“Ever wonder what KDE 4.0 is going to look like when it is finally released some time this year ? As far as end users should be concerned, it is going to be much more beautiful, responsive and usable than KDE 3.5. Some of the features that it will have are as follows.” Note: I thought the Kickoff menu was a SUSE thing, instead of being a KDE 4.0 thing?
Sneak Preview of the Expected Features in KDE 4.0
56 Comments
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2007-01-08 9:00 pm
spikebI think the point right now is that they’re NOT READY to show you the money: they don’t have any money to show.
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2007-01-08 9:24 pm
teprrrWhere’s the public preview of Oxygen? Where can I download a .tar.gz of the icons they’ve done so far? If there’s one available, why isn’t it on their website?
There’s no public review besides the ones available on Oxygen’s website. That’s because the artists want to finish it before releasing it.
What is Konqueror 4.0 going to look like? What features will it have? How much progress has been made? How can I build and play with it right now?
Even the developers don’t know what Konqi 4 is going to look like. Currently it has been ported to Qt4 libs and its working and runnable, though not as stable as KDE 3 version for sure.
People are currently working on the foundation of new KDE and thus there hasn’t been much feature development yet. You can play with it though if you want to, there are instructions available: http://developernew.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/Unstable_Version
Remember, that this stuff is extremely EXPERIMENTAL at the moment and not much use for a regular user.
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2007-01-08 9:27 pm
anda_skoaThen perhaps a better way of putting it would be that Gnome (and Apple) prefer to rewrite and reorganise as they go along, in minor releases, rather than the KDE (and Microsoft way) of saving lots of things for one big rewrite.
No, still do not agree. It is one thing to restructure internal things and one thing to restructure APIs or services.
Everyone you listed does the former all the time to keep their platform up-to-date, maintainable, etc.
And also everybody needs to introduce major new things when necessary, e.g. Bonobo in GNOME 2 (with a very likely removal in GNOME 3), Apple’s Core APIs in OS X, etc.
Where’s the public preview of Oxygen?
No idea, I thought we were dicussing openess in a KDE/GNOME development context. I could imagine that artists use repositories as well these days, but maybe they work differently.
How can I build and play with it right now?
Build instructions for SVN trunk can be found here
http://developer.kde.org/build/trunk.html
If I remember correctly, some packagers started to create binaries of at least the snapshot releases.
The point I’m trying to make here is that neither this article, nor the one last week, nor anything that I can quickly find on the web, actually tell me anything of substance about KDE4.
Well, I’d say user “elsewhere” posted a pretty awesome comment listing interesting technologies and their potential use cases.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16889&comment_id=199548
Actually I think pretty any article about KDE4 that is not just a weird attempt in reducing KDE 4 to eyecandy is telling substential things.
I want to be impressed by these things called Solid and Phonon, even if I don’t really understand how they’re different to HAL and GStreamer.
That’s pretty easy. Solid and Phonon are built on things like HAL and GStreamer.
For example HAL provides information about hardware and signals changes of such properties.
Solid is for one part using providing this information in a way that allows to gather information by different methods on different systems, and for another part letting KDE infrastructure and KDE applications know about consequences when properties change.
I am most likely not qualified to do a great example, but for instance if a network interface goes down, an application might not be interested in this very fact but more if it can only use offline stuff or if it can just reinitiate its connections (system still online through a different connection)
Or in the case of Phonon by providing managing and switching of policies, e.g. turning down the volume of media players when a voice communication channel gets active or moving voice communication to a headset when it becomes available.
For a summary I’d say its all about getting better access to already available information, to manage relations of information and state changes, to allow to work with policies rather than checking every possible state by yourself, to let developers deal with results rather than low level causes and their dependecies, …
The user experience is more likely to be seeing less rather than seeing more, e.g. no longer getting warnings about lost connections but rather having them “resumed” when possible again.
Edit: added the link to elsewhere’s comment
Edited 2007-01-08 21:30
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2007-01-08 10:30 pm
smittyThen perhaps a better way of putting it would be that Gnome (and Apple) prefer to rewrite and reorganise as they go along, in minor releases, rather than the KDE (and Microsoft way) of saving lots of things for one big rewrite.
