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KDE 2.1 Is Out
Well, it's here -- the KDE 2.1 final version. You can find the official (and lengthy) press release here as well as the locations to download the various packages. I have been playing with this version for a week (took the tagged version which went to packagers) and I can definitely say that it is very stable and fast. You can also read a small review here. Good work, KDE team.Update: 02/27 12:05 AM by T : Check out the change logs, as provided by seanr, and enjoy the "major improvements" pointed to by Andrew Coles in Konqueror and KMail, as well as "the addition of the excellent IDE KDevelop, as well as the modular new multimedia player noatun."
"Worried"? I can't tell if this is a troll, satire, or what, but...I'll tell you what's to be done for Gnome.
A whole bunch of people will continue to add features, fix bugs, and optimize it, perhaps occasionally spotting something in KDE that they like which they may then, if they feel the urge, translate into something for Gnome. Meanwhile, the same thing will be going on in the KDE camp. The open competition between the two will result in two really serious, kick-butt "desktop environments" to choose from as both projects benefit.
The alleged "war" between the two projects seems to be mostly fictional to me. I don't forsee either project harming the other in any meaningful way, any time in the near future. But then, maybe I'm just feeling happily optimistic because I just finished downloading KDE 2.1.... :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I think you're missing the point. Mozilla is not _just_ a browser. It's a development platform. And thus, its taken a long time to build. Were it just a browser, you could say that it took a long time to build. In addition, Mozilla is _not_ a GNOME project. It doesn't even really use GTK.
Instead of thinking of Mozilla as a browser, think of it as a replacement for GNOME/KDE rather than a component of them. Look at what it has:
it's own Object Model, with its own Object Protocol
It's own widget set
It's own theming engine
It's own language
The ability to house many applications that aren't just web-browser specific
Its a whole system to itself. Its _not_ just a browser. Now, whether or not it was a good idea to be a whole system to itself is up for debate. But don't compare Mozilla to Konqueror. If anything, compare Mozilla to GNOME or KDE.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Actually, Mozilla is usably fast, if you embed it in something else. What makes Mozilla slow is the fact that much of the web-browsing logic is written in JavaScript. So, if you use Mozilla embedded in Galeon, it is much, much faster.
Engineering and the Ultimate
there is still one area where gnome is leaps and bounds ahead of kde.
every time kde comes out with a new release (and usually several times between releases) i will download it, compile it and mess areound with it for a while. on a technical basis, i agree that the kde project is astounding. it is miles ahead of gnome. but yet, every time, i end up (somewhat regretfully) going back to gnome. and it has nothing to do with how kde looks. the fact of the matter is that i just can't do what i want with kde. i would gladly use a less attractive system, if it would allow me to get my work done better. but so far kde has only hindered my work, and i have yet to find a kde setup where i can be as productive as with gnome. so here is a list of reasons why i still use gnome (and if the kde developers are listening, if you could change just a few of these, i would love to switch to kde.)
1) there's no way around it. the window manager sucks ass. it's almost completely unconfigurable. what if i want a double click to lower the window instead of shading it? what if i want to bind window manger commands to the windows key? (that's what it's there for, isn't it? the start menu is useless, and wasting a keyboard key to activate it is even more pointless...) and half of the commands i use aren't even available to be bound... vertical maximize, anyone?
im told that there is a kde windowmanager interoperability spec that several windowmanagers have pledged support for, but last i tried, no other window manger worked well with kde. maybe this is better now, but im not getting my hopes up.
2) root menus. root menus are not a part of the window manager, they are a part of the 'desktop'. which i suppose conceptually makes sense somewhat, but practically, it's quite annoying. it means that if i want to use the kde file manager desktop, i also have to use the almost completely unconfigurable kde root menus. yes i realize there is a menu editor, but even ms realised in time for windows 98 that just putting files in a directory was no way to build a menu. in kde there is no way to sort items in a menu other than by the order the files appear in a directory, which means all submenu entries are in front of all application entries, and each set is sroted alphabetically. now you can kinda hack your way around the alphabetic thing by putting numbers in front of your menu items, but there's now way around the submenu thing. you see, 95% of the time i open the root menu, it's to start a terminal. which means it should only be logical that the first thing on my menu would be a terminal. the only way to do this in kde is to name the file 0_terminal, and not have any submenu 's in my root menu (which isn't really possible anyway, because kde always puts the system menus in there even if you get rid of all of your own.
