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KDE Open Source Technology

KDE 4.10 Released, the Fastest KDE Ever 184

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the giving-people-what-they-asked-for dept.
sfcrazy writes "The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments. With 4.10 KDE users can experience a much more sane global-menu like implementation without interrupting their workflow. A list of improvements is available here." This release makes major steps toward further Qt Quick/QML integration (more plasmoids are written using QML, you can create animated desktops using QML, etc.). KWin's configuration applet also supports fetching extensions from KDE Look. Perhaps the best improvement is a new indexer for Nepomuk, with claims that the semantic desktop is finally usably fast (after suffering through a multi-week indexing on my laptop, I have to say Nepomuk is really cool, but having an unusable system for that long is not so I for one welcome our new indexing overlords).
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KDE 4.10 Released, the Fastest KDE Ever More

KDE 4.10 Released, the Fastest KDE Ever

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  • Nice! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @10:57AM (#42809043)

    I hear both KDE users were super excited

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hear they were so excited they went over to the sole remaining Gnome user's house to gloat.

  • Juicy! (Score:3, Funny)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:01AM (#42809077)
    So the question: Why does Ubuntu stick to Gnome?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The better question is why do you care? Use Kubuntu, or one of the many other distributions that default to KDE

    • Ubuntu switching to KDE (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrewNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:10AM (#42809231) Homepage Journal

      This is actually a legit question. Mark Shuttleworth has repeatedly praised Qt. He has forked away from Gnome. The new Ubuntu phone interface is apparently written in Qt, and he is encouraging developers to write Qt/QML apps for his new phone platform.

      I bet Ubuntu could recreate their Unity interface in Plasma/Qt easily enough. But the really interesting aspect of that is that they could create one device that could easily change UIs/shells based upon how it was used. A tablet could default a touch interface, but switch to a more traditional interface with paired with a keyboard. A phone interface could change to a desktop interface in a dock.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        As I understand it the original Unity was on Qt. But now they are rewriting it to run on top of an extremely thin OpenGL wrapper instead. I know it sounds idiotic to reinvent a LGPL licensed wheel but this did seem to be their direction 6 months ago when I investigated helping out the UbuntuTV project (which is built on Unity of course).

        Ubuntu should switch to KDE. But they laid off their last paid Kubuntu maintainer some time ago. They are focused, which is good; but they are focused on the wrong suite of

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Thank goodness Canonical jettisoned Kubuntu. The project has been faster and leaner and more productive ever since. During the age of Canonical's "guidance" the monthly updates released by KDE were released weeks later in Kubuntu. Now, KDE updates are released in Kubuntu's updates and backports PPA almost the same day or within a couple days maximum.

          Now that Kubuntu is sponsored by Blue Systems [blue-systems.com] rather than Canonical, the project has improved noticeably. An example of my first point is that 4.10

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Teun ( 17872 )
            Exactly my thought, it's almost as if Canonical is a government and advanced stuff is better privatised :)

            The Blue Systems crew is also very accessible for the users, a joy to see.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by petman ( 619526 )
            I'm a bit confused by Kubuntu's announcement. The link on http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-sc-4.10 [kubuntu.org] points to the kde announcement on 4.10-RC3. I suppose it's a mistake?

          • This is not necessarily always a good thing. KDE 4.10 has serious crashing bugs in plasma-desktop that were known and reported in 2012 while 4.10 was in beta. Now, if I upgrade my Kubuntu system, and don't manually avoid upgrading to 4.10, I may very well end up with an unusable desktop and be forced into doing a very messy, manual downgrade back to 4.9.5.

            Sometimes a delay of a few weeks is not such a bad thing.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I bet Ubuntu could recreate their Unity interface in Plasma/Qt easily enough.

        They already did (at least the port to Qt part), it was their version of Unity for low-end devices and graphics cards that do not support 3D acceleration on GNU/Linux, and it was called Unity2D [launchpad.net].

        Unfortunately they ditched it [omgubuntu.co.uk] and are going to use LLVMpipe to make the full Unity work with the low-end/non-3D-supporting devices instead. It's easier to support a single codebase, I suppose. However, this does show that you're correct: Uni

        • You could make Unity as a Plasma containment. It would take about 5000 loc (all of a week's work for a dev). But then, I guess all the gnomistas in Ubuntu would cry foul.

