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.

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Comments

by Anon (not verified)

I was expecting KDE4 to be stable on Windows with 4.1 - has that changed? Why is the windows.kde.org so minimalist?

by blauzahl (not verified)

If you are having problems, feel free to help them. :)

join their mailing list
report bugs
help triage bugs

None of these require you to know how to program. If you join #kde-bugs on freenode, we are happy to teach you how to triage, and then send you back to the windows team (who live on #kde-windows, in fact).

by Junaid (not verified)

Archlinux provided 4.1 packages in their main repos a day before the official release. 4.1 is stable enough for me that i've completely switched to it already.

4.1's elegance tempts me to join in as a dev. :)

A HUGE THANKYOU to the devs, testers, artists and all kinds of contributors !!

by Andy (not verified)

First thanks for KDE team for their efforts.
But here I'm faced with some problems:
- Sometimes I cannot copy/paste from a windows session open through krdc (rdp).
- Okular won't print a PDF file to my printer
- The telnet://host bookmark doesn't work anymore in konsole. The ssh bookmark (ssh://user@host) is working fine. Konsole keeps complaining about "I do not know how to handle the protocol "telnet".

Any ideas about those problems?

Thanks in advance

by felix (not verified)

okular:

this issue should be fixed (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162793).

maybe it takes some time until you get a new qt-version.

kde 4.1 is just great.

felix

by cirehawk (not verified)

On your first point, I noticed something similar when using fish to copy files from my other linux box. A lot of times copying via "drag n drop" did nothing. However, if I right click the file and select copy, I can then paste the file to the new location.

by Sepp (not verified)

I use the 4.1 packages from Debian experimental and I wanted to try out Step, but I can't find it.
kdeedu is version 4.1, but the package release doesn't mention Step at all:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/k/kdeedu/news/20080727T224745Z.html

Does anyone know what's up with it?

by Ana Guerrero (not verified)

Because it does need Gmm++ 3.0 [1] (A generic C++ template library for sparse, dense
and skyline matrices), that is not in the Debian archive.

[1] http://home.gna.org/getfem/

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Then why don't you package it? You can't probably get anything easier to package than this package. :-)

If that helps, here's the specfile we're using in Fedora:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/rpms/gmm/devel/gmm.spec?rev=1.1&vie...
(but I don't think that'll give you much information other than how trivial this package is).

by yoriq (not verified)

The Kde in debian seems very incomplete. For example I could not find any kdebindings, Superkaramba is useless without it. What happend?

by Sepp (not verified)

OK, that explains it.

And btw, thank you for making the great Debian packages!

by Crazy Henaway (not verified)

I'll admit it ... I found the 4.0 release unusable for daily computing. Looks like you've turned it around and really delivered a 4.1 that's ready for the world.

I've only been able to use it for a couple of hours so far, but it's been stable, looks great, and no matter what some folks say, I REALLY like the folder views on the desktop! Especially since you can filter the contents. That's just sweet.

This one just might win me back from Gnome ... which I used to hate, but found it a better option than the 4.0 release last year.

by cirehawk (not verified)

Agreed. 4.1 is very nice. The difference for me is I never went over to Gnome. :) I guess I'm more patient than most, but I wasn't bothered by the roughness of the 4.0 release. I was more than content to keep using the great 3.5 series until the 4 series stabilized. I have OpenSUSE with 4. on my laptop. As soon is my distro of choice (PCLinuxOS) moves to KDE4, I will convert all my boxes.

I do have a comment/question about folder views. For the life of me I really can't grasp the benefit of it yet. From my limited testing, it just seems like a file manager with transparency. Seems like I can just use Dolphin (or Konqueror) to view my folders if I need to. Obviously I have a limited perception of it since most seem to be excited about it's capabilities. Can someone better explain to me the benefit of folder views, or better yet, give a good example of how they can be used to enhance the user experience?

Thanks again KDE team. Great job!

