Submitted by And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE. Major new features include social networking and online collaboration integration, the new netbook interface, the KAuth authentication framework, and a lot more.
One of the major additions is the Plasma Netbook interface, which has been in development for a while now. “Plasma Netbook shares many components with the Plasma Desktop, but is specifically designed to make good use of the small space, and to be more suitable also for touchscreen input,” the KDE team writes, “The Plasma Netbook shell features a full-screen application launcher and search interface, and a Newspaper which offers many widgets to display content from the web and small utilities already known from Plasma Netbook’s sibling.”
A lot of work has also been done to integrate social networks and other online services into Plasma, making it easier to manage those via Plasma widgets; there’s a widget for posting to various social networks, as well as a widget for following what your friends are doing.
KWin has also seen a number of feature additions, which mostly can be summed up as: copy the hell out of Windows 7: move to the top to maximise, move to the left or right to fill half the screen (for side-by-side viewing). And you know what? That’s a good thing. Just as Apple’s Expos~A(c), Windows 7’s Aero Snap is simply a very handy and sensible feature that ought to be copied simply to make my life as a user easier. Kudos to KDE for implementing these features – whether they come from somewhere else, or not.
There’s more to it than that, though. KWin can now tab windows together, with the titlebars turning into tabs you can switch between. Support for scalable graphics in KWin themes has been added, and performance should be increased too – still somewhat of a sore spot in KDE4.
The file manager, Dolphin, has seen improvements too. Search is now integrated into Dolphin and makes use of Nepomuk’s semantic framework to help users in finding and organising their stuff. There’s also a new timeline view which displays recently used files chronologically.
Under the hood, we see Qt 4.6, which brings with it a new animation framework, support for multitouch, and support for the Symbian platform. The KAuth framework leverages PolicyKit so that developers can write applications that can easily elevate privileges if the need to so arises – for instance within System Settings. KDE SC 4.4 also starts leveraging Akonadi, which “acts as a transparant cache to email-, groupware-servers and other online resources”.
The impatient can build KDE 4.4 from source, but of course, it will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
This is a phenomenal release. thank you KDE team. also, the netbook interface is very nice in this release, fast and polished.
KDE is getting to be quite good.
It is stable and responsive, and that matters to me.
Recent versions don’t really look any worse than Mac OS X either if you care about that. IMO, after playing a bit with a Mac, it seems obvious that both KDE and Gnome are heavily inspired on Mac OS(The stupid control panel for example).
But while Gnome, well, is Gnome, the latest KDE does a better job in keeping the useless eye-candy from affecting usability negatively.
Now C++ and very few not quite excellent apps and applets are the only items remaining on my minus list.
If I had to recommend a Linux Desktop, without any doubt, it would have to be a KDE distribution.
Don’t look any worse than OS X? Well, yes and no. Certainly, KDE 4.4 is up to par when it comes to themes (Oxygen has really matured into something attractive and unobtrusive) and catching up fast when it comes to desktop effects (the timing seems just a bit off, still), but when it comes to icons, layout, and especially default fonts and spacing, it needs a lot of work. Sane and attractive defaults matter quite a bit, especially when a user’s not able or willing to root around in the various config dialogues to tweak them.
Do the better fonts and spacing even exist in a way that can be used by KDE(copyright and patent free)?
Frankly, I don’t think default fonts and spacing are that bad. They may lose in a side by side comparison but I doubt most people can tell a “perfect” font from a “a bit off” one when actually using the software.
They are not like the fonts distros were using a few years ago.
A major “problem” with eralier versions of KDE was the fact that it was waaaaay too much screen estate swalllowed to be usable on 1024×600 screens. It’ll be interesting to see how this new Netbook Interface handles it.
That is not true! I have been using Kubuntu on my 1024×600 AspireOne netbook since 9.04. As a matter of fact the KDE 4 taskbar uses the smallest vertical space compared to Gnome or Windows. Additionally the KDE windows in general use less whitespace than Gnome.
Poor naming:
1. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
2. KDE Software Compilation
I think it is a tie.
It’s not a name, it’s a description, what KDE releases is a collection of applications & stuff. As in time stuff now in there might not be released on the same day, we didn’t give it a special, sexy name…
I have used Linux and bsd for 10 + years now. I have always felt like it was worthy of being sold in stores like windows and osx. But this release is now to the point I can now see other people feeling the same. This is now a viable alternative to windows and osx. With the progress of Wine, there will be no stopping Linux and KDE.
You have forgotten the hell of what is X.org
X is the worse thing in any Linux system.
Kernel development is veeeery fast.
KDE development is very fast
but the problem is in between : X
Being based on the Qt4.6 version, and having optimization is the most important thing.
I wish I have better performance and responsiveness in low end hardware with very small amount of RAM and CPU.
Most of the real problems these days are being worked on in the DRM/Gallium3D repositories.
Just like we heard before that all problems will be fixed by EXA, GEM and DRI2.
While not “fixing everything”, those technologies improved Xorg big time.
That is entirely true – at least, if you use one of the open-source drivers. If you do, modern X is actually quite nice. It does a pretty good job configuring itself, and you can re-configure it on the fly: mucking about with xorg.conf usually isn’t necessary. In fact, many modern distributions no longer include xorg.conf files – for example, Sidux Linux 2009.4 and Slackware 13 don’t.
The biggest problem right now is simply the limited nature of the open-source drivers: they don’t provide full functionality on many platforms, requiring use of the closed drivers – which are not nearly so well integrated with X, don’t support many of it’s shiney-and-new features, and aren’t as stable.
I installed Sidux Linux at work recently. Out of the box, it used a newer X. It had no xorg.conf file. It came up flawlessly, recognized both my monitors, etc. Except… for whatever reason, the open-source NV driver appears to allow the multiple desktops of a dual-head system to have a total area of all of 1280×1280. And, apparently, GLX was using MESA (in software). To get real hardware-accelerated rendering, not to mention to be able to use my dual-head system at a higher resolution than 640×480 a piece, I had to install the proprietary nvidia driver. This was… not nearly so pleasant an experience. Hello (creating and) manually editing an xorg.conf file, and spending several hours on cryptic X errors.