          So for the peace of their community, they went the stupid route.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Knuckles ( 8964 )

        AFAICT it was a licensing issue for the longest time. Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform. Of course, today the available licenses [digia.com] from Digia also include LGPL, but that came pretty late.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform.

          Charging developers seems to work rather well for Apple, despite their $99/year iOS Developer Program fee. Unless you have a cult following like the late Jobs developers follow the users so if you could polish up the OSS desktop enough that users would come the developers would follow. That is to say they follow the money and users that don't insist on running pure OSS or are tech wizards in their own right who'd rather fix it themselves than give Ubuntu business. I'd love to see the alternate timeline wher

        • AFAICT it was a licensing issue for the longest time. Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform. Of course, today the available licenses [digia.com] from Digia also include LGPL, but that came pretty late.

          Yep, 2009 in fact.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)#Licensing [wikipedia.org]

  • Gnome is going to Sandbox their Apps (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now that Gnome came up with Java Script AND now eveb with Sandboxing their Apps like Apple does with iOS

    http://m.h-online.com/open/news/item/GNOME-developers-plan-Linux-apps-1798691.html

    Kde as well as Xfce start becoming a serious option for me.

  • Nepomuk sucks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nepomuk usually crashes before the desktop is loaded. If it doesn't then it slows down everything. I'd rather figure out how to uninstall it.

    • This AC needs modded up for being spot-on. That has always been my experience with both Nepomuk and Akonadi. The only difference is that sometimes, in the newer KDE releases, it waits until the desktop has been up and running for a few minutes before crashing.

      • So what exactly changes in KDE 4.10?

      • Indeed! On one of my user accounts, the only solution is to $(chmod -x /usr/bin/akonadi*), otherwise the whole computer locks up a few minutes after logging in because akonadi processes run amok, sucking up all CPU, causing excessive I/O, and apparently causing some kind of weird kernel or hardware bug. But I never have that problem except when caused by akonadi.

  • Nepomukrewr (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:03AM (#42809119)

    Just to clarify for people, the new Nepomuk indexer was COMPLETLY and UTTERLY rewritten from scratch and shares ZERO of the old code. IT uses 2 pass indexing just like OS X-- pass 1 is just file name and location so that basic search works. Pass 2 is when it starts figuring out music tags or director tags for movies , things like that.

    One of the reasons the old indexer was so slow would be because you could search by content WITHIN the files, unfortunately it would scan every file, even those without any useful content for indexing like movies or music. This does mean some reduced functionality but it also means a lot more stable and quick system.

    Also STRIGI has been completly thrown out so thats not an issue anymore.

    • Re:Nepomukrewr (Score:5, Insightful)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:18AM (#42809317)
      OK, so you are saying that I don't have to turn the bladdy nepomuk thing off anymore as the first step after an install, since it may actually work now?

      • Re:Nepomukrewr (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @12:48PM (#42810591) Homepage Journal

        I weep for the mountains of coal that have been burned for the millions of nepomuk indexers that nobody ever used or knew to turn off.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xaxa ( 988988 )

          I turned Nepomuk on on Monday, as I thought I'd give it another chance. I tried some tweaks to the setting, and by lunchtime today everything seemed to be working quite well.

          I'd never used the semantic search thing, but was very impressed with the speed. Unfortunately, I don't often misplace files, and when I do 'locate' is usually sufficient.

        • This is more insightful than some may give credit for. All these years, the buggy mess of Nepomuk was released over and over, forced upon innocent users, when it never should have left private development builds. It was justified by "getting more exposure" to "fix more bugs faster", but all it really did was waste real people's time and energy.

          KDE needs something like Debian's ftpmasters: a person or team with the authority to say "no" to a developer who wants his pet software released with the rest of KD

    • Re:Nepomukrewr (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pesho ( 843750 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:24AM (#42809385)
      Well this is some seriously good news. The bloody thing was not only completely useless but was sucking the life out of my desktop. It should have never been enabled by default.
    • *THIS* alone makes me re-think changing over to Lubuntu on my desktop. Thank F'ing God.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )

      Maybe I'm totally naive here, but why not optionally make it a 3-pass indexer, with the third pass doing a file-content index on the files shown by pass #2 to be documents?

    • What was STRIGI and what was the problem w/ it?

