No KDE 4 for Fedora 8 [Update]

Rex Dieter today announced that there will be no KDE 4 for Fedora 8. That’s sad but understandable. But now I wonder where I will get my KDE 4 from.

Rex Dieter, one of the main KDE persons of the Fedora project, today announced that there will be no KDE for Fedora 8. The “KDE 4 in Fedora” plan was changed and now targets Fedora 9.

This is sad since I was expecting to switch to KDE 4 and Fedora 8 at the same time but I must admit that the current KDE 4 Beta versions do not look like that they will be ready in time for the Fedora 8 release. Also the feature freeze of the Fedora 8 release cycle simply would not allow major changes in the packages but KDE will still see some major changes until the October release (think of the system bar here, afaik there is still no system tray).

From my personal point of view this is indeed a bit troublesome because while I am a Fedora user I am first and foremost a KDE user. And while Fedora is already maybe the worst possible distribution a KDE user could take I hoped that KDE 4 would give this a push into a new direction. But without KDE 4 packages I need to compile the stuff by myself or have to check for other opportunities, something which I don’t really want to do…

Update
Just to make it clear: while Fedora 8 will not come out with KDE 4 as the default KDE desktop it is very likely that there will be packages available after the release to add it as another option. Fedora often adds new packages and even updates them to new versions during a life cycle of a distribution version (although KDE 4 will be most likely introduced as an option for parallel installation, not as an update to KDE 3).

Playing the numbers game: how many Linux installations and users are out there?

Recently the Desktop Linux Survey was published. It showed how the different Free Desktop components and distributions are rated among different users. While of course these numbers are by no means reliable it makes fun to use them for some simple calculations.

The last Desktop Linux Survey was interesting, but hardly surprising. But most important is that this was no real statistic: the sample was not representative by any means.
Also, as Distrowatch.com noted, there are inconsistencies if you compare these results with other surveys. For example the web server logs for Distrowatch.com give OpenSuse 5 % of the cake, while the Desktop Linux Survey lifts OpenSuse’s share to 20 %.

Still, these numbers give some opportunities to play with. And that’s something I like.

Fedora

Let’s take Fedora: in all three columns listed at Distrowatch it gets roughly 5 %. Let’s take this as true.
Now, according to Fedora’s statistic tool smolt there are around 125,000 registered Fedora users out there. If Fedora really has a market share of 5 % this would result in 2.5 million users.

But smolt is only an opt-in tool and is not offered during text installations (Servers, etc.) at all. According to Fedora’s statistics page the estimated ratio between smolt data and reality is 1 to 10. This would result in 1.25 million Fedora users – and therefore in 25 million Linux users.

Looks nice, especially considering the fact that Apple’s userbase was around 22 million half a year ago.

Ubuntu

There is another possible approach to these numbers: Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth estimated 8 million Ubuntu users in an interview in late December 2006. And both the Linux Desktop Survey and the web server logs from Distro Watch gave Ubuntu roughly 30 % of the cake. This makes more than 26.6 million Linux users 8 month ago.

German traffic lights

The numbers mentioned above only include popular distributions. They do not include embedded devices or corporate installations like the one of the German drugstore chain.

Now Linuxdevices.com posted an article about the German company Signalbau Huber. Signalbau Huber produces and installs traffic light systems across Europe. And they mentioned now in this article that they are going to switch their software from some Debian based thing to Sysgo’s embedded Linux solution ElinOS.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t say anything about how many Debian installations are already out there, but I gues there are quite some across Europe. This is again an example for the fact that it is impossible to track all Linux installations out there – and that there are many more than most people expect.

Comments to Commit Digest Issue 73

Issue 73 of Commit Digest mentioned that there will be no Mixer in Phonon. It was however not explained that the missing Mixer would only affect application developers.

The Commit Digest Issue 73 just picked up the SVN commit comment:

Matthias Kretz committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/phonon/xine:
no mixer in Phonon for 4.0

This led to the question if we will have a mixer at all in KDE 4.0 or if that means that Phonon would not be able to mix different sound sources.

