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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.
Great. I'm very glad to see that KDE is making headway. (Now if they'd just fix the minor security hole in their screensavers...) I'll be upgrading my Linux desktop for 2.2 pretty soon.
I just wish installing KDE on Solaris was as simple. Non-Linux situations just don't receive as much attention as they need to if KDE is really going to live up to its cross-platform promise. I've converted some of my Solaris users to KDE on the strength of the 1.1.2 release alone; if I can give them 2.2 on the SPARCs as soon as it appears on the x86s, I'll have won them over, I think. :-)
(They really like browsing the contents of a tar file in Konqueror. But they still laugh when the "system information" screen complains that it can't find the IRQs in use, or the game controllers, or any of the other all-the-world's-a-PC things. Enh, it's a start...)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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
poor little dot server. it goes down for like a week or something, and now it's being slashdotted.
maybe they should switch to an IIS server
if you think that was anything other than a joke, kill yourself; you're stealing my oxygen
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
I really really am. I use GNOME and have virtually ignored KDE with extreme prejudice. I know it is rather small-minded of me but at least I admit it.
I love the progress that KDE has been making. It has been steady and strong. I love the sane orderly and approach that KDE has taken from the beginning.
Originally, I hated KDE because of the non GPL issue. Now that is resolved. Next I hated it because it lacked nice eye candy. There have been terrific improvements in the theming department though there is more to go before it wins me over. 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.
I still hate that seemingly everything has an inappropriate use of "K" in there somewhere. Of course GNOME stuff is prone to the same problem, but you have to understand, I'm in the U.S. and it reminds us of K-Mart... bleah... white trash... too much associative crap associated with "K" words.
Just the other day I was wishing KDE and GNOME would just merge.
And where is GNOME's promised 2.0 release!?!? I'm getting seriously disillusioned. I think when I install this RedHat 7.2(beta) I'll give KDE a try... nothing new for me to see with the GNOME 1.4 there anyway.
Damnit Miguel?!?! What happened to the enthusiasm and momentum?! Put your marketting hat on!
This sort of short update schedule, etc. is great. I've always like that about OpenBSD (new version every 6 months) and if I remember correctly, Linus had made comments about trying to get the Kernel on that type of track as well.
Fewer "massive" changes that take 2 years to complete and more "evolutionary" style.
Whatever happened to that idea? (Officially)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Great timing with this release. I figure by the time my infant gets into college, this'll show up in Debian stable.
(Blah, blah, blah. I use Progeny. Now go away Debian flamers, it's a joke.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
real screenshots here - not goatse, i swear!
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.