KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released, Codename "Cnuth"

The KDE Community is happy to announce the first
Beta release for KDE 4.0
is available now. This release marks the beginning of the integration
process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the
now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications. Simultaneously KOffice have released the second Alpha of KOffice version 2. Highlights are improved text rendering and layout and the new Flake library. Read on for more details.

Almost two months after the foundations of KDE 4 have been laid with the first Alpha, KDE enters the stage of a full freeze of the library interface. From now on, the applications will focus on integrating the new technology refined during the last months, and the library developers will try to fix all bugs found during this process. No new applications will enter the official KDE modules and usability and accessibility work is an ongoing process. In the following weeks, KDE developers will be able to add features to their applications until the next Beta is released and the application features will be frozen as well.

The info page has the download links, including packages for Kubuntu, Mandriva and openSUSE.

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Comments

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

of course i can get the answer just after less then a month, the time for the next beta, but as i am impatient, i wanted it now ;-)
who will be shipped in kdebase, kcontrol or systemsetting !!! and i thought that raptor is the official application launcher, so what's about lancelot and kickoff and one more thing; did you know the name of ( to be coded) replacement of kicker !!!

thanks

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

The Kcontrol thing can be answered: no Kcontrol, so its gonna be systemsettings. Raptor, Lancelot an Kickoff: it's not decided. We'll see which one will be best when KDE 4.0 releases ;-)

Damn, I knew I shouldn't commit Lancelot to the svn... now everybody expects a kmenu/raptor/kickoff type of thing... as I've already mentioned in another .kde post, Lancelot is not planned to be a kmenu replacement - just a testbed for no-click interface for launching apps (and only for that)

by renoX (not verified)

While the press release talks about improved font rendering, the corresponding screenshot didn't impress much: the "blackness" of characterier is irregular: the 'y' in Kylie looks darker than the other character.. :-(

I hope that's because the screenshot was here to demonstrate the 'flakes' and that the font rendering was correctly set..

by renoX (not verified)

was correctly set --> wasn't correctly set.

by Robert Knight (not verified)

I think what the press release intended to say was better text layouting. The actual rendering of individual characters is still problematic as you can see (that is, they do not look sharp as they should).

The layouting is hugely improved over KWord 1.x with characters not jumping around all over the place any more. In fairness this was always a slightly system and font specific issue with some fonts working pretty well and others producing very strange results.

For the fonts I have tested, which includes the selection of free fonts that comes with Kubuntu, Nimbus and Gentium (my personal preference) and of course Microsoft's standards (Times New Roman, Arial etc.) the layouting of characters seems to behave much more consistently.

by boemer (not verified)

To be honest, only the text in the last screenshot looks a little strange. The fonts for the dialogs everywhere look very good...

We'll see when screenshots of KWord 2 arrive....

by chhchhchh (not verified)

KDE did a complete Switch from CVS to SVN ---- and from autotools to Cmake from kde 3 to kde 4

this was major work !!!

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

and DCOP to DBUS, and QT3 to QT4...

by Matt (not verified)

Well, they switched to SVN a while ago. I think it was sometime during 3.5, but it might have been earlier.

by Anonymous (not verified)

According to the screenshot they moved Konsole tabs to the top like GNOME. What next, switching Yes, Ok, Cancel buttons? :(

by Robert Knight (not verified)

> According to the screenshot they moved Konsole tabs to the top like GNOME.

That is actually an old screenshot. The tabs are currently on the bottom as per KDE 3.5

For users who prefer to have the tab bar at the top, or prefer not to have a tab bar at all there is an option for that as well.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Thanks for clarifying!! It's looking great otherwise... especially search highlighting. :D

by LordBernhard (not verified)

don't know if the button to create tabs in konsole is already there again (left corner on the bottom) (wasn't able to follow svn for a time).. but i really hope that it'll be there again... i really liked it (kde 3.5)

by Anon (not verified)

God, you people complain about the lamest things, and your slippery slope scenarios are hilariously dumb. "I tripped over my cat this morning. What's next - WORLD WAR 3?!".

Anyway, Konsole from SVN today had tabs along the bottom, just as it has had for the last few months. So I guess your apocalyptic "KDE is turning into teh GNOME!1" scenario will be delayed for at least a couple of weeks longer.

By the way - I would like to formally coin "Anon's Law", as of this moment:

"In any discussion of the progress of KDE, the probability of an (apparently unflattering) comparison to GNOME approaches 1".

"You know who else had tabs on the top of their terminal emulator, don't you? That's right!"

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

hmmm, Godwin's law but gnome in lieu of nazi, good idea to begin a flame war, i am just amazed at the idea if this discussion was on slashdot ;-)

i just like you guys.

by Anonymous (not verified)

The button order can already change depending on the theme ;) for example the cleanlooks qt theme rearranges the standard buttons

by LiquidFire (not verified)

You can move them... at least, in KDE 3 you can, and I doubt you wouldn't be able to in 4. Just right-click on the tab bar.

by vincent (not verified)

My only words are

thanks, thanks and thanks

by bigtomrodney (not verified)

Yep I have to echo those sentiments. Thanks guys for all the hard work, I'll be trying out Beta1 as soon as possible. Cheers ;)

by Joergen Ramskov (not verified)

++

I haven't tried the beta and I'm not even sure I will, but I really look forward to kde4, with all the cool new stuff it will have it can only rock!

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

...because this software isn't perfect right this second, and because it isn't everything I expected, then my life isn't worth living. Even though this is free software, and I haven't contributed anything, I am entitled to demand that the KDE team cater solely to my desires.

How dare they not create the perfect (in my opinion) OS over-night?

