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Linux DevCenter - Previewing KDE 4

Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE developer's laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux.

We want screens!

Wally Balljacker wrote:We want screens!

You're not getting them! Aaron specifically said they would try to minimize early screenshots. The want to get the biggest impact when the time is right. I hope it lives up to the hype. If KDE4 is as good as people are saying it is it could really impact acceptance on the desktop.

Patrick wrote:You're not getting them! Aaron specifically said they would try to minimize early screenshots. The want to get the biggest impact when the time is right. I hope it lives up to the hype. If KDE4 is as good as people are saying it is it could really impact acceptance on the desktop.

Completely agree, the KDE developers should take their time to make this thing kick some major ass, if they scale the stuff right I think they could have most, if not all, of Winodws Vista's new UI features.
Also, something about KDE4 that I'm really excited about is the new hardware interaction stuff called Solid, one of the thing that currently really can piss me off is when I plug in a USB drive or my iPod and then I can't unmount it smoothly, I sometimes have to pop open a terminal log on as root and manually eject the thing. Also, kicking aRts out will improve KDE A LOT, I think GStreamer would be a good choice, because it's very very good for using plugins so someone can license some of the proprietary audio codecs and create GStreamer plugins for them, Fluendo recently did this with mp3 and offers a free GStreamer mp3 plugin that allows for legal mp3 playback.
I also think the use of XGL to make the graphics card render some of the transperancy stuff, along with scaling SVG images will take a significant load off the CPU so people can't complain about KDE hogging CPU cycles, Qt4 also helps on this one with performance improvements.....

My nag 0n KDE is that m0st 0f their s0ftwar is n0t very stable. Meaning that the architecture 0f kde is very m0n0litic and y0u g0t huge pr0cesses like the 0nes c0ming fr0m libkde and kded.

If y0u shut d0wn a pr0gram it might drag a wh0le branch 0f 0ther applicati0ns. S0mething like that happened with KAT which is a deskt0p search similar t0 beagle.

KDE4 might c0me with m0re g00dies but at the same time at what price. A l0t 0f pe0ple might n0t use it just because is t00 unstable.

I think your stability problems come from the distro. you're running, Jza.

With Arch, and even when I was using Kanotix, KDE applications never crash on me.

I found some screenshots. Looks pretty slick.

http://www.planetdiaz.com/forums/index. ... wtopic=127

Judland wrote:I think your stability problems come from the distro. you're running, Jza.

With Arch, and even when I was using Kanotix, KDE applications never crash on me.

Yeah I was gonna say, my current KDE session has been running for 24 days now, and everything is rock solid, Kontact, which is one of the bigger apps, runs like a bat out of hell, super stable, samething with my KDE in general. There are the ecational time when Konqueror crashes, but I have it up right away again, but that certainly happens with Nautilus in GNOME too.

Also, KAT is not gonna be the "official" KDE desktop search, I think it was Zack Rusin who was working on a desktop search, but I'm not sure.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I found some screenshots. Looks pretty slick.

http://www.planetdiaz.com/forums/index. ... wtopic=127

Those look like mockups for brainstorming, I doubt those are actual screenshots, sure don't look like it to me.

No matter what distro and even Arch I have had nothing but bad luck using kde. Some app seems to always freeze , sometimes even the whole desktop. Whatever happened to the KDE Lite project?

doublejoon wrote:No matter what distro and even Arch I have had nothing but bad luck using kde. Some app seems to always freeze , sometimes even the whole desktop. Whatever happened to the KDE Lite project?

I've been running KDE for a long time now and have not had this problem ever. I've run KDE on Arch, Kanotix, Fedora, Kubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, Debian without any issues. Maybe you're having a hardware issue. You could run the worse offenders from a console window and see what messages get spit out if it bombs.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I found some screenshots. Looks pretty slick.

http://www.planetdiaz.com/forums/index. ... wtopic=127

gets:

This Account Has Been Suspended
I Am Sorry Your Account Was Suspended Please Contact a admin on the forum thanks.

I've used Gnome and currently XFCE without any problems. Even my KDE apps work great such K3b, Kmix. Konqueror..etc

Of course this is on my home desktop
Athlon XP 2600+ 1.9Ghz
1GB DDR 333
120GB IDE

I've never tried KDE on the Arch laptop yet. Maybe I will give it a ago and see how it does.

Acer 1362LCI
AMD Sempron 1.6GHz
512MB

Snarkout wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:I found some screenshots. Looks pretty slick.

http://www.planetdiaz.com/forums/index. ... wtopic=127

gets:

This Account Has Been Suspended
I Am Sorry Your Account Was Suspended Please Contact a admin on the forum thanks.

I guess he went over his bandwidth. It was on Digg.

doublejoon wrote: I've never tried KDE on the Arch laptop yet. Maybe I will give it a ago and see how it does.

I'm running Arch with KDE on my laptop and it runs very well. This is with 256 meg of RAM and a 2.4ghz Celeron. I plan on upgrading my memory to 1 GIG in a few weeks. The reason for the upgrade is not for KDE but because I'm running virtual machines (major memory hog) and I'd like to speed up my compiles. The extra memory also helps when encoding audio and video files.

KDE has almost never crashed on me on Gentoo. Runs great!