No, not really. KDE has been doing incremental releases for years, just like GNOME. Moving from KDE3-4 is no different than when GNOME went from 1-2 or when the Linux kernel went from 2.4-2.6. All 3 projects mostly have minor releases, with a very rare major release.
Where’s the public preview of Oxygen? Where can I download a .tar.gz of the icons they’ve done so far? If there’s one available, why isn’t it on their website?
I’m also disappointed in the lack of Oxygen previews. I’m not sure if there just isn’t much done yet or if they want to finish most of it before actually releasing, but I would certainly appreciate some more openness here.
What is Konqueror 4.0 going to look like? What features will it have? How much progress has been made? How can I build and play with it right now?
Well, download a KDE development snapshot and you can play with it, but I think the only real differences are that it has been ported to QT4, so there are no “screenshot” differences. The last I heard they were working on a new “simple” file manager for most users and were going to keep Konqueror around for more advanced users, so I would expect it to include every function + the kitchen sink.
Does “Plasma” mean anything, or is it just a load of hot air (geddit? :-D)? If so, what does it look like? There aren’t even any *mockups* on the Plasma website, let alone screenshots!
Plasma does mean something, go to the website and find out what. Right now it is still in the planning stage, so there is no code or anything to see. I would expect it to be the very last thing finished before KDE4 is released, because it obviously is going to rely on a ton of libraries and other work being finished first.
I want to be impressed by these things called Solid and Phonon
AFAIK, Phonon and Solid have been completed and you can use them if you get the latest development releases (although I could be wrong about this). However, I’m not sure if any apps actually use them yet, and it’s pretty hard to take a screenshot of an API, so I’m not sure exactly what you want to see here.
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2007-01-09 12:09 am
MortyI’m also disappointed in the lack of Oxygen previews. I’m not sure if there just isn’t much done yet or if they want to finish most of it before actually releasing, but I would certainly appreciate some more openness here.
They are all there in SVN, and the updates usually gets mentioned in the weekly SVN commit-digest. What more openness do you really need?
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smitty
They are all there in SVN
Are they somewhere in the trunk SVN? I wasn’t aware of that. It would be nice if someone could place them on the website since it would only take a few minutes, but if they can be gotten somewhere that is good enough for me.
Edited 2007-01-09 00:42
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2007-01-09 8:33 am
slougiWhere’s the public preview of Oxygen? Where can I download a .tar.gz of the icons they’ve done so far? If there’s one available, why isn’t it on their website?
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/artwork/Oxygen/
How about that? It’s ALL in the svn repository, all the work going on with artwork, code, etc. Just because you are not looking doesn’t mean it’s not there.
2007-01-08 8:12 pm
elsewhere
Both are valid ways of doing things, and have their pros and cons. But the crucial difference for me if one of openness. With Gnome, all the new stuff is out there, in the open, for me to try if I want to. Yes, it will have bugs, but feel free to fix them. With KDE on the other hand, everything seems to be done behind closed doors.
There is no issue with openness. The information is out there and easily accessible, the devs are looking, practically begging, for community assistance. Your issue is likely with time-to-delivery, but as you previously pointed out, KDE4 is a near tear-down/rebuild. It’s not very reasonable to expect user-testable elements when those new elements are dependent upon a core set of libraries that is still in development.
This has been brought up before in previous articles, as well as some of the dev blog posts. There’s a sense of requiring immediate gratification within the community; the KDE team knew that the extended development cycle was going to lead to some users moving to alternatives whenever a shiny new feature is announced but the long-term gains from KDE4 far outweigh any short-term pain. It becomes an issue of design philosophy; do you just keep patching on and adding additional layers to an existing and aging infrastructure in order to enable rapid development/release or do you apply a clean slate approach when newer technologies are available to be adopted and implemented but would be unwieldy or resource intensive to try and backport?
