latest and greatest free software it is set to be the default KDE environment in the next major release of Fedora. We caught up with two members of the KDE SIG to talk about the work they’re doing to get it ready for release, their own opinions on the software and what they think about the progress made by Fedora in getting over its GNOME centric reputation.”
Well, you should never go backwards always move forwards in software land it is better to push the bleeding edge as Fedora does.
I have been using Fedora since FC1 now I am on Fedora8 and I feel this is the best desktop distro for my needs.
Plus, Red Hat is pretty much the standard for the data center and it helps keep your skills honed for new releases of RHEL Enterprise Linux…
While those of us who have actually tried to use it on a daily basis, for doing real work, have simply found it to be unusable in its current form.
Fedora does not really have to worry about that, since KDE is not the default Fedora desktop. Happily, the majority of other distros also do not have to worry about the move to version 4, and for the same reason.
Its funny when people restate their opinions in the collective to give the illusion of importance. Why do you bother? What you are really saying is “I tried to use it on a daily basis for doing real work and simply found it to be unusable in its current form”. That’s fine, KDE 4.0 has a lot of rough edges, but don’t pretend to speak for anyone but yourself.
I use it on a daily basis for doing work, and have since 4.0 was released. It’s fine. It may not have the fit and polish that 3.5.x does, but it works. When I come across the odd glitch, I report it, because that’s what the devs are looking for.
And for those apps that are missing from KDE 4.x, the KDE 3.5.x ones work just fine within KDE4, as do GTK apps, etc.
Really, it’s not that bad. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t flake out. It doesn’t eat your children. It’s a starting point, and it portends many good things to come…
Having said all that, I’ll agree that it may not be ideal for production use, but then it was never positioned as that.
And that’s not the market Fedora targets, so all is well.
uhmmm…
Yes it does. Even 3.5.x does. I still see way too much of even the 3.5 crash dialog. Konqueror is a particularly egregious offender.
Yes it does.
I cannot comment on this since I have none. I didn’t even have any before I tested KDE4. Are you claiming that you had children before your KDE4 adventure, and that they remain uneaten at this moment? 😉
Then you’re using the wrong distro. I haven’t had a crash in KDE 4.x with openSUSE, with KDE4 apps or KDE3.
Seriously, when Gnome 1.0 and 2.0 were released, they needed some love to become loveable. But they were usable, mostly, and bugs were quickly addressed. Look where they led to.
If you’ve got serious problems with KDE4, then please report the bugs, otherwise you’re not helping the situation.
I didn’t before KDE4, but they were brought in as package dependencies… Damned RPM
“””
Then you’re using the wrong distro.
“””
I know, I know! It’s obviously a problem with my configuration. On this machine and that. And on this distro and that.
And if the kids only showed up *after* your KDE4 installation… have you checked that they are signed with the proper keys? 😉
Excellent! So we’re in agreement…
I’m a little suspicious. I first met KDE4 briefly six or seven months ago, and now suddenly I’m living with it and these new dependencies. The math doesn’t add up, so I’ve sent the keys in for verification, since I don’t remember signing them. Could have been the coronas, but I need to know for sure…
Always a pleasure, elsewhere. 🙂
So tell me, how is it that we should take your word about KDE’s frequent crashes as granted and generally true? Maybe we should take the same truth pills you take. Other than that, believe it or not, it’s not just you who uses KDE, 24/7, and I find such opinions somewhat nerving.
Never would I say any long preaches about KDE’s superior stability, since I have seen some installs that crashed more than a crash test dummy, but I’ve seen and experienced the opposite much more frequently. What I can tell for certain is, that months can pass me by without any crashes whatsoever.
You can believe that at least that much as that
comment.
Rebuild with debug and post a bug, otherwise shut up. Don’t piss on other people work you are using for free!
—
I use kde4 apps in my kde3 installation, checkout kdesvn-build it is really easy if you are not afraid of compiling. I’m waiting for kmail & amarok to get ported, then I switch to kde4 for good (e.g. remove kde3 packages).
