Today sees the release of Kubuntu 8.10 featuring the latest KDE 4.1 desktop. The Kubuntu developers have been hard at work, integrating this major new version into a completed desktop. The settings and artwork have been kept close to KDE's defaults to ensure the best face of our favourite desktop shines through. Desktop effects have been enabled by default for cards which support it thanks to the wonderful KWin and package management comes via a brand new version of Adept. Printer Applet and System Config Printer KDE were written to ensure a complete user experience, both are now part of KDE itself. Update Manager, Language Selector and plenty other tools have been reworked for KDE 4. Upgrade, download or request a free CD.
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The reason I won't upgrade is because Kubuntu has disabled the ZUI, including keyboard shortcuts. Since I need this feature (even on this Eee PC I am writing this on I have 3 activities), I can't really upgrade.
Why was this done?
Maybe cause ZUI is more confusing than anything else at least in 4.1.
I don't find it confusing at all. It actually made me become more productive. I even made a video (on YouTube at the moment) showing how it can be used.
It is confusing. You've got two similar concepts, multiple desktops and multiple activities, I think they should be somehow merged.
Actually, there are plans to do so. See the 4.2 Feature Plan on Techbase.
10x, "Activity<->Virtual Desktop Affinity" sounds nice, I'm eager to see how it's going to be implemented :)
Is there a doc somewhere explaining how to use all these must-have cant-live-without features? The ZUI is the strangest thing I've seen. You zoom out and now you have a tiny desktop up in the corner. And you can scroll around in a large empty field that has a tiny desktop in the corner. I don't get it.
This image (courtesy of Half-Left on #kde) shows what you can do with activities:
http://img28.picoodle.com/img/img28/4/7/19/f_DesktopZoomm_31fc46d.png
I made a video showing how to use the ZUI:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhODrJkoidA
There's an activity tutorial on the KDE Forums:
http://forum.kde.org/showthread.php?tid=7671
Hope those are enough to clarify.
>Hope those are enough to clarify.
No sorry, I've looked at your three links and still doesn't understand what's the difference between the 'activities' and the virtual desktop.
It looks really redundant..
Seriously. I've been following KDE4 (obviously not very well...) since it was just in the early idea stage, something like three years ago. This is the first I've heard of a "ZUI" or "Activities". I always thought the "zoom out" thing was a weird bug; I had no idea it was a reimplementation of multiple desktops.
Why can't you just check a box to have separate plasmoids for each desktop, just like you can to have separate background images? Does the ZUI/Activities thing do anything besides creating a separate set of plasmoids and background image? If not, it seems like a ridiculous way to do things, with the "eye candy" factor being the only reason to have bothered with it at all.
If you look up aseigo's earlier blog posts, you'll see that there are ideas to make activities as different "contexts".
so kubuntu now begins to remove features because they might be confusing some users? at the moment I feel more and more uncomfortable with kubuntu. ZUI is one of the key features of KDE4 and although it is very basic in 4.1, it is very useful, for me at least.
This is nothing new, kubuntu has always removed features to "improve" usability. Ironically the disease in kubuntu of removing features because they might confuse some users, has created lots of confusion on it's own caused by missing functionality when experienced users and developers have have tried to help kubuntu users.
emoved features to "improve" usability
Smells like Gnome and this is not a compliment.
The problem is not smell, rather a unsubstansiated belief that users may get confused, and that removal of some features may migitate this and make better usability. Usability are more complex than that, requiring metodious testing and analyzing rather than such hand waving.
This is basically the list of reasons why the ZUI was made inaccessible to users:
* at times it puts activities on top of each other
* upon crashes it also happens to add activities
* it's not granny-proof, the zoom of the cashew control is horrible for people who can't navigate all that well using a mouse
* you can easily get lost if you don't understand the concept of activites (especially because there is no 'bring me home' feature)
* by default it doesn't add any activities which would explain the actual use of this feature
* by default it doesn't use wallpapers, using the default transparent background instead, which looks the most horrible
Luckily, most of these issues should be resolved in KDE 4.2
there could have been at least an option to switch it on, there are some users who used this feature in hardy and can't do it now.
