Hooray, it's a 4.1.1!

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

The most significant changes are:

  • Significant performance, interaction and rendering correctness improvements in KHTML and Konqueror, KDE's webbrowser
  • User interaction, rendering and stability fixes in Plasma, the KDE4 desktop shell
  • PDF backend fixes in the document viewer Okular
  • Fixes in Gwenview, the image viewer's thumbnailing, more robust retrieval and display of images with broken metadata
  • Stability and interaction fixes in KMail

To find out more about KDE 4.1, please refer to the KDE 4.1.0 and KDE 4.0.0 release notes. KDE 4.1.1 is a recommended update for everyone running KDE 4.1.0. It will be followed up by more x.y.z updates over the next months and ultimately by a new feature release, KDE 4.2.0 this coming January. Enjoy KDE 4.1.1 and let us know your findings.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by tracyanne (not verified)

quote: if you really feel that strong then start helping these amazing people out with building KDE and stop the moaning.

what would you suggest? my C/C++ is crap, and I don't think they accept C#/Mono or even GAMBAS or realBASIC BASIC code.

Would you have those people move to KDE 4 before it has the feature set they need, what would be the point of that? When that feature set is there, then they can usefully provide bug reports on it, but until then, for them it's sheer masochism to try using something that doesn't meet their needs.

Not everyone can write code, not everyone who can code can write in the language(s) the KDE team use. but a lot of people have come to depend on features built into the software that the KDE team, for whatever reason - pay, pleasure altruism, fame, notoriety - write. Those people have a right to comment on the usability of the software, just as anyone who can and does contribute code. The KDE team chose to write this code, they chose to put it out there, for the world to comment on. No sane person could possibly expect that all they are ever going hear are compliments, and the "if you don't like it, contribute" response is simply disingenuous.

by Morty (not verified)

"what would you suggest?"
"Not everyone can write code, not everyone who can code can write in the language(s) the KDE team use."

There are lots of other ways to help other than writing code. Such contributions usually result in freeing developers to use more time to do what they are best at, writing code.

There are lot's of jobs ready for the picking not needing any coding skill like writing documnetation and whats this messages, triaging bugs, usability testing and even helping out with the websites/infrastructure. There are no greate barriers to overcome to start contributing, other than simply start doing it.

by anon (not verified)

As already stated you can contribute to KDE in many ways

Is there really a need to write "I am not moving to kde 4.1 until" no there isn't. If there is a feature missing you want, submit it as a Wish. Have a problem, submit a bug report. That is how you contribute to KDE if you can't code.

People don't have the right to come here and bitch constantly, you have the privellage to come and post on this site, not a right.

When someone gives you software for free you don;t come here and complain like a rude twat like so many people do. You file a bug report, a wish, and contribute to making it better. This is not the place to complain, the people building KDE will most likely bypass and not read it, file bug reports.

Writing silly posts like Iw ill not move to KDE 4.1 until is in no way productive. Want to complain be productive and positive about it.

Got to love the post in this dot, not moving to kde 4.1 until a problem with a gnome app is fixed, lol. wrong place to post you want a gnome app fixed.

by tracyanne (not verified)

quote:: Is there really a need to write "I am not moving to kde 4.1 until" no there isn't. If there is a feature missing you want, submit it as a Wish. Have a problem, submit a bug report. That is how you contribute to KDE if you can't code.

I have and I have

by Paul Leopardi (not verified)

Hear hear. I for one *do* look at the comments on Dot to see if there are usability problems with new versions of KDE. Looking directly at the bug list also works but takes much longer, partly because of the time it takes to formulate the appropriate query, partly because of the response time for each query, partly because of the number of bugs/wishes filed.

For me, the most interesting problems are the ones which generate the most "push back" from the KDE developers. This may hint at a more general problem in KDE's overall approach to harnessing its existing user base to improve usability. Not all users are developers. Not even are all users contributors to bug databases. At some point a desktop environment, even a free one, becomes stable enough and widely enough used that there is a certain amount of "corporate knowledge" out there in user-land. Some of this can be packaged into use-cases. Some is more complicated or more personal or more specific. But it is valuable knowledge. So to have developers push back on this knowledge means to me that maybe the developer community is not yet as mature as the user base and hasn't yet learnt how to harness this knowledge more productively.

