Posted by
HeUnique
on from the congratulations-to-kde-team dept.
Linux Journal has just posted who won its awards this time - and KDE got 3 of them: Konqueror, KDE-2, and KDevelop. Congratulations to the KDE team and to all their supporters.
Much deserved
by
phutureboy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
KDE 2.2 is slick as all hell. Still a few minor hiccups every now and then (many of which would probably be fixed if I upgraded to 2.2.1) but overall it's the most solid and robust *nix desktop environment I've ever used. (I've used OS X, but am not really impressed with it).
While everyone was busy harping about Mozilla, Konqueror grew up. It's now tantalizingly close to being an IE-killer. I shit you not. It's a very pleasant browsing experience, standards compliant, and to top it all off it's a great file manager as well.
KOffice is a great start at an integrated office suite. It's at the 'basic' stage right now. It reminds me of Clarisworks for the Mac, in that it's all integrated together and, while it doesn't support some of the fancier features, it can handle 90% of what most people want to do.
I'm really looking forward to KDE 3.0.
Go KDE.
Re:Much deserved
by
aussersterne
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While everyone was busy harping about Mozilla, Konqueror grew up. It's now tantalizingly close to being an IE-killer. I shit you not. It's a very pleasant browsing experience, standards compliant, and to top it all off it's a great file manager as well.
No doubt! A year or so ago, each time I booted in to Linux I would find myself missing Internet Explorer and thinking that if Linux only ran IE everything would be great.
Those days are over... the tables have turned. Now when I'm in Windows 2000, I find myself dying for the features of Konqueror, and even just for the Konqueror web browser component. Konqueror is my favorite browser right now among all browsers, for any platform, hands down.
When I glanced at the headline, I thought it said 'KDE 3 Wins awards'. I know KDE development is fast, but still it was a bit surprising...
-- --
Ed Avis
ed@membled.com
i'm going to suffer for this but...
by
posmon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
kde *is* getting better, but compared to winxp's interface? forget arguments about the underlying os (it's stable, ok!) or fisher price looks (you *can* turn them off!), just the physical organisation of the various functions.
when i first installed kde2 it took me about five minutes to work out how to change the screen resolution and then i had to reset kde before it took effect. and don't get me started on the default setup's choice of font in konqueror.
the only thing that kde could win on is virtual desktops, but now that winxp can be patched to support these, it's getting left behind.
but like i said, it's getting better. at least linux developers are finally getting over those fucking 'where do you want to go tommorow?' cracks and are starting to create good looking AND useable windows managers.
still, well done to the kde team and best of luck for v3.
--
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
Re:i'm going to suffer for this but...
by
Nailer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
That's true, and all your points (especially the lack of a good X setup apps - Ximian might fill this in with its own tool if only it would work). Fonts, media playing, network display, and software installation are also areas where Linux desktops currently are behind, but they're also being addressed (KFontinst, MPlayer, DXPC, and Red Carpet). However, there's many points where KDE is ahead of Windows.
* Behaviour of Windows drag and drop depends on whether the destinatio nand source are on the same partition, a new partition, or a shell folder, and what type of application is being dragged. KDE simply asks me when i drop it - copy, move, or link?
* The ability to support document previews is getting even better. XP, for example, don't support previewing Acrobat files (obviously, NIH). Note sure about Word files in XP, but KDE could easily preview Staroffice or KOffice files in Konq too.
* Drag a file to the desktop and it has the brains to suggest I'd like to make that file my wallpaper. This allows me to easily change my desktop, for example, from a pictire of Christina Ricci, to er...another picture of Christina Ricci. How good is that?
* Linux web browsers often have some very useful features their windows counterparts don't - eg, the ability to turn off annoying popups without disabling javascript, stop animation on a page, and handle privacy and cookies in a much more customizable way than IE can.
* Xkill shits all over the windows task manager - so does ksysguard.:D
So yeah, there's good and bad points about both (the point my seemingly inflammatory sig tries to make).
However, in the space of a year, Linux desktops improve faster than their Windows equivalents, and are already ahead in some areas. If this continues (and it seems it will), in 2 years time KDE will blow Windows away. in almost every aspect.
