Living on the edge | dennogumi.org

KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has been released, and of course I couldn’t stay still. Thanks to the friendly openSUSE Build Service, there were packages available, so I just pointed my zypper sources to KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository, adjusted a few other things (mainly other third-party repositories) and updated.

It was a mostly painless process, mostly because I was too fast, and the mirrors hadn’t synced yet, so I ended up with 4.3.77 packages instead of 4.3.80 (Beta 1). I just avoided to log into X and waited till the right packages were available, then I updated again. I updated system-wide (yes, I can be that crazy) and I started using the beta (and its subsequent snapshots) full time. In part it’s because I’m a feature addict, in part because I wanted to write some promo material (I’m really sorry Jos, I didn’t find the time to do it yet!) to make things easier prior to release.

So, how’s the SC faring, so far? Pretty nice, overall. There are of course quirks (for example KWin not responding to global shortcuts unless it’s restarted), but generally the experience has been quite positive. The user-facing components, such as KWin and Plasma, have improved quite a bit (new effects, the new widget explorer, new applets….), but also less visible parts such as Nepomuk (with the Virtuoso backend it works OK, although for some reason I can’t access the metadata panel in Dolphin or use the search, also in Dolphin). I also took the time to explore other applications, for example Cantor, as I’m a (reluctant) user of the R programming language. The version built by openSUSE doesn’t ship with an R backend, so I had to compile it on my own. It is more minimalistic than, say, rkward, but I can foresse already some uses for it (especially running already-made scripts).

I also tried out the netbook shell on my Eee. Again, it’s pretty nice, although sometimes the performance is still lacking (but my Eee uses an i915 chipset, so it’s really the end-of-line and may have played a role in this.

Overall I’m very impressed, so congratulations to everyone who’s making this possible!

Lastly, following up what Stuart and others did, here are two screenshots of two of my (many) activities (click for full picture):

19 thoughts on “Living on the edge”

4.4user December 7, 2009 at 23:00

nice, but i must say, the wigets does not look graphically polished.. :(

esspecially the harddisk/cpu and weather plasmoids – check out what MS and Apple did on the design. And i mean the content, not the plasma-suroundings..

arxus December 7, 2009 at 23:27

Hello, i have opensuse too, kde 4.3.81, do you work alt+tab? i can’t switch between windows :(

Einar Post authorDecember 7, 2009 at 23:31

@arxus: Do a “kwin –replace” and shortcuts will work again. IIRC it’s a post-4.6.0 Qt bug.

Jonas December 7, 2009 at 23:35

Heh, I guess I’m as crazy as you then…and I’ve run into pretty much the same issues regarding kwin and nepomuk. Nepomuk works though, since the ratings and what not can be accessed through gwenview and bangarang.

Two issues I had regarding the opensuse unstable factories though, for others who may be tempted:

1. The python-bindings packages are not up-to-date yet, so if you rely on something written for KDE in Python, either wait or skip those programs for the time being. Somehow I’m used to this…always seems to be the case when it comes to openSuse.
2. The Firefox-kde integration is not yet built against unstable. May not be a deal-breaker but worth keeping in mind.

arxus December 7, 2009 at 23:37

Thanks!!

Einar Post authorDecember 7, 2009 at 23:39

@Jonas

1. This is due to the fact that the bindings get up to shape only later during the release cycle, as the underlying architecture changes too much before that (I just saw a commit by Simon Edwards fixing Akonadi bindings for Python). The package isn’t there because it cannot be built (compile errors).

2. I didn’t even notice… I guess it’s because I use Konqueror.

Jonas December 7, 2009 at 23:56

Regarding 1…it makes sense but somehow I don’t think that’s the entire reason. The ruby-bindings are up-to-date (well, more up to date than the python at least 4.3.80 compared to python’s 4.3.73) so it seems the python-bindings are harder get to compile for some reason.

And number two: didn’t yast or zypper complain though?

Tim December 8, 2009 at 2:19

So, you are 32 and still using anime wallpapers?

William Chambers December 8, 2009 at 4:34

Tim, is there an age limit to having fun? Anime are as much a work of art as anything else.

Jason "moofang" December 8, 2009 at 6:30

*Thumbs up to anime wallpapers* ;)

Think I won’t bother upgrading though, since trunk is still synced to 4.4 and I can twiddle with it there.

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Martin December 9, 2009 at 7:06

Look’s good to me :), I have read a lot of work has gone into Nepomuk this time round. Hopefully 4.4 when it get’s later in the beta releases will become as polished as we all expect it to be.

As for the comment about the “anime wallpapers” I’m 35 and still use anime wallpapers :p, As William stated Anime is an art and i must say the background’s you have are awesome!

Nicolas December 10, 2009 at 23:03

Wow, so are plasma activities actually usable in KDE4.4? :)

Einar Post authorDecember 10, 2009 at 23:10

@Nicolas – I can’t really say because I started using them full time when the Activity Bar was introduced (so at least for KDE SC 4.3). It’s still a little difficult to grasp, hopefully around SC 4.5 we should start seeing something interesting (Nepomuk-based contexts, etc.).

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