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 Luca Beltrame (not verified)

The fact is, I'm happy with KDE 4.2 even on my Eee, and there's no compelling reason to switch (I don't like GNOME and now I can't stand 3.5.x anymore).

by vf (not verified)

Sad thing is that some people will accept everything no matter the quality of the product. It doesn't have nothing to do with KDE (some users even like (old) gtk2 file dialogs!!), I see it everywhere. Others call them fan(atic)s. :-)

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

Call it whatever you want. I've actually increased my productivity with a proper use of ZUI, Plasma and activities, I'm enjoying also the other KDE applications I use often either for leisure or work (Dolphin, kopete, kontact, krdc, Amarok 2, kate, gwenview, digikam KDE4 beta...). The only serious non-KDE app I use is (g)vim.

P.S.: I've been using KDE since the 1 era.

by vf (not verified)

"increased my productivity with a proper use of ZUI, Plasma and activities"

How? Use case example?

On my desktop computer plasma and whole KDE4 is very slow, like when you play game with old gfx. card and have only few fps so with KDE4 it's more UI waiting then actually being productive. So event if they fix most bugs and add missing features I would be less productive.

"P.S.: I've been using KDE since the 1 era."

Seems that you didn't use much of old KDE features. There are some people that use them, people who wrote script KDE to do things faster. I cannot do that in KDE4 thus I'm less productive.

by Luis (not verified)

Your computer is irrelevant for the world. I mean, I can't run KDE 4.2 in the computer I easily run e17.

I WILL COMPLAIN!

Come on, boy.

by Nuno Pinheiro (not verified)

Oxygen just freed up the space now we need to take control of that space.
we need you and more people to go thrugh all the aplication Ui's and make it shine, its not an esay task couse of the huge numbes of use cases out there and all the implications change brings.
"Finally look at the highlight color, it's yellow, and in plasma taskbar it's blue. Inconsistent, looks very unprofessional."
No it is not yellow its blue :) just like plasma.

by vf (not verified)

It's easy, just reduce empty space between all widgets (buttons, *bars, menubars). Maybe some people like it as it is, but for us with smaller screens I would like to see oxygen-compact, like this:

http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/

"No it is not yellow its blue :) just like plasma."

So plasma now follows color scheme of oxygen style? That's new to me, I didn't read nothing about it. When was that feature added? Must be very recently.

by T (not verified)

You should be a bit patient! That last post was only Dec 19, when 4.2 was well on its way to finalization. One doesn't make intrusive changes so late in the game.

I'm an open source developer, but I'm not a KDE developer, and in any case I can't speak for how other people plan to spend their time :-). But I'd guess that the usability team might appreciate your help (you seem to be thinking carefully about usability), and that if you volunteered you might indeed see some of your suggestions implemented for 4.3. Just keep in mind the fact that there is a definite rhythm to releases, that "issues" are more often due to a lack of time than any nefarious intentions of the "devs," that it takes _much_ (much!) longer to fix issues than it does to point them out, and that a small amount of patience will make the process less frustrating for everyone.

Everyone knows there are still problems---that's why a KDE 4.3 is planned, after all---but the developers, packagers, artists, documenters, translators, media people, and everyone else who has contributed to KDE4 should be justifiably proud of how far they've come. Get ready to party!

by vf (not verified)

I'm patient. I voted for some KDE4 bugs well before even 4.0 was out. They are still open.

"if you volunteered you might indeed see some of your suggestions implemented for 4.3"
I commented a lot about plasma for more than a year...I was ignored. I opened a bugreport about huge menus, it got closed as WONTFIX.

I'm also going to party... because debian still has 3.5. ;-)

by slashdevdsp (not verified)

one method is to "change the show text below icons" to "show text alongside icons", to conserve vertical space :)

by vf (not verified)

Good that you put smiley. :-)

I could also set in kco^H^Hsystemsettings that all apps use small icons in toolbars. Oops, I can't. That's broken since KDE4 technical preview 1. :-)

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

Which bug report number?

by vf (not verified)

You mean numberS (as this is frequently reported). You can find the number of the first bugreport (back in 2007) here:

http://dot.kde.org/1229613785/1229633767/1229634780/1229638970/122970453...

