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KDE 2.0 Beta 3 Is Out
As the title says - KDE 2.0 beta 3 is out. Announcement is here. The KDE development team worked really hard to make KDE 2.0 beta 3 stable - and people who have tested the snapshots can testify about it. Grab it, test it, torch it, and please - submit bug reports. Great work, KDE team!
Yes, they are. The Mozilla team is considering to drop Gecko and include Konqueror's great KHTML engine for their next milestone. ;-)
(stop bitching already, just a little piece of funny flamebait)
Anyone fancy writing KBSOD?
HH
GNOME's new html viewer is not based on khtml, the html part of konqueror. It is based on kde 1.x's html widget, which was dropped in favor of khtml. (I guess it had design flaws which would make it nearly impossible to implement dom/css.)
-- Thrakkerzog
Actually the bias is far less. A couple of years ago it was far, far, far worse.
/. but unfortunately within many of the article posters themselves. (Witness the recent poll of login managers omitting kdm.....)
It definitely still exists though. Not only within the readership of
It is a shame really, IMO KDE deserves every bit as much coverage as Gnome. It really is a fantastic effort and even many of the features of Gnome were "borrowed" from KDE(don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more of this cooperation). For instance, I read recently that Gnomes new HTML engine is actually based on Konquerors!
Also to those who complain of KDE looking like Windows, but who who evangelise Gnome and in particular GOffice and Evolution, I would ask them to look to Miguel de Icaza, who is involved in leading several of these projects and his stated(yes he has been quoted saying this, but I haven't time to find links to quotes not) that he wants to make his programmes work just like those from Microsoft. (BTW for even more proof that KDE does not have to look like Windows anymore(I admit to a vague resemblance in 1.X(though I though 1.X was more OS/2ish) check out the new widget and window manager styles, these aren't just pixmaps but coded styles that change their appearance in accordance with your colour settings!
A lot of the criticism of KDE is unfair and misinformed, but thankfully it is gradually getting better, hopefully it will improve even more.
I think I'll stop here, before I go even more off topic.
I've been using KDE2 beta for several days now, and I'm *never* going back. It is a fact that KDE2 uses less screen real-estate than both KDE1 and GNOME. First of all, the widgets are more compact, and don't ask for more space than they require to do their things. Secondly, the panel can be auto-hidden. I've configured it so that it goes away as soon as I move the mouse away from it. Third, any status line and tool bar can be switched off.
;)
Ever tried the new Konsole? Remove all borders, title bar of the WM, the menu bar and the tool bar, and turn on "Full screen". Voila, you're using *every pixel* of the screen, with no crap to distract you.
I've already found several bugs which I have reported, but no real show-stoppers except for some rare crashes of konqueror. This thing is going to do wonders for Linux on the desktop.
(Posted from Konqueror, btw
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
There seems to be a bug in your software that somehow automatically crossposts any and all update announcements to the slashdot forum.
This bug cannot lie in any of the source code files, but must somehow be a metabug (perhaps a virus?) that has infected the source code system as such. I would do a virus check of all files, beginning with the CHANGES file, since updates of that file is what seems to trigger the errorenous behaviour.
If no bug can be found, I would guess that the source code is simply feeling lonely and in need of attention, and that this is the cause of it's many slashdot announcements. Perhaps a nanny could be appointed to talk to it, feed it and take care of it?
It emulates the look and feel of Windows quite nicely. Its got the user friendliness of Windows. It's surpassed the speed of Windows. All it needs now is to crash a bit more so that it can get to the stability of Windows.
The last version I tryed... my wheel mouse worked, my browser didn't crash, my sound sounded better, my monitor looked sharper, my slashdot posts were funnier, my GF looked thinner, my lawn was greener and I got a raise... I CAN'T WAIT to see what this version does for me!!
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Does anyone know where we got the term "beta" for "nearly (but still un-) finished software"? It just seems to me that "Beta 3" is a little bit of an odd phrase. Why not "alpha", "beta", "gamma", "delta"?
