KDE 4.1: Visual Changelog (rev 777000)
[ Friday, 22 February 2008, Bastion ]
KDE 4.1 will be what everyone expected 4.0 to be — a fully functional revolutionary Linux desktop. I took a look at the revision 777000 of this desktop environment and what you get is a visual changelog describing the current progress in terms of look and feel and the features.
Author: Korneliusz Jarzebski
Desktop
This is how the default KDE 4.1 desktop looks like in rev 777000.
KDE 4 Desktop - Revision 777000
Plasma
Character Selector is a new applet for picking special characters. Its functionality is currently still very limited, but we could expect that in the future it will be a useful tool for picking special chars like euro sign, copyright sign, trademark or Greek alphabet letters.
Character Selector
Keyboard Leds is a very simple applet informing us about the state of the keyboard (e.g. whether the Caps Lock, Scroll Lock or Num Lock is pressed).
Keyboard Leds with Caps Lock on
The work around the new Lancelot menu has been started again. Its current state is shown on the following screenshots:
Lancelot — Applications
Lancelot — Computer
The Luna applet for watching the Moon (which we already know) has been enhanced. Now we can also choose which Earth Hemisphere we’re, since this changes the way the face of the Moon should be displayed. If we’re in the Northern Hemisphere the North Pole of the Moon should be at the top (right hand side lit in the first quarter), if we’re in the Southern atmosphere it should be at the botton (left hand side lit in the first quarter).
Thanks to Sheld Sunday for explaining this
Luna
Picture frame has been in KDE 4 from the very beginning. It allows to place a frame on the desktop which hosts and displays images inside.
Picture Frame
Picture Frame — Configuration
KGet — Download everything from any location
KGet is quickly becoming my favorite app for downloading files. It’s small, handy, and most of all it provides powerful features. As I’ve mentioned before, it enables downloading both file from the web and from the Bittorent network. It also handles mirror servers to increase the downloading speed. KGet in this particular revision gained one more interesting feature which is the web interface. It means that from now on we can remotely control KGet by adding new downloads, editing and removing the current positions directly from any web browser!
KGet — main windows
KGet — Bittorrent
KGet — multi-part download
KGet — web interface configuration
Using KGet remotely via web browser
Games
A new game has been added: KDiamond. The rules are fairly simple. You need to manipulate the diamond in such way to place the identical ones in lines of three or more (either vertically or horizontally).
KDiamond
System Settings
System Settings received some polishing and some features. First of them is emoticon configuration. We can select one of the default themes or install a new one directly from kde-look.org. For the time being I cannot however find an application that uses these emoticons. All apps that do use emoticons (like Kopete IM client) have their own implementation.
Appearance — Emoticons
Also, semantic Nepomuk desktop can be now configured in GUI. The options have been divided into two groups: basic and advanced.
Nepomuk — Basic Settings
Nepomuk — Advanced Settings
Libraries
In Phonon sound engine configuration a new option has appeared: GStreamer.
Phonon — Xine & GStreamer
It’s also worth noticing that the current development branch of KDE 4.1 requires qt-4.4 libraries to work.
General stability
The stability of this revision is very low. I experienced problems with windows scaling and drawing (in such case usually the minimize-maximize pattern used to fix it). Plasma was very unstable as well. It would crash completely in an unpredictable manner leaving a blank screen with no icons and toolbars whatsoever.
This article has been originally published on /dev/jarzebski blog. It has been translated and reprinted with author’s permission.
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53 Comments
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You say stability is very low, but for me it’s a way better than Ubuntu’s 4.0.1 packages, which were unstable and very very sluggish on my machine.
The change to 4.4 seems to broke somethings, but rendering performance seems to be better now, and without funny colors while rendering…
Kget is one of my favourites too. Even in the 3.5 version its more than great.
I didn’t mind 4.0.1 but I found it awfully slow if not as unstable as 4.0.0 . What I’m MOST interested in whether I will still get horrible window drawing performance, or that dragging windows across my desktop don’t suck up cpu time, If 4.1 is stable and relatively fast then I’ll be happy. I’m not expecting it to be as lighting quick as 3.5, but at least a usable speed
“KDE 4.1 will be what everyone expected 4.0 to be” Whoever expected that is a complete idiot and they need to A) get a brain and B) learn how to read.
Exactly, not everyone has expected 4.0.0 to be all that and more. Those who know how open source development works and those who know what a *.0.0 release means for KDE knew exactly what to expect. And even if you didn’t know what to expect you could read reports of the development and read blogs of evelopers and know what to expect, it’s not like the development is hidden and behind the doors. Well maybe people will learn for the future. Many people also mix two different things, KDE 4.0 and KDE 4. The first is only the very first release (without even any bugfix polish) of a new series, and the second is a complete series of new version (including 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 ….) that will come in the future.
