4.1 Release Candidate Out For Testing

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page.
KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The development in trunk/ in Subversion has already been opened for feature development, which is going into KDE 4.2 (to be released in January), but developers are strongly encouraged to concentrate on bugfixing in the 4.1 branch for now. Do give RC1 a spin, file bugreports and fix things, there is only a week left until 4.1 is being tagged. Do have your changes in the 4.1 branch reviewed by your peers, though. Note that some users might still be suffering from performance problems with NVidia graphics chips. There is a page on Techbase that gives some more information about it. Make sure you report bugs via KDE's Bugzilla so they can be addressed and do not get lost.

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Comments

by Morty (not verified)

Proper Python support for KDE/Qt libs are already present, so it's no problem writing Python applications for KDE. By all accounts the most comprehensive and up to date set of Python bindings for any desktop.

For Plasma I guess you have to wait some more.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I was actually referring to Plasma Python bindings. I know about PyKDE, actually I'm learning PyQt so I can actually use PyKDE in the end.

by Simon Edwards (not verified)

> so it occurred me, what bindings KDE currently support?

That info is on the 'base, (and even updated on the weekend. wow!)

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages

--
Simon

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

I have an important bug to report that has nothing to do with KDE itself.

Each time I want to install a new Plasmoid using KHotNewStuff2 (from within KDE itself), KDE says that it installed successfully the Plasmoid, but I can't use it. Later, I went to http://www.kde-look.org, and what I found was: no Plasmoid was in a format usable by the KHotNewStuff installer. All Plasmoids were in a beautiful source-code-state, with instructions as useful as "cmake -DI_DONT_KNOW_WHAT_THE_HELL_IS_HAPPENING_HERE; make install", or something like that.

Please, provide in your KDE-Look website packages usable by KHotNewStuff2. I want to try all Plasmoids out there! ;)

Thanks for your amazing release.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

kde-look.org is not run by KDE project members. You will have to ping the kde-look administrators for this bug.

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

OK ;)

Hi,

I´m running KDE-Look.org and I am a member of the KDE project. :-)

This is a known problem. Most of the plasmoids on KDE-Look.org are C++ applications. GHNS has to download this apps, compile them and install them. This is not possible and, of course, not a good idea.
The GHNS system becomes more usefull as soon as the python bindings are stable ad more plasmoids are written in scripting languages

Cherrs
Frank

by Michael "a way ... (not verified)

Would it be possible for people uploading plasmoids to KDE-Look to tell KDE-Look what language the program is written in? This would get rid of the problem (and allow for KHotNewStuff to check if the needed interpreter is installed ;).

by BogDan Vatra (not verified)

I just want to say I love you !

by furanku (not verified)

Hello

will be very happy to hear that ;)

SCNR

by JS (not verified)

-when moving applets around on the panel, sometimes the "Task Manager" takes up the entire space so you can't add anything else to the right of it

-it would be nice if the file transfer dialog would stop popping up in Konqueror ("Web Browsing" profile) when your opening links to pictures, text documents, etc

-Konqueror's search bar is gone. Is this avaliable as an extension?

-KGetHotNewStuff dosen't work when trying to download new plasmoids. Wallpapers/themes work however

-KGet's bittorrent plugin dosen't work. The status says "Stopped" and you can't do anything about it. Ktorrent works

-KDE people seem to have an obession with clocks but the digital clock placed on the panel looks so ugly. I miss the old one in KDE3 which looked like an LCD

Otherwise I love it. The KDM theme/Bootsplash looks great. I plan on switching to KDE 4.1 when FINAL is released.

Amazing job KDE devs!

by JS (not verified)

BTW I'm using Kubuntu 8.04.1 incase some of my problems are distro specific.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

Train station clock for the win.

by Michael "+1" Howell (not verified)

+1. I would work on it myself if I knew where it was.

by SVG (not verified)

I think it is at

(With subversion installed)

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma

or

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdeplasma-addons

Well, all plasmoids (that are not officially released yet) are being worked on these paths.

by Mark Hannessen (not verified)

I recently decided to try out kde4 SVN and i must say i am very much impressed with the kontact suite. everything works as a charm and the new look is very awesome looking.

it looks like the wait between 4.0 and 4.1 without the pim tools was well worth the wait!

thanks guys!!

by JC (not verified)

I gave it a try, after all the negative comments I read for a while.