3) since i mentioned it, the whole desktop thing. what's wrong with just painting the file manager icons on the root window? why do they have to make their own desktop? this makes it almost impossible to use another window manager. as if it wasn;t hard enough already....
4) when i select an entire line in the konsole and paste it into another konssole (or other app), why doesn;t it paste the newline? i wouldn't select the entire line if i didn't want to paste the entire line.
5) the themes suck, they're all tacky. it's quite possible to make attractive themes without pixmaps. there are a number of very nice theme engines for gtk+ which are every bit as technically advanced as the kde theming mechanism, and they look ten times nicer. (note this isn't as big a deal. as i said, i would gladly use an ugly environment if it made me more productive)
6) there is almost nothing i dislike about konqueror. i loved using it even after i stopped using kde in general. except that gnome's session manager would constantly give me errors. i dont know if the problem was with gnome or konqueror, but i thought the session management between the two systems was supposed to be compatible.
but for all my complaints i think the kde developers are doing a great job. keep up the good work, and i look forward to trying out the new release.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
>BTW, they say keep calling this a "desktop war", but can't we refer to this as a sporting event?
>So what if we both get a little bloody... this is FUN! And tell me we both don't realize
>that the competition is just making us stronger.
It depends on what sports it is. For example, I'd rather think of it as a war than as NHL, or worse, XFL...
I'm working from gcc 2.95.2, and it does give benifit from -march=pentiumpro. Most of the ppro core(aplicable to ppro,p2,p3) changes were merged from pgcc into normal gcc a while ago. I didn't reccomend using pgcc bacause a) most people don't have it, and b) because my version dies of an internal compiler error part way through kde2. If you're willing to use regular gcc to handle the few offending files, pgcc's a good choice. Oh, and I have no clue what mandrake ships with their distro.
I would optomize for the version of Intel chip that the AMD chip tries to emulate. Don't use any of the -march directives, since they create intel-only instructions. I would suggest -mpentium. Oh, and there's gotta be some AMD optomized compilers out there, but I don't know anything about them. As to gcc 3.0, it hasn't shippped yet(has it?) so YMMV big time.
One wonders what an -O3 by itself would do. Is this a good compromise? One of the things that makes Linux so popular is the fact that it runs on darn near anything. I think being architecture-exclusionary like this is a Big Mistake. (No, I don't expect something as big as KDE to run on some 286 boatanchor. But once we start down that path, the next thing you know, I'll have to run out and buy an Athlon board, or sully my network with Intel snoopware. No, thankee.)
Yes, it's a flame. But it's a mild flame, complete with a solution, and G-rated. I've seen worse.
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I'm altering the bargain. Pray I do not alter it further.
Oh right, because everyone knows that gcc is only used on x86 platforms... not.
I doubt that Intel can pull off a decent C++ implementation anyway, even if it is expensive, proprietary, and platform specific. It seems no one else ever has.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
Absolutely every one of the programs you mentioned
works fine on kde. I don't understand the attitude of "either/or" when it comes to this stuff. Just because I have Kde does not mean I can't use Gnome, gimp, any other GTK app. There
seems to be a common misunderstanding about this,
and it should be clarified.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
" When connecting to: wellsfargo.com
Send user agent string: Pick any of the Netscape4, IE4 or IE5 options. "
It does not work. This feature is broken in the 2-21 snapshot, today's snapshot, and in the new deb's. For one thing, the ADD button stays greyed out. If you put a "*" in the match field, it doesnt save the config. I've tried to fix this but it will take a while for my build to finish.