Awards like this mean plenty to everyone within the industry...Developer, User, or somewhere inbetween: We all benefit by recognizing excellence. What we have here is not necessarily Yet Another Award, but a standard for others in the Linux Community to measure up to. Just because it doesn't come from a Ziff Davis publication does not lessen its value -- besides, it's not like this 'zine hasn't been around enough to have established credibility...
i just installed kdevelop for the first time yesterday and i was was pretty impressed. on the down side it only supported C/C++... even in the syntax highlighting part - when it shouldnt be too hard to have it for other languages as well... but ok it's 'an ide for c/c++ development' whatever... i'm so sure you're all thinking 'real coders use VI';-)
konqueror's just awesome. it does crash from time to time, but i'm happy with the features, especially with being able to just enable cookies for just a few sites in particular - like slashdot so i dont have to relogin everytime i come here, load my prefs just to filter out all my jon katz posts...
mozilla has that too, but it loads too slowly.. but konqueror's loading faster.. could this have anything to do with it being "integrated" with the kde desktop? man.. this thing is sounding like IE with windows... they're saying about implementing activeX in this thing in future releases... oh boy... next thing, "KDE updates" anyone?
Koffice is nice... one great thing they can have is to include a pdf writer into it... ps2pdf isnt good enough... fonts arent always supported properly..
i just switched from 2.1.1 to 2.2.1 or whatever it is (the one available in debian testing to one in debian stable) last night. very pleased. but so much slower. this thing does eat up a lot of RAM - eventhough i've got plenty of it.. but still...
kde-look.org's got some great themes for 2.2.1 (despite recent random postings of ugly themes and porn...)
check out the QNX theme. looks great.. but it's not just bells and whistles we're about right?
Would be nice
by
datazone
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It would be nice if the editor showed which products he compared, and why the others did not get the award. and as far as the "Office Application
" section goes, was he only comparing word processors? what about gnumeric? gnumeric 0.75 is at a point right now where its so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt. and did he even try galeon. as far as the browsing experience goes, its my opinion that galeon is much better designed to be a web browser.
-- Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Sooo, you just decided to pop onto this thread and state a comment about a product you didn't like, but didn't take the time to look at even it's most basic features? Well by gosh, on behalf of everyone reading this thread I would like to say thank you for your insightful, and interesting bit of literary magic you have graced us all with.
Gosh, I can only hope we get to hear about more things you haven't used, and your opinions on them really soon.
-- The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Re:KDE is just a Windowsalike
by
loopkin
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
i disagree some 150%
you want KDE look (and feel) like Mac ? enable Desktop menu, and remove taskbar.
you want KDE look (and feel) almost like WindowMaker/Afterstep ? enable WindowMaker Applets extension, and remove taskbar
the only thing you can't disable is the KParts/DCOP underlying system (well.. i think you can't). but i thought the aim of Linux on Desktop (which is the purpose of KDE), was to provide a component model implementation in order to allow high level interaction between applications (which is all the GNOME/KDE/GNUStep-WindowMaker projects do... using different languages, APIs, and having different set of features).
sure, if you want less features and les memory usage, you can stick to old and light AfterStep or FVWM (though IceWM and others appear to be better)
as for the binary size for KDE or problems of slow launching or whatever, one of the biggest problems of QT/KDE for the time being is that they are written in C++, and gcc is far from good at compiling C++ (which gave all the fuss about 2.96 and 3.x versions). usually distros don't even build kde using objprelink. wait a bit that all those things improve (and they are close to), and i think u'll see a great improvment in KDE performances.
> Koffice is nice... one great thing they can have is to include a pdf writer into it...
> ps2pdf isnt good enough... fonts arent always supported properly..
Well, try to print a file, every KDE-2.2.1 application has the option to print to PDF (and Postscript) by default. This is caused by the great kdeprinting system, which RULES in combination with cups.
If the quality of ps2pdf bothers you, thius is part of ghostscript. If you still use a 5.x version, I urge you to upgradde to GPL ghostscript 6.5.2 or AFPL ghostscript 7.03. PDF support has been greatly improved.
--
Moritz
XPs interface is horrible
by
HanzoSan
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Windows98 has a better interface than XP as does Windows2000. Turn all the new features off and what you have IS windows2000.
I prefer the interface of KDE by far, I mean WinXP copied KDEs ideas, the taskbar grouping, they stole that, As far as the Icon goes, thats KDEs main weakness.
Gnomes Icons totally destroy KDEs, as does MacOSX and WindowsXP.
