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KDE 2.2 Released
Well, we had covered it being tagged last week, and now, after a hardware problem with one of the main download servers, KDE is ready for download. Except that you'll probably want to go to the mirrors to actually get it. You can get more about it about it from Dre's dot.kde post, or you can read the KDE announcement - and have a good time!
Europe:u b/ kde/
u x/ kde
p ub /kde
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/kde
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/kde
ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.kde.org/p
ftp://ftp.rz.uni-wuerzburg.de/pub/unix/kde
ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Lin
ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/X/kde
ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/linux/kde
ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/linux/mirrors/ftp.kde.org/
Asia:
ftp://ftp.au.kde.org/pub/kde
ftp://casper.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/mirror/kde
ftp://linux.sarang.net/mirror/desktop/kde
Africa:
ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
ftp://ftp.na.kde.org/pub/kde
America:
ftp://ftp.matrix.com.br/pub/kde
ftp://mirror.chpc.utah.edu/pub/kde
ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/kde
Now, could anybody tell me when the debian (potato) packages of the 2.2. will be available?
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It's not really like that. The decision to break binary compatability was based on the desire to use new features in Qt 3, and encouraged by the fact that gcc 3.0 is going to disrupt BC anyway. Given that decision, you may as well take the opportunity to patch up API's that could use some further improvement.
There is activity going on on their mailing list. E.g. right now they're coining up a standard for storing image thumbnails so Nautilus, Konqueror and the GIMP will be able to share them.
Monkey sense
Despite how mature KDE 2.x is, it still has a killer flaw: it is dreadfully slow. I mean it makes Windows-2000 feel like BeOS. I scares me to think of all the people who never got into Linux because KDE's speed frightened them away.
/. once made a very good point. Developers should be forced to code on vanilla pentiums with 48MB of RAM. Thus, their programs will run quickly on those with mainstream machines. Watching KDE-2.1 (I have not tried 2.2, so I won't comment on it) sputter along on my PII-300 /w 256MB of RAM (which runs Win2K damn snappily, thank you very much) is just sad. For example try loading up a directory with a lot of files in Konqueror. KDE2 will visibly pause while Win2K will merrily blast them all onscreen. Then try resizing the window (with opage resize turned on). With Explorer, there is barely any flicker, and the process is *smooth* With Konqueror, you can see visible redraw, and the thing rubber-bands like Netscape 4.7. While Word 97 starts up instantly on my computer, even simple apps take several seconds to load on KDE. For a twichy guy like me (spoiled by BeOS) KDE's lack of snappy response makes it unusable. Alex St. John (DirectX evangalist and former columnist at MaximumPC) once asked how the hell Internet Explorer could visibly flicker when drawing a few bitmaps and some text, while Carmack was spewing tons of AI driven monsters on the screen at 30fps.
Somebody on
What KDE really needs is a feature-freeze. It is already "usable enough" and has enough eye-candy (aren't UNIX guys supposed to HATE style over substance?) What needs to be done is to revamp the internal architecture for speed. Not turning the codebase into spaggheti code for a few more % speedup, but making good design decisions that trade some 1% functionality (defined as functionality that is cool, but useless to 99% of the population, such as remote network objects) for speed and simplicity. Unfortuately, the tricks going on at AMD and Intel virtually assures that such a thing will never happen. It has been said of software (MS software in particular) that it expands to fill available hardware resources. I thought Linux was supposed to be different?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE 2.2(Final) Debs are available in the unstable tree. If you normally run the stable tree, you may want to switch over to unstable, install just the needed kde packages, then switch back. deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
Mmmm, -funroll-loops
Why not use both? Install both of them, install a program like selectwm, and choose which wm to use. This way, if you get tired of using one, you can easily switch to another. No big deal.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
New features I like:
Pulsating icon when program is loading
Interface cleanup - Finally looks good on hi-res LCD
Bug fixes - Browser is getting more usable day by day
Kdevelop - intriguing program. Hope it continues to mature at it's current pace. Very familiar coming from MS Vis Studio.
Koffice - Hope to see you at 1.1 soon! looking great
Schemes, Colors, Sounds and everything are much snappier
Control panel cleanups!
Setup wizards (makes it easy for windows converts
And lots of GUI toys & options - can change icon & font rendering, window popup speed and much more. eye candy for sure
Again, compile times suck. It takes a few hours to compile kde_base alone on a 1ghz P3 with a gig of memory.
Hopefully Gcc 3.01 /3.1, QT 3.0 and KDE 3.0 will be the killer desktop. 2.2 is a VAST improvement, but only that.. an improvement on existing interfaces and bugfixes.
I do like KDE's object model of sorts, widgets and kparts. Very will thought out implementations, i just hope they learn to quit breaking binary compatibility with each major release :)
Keep up the good work KDE team!
It's a major upgrade - you probably want to upgrade (or, get ready to upgrade when 2.2.1 inevitably comes out in a couple of weeks).
The release notes are worth reading over.
...j
(jackass has been cancelled. eep!)
Well worth the upgrade. It's slicker and feels faster than before, and the "kpersonalizer" is a nice quick way to tune your environment. Konquerer is nice, but still a bit clunky, so Moz wins for me here. KMail simply goes from strength to strength.