I submitted a bug report.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
One thing that doesn't get said often is, Gnome was probably the greatest thing to ever happen to KDE. Without the heat from the Gnome folks, would stuff like KDevelop, KOffice, KDE's component architecture, and a zillion other things ever have happened? Or would the developers have been satisfied to merely create a CDE-like thing, basically just an integrated window manager, toolbar, file manager, and help system plus a moderate collection of basic apps?
Likewise, if the KDE developers had just stuck to the basic architecture of 1.x, would the Gnome people have been inspired to come as far as they have? I keep hearing people complain about how awful it is that we have two different major desktops, but I bet that if both groups of developers had been working together on a single desktop from day one, that the results would not be nearly as impressive as either of our choices now.
For those who are concerned about the situation, keep in mind that this is not a situation where you have two incompatible, warring standards. Gnome and KDE are not mutually exclusive choices, as both are merely sets of libraries and apps built on top of X. Gnome-based apps run under KDE and vice-versa; the two environments easily coexist on the same system. Having this kind of a choice makes Unix systems very unique compared to Windows or MacOS. Having a choice between two very mature desktops will draw far more people than it will drive away in confusion.
To a new user they're going to pick the one that has the coolest name during the install/setup. Gnome sounds cooler then KDE. Then, once they've installed the cooler named gnome, they'll get used to it quickly, and not untill they come way more into the linux world will they realize they can chose even after the install. I personally think they should change KDEs name to something better, even "Makes Gnome bend over and take it" (Even though I don't really prefer one over the other.. I use both, and couldn't be a happier llama, it's just an idea).
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
No, the point is that http://ftp.kde.org automatically redirects to a mirror, most often sourceforge... which hasn't updated yet :(
:)
Be patient (I didn't think it would take so much time to get there
Sure it is! It runs on BOTH operating systems, Linux and BSD! :-)
(Sorry, "Blues Brothers" flashback. ["What kind of music to you get here?" "Oh, we got BOTH kinds, Country and Western..."])
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
With the -march=pentiumpro option, it's generating instructions that only i686 CPUs will understand. With -mpentiumpro, it simply arranges the instructions for optimal execution on a Ppro. As far as I'm aware, Red Hat compiles with -march=i386 -mpentiumpro so that it's optimized for Ppro, but still runs on a 386. Mandrake does -march=i586, I believe.
Do you still want the same exact default decorations that were in KDE-2.0? Just select the Laptop decorations.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
i am surfing with Konquerer right now, and have to say that i am more than impressed. it is a very mature and fast browser. but the fact is that the latest nightly builds of mozilla are faster and just feel more solid on my system. Konq has come really really far really fast, but people need to be honest, it still has a bit of catchup to do with mozilla. keep up the good work KDE people, i'm quite glad there is a strong competitive free browser out there.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
I'd love to be able to demonstrate how wonderful KDE and OSS projects are to my disbelieving coworkers...
Unfortunately, I can't. We all use Solaris here, and the last version of KDE that even pretended to run under Solaris was 2.0. And it does a damn poor job at that. KDE 2.0.1 looks beautiful on my Linux desktop, but we can't do that for production servers.
So all I can do is say, lamely, "Well, it works really really well... on one platform..." And that makes my disbelieving coworkers... correct.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
There are few very valid arguments why I did this. First, pretending to be another browser (specially IE) under some circumstances causes more problems where there would have been none (reverse breakage) if the default user-agent or any other useragent string was used. It also put us into this catch-22 where we end up encouraging website operators to ignore our existence! As you know the only other reason besides marketing that has some effect of forcing many website operators to consider supporting set standards is for them to see which clients access their servers and thus we should not encourage cloaking if we want them to notice our existence and quit their exclusions. Additionally, we also do not to loose bug reports that will actually allow us to fix any missing features :)
BTW, if you look hard enough under kdenonbeta, there is a plugin that would make setting this values very simple on a needed-to basis. It is not yet complete hence no announcement about it yet...
Regards,
Dawit A.