KDE needs to copy gnome and go for SVG based Icons.
Good icons is very important when it comes to having a nice looking desktop, good fonts is also important, XP has better fonts. KDE already has the best functionality of any interface i know of besides perhaps OSX. What KDE needs right now, is to improve certain things, the icons in KDE are crap and i hear they are planning to copy Xps icon style, thats fine for windows users who go to linux, but XPs icons are horrible compared to Gnome, Nautilus, MacOSX etc, SVG is definately the way to go for Icons.
Fonts will take time to improve but they are getting to be at XP quality, I think we will see high quality fonts before the end of the year, The Icons in KDE hopefully will be fixed sometime in 2002 if they switch to SVG but if not, then their icons will be as crappy as Windows icons, which is fine for Windows users who havent seen anything better but not for me.
KDR looks very nice however it still looks very plain, it needs a theme, KDE has Luna, Mac has Aqua, even Nautilus has its look, KDE however looks too plain, as if it was just thrown together, i mean theres no theme, its bland, like windows2000, while this is fine for most users, its not going to give KDE the impression that its on the level of XP because XP will have a taskbar which is beveled, has a nice color and shadows, while KDE just has plain style.
Nautilus and Gnome have figured this out and currently looks way better than XP, but KDE and this isnt in terms of functionality, but in terms of how pretty it looks, it doesnt look as fancy as it could look.
I also dont like the fact they took out the little icon effect where you click on it and it swirled,why? these little unique effects were what made kde KDE!
Put it back, the highlighting is nice, windows doesnt do it but still this isnt unique to kde.
If you get what I'm saying, KDE needs more unique features and looks to seperate itself from being too generic.
-- If you use Linux, please help development ofAutopac
Re:XPs interface is horrible
by
Rogerborg
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is it that you say WinXP "stole" from KDE, but KDE should "copy" from GNOME and XP? Curious choice of language. What did KDE lose when WinXP adopted the KDE taskbar grouping?
Oops, I'm trolling, right? Ah, the hell with it, it's only karma. Mod me, I am still full of love for KDE.;-p
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Re:But does it have to start that slow?
by
bero-rh
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is related to the fact that the dynamic linker is slow when it comes down to resolving loads of C++ symnbols.
It's a deficiency recent versions binutils fix - try the (WARNING: not yet 100% stable) stuff from rawhide.
-- This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
KDE Release Schedule
by
digitaltraveller
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Stay tuned. KDE 2.2.2 will be released on November 12th. It is a bugfix release for 2.2. KDE 3.0 Beta 1 should be out on December 3rd.
Come on Guys!
by
Garfunkel
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why is this KDE centric?
A lot of things won awards. Yes KDE won 3, and good for them. But why does the story only include the KDE part. All the other awardees were surely deserving too.
So, I'm saying it. Caongratulations to ALL the entities who won awards from Linux Journal. You ALL deserve it. Keep up the good work!
Re:Eye candy or efficiency?
by
JabberWokky
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Expect a massive number of bindings with KDE 3.0. There is now an automated system to export the Qt and KDE API to C bindings, not just for direct use, but rather to use to create bindings for other languages that are written in C. I know there was a flurry of languages that "worked" right after the announcement (i.e., individual test efforts), mostly lesser used languages like Ruby and Eiffel (Sp?).
--
Evan
-- "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Not to start a GNOME vs KDE flame war...
by
wrinkledshirt
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...but it's high time someone started a GNOME vs KDE flame war.;)
Seriously, where's the beef, Miguel? What've your boys been up to?
1- Office Suite? Still waiting.
2- Flagship Browser? Still waiting.
3- Dedicated components architecture fully integrated with the environment and gone through several debugging stages? Still waiting.
4- Some sort of IDE tool above and beyond Glade? Still waiting.
5- Database application? Still waiting.
Meanwhile, KDE's been addressing all of these, three of them to the extent of winning awards.
Granted, KDE's not my tool of choice for a couple of the above (currently prefer Mozilla & wouldn't use Rekall over PostgreSQL anyway), and the promise of.NET compatibility intrigues me (sorry anti-MS folks, but it does), but it's been REALLY quiet on the Ximian front.
Anything we should know about?
--
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
KDE 2.2 is slick as all hell. Still a few minor hiccups every now and then (many of which would probably be fixed if I upgraded to 2.2.1) but overall it's the most solid and robust *nix desktop environment I've ever used. (I've used OS X, but am not really impressed with it).
