Schedules/Is KDE 4.1 for you?

KDE 4.1 is scheduled for release at the end of July 2008. This is a significant milestone for the KDE 4 series and for KDE in general, but as an early release in the KDE 4 cycle, it does have some known issues which will not be fixed in KDE 4.1. Huge progress has been made in KDE 4.1 which is listed in the KDE 4.1 Feature Plan.

Some of the more obvious issues are listed below. If these issues are important to you, you should stay with KDE 3.5.9 until KDE 4.2 when most of these issues are scheduled to be resolved.

It is possible that distributions will work around some of these issues before distributing to users. KDE 4.2 is currently scheduled for release in February 2009.

The Desktop

The desktop in KDE 4.1 will mark the start of some significant user interface changes. This is a step away from the way the KDE 3 desktop was designed, but everything possible on your KDE 3.5.9 desktop will also be possible on your KDE 4 desktop. For KDE 4.1, however, some features are not yet complete, but should be ready for KDE 4.2.

FolderView

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Under Construction

FolderView is a new technology on the KDE 4 desktop which allows more than one collection of icons on your "desktop" and discourages making it the dumping ground for miscellaneous files (though that is also possible, like in KDE 3). See blog entry by Lydia Pintscher for some infomation on FolderView.

The following issues are known are scheduled to be resolved in KDE 4.2 next February:

• Icons do not need to be in a grid. You can drag them to any point within the FolderView. However, the location you leave them in is not saved, so they will be a grid again the next time you start the desktop.
• You can have a full screen "desktop with icons", but if you do, you can not have a desktop background. See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhYinDOKbE8
• You can have a desktop background, but then you must use the FolderView in regular, not entire screen mode (as shown in Lydia's blog above).

Panels and workspaces

• You can drag applets on to the desktop and on to the panel from the add applets dialog. However, when an applet is already on the panel, you can not drag it left or right.
• Autohiding of panels is not yet configurable.
• It is not possible to set different desktop wallpapers for different virtual desktops.

Applications

New and missing applications

Some KDE 3 applications have not yet been ported to KDE 4. Most distributions still package KDE 3 versions of these applications with their KDE 4 desktops. Some notable applications which will not be included in KDE 4.1 are listed below:

• KOffice has a different release schedule than KDE 4. KOffice 2.0 will likely be released late in 2008.
• Amarok has a different release schedule than KDE 4. Amarok does not currently have a (public?) release schedule for the 2.0 series.
• Konversation has a different release schedule than KDE 4. Konversation 2.0 does not yet have a release schedule.

Misc. Features

• HTTP proxy support hasn't been ported yet. SOCKS proxies should work fine, however.