Huh ?
;)
Name one thing mozilla has that konqueror doesn't have - please -
I'm writing this in Netscape - which is slow, ugly, and crashes frequently. I have been using Mozilla, which is much slower and crashes about as frequently - looks pretty though. And I have been using Konqueror 2.0, which is very fast compared to the two other monsters, but also crashes about as frequently as the old Netscape.
I have a lot more faith in Konqueror than I have in Mozilla, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what they've been up to while I haven't been following...
Oh, did I mention, I used Konqueror in GNOME, because while it doesn't fit into the look and feel (QT instead of GTK+), well, neither does mozilla or netscape
Please, let me know what it is that mozilla has..
Yea, but remote objects (in many different forms!) have been around for many many years and STILL nobody uses them. There are bad ideas, and good ideas (not to be confused with cool ideas). This is just one of the former.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
AbiWord is a Gnome program. In fact it is shipping with Gnome 1.4 Fifth Toe, a collection of applications outside of Gnome proper that work well with Gnome. AbiWord now ships in two versions, straight gtk+ and Gnome.
There are many successful Gnome applications out there. First of all I'd like to address your point you make about Nautilus being an "outside project." If you spent any time in #gnome or #nautilus on gimpnet you might know what I mean. Nautilus is in Gnome CVS and receives thousands of manhours outside of Eazel in terms of development, testing, and ideas. Eazel and Ximan, two companies who do Gnome development are made up of some of the best Gnome hackers around who are very much a part of the community. There are also many successful Gnome applications which receive no corporate sponsorship, though I don't see why that should be a sticking point (all the code is GPL'd and community involvement is encouraged). GStreamer, The Gimp (Gnome-ification such as using Bonobo as a component framework is planned), GnomeICU (the best ICQ client I've see yet), Gabber (the best jabber client for Linux/Unix I've seen yet, gPhoto, Gnumeric (An amazing piece of software with very elegant code), GnuCash, X-Chat, etc. Not to mention Evolution, Ximian Setup Tools, and Red Carpet, offered by Ximian. With an estimated over half-million downloads of the Ximian distribution of the Gnome 1.2 desktop, Sun and HP announcing they will Ship Gnome 2.0 (replacing the long time Unix Desktop CDE) in their Unix offerings, Dell to ship Gnome on their Linux desktops and laptops, tools falling into place rapidly to provide a full-featured Office suite (Open Office + Gnumeric, AbiWord, Sodipodi, Guppi, touxdoux and the other Gnome Office apps), system administration (XST), PIM and Groupware (Evolution) all built around an outstading architecture including a component model built around a long-time standard in the unix world (CORBA) and modeled heavily after a proven component architecture, Microsoft's COM, I'd say that's a success. Sorry, a long winded answer to a simple question. The short answer is Yes.
There's no reason GNOME can't catch up, but at this point KDE is obviously ahead of GNOME, but that's a given since KDE started first anyway. I disagree. KDE has strengths over Gnome and vice versa. I personally use Gnome because it has the features/look&feel/applications that I want and no other desktop provides. And I'm a developer and am extremely excited about the Gnome framework, especially stuff coming down the pipes. Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. The next couple of years are going to be crazy!
Congratulations to the KDE team for their hard work on the release. Kudos! I look forward to further cooperation between Gnome and KDE. I think a unified component architecture (like is planned for XP-COM, UNO, and Bonobo) would be particularly exciting.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Personally, I like the seperate-ness of GNOME.
KDE seems to try to be a monolithic UI that controls everything, while GNOME seems to take a more modular approach. GNOME allows me to mix-and-match the programs I prefer and still have a consistant UI (I wish mozilla would at least have an option for letting GTK/QT handle it's widgets), that allows for greater flexability/configuration but does lead to occasional conflicts and slowdowns.
I do use KDE apps alongside GNOME though, which is nice to have that option. I use konq for light browsing/ftp stuff. I don't bother with koffice because abiword suits my wordprocessing needs.
