First stable release of Frameworks 5 | Hacker News Reader

First stable release of Frameworks 5

dot.kde.org

37 pointsTsiolkovsky8 comments

Shameless plug but the funding period for Randa meetings is due tomorrow and they have raised only 60% of the needed funds. Anyone interested to help: http://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2014/

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with KDE nor I have any connection or will participate to the meetings. I am just a KDE fan and I am sad they didn't reach their goal.

Are these libraries at all portable? Do I have to be on Linux or KDE to make use of these? The feature set of eg Solid sounds very tricky to implement in a cross-platform way.

Solid is an abstraction layer. Currently, it has multiple backends, including a windows one[0].

[0] https://projects.kde.org/projects/frameworks/solid/repositor...

Making it possible to use the functionality outside of KDE applications is the entire point of splitting it into a bunch of standalone libraries. http://api.kde.org/frameworks-api/frameworks5-apidocs/ says Solid is supported on Linux, Windows and OS X, so I assume they've just implemented all of the platform-specific versions needed.

Fantastic. They seem to be handling this better than the debacle that was the 4.0 release. Kudos to the team for all their hard work.

KDE 4.0 was still somewhat immature when it was released, but I'd hesitate to call it a debacle. From what I remember, it was meant mainly for early adopters, so that issues could be discovered and resolved quickly. KDE 4.1 addressed many of these. KDE 4.2 and subsequent releases have provided an extremely robust desktop environment.

On the other hand, GNOME 3 was a debacle, without any doubt. KDE 4 resulted in nowhere near the level of backlash and response that GNOME 3 did. I mean, GNOME 3 was and is so bad that it spawned two rather significant and ongoing salvage attempts in MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to completely driving away a lot of existing users. We just didn't see anything close to that with KDE 4.

KDE4 was released when KDE3 was still seeing support. Gnome 3 dropped Gnome 2 entirely, and they even dropped the "compatibility mode" old desktop around the 3.4 release I think, well before most people were keen on switching to Gnome 3.

The early adopters of both complained about how different everything was, but at least in KDE land version 3 was still available for a while. It took the Mate project to maintain Gnome 2.

>GNOME 3 was and is so bad that it spawned two rather significant and ongoing salvage attempts in MATE and Cinnamon ... We just didn't see anything close to that with KDE 4.

Trinity is a fork of KDE3, that was highly-publicized at the time and still sees some ongoing development.

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