In short, "it would be nice if" the KDE project could figure out a way to capture this knowledge in a way which is more widespread than bugs/wishes, more general than usability labs, and more usable than surveys. Maybe just listening to users? Or maybe something more organized than that. Perhaps I will submit a meta-wish.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

C++ is not impossible to learn. Especially with Qt which is a lot less of a PITA than the STL or Boost.

by tracyanne (not verified)

I'm willing to accept help from anyone who is willing to help.

by Noname (not verified)

With the new Nvidia drivers and KDE 4.1.1, it all begins to fall into place. Great, thank you, developers!

However, I know this os the wrong place, but I'm just interested: I haven't been able to use EBay for ages with KHTML (there are also bug reports in bugzilla that get no attention): The dropdown menus in "my Ebay" aren't rendered since KDE 3.x days. Any other rendering engine (firefox, webkit) has absolutely no problem with the same setup.

As Ebay should be one of the popular sites, am I really the only one who experiences this?

by Anonymous coward (not verified)

Sadly most people just use Firefox, a few Opera and when Chrome will be available... Well, you get the picture. Konqueror is falling back in performance and support for popular technology (flash!, javascript!) and the KHTML camp shows little interest to change this. Oh so often we heard "that's proprietary" and "that's not standard". Fair enough.

And then we will probably get some "QtFox" sponsored by N0kia soon, so the competition for Konq ist just getting too strong. So, do what all the others do: just use a working browser. Sad for Konq, though.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

"And then we will probably get some "QtFox" sponsored by N0kia soon, so the competition for Konq ist just getting too strong. "

I for one would not use Firefox even if it used Qt. Its integration with KDE is non existent. That is why I'm using mostly Konqueror, and FF just for some troublesome sites.

by taurnil (not verified)

I would really love for konqueror to have the flash problems fixed. It is the ONLY reason I use firefox and seamonkey.

by SadEagle (not verified)

>Konqueror is falling back in performance and support for popular technology >(flash!, javascript!) and the KHTML camp shows little interest to change this

Really? Konqueror 4.1 shows close to the 50% improvement in JavaScript performance, and is competitive with other browsers in real-life stuff.
And as someone who has spent a great deal of time on JavaScript performance, I resent anonymous lies about us not caring about that.

As for Flash, the only significant problems I am aware of are in distributions that use Qt compiled w/o Glib event loop and use our builtin event loop integration; however all analysis with valgrind thus far suggests it's a crash inside Flash proper.

by anon (not verified)

i would be surprised to see any linux user use Chrome. Let's see their user license that had to be re-written after being written and released by their lawyer gave them royality free rights to anything you post or upload with their browser. Their omni box records keystrokes and send them to google without you even having to it return, google has admitted they will keep some of those along with your ip address. Personally, anyone that trusts google needs their head read

by Michael "Done."... (not verified)

The user license has been rewritten (http://blog.binaryhelix.net/2008/09/google-chrome-houston-we-have-proble...). Not sure if Google meant to reuse their old eula or not.

As for the Omnibox, can you show me where you heard that? Did you see the network traffic? Can you show us the code? (Chrome is OSS, the code is available in a public repository.) If it really does that, such information would've proliferated more. If the info didn't proliferate for some reason (you saw the network traffic), then I'd go tell everyone.

by SadEagle (not verified)

It may have been rewritten for the app, but it's still the license for their web services, isn't it?

by Michael "So?" Howell (not verified)

Yes, that is the license for the services. We weren't discussing the services, were we?

by S. (not verified)

> As for the Omnibox, can you show me where you heard that? Did you see the network traffic?

have you even tried the software? right click address bar, choose "Edit search engines...", and there it is staring right at you in all its evil glory:

"[X] Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the
address bar"

E.g. after a fresh install, no bookmark import, type "k" in address bar and look at the suggestion drop-down box:

k/
www.klm.com
Search Google for Kelly Blue Book
Search Google for Kohls

interesting isn'it?