You actually commented on my post which included the bugreport # few weeks ago. :-)

by slashdevdsp (not verified)

I hope you can contribute with issues like this early and help in getting rid of them :)

by vf (not verified)

I'm not going to report bugs about obvious issues. If devs cannot spot them, then they have some bigger problems than those issues.

by hias (not verified)

well, do you remember that some time ago people complained that comments on digg were broken, but no one filed a bug report because it was so obvious. do you know what, no developer visited digg, so it didn't matter how visible it was because no developer ever saw it.

what if the developer use a very high resolution? then the empty space would look very small. so if you really want it to get solved, then you have to point the developers to the problem.

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Well, it's not necessarily a common issue. People like you and me like things borderless and with no spacing. I use a 1px maximum border on everything and typically a zero pixel border and a frame based window manager. As a result, casual users typically have a hard time finding something on the screen even when I'm pointing it out to them. It seems that the white space we both dislike is necessary to organize screen elements and focus attention for many people.

I'm likely even more aggressive than you regarding removing white space (I don't even tolerate *any* window decoration and just get rid of windows entirely), but I do think that I'm decidedly not who should be catered to if people have a hard time finding words and icons I'm physically pointing to with my finger while describing them.

I also don't think my "Super-W Ctrl-A Backspace Ctrl-ESC S Enter kcd" to jump to the directory open in the Konqueror tab to the left in the running Konsole session is appropriate for most people either, although it rolls off my fingers and I'd hate to give it up. That said, I'm happy that KDE allows me to configure my system so I can do it that way. I'd imagine some aggressively compact styles will appear as options for those KDE4 users like you and I who want to render their applications that way. I'd just hate to see them as the default.

by SVG Crazy (not verified)

Why some people keep saying KDE is not ready because of the widgets style? If you do not like Oxygen or think Oxygen takes too much screen space to use it, just change it. There are QTCurve, plastique, bespin and some more. The widget style itself is not an issue to stop using KDE, since there are some more available, just choose one that fits your necessity.

I think Oxygen is indeed in a very good share now. Because of the following:

* KDE 4 is only one year old;
* There is a few number of coders working in Oxygen now;
* Coding a widget style can be a VERY VERY difficult process (Believe it, I tried it myself). You have to practically draw everything you see on the widget in C++.
* Oxygen is indeed BEAUTIFUL right now. Has its issues, but it will be solved as time goes by.

I thing these "problems" in Oxygen will be solved, but it DOES take time. Coding a style, once more, is not an easy task nowadays.

So please be patient of simply change the theme.

by vf (not verified)

Actually most of issues I reported in my comment will still be present even if you change style. Just try it yourself.

by txf (not verified)

then this almost certainly an issue in qt...

by vf (not verified)

Some of them yes, but some are not (e.g. unneeded scrollbars in kate).

by knue (not verified)

I also think that there are some layout issues. I filed some bugs for them.

by Chaoswind (not verified)

Nice development. Sad that no (for me) important known bug is fixed yet :(

by slashdevdsp (not verified)

Kde 4.2 is rocking hard, I am impressed :) Thanks for all the hard work you guys
My my kde 4.2 screenshot gallery below: http://www.imagebam.com/gallery/c2b1855e780164f08450069f8c6024c2/

Don't wet the keyboard guys :p

by Alejandro Nova (not verified)

I've posted my own at http://www.linuxchillan.cl.

Coincidently, I've listened all day to a pop song called "Aire" that would say something like this, in english.

"Air... I dreamt for just a moment that I... was... air... Oxygen, nitrogen and argon... without a definite form..."

Perfect song for the Air wallpaper and the Oxygen theme, I think ;)

by mdl (not verified)

how can i try it on fedora 10?

by plupla (not verified)
by Damnshock (not verified)

This release is AWESOME. I don't have words to describe the tremendous advancement there has been done in many apps and the desktop in general. Have you seen kmail? It is... WOOOWWWW And kopete's notifications look very "sweet"

And a lot of bugfixes! The key bindings seem to work much much better ( they actually work ;) ), akregator no longer "forgets" the columns arrangements, kopete does not eat 80% of my cpu cycles anymore as neither does strigi nor nepomuk.

More advances... finally dolphin keeps thumbnailing on the background while looking at images in a folder, this is somethings I've been missing for a long time!