The friendly competition between desktop environments will ensure that both are better because of it.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Umm, about .01% of the computing population uses remote objects. There decision seems to have been that standard communications methods based on TCP/IP are more efficient than doing networking through the object system, and that the other benifets of network objects (not having objects locally) was really outweighed by powerful clients and fast networks. So in the end, you have a lighter, more universally usable object system with less *wow* factor and no REAL disadvantages. I think it was a good decision. (BTW, COM kicks CORBA's ass. CORBA is just too much technology to be used everywhere in a desktop environment. COM (minus the MS crap) is just ABCs exported by DLLs. Can't get much simpler than that.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
XUL is eye candy. ;) If you're on *NIX, Konqueror works. If you're on Windows, you're already using IE.
DOM might be useful, but not yet.
ECMAScript support seems good enough on Konqueror.
MathML: What uses it?
Cross platform: Who cares? There are two platforms, *NIX and Windows. (BeOS is too superior to be considered in this discussion
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
XUL is very similar to our XMLGUI and serves the same purpose. I suspect ours is actually more powerful, but if some can show a way that XUL is better we'll listen.
MathML isn't actually part of the default Mozilla I believe, and while it is extremely useful for a small number of people it is not something people are screaming for. If there is a demand for it then I'm sure it will arrive at some point, if necessary we could simply embed that part of Mozilla using XParts as a short term solution.
Cross-platform is a rather loose term. We support pretty much anything that runs X, and Konqueror is also available for embedded devices. We don't support Win32 or Mac though.
I guess you haven't checked out the DOM support, or the JavaScript in 2.1 - have you actually used it at all? You'll find it pretty impressive.
I think we support pretty much everything that that's in common use at the moment, and that we can add emerging stuff pretty quickly. We also have the advantage of having made a number of stable releases.
Am I correct in saying that the processor specific optimisations will do nothing on most distributions, because you need to be compiling with pgcc for it to have any effect, and that (Pentium-specific) compiler (a patch against gcc) only ships with Mandrake? Does it indeed ship with Mandrake, or do they just use it to build the packages that come with their distribution?
You will be quite pleasently surprised as to what great things XUL is going to bring. Mozilla is a very real cross platform development platform, not just a browser. Its scope is really grand. Go check out XMLTerm and all the projects at mozdev.org to see the begginings of what is to come.
DOM is essential, right now web developers have to code to 3 standards, DOM is the key out of this mess. obviously you don't know much about web design issues if you simply dismiss the DOM
As far as ECMA, good enough isnt good enough for me... i want full standards support. I'm sure Konquerer will get there, but the facts remain that Mozilla is the most standards compliant browser ever implemented.
Cross Platform... i care. very very much. If you think that in a world with no Mozilla Konquerer will even cause the slightest thought in the minds of 99% of web developers, you are insane. You really can't dismiss the Apple platform, which mozilla runs very nicely on. The Linux desktop is barely a blip on the map, MS knows in order to cut off its growth, it has to have the web. If it achieves this, it starts implementing proprietart "innovations" to web development that Apache and Konquerer can't touch. What is the key to cutting off microsoft from this? Strict standards compliance, and right now this is being spear headed by Mozilla.
To be clear, i love the Konquerer exists and hope that it continues to grow, but i get sick of people spreaading fud against Mozilla as a way of promoting Konquerer.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
KDE is short for:
The Kalle Dalheimer Experience
The browser is, hands down, the best feature of KDE2. It uses your JVM, your libssl, and it can
run netscape plugins, and it is much more easy to build than Mozilla.
The downside to Kde2 is that it can be a bitch to
build from source. Once you setup your environment and have all the dependencies, it's not too bad. My nightly checkout and build of the whole cvs tree takes about 3 hours. I have had problems with the dpkgs, but, I stopped using them
when I got really interested in the dev versions of kde2.
The only reason I need Netscape at all now, is to
connect to my bank (Wells Fargo only allows specific Keys from specific versions of Netscape.
If I could work around this, I wouldn't need Netscape at all).
