KDE 4.1 in the Press

Our latest release, KDE 4.1, has had a great reception in the media so far. The KDE Promotion team has been collecting articles and blog entries, and put them together. Very interesting reviews have been published, and we thought you might want to read some. There are reviews in English, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese. If we missed one, feel free to add them to the comments below.

Comments

by velum (not verified)

Which distribution do you recommend me to test if KDE 4.1 suits my needs?

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

openSUSE 11. It ships with 4.0.4, but you can easily update to 4.1.

by chuck (not verified)

I tried kubunutu and fedora. While I like the backend of kubuntu better, OpenSuSe does kde4 the best.
try opensuse 11 first, it's really a nice distro.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Fedora 9, a few days from now, when the KDE 4.1 update goes stable. (It's currently in updates-testing.)

by Simon (not verified)

Is it correct though that the Fedora 9 KDE 4.1 will lack (KDE 4 version of) KDE PIM? Or is this an issue that is fixed before the push to stable?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

It's not an issue, it's fully intentional. Fedora 9 shipped with kdepim 3.5, upgrading from 3.5 to 4.1 is a major upgrade which breaks several things, especially dependencies of other packages, but there are also some reported bugs which we hope will get fixed before the Fedora 10 release (which will be the first to include kdepim 4).

You can get kdepim 4.1 for Fedora 9 from the kde-redhat unstable repository. (You'll also have to pick up the kdeutils from there, because kdeutils in F9 also includes kjots from kdepim 4.1, because kjots used to be in kdeutils until 4.0. The kde-redhat unstable package of kdeutils doesn't include kjots, it's shipped in kdepim 4.1 instead, which is where upstream includes it.)

by Oscar (not verified)

Mandriva 2009?
I've tried their "beta" and it's really good. Well worth checking out.

When I've made sure that the programs that I need are availible in opensuse or mandriva I'll switch my laptop to one of them. Kubuntu isn't what it could/should be.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

openSUSE doesn't have everything in their main repositories, so sometimes you need to add additional repositories. However, I've found there are two great tools to locate these packages.

http://software.opensuse.org/search - that will search all repositories, and provide you with an RPM download, or a 1-click installer for what you need.

http://rpm.pbone.net/ - this should cover everything else. It is a big, global RPM search.

by guy (not verified)

Also this search page, http://packages.opensuse-community.org/ Useful as it also includes packages in the massive http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/11.0 repository. And for 1-click mp3 support etc.. http://opensuse-community.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE-Community.org>opensuse-community.org

by madpuppy (not verified)

you are right, mandriva 2009 beta is the only one that hasn't pissed me off when it comes to working right. they do a good job polishing releases.

by anon (not verified)

it all comes down to a person's view. Personally, I've never had a problem with openSUSE. the only real wayt o find a distro, is to try all of them and settle with the one you like the most. To ask which is the best, just leads to this constantly boring slam of other distros. But hey, it's what the linux community does best, slam microsoft, slam different linux desktop environments, and slam different distro's. I find it is the one thing that stops people I try to convince to come to linux, the constant in house bitching in the linux community.

by Bobby (not verified)

Same here. I have tried a lot of distros but kept coming back to sweet Suse. I love the flexibility of openSuse especially during the installation and 11.0 is simple great. It's stable, fast, very reliable and is the most KDE friendly Linux that I have used up to now.
But like you said, it's a matter of personal taste. I have heard a lot of positive things about latest Mandriva release for example but I haven't tried it as yet, just because i am satisfied with openSuse.

by Jake (not verified)

Versio 4.1.1 (KDE 4.1.0 (4.1 >= 20080722)) "release 38.1"

from openSuse's repositories today ;)

by NabLa (not verified)

I've had no trouble so far with latest Kubuntu and KDE 4.1

by Oscar (not verified)

Is there a KDE4.1 for Kubuntu7.10?
I can't really leave 7.10 since I use something called BankID which didn't work with Firefox3/Java in 8.04 and I need that to get money from my bank.

Would love to use KDE4.1 in 7.10 though.

by Yves (not verified)

Hi

better upgrade to a more recent distro and install firefox manually, that will be easier than installing kde 4.1 manually... :)

by yman (not verified)

I think FF2 is available for Kubuntu 8.04.

by ac (not verified)

reeally any distro but Kubuntu. They are doing a really bad job nowadays :(

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Like how? Everything's fine for me.

by anon (not verified)

Hmm, I can understand that if you look at just one distro you don't see the differences. But kubuntu is certainly making lots of little mistakes that make the experience worse.
If you want to compile a 3rd party app against the kubuntu shipped kdelibs all instruction pages fail you due to the different prefix. On top of that the headers require a newer cmake version than the one shipped.
I've been told font rendering is broken wrt hinting; the same actions lead to different results from other distros.
And thats just the two things I learned recently *after* switching to OpenSuse myself.
Not sure if you are the jonathan from kubuntu; don't take this personally! Just without a Q&A department mistakes will be going through to the release and the uses will suffer.

Its just depressing to see people walk away from kde because printing doesn't work and then to discover that if you install opensuse cups actually *does* detect all printers flawlessly.