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I've recently started using KDE and the one thing that bugs me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts for many things. I don't currently own a mouse and one of the nice things under Windows is that you can emulate the mouse using the keyboard - tricky, but better than nothing. Considering *NIX is the home of the CLI it seems strange that KDE is so keyboard-unfriendly...
Does anyone know whether this is going to improve or not, or if there are any utilities which can help in this matter?
Apart from this gripe though, KDE is nice :)
I have to agree with most of what you said. It is really sad to see linux developers putting out products that seem to aim more towards being like windows, instead of better than windows.
Not to put down the KDE or the GNOME teams, they are putting out the software, I am not. ;^) And they've done a really good job in some ways, they deserve a lot of credit. I use components of both KDE and GNOME at times, and while I can imagine better alternatives, I am not the coder to write them, so my bitching is completely with that in mind, and with a lot of respect for the people that are producing usable software, however much I dislike some of the choices they have made.
Still, I personally would be so much more happy to see them working on something fundamentally different and better than windows instead, and I really think they are selling themselves and free software short.
There has to be a reason that GNUStep is languishing, while KDE and GNOME seem to be swamped with volunteers. I can't for the life of me think of one though. I'm trying really hard too.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Usually numbered milestones are first, followed by alpha, which is the first "feature compleate" version, then "beta" which is the first major bug fix release, everything after that is a "Master Candidate". If your good/lucky the beta goes to master.
As I said, the open / evolution style development, the releases alpha/beta mean very little.
Thad
Thad
I am beginning to 'smell the coffee' as far as moderation on /. is going. If this comment were posted to a discussion about GNOME, it would be equally funny. But that's not the moderation it would get. It would be flamebait. I guarentee it. Is it because GNOME fans moderate it this way here to further their anti-KDE agenda, or is it that KDE people read KDE stories and can laugh at themselves?
;-), and Go KDE! I will begin downloading this as soon as the smoke stops coming out of my nearest mirror! Now where did I put my last KDE2 build script...
Glad to see that people still dare to make jokes around here anyway (nothing beats a bit of geek-humour
When was the last time you could say that about a software project, much less one of this scale? Based on the last update on the KDE site, we should be along the following time line...
3 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 (14 August)
6 weeks until KDE 2.0 Final (4 September)
With so many projects out there with as of yet undetermined schedules, it sure is nice to see folks like over at KDE show how it's done. Set a realistic schedule with achievable goals and stick to it.
Mozilla, are you listening?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Read this thread. An engineer at Sun has a page with the tweaks he needed to get KDE to work on Solaris. Note that the beta is from a week ago, so you may need to get new snapshots or CVS updates to get this to work. (Or you may not -- I have no idea.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Sorry about your solaris problems, but in case you haven't tried Beta 3, I really suggest taking another look at it. The icons for almost everything have been totally revamped and look much more 'mature', and I've heard word that the startup screen is getting a makeover as well as Konqueror's buttons.
Once the servers crawl back to some semblance of their former selves, I suggest downloading it and taking a look. If you can get it to run, that is... I could've sworn people on the mailinglist had fixed the Solaris compile probems though. Try it on Linux, it works best there (big surprise, eh? ; )
Miguel also said that UNIX sucks. More likely it's his approach at the project which is sub-optimal, for instance an object oriented language lends itself to writing object oriented environments. Procedural languages, well, don't.
I'm amazed that GNOME is as far along as it is, and while there's more to be done, we should remember it takes more effort to do this sort of thing in C than C++. (Remember too that the KDE project was around for at least a year before _it_ was released.)
Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. I use it daily, and think it has the best chance to "win the desktop" for 'NIX if anything on X will. They've done a lot of things right, and created a wonderful environment which has allowed me to quickly assist many people getting into UNIX for the first time.
That doesn't mean that GNOME isn't headed in the right direction. They just need time. I look forward to seeing what they have in store for the coming year.
For now, isn't having a choice wonderful?
GPL: Free as in will
Ah, but not KDE 2.0, it never pops up correctly because it is treated as a window, and when it pops up, it doesn't get focus, so it ends up behind the top window.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
These are five minutes old... ;-)
Showing Konqueror, KMail, the Alt-F2 minicli, Konsole and KControl.
