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KDE 2.0.1 is out
KDE 2.0.1 is out. Announcement is here and a summary of fixes is here. You may also want to look at the FAQ before you install it. Lots of bug were fixed (specially to Konqueror). Binaries are available for RedHat (6.x and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4, 7.0, and 7.0 Sparc) as well as the usual tarballs. Japanese users may want to install the Japanese translations which have been added to this release. Any comments from people about Konqueror?
What I consider strange is that many people are complaining about instability of (especially) KWord and Konqueror.
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:)
I have tested many of the beta's and RC's myself and they generally worked better than the 2.0 release.
However, to compile 2.0 release, I used pgcc with -O6, which produces highly optimized code but *may* not work in all cases. A large project like KDE, which takes a day to compile even on a dual celeron system is very likely to trigger bugs in only half-decent, just-apply-this-patch-and-it-should-work-compiler
And indeed I encounter many more crashes then before. This time, I'm going to reinstall my old gcc version (I believe it was gcc 2.95.1) and just compile with -O2 (the default) and see how it works out.
I mean, highly optimized is cool and all, but it's also great if it actually *works*!
I suspect that many people have used very 'new' and untested compilers because in the slashdot thread just after release there was much discussion about that (which is why I tried to do it
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Good thing I didn't waste time with the kde2 freebsd port. Now I get to download the whole ball of wax for 2.01. Over a 56K modem. 56K if I'm lucky. I just do not get it, I update the OS with cvsup, I update the ports collection with cvsup ... why can't I get one single PORT that updates with cvsup instead of downloading the WHOLE damn set all over again? This is the same beef I have with rpm's.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> The HTML rendering engine needs work in some places, but people should keep in mind that this is the KDE file browser.
Not so, Konquerer is the KDE generic browser. As in it is able to select and view arbitrary content via a variety of access methods. The file listing component need have nothing to do with the HTML renderer -- and probably shouldnt, since I much prefer a column/graph component for managing large numbers of files.
I'm not terribly enthused about having to do a whole damn make world just to get a version of OpenSSH it'll be happy with tho...
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
KDE themes are great, but they're sort of hidden away. To change window decoration themes, right click on the titlebar and choose something the 'Decoration' submenu. All of these window decoration themes are proper QT themed - not pixmapped, and they look great (although there aren't many). The good thing is that the window decoration themes pick up the right colours from you colour choices in the control panel. It's a bit hard to explain, but if you go and try it out, you'll see what I mean.
As for widget theming, the KDE 2 widget theming system is very powerful. You can change the widget theme in the control panel, under 'Style'. There are quite a few native QT themes that emulate MacOS, SGI, BeOS etc. These are good because, like the window decoration themes, they reflect your colour and contrast choices from the colours control panel. KDE also does pixmap widget theming. There are only about 4 KDE2 pixmap widget themes on kde.themes.org, but the great thing is that KDE can use GTK pixmap themes, and is much faster than GTK due to it's advanced engine.
To use a GTK pixmap theme, use the program in the K menu called 'Legacy theme importer' (yes, that's a bit of a nasty name for it). You just need to untar the GTK theme wherever you want it, then tell the theme importer where the directory is.
However, there are a few drawbacks that I've noticed which I hope will get fixed for 2.1. Using KDE native pixmap themes seems to be somewhat slower than using GTK pixmap themes. I've noticed (for example) with the Aquatic KDE2 theme, that when drawing windows, the background behind the toolbars tehnd to flicker a bit, and draw a bit slugglishly (about the same speed as GTK themes on my box). And the GTK importer isn't bug-free. I've had problems with the GTK theme overriding my font choices in KDE, and as much as I try in the control panel under 'Fonts', I can't get it to do what I want. There are also problems with using GTK themes, in toolbars. For example the Aqua theme for GTK draws those 'bubble' things under toolbar icons when you mouseover them, but when used under KDE, you just see a bland bevelled rectangle when you mouseover. Another problem with the GTK themes is that it doesn't theme the Menu Bar, if you have it at the top of the screen like MacOS.
Other than these issues which I hope will be fixed soon, I love KDE2 and its themeing capabilities. Right now, I'm using the KDE2 native BeOS-style window decoration theme and QT theme. It looks beautiful, and it absolutely flies.
...i really wouldn't be caught dead using a beefed up, ripoff of a microsoft gui.
Assuming that's all that KDE and Gnome are... why not? What's wrong with it, other than the fact that Microsoft uses it (and we all know Microsoft isn't hip)? Are you too 1337 for a task bar? Too punk rock for icons?
Hopefully this release is more solid than 2.0, which was quite unstable under FreeBSD, not to mention that all the apps still spewed tons to debug messages to stdout, which isn't something one would expect from production quality software.
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Otherwise, KDE2 is excellent.
When I first got KDE 2.0-final installed, I posted a semi-nasty comment about Konqueror, because my impression was that it sucked.
However, during a recent reinstall, I was having trouble getting Netscape up and running, so for a couple of days I used Konqueror as my sole web browser. This was the version from KDE-2.0-9 or whatever came before 2.0.1. Man, I was impressed. Not perfect, but it was very fast, and ate MUCH less memory than Netscape. Didn't segfault on me or crash at all, which was a huge improvement over the first version I tried.
Still had some difficulty with plugins, https and the like, but I'm now thinking that this is a viable browser. I can't believe how quickly this thing got stable.
Nice work, Konqueror folks. And I apologize for my previous bitching.
Monkeytreats
My main concern is that KDE will do with KDE2 what they did to some extent with KDE1--they will abandon development on the stable KDE2 release in order to get on the the KDE3 bandwagon.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I've found myself using it as my primary web browser. I love the cookie handling and it feels quicker than Netscape 4.x and the overall app is more polished and stable than even recent Mozilla nightlies IMHO.The HTML rendering engine needs work in some places, but people should keep in mind that this is the KDE file browser. The fact that people bother to make criticisms that it doesn't handle complicated Javascript or encryption on certain sites suggests just how well it works as a web browser. And this was done with a tiny fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project! A comparison of the two projects would make an interesting case study for open source proponents.
That was as of last week. Some ugly bugs have popped up in recent CVS (at least for me), but that should be fixed soon.
My main criticism is with the separation of the KDE desktop from the browser. I used to use kfm in WindowMaker or icewm to get a lightweight but vey flexible setup. kdesktop creates massive problems for me with other window managers, even when it's started with the root window option. Hopefully that will be polished in future releases.
When the KDE team added V2 RPMs for Redhat-6.x I decided to deploy KDE-2 along with Helix-Gnome for a nearly 200 host desktop rollout. My feeling is that as head SA it's really not my decision to tell people what desktop to use, it's up to them to tell me what desktop they need to be productive; and anyway if I can offer both Helix and KDE-2, well then let the users decide. I really wasn't planning on this since I didn't expect the KDE team to support RH-6.x given how much trouble I had attempting to compile the source tarballs when they announced the first release; I figured it was brokenness in the egcs-2.91 g++ compiler and just gave up.
Boy, am I glad they decided to support RH-6.2, I've been fiddling with it and like the desktop a whole bunch. My users are happy since many of them come from Europe and prefer KDE. The others from America most to prefer Gnome -- now both need not feel slighted.
The only thing I seriously dislike about KDE is the lack of Scheme/Guile bindings to the toolkit... sorry, but I just love Gnome because of that!
Cheers,
--Maynard