I see the point of doing so. However, I think that a way to keep those available would have helped, at least to report bugs (like that, no one will since there is no way they can even use the feature).
* at times it puts activities on top of each other
This NEVER occurred to me in Hardy with KDE 4.1.2 (and earlier).
* upon crashes it also happens to add activities
Do you mean upon crashes of plasma? If so, then this NEVER occurred to me in Hardy either. So I assume that this and the previous point occur because Kubuntu screwed something up in the packages for Intrepid.
* it's not granny-proof, the zoom of the cashew control is horrible for people who can't navigate all that well using a mouse
True.
* you can easily get lost if you don't understand the concept of activites (especially because there is no 'bring me home' feature)
Since in the zoomed state there is only one activity with a cashew that contains a "Zoom in" button, it is quite obvious that pushing that button will do the opposite of the "Zoom out" button. In my opinion, there should have been the feature that pressing the Escape button on the keyboard zooms in to the last used activity.
* by default it doesn't add any activities which would explain the actual use of this feature
Write documentation instead of removing features.
* by default it doesn't use wallpapers, using the default transparent background instead, which looks the most horrible
A small patch would fix this. As far as I know Kubuntu is not afraid to change the behavior of KDE (after all, you patched out the zoom), so why are you all of a sudden afraid of changing the background in the zoom?
So from all the arguments above, only one is valid, namely that the zoom is not granny-proof (the other ones can be resolved by not adding bugs and patching stuff). Since you write yourself on the website of Kubuntu that the user needs to decide for himself/herself if KDE4 is good for him/her (and therefore if Intrepid is good for him/her) and that Hardy is still supported for another year, I see no reason at all to remove features that will only be visible to people who deliberately decide to switch to KDE4 anyway (granny is probably not going to "risk" installing Intrepid after reading the announcement).
We have gotten several bug reports regarding the first two issues.
We ship pure KDE code for Plasma except for the Taskmanager tooltips we backported. There isn't any magical package error that could cause this. In short, the above problems are problems with KDE that will be resolved in the future.
In case you didn't notice, there is documentation for activities in KHelpcenter in the Plasma Manual. Most people would use the feature and go "wtf?" before they found documentation for the feature, except maybe if you took a png of the documentation and used it as a wallpaper. The feature is just too infantile in its current state, and people don't just go and read the manual about such things, even if they should.
Making the zoomed-out background is also somewhat non-trivial. There isn't any code in place for actually *painting* a background (hence the default transparency-checker background), so it's not a simple matter of switching wallpaper.
I actually agree with the temporary disabling of this feature, for exactly of the reasons Jonathon cited. For some users, it can be very confusing in its 4.1.2 state. I too used the plasma ZUI when using the Hardy and the KDE 4 ppa. When you know what it is intended to do it can be quite nice. But there are both bugs and credible usability issues, many of which have been diligently reported (and if you haven't reported bugs, please report them). It already appears to be improving quite nicely in 4.2 (especially with the activity switcher plasmoid).
I think Hardy with KDE 4.1 from the ppa repository served exactly the purpose it should: Expose the essentially unaltered KDE to the user community so feedback can be provided directly upstream. Intrepid is a product release and I think the Kubuntu community correctly tried to address the expectations of their users for a released product. I think this approach is a reasonable balance between providing upstream feedback on the core KDE experience and servicing the expectations of their users.
workaround for activities:
if you already have activities you can switch them by clicking on the desktop and then pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N for next activity or CTRL+SHIFT+P vor previous activity.
to create an activitiy first quit plasma by starting krunner with ALT+F2 and type "kquitapp plasma". maybe you have to do it several times.
then open ~/.kde/share/apps/config/plasma-appletsrc and look for [Containments][1] which should look similar to this
[Containments][1]
backgroundmode=0
formfactor=0
geometry=1286,0,1280,800
immutability=1
location=0
plugin=desktop
screen=0
zvalue=0
copy and past it and increase the number from [Containments][1] until there are no dubicate numbers. you also have to set the position of the new activity. I have a resolution of 1280x800, so I changed "geometry=0,0,1280,800" to "geometry=1286,0,1280,800". my new activity is on the right from the default one. if you add more activities you have to make sure that they dont overlap. then you have set "screen=-1"
you should now have something simlar to this.
