Submitted by “KDE 4.0 is very exciting, though not yet production ready, and that shows with this weeks’ release of the first beta. It’s a beta release for a major software project (using the traditional definition of beta, and not Google’s it’s-production-ready-but-we-don’t-want-to-support-it-officially-yet definition of beta) and thus, it comes complete with bugs, crashes, missing artwork, and other goodies one would expect such as new code, new technologies and fun toys. For those of you who are unaware, KDE is one of the largest open source projects ever conceived. A major milestone release such as 4.0 is a long time in the making. Here follows a number of things to look forward to for those of you brave enough to try this early beta.”
very good overview of KDE 4, tried it myself was pretty impressed how snappy it felt even though its not fully optimised and polished yet, can’t wait for the final version.
Great, I posted a few minutes ago a sarcastic post about KDE and the editors decided to remove it.
osnews editors are n00bs.
… and a reminder about the intended meaning of “Beta”
However, there is a little mistake in the section about portability improvements: Qt3/GPL has not only been available on Unix/X11 but also on Mac OS X.
Though it is still awesome that Qt is now available for free software development on all its supported platforms.
I apologize, but isn’t Mac OS X part of Unix/X11?
Yes, you can have X11 on MacOSX, but Qt is supported in Aqua too. That means you don’t need X11 anymore in MacOSX.
No. Qt3/GPL was available using the native GUI of MacOSX which is not X11 based.
witht he improvements witht he java and GT bindings as well as teh fact that KDE 4.0 is going to be pretty far ahead of gnome, i really with opensolaris would make an official switch as to its prefered choice
I doubt that Sun will change the default desktop: it’s most likely the license (Qt is GPLv2, GTK is LGPL) which made Sun choose Gnome instead of KDE..
yet they are working on it.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-red-solaris-herrings.html
I doubt that Sun will change the default desktop: it’s most likely the license (Qt is GPLv2, GTK is LGPL) which made Sun choose Gnome instead of KDE..
I hear people repeating this one over and over, but where has Sun actually said this? Anywhere. It looks like Sun were more comfortable with C as their language, as everything else they had done was written in it, and were enthusiastic about the use of CORBA in Gnome, which didn’t really work out.
its a damn shame that all these liecence and pattent issues get in the way of delivering a best possibly product to the consumer.
while improvments on compony colaberation and licence colaboration have been made, a hell of a lot more of them need to be.
Dude, can you at least try to avoid typos?
I wonder when those will be out.. I wouldn’t mind having a look at it..
I believe packages for Debian unstable (sid) will be available shortly after KDE 4.0 has been officially released. It should also be possible to backport (= compile sid source debs to binaries and package them, can be done automatically with Debian packaging and build tools) KDE 4.0 and its libraries to Debian stable (etch).
Wow! Since the Desktop is the first thing most new users of Linux see, I think it is awesome that this kind of innovation is taking place. Linux is no longer in a “catchup” game with Windows and OSX. It is able to chart its own course, and I believe KDE4 will be an example of this – innovation not emulation! If nothing else, seeing Arts go bye bye is a MAJOR good thing. Hello Phonon!
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/rect5040.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/rect3211.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/rect2217.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/image4282.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/rect2574.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/cbj12.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/cbj14.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image219.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image2274.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image428.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image4282.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/plasmadictonary.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/rect6430.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/yuy.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/rect2955.png
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/new%20style%20tabs….
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/zoom3x.png
Note that all of those nuno-icons.com pics are mockups, and that they were never officially released by Nuno, so we have no idea how accurate they will be.
Having said that, one of Plasma’s (long-to-medium term) goals is to make the creation *and* deployment of docks, taskbars, system trays, applets/ widgets as easy as Firefox extensions, so maybe someone will step up and make these a reality
—
Anyway, another nice KDE article by Troy, author of the popular Road to KDE4 series of articles published on dot.kde.org. One thing that I didn’t see mentioned in the article is that the style and windec shown in the screenshots, are *not* the new Oxygen style and windec, which is currently being re-written from scratch due to problems with the quality of the old code-base.