But the difficulty in using the closed drivers isn’t really the fault of X’s maintainers, and will be less and less of a concern as the open drivers improve. The X experience is generally pretty good on platforms that the open drivers support, and that list is growing.
My Arch Linux system has a low-end ATI graphics card. Arch Linux has kernel 2.6.32, so that the new open source xf86-video-ati driver is included. With my card, this driver installs and configures automatically, out of the box, with 3D hardware-accelerated compositing automatically enabled. Mesa is not rendered in software but in hardware, all of the Kwin effects work straight away, and the desktop is very fast.
Xorg is fine with the right drivers.
That’s… what I was trying to say. The second half of the post was, in short form, “the wrong drivers are the proprietary ones, which, sometimes you have to use, and that sucks.” But I agree with you completely: when you can use the right drivers, X is wonderful.
Edited 2010-02-10 02:17 UTC
Fair enough.
With the coming-soon Linux kernel 2.6.33, the open source xf86-video-nv driver for nvidia cards will be replaced by the newer Nouveau driver (xf86-video-nouveau) for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzc5OA
The xf86-video-nouveau driver will still not (yet) bring an open source 3D driver to Linux for Nvidia cards, but it will nevertheless be a lot more functional that the old xf86-video-nv driver.
Hopefully, full 3D support in an open source driver won’t be too far away for nvidia cards.
Tell me how that’s going in another four years
I can tell you right now, if you like:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
More here:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix
Here is the equivalent page for xf86-video-ati
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
Progressing nicely.
Seconded: I’m using the open-source ATI driver right now on my lap-top, and it’s working fine (with an ATI x1800). No X problems, decent performance, everything’s good. Better open-source drivers aren’t a pipe-dream: they work pretty well (delivering on promises of improved stability and performance!) on at-least-some platforms right now.
Heh, that’s good news for me. My work machine is using a GeForce 9400, and it’d be nice to be able to use an open-source, in-kernel-tree driver, and get all those goodies (KMS, proper XRandR, etc.). And Sidux may actually include the 2.6.33 kernel withing a reasonable time-frame after it’s released.
“Fine” is far from great. I got compile 2.6.33 kms + mesa 7.7, with HD4770, the frame rate of kwin desktop effect dropped significantly when 6+ windows are opened.
Top cmd shows X of a 50% CPU usage with E5200, compare to my Mac and WIN7 of only 20% even when dragging a window around.
There are much place for X to improve.
Nope, not true. The nv driver is a joke. It is maintained (or rather, not maintained) by nVidia. It is open source, but obfuscated, and supports almost no acceleration. Already, the community maintained, open source, reverse engineered Nouveau driver is way better. It supports more acceleration (but OpenGL is experimental), supports dual-head, and develops at a very fast pace. Use nVidia’s proprietary drivers if you play games, otherwise, use Nouveau.
Unfortunately such things have been sitting in repositories for ages and never seeing the light of day. The open source world is great when it comes to ideas and starting up new projects but when it comes to following it through to the logical conclusion its an entirely different matter. Xorg unfortunately is what holds Linux (or in fact any *NIX for that matter) from mainstream adoption. Distributions talk and talk about ‘improvements’ but most of it is tweaking around the edges rather than addressing the fundamental flaws in Xorg. It will require some heavy lifting but so far the parties that yield the most benefit from Xorg seem to give back the least amount.
Unfortunately such things have been sitting in repositories for ages and never seeing the light of day.
All the work based in GEM/KMS has been merged. Check the kernel changelogs. Gallium3D entered in Stable mesa in version 7.5.
rather than addressing the fundamental flaws in Xorg.
What “fundamental flaws”? Let me guess – the “networking oriented protocol”?
Indeed. X development… OK, it’s maybe not as rapid as it could be, the xorg folks aren’t great with deadlines, but it is definitely moving! The improvements in X over the last several years have been visible, and are still on-going.
“X is bad!” has become a talking-point for the local Linux Hater’s Club. It’s not a substantive claim. X has gotten O.K., and it’s still improving. Soon, it will be good; eventually, it will be freaking awesome. It’s certainly not Desktop Linux’s constraining factor.
The biggest thing holding Linux back from the desktop, I suspect, is just that there’s no need for it. Most people already have Windows, and it works well enough that they have no need to switch. (Which is not to say anything negative about Linux – or anything about its comparative quality at all, really.) That, and they have Windows software.
Edited 2010-02-09 23:26 UTC
Funny I could just as easily say that “X has gotten better and will soon be awesome!” has been a talking-point for the local Linux Desktop Defender’s Club.
I agree that it isn’t the weakest link in the Linux desktop. I’d say that dependency issues cause more problems for people. Sub-pixel font rendering also needs to be improved.
At the very least there is a need on portable devices, and there are a lot of old computers in the third world that need to be upgraded from their pirated copies of XP. However in developed countries it is hard for me to recommend it even for a basic browsing pc. It’s getting there but I still wouldn’t put it on a relative’s computer out of fear that I would get a call over an update breaking something.
Fair enough. In any case, the original statement was… far from original. One might say, we’ve covered this territory on OS News. Exhaustively.
If you’re trying to install things from source, sure. But if you stick to your distributor’s repositories, you’ll probably be fine. I haven’t had dependancy resolution problems in a long while, on Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. Or Slackware, for that matter, as it pretty much just installs everything you’d want in the first place. (I have on RHEL4, but it’s… very old.)
Dependancy resolution seems like a consistent gripe of yours; I’m a littel curious about what actually happened to get you so convinced that it’s such a pressing problem.
Also, my fonts look fine, and have since forever on pretty much any Linux and any hardware I’ve used. But I’m not a typographer, so as long as they’re legible and not highly aliased, I’m O.K. with them.
Probably isn’t good enough and users shouldn’t have to wait for a repository update just to run the latest version of a browser. It’s also a complete waste of labor hunting down dependency bugs.
I think it’s an archaic system that causes needless problems. Shared libraries made more sense in the 70’s when hardware resources were severely limited.