The problem is that the hype around plasma is what casual users are looking for, yet eye candy IMHO represents only 5% of the improvements KDE4 will bring. The eye candy will come but you don’t put the cart before the horse, the underlying framework needs to be built first. And for those really interested in seeing the new technologies, it’s available and accessible from public SVN’s. Kubuntu and Suse maintain snapshot builds of the libraries in binary form. No, you won’t get a revolutionary new desktop in downloading them, but that’s not the point; the code is there for the developers looking to get involved.
So I hardly think it’s fair to the devs involved to criticize the KDE4 process as being closed, or to even compare it to Gnome’s process of incremental updates. They stated all along that this was going to take time, nobody has been misled.
The Oxygen website on the other hand has none of these things. There is a bit of background about the inspiration for the new icons, and a page showing (non-downloadable) previews of a few icons… and that’s it. Where’s the link for me to download the latest work-in-progress version? What do I do if I want to draw some Oxygen icons? What if I’d like an Oxygen icon for my new KDE app?
If you want to contribute, contact the oxygen team, they’d welcome support. If you desperately need to see the icons, you’ll find some in the KDE svn. But don’t expect them to be packaged and nicely ready for download at this point, they are still in development (there are 1000’s of icons involved) and they will be released as part of KDE4.
I’m sure this doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people, and that they don’t care as long as they get the goods in the end. But the whole behind-closed-doors, you’ll-get-it-when-it’s-ready mentality of KDE4 really puts me off.
Again, you’re defining “behind-closed-doors” as meaning nobody is there to hold your hand and put everything into a nice package file so you can somehow have the new features of KDE 4 to test in your current environment. Everything is open and accessible, and with a little bit of effort you wouldn’t even have to work that hard to access it. I’m not a dev myself but it wasn’t very difficult to get KDE4 test packages running. It just takes a bit more effort than apt-get install to do it.
But the devs have enough work to do, and it’s a bit unreasonable to expect them to sidetrack themselves by producing easy-to-use packages just for you. The work is developmental right now, which frankly means that it isn’t ready for use by anyone that is uncomfortable with using and installing developmental packages.
All good things take time.
2007-01-08 10:27 pm
aseigo
> You could perhaps call it “evolution versus
> revolution”, or something like that. Whereas Gnome
> gradually adds new features (when it’s not taking
> others away 
) and incorporates new technology,
> the KDE approach is to sweep away what was there
> before and make a fresh start.
others have commented on other parts of your posting rather well, but i’d like to expand on this point.
we spent 6 years incrementally improving kde from 2.0 to 3.5. there is another 3.5.x release about to come out within the month, even. this was an evolutionary period where APIs didn’t change much at all. we polished frameworks, libraries, then applications. that’s 6 years of incremental improvements.
what we aren’t is a one trick pony. we also know how and when to do larger leaps in development and how to strap on the balls to do so.
we did this once with kde1->kde2, and 6-ish years after the release of 2.0 we’re doing it again.
to me that speaks to good stewardship of the project and the ability to know the strengths of both conservative and daring approaches.
2007-01-08 7:25 pm
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teprrr
Yup, it already has been replaced in the trunk of KDE’s subversion and applications are being ported on it if not done already.
2007-01-08 11:01 pm
broken_symlink
so since they are using svg now on most of the kde desktop, does that mean things should look good no matter what resolution?
2007-01-08 11:07 pm
DigitalAxis
It’s all well and good to have frameworks, but I’m curious about who’s going to use the frameworks. I mean, if I have nothing that plugs in, it’s not much use, right?
KDE 4.0 will feature better multimedia experience through a project called Phonon which will collaborate with Solid. So no more need to choose multimedia backends as the Phonon API will take care of it.
And then there’s usage things: Currently I use Amarok with the Xine engine because last time I tried it, gStreamer was still rather unstable… and yet, I have a large collection of Amiga and DOS Soundtracker modules, and only gStreamer has a player for them.