Well, the style and windec are indeed being rewritten, but they are mostly creating the look from the mockups shown by the parent. Thus, it won’t look much different from the current style (which is also modelled to the mockups). Most differences you’ll see are due to both styles not being ready…
Looks nice but more like a cross between leopard and Vista. Gnome’s new clearlooks in the coming 2.20 is more original.
Sorry, but clearlooks has always been a ripoff of Plastik, the KDE 3.3-3.5 style. I think Oxygen is the most original style I’ve seen in a long time…
I really dont know where you got that idea and it’s not like KDE rips off GNOME ideas is it.
I dont know why I make comments in KDE threads because criticisms always get modded down.
let’s just finish this then and say we all share ideas
Not quiet, you usually post good stuff but it seems you posted that knowing it was going to be modded up. Clearlooks is nothing like plastik, nice troll.
Edited 2007-08-08 17:49
that really isn’t on my mind when I post… If you look on the web, you’ll find earlier versions of clearlooks which really resemble plastik a lot. It sure did start out that way. I do think the current clearlooks version in Ubuntu looks way better than plastik, though. It’s only disadvantage (but that’s typical of GTK themes) are it’s large widgets. Kubuntu (with plastik based polyester) is tighter, thus more usefull for my laptop with 1024×768 screen. The 800×600-screen my previous laptop had was even happier with polyester
I wish these size things where configurable – on a large screen, larger widgets are usefull. On my main desktop with 19″ screen, I use QtCurve, which looks a lot like clearlooks (if you want it to, it’s pretty configurable).
As far as I know, KDE has always been a compromise beetween other environments picking good ideas from them, mixing them with what makes KDE one of the best Desktop a computer could have (my opinion).
Looks nice but more like a cross between leopard and Vista.
Right……
Gnome’s new clearlooks in the coming 2.20 is more original.
What do you mean, new Clearlooks theme? Gnome, certainly as it was on most distributions, used to use the Industrial theme and KDE used Keramic. Keramic was an attempt to make something new and different, but just didn’t work as a usable theme. This is why Plastik came into existence, and then Clearlooks appeared.
I don’t know how on Earth you can call Clearlooks original. It’s just a very simple theme that takes many of the ideas of a standard Windows theme together with what Plastik ended up looking like, having learned the lessons of the overdone Keramic. There’s nothing original going on there with either Plastik or Clearlooks.
Edited 2007-08-09 09:14
The new clearlooks looks much better than it was, 2.20 will have the new version. What OS/DE has a look like Clearlooks, it was even very popular when ported to KDE. It’s not about who had it first, why can you not get it through your heads, KDE/GNOME share ideas. If Clearlooks was a copy of Plastik then for good reason because then both DE apps would look similar.
Dont make out KDE has all the ideas, people moaned about how simple nautilus was, now Dolphin looks almost identical to nautilus. It’s a good thing so lets not claim KDE is superior when KDE4 is actually more simplified and cleaner, ironically just like GNOME is.
Edited 2007-08-09 10:05
The new clearlooks looks much better than it was, 2.20 will have the new version. What OS/DE has a look like Clearlooks, it was even very popular when ported to KDE.
Red herring I think. Neither Plastik nor Clearlooks are ground-breaking in any way. They’re just approximations of trying to get something that works within current limitations. Everyone has borrowed something from each other, but they’re still standard themes that don’t do very much, nor are the original.
Clearlooks was never ported to KDE though, so I’m not sure why you’re still trying to claim that.
If Clearlooks was a copy of Plastik then for good reason because then both DE apps would look similar.
I don’t know about that, but if Gnome had collaborated more with things like QtGTK, which allowed GTK applications to use KDE/Qt themes, so that GTK could use Qt/KDE themes, then things might have been an awful lot better than they are.
Dont make out KDE has all the ideas, people moaned about how simple nautilus was, now Dolphin looks almost identical to nautilus.
It’s not identical at all. The difference between Dolphin and Konqueror is that Dolphin is purely focused on file management, with all the powerful file management features that Konqueror ever had. It’s also still building on the same framework, like IOSlaves, that Konqueror used, and uses.
