In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
"I think it's up to compiz fusion develepers to make sure kde4 "integrates with, or works well with Compiz fusion", not the other way around."
That's what the KDE developers said, which actually makes sense but will they (the compiz guys) go the extra mile? I mean they have Gnome and compiz-fusion is actually a Gnome application so why bother with KDE?
Compiz-Fusion is far ahead of Kwin4 when it comes to eye-candies but the effects in Kwin4 are much better integrated. An example is running Kaffeine with Compiz-Fusion turned on. You will get a funny looking green line at the top and the pictures delay when playing some video formats. This doesn't happen when using Kwin4 and one gets the KDE system sounds! Which you don't get when Compiz-Fusion is turned on.
I would love Kwin4 to get a bit more of Compiz-Fusion's eye-candies with it's very good integration instead of using Compiz on KDE4 but I think it will come over time. Like they say: patience is the name of the game :)
Well, what you want is much easier too - Compiz effects are just a few hundred lines of code each, pretty easy to port too. On the other hand, all the cool stuff in KWin and all it's power would be almost impossible to port to Compiz, so the KDE dev's clearly choose the smart route.
compiz has more eye candy effects, but KWin has lots of practical functionality that's missing from compiz. Adding practical functionality to compiz is harder than adding more eye candy to KWin.
Which distro has dropped KDE?
Maybe he has confused Ubuntu's KDE LTS with them dropping it which is not the case. Canonical is simple being careful because KDE4 is still in early stage, which one can understand.
I think that they will do the same when Gnome finally sees the light and decides to do a clean up and go 3.0, which by then KDE4 will be more than mature. Distros would be stupid to drop KDE because it's the more beautiful and advanced of the two popular open source desktops and I don't see that changing in the future.
Personally i'm deeply impressed by the state of KDE4 allready. It's simply amazing what a group of dedicated developers, translators, and other way involved people can do, mostly in there free time!
Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (the gnome edition) on some free space on my laptop. This, because this release is said to be the most polished Gnome experience at the moment. I fiddled around a bit, using f-spot, some multimedia apps, and evolution. I was confused allmost all of the time. KDE 3.5.8 is, for me, by far the better desktop. KDE4, in it's current shape is, to me, also better. Sure. there are some things left to be desired, but overall, the look and feel is imho so much better than current Gnome. And this is just the start! Remember, this is v1.0 of the KDE4 series!
When KDE 4.0.0 is released, it will receive critics, i'm sure. People tend to focus on what's wrong, not what's better. I really, really, really hope this will not discourage the people involved to leave in bitter disappointment. Just be prepared for it and keep informing people of the reasons why KDE 4.0.0 was released. I see it as a "developers release", It gives the dev's of third party apps a solid ground to work on to port their apps. I really hope that Gnome users, eager to try KDE4, will not back down when using KDE 4.0.0.
I would like to give all you guys a very big thumbs up for all you've done so far and all you will do in the future. There come's a moment I will get involved. I'm playing with Python/Qt4 now and I like it. Speaking of the future, I can't finish this without at least giving my personal top3 wishlist for 4.1:
1. PIM (kmail needs to support HTML sigs and nice background and that kind of stuff, just to make my boss and my wife happy :-). Make it "cool" again!
2. Konqi. maybe webkit isn't such a bad idea. Give us a choice of render kit (khtm, webkit, etc). I'm working with ampache 3.4-beta right now, and it won't play nice with konqi. I filed a bugreport, but the dev just plainly refused to fix it, because he states konqi is "seriously broken".
3. KNotes should get tomboy like functionality (without mono please :-)
Again. Thanks for all and keep it up!!!
Nice post. I hope that the developers will read it and let it sit in their heads. People will bomb them with criticism on the release of KDE 4.0, some of the critics will even be coming from people who never used KDE but the devs should keep their goal in mind, the goal to make KDE 4.0 the most beautiful and powerful desktop ever!
They are already on the right track, all that they have to do is keep it up.
I can't imagine KDE 4.0 winning over critics necessarily, but I think it might win over developers. KDE 4.x will win over the critics in time.