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Yes, conceptually Mozilla is much better. I'm sure that DOM is great, ECMAScript is essential and XML will bring lots of good things. (I still dismiss XUL as wasteful and unecessary. You need a good, font+layout sensative view management system and that's it. XUL is too performance sapping for compartively little gain.) Despite all that, what's the use *now* The web-development community is not exactly known for quick support of standards (especially since IE doesn't support much of this stuff yet) and until the minimum system becomes fast enough to run Mozilla comfortably (I'm typing this on a 500MHz PIII w/ 64MB and Mozilla is god-aweful slow. On my 300Mhz w/ 128MB it's still slow) people will not adopt these new standards. I'd say that adoption of these standards is still a year away, and that is just too far in the future to contemplate about now. So, again, what real, tangible benifets does Mozilla have NOW?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
He he. There was a remark on the BeOS development mailing list once about how 32MB was a *LOT* of code and that BeOS's 32MB memory limit on add-ons wasn't a problem. Then Mozilla hit against it...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How can you possibly say that Mozilla is usably fast? I think developers should be forced to use systems comparable to the low-end of available systems. Then, jack the proc down for the inherent speedup that a programmer's mind imparts onto its own creations. I'd say if it runs tolerably on a 150MHz with 32MB of RAM, then its really ready for prime time.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think this is unfair, application programmers should strive for _supporting_ desktop specific features and libraries, without _requiring_ them. A really good application would have the UI separated from the functionality, and be buildable for Qt (with/without KDE), Gtk (w/w Gnome), Motif (w/w CDE), and perhaps Xaw and tty from the same source.
That some of the Gtk/Gnome applications are closer to this ideal should not count against it.
This isn't true. Any reasonably modern version of gcc (such as 2.96) can handle -mpentiumpro, -march=i686 and the likes.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?
Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.
If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.
PS Sorry for ranting.
Ok, no FUD intended.
;)
I just look at stuff as a user who doesn't know what XUL and DOM even stands for - look at my homepage and you will see that I *really* don't
I was impressed with konqueror, but the last version I looked at had it's weaknesses (crashed too often). Maybe, if it hadn't been for my disappointment of the speed/footprint of mozilla, I would have been less impressed. I don't know.
Also, at the time I gave up Mozilla, they didn't have proper Java support or SSL. Konqueror had all of it, out of the box, immediately. I know mozilla got SSL (but still don't proper java right ? - I mean, you need to get a plugin from somewhere in order to get it to work)
Sure, Konqueror isn't exactly lightweight either, it's only semi-leightweight when standing next to a monster. But it's funny when you're developing software for a living and you know how much stuff you can actually fit in a megabyte, to watch *both* mozilla an konqueror consume 30+ megs.
Anyway, I'm going to check out the K in a few hours when the compilers are done...
Justin,
Thanks for the informative post on KDE. However, while your information about KDE is useful, it worries me that your post got modded to +5, Informative given that you do state some things about GNOME which are at best ill researched, at worst... FUD.
I remember a quote... "never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by ignorance." And honestly, much of the FUD ever laid against the Amiga, or OS/2, or th Mac, or Linux was not so much based on malice as it was based on ignorance.
Now, what worries me is when FUD sligns not between big, bad, Windows, but between free software projects. Perhaps I'm over reacting, and yes - I know that people on "the other side" (ie GNOME users) do the same thing - but what I want to say is that we shouldn't think of people as one "one side" or the "other".
Does GNOME have comparable programs? Yes, another poster mentions some. Some of these programs, such as Gnumeric, are probably more functional than their KDE equivalents. But this isn't really the point. My underlying point is this: there's a thin line between cheerleading and FUD.... just be careful of it!
