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KDE 2.2 Tagged
ByTor-2112 writes "According to dot.kde.org, KDE 2.2 has been tagged out. Awesome." Plans were originally to release 2.2 today, but scheduled release is now next Monday, to allow some time for more stability/speed work. 2.2 rocks my world. Excellent work on the part of all the KDE developers. Other dates mentioned are 2.2.1 in September, and opening work up on 3.0, which will hopefully come out at the beginning of 2002.
KDE-2.2 is quite a lot (noticably) faster than KDE-2.1.1. Especially file management is a lot faster now, but also configuration dialogs and so on. Not as fast as Win95, but fast enough to feel snappy (on my P-ii-300).
If you are interested in startup speed, check out the objprelink hack for C++ projects, that was just recently done for KDE. It improves startup times of KDE apps by 30-50 % and might also be of use for OpenOffice, Mozilla and other large C++ applications. Of course it is just a hack until real (stable) prelinking in gcc is available. Note: This has not been included to KDE-2.2 by default, because it arrived during the feature freeze. Hopefully your packager will use this or just follow the step-by-step instructions yourself. It is easy and works like advertised. :-)
Have fun KDE folks!
Moritz
You simply must spend time diggin through all that 2.2 offers before offering an opinion on it. The depth of available features are astounding.
:-)
For example, I *love* how finegrained Konqueror's support for cookie and javascript is. You can specify particular sites that allowed to run javascript, to the exculsion of all others.
Kasbar, the newly spiffed up task switcher, pop up a scaled down screenshot of the app whose icon your mouse is hovering over. This makes it WAY easier to pick the web browser windows you REALLY meant.
Konqueror's support for file-data-as-the-icon has truly matured. It renders text, html, pics, postscript and pdf, alphablending in the normal icon underneath the data. Sweet and really effective for me.
KMail gives surprising good control of mail. Some of the options make procmail unecessary, except for really advanced stuff. ANd it supports IMAP now.
Konsole may be a bit bulky for a shell, but I love having a menu listing all my nachines on the network, giving me one click ssh to them, all in one manageable window.
How many times have you seen a newbie click the icon to launch a program, get tired of waiting for it to come up, and click it again? Of course, two copies get launched, confusing the user. Well, KDE now "attaches" the 16x16 icon of th program you asked to launch to the mouse cursor, throbbing gently until the app comes up. this gives *useful* feedback to the user. Not only does it tell them that something is happening(which an hourglass can do), but it tells them what is being launched, boosting their confidence.
The kicker can now take up less than the full screen. The default is not to have a handle on the left, making good use of Fitt's law; slam the mouse to the lower left and you are *sure* to get the Start Menu when you click.
KDE is full of wonderful touches. Keep digging, you'll be pleasantly surprised, constantly
Yes, any C++ application on Linux is slow to start up due to symbol relocation in linking, and the weak support for C++ in the GNU toolchain, from compiler to linker.
Strange that Mozilla, StarOffice / OpenOffice are all C++, all slow to start up.
Fwiw, I use Knode from CVS and it runs in ~8 seconds from a twm based X session, no other KDE desktop tools running. On a machine with twice the Mhz and half the RAM.
The excessive load time is probably misconfigured DNS, btw.
I am runing 2.2 beta and here are some new things that I discovered in konqueror:
An interesting (and very usefull) feature is that Konqueror will show the HTML DOM Tree, therefore making much easier to study a document structure.
Another very important tool is the web archive (something I've been waiting for a long time) - it makes you a tar with a html and all the pictures, a complete web page (Opera had this also but it didn't compress). Web archives can be opened directly in konqueror.
You can validate html's directly from konqueror toolbar, and from the same toolbar you can use babelfish to translate pages.
In the file manager you can see thumbnails of ps and pdf pages now, (up to 2.2 you could see html, text and images).
