KDE 4.2 is out

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KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Stormwatch »

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January 27, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "The Answer", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008. After the release of KDE 4.1, which was aimed at casual users, the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Maturion »

It looks like Windows Vista.... I may have a look at it, but I really like the simplicity of GNOME.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by BlackAura »

Maturion wrote:It looks like Windows Vista.... I may have a look at it, but I really like the simplicity of GNOME.
No, I don't see it. The only thing it shares with Windows Vista is that the taskbar is black. Nothing else looks even remotely like anything in Vista.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Specially Cork »

Tried it on my laptop and found about 10 things I don't like about it in 10 minutes. I'm sure a lot of it is down to my laptop, but Gnome runs so much better.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Ex-Cyber »

From what I've heard, the performance problem with KDE4 is that QT4 uses an unusual pixel format that the current graphics drivers don't accelerate (and, according to at least one developer, isn't natively supported by most GPUs in the first place).
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by BlackAura »

Ex-Cyber wrote:From what I've heard, the performance problem with KDE4 is that QT4 uses an unusual pixel format that the current graphics drivers don't accelerate (and, according to at least one developer, isn't natively supported by most GPUs in the first place).
Depends on what graphics card you've got.

It's unusably slow on my desktop machine with an nVidia card, unless I run the absolute latest video drivers. In that case, it's just slow. And crashes whenever a menu appears anywhere on the screen. The performance problems on nVidia hardware were basically because KDE 4 relies on the XRender extension to do most of it's drawing, and nVidia's implementation of that API was extremely slow. It's a lot better with the latest drivers, but still not good enough.

On my Macbook, which has an Intel GMA something-or-other (crap, basically), it works great. Easily as fast as anything else (Mac OS X included).

The pixel format thing is actually a different problem. KDE uses ARGB windows for certain features, such as Plasma, so the Plasma windows can have per-pixel transparency, and arbitrary shapes. Some drivers perform very poorly with ARGB windows, and some have (or had) all kinds of bugs, or graphics corruption...
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by nymus »

I haven't tried 4.2 but my initial impressions of 4.0 and 4.1 haven't been positive. I don't understand/use widgets so I'm having trouble switching to the new system and a lot of the configuration options seem unintuitive to me at this point. I'm seriously considering reverting to a simpler desktop like blackbox and using basic shell and vi for more serious work. Hopefully that will take away all the layers of abstraction ruin the multimedia/desktop experience for me in both KDE and Gnome.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by curt_grymala »

nymus wrote:I haven't tried 4.2 but my initial impressions of 4.0 and 4.1 haven't been positive. I don't understand/use widgets so I'm having trouble switching to the new system and a lot of the configuration options seem unintuitive to me at this point. I'm seriously considering reverting to a simpler desktop like blackbox and using basic shell and vi for more serious work. Hopefully that will take away all the layers of abstraction ruin the multimedia/desktop experience for me in both KDE and Gnome.
Supposedly, this new version addresses a lot of the issues people had with 4.0 and 4.1.

Unfortunately, though, it's still not available from anywhere but the bleeding-edge repositories on either of my Linux installations (Mint and Mandriva). Therefore, I haven't been able to test it, yet.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Juan »

KDE SC 4.8 is out. Go use it.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by Juan »

4.9 yo.
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Re: KDE 4.2 is out

Post by mankrip »

KDE website wrote:KDE's powerful file manager Dolphin now includes back and forward buttons
MS Windows has that since... Windows 95 (or 98, if I'm mistaken).
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