Markus Mauder: A First Look at the Unreleased KDE 4.0.0

Markus Mauder on his blog posts a look at the soon to be released KDE 4.0.0 complete with screenshots and a review of some of the significant changes. "I hope you enjoy this preview and come to share my opinion that KDE 4 is going to rock!" He also has an album of screenshots on Picasa that expand on the ones in the article. The big release happens on Friday, join us in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate.

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Comments

by Cavendish Qi (not verified)

A KDE friend in China had translated it into Chinese:
http://linuxdesktop.cn/2008/01/07/kde4-preview-2

by bull (not verified)

It is a bit like KDE 3.1. New graphics and blink but lack of coherent "style". This will emerge later.

(e.g. the plasma panel look is a bit prototypish, the KDE Icon is just too large, proportions don't fit)

The concept of the KDE 4 cycle was non-evolutionary. It seems to me the times of these development models are over and KDE 4 is now a solid base for the future.

by an user (not verified)

Wow, like KDE 3.1? Already? Not kde 3.0 ?? So we already have a BIG improvement here! ;-) Just joking, I agree with you about the solid base for the future, but for now: look at how the windeco nicely blends with the style's background! hear the OxySounds! enjoy the OxyIcons! and Feel the OxyFeeling!!
People I showed the KDE 4.0.0 desktop were really surprised and appealed ;-)

by Anon (not verified)
by newgargamel (not verified)

Yes, you are right! I linked the old article...

by Koko (not verified)

yeap, thanx to Korneliusz from jarzebski.pl KDE users from Poland had almost one solid KDE-svn review per week :)‪

by pcp (not verified)

The article at http://jarzebski.pl/read/kde-4-rev-758000.so is a very fascinating read (and it was cool to hear the log-in and log-out sounds). For those who can't read Polish, the author was very happy with many new aspects of KDE 4.0 (such as Oxygen) but discussed a few things that could especially see more work for later KDE4 releases (I translated the major things in the list, sorry in advance if I got anything wrong):
*KDM hasn't really been touched
*More oxygen windeco configuration would be nice
*No way yet to change the size and position of the bottom panel
*No ability to change the position of applets on the bottom panel
*The grid of icons isn't very flexible yet in terms of size and spacing
*Few config options for Phonon
*Not enough options in System Settings yet.
*A lot less effects in KWin than Compiz (my note: but at least KWin is more focussed on useful effects than just plain bling, though a cube would be awesome).

As you can tell, these were pretty expected and understandable omissions, given that 4.0 is the foundation release and the developers are spread very thin. It'll be cool to gradually see all these things drop off the ToDo list as KDE4 enters later releases. Great work people!

by Stephan Sokolow (not verified)

Sounds like fair complaints. My main one concerning KWin is that I really want to see the group-and-flip plugin ported from Compiz. I can't stand compiz, but that would be very nice to have for KWin.

by Vide (not verified)

I think that the the only "real" complaints are those about KDM (which is a pity it hasn't been touched, but I understand why) and Plasma issues (which are going to be fixed in the future). the "not enough options" on the other hand is a good thing, IMO :P

by ciasa (not verified)

not _enough_ of anything is, by definition, a bad thing. I would assume what you really mean is that fewer unnecessary options cluttering up the windows, which is a good thing.

by Max (not verified)

Yea I miss much of compiz too..

Hopefully somebody will write a plugin for compiz, or port the rest of the features from compiz over...

KDE 4.0 looks gorgeous for now.. Very cutting edge. and - dare I say - Web 2.0 :D

by KDE User (not verified)

Impressive.

by nuno pinheiro (not verified)

Not sure it does now, but we realy want to make it beter than that and all the rest.

by Bobby (not verified)

It will beat Vista because Vista will be the same in the next 4 - 5 years but this is just the beginning of KDE4. Already KDE 4.0 has quite a few features that Vista can only dream of not to mention it's speed and the small amount of resources that it needs when compared to Vista.

by Terracotta (not verified)

Not that I don't love KDE as much as the next guy, but from my experience KDE 4 is way slower than Vista, last time I checked was KDE 4.0 RC2, perhaps things changed. But you are right, this is just the beginning, most of the good stuff is yet to come.

by Anon (not verified)

What have you been smoking? I'd really like some of that stuff.

by anon (not verified)

Not exactly a civil answer (im not the one you were answering BTW).

by Pascal (not verified)

I can confirm this. I'm on a Intel Core Duo 2.0 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM and 512MB Nvidia graphics card and the graphics are lacking.
I'm hoping this is a specific problem with my hardware, because otherwise a lot of people will be suprised. It may also be the kubuntu packages that have problems.
I tried this with post-RC2 packages.

However, I'm sure this issue will be fixed quickly or may allready have been fixed

by Allan (not verified)

I don't see that. I got a completely new high-end laptop last week shipped with Vista. Vista is pretty slow, but at least it realised that itself and auto decreased eye-candy. KDE 4 on other hand is completely smooth.

by Dirk (not verified)

Perhaps there's something wrong with your setup or the machine is crippled by the shitware bundled by the vendor. My laptop is one year old and Vista runs on it like a dream. Granted, it has 2GB of RAM.

by mschnide (not verified)

Like on my laptop.

But KDE4 in a chroot environement is much faster than Vista.