And I must say that KDE4 is really impressive and faster than my 3.5.9 version.
For sure more work needs to be done on plasma, screen saver, but overall after working on it today, I won't switch back to 3.5

I'm impatient to see what 4.2 and next will bring to my desktop. I have made my coworker(using XP) more jealous than ever today.

Great job and many thanks to the KDE team !!

by R. J. (not verified)

thanks for all the hard work everyone has done to bring us this release.

by opensuse11.0 (not verified)

I allways used SuSE, but 11.0 is so great, it's so much faster (especially yast-package manager) and kde 4.x feels also much more robust than kde3 in relation to opensuse 10.3.
I feel like i have a NEW PC ! really! updating packages with yast is so quickly now. i wonder, if my previous installation/updates of SuSE 10.x and earlier were buggy! but all the updates in the past just run fine.

Features, look and feel of kde4.x is already more than usable!
believe me, i tried kde4 since 4.0.0, though, you might still need some favorite
kde3 applications like k3b or amarok. After 4.0.3 i switched to daily/weekly development snapshots. Lately, updates are rare.

by vf (not verified)

It still has a way too many (mostly regression) bugs (see bugs.kde.org).
Still no kprinter and khotkeys. I know that people are working on that but only one person is not enough for these flagship components of KDE. Many of us are using KDE because of it (and not gnome or something else). It's really sad to see that skilled developers are working on useless eyecandy and ignoring this.

And btw., plasma looks promising but is pain to use. It is designed for touchscreens, and majority of us doesn't have a one. Why we are forced to use applet handles? I want to use applets as every other window. Imagine if every regular window had had this handle for move or resize actions, who would use kwin. Alt+LMB for move and Alt+RMB for resize (and so on) would be reasonable defaults.

by vf (not verified)

I forgot to add... can someone update this list:

http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Feature_Plan

so we could know what's finished and what isn't (and move that to 4.2 page).

by sebas (not verified)

The page is up to date as far as I can see. A more condensed list of new features is available at http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Release_Goals

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

> It's really sad to see that skilled developers are working on useless eyecandy and ignoring this.

In a volunteer project, you can't demand people work on one system as opposed to another. People work on the systems they know and enjoy. The people developing plasmoids may not know anything about writing printing systems.

You can't assume/suggest that one is stealing development focus from another.

by vf (not verified)

Well, I know that it's a volunteer project, but if there's no more people that can work on stuff that was once essential part of KDE, then I'm not sure if they can expect a successful future of their project. :-/

by Anon (not verified)

*sigh* - welcome to every software project on the planet! Can people cut out the Chicken Little-ism, or at least make sure it's well-founded? People have been heralding the death of KDE for years, now, and it's just getting annoying.

by JJ (not verified)

Gwenview seems to have gotten some speedups, its quite fast now. Theres only one major problem: It won't show files without dots. aka "img12345" "img67890"... Recent digikam (kde3 version) has the same problem. Is this just a wrong setting, intention or a bug? Dolphin and Konqueror work as expected.

by meh... (not verified)

fill a bug @ http://bugs.kde.org/

by sebas (not verified)

This is not reproducable here. Are you using the latest -rc?

by JJ (not verified)

I nailed it. It was a nfs issue combined with gwenviews inability to show svg. All the files in the top dir were svgs and the subdirs were not getting mounted.
Digikam 0.10 from svn 834341 still bugs me. Files are local this time, just to be sure ;-) 0.9.3 gives the same result. All files without a dot "." in their names are ignored. In the configuration I have added "*" to the list. The same goes for ShowFoto, it displays the thumbnail but claims the image could not be shown. I will clear out my kde4 config and dirs and rebuild all modules to see if this bug stays.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

I noticed this in the 4.2 Feature Plan.

I'm curious what the plan for this is.

by Peter (not verified)

long time ago there used to be a early screenshot of this (I guess at Aarons Blog) and it appears to be basically what its says it is. A plasmoid that sits on the desktop at first starts and links to introductions and similar stuff.

by Morty (not verified)

Yes, and also as a replacement for the First Time Wizard from KDE2-3.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

For instance, when you install openSUSE and log on to your desktop for the first time, a welcome screen is shown with information about how to get updates, a link to openSUSE etc. It might be something like that.

by CondorDes (not verified)

"While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, ..."

I'm really glad to see this. Thanks for making it clear where KDE 4.1 stands.

For the record, I've been using SVN as my main desktop at home for a while now, and 4.1 rocks. Panels are now mostly-configurable, and folder view is quite nifty.