Will Phonon allow me to transparently switch media players, much in the same way programs like Winamp, XMMS and Audacious handle audio via plugins… only on a systemwide basis? (assume the player supports Phonon)
As for features and everything, if KDE 4.0 is really going to be KDE 3.5 using QT4, why not call it KDE 3.9, and then once they’ve had time to perfect the new KDE4-specific issues call THAT one KDE 4.0? I mean, I’m seeing posts saying that KDE 4.0 won’t have all the features the KDE developers have planned for the 4.0 series. (and that the poster intends to wait until 4.1 or 4.2…) If it’s not really KDE 4.0, why call it KDE 4.0?
Perhaps I’m taking a rather dim view of how much has already been done by the KDE people, I’d be interested if someone can correct me?
Edited 2007-01-08 23:21
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teprrr
Will Phonon allow me to transparently switch media players, much in the same way programs like Winamp, XMMS and Audacious handle audio via plugins… only on a systemwide basis? (assume the player supports Phonon)
Yup, that’s the spirit as far as I have understood. Phonon is only an API to access audio device no matter what framework its using below. So CoreAudio, GSTreamer, Xine, Direct Audio and so on should work as far as they have Phonon backend available.
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smitty
Will Phonon allow me to transparently switch media players, much in the same way programs like Winamp, XMMS and Audacious handle audio via plugins… only on a systemwide basis? (assume the player supports Phonon)
I don’t actually know for sure, but that seems like one of the easiest and most annoying problems that could easily be solved – Phonon could simply query the backend to see if it supports playing the current format and switch to another transparently if needed.
As for features and everything, if KDE 4.0 is really going to be KDE 3.5 using QT4, why not call it KDE 3.9, and then once they’ve had time to perfect the new KDE4-specific issues call THAT one KDE 4.0? I mean, I’m seeing posts saying that KDE 4.0 won’t have all the features the KDE developers have planned for the 4.0 series. (and that the poster intends to wait until 4.1 or 4.2…) If it’s not really KDE 4.0, why call it KDE 4.0?
The numbering scheme is more for developers than end users, so by going to 4.0 it denotes that the framework built on has been through a major change even if no ui changes are visible to the user. KDE4 is built on top of QT4.
Also, don’t get the wrong idea. KDE4.0 should have a number of significant end user changes, the developers are just saying that some of the new stuff won’t be used fully for some time.
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teprrr
As for features and everything, if KDE 4.0 is really going to be KDE 3.5 using QT4, why not call it KDE 3.9, and then once they’ve had time to perfect the new KDE4-specific issues call THAT one KDE 4.0? I mean, I’m seeing posts saying that KDE 4.0 won’t have all the features the KDE developers have planned for the 4.0 series. (and that the poster intends to wait until 4.1 or 4.2…) If it’s not really KDE 4.0, why call it KDE 4.0?
Like Aaron pointed already, dot zero releases has been mostly about big porting stuff and then it keeps evolving with minor releases. Why 4.0 is needed is that when the frameworks are ready and used people can start building apps for them better as there are more users.
KDE releases are also band with Qt’s major version number, so the major version points out the version of Qt. And if developers waits that everyone has finished what they’re doing for KDE4 there would be no KDE4 release any time now, as there’s a lot of things to do and as you may know, software never comes ready and complete.
Edited 2007-01-08 23:55
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2007-01-09 2:12 am
phoenix[Note: I am not a KDE dev, just a KDE user who has been following the developments of KDE4.]
Seems to me you are confusing KDE4 / KDE 4.x with KDE 4.0. There’s a big difference between the two.
KDE4 is the term that encompasses all the frameworks and technologies that will be used in the KDE 4.x lifetime.
KDE 4.0 will be the first release in the KDE 4.x line. First releases rarely have *every* single feature planned. So maybe the devs won’t be able to ship KDE 4.0 with every single feature enabled. They’ll add those into KDE 4.0.x and KDE 4.1.x and KDE 4.2.x, and so on.
Just like they did with KDE3 and KDE 3.0 through KDE 3.5.5.
2007-01-08 11:41 pm
chocobanana
… I wonder how easy will it be to switch from Windows, Mac OS or even the actual KDE and Gnome.
That’s something I’m really curious, will it be hard to switch or will it be reasonably familiar?