Eric.....

by hmmm (not verified)

Normally, you are using the desktop as a sort of temp folder in which you dump stuff before using/moving it.

Folder View allows you to have a series of such folders, and not just one. They are network transparent, meaning you can use them to monitor things on the network.

They support filtering, so you can refine the view to only show what you care about.

unlike dolphin windows, they can be brought on top with a specific keyboard shortcut.

Now if embeded file previews could be activated, I'd be really happy :)

by Spud (not verified)

Hia.

Clicking on the KDE4 End User FAQ currently doesn't work. It gives an "Account suspended" message from the hosting supplier. I presume that it has exceeded its bandwidth allocation or something like that?

Anyway, just thought I'd let you know in case you hadn't noticed yet.

Cheers!

by pete (not verified)

i have ever been using and way ahead of all the others . its shiny , beautiful , fast and custumizable the way i can lve with it . it's simple the future we see and can use now . there are some hicks here and there , but in general it's simple awewsome . i had some hard words in the past for the early releases , and i wouldn't change the words today , they were simply emotional . i am now in the state of paying back . me not being a developer paypal will be my friend .
a big thx go out to all who made that big thing possible !!

cheerz pete :-)

by Junaid (not verified)

Well I must confess that KDE-Edu offers a set of applications that is simply UNMATCHABLE for any project !!

In my opinion, these applications alone warrant KDE's adoption in schools. Great stuff guys !!

by Robin (not verified)

See this post by AaronP from Nvidia:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1728071&postcount=7

Quote:
"I posted about it somewhere, but I can't find the post now. Anyway, a number of improvements to the RENDER acceleration on GeForce 8 and higher GPUs are being developed for the 177.* and 180.* driver series. These include support for the various repeat modes, transforms, and convolution filters, as well as acceleration for trapezoid rendering. In addition, resizing windows in KDE 4 hits a number of particularly slow fallbacks that we're working to avoid. The official release notes will mention these improvements when they're ready for prime-time."

Sounds great!

by Sebastian (not verified)

Oh yeah!

Please post it on the dot as soon as new Betas are available. I neeeeeeeed to try them!

by Teddy Widhi (not verified)

Congratulation for KDE 4.1, btw, today i see the NVidia lounch new update driver http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_173.14.12.html
I don't know this one already fix the issue or not.

by christoph (not verified)

This version does not. But it really looks like the KDE 4.1 release has brought so much attention to the "problem", that (a) the NVidia/Linux issue made it to the digg hall of fame, and (b) kicked NVidida in the ass so hard that they made the first public statement about their intention to fix it. Perfect.

by Jan (not verified)

Sorry, i dont understand this...

The nvidia guys want to force me to buy an new 8xxx+ card just to have proper 2D???

I doubt that my current 7600GT cannot do the same...

What a shame!

by Robin (not verified)

older cards don't have those performance issues...

by Jan (not verified)

Of course they have...

Just check my posting here and try it:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1725445&posted=1#post17...

And i have already answered in the thread the original poster mentioned here...

by Robin (not verified)

interesting... maybe a (slightly?) different issue or only a few 7xxx are affected.
I read many reports of people using 7xxx without performance issues.

by fredde (not verified)

I'm using a 7300GS and yes, things are really crappy, mostly with compositing enabled though, as often reported before, performance is ok with compiz.

by taerde (not verified)

i have got a nvidia fx 5200, and 2d performance (resizing windows,... ) in kde 4 ist much worse than in in kde 3.5, no matter whetzer desktop effects are enabled or not. so this definitely also affects older cards.

by Daniel (not verified)

There's nothing like a clean, visionary rewrite of the foundation to keep you busy and out of sight for a while, to make an initial release people don't get unless they understand what's happening under the hood, and then to dazzle them with all the payoff at the end. Go devs! Your attention to infrastructure for KDE4 is getting its due at last.

by Srikanth Agaram (not verified)

I am currently running KDE 3 and have been looking forward to a more fully featured KDE 4. The one feature I absolutely must have is the ability to use a mac style menubar on top (outside the app window). There was an option to do this in KDE 3, is there any way to do this in KDE 4.1?

