KDE SC 4.5 Just Got Hit With A One-Week Delay

[pingufunkybeat]

Are you really saying that Red Hat is the Linux distribution more widely used in the US? I find that odd.

It traditionally was.

It changed when they stopped the desktop version and rolled out Fedora, and changed again when Ubuntu showed up.

Do you have some data to backup this? The perception that Ubuntu brought a lot of new users is everywhere.

This stuff is hard to measure. The web-based estimated have been hovering around 1% for Linux since as far back as I can remember.

I think that the impression that Ubuntu doubled or tripled the Linux installed base, as assumed by some, is quite wrong.

[kraftman]

Is Akonadi finally ready?

There were so many bugs with Akonadi/KDEPIM when using a Kolab server or an IMAP adressbook in KDE 4.4. Akonadi seems to be the last, big construction site, so I really hope that this release finally has full Akonadi support.

From kde.org:

Initially planned for KDE SC 4.5.0, the KDE PIM team have decided to delay the release of the Akonadi-based KMail. In the meantime, the stable version of KMail from KDE SC 4.4 will be maintained. Akonadi will centralize syncing and caching of PIM data, deliver wider support for groupware servers and makes handling PIM data, such as contacts, calendaring and email more efficient by sharing it across applications.

[kraftman]

This changed in 2004: Novell bought SUSE after it already bought the GNOME founder's company Ximian. With Ximian bought first its executives were put in charge of Linux operations at Novell. Needless to say one of their first orders was to kill KDE from SUSE Linux and replace it completely with GNOME. After uprising by its customers the plans were changed and KDE was kept intact, but degraded to an alternative option.

This is exactly what I was thinking. When OpenSuse decided to make KDE default some mono fanboys (ex-ximians, maybe?) were screaming on the mailing list, because it doesn't ship with their favourite mono apps.

According to some comment "http://dot.kde.org/2006/05/19/kde-multimedia-meeting-netherlands" It was Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Ximian's director of marketing and now Novell's (2006), who said that Novell will standardize on gnome:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/05/1620206

This, removing features in Gnome and moving towards mono is just a damn politics.

Stop using Kubuntu or Arch and get a working distribution, like openSUSE.

Arch is my primary distro now and I found KDE is rock solid here. I used Kubuntu before, but ibus-qt was broken and Dolphin crashed sometimes.

...but when combining the whole GTK camp (GNOME, Xfce, MeeGo Netbook, even LXDE), that one leads over the Qt camp which currently consists of KDE alone.

Isn't MeeGo using Qt? Or MeeGoNetbook is something different?

[kraftman]

Also, by polls we do, it seems that a lot of users who become more or less familiar with Ubuntu, turn to change to Kubuntu. KDE is very popular even in this Gnome-centric distro.

Sadly, some of those who have switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu are little disapointed. Both my friends had problems with codecs (I don't know why, because system should ask them if they want to install codecs or not). It will be perfect if Kubuntu would ship everything out of the box, but I guess it's not so easy to do.

[monraaf]

Well Kubuntu is mostly a toy distro. Nice for the kids to play around with, and good for derivative spins such as Hannah Montana Linux. But KDE is just not something they wanted for their main product.

[Apopas]

This stuff is hard to measure. The web-based estimated have been hovering around 1% for Linux since as far back as I can remember.

I think that the impression that Ubuntu doubled or tripled the Linux installed base, as assumed by some, is quite wrong.

It's impossible to count the Linux machines and for that the web-based estimations vary a lot.
As I said before, in the greek Ubuntu forums we have 5000 noobs. Where did they come from? They didn't use Linux before. Most of them ofcourse are dual booters. That counts them as windows or Linux machines?
In our schools as well, the computers come with windows and Ubuntu prinstalled. That directed a lot of students to use Ubuntu regularly. I see it in my neighbourhood too. A lot of guys use Ubuntu as second and first OS and if you browse the free wi-fi connection you find Ubuntu machines to be online and almost everyone from the young people recognizes the Ubuntu logo. Never ever before I could count another Linux machine but my own ones.
Ofcourse this proves nothing. Actually nothing proves anything, but after Ubuntu came in life there is the feeling that Linux became more famous, at least here. For me Ubuntu at least doubled the Linux user base. How many of them understand what free software means though is another matter for another thread maybe

[Apopas]

Sadly, some of those who have switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu are little disapointed. Both my friends had problems with codecs (I don't know why, because system should ask them if they want to install codecs or not). It will be perfect if Kubuntu would ship everything out of the box, but I guess it's not so easy to do.

