After a long awaiting, KDE 4.6.1 has become available to the Debian users via the semi-official qt-debian repository. The release is said to be of experimental quality, and not guaranteed to be compatible with the official 4.6.x releases which are planned for sid and testing.
KDE bindings are not packaged yet, and expected to take some more time due to their complex dependencies. This excludes a subset of the packages which are written in non c++ and bound to kde by their respective bindings. For example any KDE application written in python is not going to work with this installation.
The packaging team has tried a new way of packaging KDE software so that it will not conflict with some of the third party KDE software like ktorrent and kmess. Previously it was conflicting.
Performance improvement is said to be the most visible improvement. Another change interesting to me is that the networkmanagement plasma widget of 4.6.1 not being compatible with 4.4.5. KDE network management plasma widget was not up to the level when it comes to Mobile Broadband support. Some decent work has went into this, and some other complaints are also fixed in the latest version. Lets hope and wish that similar improvements have gone to dual monitor support as well.
I personally had a bad experience with knetwork client when I once tried to do a presentation. The wireless network connection got deactivated accidentally using the function keys of my laptop and did not pickup after I re-activated it again. After some tries I got desperate and even restarted the laptop. Still it was not working. And in the same presentation, the projector detection was also not so smooth, and finally I had to use someone else's laptop to proceed with. (I did some experiment later and found out that I have to kill knetwork and start it manually to make it detect the changes)
Anyway, It is a good decision to break the long silence and provide something to the end users via the semi-official repository, rather than not producing anything at all. Though things are not perfect, people will have something.
What the package maintainers want is an early feedback, so that the quality official releases can be enriched. Brave souls are welcome to give it a try!
KDE bindings are not packaged yet, and expected to take some more time due to their complex dependencies. This excludes a subset of the packages which are written in non c++ and bound to kde by their respective bindings. For example any KDE application written in python is not going to work with this installation.
The packaging team has tried a new way of packaging KDE software so that it will not conflict with some of the third party KDE software like ktorrent and kmess. Previously it was conflicting.
Performance improvement is said to be the most visible improvement. Another change interesting to me is that the networkmanagement plasma widget of 4.6.1 not being compatible with 4.4.5. KDE network management plasma widget was not up to the level when it comes to Mobile Broadband support. Some decent work has went into this, and some other complaints are also fixed in the latest version. Lets hope and wish that similar improvements have gone to dual monitor support as well.
I personally had a bad experience with knetwork client when I once tried to do a presentation. The wireless network connection got deactivated accidentally using the function keys of my laptop and did not pickup after I re-activated it again. After some tries I got desperate and even restarted the laptop. Still it was not working. And in the same presentation, the projector detection was also not so smooth, and finally I had to use someone else's laptop to proceed with. (I did some experiment later and found out that I have to kill knetwork and start it manually to make it detect the changes)
Anyway, It is a good decision to break the long silence and provide something to the end users via the semi-official repository, rather than not producing anything at all. Though things are not perfect, people will have something.
What the package maintainers want is an early feedback, so that the quality official releases can be enriched. Brave souls are welcome to give it a try!
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