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

Not yet. The devs love to bring this feature back to KDE 4 as well, but there wasn't much time for it now. AFAIK it will reappear in KDE 4.2.

by kde dragon make... (not verified)

i'm sexually attracted to the KDE dragon

by AC (not verified)

I'm sorry to tell you, but he's taken:

http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart/katie-221x223.jpg

by Sebastian (not verified)

There is one thing that KDE's techbase misses in order to support better NVIDIA effects: XGL

I read it months ago on the dot, but using XGL on OpenSuse 10.3 with KDE 4.0.x I could not enable desktop effects, though most 2d rendering problems vanished.

Right now I tried XGL and it works much better (though not optimal):

Measured Frames per 5 seconds:
Xorg, effects activated: 280
Xorg, effects deactivated: 21000
Xgl, effects activated: 12000 (Though the keyboard is a little choppy)

Using OpenSuse 11.0, NVIDIA 8400 GT, latest NVIDIA driver. The hibnts on techbase did not work at all.

by Sebastian (not verified)

I am sorry. I was wrong. Before yesterday I tried the hints on techbase, but they did not work. Yesterday I used yast2 to start xgl instead of Xorg, restarted X and the wonder happened. After rebooting I found out, that Xgl still is not working, but the benefits were still active using Xorg with the modified settings (somehow they were not enabled before yesterday?). Does anyone experience problems with the keyboard and with firefox? I got them with the modified settings.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Yes, 4.1 has come on a long way from 4.0. But there's still too many features missing that were in 3.x, too many things that aren't obvious. Just a few examples:

How do I move widgets in a panel? If it's possible, it's not at all obvious.

How do I change the colour of the panels? That black just draws the eye too much from the windows where I'm actually working.

Why can't I change the layout in knode? I could in 3.x.

Plus, fonts seem fundamentally broken - I change the size so that one application looks right, and another has giant or tiny fonts. And I was using it for about 10 minutes when the system tray disappeared - no amount of removing & re-adding it would make it come back.

Ah well, back to 3.5 for now...

by Anonymous (not verified)

Of course, as soon as I post it, I manage to find something explaining how to move widgets. I have to say though, that even knowing how to do it, it's not obvious.

by Jarl E. Gjessing (not verified)

I too had problems figuring this out.
In general configuring the panel is very hard to figure out. I.e. resizing the panel; it is hard to see exactly how big it is and how the end result will become.
First I was extremely irritated, not only about this problem but many other configuration issues in KDE 4.1
I have been using KDE since version 1 and has always been very happy with how easily it was to configure and how many options there were.
But as time has gone by and as I've used KDE 4.1 since it's release, I have gotten to like a lot of them and its becoming harder and harder to return to KDE 3 :-)
Have to agree on the panel thing though :-)
Thanks KDE team!

by Herbert Eisenbeiß (not verified)

KDE 4.1 SUCKS!!! It still sucks dead hamsters through a garden hose!

Why? Because you, Sir, have stopped listening to your community and its needs and just code along what you think is cool, because you stopped giving us the opportunity to actually configure many things!

What sucks?

For example this:

- folderview or the plasmoids at all. Yes, might be a NVIDIA driver problem with that lousy performance, but: it was known before, why haven't you implemented it another way? Why did you take our old desktop away??? GIVE US OUR OLD DESKTOP BACK!!!

- knode. This thing is completely broken in 4.1.0. Something, that shouldn't have slipped through beta testing. All postings are now without any charset at all, it doesn't honor this anymore, all postings are made without any word wrap at all - what in Jesus H. Fucking christs name has gone wrong there???

- the panel. Yes, finally we can move it (ooooh), and also make new plasmoids on it (ahhh), but: why can I still not change its color? Where are all the little helpers gone we had in 3.5.9, like quick folders and such? In few words: it STINKS! Give us our old, beloved kicker back!!!

