KDE 4.1 Released, Dedicated to Uwe Thiem

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications. Make sure to take some time to read through the high-level changelog or even the more detailed feature plan on Techbase. Before you try KDE 4.1, please read the KDE4 End User FAQ and make an educated guess whether KDE 4.1 is for you.

The release is dedicated to KDE's contact in Africa, Uwe Thiem. Uwe passed away after a kidney failure two weeks ago. Africa's new press contact for KDE is AJ Venter, a friend of Uwe's who stepped up on short notice to help with filling the gap Uwe's death leaves in the KDE community.

Meanwhile, KDE's Release Team scheduled a number of bugfix and translation updates. KDE 4.1.1 will be made available on September 3rd, 4.1.2 will be out on October 1st, and 4.1.3 will be there on November 5th. KDE 4.2.0 will in 6 months, the release date is set to January 27th 2009.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

are you sure it's a memory consumption issue?

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

No :)
You know, it is a bit hard to find out exactaly what is causing the slowness, but I'm running (when I have time) a series of tests to try improving things, so I can document it for other users on the ubuntu-eee.com page.

First thing I did was to disable neopomuk semantic thing I hate [personal taste here, nothing to complain] :) It helped a lot.
Then using top, noticed that all the 512 MB of RAM where being used, and little of it was desk cache, so KDE4 on ubuntu uses a lot of RAM and this is not a good thing for speed, but moved forward to next test.

As the machine is slow/small, desktop effects where disabled by default, so it's not the culprit. Again, move ahead.

Opened a Dolphin, once open, memory does not matter that much, so it should behavre more or less well. No, it does not! When I simply move the mouse from a folder to other (the nice blue rectangle on the folder changes to the other). WOW, SLOW like hell! I'm talking about 3~4 seconds to change the focus from one folder to another. Maximize/restore window is slow also.

And then it was sleep time :)
Today I plan on using other theme than oxygen to see how things goes.
If any KDE developer want access to my eeePC to test, I'll gladly set up ssh and vnc for it or run more tests, just mail me (protomank at gmail), I'm here to help [we are all getting a bit more mature, aren't we?] ;)

by Anon (not verified)

I've found that KDE4 uses *massively* more X-server memory than KDE3, primarily due to the double-buffering of widgets performed by default in Qt4. With tabbed applications like e.g. Konsole, you are quite often looking at several MB *per tab* of pixmap usage that wasn't used in KDE3 and, since only one tab can be visible, this amounts to simply wasting 10's of MBs of memory for no improvement whatsoever. It's a pretty serious problem, IMO, and one that very few KDE devs seem to appreciate as far as I can see.

by Ego (not verified)

You shouldn't generalize so easily. My eeePC 701 runs 4.1 (even trunk) quite fine. Even the desktop effects work, but due to slow scrolling in Konqueror I usually disable them. Overall memory consumption after login is ~130 MiB and rarely greater than 400 MiB (paging is disabled). I should add that it is a Gentoo build with a heavily patched 2.6.25 kernel and an almost pure Qt4/KDE4 system (e.g. there are no Qt3 libs).

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

In my case I'm using an ubuntu-eee with custom kernel, but that build is not *that* optimized, that's true.

by Fri13 (not verified)

"-Digikam with kick ass nepomuk integration"

digiKam does not have Nepomuk integration, it had many years now own search/metadata functions and mayby in future versions we get Nepomuk too. So currently it use own kind and nepomuk does not exist.

by Jeffery (not verified)

I've been using KDE4 on and off since 4.0a, and the rate at which it is improving up is nothing short of astounding. I knew had potential back when it barely worked, and it's really showing that potential now. Way to go, KDE devs!
Release day being my birthday, I'll count it as a present - thanks :D

by boudewijn rempt (not verified)

Many happy returns of the day!

by Judd Baileys (not verified)

Happy Birthday!!! And KDE4.1 is an awesome birthday present.... On my birthday, Windows 95 was released in Australia (Aug 24) :(
Thankyou to all the KDE team, and to all the KDE users who have made this such a great desktop.

by TomiF (not verified)

