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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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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Moritz
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