I'm looking forward to seeing what 4.2 brings.

by jorge (not verified)

Most be on the heads of developers but it would be great to be able to order Plasmoids in the desktop. Especially Folderview, and to resize them according to a grid so my desktop don't becomes a mess. Like 3.11 (yes its a joke :-D)

Love this kde 4... thing !!!! Really cool to use!

by cloose (not verified)

There is a Grid Applet in KDE playground:

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets/grid

by Ian (not verified)

I agree. It would be nice to auto-size the folder plasmoid to just show the folder name and to automatically expand when the mouse hovers over it or just click on it.

KDE4 is looking great now. Hopefully all those "supposed techies" that got their knickers in a twist over 4.0 because they could not read/comprehend may now crawl back into their basements.

by Matt (not verified)

>... It would be nice to auto-size the folder plasmoid to just show the folder name and to automatically expand...

A good analogy for that in real life would be suspension files in a filing cabinet and using the tabs at the top of the files to find the appropriate folder before opening it. I think this would be a sensible extension to the folderview concept, and as it has strong links to a similar workflow in real life it should be pretty easy for people to see how it could be used.

If the panes collapsed down into tabs like the BeOS window manager grouped windows (or the icons on the bottom of the Kickoff menu, or the tabs in Konqueror) this would reinforce the analogy.

Re: the GP post about Windows 3.1:

Until you mentioned it I hadn't thought of folderview as being a bit like the groups in program manager. I thought program manager worked well and missed it when it was dropped for Win95 (although progman.exe was still there if you looked for it).

That said, folderview is more featureful than program manager, but your comment has made me think of other ways of using the folderview plasmoid :-)

Does anyone know if the folderview plasmoid can minimise/collapse down to an icon on the desktop? (I guess this is conceptually quite similar to the parents suggestion).

by Bobby (not verified)

I have been thinking about that for quite a while now. I wanted to add it to the wish list but somehow didn't. That would really be great and takes up only little space on the desktop, in contrast to the present folder view. Folder view is a wonderful idea but it it doesn't look all that sexy yet.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

One thing I would like to see is better move/resize.
For example, if I cant to increase a plasmoid size that is on the left side of desktop, as I can't move the mouse more to the left (the plasmoid handler is on the left side), I have to move it to the right, then resize, then place it on the right place I want again.

I would like to see plasmoids inside kwin instead of this desktop-think where only folderview is usefull (to me). :)

by furanku (not verified)

Yes, I think resizing the folderview plasmoid is a bit problematic. I think most people want to have it fitting for the numbers of item in it. But when you resize it you cant tell when it has the correct size as the current view simply scales and the icons are not reordered during the resizing. So you end up with estimating the size, trying to keep that in mind, resize eth folderview and repeat that process until the size is right. Not quite an elegant solution.

Another thing is that it's a bit inconsistent as it scales around the center and not around one corner as "ordinary" windows do, you have to get used to two different types of resizing.

by Sebastian (not verified)

I agree that the Plasma desktop needs at least some basic DTP-like layout mode. For example, by introducing helpers, i.e. horizontal/vertical lines which are used to align the plasmoids ("snip"). And it should be possible to define a "reference point" for zooming/rotating/moving.
It bothers me as well that I can not arrange the plasmoids properly on my desktop.

But anyways. At the moment I like the way how the desktop looks on my machine - it is totally empty. And this is okay for the 4.1 cycle.

by David (not verified)

how can I disable the cashew? I don't have a touch screen.

by Morty (not verified)

Give one valid reason why you need to remove it, and I'll tell you.

by David (not verified)

Give me one solid reason why should I have it if I don't need it.

by Anon (not verified)

Because nuts are good for you.

by Morty (not verified)

It's already there and it's presence does not impede you in any way, removing it are superfluous.

by Sebastian (not verified)

Without wanting to give oil into some fire I have to agree with the original poster. As an engineer I follow the philosophy that a technology is optimal only when you can not remove anything without harming functionality. The cashew is NOT required in most use cases... And it is visually not very appealing. As you see, there is no reason to give crude answers to valid questions. But anyway, I am pretty sure that the KDE developers care and that they will find a way to remove it in upcoming releases...

by Morty (not verified)

As an fellow engineer I have to point out that your application of the philosophy in this case are flawed, since making the cashew removable would add functionality not remove:-)

My intention was not to be crude in my answer, only to get a reason why he wanted to remove the cashew. Any answer would have to fall in to four categories. Bugs in the implementation needed to be addressed by the developers, valid reasons for the developers to implement removability, missunderstanding or just joining the choir.

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

I recommend "relaxation". It helps! :)