If you've not done it yet, go for it. You won't be disappointed, you'll certainly be impressed at the hard work that has clearly gone into this environment. Well done the KDE team!
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
You have a choice, choice the environment you like after evaluating all your options. So create a new user on your UNIX system and try them out.
A good idea in theory - but in practice, this can be quite hard. For example, for panel applets, both desktops drag along large libraries - and while it is possible to display GTK widgets in Qt applications, you don't want the memory requirements that introduces.
/etc/X11/applnk menu on Red Hat Linux), so it's not quite as bad as you make it sound.
For menus etc., we are using the desktop file standard (with the exception that gnome hasn't converted its translations to UTF8 yet) - with a sane setup, you can get an application into both menus at the same time (e.g. the
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1) kdesupport is gone. It was a collection of libraries that are used by KDE, but not part of KDE.
;)
;)
On the Red Hat side, I've replaced it with the non-kde subdirectory on ftp.kde.org.
2) kdm configuration has changed quite a bit, but I don't see what could be causing this. Please send me your old kdm config files.
3) backtrace?
4) agreed
5) The best way to fix this is to tell them to fix up their setup - we can't keep trying to figure out what proprietary browsers are doing forever.
Most of the cases where Konqueror "misrenders" something can be traced down to the fact that it's actually more intelligent than it's proprietary counterparts. Take a look at a couple of changes in the KDE_2_2_BRANCH in CVS for examples.
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Yes, bloat, but if you do not use the STL, exceptions, and RTTI, c++ binaries are about the size of c binaries.
And yes, most of kde does not use RTTI, STL, and exceptions (Qt uses RTTI afaik, but it's not as big of a bloat maker as exceptions are).
Also, about, execution speed, c++ is only barely slower than c. HOWEVER, g++ compiled c++ programs with lots of shared libs take forever to be loaded. This seems to be bugs in g++ that the team is fixing. The same prelinking time does not occur in other compilers (visual c++ comes to mind).
There are several approaches that the kde project has compensated for this. First was kdeinit. Kdeinit linked the majority of kde and qt shared libs and then loaded the app, resulting in less memory usage. Now, with 2.2, there is a objprelink. This reduces time of loading of many kde apps from 30% to 50%.
In the future, g++ will probably be fixed. Meanwhile, there will be other prelinking solutions (some have already been announced)
if you have your KDE clock set to blink and show seconds etc, that kind of bandwidth will chew up your LAN in no time.
and as soon as you start web browsing you can kiss your LAN good bye if you have lots of clients on the same LAN.
There is a version of liquid in the KDE CVS. It's called MegaGradient. The code was rolled into the CVS and forked from the original, which is one of the reasons that Mosfet has stopped developing in the KDE CVS and is now releasing his work under the QPL.
There are some here.
Hi people,
Just few words about this release (and future road-map)..
This is the final major version of KDE 2.2 - expect KDE 2.2.1 next month with all the last-minute bug fixes (without any new features), and translations update..
The next major version is going to be KDE 3.0 that will be out at around January 2002 featuring QT 3.0.x (with all the QT 3 features), and some changes in the backend, among other things. Most of KDE will be ported from 2.2 to 3.0. SO people who want to either developer QT or KDE applications might want to download QT 3 snapshot and play with it. It's got some bugs - but it's pretty stable.
People who would like to contribute to the KDE development are most welcome to join - you don't have to be a C++ programmer in order to contribute - Graphics artists, GUI guru's, HTML experts and others are more then welcome to join the big KDE famility of developers..
I thin it's also a good time for you - the reader/user to post what do you want to be changed in KDE? what do u hate about KDE? what do you like? What do you think should be improved? What do you think should be removed? most of the KDE developers read slashdot - so maybe your request will be fullfilled - you never know...
As for other platforms - expect KDE 2.2 to be available within days for Solaris (X86 & Sparc), HP/UX, SGI's Irix, IBM AIX, and others..
Enjoy the release people - lots of work has been done on this one - and you get as a bonus %30-%50 speed increase..
Hetz (Heunique)
is done by the distributors. Debian for example splits the kdenetwork in the different applications.(AFAIK)
There is even a script in the kdesdk to package single apps. Aa long as the distributors don't do it, there is nothing KDE can do about it.
Moritz
FreeBSD binary packages are already on the KDE FTP, so you should get those. The port will probably take a couple of weeks, if the past is any indication.
2.2 works great on FreeBSD, the only problem I've found so far is that SSL is completely shot. So you'll have to do without https for a while in Konqueror. Too bad.
There was a bug that has now been fixed with g++/kde-libs. Basically the linker did not index and point to the pre-compilied objects properly. What happened was the linker had to reswap and load all the compilied objects in the proper sequence(i think) and that took some time. Its minimal on my PIII700 :-).
The new kde2.1 and the new gnu-bintools and glibc (not the recent gcc 3.0 compiler) fix the error. According to the press release you can expect %30-%50 improvment on load times because the excess object swaping and loading has been taken care of.
http://saveie6.com/