Well I don’t like the sub-pixel rendering in Linux and I’m not the only one. It isn’t simply that I’m used to Windows either. I find the font rendering in the iphone to be easier on the eyes as well.
Frankly, “probably” is all you really get in software. Probably’s all you get in Windows or OS X, where any given third-party installation may or may not work. True, the odds of failure are pretty low, usually, but then again, the odds of a modern package management system failing are also pretty low. (I’ve yet to see it happen – at least, out of Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Sidux. I have imploded Gentoo quite dramatically… but then, that’s Gentoo.)
I’m OK with waiting for my distributor to package an upgrade – certainly if I’m using a distribution that does so in a reasonable amount of time. Fedora and Ubuntu give you a decently new version of most packages.
Frankly, if you consider a lag while you wait for the distributor to package software a cost of having a centralized installation/update point, then I still think a repository system is worth it — even with that minus, I still think it’s more pluses than minuses.
And, anyway, you can just get your dependancies from the package management infrastructure, and build from source, if you’re that impatient.
Odds of a user having dependency issues than problems with an exe are much higher.
The repository system is lousy for proprietary software and the latest versions of open source. It’s also quite messy from a software engineering POV. You could have a repository without the shared libraries. A repository of independent programs would be much cleaner and would increase stability.
Yes I’m quite aware of that but it’s unrealistic to expect users to compile software, ever. All they hear is “do all this ugly crap to upgrade” when in Windows/OSX it is just a couple clicks .
I meant an installation or updating failure in general, not a dependancy resolution issue in specific. I don’t have installs fail often on Windows — but it definitely does happen. And I don’t have installations from Apt or Yum fail often either. I’m not sure one is significantly more reliable than the other: they are both sufficiently reliable.
Being lousy for proprietary software distribution… is not really a disadvantage, from my perspective. I suffer no ill effects for it, as a user, anyway.
And having a centralized repository system and distributing huge, statically-linked binaries… would be hugely inefficient. It’d certainly waste bandwidth and disk-space, at least. Not to mention that every time some common dependancy library changed, then every single large, statically-linked package would have to be re-built and re-distributed – so it’d be a recurring waste of bandwidth and distributor time. It makes much more sense, if you already have a centralized software distribution and update channel, to use a shared library system.
Not general users: you. I don’t think “general desktop users” have any business always and immediately jumping to the very latest release, in most cases. (Most distributors, I think will push an update out quickly in cases where appropriate — say, major security flaws). If you want the latest version now, you want it so bad that you can’t wait for the upstream distributor to package it, and you consider yourself to be critically deprived if you don’t get it na0, then you probably want it bad enough to go through an extra step or two. And, if you only do this for a handful of packages, the results will actually work out pretty well.
Probably isn’t good enough and users shouldn’t have to wait for a repository update just to run the latest version of a browser.
So, is manually having to update every single application any better? I’ve got several browsers and a load of other applications, every single one of them having an updater of their own. You can’t update them all at once. THAT’s what I call bad design.
I think it’s an archaic system that causes needless problems. Shared libraries made more sense in the 70’s when hardware resources were severely limited.
You’re just being biased. First of all, Linux is used on all kinds of computers, ranging from really small dedicated systems to large mainframes. Shared libraries use less memory than static libraries, and on small-scale machines every bit counts. On large mainframes with a dozen virtual machines it also helps as there the memory is needed for data. Having a gazillion different static copies of the same library eats memory unnecessarily.
Oh, and if you didn’t know: OSX and Windows support shared libraries too.
I agree completely, and that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of. Not having a single channel for software distributing and updating has its own hassles; there’s a reason other people have lamented that they can’t hook third-party applications into Window’s updating agent. On balence, I’d rather have a centralized packaging system.
And before nt-jerkface points out that a shared-library system and a package management system are different things — I know. As I’ve said over and over: linux software distribution could be done through large, statically-linked binaries. It’s just that it’s better to use shared libraries, if you’re already using a package-management system.
Well, and the other thing is, a shared-library system is better if there’s no one set of blessed libraries that make up the OS — and, in the case of the Linux kernel and Linux distributions, this is very much the case.
They do: it’s just that the libraries they share are standardized (i.e. some DLL’s can be reasonably guaranteed to be present on every single Windows system), which obviates a lot of the hassles you encounter with dependancy resolution on Linux. The real problem is that system components like the sound service or the Windowing service or the password-management service are interchangeable — or might not be present at all. If there was a blessed-and-required set of libraries — like, “there will always be a /lib/libfictitiousstdsound.so” — then Linux’s shared library system would work as smoothly as Windows’. But there isn’t, and that is largely by design, not malice or ignorance: it’s part of the trade-off of creating a highly flexible system.
Edited 2010-02-11 00:07 UTC
Spot on. Precisely correct.
The application finding/downloading, installation and updating system in Windows is absolute dreck. Utterly broken. It is a HUGE PITA, and it is also an absolute wide-open doorway for trojans and malware of all kinds to find its way on to end users Windows systems.
There is absolutely no way for end users to be able to assure themselves about the quality and lack of anti-features for much of the software for Windows that they install. It all has to be taken on trust … and that trust is all-too-often abused.
Open source software and the repository system used in modern Linux distributions, on the other hand, is utopia in comparison. It is trouble-free installation and update of software, it is a way to easily avoid any malware, and it also means freedom for people from “anti-features”.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/development/8FC32A7B611E877ACC2…
I am using Arch Linux at the moment, and this distribution uses a “rolling release” system. This means that Arch Linux repositories today support KDE SC 4.4, just a few days after it was released by the KDE project.
http://www.archlinux.org/news/483/
This is the type of information that Windows supporters just don’t want people to know about. Hence the abundance of bias and plethora of absolute misinformation spread about Linux, FOSS, and the elegant and effective software distribution methods it uses.
Edited 2010-02-11 00:21 UTC
But the drivers have to be ported over to the new model – which is still an on going issue; that doesn’t then include the power management, or there lack of, when it comes to the GPU itself.