[Containments][4]
backgroundmode=0
formfactor=0
geometry=1286,0,1280,800
immutability=1
location=0
plugin=desktop
screen=-1
zvalue=0
save the file and start plasma. now you can switch with the shortcuts I mentioned above.
have fun
I already have activities on Hardy. Can someone confirm that by upgrading one can still switch back and forth?
yes, you can. you have to click on the desktop and then CTRL+SHIFT+N or CTRL+SHIFT+P
Thanks for posting this.
@Kubuntu: this is really user-friendly... Kubuntu = linux for human beings...
I am going to wait to upgrade to Intrepid until KDE 4.2 is out and hope that then Kubuntu does not decide to remove other useful features.
It's true, people don't like change. When you have a truly visionary direction, it's hard to get people on board. KDE devs: you're diluting yourselves if you think for a minute this is the case with KDE4. Right now, KDE4 resembles the bastard offspring of OS X and Vista in terms of appearance and functionality. Except, my OS X system works, and KDE4 doesn't more often than not.
Usually, version upgrades mean more and/or better functionality. What we have is something that can't even do half of the things it has been able to do flawlessly in the 3.5.x branch. "Oh but eventually it will catch up with or *maybe even surpass 3.x!*" you say. Meanwhile, all the other desktop platforms are trooping ahead, further empowered by an infusion of development support and constantly swelling userbase thanks to the monumental /faux pas/ called KDE4.
So far all I've given is negative criticism... so what's to be done? Well, if you don't want to go the way of XFree86, the best way is to actually **listen to the power users in your community**. When we say the menu sucks, it's not because it takes time to get used to it. It's because it takes a *lot* longer to navigate than the old version, which was arguably not broken in the first place. When we say kicker is broken, it's because it has much less functionality than its predecessor... this is a step forward how? When we say Dolphin sucks functionality-wise compared to Konqueror, it's not because we just haven't taken the time to learn its nuances, it's because you've spoiled us with a million cool and useful features in Konqueror, then tried to substitute it with the KDE equivalent of Nautilus. Shame on you.
In conclusion, if KDE is to succeed on the desktop, it needs to be developed by KDE/Linux fans, not OS X/Vista/Gnome lovers. And listening to users who think Vista is super sweet or Gnome is better "because its more easier than kde" is the road to hell. Users that stupid are extremely fickle anyway, and will bounce to whatever's popular in that particular second. Where does that leave you? Where does that leave the real core constituency in the KDE community? In my opinion, it leaves us all up poo poo creek without a plunger.
i'm pretty confident time will prove all your nonsense wrong.
Re: KDE4 as it currently exists has no future.
by tooth on Thursday 30/Oct/2008, @13:31
i'm pretty confident time will prove all your nonsense wrong.
~~
Which part is nonsense exactly, Mr. Blind Fanboy? I'm confident that if anything, time will prove me right. Either KDE will shift its direction to something that makes sense, or it will ultimately wither.
call me blind from one sentence, after 4 paragraphs of narrow-mindedness. i'm content to wait and see.
You are a minority, mister. Most people do like KDE 4 as it is, and with the direction it has taken.
Also, you completely forget that KDE 4 is not kdebase, is only a part of it.
A Minority? Not at all!
The silent majority.
In our little office there are 5 developers using kde for years. And none
of us will ever switch to kde4 as long as there won't be a big change
regarding the whole direction the kde development had taken.
Reading the dot or aseigo's blog - months ago, we simply gave up!
Honestly, its already a common saying '...like KDE4' if you are kidding
about crappy software. - sadly
The guys from the Vista team claims similar things about their products...