- The kickoff style menue. What in Jesus Fucking Christs name have you been thinking while implementing this stinker? It's size is fixed, it doesn't show us all entries at all, moving between the levels takes time, because animated, in one word: it is rotten, it stinks, it's rubbish! And you keep us telling this stinker gives us better usability? Holy shit! I cannot believe it! At least we can finally turn on the old menu style back now again!!!

- Akregator. It has serious bugs in positioning the tool bars, it isn't taking archiving options anymore, meaning it's somewhat broken, too!

- Mounting of NTFS-Volumes through ntfs-3g in Dolphin/Konqueror is still not working. WHY NOT? This is something that even GNOME is able to do for quite some time now without any problems AT ALL!

- Responsiveness. KDE 4.1 still feels slow and sluggish on many occasions. Why?

Might be, that KDE 4.1 has all the nice shiney technolgy, buzz and such under the hood, but what is it worth to us when the car build upon this engine stutters and is still making errors regularly?

For short: start listening to your community again and act upon it wisely, otherwise KDE is doomed to further run down the hill!!! At the moment it JUST SUCKS!!! It is what Vista is for Windows, all bling and looking nicely, but no one really wants to use it, because it SUCKS, because it's limiting its users and its broken.

At the moment I am going to stick with XFCE, because even development might be a little bit slower than with KDE, this project doesn't nearly stink as much and the main developer cares deeply about his community!!!

by Herbert Eisenbeiß (not verified)

And I forgot:

- resizing of plasmoids just SUCKS, too! What have you been thinking - again - while implementing this stinker??? When I resize a window, I only want to resize it in the direction I am moving my mouse, NOT resizing it the lousy way it's implemented now, because this makes resizing unprecise, when it's mirrored on the other side! It sucks, sucks, sucks!!!

You need:

- a thesaurus; and
- some basic lessons in human-human iteraction.

by Herbert Eisenbeiß (not verified)

Yo, homie, yo got da shit, yo!

And seriously: I am disappointed with KDE 4.1, especially being a long time user, using it since KDE 2.x days.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

>Why? Because you, Sir, have stopped listening to your community and its needs
>and just code along what you think is cool, because you stopped giving us the
>opportunity to actually configure many things!
Because KDE is coded by one person, amirite?

> - folderview or the plasmoids at all. Yes, might be a NVIDIA driver problem
>with that lousy performance, but: it was known before, why haven't you
>implemented it another way? Why did you take our old desktop away??? GIVE US
>OUR OLD DESKTOP BACK!!!
What can't you do with your "new" desktop that you couldn't do with your old desktop? You still have icons.

>the panel. Yes, finally we can move it (ooooh), and also make new plasmoids on
>it (ahhh), but: why can I still not change its color? Where are all the little
You can get new themes for it easily. Right click the desktop and go to desktop settings, and select "Get new themes" in the desktop config dialog.
>helpers gone we had in 3.5.9, like quick folders and such? In few words: it >STINKS! Give us our old, beloved kicker back!!!
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/QuickAccess?content=84128
You can still use Kicker if you want to that badly.

>The kickoff style menue. What in Jesus Fucking Christs name have you been >thinking while implementing this stinker? It's size is fixed,
Wrong. It's resizable like any other window.
>it doesn't show us all entries at all, moving between the levels takes time, >because animated, in one word: it is rotten, it stinks, it's rubbish! And you
>keep us telling this stinker gives us better usability? Holy shit! I cannot
>believe it! At least we can finally turn on the old menu style back now >again!!!
You could do this since KDE 4.0.0. It's not "finally"

>Mounting of NTFS-Volumes through ntfs-3g in Dolphin/Konqueror is still not
>working. WHY NOT? This is something that even GNOME is able to do for quite
>some time now without any problems AT ALL!
Blame your distro. ntfs-3g works wonderfully with Kubuntu.