Actually no, there is nothing wrong with the protocol; XCB addresses many of the issues relating to libX11 but how many tool kits have wholesale moved over to XCB from LibX11?
You should read Phoronix news. Phoronix has a weird obsession with benchmarks, but covers X.org and Mesa news very well (that includes Gallium).
Stop trolling.
No. That would be laziness to try something else than Windows. Win9x was horrible on every single technical aspect and was still used widely.
You have no idea. Not every distributor is a lame freeloader like Canonical. Red Had and Novell actually work on Xorg.
Throughput doesn’t equal responsiveness; Xorg/XFree86 has always been able to great throughput – heck, I remember back in my COLA (Comp.OS.Linux.Advocacy) days where there would be numerous posts by me and others boasting about how much throughput could be achieved and that the ‘X is slow’ argument doesn’t hold water.
Throughput doesn’t equal responsiveness.
So when you meet someone you disagree with you abuse them – interesting.
I have used ‘something other than Windows’ – I’m a f–king Mac user for Christsake and used FreeBSD full time from 1996 till 2002 – so please, shove what ever ‘valuable’ advice you have up your ass.
How about this idea; the ability for my Inspiron to wake up from being put to sleep and the GUI actually coming back to life instead of being greeted with a blank screen – yes, I am using the Neavou drivers that came with Fedora. How about addressing why alt-clt-backspace has been disable on almost every distribution which leaves me screwed when Xorg has frozen. How about addressing the lack of quality drivers instead of sending off abusive posts on this forum because your cohorts can’t get their act together.
Edited 2010-02-10 03:20 UTC
I have used ‘something other than Windows’ – I’m a f–king Mac user for Christsake and used FreeBSD full time from 1996 till 2002 – so please, shove what ever ‘valuable’ advice you have up your ass.
He was talking about the general populace being too lazy to try something else than Windows, he wasn’t talking about you.
So when you meet someone you disagree with you abuse them – interesting.
You did it too right there, the “shove what ever” etc part.
No, he was directing it to me specifically due to the lack of any disclaimer saying otherwise.
When he made the first move of abuse all manners are thrown out the window – or are you yet another one of those posters here who never read the FULL THREAD to understand the FULL CONTEXT of the discourse?
No, he was directing it to me specifically due to the lack of any disclaimer saying otherwise.
There was no disclaimer saying he was talking about you either. You yourself were saying “from mainstream adoption.” to which he replied “No. That would be laziness to try something else than Windows.” No matter how much you like yourself you can’t seriously call yourself so important as to have your software adoption choices called the mainstream adoption.
When he made the first move of abuse all manners are thrown out the window – or are you yet another one of those posters here who never read the FULL THREAD to understand the FULL CONTEXT of the discourse?
When someone jumps down the bridge right in front of you do you jump after him just because he did it first?
No, I didn’t. It was a reply to your claim that Linux will never make it into mainstream.
How is the mainstream population made up just by you?
News from 2011: Kaiwai’s philosophy takes off, and people agree that, when someone does something un-civil, you are morally free to retaliate to whatever degree you desire. Shortly after this idea becomes commonplace, a small child on a playground shoves another. The children get into a brawl. Their teacher intervenes. The children’s parents become involved. The next PTA meeting is a gun-battle. Within four months of the Recess Incident, the fall-out has propoated far and wide: civilization has collapsed. It’s looting and rioting in the streets.
TLDR version: an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
Hm… You’re not Dutch and a reader of Eppo’s Elsje comic, btw?
Presuming that was not sarcasm, no, I am not.
It wasn’t sarcasm — there was a wonderful “Elsje” comic recently that was almost exactly followed the scenario you described.
That excuse doesn’t work anymore when 12% of the US population uses a Mac which is a huge increase from 10 years ago.
A) I am dubious of 12%; I would have guessed lower.
B) 12% is still nowhere near large enough to “make that defense worthless.”
C) The point that “Win98 was used despite being horrible” is worth underscoring: a large chunk of the populace will keep on using Windows forever, regardless. Even if it gives them cancer, they’ll keep using Windows. Because they’re locked in, because the cost of migration is prohibitive, because they really, really don’t want to have to learn something new, because they’re highly risk-averse, because they have lots and lots of Win32 apps, whyever, they’ll keep on using Windows until the heat-death of the universe.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-na-monthly-200901-201002
Yes it is because there is clearly a subset of the population that is willing to try an alternative operating system and yet Linux has not been able to increase its market share from about 1999. Most Macs sold are Macbooks so that means there have been more people willing to switch to a $1000+ computer with a different operating system than run Linux. Windows 7 also had more market share than Linux before it was released. The harsh reality is that most geeks don’t like using Linux on the desktop. It’s a myth that it is the choice of programmers or techies.
Yes but that doesn’t excuse the poor performance of Linux on the desktop.
Who cares what their motivation is. Linux can’t win over people like me and Kaiwai who used to run Linux. It can’t hold on to the users that it gets.
Linux has had plenty of chances to take market share including when people hated 98, when xp was first released, the 32->64 hardware transition, when vista was first released, and finally netbooks.
I think the core problem has been the FOSS ideology. Linux is designed to be a PITA for proprietary hardware companies and ISVs. When you’re small you need to build partnerships, not embrace an ideology that declares potential partners as enemies.
But it does indicate that the argument that “people aren’t switching to Linux, therefore Linux sux!” is specious. The point was, “a large number of people will never switch of Windows, reguardless of whether there are better alternatives.” And I think the point stands.
Minor point of clarification, I think Kaiwaii said he used to run FreeBSD. Not that it’s relevant.
The unwillingness to work with proprietary software vendors and hardware vendors is a problem, I agree, but I don’t think it’s crippling.
Honestly, I agree with something Steve said a while ago: I think the biggest problem may not be with Linux itself, but rather in thinking that Linux should ever be a general-user Desktop OS, or that it should be competing directly with Windows and OS X. Linux works pretty well for me: it meets my needs admirably. Linux is quite well suited to those who will suffer inconvenience for other benifits: it does not well suite those who want a system that “just works.” While the amount of hassle is decreasing, they will never go away completely: Linux will always be for those who value a modular system, whose components they can rip out, replace and remix, and therefore, will never be quite as rigorously simple and integrated as Windows or OS X. But that’s intentional: it’s a design trade-off, and it’s targeting the minority of users who like that proposition.