OpenSUSE is my main distro. I download every KDE4 update, almost daily. I am far from impressed, especially by the lack of features, but also by bugs.
If you get updates for KDE 4 on a daily basis, you are using a repository that offers SVN nightlies. Nightlies of any project are hardly known for their stability — even if it’s from the “STABLE” branch.
Ummmmmmmmmm. Yer, there’s lots of useful information people can take out of that comment.
Sadly, saying this doesn’t make any of it true, nor does it give you any credibility. Without specifics, descriptions and backtraces this is about as useful as your comments normally are.
In my experience, I very rarely if ever see the crash dialogue in 3.5, Konqueror as a file manager has never crashed for me and the only time it has choked is as a web browser with some JavaScript – as Firefox has on occasions. So what? Oh, and I also use Amarok with my music on a NFS fileshare, and that sometimes hangs for a while. That’s about it.
Based on…………what? You know what the current state and functionality of KDE 4 is, and so does everyone else. We should all know why that’s the case by now, and where things are heading. I’ve used KDE 4, but I don’t use it as my main Linux desktop at the moment.
Functionally, it’s by no means complete, but trying to create this impression of extreme instability and making the usual and predictable comebacks about children eating is pretty sad really, isn’t it? If you’re worried about something, just say come out and say it.
Imho you give firefox way too much credit, it is way more unstable than both konqi and IE 6…
You almost certainly wouldn’t want people to start posting backtraces to the osnews comment system, would you?
Unfortunately it still does crash, though 4.0.1 helped quite a bit. Given my workflow KDE 4.X is still unusable:
– Can not set keyboard macros for apps from the menus. This is very important to my workflow since I am extremely keyboard centric.
– Given a 1024×768 screen the current panel takes up way too much space.
– The use of xrandr to add/remove screens does not work correctly.
– The plasma desktop and panel crash (less often in 4.0.1) Usually this is due to me trying xrandr, though it does happen occasionally in other situations (I have not figured out a pattern yet) Once the desktop plasmoid crashes it is a bit of a challenge to use KDE.
– Konqueror crashes occasionally when used as a browser (though this is not really unique to KDE4)
– System Settings for display not functioning correctly.
– System Settings in general are incomplete
– please for the love of all that is holy give us an option to turn off the cashew in the top right corner (where I would normally put the hidden panel if I could move it… or hide it… or resize it… you get the idea)
Honestly I have far less problems with 4.0.1 and if that had been released as 4.0 I probably would not have complained. I can actually see how some might be able to use 4.0.1 as a daily desktop. Given its current limitations it is not usable as a main desktop for me though.
yes, this has not been ported yet. the shortcuts system changed fairly radically at all levels (shared daemon for globals, the shortcut API changed for apps, etc) so lots of breakage happened here.
note that adding shortcuts for apps in kde3 didn’t happen immediately either; i’m sure it’ll appear eventually in kde4.
4.0.2
this is a problem in Qt due to xrandr breaking compatibility in the xinerama api so absolutely horribly. some x.org devs (in this case keithp) are a bit … unusually unconcerned about the effects of some of their decisions.
there is a patch in qt-copy that mostly fixes these issues (#0172) and we are working right now with Trolltech to get the fixes polished and upstreamed for Qt 4.4 (and therefore KDE 4.1)
i hope you’ve reported this on bugs.kde.org with backtraces?
alt-f2 (run dialog), plasma, enter.
khtml is what’s crashing, and it’s got some issues in kde4 atm.
in which way?
i do wish there were people who could spend more time with the control panels. they are generally underloved; that said, what parts are particularly incomplete for you? (he says, hoping this isn’t a “critic’s perfectionism” sort of observation on your part)
what does the toolbox have to do with panels? nothing: they live on different zorder’d windows.
so to get to 4.0.1 we needed to release 4.0.0. sitting on the code base longer would have resulted in us not being nearly as far forward as we are now.
we said this right at the start, many people refused to believe us. some probably still don’t.
it would be awesome, though, if people would actually appreciate that to get *there* (4.0.x, 4.1) we had to start *here* (4.0.0). every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and try as you might you can’t avoid the first step. if you do, your second step becomes the first step and really, you can only skips so many steps before you run out of leaping power.
that’s fine; different people will come along at different points in time. saying “it’s not ready for me” can be useful if you can enunciate exactly what is missing for you (no, it’s not always obvious, we aren’t mind readers) and even more so if you can get involved and help push things forward directly.
when we get over these various humps, the number of things people will have left to complain about will start to approach zero (it’s a limit, not a solution
and all this will be behind us.
