KDE 4.1.4 and 4.2 Release Candidate Available Now

The KDE community has made available two new releases of the KDE desktop and applications today. KDE 4.1.4 is the latest update for the KDE 4.1 series. It contains many bugfixes, mainly in the e-mail and PIM suite Kontact and the document viewer Okular. KDE 4.2 RC is the release candidate of KDE 4.2, also bringing new features and thousands of bug fixes to the KDE desktop and applications. KDE 4.1.4 is the last planned update to the KDE 4.1 series and stabilises the 4.1 platform further. It is a recommended update for everyone running KDE 4.1.3 or earlier.

KDE 4.2.0 will be released on January 27th and is considered a significant improvement over the KDE 4.1 series. The beta announcements have all the details. Enjoy our releases, and don't have your head explode when choosing which version to upgrade to.

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Comments

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

KDE 4.2 is my home now, and I'm not planning to look back. Thank you!

by txf (not verified)

drat! no suse packages yet...

The suse repos are usually so punctual. I'm surprised packages aren't in yet. I thought tagging was done early so that packages would be ready when released.

by Burke (not verified)

check KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repositories, I guess they are in there.

by sebas (not verified)

Yeah, we screwed Beineri on that one, unfortunately. We wanted to put out -rc rather quickly to give it more time for testing. (Some days ago meantime, we said we'd put it on the shelf until Thursday, but it was just easier to put it up quickly.)

Work on OpenSuse packages is under way though, as I've heard.

by binner (not verified)

Two reasons:

- Despite the planning on the release-team list for the last week to have the 4.1.4 and 4.2rc1 releases NOT coincide but have 4.2rc on Thursday, the release was suddenly on Tuesday evening pushed forward two days to Tuesday night (and final 4.2rc1 release tarballs were available on Tuesday only too).

- The Build Service started to suffer heavily from its own success yesterday: the schedule server is regularly running out of memory ("only" 8GB RAM available atm to calculate $WORLD's dependencies) and is starting new build jobs only very delayed. This could not be fixed on Tuesday anymore.

by R. J. (not verified)

Well, I'm grateful for all the work the OpenSUSE team does, so waiting means nothing.

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Yes, indeed! And the build service is so very, very useful in itself, too.

by richlv (not verified)

will there be a supported or semi-supported way to use 4.2 on opensuse 11.1 installation ?
thanks for the work on kde, i was surprised how usable 11.1 with kde4 actually was ;)

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

[email protected] and #opensuse-kde on FreeNode give you as much real support as the KDE 4.1.4 packages released with 11.1 have.

Since we're continually developing the next version of openSUSE, it makes sense to get people using our packages of the newest releases of KDE so they get bugtested early.

by harry (not verified)

Although I really like the fact that the openSUSE guys have provided KDE 4.2 in the repos, I've got just one single request:

Please, please, pleasssse provide KDE with it's default theming. KDE 4.2 does look so much better with default Oxygen than the current Aya theme.

I can imagine openSUSE would want to brand the desktop. That's not a problem. I can live with the lizard as the menu button, but the Aya theme is just plain ugly.

Regards Harry

by unbob (not verified)

I agree, and the same goes for Mandriva, although their theme looks a little bit better than the openSUSE one.

I wouldn't mind using Oxygen with some green-ish tints to it or something, but the default openSUSE/Mandriva is downright ugly compared to default KDE.

by Giovanni Masucci (not verified)

I agree...Anyway I have to add that aya improved a lot in kde 4.2...it's really better to my eyes...in opensuse 11.1 I'm a little embarassed to show the default installation of kde4.1 because it's really ugly. :)
Not so anymore with 4.2 packages and the new aya...
That said I REALLY hope that openSUSE switches to kde 4.2 upstream plasma theme...in an ideal world i'd like a coherent visual experience with upstream from poweron to poweroff, exept openSUSE brands (kmenu, opensuse logo in a OXYGEN styled bootsplash and so on)

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

Last time I checked, Oxygen doesn't recognize the system's color settings though. It would be nice to have a well designed theme that looked sharp, and yet also respected system color settings.

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

A default theme must either obey system color settings or the user should be able to change its colors. A theme with fixed colors that cannot be changed shouldn't be the default because users will be pissed off (they could be changed even in Windows 95 after all). OTOH it may be cool as optional.