Thanks,
Amit Dubey
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
QT 2.3 is the bomb :-)
This looks *really* nice.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
"
This second major release of the KDE 2 series is a real improvement in terms of stability, performance and features," said David Faure, release manager for KDE 2.1 and KDE Representative at Mandrakesoft. "KDE 2 has now matured into a solid, intuitive and complete desktop for daily use. Konqueror is a full-featured and robust web browser and important applications like the mail client (KMail) have greatly improved. The multimedia architecture has made great strides and this release inaugurates the new media player noatun, which has a modular, plugin design for playing the latest audio and video formats. For development, KDE 2.1 for the first time is bundled with KDevelop, an outstanding IDE/RAD which will be comfortably familiar to developers with Windows development backgrounds. In short, KDE 2.1 is a state-of-the-art desktop and development environment, and positions Linux/Unix to make significant inroads in the home and enterprise."
"KDE 2.1 opens the door to widespread adoption of the Linux desktop and will help provide the success on the desktop that Linux already enjoys in the server space," added Dirk Hohndel, CTO of Suse AG. "With its intuitive interface, code maturity and excellent development tools and environment, I am confident that enterprises and third party developers will realize the enormous potential KDE offers and will migrate their workstations and applications to Linux/KDE."
"KDE boasts an outstanding graphical design and robust functionality," said Sheila Harnett, Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM's Linux Technology Center. "KDE 2.1 significantly raises the bar for Linux desktop functionality, usability and quality in virtually every aspect of the desktop."
"KDE 2 was some really great stuff. Except, even under casual use, several bugs made themselves really clear. The Taskbar occationally went bonkers and stoped registering programs that you start. Getting that sort of thing fixed would be a whole lot more valuable to me than these features. It'll be interesting to see how they did...
Because users complained. They're so used to the Windows way of having "the cross" at the rightmost corner. From a usability perspective, this is very stupid, but you have to hand it to KDE that they listed to their users ;) And you can always select a different window decoration manually.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Hehe, you have a very good point about people curring costs.
:) Something GNOME would use too.
Unfortunately, the majority of people don't have a bit of sense... But of course, with the major layoffs, maybe just the people with a little sense will be the ones that are left.
Now all we need is a *standard* backend for the calendar and messaging
For those who build KDE from source, and ESPECIALLY the pacakagers at big distros, consider strongly doing the folowing:
set the -no-g++-exceptions flag when building qt
and set the folowing options for all qt and kde:
-03
-mpentiumpro (or -march=pentiumpro for ppro only objs)
the exceptions optimization literally reduces the size of everyting related to qt by several megs a piece with no detriemntal effects. -03 is important because it turns on inlining, which is a big win for C++ code with lots of tiny functions. And optimizing for modern chips should be standard for anyone. These changes sped up my KDE load time by 50%, and made the whole thing feel much "snappier" and smoother. Don't let KDE2 get a rep for slowness just because you used lousy compiler options. (and yes, I posted something similar to the kde2.0 article, but I'm going to repeat it until the packagers get it right)
is Gcc 3.0 which will be the first good C++ compiler. And this will help KDE even more, as it is a C++ Project. I guess great speedups are still possible.
Ohboyohboyohboy!
--
Moritz
It is well known that KDE is ahead of Gnome on the development stakes, and that Gnome looks better and is, well, 'cooler' than KDE. However, now that KDE2 has the theme importation feature this last point is wiped out.
You may think this is nothing, but the simple fact is that the majority of users use a desktop for how good it looks and how easy it is to use. Now, through stealing the coolness of Gnome and the useability of Windows, KDE is streets ahead of the competition, from the point of view of the non-technical user.
I am extremely worried about this. What is to be done for Gnome? Someone will have to bring it on quite a lot if it is to remain valid from a Prima Facie, shallow & unthinking users perspective.
It is the morons who make the final decision regarding the fate of all software, and Open Source software is no different. I just hope that Gnome pull through.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
Maybe my staff can actually do something more productive than grab the latest snapshot of the KDE Betas... I was impressed by them, but constant messing with the upgrades was aggravating.
I'm sure that Slashdoters will pay little attention to this, because for reasons that are beyond me the consensus here is pro-GNOME. Oh well, I think that KDE is so FAR ahead of GNOME it isn't even funny. The licensing issues were becoming a headache, so I'm glad Trolltech made them go away.