If that’s not just rambling on my part.
You made a claim about the entire open source world. That’s trolling.
I thought it was simply replaced with RightAlt+SysReq+K? Anyway that works for Ubuntu.
If you were counting monetary value for the hours being used to develop a system like KDE (and we get for free), what we have here amounts to millions of euros – and you are unwilling to spend a few hundred EUR on decent hardware?
For obsolete hardware, there are other environments like xfce.
And what about current netbooks? What about possible ARM-based netbooks in the future?
It isn’t always about spending money or not.
No problem. I have been using KDE 4 on Atom netbook (AspireOne) since Kubuntu 9.04 and it is running great.
Conversely, the worst thing about X is Linux.
There are too many Linux-centric changes entering X.org, which is supposed to be a cross-platform graphics architecture. First, breaking it up into a bazillion packages, like a Linux distro, whereby any bit can be updated at any time. There’s no real “X.org” releases, just distributions with almost random version numbers of packages. Then there was the inclusion of a dependency on HAL, even though every platform except Linux already had a (working|better|dependable|power-conscious) hal-type system. Finally, there’s the upcoming removal of all user-space mode-setting support, effectively turning X.org into a Linux-only system.
Maybe development of XFree86 was slow and took a few wrong turns, but at least it was true to its roots as a cross-platform system, usable on commercial Unix, free Unix, Unix-likes, and more.
Firstly, they are excising HAL and going towards using the platform libraries. So that problem is going away.
Secondly, the other OSes are more than welcome to add support for modern X. There’s nothing in the newer architecture that is at odds with non-Linux OSes. In fact, KMS equivalents are what commercial Unixes have traditional used for X. It is the only sane way to do it. If the other OSes don’t want to support that, it’s their loss, really.
I wonder why the X server from SGI was never open sourced? They had the best one from all of the Unix vendors.
Oh no, not another one blaming X for all the world’s problems.
Xorg is fine. Get over it already.
What happened to Wayland?
I agree, KDE SC 4.4 will change the way people use computers. 2010 will finally be the year of linux
I agree, KDE SC 4.4 will change the way people use computers. 2010 will finally be the year of linux
As much as I love Linux…no, the year of Linux is more likely something around 2035.
First of all, most people don’t need Linux; they have Windows which suffices for their needs. Secondly, their software stack is usually tied to a single platform. Third and most important, I still see lots of issues related to video; missing features in open-source drivers, buggy closed-source ones, neither of them being configured the same way etc. Non-geek users just can’t tackle with such, and even geek users often do not wish to tackle with such when they can get work done easier on another OS.
All of these possible snags are easily overcome via the simple procedure of pre-installing Linux and an advanced desktop and application set (KDE SC 4.4 is a great start) for the end user on appropriate hardware.
This is, after all, what users get when they buy Windows or Mac. If KDE SC 4.4 were allowed to compete on equal terms (that is, one could buy it pre-installed in a computer shop, and shoppers could compare it side-by-side with a Windows or Mac machine) … then there would be no contest.
Compare apples with apples, so to speak. Compare each OS under the same means of obtaining it.
Pre-installed, correctly working, properly shop-configured KDE SC 4.4 (plus perhaps a few extra applications outside of KDE SC, such as Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP) beats shop-bought Windows 7 hands down.
KDE SC 4.4 beats Windows 7 or Mac OSX on functionality (of pre-installed applications), performance (both responsiveness and start-up time), ease-of-use, stability, configurability, ease-of-update, ease-of-expansion and security (via both superior robustness in the first place and via lack of threats against it in the wild). Easily. By a mile.
The only serious competitor would be GNOME, really.
Edited 2010-02-10 02:12 UTC
Compare apples with apples, so to speak. Compare each OS under the same means of obtaining it.
Comparing them like that makes no sense as you can’t obtain them the same way in reality. If they were available equally then the situation would be different, I agree. Alas, it’s not. Besides, even then the shops would have to choose between possibly/probably unstable closed-source drivers or open-source drivers which almost always lack features.
There are a few places online where one can escape the tyranny of not being able to choose from all possible options.
ZaReason, System76 and even Dell, in the US, and in my country, somewhere like this:
http://www.vgcomputing.com.au/nsintro.html
will pre-test Linux on the hardware for you, and tell you the result. Where they rate the Linux compatibility as “excellent”, AFAIK they mean that all drivers are fully functional and supported as open source.
The fact that VG computing is a supplier in my country does not mean that they are of no interest to everyone else, because their list of notebook/laptop machines versus their as-tested Linux compatibility is valid world-wide:
http://www.vgcomputing.com.au/notebooks.csv
Download it if you like, perhaps if you are considering buying a notebook/laptop from which to strip away the OEM Windows. There are 73 recent laptop/notebook machines listed which are rated as having “excellent” Linux compatibility.
Thanks for the subjectivity on benchmarks and productivity software.
I enjoy KDE 4.3, Gnome and of course OS X. I won’t speak about Windows as I stepped away from that system 8 years ago for development.
/me raises hand
I sure tried though. Four or five years, wasted
I think he was being sarcastic.
Linux is just a kernel and it’s already being used in millions of devices around the world.
There is no the year of Linux. It’s already been several years.
As for the desktop: Linux systems are very well supported these days. Day to day use is no problem any longer. As long as the Linux, KDE and other FOSS communities are healthy, it doesn’t matter if Linux systems have an installed base of 1% or 84%.
Hardware companies would rather support a system with 84% share than 1%.
All mainstream hardware is supported by Linux and other related FOSS projects — often with drivers officially provided by hardware manufacturers.
These days, you can get pretty much any PC off the shelf and a modern Linux distro works on it. In the worst case one has to download the drivers manually.
Sure, there is hardware that doesn’t work with Linux, but you can just as well find hardware that doesn’t work with Windows (usually slightly older hardware for which the manufacturer refuses to support newer Windows versions).