  • This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jaymz2k4 ( 790806 ) <jaymz@jaHORSEymz.eu minus herbivore> on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:05AM (#42809141) Homepage
    I was a big time fan of KDE2/3. The 4.0 release was far too rushed and eventually made me switch entirely to Fluxbox, which these days I've replaced with XCFE. I can't imagine switching back now but the change list and features in this 4.10 series make KDE a much more viable alternative to other WMs now. I feel a bit sorry for the KDE developers - I got the impression there was a sea-change in the project with the 4.x branch that they've had to slog uphill to overcome.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There was a sea change. KDE has gone just as mad as GNOME when it comes to adding ridiculous features. The only difference is that, in traditional KDE style, Plasma can be completely configured. And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice.

      • Re:This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be (Score:5, Informative)

        by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:58AM (#42809839) Homepage

        " And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice."

        Bullshit. I have one of the nicest looking WM setups I have ever seen, and people who are used to Windows always do a double-take and ask me what software I am using to get such an awesome look. I don't even have this latest release and my 4 year old laptop is already blazing fast with KDE. Anyone who complains about performance or a look they don't like is either trolling or ignorant and/or incompetent.

        • Back that up with a screenshot?

        • You seem to be confusing high temperatures, noisy fans and the aroma of burning components with the perception of speed. I blame this perceptual dissonance on unquestioning and/or subconscious acquiescence to the slashdot cult of the car analogy, possibly compounded by too many hours watching nascar. Another win for nepomuk and the semantic desktop.

          In Koviet Krussia the Kovernment Kindexes Kyou.

          K kthx kbye.

          • ... or you could google disable nepomuk and click on the first link, and then you know ... disable strigi. Of course, on my 4 year old laptop I have no need to do that, so my guess is that you haven't tried a recent version of KDE.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jafac ( 1449 )

          and people who are used to Windows always do a double-take and ask me what software I am using to get such an awesome look

          . . . I find this to be an incredibly ironic statement. I am primarily a Windows user - and granted - I am exposed to pretty much every OS out there (and my heart goes to OpenStep; and I do use Unity for my home setup) - but, frankly, I always found Windows to be pretty much butt-ugly.

          There's a lot of ugly Gnome themes out there. And OS X is getting pretty long in the tooth. But they

        • I disagree. I've been using KDE 4 for many years, and it has not gotten faster in every way. On a 2+GHz Core2Duo system with 3 GB of RAM, things like this happen all the time:

          * Dolphin takes 30+ seconds to launch because of all the stuff it has to read off the disk just to run
          * Plasma freezes for seconds at a time
          * The "classic" launcher menu takes a long time to open
          * Hovering over an image in Dolphin to get a thumbnail takes 30+ seconds because I guess it has to read in so many libraries just to run the

      • There was a sea change. KDE has gone just as mad as GNOME when it comes to adding ridiculous features. The only difference is that, in traditional KDE style, Plasma can be completely configured. And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice.

        Of course, the fact that you can make KDE look identical to any major OS with a GUI that has ever been built, makes your comment a bit absurd.

        Perhaps you're talking about more than the theming capabilities?

        The only thing I'd say is that there is a lack of really nice widget styles (note, not window themes), but that's a question of current availability, not that you can't do it.

        • How tight is the integration between text based configuration tools in /etc/ and the KDE widgets themselves? Does KDE know how to connect those to the corresponding files in all the OSs it supports, depending on whether the underlying base OS is Debian, Fedora, FBSD/PC-BSD, Gentoo, Slackware and so on? I would think that that one thing is the key to eliminating the dependence on the CLI to configure various things in the OS, whether it is the networking & wi-fi, IP Tables or pF, and so on. Can one a

    • Re:This feels like what 4.0 was meant to be (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:27AM (#42809407)

      No offence... but isn't it time we stop complaining about 4.0 every time there is a KDE story?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No offence... but isn't it time we stop complaining about 4.0 every time there is a KDE story?

        I totally agree. I switched to KDE just last year, so for me the experience was awesome from the beginning. Continually hearing about old bugs from 2008 that were fixed long ago is like listening to people who are still bitter about Windows ME. Give it a rest already.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        Don't blame KDE, ver4.0 had to be.

        Blame the distro's that included it in a release before it was ready for the masses.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      4.0 was meant to be a rough implementation not aimed at or recommended for end users, but with a stable API so that KDE developers could start developing and porting apps for KDE 4 and not have to worry about rewriting them again later, so that there would be a large ecosystem of software ready for when KDE4 would be at a point where it was good enough to recommend over KDE 3.5, which was expected to be at roughly 4.3 or 4.4.