"Kde 2.0 is already a year behind schedule. A whole year was lost messing with CORBA shit, but everybody seems to forget that. "
A year delay is pretty insignicant compared to the rest of the industry. Look at NT 5, Mac OS X and Windows 95, all released several years later then their orginal planned release date. Not to deny the fact that they have had great improvement over the past few years, as has KDE. KDE 2 beta3 in August 2000, versus an pre-Alpha snapshot one year ago is a totally different beast. KDE 2 today has many new features, it is faster, better designed, and just works better(TM)..
"Sadly, third party developers of Kde apps which work fine with Kde 1.1x have been unable to port their apps to Kde 2 because the base libraries kept changing from week to week or even from day to day. Hopefully there will now be binary and source stability in the infrastructure, but based on failure of Kde to deliver that stability despite promises to do so months ago I suspect that the infrastructure will keep changing in incompatible ways right up to the final release date."
This is true. KDE project clearly noted with these snapshots, that they were highly experimental, and were testing grounds for new technologies, not the actual release. Today, as of the feature freeze of two weeks ago, the API should be considered completely stable -- nothing is bound to change that would break apps for at least 3 or more years. Now is the time KDE app developer should be porting to KDE 2, before it was risky, as it was known that things were broken.
"Since Kde got motivated to actually start releasing 2.0 betas progress has been good. The current snapshots are very usable right now."
Yes, things have gotten alot better, now that they are actually working on a release. The technology and framework, and code was there, so now was the time for them to start focusing in on a release. I have to agree it's comming along nicely.
"However, everybody seems to forget that Kde is much more than what is in the official packages. There are literally hundreds of excellent Kde applications written by people who are not part of the Kde core development team."
Yes, I have to agree. The biggest examples are things like Quanta+, KVirc and KDevelop. However, I use many smaller ones quite often, like Kweather and KBill too. Now that the API is stable, hopefully developers will continue bringing these apps to the next generation of KDE.
"So much time has now gone by that it's a wonder these developers have not abndoned Kde and moved over to the Gnome camp where changes in the base libraries have been incremental and apps can also be incrementally upgraded to stay compatible."
You lost me there. Is this the GNOME that uses GTK+, the library that has had 3 source and binary incompatible stable or in the line to become stable releases in the past 3 years. KDE and Qt have only had 2. Break libraries and software from time to time is neccessary, unforently, progress, and stable design demand it. At least with OSS, the port is not too difficult in most cases.
"If Kde does not do more to make these independent developers feel more involved and appreciated (like providing decent descriptions and links to the application home pages and download sites from the official Kde site for heavens sake) Kde may lose these developers."
Have you ever looked at ftp.kde.org or even around at www.kde.org? On ftp.kde.org, I see lots of KDE apps that aren't included in the main KDE distro. Many quality ones too. devel-home.kde.org hosts several KDE application projects, some are not in the main KDE pacakges. Non-main KDE applications are frequently announced on kde-announce@lists.kde.org.
"Kde doesn't seem to care. It only seems to care about a few prima donna deveopers working on core components who have corporate sponsors. Certainly these hardworking and very talented people must be accomodated, but that is only part of the picture. "
That's not how KDE comes up with there main packages. They take the best, and put in there, even from the non-core developers. They send crap that doesn't work to kdenonbeta, and don't include it the packages -- even if it's from the core developers. If somebody writes enough good patches, or enough good software, they become a core developer. It's not an exclusive club that you make it sound.
"Kde seems to have forgotten what made its application framework so attractive to so many developers - a sense of participation. There now seems to be a sense of elitism or even exclusion, and a boys club mentality that will be Kde's downfall if a concious effort is made to keep it in check."
No, that's just wrong. I think you should refer to my above comment..
Disclamer: I am NOT a KDE developer, just an enthuist who enjoys working with K Desktop Enviroment Technologies. I believe they have worked hard to create an awsome desktop enviroment, one with exterme flexablity and usablity, in some respects far superiour to the commerical desktops. I am a long time Mac user, and enjoy working with high quality user interfaces that work for me. I have used Helix GNOME, WindowMaker, E and several other software pieces, however I still enjoy KDE the best.
Thank You.