KDE 4.2 Beta 1 Desktop Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 4.2 Beta 1 Desktop Released

The KDE development community has banded together and today released an early Christmas present to those using the K Desktop Environment on Linux and other operating systems. The first beta release of KDE 4.2 is now available. KDE 4.2 Beta 1 features a large number of improvements since the release of KDE 4.1 in July.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13166

[ethana2]

OOH-- I may seem shallow, but that desktop background thing is what I'm looking for in a DE.
Make it able to do screensavers, videos, and arbitrary application windows OOTB and come 9.04, you've got yourself an addict.

[Vadi]

Hey.

They're getting tricky now. Is KDE 4.2 Beta 1 allowed to end-user usage or no?

[FallenWizard]

It is a test version, so I don't think it's made for end-users


I am installing KDE 4.2 Beta 1 atm, looks nice.

[Tsiolkovsky]

I've been exploring this beta for about an hour and so far I like it a lot. A giant step forward from KDE 4.1. KDE developers are bringing in some cool features. This beta is not yet for end-use, but if you can developers would definitely be very grateful if you could test it and report bugs so they can polish it even more. When the final version gets out it will rock. Can't wait to see the new series of Linux distros that will come with this version of KDE.

[ethana2]

I just tried the LiveCD and it did little but crash, just like Kubuntu 8.10, albeit a little more gracefully, if that's possible.

Still looking forward to 9.04 though, hopefully it'll work better..

[Chewi]

Heh that desktop background thing is certainly nothing new. X has always been able to support applications as backgrounds, it's just that the DEs haven't allowed you to configure it. It's nothing special when you think about it, just an "always on bottom" application that you can't click on.

[d2kx]

KDE 4.2 rocks :) KDE 4.2 with desktop effects rocks ^ 2 :)

[conholster]

Yay!!! :) I'm so happy!

[mityukov]

Waiting backport for Kubuntu Intrepid.. (if there will be one) %))

[_txf_]

I just tried the LiveCD and it did little but crash, just like Kubuntu 8.10, albeit a little more gracefully, if that's possible.

Still looking forward to 9.04 though, hopefully it'll work better..

Isn't the live cd based on suse packages? I'm using them now and I find them to be really surprisingly stable. If you install suse then add the unstable kde repo then it probably will work nicely. Do it in a vm if you don't want any risks

[EmbraceUnity]

I am loving the themed kickoff menu and the new settings for the panel and desktop. The only feature from KDE 3 that I can think of which is missing is the ability to individually change the wallpapers of each virtual desktop.

I am glad they added more compiz plugins like the cube. I doubt many kde users will be downloading compiz anymore, since it has been so nicely integrated.

With the Jaunty packages I have noticed a few glitches regarding that button on the top right of the desktop, and I have noticed some problems with plasma. Nothing major, but I certainly recommend keeping it inside a virtual machine at least until the release candidate.

Now if only I could get DRI2 compiled...

[jeffro-tull]

I've got openSUSE 11.1 RC1 with KDE /trunk packages running on my main rig. Far and away better than 4.1.x provided with Kubuntu that I'd been using. A lot snappier, a lot more feature-complete (though not necessarily implemented as it was in KDE3 - see the slider in Dolphin to resize icons, for example), and, as a whole, more stable. konqueror's finicky, Dolphin borks when trying to preview relatively large files (over 1GB), and some of the Comic widget engines crash the applet.

Still, it's shaping up nicely. I do miss having a different background for each screen which using xrander to do dual-head (not it's cloning the wallpaper). But at least the zoomable user interface is enabled and worked (unlike Kubuntu right now).

[coats]

A QUESTION: what about mouse-button menus, and mouse-wheel desktop-changes?

I just spent a weekend installing and re-installing Mandriva 2009.0 PowerPack (which, by the time online-upgrades
are finished, defaults to KDE 4.1.3). The real deal-breaker was that I could find no way to enable mouse-button-in-root-window application and window-list menus. I had lots of trouble just finding how to do focus-follows-mouse...

I wound up re-installing as no-KDE, and then bringing in KDE3 off the net--but wasted all day Saturday struggling, trying to fix KDE4, or else to uninstall it cleanly.

Is that just a 4.1.x deficiency, or is that part of the plan for KDE in the future? (Looking at the "plan" documents, I don't see anything about this issue.)

[jeffro-tull]

what do you mean by "mouse-button menus"? You mean like right-click context menus? I've been using KDE4 since 3.93, and, to the best of my knowledge, they never went away.

I'm not going to pretend that each and every functionality from 3.5.10 is back in 4.2 - they're not. But a lot of them are. It's just that not everything is accomplished the same way, and that trips people up.

That's one thing the KDE people need to step up and take care of. It seems like there's great strides being made (as far as feature parity and usability), but they aren't communicating it well. THey pretty much leave it at "yep, this functionality is back." I know openSUSE has a "welcome to KDE4" type thing on the first log on popup, but that's for 4.1.3. 4.2 is very, very different usability wise.

[DeepDayze]

Once it is fully polished it should rock the universe :)

[coats]

what do you mean by "mouse-button menus"? You mean like right-click context menus? I've been using KDE4 since 3.93, and, to the best of my knowledge, they never went away...


For KDE3, the effect controlled by Control Center > Desktop > Behyavior > Mouse Button Actions
(choices are "Application Menu" "Desktop Menu" "Window List Menu") -- the effect is that mouse
clicks in the root window bring up the corresponding menu: is "context menus" the correct term
for that? I've had some variation of them in every Linux window manager I've used over the last fourteen years, and frankly the KDE3 ones are the best I've found.

Because I'm doing extremely-detailed GIS work, I use *large* virtual displays -- 3200x2560, on
a physical-1920x1200 screen. Having the above-mentioned window and application control "at my fingertips" anywhere on screen is essential to the way I work -- to the point that its absence is a deal-breaker. Having to go a long way to some corner of the virtual screen is not really workable for me.

I hunted for quite literally hours trying to get that functionality in Mandriva's 4.1.3 and failed utterly on my upgrade last weekend, to the point that I did a no-KDE install (the installation sources only come with KDE4, not KDE3 as an option), and then went back and installed KDE3 "by hand".

I then went looking at the planning documents for KDE 4.2, and wasn't able to find anything about such mouse-button-activated menus. My question: is this an oversight in the docs, so that I can expect them to work properly in some later edition of KDE4? Or am I out of luck?