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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'
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.
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
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