KDE 4.4 Kreeps Kloser to Komplete

by Joe Brockmeier - Jan. 26, 2010Comments (4)

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The KDE team is getting very close to a final release of KDE 4.4. The second release candidate came out yesterday as a testing platform for users and developers to find and squash bugs before the final release date of February 9th.

The 4.4 release brings quite a few changes over 4.3, new applications, enhancements, and much more. Bloggers will find a new blogging tool, Konqueror has been beefed up with a history sidebar, KDE's groupware has received several improvements including POP3 support in Akonadi and other changes.

This release also includes a whole slew of new widgets for KDE. This includes a "Webslice" plasmoid to display a part of a Webpage, a spellcheck widget, an on-screen keyboard, and a blackboard widget that allows users to paint with the mouse or even multitouch devices "on platforms that support them." KDE inherited multitouch support from Qt4.6, and could make KDE a contender on mobile devices and tablets.

Users looking to try out the new KDE goodies can find some instructions on Ben Kevan's site. This will give you a step-by-step to get KDE 4.4 RC2 up and going on openSUSE and/or Kubuntu.

KDE 4.4RC2 is only a few days late on the roadmap, so it looks good for the project to hit the scheduled release of February 9th. KDE enthusiasts can find quite a few release parties to get together to celebrate on or around the release.

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by bitcube bitcube on Jan. 27, 2010

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Jan. 27, 2010

I really like this RC2, it looks promising.

One note is that PIM is getting closer and closer to be totally unusable and it is really sad : each time I upgrade akonadi breaks and it is harder and harder to recover, you have to do system administration tasks like setting up databases because the embedded version doesn't work etc ... And it now spawns virtuoso processes all the time for whatever reason grabbing your CPU/IO.

This is total overengineering. Where an users want an email, calendar and contact, they try to make a superdupper-generic-transactional-multiuser-multitronic-manage-your-all-life-killer-application for the beauty of it, the user is a second thought in that.

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by an anonymous user on Jan. 27, 2010

I'm happy with 4.3 and looking forward to 4.4, but I need to ask. Is version 4.4 binary compatible with 4.3 (or I guess I should ask is QT4.6 binary compatible with 4.5)?

Not that it matters that much (yet), since my distro will probably upgrade all of KDE at once. But at some point there will begin to be 3rd party apps that won't release in sync with KDE itself, and I was kind of hoping KDE4 was a serious attempt to 'get the platform right once and for all'.

I imagine that it *is* strictly source-code compatible. But how about binary? Is it possible? My guess is that C++ makes binary compatibility a little harder than with C (or put another way, makes breaking binary compatibility a little easier). Either way, does KDE attempt to use the language in ways that don't break binary compatibility? If not, does anybody see that as a problem?

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by Gerry on Jan. 30, 2010

Nice updating article, thank you. I'm using RC2 on openSUSE and it's great.

In general terms i have a lot of difficulty with high levels of negative posting about KDE. Honestly if you don't like it why not just vote with your feet?

The first anonymous post describes KDEPIM as being close to unusable - perhaps we could hear a little bit more about the circumstances.

As someone with an unhealthy taste for incremental upgrades from openSUSE Factory I've occasionally cursed myself (i.e., me, not KDE) but KDEPIM is looking totally amazing and even on my half-arsed upgrading policy has broken nothing.

And i call bullshit on CPU/IO grabbing - I discovered control esc recently and on a 7 year old computer most processes are using 0% CPU most of the time except when they burst into life and do something

The second anonymous post is equally baffling. What class of user has the problems described? if you are such a hacker then compiling from source. If you are a user, (and not a junkie, like me) then if you are upgrading at all, you are not doing it from "Factory" or equivalent.

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