In fact, the KDE fairy should have created packages and installed them on my computer for me. I can't believe they expect me to get packages from my distro, or compile from source!

I'm going to go complain on Myspace at how betrayed and disappointed I am. I'm not sure I'll ever recover from this set back.

Nice fake :)
(I mean, I really like it, it's hilarious hehehe)

by Vide (not verified)

Errr, I think the link is premature, cause
1) the story isn't officialy out on Kubuntu blog
2) the packages in backports are simply not there...

I think we should wait some more days before we can update to beta1

by anonymouse (not verified)

yeah, that bug me too!

http://www.kde.org/info/3.92.php clearly states:
Currently pre-compiled packages are available for:
* Kubuntu
* openSUSE
* Mandriva

But you're stuck with the alpha packages (at least for kubuntu).
How about announcing binary packages when they're ready?

beeing just a little impatient...

by Jonathan Riddell (not verified)

Beta packages are available for Kubuntu Gutsy. Unfortunately the feisty-backports are being notably slow in the build daemons, but they really should be available this European evening.

by Vide (not verified)

Thanks Jonathan! apt-getting right now on Feisty! :)

by Acke (not verified)

"Due to Qt4, KOffice will have a native look and feel on all platforms"

Yes, great!

by Inge Wallin (not verified)

Haha, I knew that would please some people. :-)

by bert (not verified)

"After recently having started over with coding of the Oxygen style, things are progressing rather well. The old code of the style was ditched mainly due to negative feedback from code tested and reviewed at Akademy. Thomas Lübking, the original developer then (quite understandably in my opinion) got up and left. Unfortunately, many of the Akademy reviewers were reluctant to actually help in the effort of improving the code, and so the style was essentially dead in the water."

Oxygen - first the vision, then the excitement, then someone actually implements something and when the beta stage of KDE4 is reached someone admits a core component was "essentially dead in the water".

Maturity by curiosity does not work. Release early, release often. Make evolutionary changes.

A wonder if the same applies to the new plasma kicker. Finally someone will admit that there is no revolutionary concept and reveal a suse++ version.

Ah, didn't I read it: "..., and the Kickoff menu start to be ported to KDE 4."

Ay-he.

by Erunno (not verified)

Kickoff is not the official KMenu replacement, Raptor is (look for more info on it on Techbase). Since Oxygen had visible results for a long time calling it "dead in the water" is kind of a far-fetched statement but the quality of the underlying code seems to have been problematic as far as I understand it and warranted a rewrite to ensure it's maintainable in the future.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

Raptor isn't there yet, and I wonder if that one will be the final one. I'd say nothing is set in stone, and if Kickoff works better, it'll be the default for 4.0.

by Erunno (not verified)

This would be a welcome development. KDE is often attacked for its perceived lack in the UI department and I'm still confused to a certain degree why Kickoff was met with a lot of hostility although Novell really tried hard to back up their design decisions with publicly available usability studies.

After all, it would seem more logical to me to use a scientifically investigated menu and build upon it in future releases then introducing a totally unproven and untested application like Raptor is at the moment. I still have gripes due to the decision to develop Raptor in secrecy.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

To be honest, I agree. I personally prefer the current KDE menu over Kickoff, but also over raptor. And it just seems Kickoff is developed more in the open, and is really usability-tested.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

Can we cut the doom & gloom crap now?
I understood that this beta was released because kdelibs API are mostly frozen and because apps dev need to see where things are going. This is not for end users to have fun with it as far as I understand and has never been advertised as such.
KDE is getting a nearly full overhaul and this is obviously quite a bit of work, the less the devs need is people whining and complaining.
Wait for final release before complaining : this is not libquicktime or mplayer where a beta can be enough to get the job done, and that is not really surprising.
As for undelivered promises, even if they do occur, there's no one to blame : having great visions for a new version of a desktop is normal and the contrary would be weird to say the least. But it may happen that the vision is a bit too big for the decided time frame, so you have to fall back to Plan B for the time being. This does not mean that the whole vision is flawed, just that it will need a bit more time to mature. So what?
I'm really absolutely amazed by many comments in this news : watch your manners, please.

Right.

Anyone not happy with the progress of KDE at this point is free to switch to Windows Vista. I mean, with their thousands of full-time, paid programmers, MS was able to deliver on all the promises they made, right? Oh wait, they cut most of the innovative new features out before release.

It is possible to be constructively critical without being a dick.

Yes, it is possible to be constructively critical, but also to be
that way and get "do-it-yourself-or-turn-around" answers

In OSS most "in"famous cases are:
1)gimp and the layer styles/adjustment layers (lots of flame wars there)
2)mythtv and an option to disable the timeshift features
-(the funny about this is that devs sometimes say "it's the gazzillion time
someone ask this, but it wouldn't be anymore a PVR!" , without ever thinking
that if a gazzillion people need that, they'll move to elise or freevo just
because you can't hear....)
3)koffice and the file format filters, from time to time someone asks why
anything else is developed but this, when almost anyone has the need of this.

Also, please be serious, linux folks know that there are alternatives to KDE
without moving to Micros**t, like gnome, xfce,fluxbox....

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

I dunno about the first, but the third is simply about priorities and interest of developers. Getting the MS import filters perfect would mean a huge effort, and developers rather work on things THEY consider more usefull and fun.

Yep, a lot of people still seem to have problems grasping the difference between KDE 4.0 and the whole KDE4 lifespan. A lot of features where promised and from past experiences I'm reasonably sure that they will find their way into future feature releases in one way or another.

I promise I won't start bitching about KDE 4 until 4.1 is out.

by Gerry (not verified)

http://www.techshare-expo.com/

Organised by RNIB, (charity for blind), and Abilitynet. Opportunity for KDE4? Just a thought.