I don't think Aya is ugly (or uglier than KDE 3 or classic Windows or default GNOME), it is just not "cool" but more "traditional". And in KDE the consistency and configurability should be prefered over eye-candy, although unfortunately we can see the opposite in some places in KDE 4.

by binner (not verified)

Packages for 11.0 and 11.1 are meanwhile available.

by Andrew Stromme (not verified)

The Kubuntu Jaunty packages are being built as we speak.
http://launchpad.net/+builds

Hopefully they will be done in a few hours. I'm on beta2 and am quite excited for the RC.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

I think the only ones we are waiting on now are the amd64 packages. (The amd64 servers are being a bit slow today...)

by Martin (not verified)

This worries me a lot:
amd64 28 builds waiting in queue
crested AUTO Idle
yellow AUTO Idle

I have 30+ kde 4.2 packages being marked to remove because they all depend on kdebase-runtime which still isn't bumped to 4.1.96. And both amd64 machines are idle?

by jay (not verified)

thanks to anyone making this happen ( :

by NabLa (not verified)

There's a conflict between kscreensaver-xsaver and kscreensaver-xsaver-extras that prevent one of them to be installed (a file belonging to both packages), other than that installed and working fine :)

by NabLa (not verified)

Sorry, I forgot to mention, this is on 8.10 packages.

by Fri13 (not verified)

The KDE 4.2 will be the state what persons who are not familiar with computers can use as desktop.

There is great new features and most important thing... more features ;-)

I currently have a 4.1.96 version (>Beta2 4.2... It will rock more.

If Aaron Seigo saw this in his dreams when the muse was bringing the Plasma idea to his brains... and the community could share that idea and actually make it happend (and build it even better ;-) ) It was very badly explained to normal users what to wait ;-)

by sebas (not verified)

> unique wallpaper for every virtual desktop

You can get that by putting a line perVirtualDesktopViews=true in your plasmarc. It's an experimental feature we've implemented that doesn't have a configuration UI yet.

by Fri13 (not verified)

To what location it should be placed? To first [Containments][101] or just end of file? I really would like to test this ;-)

by sebas (not verified)

You seem to be looking at plasma-appletsrc, while it's in plasmarc.

Try the [PlasmaViews] group. (I didn't use this yet, so I'm relying on 3rd party information here ;-)

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/kcfg/plasma-shell-desktop.kcfg implies that it's the [General] group. (Create it if it doesn't exist.) Unfortunately, the only effect that I can see is that the background image is now indeed no longer shared by the desktops. The other desktops, however, are empty and I didn't yet find a way to add other backgrounds there.

This is the last major reason why I hadn't yet switched to KDE4. (Well, and the fact that I don't know yet if I can use konsole in a sane way -- full size without decoration, but not in "fullscreen" mode. I still want to be able to use the autohide panel and switch desktops while I'm working with it.)

by Fri13 (not verified)

"Well, and the fact that I don't know yet if I can use konsole in a sane way -- full size without decoration, but not in "fullscreen" mode."

You can. I maximised the konsole window, disabled the border via Alt+F3 and then set konsole never show tab-bar. Then I enabled the auto-hide to panel and I got "fullscreen" konsole with panel coming top of it when moving mouse bottom of screen etc... needed to made a profile for it ;-)

It is nice to get the TTY feeling when having all great functions from konsole.. and KWin effects ;-)

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

Ahh, thanks. I had used a different method in KDE3 with dcop commands, so that I only had to type "fs" in a konsole window and it would do the necessary stuff. Under KDE4 dbus seems rather limited: I could figure out how to maximize the window (qdbus org.kde.konsole-$pid /konsole/MainWindow_1 com.trolltech.Qt.QWidget.showMaximized), but not how to remove/restore the decoration. Of course, doing it by hand is better than nothing.

by Fri13 (not verified)

Mayby you could do it totally automatic.

Set Konsole profile the tabs etc and then set the profile to have own unique name on it what the window is called. Then make the KWin profile for that unique name what you gave to profile. Store both profiles and add a konsole profile-manager plasmoid to desktop what launch the wanted "fullscreen" profile, what gets set as correctly with KWin ;-)

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

I had tried that, but this works only on newly created windows, which isn't enough. I'd really prefer a complete set of DBUS commands for KWin. One can't do much with what's available now.

by Anon (not verified)

File a wishlist, giving a complete list of those you require and the affect they should have.

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

Err ... KWin operations have a defined effect, so there's not much to describe. But meanwhile I've added the missing DBus methods myself. So for me it's just one script command in a konsole, and it goes full-size without decoration and menubar, or back to normal. /me happy now. :-) (Yeah, I'll submit it.)

by NabLa (not verified)

Speaking of being proactive :)

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

about plasmarc -> [General] -> perVirtualDesktopViews=true

I also had to adjust the respective [containment]s manually, setting desktop and screen to subsequent numbers, and added [Containments][*][Wallpaper][image] entries (the latter of which was probably not necessary). Now it works! :-)

by sebas (not verified)

> unique wallpaper for every virtual desktop

You can get that by putting a line perVirtualDesktopViews=true in your plasmarc. It's an experimental feature we've implemented that doesn't have a configuration UI yet.

