Submitted by KDE 4.0 was released to mixed reviews; more or less everyone recognised the enormous potential of the still young platform, but some doubted whether or not the KDE project had made the right choice by releasing KDE 4.0 as, well, 4.0. The KDE developers were clear: just you wait for KDE 4.1. They released the first beta of KDE 4.1 today.The goal of this first beta is to find any bugs and regressions, so that KDE 4.1 can be the version of KDE4 which replaces KDE3 for end users. The release announcement states the following three highlights of KDE 4.1:
- Greatly expanded desktop shell functionality and configurability
- KDE Personal Information Management suite ported to KDE 4
- Many new and newly ported applications
A lot of time and energy has been put into Plasma, as anyone following Aaron Seigo’s blog (now with punctuation!) will know. Panels can now be multiplied and resized, so users are no longer stuck with just one immobile, inconfigurable panel at the bottom of their display. The Kickoff menu, my personal pet hate about KDE4, has been overhauled too, as well as the Run command which allows power users to textually launch just about anything. The compositing features have also been improved.
Since the release of KDE 4.0, a number of new applications have been written for or ported to KDE4, including Kontact, a CD player and Dragon Player (lightweight multimedia player). The printer applet has been overhauled, and Konquerer got a set of new features such as web browsing sessions, undo mode, improved smooth scrolling, and a full screen picture browsing mode courtesy of Gwenview. The KDE4 file manager, Dolphin, now supports tabs, and improved folder tree, and the ‘Copy to…’ makes it return.
There have been a lot of changes under the hood as well:
KHTML gets a speed boost from anticipatory resource loading, while WebKit, its offspring, is added to Plasma to allow OSX Dashboard widgets to be used in KDE. The use of the Widgets on Canvas feature of Qt 4.4 makes Plasma more stable and lightweight. KDE’s characteristic single-click based interface gets a new selection mechanism that promises speed and accessibility. Phonon, the crossplatform media framework, gains subtitle support and GStreamer, DirectShow 9 and QuickTime backends. The network management layer is extended to support several versions of NetworkManager.
The final release of KDE 4.1 is scheduled for a July 29th release. The beta release will find its way to your distribution of choice quickly enough.
Congratulations KDE people, and thanks for making KDE4 the best DE ever
i’m testing kde daily; i’ve rebuilt SVN every 3 days since 3.96 (kde4 betas), and let me tell you…
IT IS A MESS!!!
gladly it is growing fast…
it will be ready for joe user until 4.2
for kde users it is a good release…
congrats kde team!
Ah, so it’s not 4.1, it’s 4.2 now that will be the real KDE4 huh?
To be honest, it still looks very unpolished in a lot of spots.
Which spots are those?
God, I’m starting to throw things around, how the hell can you change the panel size now ? This abomination of the new panel settings has to be a joke.
it’s really easy see this video
http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Software/Enlarge_your_panel
Thanks !
Stated nore generally, it will be the real KDE4 at “4.(x+1)”. 😉
Works nicely for me. Can you elaborate what exactly you think is a mess?
1.- Plasma (it is a chaos)
2.- Konqueror (as file manager…. and as web browser)
i’m using it on my gentoo machine.
i’m not whinning about it; i know its a work in progress, i’m just remarking plasma (the MAIN FACE of kde4) as a mess.
If plasma crashes very often then joe user will feel Whole kde as a weak and unpolished DE.
i do not want to be missunderstood; i love kde4, but sometimes building it make feel, anxious!
sorry my english.
ad 1) I think it was a mess lately, especially because of the introduction of WoC, but now with the latest Revisions I’m positively surprised. I could actually use it –> if I could compile it on my main PC, on a different where I test stuff it works.
ad 2) I guess you would have to elaborate that more. Do you mean websites with Java-Apps, Java Script, Flash, websites heavily using CSS X (where X is the version number) or just “normal” websites.
