Comments on KDE 4

[fingal]

Well, as far as I can see the 'technical preview' release date isn't due until October this year. I'm not sure when I'll get my hands on this. I'm quite lazy when it comes to upgrades, but I think this might encourage me to do so.

The feature plan - which I find very hard to read - can be found here.

I found some screen mockups following some information I got
from /. These are they. Not all of them are viewable at full size though.

Is the new coolness worth embracing, or should we just stay with the status quo?

[bigtomrodney]

I've been following development quite closely. For what it's worth both of the links you supplied at this point are very inaccurate (Not to attack them , just to inform). For instance aRts is being scrapped, kicker is being removed.

Some cool new features are

• phonos
• plasma
• tenor

to name a few. Most (if not all) of the UI is now plasma based. Plasma is closely related to SuperKaramba and will integrate its features as far as I know. Personally I'm really looking forward to seeing it. I'm kinda glad all is going quiet on its development. There are some areas of desktop design that are being borrowed from on all sides so it will be nice to hold it back until the last minute.

I know some people have beefs on this. Like XGL being taken inhouse at Novell, but in reality most projects don't show a release or code until they have it working to at least an alpha stage. Given that even basic intel chipsets released now can support decent acceleration I foresee that the really slick interfaces of KDE 4.x and eventually Gnome 3.x in conjunction with compositing technologies like XGL and Aiglx will provide the finest desktop experience available. Look at Gnome now - it's fine as it is but people throw XGL/Composite into the mix and all of a sudden the usual net hype is calling it the Mac killer.

Anyway, rant over. I love following desktop development, and I think I can say with my hand on my heart that linux really is going to be the 'killer' desktop in the foreseeable future.

[fingal]

I've been following development quite closely. For what it's worth both of the links you supplied at this point are very inaccurate (Not to attack them , just to inform). For instance aRts is being scrapped, kicker is being removed.

Really? I'm pleased about the removal of kicker. Personally I've never felt 100 percent happy with it: somehow too big and cartoony. Nope - thanks for the update.

[bigtomrodney]

aKademy is on in Dublin this year. I'm sure they'll have to show some of KDE4 at the developer's conference! I'm hoping to pop along. That should be a good month before the official technology previews.

[fingal]

aKademy is on in Dublin this year. I'm sure they'll have to show some of KDE4 at the developer's conference! I'm hoping to pop along. That should be a good month before the official technology previews.

Ah! There we part company. If I was in Dublin I'd pop over to O'Donahues for some music and several pints of Guinness. Ooops! Off topic again - damn.

[GNOME_n00b]

i think KDE 4 is all hype and no trousers. phonon is reinventing the wheel. tenor has died a death. plasma is superkaramba with a mask and different clothes.
whats more, KDE is now mostly in the hands of the fickle whims of trolltechs shareholders. the future does not look good for KDE.

[bigtomrodney]

I wouldn't say phonon is reinventing the wheel. It's adding abstraction between the apps and the interface. That way you can use any sound server you want so all of the debate over gstreamer/arts/xine whatever are irrelevent. Anyway, I won't argue with you it's still a few months before we even see a real preview. A good 18 months of work will have gone into it by that stage. I am hopeful for it. SUSE 10.1 is the first time I've switched to Gnome for more than a few hours, running it full time now.

[fingal]

Hi again - I notice that whenever KDE works on a new release someone somewhere says: 'Bah! This is bloat' and 'KDE are trying to look like Windows'. Then I think, 'But you have 1GB of RAM and two 250GB hdds working in a liquid cooled box running dual 64 bit chips ... Why not use it!?

I mean, elegance and minimalism are great, but not everyone is a minimalist.

[GNOME_n00b]

I wouldn't say phonon is reinventing the wheel.

i would...very much so. gnome and kde are meant to be moving towards common technologies such as dbus, gstreamer, etc. they are freedesktop projects, which is set up for purposes of interoperability between the desktops. now considering that gstreamer does everything that phonon does except gives users a choice of whether they want to continue using the future common audio technology(ie gstreamer) on linux or stick with something(ie xine, etc) that is destined to fall by the wayside at some point, phonon definitely is reinventing the wheel. (actually, phonon is just a wrapper around all the backends, but from the users point of view, they are the same). either the kde developers are blind, or they are hell bent on doing things the kde way, and have stuck 2 fingers up to interoperability.
the freedesktop organisation is there for a reason and for the good of linux in general. at some point in the future, phonon will just end up being an unecessary layer of abstraction at a time when gnome/xfce/etc developers are directly programming the common audio backend on linux - gstreamer.
its a bit like designing a car that can run on both unleaded and leaded at a time when leaded is being phased out and unleaded is the future.

[daark.child]

Phonon is not reinventing the wheel. From my understanding, phonon makes it easy for a user to pick the multimedia engine they want to use instead of the KDE developers dictating what a user should use. You can choose from gstreamer, xine, helix etc, so I don't see anything wrong with giving the users, the choice of engine. Personally I hate gstreamer and prefer xine, so it would be good to have that choice.

One thing I have noticed is that whenever there is a major KDE upgrade, there are some GNOME fans and devs, who always talk KDE down, but the releases are always successful. To get some sort of idea of how the development is going, read the weekly KDE Commit Digest.