KDE is allwais fantastic, but I think we don’t use it at work until versión 4.1.2 or 4.2.
People need very stable software…. not like m$
thanks
suggestion: from technical view it’s great, but KDE 4.1 needs a serious theme!
oxygen style is preTTY good for me, a promising theme is bespin (which a liked a lot but was a little bit unstable), but there will be a lot of new themes for 4.1.
A small astronomical correction: The hemisphere selector in the Luna applet has nothing to do with which side of the Moon you’re looking at. Where ever you stand on the Earth you’re always looking at the same side of it: the one facing the Earth.
This is to Select the Earth Hemisphere you’re in, since this changes the way the face of the Moon should be displayed. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere the North Pole of the Moon should be at the top (right hand side lit in the first quarter), if you’re in the Southern atmosphere it should be at the botton (left hand side lit in the first quarter).
That Luna dialog should probably be made clearer.
@Sheld Sunday: Thanks for explaining this, I corrected the article.
Not so big a deal. Look out at the moon and make the applet display the same view.
Great!
KDE becomes better and better. I’m waiting for KDE 4.1, because 4.0 hasn’t some useful finctions. Either way, KDE 4 is a quite well written piece of code, so why not to use it?
As a Mac user, I really find the Plasma look and feel to be pretty awesome. I run Ubuntu on my home desktop and did try KDE 4.0 when it came out; I think if they can fix all the little glitches and such, the experience will be much more attractive than OSX. I’ve switched back to gnome for now, but wait eagerly for 4.1.
I really, really, love the work they’ve done on this. Slick, clean, integrated, consistent.
Looking at those images, it looks better than KDE ever has, but that being said, it has a long way to go, it still looks clunky and the design still lacks flow or direction.
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2146727
Err, what? Unintuitive keyboard LEDs (what for?), XP-ripoff title bars just above Aqua-ripoff scroll bars, a weird graphics glitch that is supposed to turn into a start menu ripoff… This is horrible, and needs, at the very least, a benevolent dictator that turns this mess into something coherent.
you know what, screw yourself on the beach at night
The aqua scroll bars really do need to go. Most of oxygen at least manages to have its own look and feel, but other parts just seem like mindless copy-catting. The default Plasma theme seems similarly copy-catting of OSX and/or Vista. And at least from the screenshot Lancelot looks ugly - why is there all that unnecessary transparency thrown around? It just makes it less accessible to the user.
why bother, gnome is coherent enough
Why bother? Well for one it’s good to have a choice. The mere idea of having only one option means you’re locked into it. Linux and OSS is all about freedom and choice. You want a locked window manager use Windows. It’s “coherent enough”.
Secondly, having any competition, even friendly competition that we see between open source projects, pushes innovation and encourages developers.
Lastly, Linus Torvalds doesn’t like Gnome and that’s enough for some people to use KDE.
I think the KDE guys are doing a good work. This is a good improvement over the last release. But - and this is a *big* but - this is ugly. Honestly. I doesn’t come even close to OS X, for instance. And regardless of the technology underneath, Gnome still feels more ’solid’, interface wise. This just looks like a bad rip off from Vista meets KDE 3.
Sweeter than any kind of sugar!
Why is this a complete revolutionary Desktop? Because of a transparent menu, or the Chartable or *big laugh* because of the moon?
It’s revolutionary because of the ideas behind it and technology behind it. Scalable vector graphics almost everywhere, the desktop is built out of those plasmoids (similar to lego bricks), first steps in implementing ZUI (zoomable user interface) on the desktop, first steps in integrating semantic technology into desktop… You must look further then just some screenshots, read about the technology behind it and how it is done and think abut what all new things it makes possible. Then you will see why it is revolutionary.
Thanks for providing real specifics.
The more the best.
Andre
Can I still disable the icons on the buttons?
Maybe its just me, but it really serves no purpose and gives the whole interface a telly tubby feel to it.
Install kde4 new desktot kde in ResuLinux2.5 from Brazil.
http://www.resulinux.forumdebian.com.br/web/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17570#17570
Is very good .
Truly beautiful. You’re setting new standards for how a desktop should look. Bravo.
One question: in the first screenshot, the two desktop icons have dark fields around them that look ugly. I had those same ’smudges’ when I tried out 4.0 on my machine, and couldn’t figure out how to turn them off. Any help?
Or, if they really can’t be turned off, then is there at least a way to make them all the same width? When you have a bunch of icons on your desktop, each one having a different width makes keeping your desktop organized a pain.
Awesome. 4.0.1 already does some stuff better than 3.5 (Finally, I can print and make PDFs using OpenType fonts) and the new look is great. 4.1 looks like it’ll be even better.