Yeah I guess after the WOC changes it was very unstable. I think its getting better quickly though. I use the debian packages so I don’t see all the mess
Yeah I stopped using Konqueror entirely in KDE 4. I like Dolphin so much more as a file manager, and as a web browser I use Firefox 3 now, which is quite good. Another possibility for the future is Aurora for Webkit goodness (http://code.google.com/p/arora/)
Yes. I don’t think this will happen in the released version…
what’s a mess in kde 4.1? even if we are in hard feauture freeze mode it’s still a beta, if you are talking about plasma, just wait a bit more since there was a lot of mess because of the WoC(Widget on Canvas) porting, if you have any questions come to #kde-devel on freenode
I think if you’re building against the SVN daily, you forfeit the right to complain about stability.
EDIT: typo
Edited 2008-05-28 00:14 UTC
Strictly none-scientific, I would say that it looks more polished than ever on Suse after having fiddled with the live CD. Of course I don’t build it every 3 days or anything…
I’ll then take a look at it.
Note: I’m not referring to Debian Experimental. Building against KDE Trunk should by now be just using Qt 4.4.
Edited 2008-05-27 20:01 UTC
I suggest you reading Debian Qt 4.4 changelogs.
I started using KDE when I first began using Linux six years ago. A couple years ago I switched over to Gnome when I started dabbling with Fedora & Ubuntu and have preferred the Gnome desktop experience ever since. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with KDE and in fact, as a power user, I really appreciated all that it offered to the user. I think KDE 3.5.9 represents a great desktop environment. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about the new KDE 4 that I just don’t like. Maybe it’s the uber-sized desktop icons, the ugly configuration screenlet in the upper corner, or the vastly limited kicker (or plasma…whatever they’re calling it). I just don’t like it…yet. I’m going to keep an eye on it and perhaps try it again when it reaches 4.2 or 4.3.
I think I kind’a understand what you mean with the ‘I can’t put my finger on it’ (even though I don’t feel the same about it). KDE 4 is pretty different from KDE 3, mostly it’s feel. At first, when trying, it feels rather alien. But after a while, I noticed it really grew on me. I didn’t really switch to KDE 4.0 due to the many issues it had – but trying it did make me feel less comfortable in KDE 3. There is just something about KDE 4 which makes it feel right. I do have a svn with KDE 4.1, and I’m using it right now – having a hard time going back to safe and stable KDE 3.x just because KDE 4 does some things just too good. But I can’t put my finger on it – I just can’t say WHAT exactly it is which keeps me from logging into KDE 3. Despite the fact all my files are there, and I have to go through all kinds of ‘chmod’ stuff to get to my own stuff…
Personally I’m beginning to have opposite feelings. Sure KDE4 may still be beta quality in many aspects, but the more I play with KDE4 and see its huge potential, the more I’m starting to feel that I might switch from Gnome to KDE4. Especially as I don’t like all the directions that Gnome development has taken (it is mostly ok, but the goal of extreme simplicity may not always serve users, especially power users best).
These feelings may have a lot to do with aesthetics only too. For example, as KDE4 likes to use vector graphics it helps a lot in making KDE4 look much cleaner and tidier than KDE3 in my opinion. As to default theming like icons, those things can be easily changed if the user or the distribution (like Kubuntu etc.) so wishes. The underlying technology and potential is what is important, not the decoration on the cake.
… when someone points out how screwed up software is really have ego issues.
You should see what they’ll do to you when you dare to say anything derogatory about Ubuntu. You’ll be whisked off to Guantanamo and water boarded until you recant!!!!!
I’m a lot more comfortable now with the new menu setup.
They seem to have done a few tweaks here and there, and
it seems much easier to use now.
The KDE 4.x series is becoming stable very quickly, I’ve
found. I’ve had no crashes whatsoever in the last few weeks, so it’s looking good!
The new underlying framework will be a huge help to KDE
in the next few years, and the 4.1 release looks like it’ll be awesome! Rock on, KDE!
The appearance of Kontact from the screenshot looks kind of “old”. It doesn’t go well with the rest of KDE 4.1…
Why is that?
Judging from the scrollbars, they are using the old Plastik theme instead of the new Oxygen one.
I prefer Polyester to all of the above.