One only has to look at the SVN stats for KDE vs other desktops (assuming he means Free desktops) to see precisely which one is "trooping ahead". This is just another in a long line of posts making the same central mistake: Assuming that things are the way they are now "by design" (with the implication that the KDE devs are explicitly ignoring [power] users' requests) rather than as a result of the extremely gruelling port to Qt4 coupled with a complete re-write of the desktop portion.
I agree with the parent. KDE4 is broken. Not just the codebase, but the whole mentality. It is embarrassing to have a desktop that is so clearly a poor counterfeit of Vista and Leopard, especially since KDE used to be arguably the best desktop environment around.
And here's to all the people making excuses for the way things are: YOU'RE NOT HELPING. A healthy open-source effort needs to take negative criticism into account as much or moreso than the positive criticism. You can disagree, maybe to you, KDE4 is your ideal desktop. But excuses just make you look foolish, and they make the KDE team look ignorant and inflexible.
Best,
-Ben
That's /exactly/ what I was trying to say, though much less elegantly (and a lot more angrily, unfortunately). I don't feel like the KDE team listens anymore.
If you use KDE4 as it comes with SUSE, it looks mostly like KDE 3, not like OS X or Vista.
The codebase is not broken. Where do you see it broken ?
I think we all (many) agree that KDE 4.0 was basically a beta, and 4.1 can be considered the first real release. We could have given them other names (we discussed that lengthy), this is what came out.
KDE4 is a huge step, and really on the way to be that much better than KDE3 was. I can't really say a lot about Windows and Gnome, I almost never use them. Windows - well, nothing fancy. Vista - looks nice. Gnome - kinda boring. OS X - looks nice, has some nice things, but overall I don't understand why people claim it would be by far the most user friendly OS.
Alex
Well Alex, that probably has something to do with the fact that it is.
Here is the great contradiction of your post. On the one hand you demand the right to express negative criticism, even saying it is a healthy thing (which is probably true if it's constructive as opposed to destructive). But on the other hand, you accuse "all" those who like KDE4 as making excuses for the way things are. So your viewpoint is correct and all those differing viewpoints are wrong? Could it be that many people genuinely like KDE4? Could it be that more people like it than not? A word of advice for you. You have every right to offer criticism, especially constructive. But when you demean others for having a different viewpoint, you come off looking like nothing more than a petty complainer. And nobody likes complainers, except for other complainers.
Yes, I agree with you. In contrast to 3.x, KDE4 is nothing but a piece of crap.
I'll still use KDE 3.5(shipped with Fedora 8) in the very future. I'll switch to gnome, or anything else who doesn't like a bastard of Vista and MacOS.
KDE4 will die, I bet.
I have just upgraded from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and I find KDE 4 *very* hard to use. It is not at all intuitive; for most of the things I want to do as a developer, it takes more clicks; I cannot move icons around on my panel (there is surely some way, but it certainly is not obvious to me); the panel documentation talks about clicking on certain "icons or features", but since most icons don't have info bubbles and the doc doesn't include icon images, it is very hard to read and understand.
For now, I am staying with KDE 3.5, which is a great desktop. If I am forced to upgrade someday, and you keep your current metaphor in KDE 4, I'll reluctantly go back to GNOME.
For me, your new desktop is much harder to use than KDE 3.5 (my favorite), or Vista or Mac OS X, and it is not as good looking for my taste.
I hope you pay attention to some of the comments I have seen posted here.
It's actually very easy to do, just not completely obvious. On the right handside of the panel press the plasma button, suddenly the panel opens up. Now you can do things like resize panel and move icons etc etc. Press the Red Cross when your done.
Bear in mind that KDE 3.5+ has more functionality than KDE4 but took many years to get there. KDE4 is a complete rewrite and you will find that in January with KDE 4.2 a MAJORITY of the things you are missing from KDE 3.5 will emerge. There is a section linked in kubuntu release that lists the HUGE number of things in the pipeline for KDE 4.2
I kind of compare this whole flame war to people upgrading from XP to Vista (not that I like having to use either!). There is a paradigm shift and it takes a while to get used to it.
