On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Uh oh. I sense a potential disturbance in the force. I hope the 4to5 > transition experience in Fedora won't be as adventurous as the 3to4 > was. Nope. There will be lots of changes under the hood, but not so much in the way of user-visible changes. The big ticket item is splitting out the big old monolithic kdelibs into 57 separate libraries that each do one thing and one thing well. That effort recently hit a major milestone of actually separating out into different git repositories. [1] There is some work to be done for developers, but much less work is required than the Qt/KDE3->4 transition. I've been watching the commits for porting Kate to KDE5 fly by my e-mail and it's amazing how quickly they got Kate & KWrite up and running on KDE5. [2] The only thing you may notice is some of those under the hood changes will result in greater visual consistency. Right now everything's a grab bag of various theming and GUI implementation. In KDE5 the plan is to render everything in the workspace the same way using the same theming framework, so those jarring differences between different components of the desktop will become a thing of the past. [3] Also, disk and memory use will slightly improve for us KDE users, but vastly improve for those folks using other environments, since instead of a big old kdelibs they'll just need the libraries the app they want uses. So soon your GNOME-using friends will have no excuse not to try out awesome KDE app foo. ;-) Finally, you didn't say it, but before anyone else does—a lot of people seem to be worried that KDE is suddenly going to go all touch-friendly and forget the desktop. This is not the case. As one of the KDE core developers so elegantly puts: "...we do not believe in the 'one interface that runs on both your desktop and your tablet'. We believe in code reuse, in component-reuse (and, where beneficial, drop-in-replacement), compatibility and interoperability; but we also believe that a tablet interface and a desktop interface are not, and should not, be the same thing. The use cases and form factors are just too different. "We have no plans of bastardizing Plasma Desktop into a watered-down attempt at a tablet interface that also sort-of-makes-sense on a laptop. We feel this only produces interfaces that perform OK but not great on either kind of device. We want interfaces that work great on each sort of device." [4] So instead, KDE 5 will provide the ability to switch between various Plasma shells instantly, even automatically when triggered by the appearance of certain devices. You will be able to have a tablet with an awesome Plasma Active touch-based interface, then plug a keyboard and mouse into it and instantly get the full-featured Plasma desktop you know and love. (And you'll still be able to turn that off and get the desktop in tablet mode or Active in laptop mode if that's your thing. KDE's legendary configurability isn't going anywhere either.) There's really nothing to worry about. :-) -T.C. [1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=138738562930062&w=2 [2] http://kate-editor.org/2013/12/08/kate-on-kde-frameworks-5/ [3] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/05/qt5-kde5.html [4] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-on-active-strategy.html _______________________________________________ kde mailing list kde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
