My supervisor has given me an OK for my thesis (save for a couple of cosmetic changes), therefore now I have just to wait for the verdict of the Ph.D. council then fill in some paperwork: the next step is the defense, sometime in January.
After that I’ll probably put my thesis online and post a few articles on the concept of group testing for microarray data.
First of all let me make some disclaimers :
As you may know, KDE 4.0 Beta 3 was released a while ago. With it came the usual number of criticisms, some sensible, a lot of others not. Most of the latter fell into the category of “it’s an alpha, not a beta” and “Plasma sucks”. Well, one can ignore most of them since they rarely provide anything constructive.
What worries me instead is this thread on the kde-core-devel ML, where other people have (probably out of concern) been questioning the state of the workspace and some even proposed to go back to kicker + desktop for 4.0. It worries me because (at least as my non-developing eyes see) some people just jumped on the bandwagon. Plasma is one of the most important aspects of KDE4, but also of KDE 4.0, so proposing such a move would:
Last but not least I’m wondering why all the criticisms arrive now. It’s not like Plasma appeared out of nowhere one night… This might just drive people away, rather than give an advantage to our favorite desktop environment.
I obviously did not want to stop with a single compile of KDE4, therefore I’m updating more or less randomly my build off the SVN to check what has been changing.
The first and most important change since my last post was the addition of the K-menu in the taskbar: Kickoff was moved from playground (where it resided) to kdebase. Also, kate now works perfectly, and is already usable as a full-blown text editor.
Last time I did not test gwenview, the KDE image viewer, and now I can happily report it works. I like the new UI, with the sidebar (which can be hidden if needed). Here is a screenshot of it in action:
Aside that, I’ve tried again to compile kdenetwork without much success: the codebase seems in a state of flux right now, and errors pop up here and there. Too bad, as I really wanted to see the new KRDC. While I wait for it to be fixed, I installed kdemultimedia: so far I’ve only tested kmix, and it seems to work (it displays the interface but I have no idea if it actually modifies the volume). I’m not daring to touch kdepim as I know kmail4 is in very bad shape right now.
I’ve also tried to compile some Plasma applets from playground but I get CMake errors, I assume I need to checkout something else needed for it to work.
I’ll keep on reporting in the next days, when I get time.
Since Beta 3 was announced a short time ago, I thought I would try testing KDE4 on my computer. Here I’m reporting on my first impressions and I’ll try to provide constructive feedback as much as possible: the developers are being already (and unjustly, in my opinion) bashed enough.
