KDE 4: A milestone or plain hype?

[Castar]

Do you think KDE 4 will be an amazing new experience or is it too hyped-up?

[plb]

Only time will tell. It sure does sound interesting and promising....I guess we will see.

[GeneralZod]

Speaking as a devout KDE fan, I reckon it's been very, very over-hyped. I'm not expecting anything radical at all.

[ComplexNumber]

pure unadulterated hype. having said that, its certainly not the developers who are to blame, it seems.
"dont expect and you won't be disappointed" is a good adage to follow. given the amount of hype that its received, its sure better be amazing beyond belief, otherwise its going to leave a lot of people with a bitter taste in their mouth.

[dabear]

I'm looking forward to the speed optimalizations given the move to qt4. Speed is the only thing significant factor for me

[plb]

http://developer.kde.org/development...-features.html
http://wiki.kde.org/KDE+4+Goals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE4

[win_zik]

Looking at what's new in Qt4 and looking at the appeal projects, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a great step forward.

I also fail to see the hype. Where's the hype exactly? I almost never come across KDE4 stories and if I do they are usually about the current status of the project.

[gnomeuser]

So far I haven't seen anything in KDE4 that makes me want to switch. To me it seems overhyped, I'm sure it will be a fine release, the KDE people always deliver well tested code but I just haven't seen anything groundbreaking just more of the same and that doesn't excite me the least bit.

Then again it does seem to me that GNOME is a bit at a stand still, we lack the desire to set down a hard feature requirement list for any given version. That is something KDE has always done well, even if they don't always hit all their goals they aren't at least afraid to set them.

One thing I am very pleased to see in KDE is the adoption of DBus, I hope we'll see even more work between the various free desktops to adopt FreeDesktop.org standards, I'm honestly more fired up about the projects under that umbrella than any given desktop.

[Jucato]

You know the funny thing about "hypes" like these? They're usually made and magnified more by users than the developers themselves. KDE devs say that KDE 4 would be lighter thanks to Qt 4, users go around saying KDE 4 will be awesome. KDE devs say that this or that feature will be included, users will say KDE 4 will be awesome. The irony of it is there is no means for these users to actually verify these things, because all that has been done up to now are on the code level, and nothing usable yet by non-developers.

Whether KDE 4 is a hype or not, only time will tell. We'll only be able to really judge it when it comes out in a usable form (the tech preview in October does not count). Until then, we could only judge its progress if we are constantly monitoring developments in every way possible (SVN builds, Planet KDE, etc.)

I can't really blame users, though. It seems to be only human nature. Just look at all the excitement around Dapper. I think the same atmosphere will surround GNOME once it starts to "publicly" work on 3.x.

[tikal26]

Uhh, maybe people expect something completly radical, but I am expecting a step of evolution magnittute not revolutionary. KDE 4 is the beginning of Linux doing its own thing and not just copying other OS.

I would be happy with things that are not that far fetch 20-30% increase in performance, a nicer look (take a look at the new Oxygen icons preview. the new mixer that Phonon has made avaialble, during the multimedia meeting they added a feature in which you cna set volume separetly for Video, music,etc. You can be listening to a song on Amarok and browsing the internet and if you play a clip from the internet the volume from the song you were listening will get lowered and when you finish watching or listening to the streaming clip the volume will go back up. (I mean this is just woth the upgrade).

I am still looking foward to see what plasma is all about (most hype comes from this projec), and see if tenor gets resureccted. Kde 4.0 is also bringing coll apps like koffice 2.0, Amarok 2.0, plus Okular (an all purpose viewer) so some things already there are extrmely nice, but only time will tell if KDe 4.0 will live up to the hype

Aaron is actually going to give a talk about plasma during Akademy and how they plan to help existing users to learn to use it, so I think we will actually see something worth at that time