KOffice is the best shot they got at home office desktops. I wouldn't expect corporate adoption, but if the techies eventually have a reasonable environment and can share data with the rest of the corporation, there is no reason not to allow Linux desktops.
While I don't doubt KDE is getting better, surely it stands little chance competing against Win 2000 in mainstream enterprises.
What the majority of businesses use desktops for is Office applications. If the likes of StarOffice/OpenOffice cannot even effectively compete with MSOffice on windows, there is little chance of them temping users to a different OS as well as a different Office suite.
If it can't compete in the mainstream office environment, it will never escape its niche since network effects come into play. If everyone else is using MS word, the cost for me of not using it is high. First, the file filter are not perfect, so there is the cost of not being able to read some documents people send me. Second, if I hire new staff, they will need retraining.
The claim of being ready for prime time seems premature.
Probably the best way to check is by looking at the file size of your libqt.so.2.2.x file. I built mine with exceptions disabled, and the filesize is about 5.5MB. With exceptions, it was closer to 10MB.
Some of those projects you mentioned, notably Grip, XMMS and XChat do not require GNOME. They just require GTK. Heck, I don't have any trace of GNOME on my computer and yet XMMS and Grip run great. If a program (LICQ is an example) uses QT, I would not call it a KDE program unless KDE has to be there. Sure, some of them can integrate into GNOME, but the same thing can go for KDE. Anyone can get either KMMS or XMMS-KDE and get an integrated XMMS control in their KDE panel.
KDE2 is a great piece of work. I've been using the 2.1 betas and I couldn't be happier now that 2.1 final is out. It is so vastly different from the old KDE1. In fact, it's almost a complete rewrite.
KDE has many merits, and probably the reason for its success has much to do with the use of Qt. Talk about toolkit wars you want, but the KDE team chose Qt even when it wasn't GPL. The decision was clearly based on technical capability. Just visit Trolltech's site to see a small list of big companies that have invested in Qt. And the toolkit is fully cross-platform. There is clearly no toolkit of comparison.
The KDE libs take the good design of Qt and extend it, bringing us the KParts component system and DCOP. Why not use CORBA? Because the KDE guys didn't think it was the right tool for the job. One really cool part about their DCOP system is it can be controlled from the shell, thus making the whole system fully scriptable. It is all of this well designed framework that allowed the KDE team to bring about so many applications in such a short amount of time.
Konqueror is the most obvious of these first class apps. It is the browser everybody has been waiting for. You want IE on Linux? Here it is, just without the junk. It even has a checkbox to disable javascript window.open(). It's fast, and will manage your files like a pro as well. Also, completely transparent FTP access (IE only does partial), embeddable xterm, image/html thumbnail previews. My goodness does this program rock. I say this as an experienced Unix user, not just as a Windows convert.
And this is just one application. KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program). Dare I mention KOffice?
Does GNOME have any comparable programs? Star Office? Mozilla? Abiword? Those are not even GNOME programs, although they can be "GNOME-ified" (Galeon, Open Office). There is Nautilis, but that is an outside project as well. If we want to talk about outside projects, I could bring up [TheKompany], but there is no need. The core KDE team does enough work themselves to warrant this posting.
There's no reason GNOME can't catch up, but at this point KDE is obviously ahead of GNOME, but that's a given since KDE started first anyway. Some may argue that KDE is behind Windows. Even if that is true, the rate at which the KDE team moves will answer to that quickly. In a recent LinuxPlanet review of KDE2.1 Beta, the author states that the difference between KDE 2.0 and 2.1 is comparable to the difference between Windows 95 and 98. Three years squished into three months? It will be amazing to see where the KDE project is a year from now.
Go KDE!
-Justin
Well, thats true - the ftp admin blocked the ftp/http file getting - so that mirrors would get those files first. That way, the mirrors get the files, and after that - everyone else from the main ftp and the mirrors..
Hetz (Heunique)