Edited 2007-01-08 23:41
2007-01-09 9:02 am
melkor
KDE 4 will be ready when it’s ready. I can’t believe how rabid people are about it all. Microsoft’s Vista was in development for 5 and a bit years, nearly 6. Did I hear people demanding that Microsoft show them proof of code/conceptual code in the first few years?
I really look forward to KDE 4, and hopeful porting to the Microsoft Windows platform.
Dave
Looks nice, it’ll further the OSS desktop. But being the performance junkie that I am I’m all for the greater performance *AND* reduced memory size.
Apple and MS haven’t grasped this concept. I don’t think they ever will. Apple at least increases their performance(10.2, 10.3. 10.4, etc), but their in-memory size gets bigger too.
Performance is important, but memory is almost free these days. Apple puts their memory usage to relatively good use*, for things like double-buffering windows, etc.
*) In most cases — Safari is a pig for no good reason it seems…
———-Performance is important, but memory is almost free these days.———
Perhaps you could send me one or two of your paychecks then?
I clearly don’t have it the way you do.
I can think of plenty of things to spend my money on that’re more important than a stick of ram. If these software companies have the ability(and they do) then they should make their software more efficient in all areas.
I’m the customer. It’s their job to run circles around me, at my whim. Not the other way around. That’s why I run linux, more than any other single reason.
The SVG stuff looks really good, but I hope they don’t use the SUSE kick-off menu in KDE 4.0. IMHO, kick-off looks dreadful.
and that kick-off menu can be switched off in S10.2 in favor of the old one. It’s all about the ability to have a choice.
kick-off is also a pain to use. I’ve seen it in 10.2, and I hate it.
It takes a click to have it old style, what’s up? I just did it on my laptop to show that it can be done.
If you don’t like the menu, use the old one…
The SVG stuff looks really good, but I hope they don’t use the SUSE kick-off menu in KDE 4.0. IMHO, kick-off looks dreadful.
From what I’ve seen following the dev blogs, the proposal is to replace the kmenu but not necessarily with the Suse menu; they may take elements of it. Novell did conduct usability studies in the design of that menu, it would be shame to not try and take advantage of parts of it.
Though personally I’m not a fan of it, and disable it in favor of the standard menu. I don’t think it’s *that* bad, but it doesn’t have an integrated feel. The actions seem a bit inconsistent, some elements require a hover over, some require a click. The display elements are fixed, such as font size and icons, so they don’t unify with the existing KDE desktop theme elements. Frankly it feels more like a the Gnome version was simply ported to KDE instead of developed from the ground up.
Change isn’t bad, as long as it’s not simply done for change’s sake.
I saw that menu in Sabayon Linux 3.2 which uses KDE 3.5
I like kickoff! It just needs to be fine tuned a bit. But I don’t think the KDE devs have decided on the menu yet for KDE 4.
as we again and again see is that open source beats the closed soure stuff in features, speed and beauty..
I love it..
… significant improvement over KDE 3. I like that QT 4 is free to use now for all platforms, I had not realized that had happened. It would be very cool to see some of these linux/KDE apps appear on OS X, since I think KDE has the best chance of blending in.
KDE has always seemed pretty quick to me, I wonder how much the performance has increased and if it will be noticeable.
Not sure yet if I like kickoff, but I am sure it would grow on me once I started using it (tabs vs. simple icons or menu links).
Are the projects such as Decibel and Akonadi really KDE-only projects or are they back-end projects that the KDE team will be integrating?
Are the projects such as Decibel and Akonadi really KDE-only projects or are they back-end projects that the KDE team will be integrating?
Decibel is, if I understand correctly, the KDE implementation of the Telepathy specification.
Akonadi is also partly a specification and an implementation, the latter using KDE technology. The idea is that it would be possible to swap the implementation for something not depending on KDE if the work can be shared with other interested projects, but as long as only KDE is going to use it, KDE technology will make it easier for the developers to do it on time.
as already mentioned, decibal is a project that is riffing on/with an xdg project. so no worries there.
akonadi is something that could certainly be useful for much more than just KDE. whether it gets up take outside of KDE remains to be seen, but i’d hope so since it’s sad when difficult and boring wheels get reinvented in ways that don’t add to the value of the experience and only get in the way of things working together.
other projects that are borne out of the qt4/kde4 efforts such as strigi and eigen are also not kde specific at all though written in response to needs our community has.
sort of like ldb, tdb or talloc from the samba project.