IMO overall Linux systems have broader hardware support than Windows — even with its current 1%-2% market share.
Lexmark printers are mainstream, are they supported? How about the iphone?
Out of curiosity I was wondering if anyone has had any success with Linux on a laptop I might buy. Hmm what do you know, wireless problems:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1364651
Let’s try another laptop I was looking at, the Toshiba Satellite M505D-S497. Hmm look at this poor ACPI support:
http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/t5/Open-Topic/Linux/td-p/58737;jses…
So the worst case it is unsupported and the second worst case is that you have to download and compile the drivers, right? You think that is acceptable in 2010?
Every printer at best buy will work with Windows. Every laptop will work with Windows. The same can’t be said for Linux so I find your comparison to be rather disingenuous.
Linux has better support than it used to but it isn’t comparable to Windows, especially for new hardware. Describing the situation as comparable since Linux has support for legacy hardware presents a dishonest view for users. No one cares that Linux can support 16 bit sound cards. They’d rather have iphone/ipod support.
You have it slightly the wrong way around. It is a case of “Certain hardware does not support xyz OS”, rather than “xyz OS does not support certain hardware”.
For example, certain older hardware, typically anything that was out of production by the time that Vista was released, supports only Windows XP and Linux. This is true of a substantial percentage of printers still in use … there is a driver CD for that printer for Windows XP and earlier, and Linux has a driver, but the printer does not support Vista or Windows 7.
As far as Lexmark printers goes, here is the state of play:
http://www.openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=Lexmark
In general Lexmark doesn’t have particularly good support for Linux, so I would buy one. The ink is hellishly expensive anyway.
Mind you, most of those Lexmark printers listed above wouldn’t have a driver for Vista or Windows 7 either, so in general the Lexmark support for current Windows is even worse.
Indeed. I did an internship with Floyd County as a tech back when I was an undergrad, around the time Vista launched. We got in a whole bunch of new machines running Vista, and it was my job to configure and deploy them. The biggest problem we had was printer drivers: for a lot of our very old (parallel-port) printers, there was just no way to get them working with Vista. IIRC, we had to downgrade several machines to XP, basically so they’d work with the printers we had. I think we also held back several machines for the assayer’s office, also because of compatability issues with old hardware and software.
Are you just incapable to use Google or is this a lame attempt at trolling?
According to http://www.openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=Lexmark the majority of Lexmark printers work on Linux and iPhones work with Linux, too, according to http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/10/iphone-syncing-on-linux/
OTOH iPhones don’t really seem to work at all on 64bit Windows:
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/06/30/iphone-not-comp…
http://secunia.com/community/forum/thread/show/3358/windows_7_64_bi…
If you are picking hardware for your lame “proofs” that Linux is bad and Windows is great, pick hardware that works with Windows.
According to http://mgsimon.de/2010/01/17/linux-notebook-p50ij-von-asus-im-test/ and http://ixsoft.de/cgi-bin/web_store.cgi?ref=Products/de/ASSO008LHW-4… (German) that notebook can be bought with Linux preinstalled.
Seriously? You are complaining that a manufacturer that produces notebooks that don’t even work properly with Windows has problems with Linux? To quote from the very same page:
“Also I will like to know how can I get the 3G Wan connection working under windows, (…) it does not connect or even get any cell phone signal from my GSM provider, under windows 7.”
Looks more like Toshiba notebooks ship with broken hardware that doesn’t work in whatever OS.
Bullsh*t. Nobody compiles drivers these days. Why should anyone? FOSS drivers are shipped with the distributions — just get a recent one.
Proprietary drivers may require to be downloaded separately, but they are proprietary… that means closed source. You can’t compile a closed source driver yourself. :-p
Your attempts at trolling are so lame, it’s very funny.
For how long? Will there be Windows 8 drivers?
Of course they’ll work with Linux.
Or do you see any laptop at Best Buy that does not have a chipset by Intel, AMD/ATI, or NVidia these days?
Those three companies all develop FOSS chipset drivers directly in the Linux kernel repository. AMD/ATI and Nvidia additionally provide closed-source GPU drivers. AMD/ATI also has very well working FOSS drivers.
I’ve got an semi-old (two years) Acer lap-top, Z96J (I think) dual-booting Windows 7 and Fedora 12. Guess what? Neither the built-in USB web-cam nor the sound card work in Windows 7. Turns out, so far as I can determine, there’s just no driver for that hardware for Win7, period, ever. And I had to manually download the driver for the Ati Radion x1800m graphics card. Manual driver installs, and hardware without drivers, period. Do you think that’s acceptable in 2010?
By the way, everything was supported out-of-the-box in Fedora, even the web-cam(!).
My point here isn’t that “Windows has worse hardware support in Linux.” My point is, it’s a mixed bag whatever you use: for any OS on any real-world hardware, especially usually-more-exotic laptops, some things just aren’t going to work well, and some things won’t work at all. It’s true on Linux and it’s true on Windows. Deal with it.
(Oh, another gripe is that, in order to turn off tap-to-click in Win7, I had to install the third-party Synaptics driver: the basic Win7 touchpad driver didn’t have an option to disable tap-to-click, that I could find. So, that’s more manual work to resolve hardware driver issues. And now I have the synaptics tray agent running all the damned time — yes, I know I could disable it, but to do that, I’d have to run MSCONFIG and poke at system internals for two minutes, and that’s just so… not 2010.
)
How about you talk to Lexmark and Apple, or Toshiba before you lay blame with GNU/Linux. Kernel developers and distributions bend over backwards to make sure that Linux supports more hardware “out of the box” than any other operating system. What do you think is “acceptable in 2010”? As if this community does not already do an awful lot to support your hardware. It’s free software, and it owes you nothing. Go talk to Apple and friends if you want to find somebody to blame. If you want to talk about honesty, you can start with a clean install of Windows and find out for yourself what drivers you’ll need to download after installing before you start slagging off about Linux hardware support.
Oh man, I love it when people say that. Most of the tech press stopped after the first ten “Year of the linux”s, but every once in awhile you still hear it.