Sorin M
For more information on KDE, the release and support for 2.2, please visit irc.openprojects.net #kde-users. For anyone interested in the development path that we'll be taking in the future, discussions about that will happen on the mailing lists (lists.kde.org) and #kde. Please do not fill #kde with support related questions... go to #kde-users for that if possible. Thanks, and enjoy the release. Troy Unrau troy@kde.org
Huh? Do you even remotely keep a watch of the GNOME community? A couple months ago the GNOME 2.0 schedule was released and things are moving along pretty much as planned. A 2.0 API freeze just occured, activity on the lists and in CVS is dramatically rising. We've had recent releases of the new Control Center, a brand new AbiWord, second Beta of Evolution, new releases of development tools gIDE (screenshot) and DevHelp (screenshot), a new file selection dialog, etc...I could go on. I suggest you at least read the GNOME Summaries or check out Gnotices every now and then.
Celebrate the finer things in life
If anybody wonders what Fitt's law is, here ya go.
KDE 3.0 will basically be what you would imagine KDE 2.3 would be (i.e. no world shaking new changes), but ported to QT 3. This will enable much better handling of 'foreign' languages, and a rewritten styling/themeing engine, plus other extras (data aware widgets for example).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Anyhow, allow me to retort.
I love the progress that KDE has been making. It has been steady and strong.
GNOME is still moving along at a great pace too, but much of their work is on the backend right now, developing libraries, APIs, etc, rather than just new apps based on the old libraries.
Also, GNOME is planning a 1.4.1 release which really cleans up on the 1.4 release - lots of changes and improvements have been made based on all the feedback the developers have gotten from everyone who's been using GNOME 1.4 (like Nautilus - WOAH is it faster now! 1.0.4 beats the crap out of older releases for speed and usability, and is finally becoming a viable "everyday" file manager. It's still a little "pudgy" memory-wise, but with SDRAM prices where they are, this is less of an issue than speed, IMHO)
I still don't like the lack of choice in window managers but I'm having second thoughts on that position since by only having one WM, more uniform configurability is possible.
See Ximian's "Metatheme" for your answer, my good man. If you're using Ximian's GNOME 1.4 (Highly recommended!), you can get Metatheme from the "Ximian Preview Channel" in Red Carpet. Otherwise, just go to ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/metatheme/ for all your metatheme needs!
Just the other day I was wishing KDE and GNOME would just merge.
heh.... maybe when Satan ice skates to work and opens up a sno-cone stand. ;) Seriously, though, having 2 desktops is a GOOD thing! Linux, if anything is about Freedom and choice; combining the projects is not only technologically unfeasable, it's foolish. What we all *should* be hoping for is further development on standards to help KDE and GNOME play nicely together, ie: universal Drag'n'Drop, similar menu system, etc... This would be more than enough, really. I have a GNOME desktop, but I have tried a KDE app or two in the past, and they work fine, so where's the problem? :)
I hope this answers some of your questions - and feel free to try KDE - as much as I *personally* think Gnome is far superior, it may not be what's right for you. If KDE suits your needs better than Gnome, so be it! (that's where that *choice* I brough up earlier comes in!)
The Free desktop that Just Works
Hey,
;-).
Someone already posted a very nice list of projects that are being developed for GNOME, new projects: DevHelp and GIDE (it even has an integrated debugger!).
A new File Selector widget; A new control center that is very pretty and integrates system adminisrtation tools (the Setup Tools which are a cross platform set of tools for doing system configuration).
On the GNOME 2.0 front: we are frozen now (a lot of work has gone in there): Bonobo is now split into UI and non-UI pieces, so it can finally become a full component system for Unix. Gnome Print is much more advanced (six months of development, polishing and improvements
Evolution is of course one of the bits that has me super excited. Beta2 just came out, and there are so many features, productivity and usability that you will be amazed. Give it a spin, you can install it very easily:
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com | sh
(Do that as root).
We also have a new desktop-wise theme engine, that enables you to build themes that encompass all the system: Nautilus theme, Gtk+ theme, window manager theme, Gnome libraries theme (and it has a pluggable architecture).
The Setup Tools have reached maturity, and support many different systems: one UI to manage all the systems. It also comes with the time-travel feature, and we will be moving towards supporting small clusters (mostly for managing computer labs and small clusters).