To form a view we really need desktop screenshots rather than a few shots of a puzzle-type game. Maybe screenshots are not ready because a new design isn’t yet ready? Fine. No hurry.
I hope, though, that KDE4 learns the value of empty space and spaces things out more as Gnome does. Things – widgets, icons, menu bars, et al – are just too squashed up on the 3 series. That, and the blue/electric blue crystal everything thang has had its day, imho.
the screenshots you saw were obviously to show the fact that SVG is being used instead and that difference shows off pretty good.
sorry, but i don’t agree. an average Gnome desktop definitely looks better, but can handle only 2/3 of the valuable workspace a comparable KDE desktop can handle. and as i want to get work done, and not stare at a ‘clean & beautiful’ interface, i prefer KDE.
Well, I have to disagree with you, superstoned. one of the reasons I moved from KDE to Gnome is exactly because Gnome is much more efficient and harmonious in handling the balance between dektop real estate, usability and attractiveness. KDE 3.x in this matter and in my opinion sucks a lot. Even with all the tweaking possibilities it provides (which are superior to Gnome) it is just too hard to make make it space efficient and attractive at the same time.
I also want to get work done, not to stare at the screen, but work is better done when you do it with pleasure, and the tools to achieve it are crucial to attain both pleasure and efficiency.
So far KDE 4 is a big interrogation for me, regarding the desktop usability, but I hope it succeeds in its mission!
Edited 2007-01-08 17:01
So far KDE 4 is a big interrogation for me, regarding the desktop usability, but I hope it succeeds in its mission!
KDE 4 is a big what for you?
interrogation
interrogation
(noun) the action of interrogating or the process of being interrogated : would he keep his mouth shut under interrogation ? | he had conducted hundreds of criminal interrogations. DERIVATIVES interrogational
I *think* that he meant “it’s a question mark”, but since “interrogation” in Spanish is “ok”, he should’ve said:
KDE 4 is a big question mark for me…
Literal translation doesn’t work all the time.
Edited 2007-01-08 17:38
KDE 4 is a big what for you?
It’s a mystery, because I haven’t seen any images of it, all I saw was articles about how’s it going to work, not how it’s going to look and interact.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear for you.
P.S. lol, thanks for the explanation Gryzor
Edited 2007-01-08 17:42
aah, you can learn a lot on the web
about the question KDE4 currenty is, you’re right, its no clear what it’ll turn out. but the way the development is going, their creative energy, their focus – i find it hard to believe that it won’t be some amazing piece of work. it’s not vapourware, you know. much of what is mentioned in the article already exists, and i’ve seen (parts of) it. it’s just not used everywhere, and probably won’t be in KDE 4.0.
anyway, i think the whole spacing point we argue about is mostly a matter of theme and style, not really the underlying technology – and you must admit KDE is years ahead in this department, and the fourth release will only make this advantage even larger.
yes, many application interfaces are not complete or even in a state where it is worth screenshotting yet. that’ll come with time over the next several months.
moreover, it’s also useful to keep in mind that 4.0 is a “traditional” dot-oh release for us in the sense that it will have lots of framework development along with app devel, but much work will continue to go into KDE4 after 4.0 comes out… i personally hope we achieve most or all of our general visions by 4.2.
this is really not unlike how apple deals with their desktop, though significantly different than how microsoft tends to.
There aren’t really a lot of screenshots there, but from what I do see, I might be enticed away from Gnome when KDE 4 is released.
It looks very nice.
After having been a Gnome user for more than 5 years KDE 4 might be the reason to move over. I am getting tiered of all the issues with Gnome on FreeBSD. So many dependencies and breaks .. not all Gnomes issue but is painful.
If people here use FreeBSD (not PC-BSD) and KDE, can you please share any experiences on that.
