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)."

Comments

Re:Gnome User

[reverius]

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.

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 ;)) 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.

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. :)

Re:Gnome User

[hexix]

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.

Re:it seems KDE is falling behind

[Karellen]

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.