Don’t worry, we will hear the same in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015…..In the meantime we will still get filled with every excuse and conspiracy theory in the book as to why 2010 was not the year.
Then again the Saints did win the big one, so maybe 2030 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
2010 is actually reserved as a decadal break from the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a time to reflect on years of the Linux desktop in the past.
Yeah, it’s just like “Windows in the data center”.
Yeah, and 2010 will be the year of the linux desktop, and linux will take over the world and bla, bla, bla…
I’m using 4.4rc3 atm (the one that’s on Lucid).
A fun hack with the “web slice” plasmoid
– Add plasmoid
– In settings, have:
URL: http://osnews.com
Element to show: #sidebar
Voila’, you got the “news” section of osnews on your desktop. You do need to adjust the size for readability.
This might work with earlier kde too, didn’t check.
This is one plasmoid I’m going to have some fun with for other websites as well…
This, sir, is a hell of an idea.
I’m not on Linux+KDE, but you can do something similar on the mac side.
The benefits of the new OSAlert interface keep on piling!
That’s a new feature in 4.4 and isn’t available in earlier KDEs. Glad you like it.
Wow that is fcuking awesome. Seriously dude – really nice.
Is there anything like that for GNOME?
Within a GNOME session run ”plasma-desktop”. Sounds weird, but actually works (clicking on Logout in Plasma shows GNOME’s logout window — FDo and dbus FTW)
Plasma triggering GNOME logout has actually nothing to do with either fd.o or D-Bus. It is the venerable XSMP protocol.
Then it’s XSMP. Whatever.
Point is, it works and even integrates relatively nicely.
Looks pretty good but some of the icons are very hard to recognize. I think they are too “bright” and would need darker edges or something.
I’d say it does a better job of it than Windows too. Windows doesn’t know how to do the side by side snap around where Monitor A hits Monitor B; KDE can.
In Windows you can snap 2 windows in side by side mode, then have a big gap in the middle. KDE lets you snap 4 windows side by side by side by side.
Windows + Right (or left) to snap on double screens (though I admit it could have worked from scratch).
I’m not surprised the keyboard shortcut works properly in this case. I am, however, surprised there is a shortcut.
This isn’t probably the place to ask these questions but I’ll go ahead anyway:
1) Is there a plan to move away form HAL in favour of udisks/upower/libudev? do the developers have a schedule and if so what release are they aiming for regarding complete removal of HAL dependency?
2) When KDE is running on FreeBSD, is there a dependency on HAL?
3) Have they finalised the networkmanager front end? the last time I checked it was still in development/alpha with no real time line for eventual merging into the KDE distribution.
The reason why I ask is that I’ve found that nine times out of ten when I’ve had problems all roads always seem to lead back to HAL. The moment when HAL was removed from Fedora all the bugs relating to handling storage devices went and the battery life improved monumentally.
I’m also interesting regarding networkmanager front end because I’d sooner have a KDE native front end than having to deal with a GTK based on – from what I understand there was going to be a one but I never heard anything beyond a couple of posts.
Much thanks to those who can set me on the right path regarding those questions.
KDE SC uses Solid for hardware interaction. Solid can have whatever back-end. In 4.4 it still uses HAL (at least on my openSUSE installation).
KNetworkManager4 works fine, but it won’t enter the main KDE Software Compilation. KNetworkManager4 is an Extragear app with its own release cycle.
SUSE’s Will Stephenson worked hard to make KNM4 usable in time for openSUSE’s 11.2 release which was last November or so.
That said, I still use GNOME’s nm-applet very often. nm-applet has the ability to import Cisco’s VPN profile files and whenever I’m connected to an open WLAN, I quit KNM4 and launch nm-a instead to use VPN.
KNM4 can use VPN, too, but the all settings have to be done manually and I’m too lazy for that.
Only if you don’t need to use wireless broadband cuz that doesn’t work at all. The UI could also do with not sucking so much.
I have a blind spot for UI suckiness. Would you care to point out how it could be improved?
1) the “Connect to other network” dialog looks odd with the network names concatenated much prematurely.
2) The “Connect to other network” item gets high-lighted at the same time as the network name for wireless and mobile devices.
3) I would rather have the connection information in the icon tooltip rather than the menu item tooltip
4) What’s the point of being able to add/remove “tray icons” in the configuration dialog?
1), 2) Good points which I will address.
3) I know about this one, it’s on my TODO list
4) Ex-Windows users wanted an icon per network interface in the tray
Cool.
Here’s one I noticed just now. In KDE SC 4.4 if your first click on the systray icon is with the left mouse button the menu shows up in the top left corner of the screen instead of by the icon in the lower right. After you’ve clicked on it with the right button at least once both buttons work fine.
I’ll get the errors I get for mobile wireless when I get home.
With the exception of nm-applet’s usability f*ck-up to have two different context menus (right click and left click) I think it’s menus and windows are well designed. IMHO you could just adapt its design for KNM4.
Installation instructions for KDE SC 4.4 on Arch Linux are here:
http://www.archlinux.org/news/483/
It is 300 MBytes of download, so I am still in the process of seeing if this works as advertised.
It is a good thing that my ISP provides an un-metered mirror for Arch Linux, but even so this is going to cost me a few hours at least.
In the interim, while I wait, I have been reading the odd review:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6978/1/
1,400 new features for the desktop software. Never let it be said that FOSS doesn’t innovate!
Edited 2010-02-10 09:09 UTC
I’m very happy to report another apparent and welcome performance improvement in this new release of KDE.
I’d guess that the major contribution to this further performance gain is due this time around to Qt 4.6.
Edited 2010-02-10 11:03 UTC
I like it. Now we just need a decent KDE Linux distribution.
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Arch Linux does a good job of KDE, and because it is a rolling release it has KDE 4.4 SC right now. I’m running it as I type this.
If Arch is a bit too cutting edge for you, then perhaps Mandriva is the go. The second alpha of Mandriva 2010.1 was released recently:
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05893
and that release featured KDE SC 4.4 RC3. The final release of Mandriva is not due until 2010-June-03.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100208#upcoming
Fedora 13 is due for release 2010-May-11, and that may suit as Fedora normally has a fairly reasonable KDE implementation, but it is not the default since Fedora is primarily a GNOME distribution. Perhaps Mandriva would be more to your liking.