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

I will definately give it a try and I don't care much about this paranoia - Google is not your government, better be concerned about people who will really hurt you if they see fit...

And, BTW, Firefox and Opera are already best friends with Google and do supply data to their servers already. So whats the poblem with chrome?

by SadEagle (not verified)

Is this something one can test without actually selling things?

by Noname (not verified)

I don't know... however, as you can create some kind of anonymous account in EBay (only to watch actions, not to sell something), this should be possible. Just try out EBay's login page and use a guest account.

Would be great if that could be fixed.
(The next problem is that upload of pictures for auctions doesn't work most of the time. But that would require creating a real account.)

by 3way splitter (not verified)

It doesn't even work correct on kde-look. try to hit no wallpapers selection and nothing happens. Try it with another browser and it refresh without wallpapers.

They can blame the sites, but if other browsers render it good people just use that and there user base will get smaller and smaller. Hope webkit for konqueror will wake them up because that works mostly better on those same sites where khtml makes errors.

by blendo (not verified)

Hi I would like to thank the whole KDE-Team for coding, testing and releasing such a great desktop.

cheers blendo

--------------------------
http://www.kde4.de

by Phd student (not verified)

I thought that KDE 4.1 wasn't polished enough to use... I was wrong. I love it :) I needs polish here-and-there, sure, but it rocks! I am looking forward to the 4.1.1 packages in Debian. As for my issues, my "worst" problem is that when using compositing, scrolling is choppy, so I don't use it. Oh, and KDE 3.x's color schemes are not updated when I change the colorscheme in KDE 4.1.

Cheers to KDE 4!

by Vide (not verified)

I have the same problem (scrolling).. can yo tell me what are you using so maybe we could gather some more info and help to get the problem fixed?
I'm using Kubuntu Hardy 32bit with KDE 4.1 PPA packages and Intel driver. Compositing works well, a part from scrolling wich is just plain broken, sooooo slow.

by PhD student (not verified)

I have intel driver, too. Probably that's the problem, then. Dunno how to report this one :( Maybe you could take care of this?

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

I give my thanks to all developers involved in this release. I'm still affected by the "Fedora Great Update Freeze", but, hopefully, I'll have KDE 4.1.1 here soon. Go!

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

The Fedora status:
* KDE 4.1.0 has now been pushed to stable, it's in the .newkey repositories (i.e. the repositories with the new signing keys), but it may take a few hours to a couple days to get the fedora-release update and the instructions out. This is being handled by Fedora's Release Engineering and Infrastructure teams.
* KDE 4.1.1 has been built and queued for testing, it will be in the updates-testing repository in the next push (i.e. the one after the big push with KDE 4.1.0 and many other stuff). It will be pushed to the stable updates about a week later, unless some other major breakdown happens.

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

I followed your guide, and skipped some steps downloading directly the KDE 4.1.1 packages from https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates .

I must thank Lubos Lunak and all the KWin crew for backporting two fixes: a fix for the VSync bug (that bug was killing my performance with my old Sempron 2500), and the "unredirect fullscreen windows" feature.

Also, I noted that Oxygen was tweaked a little, and KDE behaves and feels better and quicker. Thank you for such a great release.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Update: FYI, 4.1.0 is now in the stable updates (you'll have to update twice, once to get the new signing keys and once to actually get the updates), 4.1.1 will hit updates-testing shortly.

by Moobyfr (not verified)

Another great release for a great software.
Thanks you for all your works, and for being open to bug reports

by Miha (not verified)

And when this one will be redesigned?

BTW: KDE 4.1.1 is the best KDE ever :D

by Joe (not verified)

I want my desktop icons back!
Removing them makes no sense. Without icons the desktop is just an empty screen. Now i have to start all my favorite applications from konsole. Okay i could search them in the Application menu.

by Anon (not verified)

It's been possible to have application icons on the desktop since 4.0.0.

by Joe (not verified)

As simple as right click on desktop -> Add new Icon?