I agree, absolutely. If a distro is released with KDE4 only.I’ll refuse to use it, for the time being.
Heck, I am even willing to move to Gnome for now, it has a lot more features and it is *a lot* more stable than KDE4. And please consider that I have always been a KDE fan till now.
Edited 2008-02-18 04:54 UTC
Is anyone forcing you to use KDE4? Perhaps, someone’s got a gun to your head, threatening to wipe your family off if you won’t switch to KDE4? What kind of baby-sacrificing, Satan-worshipping distro are you using?
I don’t understand how you came to such conclusions.
Please reread my posts in this thread.
Which part of “If a distro is released with KDE4 *only*, I’ll refuse to use it, for the time being.” you don’t understand?
It is clearly about a free choice.
luckily, afaik no distro will ship with 4.0.0 by default, let alone as only choice. Some might ship 4.0.2 as default, but offer 3.5.x as option as well. Imho that shows guts, but it’s doable. I’d rather go for 3.5.9 as default and 4.0.2 as option…
Well, Fedora-KDE 9 will offer only KDE 4.0. There won’t be an option for KDE 3.5.9. See TFA.
luckily, afaik no distro will ship with 4.0.0 by default, let alone as only choice.
Fedora 9 will.
He said 4.0.0. I doubt Fedora will use that version, maybe 4.0.1 or 4.0.2 but not 4.0.0.
But the thread was about KDE4 and not a specific point release.
And Fedora 9 will ship with KDE4 (along with KDE3 libraries for compatibility).
Edited 2008-02-18 16:51 UTC
Reminds me of a disaster I had a couple of days ago; a kernel update was released and I found that my wireless networking stopped working. I spent a few good hours trying to work out what went wrong. A couple of days later they release an update. All I can say is that if I wasn’t tech savvy and had a cable to hook the machine up to the router, I would have been screwed.
These are the types of things that really piss people off when they move to an operating system – and find when updates are released, they not only cause problems, but they find that the ability to access further updates to correct the bugs introduced in that update, is made impossible.
I’m not saying any other operating system is better at this, but generally speaking these things need to be sorted out – the whole point of open source’s ‘many eyes’ but given the flawed kernel package that was released, those ‘many eyes’ must have been closed at the time.
Fedora SHOULD worry about it – after all, most linux desktop users run KDE… And all big ones support it. If fedora is serious about the future of the Free Desktop, they should care more about KDE.
Do you have concrete numbers to back this claim… or are you just inventing numbers as you go?
P.S. I’m a Fedora user/maintainer and a KDE user, but never the less…
– Gilboa
There ARE no hard numbers on KDE vs Gnome, just the many surveys done over the years. They used to show a 60-30-10 (KDE-Gnome-other), this might lately have shifted slightly to Gnome due to KDE having no major release in over 2 years – but even then, if it’s 50/50, you wouldn’t wanna ignore half your userbase. if you doubt these numbers, both KDE and Gnome use them often – I mean the 60-30-10 thing. Look for example here: http://live.gnome.org/10×10
and recent and older KDE slides which mention numbers.
– Fedora -is- GNOME centric (though the KDE-SIG is trying to change that); so I’d venture and guess that most Fedora users are indeed GNOME users. (Then again, I’m not)
– KDE 4.x series is the future – and by design Fedora lives on the bleeding edge.
– If you rather wait for KDE 4.1, nothing forces you to upgrade your trusty F8/KDE/3.5.9 installation with F9/4.0.2 (?).