OpenSuse normally has a good KDE desktop implementation as the default, and that is due 2010-July-15, but given its association with Suse there is some danger it may try to include Mono, so beware.
Yea watch out, it might give you the ability to download useful programs. Scary stuff.
You can certainly download programs for SuSe Linux, that isn’t scary at all. However, you can also download programs for Fedora or Mandriva, even without Mono installed, so that is not a real differentiator.
Microsoft does have a campaign to try to eliminate Linux, however, and one of their “weapons” is patents and another is their assertion that if they are first to market with a certain type of technology (as an example, say LAN networking) and they have kept that technology a trade secret, then despite what the law says Microsoft like to pretend that no-one else may implement interoperable software without paying royalties to Microsoft.
So, .NET includes some components that Microsoft have submitted as standards (e.g. C# itself), and it has other parts that Microsoft have kept as trade-secret Microsoft technologies (ASP.NET, ADO.NET and WinFroms are examples). This is not controversial, this is fact.
Microsoft want dearly to pretend that if anyone else implements technologies that Microsoft has kept as trade secrets, then they owe royalties to Microsoft.
Mono implements technologies that Microsoft has kept as trade secrets. Therefore, Microsoft will want to collect royalties from users of Mono, even though Microsoft did not write the Mono software.
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-3513-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=27123…
So, it follows that in order to avoid any possibility of such trouble, and to avoid giving Microsoft any semblance of a reason for lawsuits, it is very easy to just simply refuse to install anything resembling non-Microsoft implementations of Microsoft trade secret technologies.
Therefore, don’t install Mono. Therefore, don’t risk using OpenSuSe.
After all, it is not as though you will miss out on anything.
Edited 2010-02-11 06:48 UTC
And the legally binding agreement preventing them from bringing suit against users or implementors of interoperable implementations just means nothing?
Seriously, Mono is a good thing, at least for the GTK universe.
Edited 2010-02-11 16:37 UTC
Tinfoil hat? Check.
Just to draw the ire of many I’ll say “Kubuntu”.
Dont’ think so. It’s miles away form other KDE’s implementations.
I’m using and liking Sidux at work. It’s pretty much just Debian Unstable. I kinda like it — but I have an elevated tolerance for things breaking.
Now, if only we had these fixed…
http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea62491
&
https://bugs.kde.org/34362 (sitting there from… uh… 2001)
Ok, I’m not saying there’re not a good thing, but do you seriously believe those are must have’s?
The devil is often in the details. The support for additional mouse buttons is something that has been asked for almost ten years (!) and it has almost 1000 votes (!!) on bugs.kde.org. It is a real issue to many people. It surely is to me. We’re talking of a Desktop Environment here, and the mouse is a big part of it. It’s not some obscure option for a few dudes in their basements. KDE 4 has been out for two years now. It’s supposed to be “next generation” software and we’re stuck with last millennia mouse handling. I don’t want to sound demanding but at least the devs could say something. If it can’t be done say so. But it would surprise me that a written-from-scratch effort like KDE 4 has such a structural limitation.
As for the drag and drop I personally don’t use it heavily but I can feel the pain of those who do. Just because it doesn’t touch me personally it doesn’t mean that it’s useless. I remember when I showed the beauties of KDE 4 (and FOSS in general) to a friend of mine just to have it laughted at for this very reason. The demo stopped there and while such a user (while being a very good person in general) is better lost than found it still shows that KDE devs should listen to reasonable (and I think those are) requests and not ignore them just because they personally don’t care. It’s a big world and while you can’t please eveybody and least try to remove these, maybe little but very annoying to many, hurdles.
Like a mate said… now this is something worth paying for (after some real font tweaking!) KDE 4.4 reached some maturity and it’s far more usable than before. I have switched and I like what I see.
The user interface is definitely YEARS ahead of the stagnant GNOME.
Let’s hope the best for this desktop. KDE made some shit along the way, but GNOME was not able to eat its lunch. Oh you you sad GNOME. “You had every opportunity, and you blew it.”
The technology looks impressive, but it seems there is a bit lacking in the art refinement/direction part of KDE. It reminds me a bit of computer games, where people will tell you that good graphics is part technology and part artistry. For instance, games like ICO/Shadow of the Colossus looked great despite the very limited graphics capability of the PS2 at the time they were shipping.
KDE seems to be an example of the opposite situation. The technology is there to make it look great, yet it doesn’t. The desktop bar at the bottom of the screen looks fairly amateurish, apart from the Cashew at the far right, which looks well integrated into the bar. Likewise, the default toolkit theme looks poorly integrated with the plasma elements, icons and window theme.
I don’t think this will change until someone takes a top down approach, says “this is the way it should look” and then changes every sub-element of KDE (Qt, included applications, window manager theme, etc) to match this vision.
The Gnome-shell people seem to have taken this top down approach in the design of the GUI:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/screenshots/clips/20100106201448/shell…
But then it remains to be seen how well it is implemented.
After a week playing with KDE 4.4, it feels that something is “wrong”… some idiosyncrasies sported by the mind of the developers continue to be a great barrier for KDE to automagically be ready for the desktop. Many things should be learned from GNOME, like the usability, the better distribution of menus.
The KDE menu (Kickoff and Classic) is one of the biggest issues for me. Because I always have to hunt down the application, no matter how many times I already have executed it. I suggest that you guys change the name Kickoff to Labyrinth… because it feelks like a damn hard one.
The good aspects of KDE 4 is the UI superiority over an white pale GNOME. This is the part where I clap my hands to developers of KDE.
The ‘systemsettings’ could also be called Labyrinth 2, I can barely understand the thousand options… Not that I can read all options and tweak, but you know, we just don’t have the time.. if you know what I mean…
As a resolution, GNOME is winning by some better idiosyncrasies, and it’s no wonder Canonical has put so much effort in it, polishing and making it a bit more sexy.