Can anyone tell me if this app will run under KDE:
http://my.opera.com/SimpleTournamentDirector
Booler, it’s a java app, so yes, it should run under KDE just fine.
it was spam
Hey look, it’s Vista! It seriously looks like the bastard child of KDE/Vista. Personally, I’ll stick with KDE3 and Xfce4. I think KDE4 still has a long way to go.
Can you customize the kicker plasmoid at all? Till then, I have no interest.
can’t wait KDE 4 with openSUSE
Urghh… will they improve the look of taskbar panel? It’s nightmare ugly
it’s ugly.
What is so revolutionary about it? It doesn’t seem so, at least for the time being. Maybe is because bugs prevent from showing-off revolutinary features.
OpenSource tends to be much more incremental than this (release soon, release often). KDE4 release looks more like the Vista/MAC releases, we have wait for some years just for Kde 4.0.0 & 4.0.1?
I have test them on my ubuntu and I stick with 3.5+compizFusion. And the bad news is that 4.1 seems not be get more stable. Will we have to wait for version 4.9 to have a usable KDE4? Is that the revolutionary part?
As a developer I have experienced that sometimes great ideas end up in crap code or solutions (some areas get overcomplex unexpectedly, small developmets get too buggy more often than not…). Is that why KDE takes so long to stabilize?
Where could i find that wallpaper?
OK. Now I’m getting exited. Now I have to wait. Dang.
I hope that is more usable than 4.0
On ubuntu it has many usability bugs. One I hate. If I remove the start menu to replace for other, i can not post the other in same place and can not restore the original. I really hope that kubuntu 8.04 have the packages for 3.5, because i will not use kde 4 until it have more work on bug fix and usability. And I hope that kde come back to kde, not a copy of vista as kde 4.0.
Ubuntu 8.04 has the KDE 3.5 packages. I tried to use 4, but had to go back. Simple things like word-wrapping under Kate did not work.
That and a couple dozens of core dumps made me move back.
I will wait for a rock-solid release.
BTW, Oxygen is cool, but the grassy, Vista-ish background must go along with the OSX scrollbars. they have no place in a Unix desktop.
Well… Arguably the Aqua scrollbars have a place in a certain Unix desktop, but that’s not what I meant here.
For a free desktop environment that I can freely download and try out, I applaud them for their hard work. It looks really good, despite the claims that it’s allegedly a ‘copycat’. I’m not exactly sure what the problem is.
We clamor for a modern look and feel to our desktop, and currently the trends are defining ‘modern’ as those like Micr*soft and M#cs. Should KDE take a ’step back’ or go well out of the way for something more unique?
I’m not willing to dish out hundreds just to get this modern look, and if KDE can provide it for free use, then I’d be willing to go back to trying linux (yes, I’m a linux-newb)
Some comments here are disappointingly destructive towards the hard work these developers are putting into KDE. Useless posting space. Offer some good suggestions that developers may find useful to implement. If the constructive feedback KDE gets are good ones, then the [em]revolution[/em] will surely come. 4.1 here we come!
Ugly??? Are you all crazy???
It is damn beautiful!!!
Púes es maravilloso pero prefiero Gnome
I’m prefered Gnome sorry KDE haha
Gnome???? blargh!!!!! it´s a Joke?
Those emoticons are used in KMail AFAIK (at least in 3.5 they do)
KDE 4 is going to flop, I fear, because of the over-concern on pretty and not enough on functionality. Implement the functionality first, then make it stable, then pretty it up. That’s the right way to do this, guys.
I fear someone wanted to show-off their artistic flare and forgot that Linux users are a bunch of geeks who don’t really care.
How can you come to such conclusion seeing that KDE 4 just started? Do you remember what KDE 3.0 was like? I don’t but I ma 100% sure taht it wasn’t as pretty, functional, usable or powerful as KDE 3.5.9 is today. KDE 4 was a revolution to KDE 3.5x but it’s evolution just started. It would be interested to see what you will say when it reaches 4.2 or 4.3.
Concerning functionality, just be patient, everything that KDE 3.5 and more will come in time (See KWin 4 for eg. compared with KWin 3).
You got that wrong about Linux users, we do care about look and feel, about aestic beauty and usability otherwis KDE 3.5x would’t be the desktop that it is.
I am convinced that within a year or two from now taht KDE 4 will be match or (even surpass) MAC OS X.
Sorry about the spelling mistakes that I made, my hand got away and pressed the button before I was finished
That is hot, looks so much better than previous KDE versions.
Oh boy,
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Release_Schedule
Basically we have to wait till July 29th for a stable KDE4? Longer if you wait for the packages? That’s annoying. It was released 8 months ahead, incredible.
I’m just glad it has a “show desktop” button
How can I find keyboard led for kde 4.1?
I didn’t find any. It doesn’t compile manually either because it looks for qt3 headers.