– And if you do (decide to upgrade), you’d most likely see major improvements within the first 2-3 months of F9.
I really don’t understand your point.
– Gilboa
Edited 2008-02-18 14:38 UTC
Hmmm, was this even supposed to be an answer to my post?
IMHO, the use of the word “reputation” is misleading. After all, wasn’t GNOME the official DE of Fedora? All the RedHat tools are written in GTK non? To me “reputation” is more ephemeral than that. I would have used the phrase “GNOME-centric policy”.
To me it’s like saying “Katrina was probably a natural disaster”… yes, and that probability was 100%
</rant>
PS- I consider this on-topic since it’s saying Fedora’s position on GNOME was stronger than suggested in the summary.
“For the time being: yes. KDE 4.0 may lack some functionality in comparison to KDE 3.5 … sure, some people will prefer KDE 3.5 over KDE 4.0. But because Fedora supports the last two versions they can continue to use Fedora 8 until KDE 4.1 is released … I have absolutely no doubt moving to KDE 4.0 was the right decision to make. KDE4 is all about innovation and new technologies … KDE 4.0 surely lacks some features in comparison to KDE 3.5”
That’s some quotes from the interview. Fair enough you might say, but it’s also a developer saying that users can take what they’re given, that the distro is there to serve its developers, not its users. If KDE 4.0 suddenly gets off to a flying start and all comes good, which eventually it will, then of course no problem will arise. But I’m not sure many would bet on that by the end of April, Fedora 9’s putative release date.
Why can’t they run the two things side by side for a while? That is giving users more choice than telling them to stick with Fedora 8 which may turn out to be no choice at all. Personally, I get very uneasy when I hear developers talking like this. I realize Gnome is the default DE in Fedora, but what I hear is developers not cherishing their users, that the latest in blingtastic innovation is all that matters. That’s never good news, imho, and appeals to only a narrow segment of the Linux userbase. It takes two to tango.
> That is giving users more choice than telling them to stick with Fedora 8
No.
F8 => KDE 3.5 (last update is 3.5.8 (the last KDE 3.5)).
F9 => KDE 4.0
If Fedora provide KDE 3.5 in F9, it will be the same as the one in F8.
There are nothing new to expect from KDE 3.5.
> That is giving users more choice
What choice ?
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/01/09/the-choice-of-linux/
Is that for a Fedora relase only? There is a 3.5.9 exopected for release during february 2008
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KDE_3.5_Release_S…
F7 has been released with KDE 3.5.6. Last update has KDE 3.5.8 :
http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/updates/7/SRPMS/
> There is a 3.5.9
KDE 3.5.9 will be in F7 and F8. There is in the build and test process.
Exemple for F7 (kdebase package) :
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=36253
Exemple for F8 (kdebase package) :
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=36252
That’s the Fedore “touch” :
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
To do as much of the development work as possible directly in the upstream packages. We will in general prefer moving to a newer version for updates rather than backport fixes.
I was under the impression that this was what Fedora was about, though – trying new technologies, taking risks, using experimental things which would make their way, finally, into a Red Hat release?
Or is that not or no longer the case? (I honestly don’t know, I don’t use or follow the distro, but this was my understanding).
I tried a KDE 4 live CD, spent 5 minutes with it, and went back to 3.5. It’s not ready for me to use yet but I really like the idea of release often, release early, and getting this in front of people who are interested in the cutting edge ASAP. In contrast to the way certain other OSes do things, anyway.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
Objectives of Fedora
…
# To create a complete general-purpose operating system built for and by a community — those who not only consume, but also produce for the good of other community members.
…
Non-Objectives of Fedora
# Fedora is not interested in having a slow rate of change, but rather to be innovative.
# Fedora is not interested in being a platform for proprietary components.
…
I call that a contradiction, GNOME has always had a “Slow rate of change”, it’s how they work and Fedora has always gone along with that.
SUSE 10.3 had pre release KDE4 stuff mixed with KDE3 (not a good idea IMHO). Maybe Fedora want to challenge SUSE trying to be a more popular distro, Ubuntu is way ahead and they are not going any nearer.