Some people are trying to make out that Dolphin is a knock-off of Nautilus. It isn’t. There’s far more in Dolphin.
It’s a good thing so lets not claim KDE is superior when KDE4 is actually more simplified and cleaner, ironically just like GNOME is.
Again, people are trying to claim that KDE is copying Gnome here. It isn’t, and the issue of what features to present to a user and where is a different process in KDE.
I doubt that you will be able to find a single feature that has been pulled out of KDE in KDE 4 in order to make things simpler and cleaner. That word clean that people like to use so much means nothing. It’s become a disease.
What has changed, and will continue to change, is the manner in which features are presented, where they are presented and the user interfaces involved as KDE’s guidelines and HIG develop. As KDE moves through the 4.0 cycle, that process of debate, discussion and improvement should get better, rather than an abitrary decision of “We’re not putting any more options into the print dialogue, no matter how organised they are, because they confuse ordinary users”.
All I can say it your in denial about Dolphin, it’s layout is almost identical to nautilus, thats not a bad thing so why can you not just accept it?
Have things become that bad that KDE fanboys just dont like the idea of sharing ideas from each DE?. Lets face it KDE have ideas off GNOME and if it improves KDE then thats great, KDE’s panel applet layout, KDM’s use of GDM themes.
I have no problem with KDE using GNOME ideas but what I dont like is when people claim it’s KDE that make all there own innovative features when they share ideas.
The fact that i’m being modded down ever post proves my point and shows osnews as even in a worse state.
Edited 2007-08-09 13:38
Well, and some people don’t like your ideas. Nobody says they didn’t borrow from another, but starting a forced argument about who borrowed what won’t lead to a place you’d like to be. Thing is, fans of both sides tend to think the other party is a minority, even if one side is more right than the other (
) , still, stepping forward and realizing new features is what matters and not that they’ve built on common ideas. Fortunately, FOSS is all about sharing and competition – for the benefit of all of us here.
All I can say it your in denial about Dolphin, it’s layout is almost identical to nautilus, thats not a bad thing so why can you not just accept it?
Dolphin has way more features and file management power than Nautilus. Like I said. It’s the file management subset of Konqueror organised in a different and somewhat more straightforward way. What they haven’t done is cull features out of it though, and from a file management point of view, Dolphin even adds a few in that Konqueror didn’t have.
I’d recommend using Dolphin to find out.
Have things become that bad that KDE fanboys just dont like the idea of sharing ideas from each DE?
KDE shares a ton of ideas with different desktop environments. So what? Why should nomone like that idea?
Lets face it KDE have ideas off GNOME and if it improves KDE then thats great, KDE’s panel applet layout
I’d hardly say that the panel applet layout came from Gnome. That’s stretching things.
I have no problem with KDE using GNOME ideas but what I dont like is when people claim it’s KDE that make all there own innovative features when they share ideas.
No one claimed any such thing. You feebly dismissed KDE 4 as looking like a cross between Vista and Leopard, and you then laughably told us that Clearlooks was more original. Hint: It’s not.
I quoted the mockups from the links posted as being Vista/leopard lookalikes and as it stands they are just mockups. The mockups have the feel of Vista(glass frames and black like widges) and leopard feel with the grass closeup desktop picture.
I’ve used Dolphin and you know what?, I like it, why, because it’s like nautilus so go figure. The panel applet in KDE was introduced in 3.5.x and uses the same “idea” from the GNOME applet panel.
I disagree there actually seems to be far less features in dolphin at the moment than nautilus.
Clearlooks wasn’t ported by the original author but there was a port made for kde called, of all things klearlooks, and like most things kde its a little too shiny to look anything like clearlooks.
Also if I’m not mistaken clearlooks was a retake on RedHat’s Bluecurve, it was cairofied at som elater point and now it’s what we all know and love. I think bluecruve was out before plastik if I’m, not mistaken.