>Responsiveness. KDE 4.1 still feels slow and sluggish on many occasions. Why?
Could be your drivers if you're using nvidia.

Might be, that KDE 4.1 has all the nice shiney technolgy, buzz and such under the hood, but what is it worth to us when the car build upon this engine stutters and is still making errors regularly?

>For short: start listening to your community again and act upon it wisely,
>otherwise KDE is doomed to further run down the hill!!! At the moment it JUST
>SUCKS!!! It is what Vista is for Windows, all bling and looking nicely, but no
>one really wants to use it, because it SUCKS, because it's limiting its users
>and its broken.
KDE has been very receptive to the needs of the community. This is all just wrong.

"Whaa, a few features I want aren't implemented" in no way means "KDE sucks dead hamsters through a garden hose". While KDE4 doesn't have/duplicate every last feature KDE3 has, in general KDE4 applications are much better bug-wise and feature wise than their KDE3 counterparts. (See: Dolphin, Okular, etc)

I applaud your effort, but honestly, that post simply wasn't worth responding to.

by Herbert Eisenbeiß (not verified)

> What can't you do with your "new" desktop that you couldn't do with your old
> desktop? You still have icons.

Yup, I've got icons. But either alone or in a plasmoid. I cannot for example sort them nicely in folderview (yet), there's no device showing up anymore at the desktop per default, the older thing just had more options and freedom at all.

Also scaling of folder view, make this plasmoids at all, sucks. When scaling a window, I want it only to scale in the direction I am moving my mouse, but not having that mirrored all over the window, which makes it really hard to scale it nicely. Wonder what the developers have been thinking about that - nothing much at all, I guess.

> You can get new themes for it easily. Right click the desktop and go to desktop
> settings, and select "Get new themes" in the desktop config dialog.

I don't want new themes. That's not the point. I want to be able to right click at the panel again and choose the transparency and color of it in a configuration dialogue, just like I could do it with kicker in 3.5.x. With the new panel - impossible.

I also want to change the size of the new panel, meaning the vertical space it occupies. Also impossible - yet, without editing some configuration files with a text editor. What's the point in having a GUI when quite fundamental settings can only be changed with a text editor at all?

There's no way for the new panel to autohide - yet.

There are no quick-hiding buttons for it yet, like kicker had.

There's no way for a quick listing of the contents of a folder, like the old kicker had. There I could make a quick lister and it showed up presto. Yes, I saw the plasmoid you pointed at, good work - but this should ship with the whole package at all.

The truth is: the new panel lacks many options old kicker had and still has a long way to go before it's really usable again.

> Blame your distro. ntfs-3g works wonderfully with Kubuntu.

Let me put it that way: GNOME has found a better way than HAL to deal with it, that works out of the box better than KDE. KDE normally needs quite some fine tuning for it, IF it is even able go work afterwards.

> Could be your drivers if you're using nvidia.

Yes, I'm using Nvidia, also tried the workarounds. But: it's not only Nvidia, but also ATI. No one else had those problems yet, so why didn't they implement it another, better way, that works better with the graphics stuff?

> KDE has been very receptive to the needs of the community. This is all just wrong.

I doubt that one really dearly. The internet is full of "KDE 4.x sucks rants" and that's not without reason.

Might be, that in general KDE4 applications are better bug wise now, but: why did Knode slip through the QA process of the beta?

This thing is really unusable with KDE 4.1.0 now! It shows word wraps in the editor, but when posting they are all gone. There is no charset anymore in the headers of a post at all, you can try to set, what you want - it doesn't honor this. And it is always trying to set a Followup-To: to the newsgroup you're posting at, even if it's only one at all. So for short: nice, to have it back, but in the state KDE 4.1.0 has it - it's rubbish. Period.

Some things are looking nice, like Dolphin or Okular, right. But then again, kprinter has gone with its filters, there's no option for a print preview anymore nor a module in the system settings to add printers. Why is there no GUI for installing printers anymore??? Arg!