Matthias Kretz answered to these questions and assumptions:

let me define what mixer will not be in 4.0:
– There is a hardware mixer in some soundcards (no way to not support it )
– There’s a software mixer provided by dmix (will be supported)
– There’s the possibility to create multiple AudioOutput objects in one application, those outputs will use sw/hw mixing on the driver/soundcard
– Last one: create two MediaObjects and connect them to one AudioOutput. That’s the functionality that won’t make it into 4.0. It’s basically impossible to implement using xine anyway.

Since this is a bit tricky to understand I asked him to clarify what this means for the user, and the answer was pretty clear:

It will make no difference for you as a KDE user. It only makes a difference for the developer using the Phonon API.

Yes, you are able to mute your speakers when you have an incoming call on your USB-headset.

So that’s sorted out as well. And we have one more feature which will likely have its first appearance in KDE 4.1.

KDE 4: first hints of the kicker replacement

Current KDE svn already comes along with the first bits of the future task and system bar. While the current version is not functional yet it shows that we can soon expect news about that topic.

One of the big, still missing bits of KDE 4 is the kicker replacement. KDE 4 Beta 1 was still shipped with a broken kicker and the new system bar is expected any day now. And first bits are already visible (while of course not yet exciting because they are only bits in heavy development).

In my local KDE compiled from the current SVN version I saw today this after the boot:

It lay behind the usual kicker (which didn’t crash this time) and tried to hide. As you can see it doesn’t show that much and has some problems with the embedded Plasmoids. Also it was just a plain area and nothing fancy – yet. As usual the important bit is that there is something working, and that the foundations are there. While the design will also be very important the first step is the foundation which have to be ready. And I have no doubt that the Oxygen people will come up with something fancy in that regard.

You can get a better impression with a screenshot I found at annma’s blog:

There you can already see a working task bar and a clock (which is a Plasmoid I think). I guess in that shot the system bar works better because some of the stuff is developed in some playground directories of the SVN while I only checkout the main directories.

I’m looking forward to see the new working system bar – and I’m especially looking forward to the possibilities of dragging&dropping of Plasmoids between the desktop and the system bar. Also I do really hope that the new base for the system bar is now flexible enough so that other developers can develop their own in the future!

A KDE 4.0 release party around January and the Gamma plan

For quite some time know the KDE team thought about having a KDE 4 release party some months after the original KDE 4.0 release. According to that plan the KDE 4.0 release in October will be official, but not press-release-official – that one will be celebrated some months later.

The plan isn’t new and was already discussed around last Akademy. But now it seems to be official that the big KDE 4.0 release party for the press and industry partners will be around January – months after the originally targeted release date.
This indeed makes sense in certain circumstances: if you put some time between the release date and the party you have quite some advantages. Even a shifted release date wouldn’t spoilt the party, tickets can be booked in advance, people and work can be organized, etc. Also you can fix last-minute bugs and serious showstoppers. And 3rd party content providers and application developers can pick up the new platform and create an ecosystem. Think of new plasmoids, background images, new icon sets, themes, all the famous 3rd party KDE apps (digikam, konversation, k3b, kile, Amarok, ktorrent) and so on.

However, this decision also has quite some shortcomings: the release party is supposed to be the KDE 4.0 release party, not the 4.0.1 release party. That means that there will be no minor release between October and January – although the development will go on of course, and especially the bug fixing will continue. The question is how the October release will be called. The term Gamma was already mentioned and would fit to follow a Beta release, however it would be the first time that KDE comes up with a Gamma release I think.

In the end it doesn’t really matter for early adopters how the release is called. Most distributions (especially the KDE centric ones) are not going to pick up KDE 4 as default in the 4th quarter releases so there are no problems either. But this issue has to be explained to the industry and to the press and I wonder how these will take it. The KDE team will definitely have to work out some good explanation.
On the other hand there are strange release dates, version numbers and names all the time in the software world so this KDE 4.0 release thing might not be too strange.