What a great work!!!!!!!
Congratulations to all responsible guys !!!

by Markus Wichser (not verified)

When I try to run a command and press ALT+F2, the dialog appears minimized on the taskbar and there is no way I can maximize/move/resize it in order to see it. This started to happen as soon as I activated the composite option in xorg.conf.

opensuse factory packages / intel graphic card.

by Med (not verified)

I had exactly the same problem. When compiled manually everything works fine. I guess the problem comes from an opensuse patch. In general the manually compiled version works (for me) incredibly better than the opensuse packages. I guess this will get better over time.

by Jean (not verified)

Are you sure you need to dig about in the xorg.conf file? At least in the opensuse11 series I have not had to touch xorg as it autodetects 3d abilities and just enable wobbly windows etc through the 'configure desktop' tool. I note there is a specific problem when I enable the blur option in kwin effects but it's just eyecandy so I don't miss it.

[NB, To back out of an effect which has messed up your desktop just use ctrl-alt-F4 and login as the same user and disable it in the ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc file. Then switch back to your crashed session ctrl-alt-F7 and logout of it by pressing ctrl-alt-backspace twice quickly, then log back in]

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

By "factory", do you mean the openSUSE Factory repos (i.e. what will become 11.1) or the KDE:KDE4:FACTORY:Desktop repos for openSUSE 11.0 or 10.3? I'm using the latter for openSUSE 11.0 and didn't notice such issues.

by taerde (not verified)

i can confirm the krunner problem with the kde 4.1 packages from KDE:KDE4:FACTORY:Desktop repos for opensuse 11, and i am using the nvidia proprietary driver. also, the device-list does not show up when i click on the icon in the taskbar, and the calendar does not appear when i do a click on the clock.

when switching off the kwin-3d-effects, everything works fine!

by Yogesh M (not verified)

Thanks to all the kde developers out there; many many congratulations on this release. I'm using 4.1 rc and already loving it... looking forward to 4.1 final...

by Alex Medina (not verified)

KDE 4.1 really rocks.. thanks to all developers who made this possible :D

by thothonegan (not verified)

Thanks a lot for 4.1! Been running the dev version for a while; its a giant improvement from 4.0 and will only continue to get better!

by Lucianolev (not verified)

I'm just here to say: THANK YOU!
KDE 4.1 is a great release, a big thank you for every person which makes this possible.
Keep on rocking :)

How come that there are still TODO and IN PROGRESS items on
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Feature_Plan
Why don't you move them to 4.2 page or remove completely?

by SadEagle (not verified)

Lots of these are functional in 4.1 already, just don't have the full extent of functionality.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

The dev's probably didn't have time to update that page yet...

by Christophe Durandeau (not verified)

Congratulations to all the contributers. KDE4 is really full of inovations, and a great desktop.
I'm using 4.1 since RC1 and every day it's a pleasure.
Only one thing that is not fixed in stable version. In dolphin, when cursor is moved over an avi file, dolphin still crash !!! Any solution to fix the porblem ?
Thanks.

by Annonymous Chicken (not verified)

The trunk version of strigi had that fixed ( maybe 2/3 weeks ago), although distros ship official strigi. My suggestion is update to a more recent one because I think they had that fixed in the last version.

by Annonymous Chicken (not verified)

Forgot to add, if you don't have a new version available or it doesn't fix the problem, you can just disable the Information panel, and the crashes stop.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Is 0.5.11 recent enough? Because that's the most recent release I'm aware of, and it's being pushed to Fedora 8 and 9 as an update.

by Annonymous Chicken (not verified)

According to bugzilla, seems that one is enough : http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164296

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Still have some problems here and there, but the pace of improvements in KDE4 series is incredible. If it keeps this way 4.2 will surpass 3.5 series and 4.3 will simply be the turn point of free desktop.

by Oscar (not verified)

As promised I'll add a little money that I can spare to KDE. Thanks for a great release (that I'll have to check out soon).

I'll give 10€. Anyone care to match it?

by Tim Carr (not verified)

Thanks to the Devs!

Keep up the good work!