Well, I can be here writing endlessly! I was happy with KDE 4.1 but this gets over my expectations on KDE 4.2!

Well done KDE devs, *tons* of thanks from a very happy user from Barcelona!

by tpwm (not verified)

Thanks to all the developers, this is indeed very nice. Just installed it on my Dell Mini 9 and it works great. The Animations are much smoother than with 4.1. So many little things have improved, really great.

by R. J. (not verified)

Out of interest, I prefer using the unstable branch from OpenSUSE, it was rather interesting watching KDE 4.2 coming together. Does anyone know when 4.3 will start?

by Anon (not verified)

8 days ago ;)

by R. J. (not verified)

thanks for your reply, i guess it hasn't made the opensuse unstable respo yet

by txf (not verified)

they are probably going to wait till after 4.2 before they start updating unstable

by Øyvind Sæther (not verified)

I am curious as to when KDE project leaders plan to release a stable version which can be used by the general public.

A whole range of bugs which have been present since pre4.0 are still there.

I've filed a few bug reports after updating to 4.1.96 (KDE 4.2RC) already. Some of the bugs I were going to report were, as expected, already reported. That so many of them were reported long, long ago really is quite sad.

Isn't it time to perhaps get a stable version which can actually be used out in the near future? Will KDE 4.3, scheduled this summer, be another pile of more eye-candy, more bloat and more new bugs without any old bugs being closed - like KDE 4.2 RC?

I use GNOME as my desktop now. Mainly because I have two monitors on two seperate graphics cards - which works in KDE 3.x, fluxbox, ion, metacity and EVERY OTHER WM. But not KDE 4. Didn't work in 4.0, still doesn't in 4.2. Just way to much other very basic functionality..

by Anonymous (not verified)

Are you talking about two seperate X sessions, one per screen? I've got that going with 4.1. Or the same session spanning two cards/monitors? That one I haven't tried yet.

by Øyvind Sæther (not verified)

One X session with screen 0 and 1.

by Phil (not verified)

I had that working perfectly well on 4.0.5. Not needed it on 4.1.x (only have one monitor now).

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

Do you have any idea of how many bugs have been fixed for 4.2?

Could you point us to the bugreports for those very important remaining bugs? (appart from the fixed multi screen bug)

by Mark (not verified)

I am still using KDE3 as my main desktop. I have just installed the Kubuntu packages in my parallel install. This looks very good. It is the first installation which appears to be very stable from the beginning. If that first impression continues, I will switch.
Two questions:
- Is there anything about data and settings migration from KDE3.5 to KDE4? So far I did not stumble on that topic. I can not believe that this is totally without problems.
- Is there a possibility to have different content on both screens in a dual monitor setup?

by Simon (not verified)

I just installed RC1. My big surprise is how fast Konqueror starts up, a big Wow!!. Now I am thinking seriously about using Konqueror as web browser instead Firefox. Browing speed is also much more faster.

I am very impressed. I also tried Kmail, which is also lot better.

4.2 is indeed faster than 3.5.9 installed on the same machine.

Great jobs! I can't wait to put the final release of 4.2 on.

I've thought of using Konqueror, but for me the reason i moved from opera, years ago, to firefox was all the addon's. Is there any addons for konqueror?

Some of the addon functionality are default in Konqueror, but yes there are addons too. They are called plugins/extettions, they and the interface they use have existet since before there was a Firefox.

what would be better would be if you could firefox addons in it.

I thought the plugins were rather weak, which is why I continue to use firefox

by wanthalf (not verified)

KDE 4.2 is great and I finally switched over and am quite happy. But there are still bugs. I came across even more of them than in Beta2:

- no more font size setting in the Plasma Digital clock in the panel? why?
- local time 00:00? I had to choose a particular time zone or else the time did not update at all...
- trying to set color scheme for desktop theme crashed the settings and they crash now whenever I choose the whole desktop theme settings module again
- the Kate session selection applet still cannot handle sessions with non-ascii characters, but when I start kate "without arguments" and choose the session from its own selection dialogue, it works well
(- I won't speak about some desktop effects (Desktop Sphere, Blur, etc.) they probably just don't work on my bloody Nforce FX Go5650 with only 64MB RAM)
(- oh, and of course the bloody un(re)movable useless cashew-ghost, that always pushes my gkrellm out of the upper right corner (when in dock mode) after logging in, even if I use "ihatethecashew" applet to make it disappear... well, you can customize "everything" in KDE, but this spook will probably stay there even when you switch over to Gnome...? even when I turn off the computer? ...sorry, I am probably just getting a new KDE nightmare... nightcashew... scary!)