Truth to be told I never found a KDE based distro the meets my tastes but Gentoo coz I create it in the way I want

[pingufunkybeat]

I didn't see any newer statistics recently, but if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that thanks to openSUSE's growth in the US, Fedora's better marketing for the KDE spin, and Xfce probably KDE's desktop has a slight lead over GNOME, but when combining the whole GTK camp (GNOME, Xfce, MeeGo Netbook, even LXDE), that one leads over the Qt camp which currently consists of KDE alone.

GTK has always had the advantage in terms of apps, and probably always will, if only for the fact that it's easier to use it from pure C.

But I don't think that the toolkit is particularly important. All major platform have a number of competing toolkits (Windows, MacOSX, for example), and it's not a problem. I explicitly support GTK, as it is a decent open source toolkit for developing Linux apps. If someone prefers it to Qt, they should use it, it's free software after all.

Similarly, a window manager and a panel do not make a desktop environment. I used to run KDE stuff from E16, AfterStep and Windowmaker for years. It works just fine. Plasma or Gnome-shell are just a basic interface that is not terribly important in my eyes, and at least the KDE experience can be tweaked into anything you want.

What makes a good desktop environment is desktop technologies which are used throughout all of the system. And THIS is where we need standardisation. DBus is a fantastic step in the right direction! The unified icon names from freedesktop.org are a fantastic step in the right direction! Making KHTML desktop-agnostic and turning it into Webkit (with Qt and GTK bindings) is a step in the right direction.

And if you look at the actual number of apps using kioslaves vs. those using gio, if you look at the number of apps using KParts model to the ones using embedding in GNOME (Bonobo is dead, I don't know what is used nowadays), if you look at the abstraction layers such as solid or phonon, the use of Plasma throughout, and how widely these technologies are used in different apps, you will see that KDE makes a very solid platform for developing applications which interoperate well.

And this is what makes a good desktop, and this is where KDE has always been ahead.

IMHO, one should standardise around KDE and make sure that GTK becomes a first-class citizen in KDE. Make it easy to use KDE technologies such as solid and plasma from GTK apps.

This has worked really well with dbus, and Webkit (both desktop standards today, both came out of KDE originally) but it might be difficult to do with everything. Plasma can use Dashboard and Google widgets, so you can use it without any Qt already, also good. Some other technologies might make too many Qt-specific assumptions. I think that it would be a good idea to make them more toolkit-agnostic, and make them attractive for the large number of GTK developers. This is the only way forward if we ever want to have a consistent desktop.

Waiting for either Qt or GTK to die (or trying to kill KDE, as many distros have tried so far) is the wrong approach, which obviously doesn't work. Toolkit-agnostic technologies are the way forward.

[Temar]

From kde.org:

Initially planned for KDE SC 4.5.0, the KDE PIM team have decided to delay the release of the Akonadi-based KMail. In the meantime, the stable version of KMail from KDE SC 4.4 will be maintained. Akonadi will centralize syncing and caching of PIM data, deliver wider support for groupware servers and makes handling PIM data, such as contacts, calendaring and email more efficient by sharing it across applications.

Not again! Switching a few applications to Akonadi and leaving the rest as is was the second big mistake after the 4.0 disaster. It may work for people who only have simple e-mail accounts. Groupware functionality and IMAP storage support however is awfully bugged.

So if Akonadi support doesn't make it into 4.5 it seems that 4.6 will be the first release where the full KDE framework is finally implemented. I really hope that they did a good job in designing this framework so it can be used for a long time. The last few years were a disaster!

[pingufunkybeat]

I believe that it will be released some time after 4.5.0, it won't wait for 4.6.