Let’s remember that users should be choosing their distro on the basis of what it offers them. Fedora doesn’t pretend to be Debian stable. It adopts bleeding tech because somebody has to adopt bleeding tech in order to make it stable tech. Fedora has always been that way.
Although Fedora is no longer my distro of choice, I am a little envious of their willingness to adopt new tech and attempt to make it viable for their userbase. I often think that the linux userbase in general has become a litle complacent, and lost sight of the fact that they play an important role in contributing back to their distros to help them improve. Nowadays it sadly seems to be about a sense of entitlement with users, and what the distros should be doing to “earn” their business. No reciprocity required. That’s a shame.
I often think that the linux userbase in general has become a litle complacent, and lost sight of the fact that they play an important role in contributing back to their distros to help them improve.
That idea was always crock. Very few people have the education and natural aptitude to be good at engineering, coding, etc. And very few have the skills to distinguish between a genuine bug and a user misconfiguration. It’s not a good idea – in fact very naive – to ask those who aren’t coders to start hacking on Plasma, Open Office or whatever. It won’t be a happy experience for them or for the eventual quality of the program. For better or worse, Linux has moved on from those days.
Nowadays it sadly seems to be about a sense of entitlement with users, and what the distros should be doing to “earn” their business. No reciprocity required. That’s a shame.
Quite. You’ve made my point for me. I don’t see anything in that interview along the lines of “We’ve listened carefully to our users, we’ve studied what they use and how they use it, and … “. In fact, if you’d said the interview was with two Debian devs, and substituted “Firefox” for KDE 3.5 and “IceWeasel” for KDE 4.0, it would have said pretty well the same thing.
Fedora -is- a community project; It doesn’t need to “listen” to “users” as it is mostly run by… users. (E.g. KDE-SIG are Fedora/KDE users that decided to take KDE under their wings).
Don’t like KDE 4 and rather not stay with F8 until KDE 4.1 is release? Fine.
Create your -own- Fedora-KDE3-SIG and maintain the KDE3.x packages for F9.
Like any other community project, Fedora is driven by those who are willing to do the hard work themselves. The idea that somehow ‘users’ are ‘entitled’ to be ‘heard’ (without doing anything constructive about it, other then posting messages in OSNews/ML/etc) is ludicrous.
– Gilboa
I’m sorry, I find that attitude absolutely disgusting. All it takes to write a good bug report is describe the problem, describe your platform, and provide the steps to reproduce if possible. If you can’t do that, you probably couldn’t have installed an os by yourself in the first place. All that attitude is is pure lazyness and greed. Being a member of a community project means chipping in, it doesn’t mean doing them the favor of taking advantage of their hard work, then bitching and complaining.
And there are tons of other things one can do then develop, or even bug test. How about help with documentation? Write HOWTOs? Provide help for other users? I have a friend who is a musician, not a coder. So to give back, he spends two hours a day answering questions on ubuntuforums, and put together this http://asaph.50webs.net/ for some open source software that is barely used because its got a rediculus learning curve for what it does. He isn’t a programmer, but with open source tools like http://www.kompozer.net/, you dont have to be to put up a quick and dirty website.
If you are unable or can’t be bothered to contribute your time, then how about money? I assume linux users have jobs, you would be paying at least a hundred dollars for any other os, why not pay 50$ for every major revision? I’m sure it would be appreciated. or bandwidth? At the very, very, very least, keep your torrent window open for the length of the release. You are barely doing anything, but at least you are helping out in some way.
If you don’t want to do any of those things, then you are a leech out for a free lunch. Community projects work on the back of the community, if you are unwilling to give back, you are taking advantage of others work. The amount of people in that position AND complaining about the state of things is incredably frustrating by those who actually do work. That piss poor attitude is a big part of the reason I don’t use linux anymore.
Bravo!
well, there are many ways to contribute that don’t include coding. bug triage, testing, user support, translation and documentation are things any literate user can do.
agreed. i wonder what we can do to fix that.