As for the whole clean thing. Clean is a good thing. A nice clean design form the get go is a nice path to follow. In-terms of the backend stuff, I think KDE trumps Gnome in about everyway. But what sells Gnome is its frontend (the UI), it look sclean and efficietn and generally gets out of your way. The theme is clean adn subtle with very little to no animation, and doesn’t have to draw your attention all the time. It extremely appealing and users have responded to it. KDE wnats to show you how cool it is by shoving every possible option and shiny thing in your face. KDE looks to change some of that but there are still things that I know won’t change soon if ever in the UI that really grate my nerves.
The Oxygen Icons is a perfect example of this. Sure they are pretty but they are way too obvious in my opinion. Do they really have to shove a huge blue folder in your face. Why didn’t they go with the more subtle Tango set? The problem with KED is that they don’t know when to pull back, and right now they need to pull back hard on certain things, artwork and the ui being the main one.
KDE4 looks cool so far, but with a lack of a HIG I’m extremely skeptical that anything will change much.
But what sells Gnome is its frontend (the UI), it look sclean and efficietn and generally gets out of your way.
Can you describe and quantify what clean and efficient actually means, out of interest? I just here these words bandied around so often, and they mean nothing.
It extremely appealing and users have responded to it.
What users would these be, and can they be quantified anywhere?
KDE wnats to show you how cool it is by shoving every possible option and shiny thing in your face.
Does it? Or does it have all the right features, but not well organised?
KDE looks to change some of that but there are still things that I know won’t change soon if ever in the UI that really grate my nerves.
What are these things, and how do you know they won’t change?
The Oxygen Icons is a perfect example of this. Sure they are pretty but they are way too obvious in my opinion.
That’s your opinion. What does ‘way too obvious’ mean? Can you quantify this, and tell us what it means?
Why didn’t they go with the more subtle Tango set?
Because the Appeal project and Oxygen was started before Tango was a glint in someone’s eye.
The problem with KED is that they don’t know when to pull back, and right now they need to pull back hard on certain things, artwork and the ui being the main one.
They don’t need to pull back hard on anything, because KDE has the infrastructure to actually achieve this stuff, and achieve some of the stuff that Vista and Leopard are doing today.
KDE4 looks cool so far, but with a lack of a HIG
KDE does have a HIG, and a new one at that, and it will be developed and applied through the KDE 4.x cycle.
I’m extremely skeptical that anything will change much.
You’re likely to be disappointed then. Sorry.
“Can you describe and quantify what clean and efficient actually means, out of interest? I just here these words bandied around so often, and they mean nothing.”
Stop being an ass. You know what I mean. I’m sorry I didn’t know I was speaking to a KDE fanboy. I definitely didn’t approach you as a gnome fanboy. I just stated my honest opinion considering I was a KDE user up until gnome 2 came out and want it to succeed. There is a reason I moved to gnome. I just didn’t move for shits and giggles.
Let me spell it out for you. Clean, not being bombarded by options, sane defaults. Efficient maximizing the user experience with less. KDE does neither at the moment, imo. Most KDE apps actually seems to revel in just adding option upon option with out actually thinking them through or laying them out in a sane manner.
“What users would these be, and can they be quantified anywhere?”
Oh, I don’t know how many Ubuntu users are there ( I mean plain old Ubuntu) how many fedora users are there? Nobody I know uses KDE. No to say that people don’t use it. On the contrary, but the most popular distro is gnome based. That has to at least count for something.
“Because the Appeal project and Oxygen was started before Tango was a glint in someone’s eye.”
Yeah, well they obviously didn’t learn anything when they were working on the project, they certainly didn’t learn anything from the previous mess that was the crystal icon set. Too much color, too busy and top of that they are planning on overlaying icons on top of an already overly busy icon. Subtlety can go a long way.
“They don’t need to pull back hard on anything, because KDE has the infrastructure to actually achieve this stuff, and achieve some of the stuff that Vista and Leopard are doing today.”
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Thats a lesson that KDE hasn’t learned and is why its in its current predicament and why they are trying to simplify things a bit. They need to pull back in-order to make things less busy is all I meant.
“KDE does have a HIG, and a new one at that, and it will be developed and applied through the KDE 4.x cycle.”
That’s great. Nice to know, but is it good?