      Is that what this feels like to you?

  • well (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drankr ( 2796221 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:13AM (#42809257)

    I just upgraded and luckily my heavily customized setup from 4.9 is intact. KDE's been snappy on this notebook anyway and completely problem-free for months (well only Firefox in conjunction with Google Docs freezes like once a day... but that's an FF bug) frankly I wouldn't use it if it was slow, so I don't see any particular change in speed.. and I was running the indexers and whatnot before. The only thing that was using a lot of resources (imo) was Amarok, but then I removed all services, plugins and stuff I don't use, and now it never goes over 70 MB after playing music all day.
    I've been using KDE for less than a year but all in all I like this desktop.

  • Between those "features" and knotify4 hogging 97% of the CPU after a certain period of uptime (along with the inevitable system lockups), I switched to openbox and have had nothing but stability ever since. I liked KDE but it was just more hassle, than it was worth. I very much wish they'd make a slimmed down, window manager only version.

    • Re:Left KDE Because of Nepomuk and Semantic Deskto (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:52AM (#42809753)
      Eh? You're comparing a complete desktop environment to a window manager.

      • What difference does it make? Does a desktop get a pass for instability, simply because it's aiming for a higher goal? And I'm not even comparing. I'm just saying I had to move on to something useable.

        • Does a desktop get a pass for instability, simply because it's aiming for a higher goal?

          Nothing should get a pass for instability. But Openbox is a much simpler system and it's obvious that there is less things to go wrong. It's like finding some problems in Microsoft Office and then you rejoice how you find much more stability in Notepad. Not a fair comparison.

          Of course, that being said, if Openbox provides you everything you need and it works well, then it's of course an excellent choice. Maybe you only needed a screwdriver and not the whole toolbox.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Translation

      hey guys- I've replaced my full blownout desktop environment with a lot of different services and stuff tightly integrated into it to make this shit actually useful for this window manager and oh boy, it's so much faster!
    • I run KDE on my work laptop. Have had the machine turned on without a reboot for over 6 months now and haven't experienced any rogue processes or major memory leaks. I'm about to do some kernel updates though, so here comes a reboot! =)

      My point is that your experience is not mine - nor many others.

  • Meh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:34AM (#42809519)

    I'll stick with Windows 8, thanks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Maow ( 620678 )

      I'll stick with Windows 8, thanks.

      Area man offered free high-performance sports car, chooses rust bucket with seats made of plywood with nails driven up through it.

      Film at 11.

  • And that annoying ass 'Cashew' is still there after thousands of complaints. Other than that I think it looks great!.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JCholewa ( 34629 )

      Yeah, there's no rational reason you shouldn't be able to configure that out of existence, especially given that KDE is configurability-oriented.

      For what it's worth, the "py-cashew" widget will make it disappear. Just click "Get New Widgets" when adding widgets, and search for "cashew". Not an optimal solution, but it seems to work fine from here.

  • So is KIO still going to truncate and hose files? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @02:00PM (#42811643) Homepage Journal

    I've been a KDE user from 1.x but KIO and Nepomuk have been enough to really make me consider moving to something else. I use Midnight Commander for all my big/important file moves, not because I LIKE to use it better but because I've had way too many occasions where anything that uses KIO just royally hoses up my files. I've actually lost data to how poorly that performs. It hasn't been limited to just one system either, it's been multiple computers over the years. I really want to use Konqueror, Dolphin and Krusader but for the integrity of my files I avoid it.

    Akonadi seems to be rather a pain also.

    Get rid of Nepomuk, Akonadi, and KIOslave hosing up your files KDE is rather nice. But is it really KDE anymore?

    Just to be clear, I've been on KDE from 1.x until now, I'm not a hater, I've stuck with KDE through when I first toyed with Redhat, to SuSE, to Debian, and now Kubuntu, I'm certainly not a hater, but where there's flaws the flaws are grand.

  • I haven't been able to mount my new device running Jellybean because it uses MTP instead of the old Mass Storage, so this capability is welcomed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lbbros ( 900904 )
      It's available as the kio-mtp ioslave, currently under development (and not part of the Applications bundle).

      See this post [afiestas.org] for details.

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