I don’t use a BSD, but i know several KDE dev’s are very committed to keep KDE running as good as it does currently on *BSD…
KDE runs great on FreeBSD. The KDE developers have a better relationship with FreeBSD than the Gnome developers do.
i’ll third the motion that kde works great on *bsd. we have people who build, test and develop kde4 on both freebsd and openbsd (perhaps others as well, but i know of people on those two platforms for sure). it’s the same with kde3 as well.
in addition to kde developers, there are several desktop bsd projects which have kde at the heart of their focus. so we have good downstream interaction as well.
due to this, things in kde tend to work extremely well out of the box on *bsd.
similar relationships are building up around opensolaris (stefan teleman is a god in that respect), macos and even win32.
I can’t wait for this to come to windows. Then it could spread like firefox
, gain a lot more developers and weaken microsoft’s hold on their OS.
What I want is to be able to recommand KOffice everywhere (well, I like it) and to use KMail & Cie on my office workstation.
Konqueror, Kontact, Kopete, Kate, and Klipper on Windows would be a dream come true.
Especially if KIO slaves make it through the transition to Win32.
While I prefer FreeBSD (work laptop, home server), and use Linux (work desktop / servers), I’m forced to run Windows XP at home for various things. Having the good ol’ KDE apps available on there would make the transition from laptop -> desktop, or work -> home so much smoother.
Edited 2007-01-09 01:58
One of the things overlooked will be the underlying frameworks for managing data and information.
Right now, strigi is showing excellent promise as one of the “desktop” search mechanisms; it’s fast and extensible with plugins for different data types, and although there will be kde-wrappers for integration into the environment, it’s actually DE agnostic and could easily become an alternative for beagle on Gnome. It’s fast and not based on mono, for those concerned about such things.
Even cooler though is some of the conceptual work being done on the Nepomuk project, which is working with KDE. Nepomuk will add context-based search capabilities, so instead of simply searching for raw data and scanning for what you want within the results, your search results are determined from the actual context you’re looking for. Now, a lot of this is conceptual and experimental in itself (and a lot of the underlying principles above my head
), but there have been code exchanges between the projects, and I believe Mandriva is one of the main sponsors of devs working on this project. Unfortunately the true power of the planned Nepomuk work probably won’t be apparent until a future KDE 4.x, but the framework to make it happen is part of the core project.
Akonadi also simplifies part of this process as well, as a centralized data framework for personal data it will have interfaces for searching data and metadata, which will alleviate the search frameworks from having to write application-specific plugins.
Another thing I’ve seen mentioned lately is the idea of a central backup framework for personal data, the idea being that KDE applications can hook into this framework and have any necessary data (as opposed to documents etc.) backed up or restored through a centralized interface. Nothing too revolutionary there, and it’s something most people do already by manually securing ~/.kde files, but again this just simplifies things and provides a common structure for managing that process. Should make it easier for migrating to new systems etc. since it also provides a separation between configuration data (which may be dependent on the specific underlying DE) and the user’s datastore and app-specific settings.
The eye candy will no doubt generate most of the buzz, but there are some extremely cool things being done under the hood that will be totally transparent to the user aside from increased functionality and integration from applications; but it looks to be very powerful from a development POV.
Best of all, there’s nothing that’s really pie-in-the-sky at the moment. Although many are becoming frustrated with the development cycle for KDE4 and the lack of any significant preview- or beta- availability, much the stuff they’re talking on exists today in the dev libraries and just needs some refinement and testing. It’s not vapor.
The almost exact same news was posted here a few days ago:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16861/The-Road-to-KDE-4-SVG-Renderi…
There doesn’t seem to be anything new in this post
As a KDE developer, I don’t appreciate at all the fact that this blogger takes a screenshot of the SuSE KDE 3.5 Kickoff menu and says it is the KDE 4.0 menu. This is plain wrong. Last time I checked, the KDE 4.0 menu was Raptor, not Kickoff. It is a part of the Plasma project and is still under heavy development, like Plasma itself, so it is too early for screenshots. You could find early screenshots of it but they’re not supposed to be any representative of the final thing.