Agreed guys (and girls, of course); great job! Now that 4.0 is coming out and stabilising in distros, I'll be able to target that platform with my meagre code, and I appreciate that too :)
Enjoy the release party -- you've more than earned it :)
One thing everyone can do, be they developers or not, is to monitor the tech review sites and make sure to be active in the comments sections to correct errors of both fact and perception.
If we all make an effort to be polite and provide links where possible it will surely help up the signal side of the usually pretty poor signal/noise ratio a lot of these sites have.
Support is here... who should we carry? :)
Start with Aaron (or should I say aaron?) - with all the sh*t he got over himself during the last months, he can use some support.
My best computing experience is KDE 3.5 along with KWin 4 to enable compositing (I have tried Beryl earlier which refused to work even with the right X config). Does anyone have experiences regarding this combination? All I know is that locking the session does not work (unless I replace KWin 4 with KWin 3 before locking).
I've used KDE 4's kwin in KDE 3 for a number of months, and in general it works fine, including kdesktop's screen locking.
I just use compiz-fusion over KDE 3.5.x and I'm very happy with that. Better performance, and more effects than KWin 4 at this point.
Compiz-fusion is much more mature than Beryl.
Hi everybody,
I'm using kde4daily and I noticed that the desktop is unlikely settings. It seems impossible to maintain a similar appearance to the present and, for example, no way to add applets to the Deskbar or create another (like Mac)
Are there plans to improve this aspect?
Thanks a lot.
you can add widgets to the panel by dragging them from the widget chooser to the panel. works well for some, not so much for others.
It works fine
works well for some widgets I meant, some don't scale correctly.
Oh, yes. It Works.
Sorry and thanks. 8 years using KDE and I feel like a novice :)
Don't be sorry.
The discoverability of the feature is extremely low.
Hmm, interesting to read aboubt Glimpse and libksane, it was on my todo list for this year to look at something similar, I think Alex Merry had simlar thoughts too (I even wrote a very basic library implementation last year). So a couple of quick questions for the author (forgive me for not e-mailing, I´m on holidy in a net cafe).
1) OCR. Kooka has probably the best OCR interface in FOSS, any plans to include these in Glimpse, or is that too advanced for the Glimpse concept?
2) The use case I most want to see is the following. I can fit 3 or more photos on my scanner at once. XSane allows me to batch queue the scans, but the various parameter levels (brightness, contract, aut-levels, etc) are not recorded separately for each selected scan area, instead the same settings are applied to all queued jobs. It would be great to have Glimpse remember and apply the settings separately.
3) The other use case discussed in the past is a more basic Copier utility, a simple GUI mode that has 3 simple buttons for Save, Copy (i.e. Print), and Fax.
Do you envision libksane replacing libkscan in kdegraphics eventually? I´m glad to see it supports more of the SANE features than libkscan. I´ll have a look sometime soon and see if I have any other suggestions.
Cheers!
John.
Apparently you do need to email the author ;-)
Hey, last week I said oxygen theme was geting nice, and one week later, I don't see any remaining glitch from the past. Good work.
Unfortunately, I can't find how to use oxygen in my to many unported yet KDE3 apps, they look uterly alien.
I just hope next update will bring as much improvements in KDE that it did in oxygen, only litle is missing for me to switch, hope you had time to achieve it ^^
KDE4.nearly0.0 looks so beatyfull and polished, I can't wait for the very anoying bugs to be squashed so I can reliabely use it
on bealf of the oxygen theme team I say thanks. Its was alot of efort. Alot more polishing will be going on in the next releases. But I must say we are very happy on its current look. "not perfect but as good as we could get it to be"
For what it is worth, I don't think the existing Oxygen work reflects the true brilliance of your initial mock-ups. But great work either way!
Yeah, I think it's very awsome. And I think that we have a very good theme here - much better than Plastik from KDE 3.5.
I really hope that the Oxygen team would spend more time and make it the best theme ever - already now it's pretty awsome :)