There will surely be more of them than what I noticed immediately. But - since I have heared some opinions - I am not sure anymore, what is supposed to be a "feature" and what is a real bug.

by anon (not verified)

some of these are distro related.

I have no problem with time in opensuse, and hey, no cashew either, thank you opensuse

changing colour scheme didn't crash for me in opensuse.

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

That 00:00 bug has been mentioned once. Somebody said it was a fixed translation issue.
Can you report a bug with the backtrace of your crash? with debuging symbols please. thank you
Desktop effects should work with your graphics card, if you have the proper driver installed.
The cashew can be dragged to another location if that helps. If the cashew is disturbing another application, like your gkrellm (don't know what that is), you should report a bug, with screenshots of the problem if possible.

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

I agree that the cashew is an abomination and the usability of it is even worse: If the bloody thing is so darn important that it has to be there all of the time then why are the menus - if you finally are pushed over the edge and try to interact with the things offered - popping up behind windows that happen to be in close proximity?
But that is just a small annoyance (I have a 2 line patch that removes the cashew once and forall - I have a monitor with dynamic contrast adjustment and the cashew botches the contrast for one area of my screen - but I can't hope to get that in place as the main developer is so fond of the thing)...
There are important bugs though that make using plasma and kwin a nightmare:
#172615: Utility windows broken - yepp, they truly are!
#177025: In GIMP default install not all windows are picked up by taskbar and alt-tab switcher. This makes the default install of GIMP unusable but for the developer this is working for him and he (un)duly closes this bug! It's mainly another facet of #172615 but those two together hinder any real use of the GIMP unless you customize the window behaviour - I dare a beginner in KDE and GIMP to get that to work without help from someone who has a clue what's going on there - and there are not many that have such a clue.
#177319: Group popup grabs the mouse and will not allow switching to another window as long as you stay within the confines of the taskbar. This is supposed to be a bug that Qt-Software is aware of. Well I have searched the bug tracker there high and low and I can't find a single reference that might be related - so the bug persists but it is deferred (and closed as such) to the upstream developers without any reference what priority or status this has there!
The annoying thing is: You run into blocks if you report bugs in plasma. In other areas of KDE you report bugs and get decent responses from the developers and they ask you if you still can confirm if the bug has been squashed for good.

by Jamboarder (not verified)

Could you file a bug report for changing the desktop color scheme, please? I haven't encountered this problem and didn't see a bug report for this.

Thanks

by wanthalf (not verified)

Thanks to everybody. Yes, the problems are probably merely distribution-related. Maybe the colortheme too:
$ kcmshell4 desktopthemedetails
QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
Object::disconnect: Unexpected null parameter
KCrash: Application 'kcmshell4' crashing...
But still it should not crash because of this. (Sorry, I do not have debug info in my binaries by default, but if neccessary, I can recompile... Maybe this will be enough to find the problem?)

And yes, there are more annoying problems - like kmail deleting all my account settings from time to time (probably during logout, I guess).

I use Nvidia binary drivers, 173.14.15 at the moment. Quite slow (especially rolling yakuake up and down or resizing windows, but quite OK for the rest of things), but the more complex effects probably trigger the old out-of-memory bug (black screen), which has never been resolved really _completely_ by Nvidia, if I understand it well. Anyway playing video through Xv is also not really flawless when compositing is on, but switching fullscreen and back a few times usually helps to make it work (show, at least - in addition, the playing gets sometimes teary and complains about lack of resources with some movies/codecs). Should I expect something better from my hardware/drivers?

Oh, the bloody cashew is movable, at least! Thanks, I somehow did not notice! Yes, it helps to move it to the other corner. Well, gkrellm just always started in the corner (in its old position), but when the cashew got activated a second later (even when using 'ihatethecashew' plugin) it moved about 60px away from the screen edge. (gkrellm is an old GTK+ system monitor, still more compact and comprehensive than any KDE/plasma monitor I've seen until now, unfortunately)