by WOW, that's REA... (not verified)

that's REALLY nice. :)
Thanks for the tip and congratulations to all kde developers for this great release! 4.2 is going to rock.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

"but I am already looking forward to 4.3'

yeah, so am i =P

"If Aaron Seigo saw this in his dreams when the muse was bringing the Plasma idea to his brains..."

honestly, we're about half way there. there are a few more fundamental pieces missing, but we're getting there at tremendous speed.

the ability to send widgets across the network between machines, timelining, social networking, a design studio and a few other bits and knobbles ... nothing a few more lines of code can't cure ;)

" and the community could share that idea and actually make it happend (and build it even better ;-) )"

that's been the joy of plasma: other people have happened along, looked at it, "got" it and then dove in and made it better than i ever could have alone. our community is beyond great.

by Fri13 (not verified)

So this would be possible http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/record-plasmoid?content=97428 for someone to make right now or does it has features what still is missing on current plasma?

I heard on #kde someone saying (actually readed, because IRC does not transmit the sound... yet) that Phonon layer only support playback but not recording.

I have trying to find nice and esay application to allow user to do video journal with their laptops (webcam is almost 100% integrated top of the screen) or sound journals. Because I did not find one good application for that, I tought what if someone with skills could do that as plasmoid if plasma just would support it. So, there it is hanging waiting someone.

The Plasma idea is still "missing" from some people but soon when they understand that plasma is not just the widgets and plasmoids... it is the desktop itself. They will got it. For me it looks that KDE4 really is braking the old habits of desktop usage.

by Giovanni (not verified)

Please could someone, especially with an intel graphic card, test this?
With desktop effects on, and folderview as a desktop background tra to move icons on the desktop...especially selecting them with the rubberband...in my kde 4.1.87 installation this lead to 100% cpu usage taken by kwin/xorg. Then everything become dog slow until moving is finished...sometimes kwin even kills composite because it was taking too many resources...moving icons on the desktop should not be so cpu expansive and this wasn't happening in kde 4.2 beta2.
I don't know if this is fixed in 4.2rc1 and I cannot test this, since I'm not with a 4.2rc installation at the moment...if somebody conferm that the bug still exists I'll be happy to report it in bugs.kde.org

by RG (not verified)

I've test this on my dell inspiron latop with intel graphic card, effects enabled. When I move icons selected with rubberband... it's a bit slow but it works. xorg & plasma 14% cpu.

by Giovanni (not verified)

that's probably because inspiron has a better cpu than my netbook atom.
I'll report the bug, but I'm happy it's not such a serious one for people with a fast cpu. :)

by Anonimous (not verified)

My Printer( brother HL 2150N ) no print ebooks :(. In Kde beta 2, it does.

by SONA (not verified)

WOW! The RC is incredibly fast now! Thank you very much, thats great! It all works fine now!

by vf (not verified)

In my previous dot comments I wrote about bugs, missing features,
questionable plasma functionality. Although none of stuff I mentioned were fixed or
explained and my KDE still looks like this:
http://dot.kde.org/1229613785/1229633767/1229634780/1229638970/122970453...
I won't talk about it, but rather about how good KDE4.2 looks.

Look at the attached screenshot, in hardware kcm in systemsettings, it shows only a few lines of information and there are so many empty space that content doesn't fit in, so vertical
scrollbar is required.
On the other hand, in Kate there's no content at all
but we have dead scrollbars. Probably devs want to show us how great they
look.
Why is there so much empty space around menubar, toolbar, statusbar?
Look at the kate's edit menu. Why is there so much empty space on the left, right
and between the items? Some of us don't have 1900x1200.
There's a image loaded in okular but you maybe didn't noticed it because you
can barely see where interface (toolbar, sidebar) ends and content starts.
Kate does that better.
Finally look at the highlight color, it's yellow, and in plasma taskbar it's
blue. Inconsistent, looks very unprofessional.

Still not there...

Regards!

by Dude (not verified)

4.2 is awesome!

btw.. I also hate the empty space around menubar and another problem is the column width! A lot of programs doesn't have a useful column width (e.g. akregator) IMHO a no go.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Yes, since Oxygen was released I complain about that, and this is the reason why I use KDE 3 on my Asus eeePC 701 :-(
But this will not be solved just by changin the theme to something smaller, all programs should focus into using less space, otherwise KDE4 will be used only in bug LCD displays (my computer @home does it).

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I actually find KDE 4.2 quite usable on my Eee PC 900.

by vf (not verified)

Imagine then how much more usable would it be if they would remove all that dead space and unneeded scrollbars. It would be as if you had 1-2 inches bigger screen. Or don't imagine, try something else and see how much more content fits in the screen.