KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish The Linux K Desktop Environment project spun out KDE 4.3 yesterday. It's the outfit's latest version of the much-loved desktop suite for Linux and Unix platforms. KDE 4.3, codenamed "Caizen", was built by a global community of 700 contributors who have slaved over 63,000 code tweaks, and 10,000 bug fixes since the start of …
Just had a bit of a play (Arch linux had it in official updates yesterday btw..)
Its got some really nice features, looks really nice and (as long as no major regressions from 4.2.4_ should be rock solid stable.
@Michael Fremlins - try turning off desktop effects ?
Its nearly as good as Workbench 3.1 .
Hi Michael
Yes, I use KDE in a production environement, and because of the age of my machine (4 yrs old), i had to disable all desktop effects when i upgraded from KDE 3.5.9 to KDE 4.2.
Once they are disabled, the system works very well, but not as snappy as with xfce.
Is your choice, but the glint don't add to productivity, and the speed improvement is very big.
Of course, you can always use another wm.
Albert.
""The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish."
Except the word is spelt kaizen. If they can't even get the title right then I don't hold out much hope for their "polish, polish, polish" mantra.
Depends on what in your computer is slow.
If your computer has a disk subsystem with high latency - yeah, KDE is a pain. On low latency disks (flash) and NFS it can run circles around gnome. The underlying reason is that it reads one thing too many from icons, mime and theme directories. That stuff is in dire need of optimisation, but that is probably the only thing that is still a bit on the slow side.
If your computer has one core too many you can probably not even notice that bits of gnome like its key management sit at 100% usage all the time. However, KDE does not and if you are using a machine which still has only one logical CPU you will often find that it behaves better.
As far as hogging memory Gnome and KDE are on par at the moment. There was a point where KDE required more memory than the average machine on the market and caused most systems to spend too much time swapping. That is no longer the case. In fact it has not been the case for 5+ years now.
And so on. Apples and Oranges.
Umm:
... a KDE-style API that the group said makes it easier to "temporarily elevate privileges for an application" ...
Aren't we heading down the wrong track here? I would think the last thing we would want to do is "make it easier" to elevate an application's priveleges. It would be much better to design the app so it doesn't require elevated priveleges in the first place (system "control-panel"-type software being the exception, of course).
UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems were originally designed to embrace the "Principle of Least Privilege," which means you only get what you need to do your job. Now the devs are writing APIs to actively sidestep this philosophy?
I used OS/2 because I didn't want to put up with the Swiss-cheese security model used by Windows. When people stopped supporting and/or developing for OS/2, I switched to GNU/Linux, because I still didn't (and don't) favour the way Windows handles security.
At this rate, pretty soon the only "secure" desktop is going to be a green screen talking to a cobwebby S/370 buried in the basement of some derelict warehouse...
I beg to differ. KDE has been my desktop of choice for years. There hasn't been any difference in speed with KDE vs. Gnome, for instance. On that note, I've found the lack of personal configuration with Gnome to be maddening at best. I may be a Debian user, but I make sure it installs KDE rather than Gnome, and I couldn't be happier with it.
They could have just worked a bit longer on it while keeping 3.x in the air, sadly they didn't. At least they didn't do an Amarok 2, but it was still a painful transition for everyone. Hopefully this release will also let people like me whom hate the 'cashew' with a passion, to take it out back and shoot it till there is nothing left. Bloody pointless eye sore that should have been stuck into the KDE Control Center.
@Michael Fremlins:
KDE (3 or 4, your pick) actually runs quite nice for me, even on one of my old fossils, an IBM Thinkpad R31 with just 256MB RAM and the much loved (cough, cough) Intel i810 graphics chipset.
You could try a LiveCD such as Mandriva One to see if a 'clean' environment gives you a better experience with KDE4, then perhaps see if there's any differences that can be solved. Then again, you may not like KDE at all, in that case forget I said anything about it. :)
Thanks to everyone for responding to my jab.
I prefer a minimal desktop over anything that looks nice but runs slowly. My preferred WMs are XFCE and FVWM. They both respond very quickly, much more quickly than either Gnome or KDE. And they take up far less resources. I have used numerous WMs in the past, but have long settled on FVWM. I haven't "needed" anything else. I would never use something like Compiz as it would just slow me down.
One of the best, and most productive, programmers I ever met used OpenWindows on Solaris. That really is minimalist. But it had everything he needed - a terminal, vi and a browser. And because he was so good, I learned from him.
I've read the stories about Vista sluggishness and performance and don't use it. Instead, on my Windows box, I have XP. That is an old desktop, but it works. And I won't upgrade it to Vista as that will immediately slow it down.
My desktop won't suit everyone. But nor will KDE.
"bits of gnome like its key management sit at 100% usage all the time"
You have a faulty system. Multiple cores are alien to me as I have given several ancient machines a new lease of life by putting Ubuntu on them, and there's nothing in GNOME which sits consuming 100% CPU or I'd sure as hell have noticed it (if only by laptop fans whizzing away)!
I was a fan of KDE (Kubuntu) until 4 came along, which was an embarrassment. I just hope these bugfixes have finally made it usable again. Under 4.2, I find the panel crashes if you disable wireless networking, and if you're using "focus follows mouse" to avoid clicking to focus, if you don't move the mouse quickly enough between (eg) the K Menu icon and the menu it produces, the small gap due to the menu "floating" above the panel causes focus to transfer to the desktop and the menu disappears!
I notice 4.3 has been backported to Kubuntu 9.04 (Intrepid). I'll try it.
My jaded, crude, underworked, overpaid, other-side-of-the-pond sensibilities have noticed that an official KDE screenshot proclaims that KDE is "out" - so congratulations to KDE on coming out of the closet! Don't worry, we still love ya. http://dot.kde.org/sites/dot.kde.org/files/kde430.png
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