While everyone was busy harping about Mozilla, Konqueror grew up. It's now tantalizingly close to being an IE-killer. I shit you not. It's a very pleasant browsing experience, standards compliant, and to top it all off it's a great file manager as well.
KOffice is a great start at an integrated office suite. It's at the 'basic' stage right now. It reminds me of Clarisworks for the Mac, in that it's all integrated together and, while it doesn't support some of the fancier features, it can handle 90% of what most people want to do.
I'm really looking forward to KDE 3.0.
Go KDE.
when i first installed kde2 it took me about five minutes to work out how to change the screen resolution and then i had to reset kde before it took effect. and don't get me started on the default setup's choice of font in konqueror.
the only thing that kde could win on is virtual desktops, but now that winxp can be patched to support these, it's getting left behind.
but like i said, it's getting better. at least linux developers are finally getting over those fucking 'where do you want to go tommorow?' cracks and are starting to create good looking AND useable windows managers.
still, well done to the kde team and best of luck for v3.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
Awards like this mean plenty to everyone within the industry...Developer, User, or somewhere inbetween: We all benefit by recognizing excellence. What we have here is not necessarily Yet Another Award, but a standard for others in the Linux Community to measure up to. Just because it doesn't come from a Ziff Davis publication does not lessen its value -- besides, it's not like this 'zine hasn't been around enough to have established credibility...
i just installed kdevelop for the first time yesterday and i was was pretty impressed. on the down side it only supported C/C++... even in the syntax highlighting part - when it shouldnt be too hard to have it for other languages as well... but ok it's 'an ide for c/c++ development' whatever... i'm so sure you're all thinking 'real coders use VI' ;-)
konqueror's just awesome. it does crash from time to time, but i'm happy with the features, especially with being able to just enable cookies for just a few sites in particular - like slashdot so i dont have to relogin everytime i come here, load my prefs just to filter out all my jon katz posts...
mozilla has that too, but it loads too slowly.. but konqueror's loading faster.. could this have anything to do with it being "integrated" with the kde desktop? man.. this thing is sounding like IE with windows... they're saying about implementing activeX in this thing in future releases... oh boy... next thing, "KDE updates" anyone?
Koffice is nice... one great thing they can have is to include a pdf writer into it... ps2pdf isnt good enough... fonts arent always supported properly..
i just switched from 2.1.1 to 2.2.1 or whatever it is (the one available in debian testing to one in debian stable) last night. very pleased. but so much slower. this thing does eat up a lot of RAM - eventhough i've got plenty of it.. but still...
kde-look.org's got some great themes for 2.2.1 (despite recent random postings of ugly themes and porn...)
check out the QNX theme. looks great.. but it's not just bells and whistles we're about right?
my blog
It would be nice if the editor showed which products he compared, and why the others did not get the award. and as far as the "Office Application
" section goes, was he only comparing word processors? what about gnumeric? gnumeric 0.75 is at a point right now where its so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt. and did he even try galeon. as far as the browsing experience goes, its my opinion that galeon is much better designed to be a web browser.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
... i didn't try it that long.
Sooo, you just decided to pop onto this thread and state a comment about a product you didn't like, but didn't take the time to look at even it's most basic features? Well by gosh, on behalf of everyone reading this thread I would like to say thank you for your insightful, and interesting bit of literary magic you have graced us all with.
Gosh, I can only hope we get to hear about more things you haven't used, and your opinions on them really soon.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
i disagree some 150%
you want KDE look (and feel) like Mac ? enable Desktop menu, and remove taskbar.
you want KDE look (and feel) almost like WindowMaker/Afterstep ? enable WindowMaker Applets extension, and remove taskbar
the only thing you can't disable is the KParts/DCOP underlying system (well.. i think you can't). but i thought the aim of Linux on Desktop (which is the purpose of KDE), was to provide a component model implementation in order to allow high level interaction between applications (which is all the GNOME/KDE/GNUStep-WindowMaker projects do... using different languages, APIs, and having different set of features).
sure, if you want less features and les memory usage, you can stick to old and light AfterStep or FVWM (though IceWM and others appear to be better)
as for the binary size for KDE or problems of slow launching or whatever, one of the biggest problems of QT/KDE for the time being is that they are written in C++, and gcc is far from good at compiling C++ (which gave all the fuss about 2.96 and 3.x versions). usually distros don't even build kde using objprelink. wait a bit that all those things improve (and they are close to), and i think u'll see a great improvment in KDE performances.