There comes a time when the distro ships KDE in such a way that, honestly, they are no longer helping kde.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

> Not sure if you are the jonathan from kubuntu

That is Jonathan Riddell.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Having a different prefix is not a bug. Most instruction pages I've seen use the Kubuntu prefix anyway. The lastest cmake should be shipped in the KDE4 PPA along with the rest of the KDE 4.1 packages.

Fonts... honestly I'm not an expert, but they look fine here to me. Bug reports would be appreciated rather than having whispering rumors going around the interwebs that Kubuntu craps up fonts.

I do happen to be a Kubuntu contributor. (Though I am not Jonathan Riddell, who you are probably thinking of) We do actively look in to bug reports we receive and fix packaging bugs on our end. But if we don't receive bug reports for these kinds of things... People insinuating that Kubuntu is hurting KDE more than it helps doesn't help either. :( I seriously don't think anything Kubuntu is doing is doing that.

One could also say that any upstream KDE bug OpenSuse has will make people walk away from KDE. I'm sure many people have used OpenSuse to test KDE4.x and have walked away. Should they stop packaging KDE because it's not perfect software and will cause people to walk away from KDE? :P

Anyway, no hard feelings here either. In conclusion:
Less whispering in rumors, more bug reports. :)

by alex (not verified)

What about the cmake versions ?
KDE 4.0.x and 4.1.x require 2.4.5, svn trunk, which will become 4.2 requires 2.6.0.
Does kubuntu do something different ?

Alex

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

I helped a friend install some software and dig an apt-get of the developer packages of kdelibs.
I got the message that the anon must be referring to that the compile fails because cmake 2.6 is required.
So the dev packages may be of 4.2.x on a system that doesn't ship cmake 2.6 :(

I had to compile cmake 2.6 before I could continue.

by Max (not verified)

Unfortunately I'll have to agree.

Their heart (Kubuntu people) just isn't in it. (KDE 4.1)

I wish they would spend 1/2 the effort they spend on Ubuntu, on the K(de)buntu version.. :(

by Anon (not verified)

"Their heart (Canonical people) just isn't in it. (KDE 4.1)"

Fixed it for you.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

Try archlinux, does a decent job... But it's rather basic (you gotta love the commandline). It does have a rolling release schedule, which means you're always up-to-date.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

It is a good distro, but be aware that it is very bleeding edge. You will get cut. :-)

by samurai (not verified)

Try Mandriva 2008.1 with KDE 4.1 packages from ftp.kde.org. Mandriva 2008.1 is a stable release and KDE 4.1 packages are excellent. I haven't had any crashes yet and I am using it on my laptop.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

Excuse me for being off-topic, but I'd like to know why akonadi doesn't get hosted on freedesktop.org.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15711

Does anybody know?

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

The request for being added there is still pending at fd.org

by gttt (not verified)

In the german c't-magazin issue from heise there is a KDE4.1 review, too. "Alles wird gut: KDE 4.1" http://www.heise.de/ct/ and TOC: http://www.heise.de/ct/inhalt.shtml

by Max (not verified)

This is not intended as a flame, so please don't treat it as one.

When will Kubuntu finally support KDE 4.1 better?
It seems that Kubuntu is the Red-Headed-stepchild of Ubuntu, and nothing really happens to it beyond the bare minimum.

Shouldn't we encourage friendly competition between openSUSE (which we know is great for KDE) and Kubuntu just to drive technology further?

I think in the end variety will benefit both KDE, Kubuntu, and openSUSE.

Hopefully people could join me in this effort.

It would be great if this Fall's KDE based distros would be the best ever. Especially if each strives to be better than the others.

Good for KDE and Linux fans.

by Yuriy Kozlov (not verified)

"When will Kubuntu finally support KDE 4.1 better?"

In October, when the release with KDE 4.1 is.. well.. released.

And that's Blue-Headed stepchild ;)

by Nicolas Dumoulin (not verified)

Publication de KDE 4.1 : http://fr.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.1-alpha1.php
KDE 4.1 : Don't Look Back : https://linuxfr.org//2008/08/01/24361.html
KDE 4.1 arrive enfin et sonne le vrai départ du nouveau KDE : http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/45227-kde-linux-plasma-dolphin-41.htm
KDE 4.1 : l'environnement de bureau passe vraiment la 4ème : http://www.generation-nt.com/kde-4-1-environnement-bureau-libre-actualit...

I've definitively fully migrated to 4.1 from 3.5.x last week, and that's true : it rocks ! Congratulations :-)

by Dany Martineau (not verified)

In my small blog (http://www6.cssmi.qc.ca/harfang_danym/index.php?2008/08/07/152-migration...), i made a quite positive review in french. Unfortunately, i came back to KDE 3.5.9 as my laptop has an NVIDIA card. I was using OpenSuse 11.0 with latest KDE 4.1.1 update, but there was some visual annoyance due to my video card. I've tried many modifications in xorg.conf but in vain. I'm just hoping that NVIDIA will release a new driver soon! I also await stable QT4 based releases from amarok, digikam and k3b! I'm pretty confident that i'll be back to KDE 4 in few weeks....