“You’re likely to be disappointed then. Sorry.”
Yeah. No shit.
Congratulation to all the KDE (& QT) developers. Thank you for making the “1st class Linux Desktop” a reality.
My respect go to the KDE project leaders that decided to re-think, re-design and re-code KDE to fit the end-user needs.
Been using GNOME for years now, but KDE4 looks like it will fix virtually ever beef I had with the platform.
The KDE devs have done a fantastic job with this one, cant wait to try it out.
I was a fir GNOME supporter (still am sort of), but after I’ve installed PCLINUXOS and installed debian with KDE I’m just very happy with the things I saw.
The options that once overwhelmed me, I find I can’t live without them when using Gnome!!
So, now I’ve seen the new KDE 4 beta, I just KNOW that I will remove Gnome on my primary workstation running FreeBSD and install KDE 4 after it hits the ports tree….
Can’t wait to start using it..
Awesome
Subject says it all =)
The work that has gone into Dolphin is quite visible in the beta, including the new file view components that are shared between Dolphin, Konqueror and the File->Open/Save dialogs.
A tad off-topic:
I hope the file dialogs will have an “open in file manager” context menu option.
The trend seems to be more minimalist file dialogs that don’t strive to be a file manager light, but often I will see stuff in an open dialog – a file that I’ve been looking for, something I want to rename, move or delete – and I’d really like to be able to do that without having to open a seperate file manager and then browse all the way to the right directory.
If I could open the directory I’m looking at in dolphin (preferably at the position I’m at in large directories with hundreds of files) that would be useful imho.
Can anyone who has used the beta tell us something about file dialogs? Thx.
Amen. I can’t stand the minimalist, throwback-to-Windows-3.1-era Gnome file dialogs!
good article thanks.
I don’t get the point in complaining about KDE in this news item, if you don’t like KDE don’t use it. Nobody is forcing you to use KDE. I happen to like KDE and GNOME, and I’m happy to see both of these projects doing good, and adding features. Choice is a very good thing, at least you can choose to run GNOME if you don’t like KDE and vice versa.
On to something more constructive, I’m looking forward to Plasma and being able to write Plasmoids very much. It should provide an extremely good container for being able to write small applications, that run in the domain of the desktop, quickly, easily and more portably than ever. Forget RPMs. If it can be distributed to KDE and run within it, it will work. That’s a step forward.
At the moment it will be C++ and JavaScript only, but that’s no bad thing really. It’s important to keep the dependencies down and have something that can be run right off the bat in any KDE environment. In the future, I rather suspect a Visual Basic (and I mean proper RAD VB here, not VB.Net) equivalent will be required in KDE.
At the moment it will be C++ and JavaScript only
There are ruby bindings already in the svn (see kdebindings/smoke/plasma and kdebindings/ruby/plasma), and a ruby clock example plasmoid in playground/plasma/base/applets/ruby-clock. The ruby bindings aren’t quite finished, as there are some garbage collection and exception handling issues to sort out, but it should be ready by next week or so.
The plasma smoke library will mean that we can implement mono bindings too so that you could write plasmoids in C# and also use the CLR version of BASIC.
I think Gambas is a good BASIC RAD development environment. The Qt/KDE is just too large for beginning programmers to get their head round. So I think the way forward in lowering the barrier to entry for KDE programming, is via simplified apis like the Plasma one or Gambas, rather than trying to wrap the complete api in scripting languages.
Additionally, there will be a simpler api for Plasmoid programming based on Kross, that will work with Javascript, Python, Ruby and the other languages that Kross supports – it should be great for beginners and non-experts to get their feet wet..
Will all this SVG going into KDE4, will this be a resolution independent desktop?
For that to happen, everything needs to scale.
In compiz-fusion right now you can zoom in and have one character in a web page take up the entire screen but it is just that original little 20px by 20px (guesstimating) being linearly scaled, not re-rendered.
Well when the screen zooms in compiz-fusion I think it’s always going to be a pixmap regardless if the original image is svg or not. It’s not like you are zooming into a document like in Illustrator or Inkscape.