KDE4 has gotten better and better in just the last 6 months. In 12 months I can't wait to see where it's at. Just think, people who don't like Vista will have to wait 3-4 years for Windows 7 to see any possible changes. We get to see radical change happening every few months!
I like some things better in KDE 3...but to be honest it took a good menu (thanks Suse for Kicker) and a lot of my own tweaking to change it from looking cartoonish and dated to something suited to 2008/2009. KDE4 takes very little of that for me. Also just wait until the Raptor menu is incorporated into 4.2
THAT will knock everything else for dead.
my 2 cents
"Also just wait until the Raptor menu is incorporated into 4.2. THAT will knock everything else for dead."
With all due respect to the Raptor devs, I really wish people would stop hyping it so much. It spends probably about 90% of the time with little to no development activity, and so far just seems to be Yet Another Menu. Frankly - if people haven't been wowed by the far more complete Lancelot, yet, then they won't be wowed by Raptor.
IAWTC
3.5 is unique, mature, highly functional and productive, and perhaps most importantly of all it presents useful defaults but is infinitely supple. In other words I've considered kde3.5 the best DE available (out of any option) because it rewards experimenting with it and makes 'play' easy and fun. This puts discovering the perfect DE experience suited to the individuals need and taste more within reach and more practical.
I know it didn't get to be like this overnight and similarly kde4 will take time to mature. In fact this is the only reasonable counterpoint.
everybody expects this. There is one problem, but it has two parts:
1) we aren't being appraised of exactly where kde4 is in this process. Dont rush people onto a development platform. Linus states that "if you want people to test tell them it's a release", but the kernel is already complete and most of these version rev's are including different software. With KDE4 we have libraries and a meager shell. When compared with 3.5 it is shockingly devoid of features.
Ok so you want to keep peoples interest as you rebuild? You've got to offer them a vision of what it _will_ be like eventually.
2) is, very simply, when you offer people your vision and they say 'that sucks, this is why' take their words into account. This is the free software way, isn't it? Maintain a bold forward looking vision, but take practical almost cautious steps toward that goal, always checking with the community and getting feedback. Making the process as open to micro-improvement as possible.
Basically I get the sense that kde4 is trying to be revolutionary instead of evolutionary, and is leapfrogging the concerns and interests of people like me in the process.
So hey these things might already be happening, but I wouldn't know because I stopped paying attention several months ago. However if they are please give them more organization and spotlight so you can beat me over the head with them.
regards,
should read:
Linus states that "if you want people to test tell them it's a release", but the kernel is already complete and most of these version rev's are including different __features__.
Long before KDE 4.0 I was reading about all this revolution, new wonderful features, better application integration... and at some point, after few disappointing alphas/betas the devs started claiming that "KDE 4.0" is not "KDE 4" - what is it ("KDE 3", "KDE 5", ...) - it wasn't really explained. After the release of the "stable" code we could easily see that, "KDE 4.0" is really "KDE 4 early beta", without most of the 3.5 features. To this date every KDE X.0 release was a really nice improvement to the end user (I clearly remembered using 2.0 beta on my workstation - it was such a nice leap forward, that I didn't want to go back to stable 1.x, despite some occasional crashes!). Oh well - it was supposed to be better in KDE 4.1, which was meant to be aimed at normal user.
KDE 4.1 is out. And what? Just the next disappointment, still most of the 3.5 features missing - very configurable Panel, and more; even the printer configuration is not there! Most of the applications are not ready yet, you have to keep either 3.5 or Gnome libraries in your system to be able to use i.e. some stable, modern DVD burning software. Still no "play" button appearing on the MP3 file icon after moving a mouse cursor over it, still no good Nepomuk support (to remember, that this file was downloaded form that Internet site), Kopete still crashing, etc. It's not about time needed to change the paradigm - it's about a desktop which is not yet ready for a paradigm change and at the same time inconvenient to work in an old way.