It's great, has some bugs, but it is not yet released (in 2 days ;-)

Great work !!!

by sebas (not verified)

KWin is snappier and smoother on my ATi AIGLX than on my nvidia system -- So I suspect driver issues with nvidia.ko. Once KDE 4.0 is out and becomes more 'mainstream', I hope NVidia will sort those issues out. They have been responive in the past fo far ...

by Michael Thaler (not verified)

If you have an NVidia graphics card, try adding "export KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK=1" to your .bash_profile and .bashrc. This should make compositing smoother and faster. Without that KWin with composting enabled felt quite slow on my system (not moving windows, but switching from one window to another or from one tab to another). With this, switching windows or tabs became much quicker.

by Robert Knight (not verified)

> I'm hoping this is a specific problem with my hardware

I have seen at least a couple of bug reports about poor performance on NVidia hardware. Apparently the very latest NVidia drivers remedy the problems somewhat. If you haven't already got them, please try them and see if there is any change.

by Jesus R. Acosta (not verified)

perhaps debug compile mode ...

by Max (not verified)

Hope not.. Vista is sloooow....
Even on faster systems...

Hopefully it'll add more color by the final release... KDE 4.0 feels a bit too black and white so far. Guess that's the style these days.. Thanks Apple!

At least it's cutting edge. :D

by Bobby (not verified)

Funny enough I didn't like black or dark themes before but KDE4 does it in a way that it really looks very attractive and it's easy on the eyes.

by Crabby Crab (not verified)

You are not a Jedi yet.

by a.c. (not verified)

I saw Dragon player and forgot that it was codeine. I was thinking that it was an interesting game.

by Dolphin-fanatic :) (not verified)

lame trick ;]

by Maximilien (not verified)

Hi there,

I just wanted to highlight a few things that I consider as mistakes in the oxygen icon set, and especially on this screenshot : http://picasaweb.google.com/mmauder/KDE400/photo#5152345685276228690

- The arrow buttons (go back/go forward) don't fit at all with the others icons. They seem to have been taken from a bad GNOME icon set... :/

- The trash is not really usable, since it is just too hard to see if it empty or not. Furthermore, because the colors are exactly the same, it seems to be part of the hard drives.

- Why are the hard drives inclined, and the usb key all vertical ? I mean, they are all volumes, so why not make them look similar ? I would be far more intuitive.

To finish with, I would like to focus on this screenshot : http://picasaweb.google.com/mmauder/KDE400/photo#5152342502705462338

See the splashscreen window ?
-Why does it have square black edges on the top coming out of the round white outline ?

- Why does the white outline suddenly disappear on the right side but continue on the left side ?

- Why are the bottom edges square while the top edges are round ?

That's all I can say for the moment. The rest of Oxygen is just great :)

by Tray (not verified)

Insightful comments! Try adding them here so that the devs don't overlook them:

http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Oxygen/StyleWinDec

by Maximilien (not verified)

That's done :)

by James (not verified)

When alt-tab works I'll consider playing with it some more. All I do now is update the new version from subversion and compile it up once every few days, confirm alt-tab still doesn't work.. remove .kde, reload, confirm alt-tab doesn't work again then decide it 'aint worth it.

by Thomas (not verified)

what's not working with alt-tab? It's supposed to change the current window/application, isn't it? That's exactly what it does over here. Is there any further functionality missing?

by Bille (not verified)

It's likely kded4, which handles the global shortcuts like alt-tab, is not running for him. Alt-f4, ctrl-alt-del etc then would not work either. The output of "qdbus org.kde.kded" should include "/KdedGlobalAccel". If the service does not exist or doesn't include that interface, something is wrong.

Since it generally works, I would try logging in with a clean user (or $KDEHOME) as there could be some user config left over from pre 4.0 development versions within $KDEHOME that is causing the problem.

by fredde (not verified)

Nah, it's the same thing here, qdbus org.kde.kded do indeed include /KdedGlobalAccel, and this is with a clean $KDEHOME. No shortcuts work.

by fredde (not verified)

looking at the service settings, it reports it as not loaded, so how do i get it to load the god damn thing? ;)

by vl (not verified)

Alt-Tab does not work for me either (most of the times).

- after deletion of "old" RC2 install and fresh "1 Click install" from OpenSuse last night.
- kded4 is indeed not running at startup (please - anybody - is there a trick?)
- after kded4 is started manually from konsole command line, all services are working; however short-cut's are not
- system configuration->advanced->services correctly report that the global short-cut server is not running; but also the "start" button is grayed out
- I got it to work few times by changing some short-cuts, but not repeatable

--> any suggestion for
1) get kded4 running from start or finding the kded4 start-up log to debug the problem
2) "ungray" the "start" button in system config -> advanced -> services
3) activate global short-cut server

Otherwise KDE4 rocks! It is fast, nice, and I working with it and can do "almost" everything with it.

by James (not verified)

No as I mentioned in my post I do rm -rf .kde4 before restarting KDE and it still won't work.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

Interestingly I have the same problem but I haven't reported yet because I am not sure it's some misconfiguration on my part rather than a bug. Where could I ask for assistance?

by Chaoswind (not verified)

So, after KDE4 ist finally coming in an first version, the only things that bugs me is: where can i get it? I'm using Debian Sid(ux) and officialy, there are only the Experimental-Version, which override KDE3 :-(

by Hans (not verified)

Be pantient. See that banner after the article? ;)

by Chaoswind (not verified)

So what? Will every person on this planet wait until the KDE-Project puplish KDE 4.0 official, to distribute their work? Hopefully not. I don't wanna fall ins the rushhour ;)

by Hans (not verified)

Well, you can do as Markus Mauder and build KDE4 from SVN. Find more at http://techbase.kde.org.

by a. spehr (not verified)

Yeah, it turns out to not be that hard, especially if you're running sid, since that has all the right library versions you need. If you're running something older, I suspect it is more work.

by Tempura (not verified)

Could take longer than waiting for binarys ;) Also, the Update-support sucks.

by Bobby (not verified)

Alternative is to switch to openSuse ;)

by Chaoswind (not verified)

Bad Joke. I Killed OpenSuSE yesterday on my Test-System @work (again), because of the horribly behaviour.