Our HTML editor is extremely good, one of the best out there in the market. How to you use it?
Just create a moniker:
moniker-test -c OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor
Or from your application, just embed it like this:
w = bonobo_get_object ("OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor");
Full with table editing, templtaes, full undo, etc.
On the GtkHTML2 side of things the guys at CodeFactory have a full CSS2 implementation (complete, not a partial one) plus DOM support and god so many features.
Gtk+2 is also packed with features, too many to list: double buffering rendering all across the place; Simplified API; Support for Pango (everyone who has seen pango loves it); New model-view widgets and oh man. So much. So much. I can not even make sense.
Some technologies are available on GNOME 1.4, some will be out with GNOME 1.4.1. Many of these are scheduled for GNOME 2, by the end of the year.
Accesibility is another major improvement that comes with GNOME 2, all contributed by Sun. All these features bring GNOME into a more mature level and a complete product that will help us regain the desktop market share.
You can help make this dream a reality, just join us in the effort to improve GNOME and make it perfect.
I am missing too many things, and I apologize for those hackers working steadily on all those pieces of GNOME that are going continously into the tree. But there is way too much going on in the GNOME world.
Miguel.
real screenshots here - not goatse, i swear!
Two at the bottom of this page:
e warticle&artid=12
http://www.warpedsystems.sk.ca/sections.php?op=vi
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
Yeah, like everybody's favorite compiler... It stalled for a year or so due to political arguments, hence the EGCS fork. After the FSF formally handed control of GCC to EGCS, the team got the 2.95 series out the door... but it still took forever to get 3.0 released. Afterwards, everybody sat down and said, "Okay, now that that's done, what could be improved?" and the result is the new development plan. The 3.0.1 code should be freezing in another ten days or so.
I suspect that this is just part of the growth of projects. A massive growth spurt (fast development) followed by a slowing and ossifying, followed by a clean-out-the-crap cycle which leads to a growth spurt...
You realize that can mean anything you want it to mean, right? It's way too vague of a term.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I just wish installing KDE on Solaris was as simple.
PatriotSoft makes Solaris 8 KDE packages. Only catch is they replace Sun's dtgreet logo with their own but that is easily fixed. We have been using their KDE 1.x package in production where I work for 1.5 years now. The KDE 2.x stuff seems to have problems when you logon on graphically more than once but that might be fixed now (run the control panel while logged in twice but only on a box no one cares about).
You can get the packages at: ftp://ftp.patriots.net/pub/solaris_packages/8-Spar c/KDE/
-- Argel
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll get hit by a nuclear submarine.
-- Argel
Well, like, that's just your opinion, man :) could you elaborate on which parts (in gcc 3.0?)
I noticed some code really runs fast on Visual c++ and runs slower and is more bloated on linux with gcc.
gcc's prime advantage over compilers like vc++ is retargetability/portability and (nowadays) standards compliance, not speed (tho it tries).
Anyway I would love to see faster load times on kde3.0.
That's actually a run-time linker (not compiler) issue. (read the dot or the kde mailing lists for more) .. "kdeinit" is at least partly a hack to get the load times down. They're still working for more improvements on the kde end, but the last word will be when the binutils guys get their linker more optimized for c++ code.
Do any of you know if the new compiler can help make kde3.0 run better?
Not yet. gcc3.0 has some bugs (again, they're working on it) that causes it to miscompile parts of kde. These issues ought to be resolved by kde3.0 time.
The big reason for the major version number change is binary compatibility. KDE 3 will be using QT3 and GCC 3.0, which will both break binary compatibility with KDE 2. At the same time, the KDE guys will use the opportunity to fix any problems that have been uncovered with the 2.0 API (since the API can't be changed much without breaking compatibility). Therefore, KDE 3.0 should be a very stable desktop (since it's not a complete rewrite), based on the newest and best in Open-Source technology, with refined APIs for developers.
Once 3.0 is out, they plan to standardize on it for a long time to allow a large application base to build up. Of course in the meantime they will make lots of point releases with the great new functionality we've come to expect from KDE releases.
The future looks bright :-)
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