KDE 4.9 Released With Many Enhancements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 4.9 Released With Many Enhancements

KDE 4.9 surfaced this morning as expected for this six-month update to the KDE desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE1MTg

[RealNC]

And none of the bugs fixed, probably. And new bugs introduced. Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

Let's hope 4.9 is an exception. KDE has more bugs than MS-DOS, Windows 95 and Windows Me put together. Amarok and Phonon have even gotten to a point where it's not possible to play your music anymore.

[Tsiolkovsky]

I installed the Fedora 17 packages and KDE 4,9 is working great so far. Amarok also still plays all my music just fine. Great job KDE people! I love the new Activity integration into Dolphin and Kwin.

[Redi44]

And none of the bugs fixed, probably. And new bugs introduced. Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

Let's hope 4.9 is an exception. KDE has more bugs than MS-DOS, Windows 95 and Windows Me put together. Amarok and Phonon have even gotten to a point where it's not possible to play your music anymore.

KDE is not my cup of tea, but I've never encountered any serious problems (Chakra Linux BTW). Can you describe some of them so I can try to reproduce them in Chakra?

[Del_]

And none of the bugs fixed, probably.

Many of the bugs are fixed. For kde-pim in particular the last fundamental bug was cleared out (autocompletion from address book). Of course, being a major release it contains new functionality and hence new bugs. If you prefer stability stay with 4.8.4 until a couple of iterations of 4.9 is available. The Kubuntu spin of 4.8.4 is a rather solid release on my hardware, you can get it on 12.04 by enabling the kubuntu ppa:
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-sc-4.8.4

Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

You must be referring to the year before last year, or you may have some tricky hardware. Last summer was rather a rather rocky ride for kde-pim, and the last couple of years before that for phonon (through the pulseaudio transition). You should give 4.9 a test drive. Thanks to project Neon, you can easily do that without endangering your environment:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/ProjectNeon

Amarok has not messed up for me in quite a while, and the phonon+pulseaudio have become a rather nice combination on my machines (realising exactly the promises made by pulseaudio giving linux a modern sound stack). I'd be glad to help you out if you want to give it another try. I have seen wine having trouble with pulseaudio though, and those issues are still there. Seems the wine crew are the last to embrace pulseaudio.

On the application side I am particularly impressed by Digikam, Kdenlive and Krita (loving kde-pim too btw). They really make KDE shine. I am planning on getting to know Kdevelop a whole lot better at work, and looking forward to it.

[Reloaded211]

And none of the bugs fixed, probably. And new bugs introduced. Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

Let's hope 4.9 is an exception. KDE has more bugs than MS-DOS, Windows 95 and Windows Me put together. Amarok and Phonon have even gotten to a point where it's not possible to play your music anymore.

Could you describe some of those bugs so that we can try to reproduce them? Just to make sure that you're not blatantly trolling here.

[uid313]

Does it support Wayland?
How is the Wayland support coming along?

Maybe the startmenu needs to be improved or redesigned or replaced?

And none of the bugs fixed, probably. And new bugs introduced. Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

Seems some have been fixed, from the announcement:

The Team also set up a more rigorous testing process for releases starting with beta versions. New testing volunteers received training; and several testing intensive days were held. Rather than traditional exploratory testing, testers were assigned to focus on specific areas that had changed since previous releases. For several critical components, full testing checklists were developed and used. The team found many important issues early and worked with developers to make sure they were fixed. The Team itself reported over 160 bugs with the beta and RC releases, many of which have now been fixed. Other beta and RC users added considerably to the number of bugs reported. These efforts are important because they allow developers to concentrate on fixing issues.

[n3wu53r]

Does it support Wayland?
How is the Wayland support coming along?

Maybe the startmenu needs to be improved or redesigned or replaced?



Seems some have been fixed, from the announcement:

There won't be wayland support until qt5.

[RealNC]

Bugs that are really annoying:

• Some windows minimize towards the center of the desktop rather than towards the task bar. Qt Creator and tvtime always trigger that bug here.
• KWin is very slow and choppy with low power GPU modes (50Mhz graphics / 135Mhz mem / 101Mhz proc). So I have to force a higher performance level.
• Icons "jump" around when hovering the mouse over them (Desktop as well as in Dolphin). Doesn't always happen. Whether it happens or not seems to be fixed at login time.
• Switching keyboard layout ignores the desktop (the desktop will use the last layout of the last application.)
• KMix lacks some mixer sliders offered to me by alsamixer. Namely the "front", "rear", "center", "woofer" and "side" sliders. Only "master" is offered. This is with an Asus Xonar D1 card.
• KDM stopped remembering the user name of the last logged in user after 4.6.
• Admin password prompts are in stealth mode. Practically, you wait for a long time for the button you just clicked to do something, only to discover that this whole time a password prompt was opened that is hidden behind the current window.
• Even though I set KDE to always automount new devices when I plug them in, it doesn't work with everything; I still have to click on "mount" in the plasma notifier.
• The "back" and "forward" buttons of my mice (all of them) don't work. No going back/forward with them in stuff like Konqueror, Dolphin or file dialogs.

There are other smaller annoyances, but they're simply due to broken design rather than being bugs (for example the resize handle on borderless windows sometimes cover scrollbar buttons and statusbar information.)

I still like KDE very much :-) It's just these things get very annoying and it's very disappointing every time I update my KDE installation and see they haven't been addressed. (I did report them on bugs.kde.org of course.)

[madjr]

very sad, the death of Claire.