FEB
14
2012

12.04 Feature Freeze This Week

Submitted by Jonathan Riddell

This week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land and the Kubuntu community have been working hard to get in as many as possible before the deadline.


Telepathy-KDE is working nicely. We're still deciding if it's better to go with the new-but-not-much-tested Telepathy-KDE or the old-but-unmaintained Kopete by default.


LightDM Plasma Theme, not likely to replace KDM yet for lack of testing but a promising way to get a login manager with all the features


Oxygen-GTK3 theme, so your GTK apps fit in with the Plasma desktop.


Calligra office suite featuring Krita the world's best painting app. Handy for updating hackergotchis. MS Office file import/export is reported to be better than LibreOffice because of the top work by KO GMBH. Not the default yet but the signs are good for fixing the "we don't have a KDE office suite by default" bug in the next year.


Rekonq 0.9 and Owncloud 3.0 are both in progress.


Plasma Active! Could a Kubuntu Active remix be around the corner? We'd be the first distro with a free software tablet UI if we can get it done.

If you want to know how my health is doing see my personal blog entry Recovery from Severe Traumatic Head Injury.

Comments

Please go for Kopete. Telepathy-KDE looks promising, but its far from being a replacement yet.

By markw at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 06:53

What makes you say that?

By Jonathan Riddell at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 08:27

I actually think Telepathy would be quite fine. It's working great here...

By jospoortvliet at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 18:14

What happens in case a bug is discovered?
Telepathy-KDE is so young, I wouldn't expect any bugfix-only releases which means bugs may only be fixed in new feature releases. That means Canonical must be willing to ship new feature releases as regular updates and hopefully those releases don't contain new bugs. And who knows how long Telepathy-KDE can even be compiled against 4.8 libraries.

Kopete is the safer choice. It's proven to be free of really serious bugs.

By kamikazow at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 23:23

I'm clearly for keeping Kopete. I'm not against change, but the new thing has to prove to be ready first. Based on past experiences with pushing premature new solutions onto users in Ubuntu/Kubuntu (entirely broken KDEPIM 4.7, just to name the latest) I afraid it might not be. I can speak only for myself, it might not be maintained (I don't know), but it's running pretty stable for years. So I see no immediate need to replace it. The telepathy thing still has to prove that as far as I can see. Has it been part of a distribution to reach a wider audience? Why not package it as optional replacement for Kopete? So that users can try it and safely go back to Kopete in case it doesn't work out. Even more so as 12.04 is supposed to be an LTS if I'm not mistaken.

By psychotron at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 20:19

Your post has a few errors which I'd like to correct:
1) Calligra does not have any MS Office export feature. It has robust OOXML (.docx,...) import but the office apps can only save as ODF and HTML.

2) Krita is not "the world's best painting app". Not by far. It may be the best FOSS painting app but for now Corel Painter is unmatched by any FOSS app.

3) Kubuntu Active would not be the first distribution with a tablet UI. There already exist openSUSE and MeeGo/Mer images with Plasma Active.

By kamikazow at Wed, 02/15/2012 - 23:05