> Koffice is nice... one great thing they can have is to include a pdf writer into it...
> ps2pdf isnt good enough... fonts arent always supported properly..
Well, try to print a file, every KDE-2.2.1 application has the option to print to PDF (and Postscript) by default. This is caused by the great kdeprinting system, which RULES in combination with cups.
If the quality of ps2pdf bothers you, thius is part of ghostscript. If you still use a 5.x version, I urge you to upgradde to GPL ghostscript 6.5.2 or AFPL ghostscript 7.03. PDF support has been greatly improved.
Moritz
Windows98 has a better interface than XP as does Windows2000. Turn all the new features off and what you have IS windows2000.
I prefer the interface of KDE by far, I mean WinXP copied KDEs ideas, the taskbar grouping, they stole that, As far as the Icon goes, thats KDEs main weakness.
Gnomes Icons totally destroy KDEs, as does MacOSX and WindowsXP.
KDE needs to copy gnome and go for SVG based Icons.
Good icons is very important when it comes to having a nice looking desktop, good fonts is also important, XP has better fonts. KDE already has the best functionality of any interface i know of besides perhaps OSX. What KDE needs right now, is to improve certain things, the icons in KDE are crap and i hear they are planning to copy Xps icon style, thats fine for windows users who go to linux, but XPs icons are horrible compared to Gnome, Nautilus, MacOSX etc, SVG is definately the way to go for Icons.
Fonts will take time to improve but they are getting to be at XP quality, I think we will see high quality fonts before the end of the year, The Icons in KDE hopefully will be fixed sometime in 2002 if they switch to SVG but if not, then their icons will be as crappy as Windows icons, which is fine for Windows users who havent seen anything better but not for me.
KDR looks very nice however it still looks very plain, it needs a theme, KDE has Luna, Mac has Aqua, even Nautilus has its look, KDE however looks too plain, as if it was just thrown together, i mean theres no theme, its bland, like windows2000, while this is fine for most users, its not going to give KDE the impression that its on the level of XP because XP will have a taskbar which is beveled, has a nice color and shadows, while KDE just has plain style.
Nautilus and Gnome have figured this out and currently looks way better than XP, but KDE and this isnt in terms of functionality, but in terms of how pretty it looks, it doesnt look as fancy as it could look.
I also dont like the fact they took out the little icon effect where you click on it and it swirled,why? these little unique effects were what made kde KDE!
Put it back, the highlighting is nice, windows doesnt do it but still this isnt unique to kde.
If you get what I'm saying, KDE needs more unique features and looks to seperate itself from being too generic.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is related to the fact that the dynamic linker is slow when it comes down to resolving loads of C++ symnbols.
It's a deficiency recent versions binutils fix - try the (WARNING: not yet 100% stable) stuff from rawhide.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Stay tuned. KDE 2.2.2 will be released on November 12th. It is a bugfix release for 2.2. KDE 3.0 Beta 1 should be out on December 3rd.
Why is this KDE centric?
A lot of things won awards. Yes KDE won 3, and good for them. But why does the story only include the KDE part. All the other awardees were surely deserving too.
So, I'm saying it. Caongratulations to ALL the entities who won awards from Linux Journal. You ALL deserve it. Keep up the good work!
-jay
I think I'll still with KDE....
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
...but it's high time someone started a GNOME vs KDE flame war. ;)
.NET compatibility intrigues me (sorry anti-MS folks, but it does), but it's been REALLY quiet on the Ximian front.
Seriously, where's the beef, Miguel? What've your boys been up to?
1- Office Suite? Still waiting.
2- Flagship Browser? Still waiting.
3- Dedicated components architecture fully integrated with the environment and gone through several debugging stages? Still waiting.
4- Some sort of IDE tool above and beyond Glade? Still waiting.
5- Database application? Still waiting.
Meanwhile, KDE's been addressing all of these, three of them to the extent of winning awards.
Granted, KDE's not my tool of choice for a couple of the above (currently prefer Mozilla & wouldn't use Rekall over PostgreSQL anyway), and the promise of
Anything we should know about?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...