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KDE 3.0 Alpha1 Available for Developers
Dre writes: "Just a few weeks after the release of the rock-solid KDE 2.2.1, the KDE Project today announced the release of KDE 3.0 Alpha1. Targeted at developers who want to get a head start on porting or writing applications to KDE 3, the release is pretty much a straight port of the KDE 2.2 branch to Qt 3. However, for developers this brings an impressive array of new features to KDE, including new database classes, new data-aware widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support), improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the planned
KDE improvements. Read the full announcement here, or go straight to the source
(alternative
link)."
I switched from KDE to Gnome. The primary reason was an easy one... the latest GNOME is available (through Ximian) for Debian Stable (aka Potato, aka 2.2)... but the latest KDE is a bit harder to do.
;)) and save on system resources. I can make my whole user interface look exactly like MacOS 8 (which I do). So I use Gnome instead of KDE.
:)
When I tried KDE 2.1 on this box, it seemed kinda sluggish. KDE 2.2 is a lot faster, but it ain't gonna run on Debian 2.2.
A big plus for me as well is the customizability (albeit mostly hidden) of gnome. I can completely remove the desktop icons (and Nautilus itself
If Debian 2.3 (Woody) would come out soon, I'd be glad to try KDE 2.2 on it, and maybe stick with it.
Well I use both, usually GNOME more often as I like the look I can achieve with it and pretty much all my favorite programs are gtk+ based, so it's nice having the same look for everything.
But the reason I think a lot of people like KDE is because of the level of integration everything has. It truly is a Desktop Environment, whereas GNOME at this point has more of a "most of the programs look similar" feel to it. Very little seems to be in place for the programs to talk to eachother and work the same from application to application.
For example, in KDE2 every program that opens files (to the best of my knowledge) uses KIO (I'm guessing that stands for KDE Input Outout) and this makes it so you can open and save files from/to anything KIO supports. For example, you can open a file in a KDE text editing program by giving a http url like http://slashdot.org/ (that should give you the source code for slashdot's main page in HTML) then you could then save that file to some ftp site, just by putting ftp://blah.com/incoming/file.html in the save dialog.
That level of integration is all over KDE2 and it really makes for a great experience. There is tons of other stuff too, like how konqueror embeds components so it can display many types of files. In fact, if I'm not wrong, the koffice office suite is made up of components so I think you can view kword files in konqueror without really launching the kword application, just embeds it into konqueror's window.
Lots of other stuff to explore in KDE. For me though I just like the look and feel of GNOME. And I think all those nifty things in KDE give it a lot more stuff that can break (and from my experience it tends to do just that). Of course I could just have bad luck with it, I dunno.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
You don't need to run *all* of KDE *or* GNOME, which is the great thing about both projects.
Take me. When I first ran across GNOME (around 1.0), it was really unstable. However, gnome-panel beat the snot out of AfterStep's wharf. So I just ran the panel, and ignored the rest of GNOME.
Now that GNOME is all around better than before, I actually run gnome-session, and have GNOME start my WM. I still don't use gmc, which I don't like, and stick to bash for file management. No icons on the desktop, but I'm using GNOME and GNOME apps.
So while you certainly don't have to run GNOME or KDE or GNUStep (It's Linux! The land of choice!), be aware that the parts may be worth more than the whole.
This is NOT my home page.
I'm one of the many who went from GNOME to KDE -- but in my case it's because I spent the last three years coding for BeOS, which had a wonderful c++ api. Just beautiful.
When I realized I had to bail to another OS(choosing linux, obviously) I went to GNOME, since all the screenshots looked so damn purdy.
But I spent, perhaps, 2 weeks *attempting* to make GTK+ cede to my will, without any worthwhile success.
For reference, I'm not a c++-only kinda guy. I used to work at a software company writing device drivers for early set-top-boxes in assembler and c. So I _do_ know that kind of stuff. Quite well, in fact.
The trouble was... GTK+ just didn't make any *sense* to me!
And on the other hand, QT _did_ and KDE is, after all, written not just in QT/C++, but it follows the same naming and logical conventions (which are, I might add, well thought out.)
In the end, I actually prefered using GNOME. I think it's nice and slick, and has good minimalist approaches to the user experience. Relative to KDE it's quite minimalist. By this point (6 months into linux use/programming) I've managed to learn KDE well enough that it's a good experience for me...
but by god I'm never going to touch GTK/GNOME APIs again if I don't have to.
Just my 2c
Konqueror is much better than GMC IMHO, and more configurable than Nautilus, but some updates to the file-browser part of Konqueror would be nice. In particular, something emulating the functionality of Windoze's listview control would be nice. I hate having to view in large icon mode just to draw boxes around files to select them. When in detailed list view, selecting a file selects the whole row when it should ideally only select the filename in the first column.
This might sound petty but this particular aspect when compared with Windoze Explorer makes the Konqueror file browser feel almost like winfile.exe when it comes to selecting files.
Just my 2cents worth. I'm still going to use KDE regardless, though, because Nautilus is slow and has very few options for configuring it.
Yeah definitely. I'm pretty sure that GNOME is getting a new file selection dialog, in fact in Ximian GNOME right now there is a new one, which is much nicer.
/usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds I can type /usr/shpixba and that will usually get me there very quickly. And you can do the same thing with files of course, and if there is more then one match when you hit tab, that's what files/directories the file selection dialog will show so you can find files very quickly this way.
;)
My only gripe about the KDE file selection dialog is the fact that you can't specify directories in the same spot you type in files. One thing I've grown to love about the Gnome/GTK+ file selection dialog (no matter how ugly it is) is that I can use tab completion to specify a full path very quickly, just like in a bash shell. For example, if I want to get to the directory
With KDE's there is a seperate text input for the directory, which is nice and it should stay that way but I think they should add the ability to specify the directory in the file text input box.
But, pretty small gripe considering all the things the GNOME/GTK+ selection dialog has wrong with it
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
This list doesn't address usability problems in a way that lets the casual reader know if usability issues are being addressed. Its simply not possible from the list, yet as far as developers are conderned this is a very concrete definition of issues for KDE 3. But usability by casual user is probably the only real obstacle between Lunux & KDE and the desktops of of those users who care more about getting their job done than they do whether the desktop was free (as in free beer). GNOME faces the same obstacle. The next version of KDE should be based on usability surveys, such as Sun did with GNOME. Perhaps the KDE developers could get IBM to fund a study?
What's so great about a CLR???
All it does is allow you to "compile" your source into a more obfuscated form of source that no-one can read but you can ship off to any other computer where it will get compiled for real (usually JIT - which is IMO more like a cached interpreter, but that's just semantics) before being run.
All a CLR allows you to do is obfuscate your source a lot. We don't bother. Just ship the real source and allow someone to compile it themselves.
CLRs are just a klunky workaround for people who feel a need to hide their source for whatever reason.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Sounds like my probloems when I used onjprelink to compile kde and qt. Much faster app and kde starts, but unfortunately a little unstable. W/the SuSE RPMS that don't use onjprelink, KDE 2.2.1 is a bit slower (though still faster than any other 2.x) and rock-stable.
Greets,
Anno.