I think this article highlights very well the difference between the Gnome and KDE approaches to new software. You could perhaps call it “evolution versus revolution”, or something like that. Whereas Gnome gradually adds new features (when it’s not taking others away
) and incorporates new technology, the KDE approach is to sweep away what was there before and make a fresh start.
Both are valid ways of doing things, and have their pros and cons. But the crucial difference for me if one of openness. With Gnome, all the new stuff is out there, in the open, for me to try if I want to. Yes, it will have bugs, but feel free to fix them. With KDE on the other hand, everything seems to be done behind closed doors.
Nowhere is this difference more apparent than when it comes to the icon sets. The “Tango” and “Oxygen” projects were announced around the same time, aimed at producing high-quality default icon sets for Gnome and KDE4 respectively (actually, Tango was supposed to be much more than that, and “cross-desktop” to boot, but apparently they forgot to tell the KDE devs that). Compare the websites of the two projects:
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library
http://www.oxygen-icons.org/
The Tango website offers me a link to download an up-to-the-minute version from CVS. It offers guidelines for artists wanting to make submissions. And it has a page showing hundreds of Tango icons in various sizes, including an SVG download link for each one.
The Oxygen website on the other hand has none of these things. There is a bit of background about the inspiration for the new icons, and a page showing (non-downloadable) previews of a few icons… and that’s it. Where’s the link for me to download the latest work-in-progress version? What do I do if I want to draw some Oxygen icons? What if I’d like an Oxygen icon for my new KDE app?
Similarly, I can try out the new “Telepathy” framework on Ubuntu today. It’s early days, but it has potential. The Decibel project referred to in this article sounds like a similar idea, and is probably at a more advanced stage if they want to include it in KDE4. Yet searching Synaptic for “Decibel” yields zero results.
I’m sure this doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people, and that they don’t care as long as they get the goods in the end. But the whole behind-closed-doors, you’ll-get-it-when-it’s-ready mentality of KDE4 really puts me off.
By the way, for all Qt’s much-vaunted technical superiority over GTK, Gnome’s version of Mahjongg has had SVG tiles since Gnome 2.6, released in March 2004. Yes, that is nearly three years ago…
This OSAlert article from 2004 talks about SVG being integrated into the Gnome desktop. Almost three years on (and counting), and we still don’t have this level of detail about how SVG is going to be used in KDE4 — just a couple of screenshots and some vague promises.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/6460/SVG-and-its-Path-into-the-Linu…
Edited 2007-01-08 18:10
I think this article highlights very well the difference between the Gnome and KDE approaches to new software. You could perhaps call it “evolution versus revolution”, or something like that.
No, you are mixing this up with the difference between a minor release (adding features) and a major release (reorganising/rewriting features)
With KDE on the other hand, everything seems to be done behind closed doors
Closed as in public mailing lists, commit digest, anonymous repository access and developer snapshot releases?
As opposed to open as in public mailinglists, anonymous repository access and developer releases?
The Decibel project referred to in this article sounds like a similar idea
Does it? Maybe because it is built on the Qt Telepathy bindings?
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2006-December/00040…
No, you are mixing this up with the difference between a minor release (adding features) and a major release (reorganising/rewriting features)
Then perhaps a better way of putting it would be that Gnome (and Apple) prefer to rewrite and reorganise as they go along, in minor releases, rather than the KDE (and Microsoft way) of saving lots of things for one big rewrite.
Closed as in public mailing lists, commit digest, anonymous repository access and developer snapshot releases?
As opposed to open as in public mailinglists, anonymous repository access and developer releases?
Where’s the public preview of Oxygen? Where can I download a .tar.gz of the icons they’ve done so far? If there’s one available, why isn’t it on their website?
What is Konqueror 4.0 going to look like? What features will it have? How much progress has been made? How can I build and play with it right now?
Does “Plasma” mean anything, or is it just a load of hot air (geddit? :-D)? If so, what does it look like? There aren’t even any *mockups* on the Plasma website, let alone screenshots!
Does it? Maybe because it is built on the Qt Telepathy bindings?