And now we are being told to wait for the KDE 4.2... Well, basing on the experiences with 4.0 and 4.1, I am skeptical, you know. I already have one Vista installed on my machine, and I don't really wont to have another one. I will probably eventually switch to KDE 4 (or move to Gnome - the more outdated KDE 3.5 becomes, the more serious this possibility is...), I would just like it to happen because of better usability and new features, not just because KDE 3 is no longer supported and more and more troublesome with new system libraries...
"claiming that "KDE 4.0" is not "KDE 4" - .... it wasn't really explained."
What you call claiming, is stating of a simple fact. And it has been explained over and over again. KDE 4 are and will be the whole series of releases dubbed KDE 4.x. Obviously KDE 4.0 are not it, it's only the fist bit. It's like saying the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring are the The Lord of the Rings.
Well, my 2c. I use KDE since 1997 and KDE4 is the worse for all the time. Most people who defend KDE4 are some way connected to its development so I can understand the attitude. But I am just user and my attitude is obvious. I must switch to Gnome env because KDE4 is not usable for me as it is. I still use Kmail, Konqueror, Kopete and many other programs because I like it. But desktop itself is sorrowful. For instance, keyboard switcher was very nice for multilingual users, especially feature that allows fast switch English/Russian or English/Ukrainian by keyboard. Now I must switch trough all 3 or 4 layouts. Panel is awfully black and I can not change its behavior or even color, KNetworkManager is more stupid then ever... and so on and so on.
To be honest, I do not understand why all this s..t happened. It's a nuisance that such wonderful project degraded to such a miserable condition.
I think the title of this thread is a bit harsh.
I would like to offer my user perspective and say I am very grateful we have a free open source OS in the first place! SO A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE HARD WORKING DEVELOPERS!!
I dumped Windoze 18 months ago and started out using Gnome. Had a flawless experience for 6 months and flawless distribution upgrades. I then really liked the look of KDE 4 and tried the 4.0 release. I struggled with that for 3 months - Plasma crashing, system freezing etc. I then moved to KDE 3.5.9 and loved it to bits...although on my system, there was still the occasional crash/freeze and it did appear to run a bit slower than Gnome. And with the Google Gadgets bar I was able to replicate some KDE 4 like features
I have had a look at KDE 4.1 now in Ibex and it looks nice enough but still a bit buggy as well. I wonder if the decision to cut KDE 3 should have been deferred until the 4.2 release???
So, for now, I have decided to go back to Gnome
It's great to have an OS that looks nice with 3D effects but the ability to do normal day-to-day stuff without performance issues should be the most important thing.....Vista is the perfect example of good looks but crap performance
I'm sure KDE 4.1 will work well for others, just not good for me right now!
And I am looking forward to the 4.2 release!
Thanks again for giving us a viable alternative to Windoze!
I have no connection to the development team at all. I have used KDE from the 2.x days and I am very happy with KDE 4.1.
KDE 4.0 really wasn't "Ready" and after trying it briefly I went back to 3.5. KDE 4.1 is a different from 3.x but IMHO it is now good different.
KDE 4.1+ is absolutely the future, great work Devs.
I think you need to be patient.
KDE 4.0 was a alpha release and KDE 4.1 is clearly no more than a beta release.
KDE 4.1.2 shows crashes all the time and lacks important features. And it is obviously slower than KDE 3 and not very responsive (at least if you have a Nvidia card, and even without the desktop effects). Also your laptop battery might loose over 25% of its capacity because of the switch (this is what I measured). Ok... This just means that KDE 4 may not be ready to please you as much as KDE 3.
Then wait! All these problems will be solved in time. Maybe in KDE 4.2 or KDE 4.3.
Sometimes I am also a bit worried because the developers do not seem to spend too much time on fixing the bugs and optimizing the code. I think the developers are excited about the new capabilities. Once this first stage is cleared, you will see improvements in your day-to-day experience. I believe KDE 4 has all the technology to be more pleasant and featured than KDE 3.