KUDOS!

"Matched" and Increased with $20 USD (~12.85 EUR)
Another Match?

by killer1987 (not verified)

thank you very much guys! hope this time people will appreciate the work done by the KDE team! keep it up this way!

by David (not verified)

Really. A lot of rough edges have disappeared and a lot of new features have been implemented!

Congratulations!!

And

Thank You!!

by Sascha Peilcke (not verified)

Awesome release, keep on rockin' in the free world!

by Me (not verified)

What happens with this graphic card?

I can't manage to make the kwin effects work although direct rendering is fine (glxgears worls perfect). Always that black screen. In the kde bug page is tagged as resolved, but, i'm know i'm not the only with this problem.

That graphic card is also tagged as "buggy" in the compiz page.

I bought this card because the 3D drivers were open, and now this :-(

Where is the bug?

About 4.1.

For me is nearly perfect. I miss k3b, amarok, kmldonkey and kaffeine kde4 versions, and, perhaps the most important: something to control the laptop power (powerdevil is perfect, simple and exactly what i need).

By the way, i'll spend a few minutes to write 5-6 bugs or requests, once per each program. I've realized that when a software is configured, the menubar (archive, edit...) is not needed. This way, with CTRL+M, i hide that menu. This works with dolphin, konqueror, genview, kmix, kget, konsole.. but not with others: akregator, juk, kmail... as part of KDE, i think that that option would be present.

Bye!

by Sebastian Sauer (not verified)

KDE4-version of KMLDonkey is available since 4.0.0 times. See also http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kmldonkey/

by Tom (not verified)

I have a similar problem. Since some SVN days before the desktop effects with intel 965gm are very very slow. :((

by Milan (not verified)

Me too :-( But it's all right with the KDE 3.x.x on OpenSuse 11.

by Stephan (not verified)

the same here.. slow scrolling in konqueror or other apps.

by Sebastian (not verified)

The same here with NVIDIA. Now I know what users where disappointed with: Using glxgears the frame rate dropped from 8600 to 280 frames per 5 seconds while updating from KDE 4.0.4 to 4.1.0. Wow! For the next time I need to downgrade and wait for better NVIDIA drivers. Very sad - 4.1 looks very promising aside from that.

by J (not verified)

No problem here on my Dell m1330. The graphics chip was originally blacklisted because it apparently caused compiz to crash sometimes. I removed it from the blacklist (google it or go to ubuntuforums.org) and I'm not really seeing any problems. KDE 4.1 with all the wizbang effects work great!

by Tobias (not verified)

Could anybody tell me where one can get all these promotion images used in this announcement? http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/

by cheko (not verified)

Take a look at Wade Jolson blog:
http://wadejolson.wordpress.com/

or his Picasa folder:
http://picasaweb.google.com/wadejolson

They are really awesome!!!

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

There are a LOT of KDE3 apps that are not being ported or never will.
Here is one idea, what about if we set up a page with some usefull apps from KDE3 that are not actively developed, with a voting system, so anyone can look and see most wanted apps, and maybe adopt them to port to KDE4?

I can create the site, if anyone is interested.

by Martin (not verified)

Sounds like a good idea. You should link here, of course: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KDE4_Porting_Guide.

What would be great is if you were able to build a community, that could collectively flesh out a "for dummies" version of the porting guide and also help people along with porting apps.

by Andre (not verified)

And those fancy screenshots with multiple screenies next to each other, with a bit of a reflection that is being used now? I know I have seen a blog or something about that some time ago, but searching planety did not turn up anything usefull. Screenshots are just too abundant...

by sebas (not verified)

It's Ariya's small app "screenie", a small Qt application. I've hacked a bit on it to make it fit my purpose and workflow better. Find more info at:

http://ariya.blogspot.com/2008/06/creating-fancy-screenshots-with.html

by André (not verified)

Thanks! That was what I was looking for indeed :-)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

All right, I'm starting it. Will try to be as more generic as possible, so we can use the system for anything.
Surely it will be an open source project hosted at sourceforge ;)

I was missing creating something fun like that in PHP/SQL for a while :D