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KDE 3.0 beta 1 is out
From the development team who tries to break every development speed record (last month they released KDE 2.2.2) comes KDE 3.0 beta 1, with lots of new features, new QT (3.0.1). It is beta 1 so expect crashes. You can find release notes and download locations over . A full feature list of whats planned to be on KDE 3.0 is also available (hmm, quite a big list) and some screenshots are available here. Please read the README files for your favorite distribution before installing the files as those packages are not replacing the KDE 2.2.X binaries (if you have it installed).
The feature list URL is incorrect. The right one is this
Don't Panic
I believe that this is the first KDE "release" where KPilotDaemon supports USB-based palm devices (such as Visors). Anyone know if there are meaningful conduits using the archeitecture, though?
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
I've mirror'd the screenshot page here. Included are also the full size pictures of the screenshots. Enjoy. Mirror Link
I am Jack's HTTP Server
That's what I first hoped. That Slashdot had finally started to mirror URLs they link to, to protect other sites from the rampant bandwidth rape which comes with a mention on /.
Alas, it was only a typo...
You missed out two things:
- The "KDE and gnome are both cheap imitiations of the Windows GUI" posts
- The "KDE and GNOME are bloated and slow, use a window manager like WindowMaker" posts
Hail to the king, baby!
KWin
magnetic borders for window resizing, gallium
At last! I'm so sick of gluing my windows in place, and the glue makes the screen blurry.
Hold on, don't magnets make the screen dark and erase the hard drive?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
No need to worry. (seriously) Sigh.. why is it *everytime* I mirror something an AC comes by and says it's the goatse link? -- At least think of something original.. seriously.. it's been going on for years.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
I have been part of the KDE team for a few years now, and slow development is certainly not something which I have experienced.
Development is not always about graphical updates to the interface - and KDE 3.0 encompasses some architectural and some extended functionality.
We are all (KDE and GNOME) evolving fine, and if you are concerned about it, why not help?
--- Jono Bacon - http://www.jonobacon.org/ Writer - Web Developer - Musician
Why not join us and make it better then?
And what do you mean by dead technology? Linux? Qt? gcc?
Jono
--- Jono Bacon - http://www.jonobacon.org/ Writer - Web Developer - Musician
What did you expect? Animated icons? fancy colors? A new task bar?
... .If it aint broke, dont fix it!
There is this old saying
What is wrong with the GUI elements of KDE 2.2? And why should they be changed in 3.0?
Microsoft needs to change the visual appeal with each new version of Windows, because tahts the only thing that catches the user's attention. Its a pity you are comparing the 'eye candy' of every new release with the real work that is done in newer version of Gnome and KDE.
Think about it...
Don't Panic
I have been very excited about KDE since the latest version (2x) series came out. Can anyone explain what the 3.0 series is going to offer? Some of the technical details of the lists will go over my head.
A few people have been complaining here that KDE 3.0 looks the same as KDE 2.x. I just wanted to clear a few things up:
- First of all, KDE 3.0 is largely an architectural upgrade - we have moved to the new Qt 3.x series, and this needs to be reflected in KDE 3.x. The Qt 3.x series has a lot of bug fixes and additional features such as database connectivity, better handling of data structures and the like - this increased stability is passed on natively to KDE 3.0.
- In terms of interface updates, KDE 3.0 will see some updates but bear in mind that this update was aimed at primarily porting the codebase to Qt 3.x. Any additional interface updates will be added as the need arises - we always like your suggestions and bug reports are always welcome.
- KDE 3.0 is largely about increased functionality - examples include better JavaScript, a more integrated Konqueror, new modules such as the KDE Educational Module, the font installer, kernel compiler etc. These things are really likely to appear in 3.1 and further releases.
- For those of you who are gonna bitch and moan about KDE, GNOME, XFree86, Kernel, Mesa etc...why not just help to correct the things you don't like. You don't need to be a coder to help ny project - *everyone* can help an open source project.
Please be patient folks and keep those bug reports coming in - we value your help.
Jono Bacon
--- Jono Bacon - http://www.jonobacon.org/ Writer - Web Developer - Musician
I'll come straight and say it... it looks like KDE is pulling some considerable distance between GNOME and itself. Look I have a lot of respect for the GNOME people... anyone who donates their time to such a massive complex system such as a user enviroment deserves a round of golf claps. The fact is though is that I used to be a GNOME user. And then one day I accidently* logged into KDE 2.2.X (whatever is with RedHat 7.2) and was blown away by the speed and grace. If linux ends up on the desktop in it's present form (X sucks but thats a different story), then most likely it'll be KDE that everyone thinks is linux. They seem to have the perfect model right now... release quickly and update often. Quite impressive really, considering how much shit goes into a project of that magnitude.
* - About the accident... usually I install both enviroments on my machine so I can use apps from both (I always liked KDE's media player and Kmail).
Basically I just always ignored KDE and then one day was checking out what windows managers was available and forgot that I had highlighted KDE and logged in. The rest is history... haven't gone back since.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I've been waiting for that for a LONG time...
Unfortunately it's still in the "TODO" group, but I think this feature is worth waiting for.
fuck GNOME, run DWARF! the GUI you can toss!
Apple's interface hasn't changed for 10 years (until OS-X). It was just good, people were used to it. The interface doesn't need to change every year (like Windows seems to suggest). On the contrary.
I think the KDE interface is getting near perfect (as far as look&feel is concerned). Making changes just confuses users and adding ever more bloat (like the WinXP themes) is counterproductive.
As for myself, I have been using bare X11/twm for the past 15 years and have no reason to change that. It does the job (for me, admittedly not for everyone), I'm used to it.
It is sad to see how many people even in the Open Software camp seem to be infected by the Microsoft idea of never ending "upgrade" cycles.
If your in the UK and need a fast download of KDE, or just about any other download, try http://www.mirror.ac.uk/ or ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/ http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/ unstable/kde-3.0-beta1/
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/u nstable/kde-3.0-beta1/
One thing that I really would like to see is a better integration of Gecko in Konqueror. I know it's already possible to switch rendering engine, but it's highly unstable in my experience.
Now here's an example of an area in which many of the largest open source projects (Mozilla, GNOME, KDE) could collaborate, benefit from each other's work and find a common standard - the HTML rendering engine. Imagine the Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and Nautilus teams putting their efforts behind Gecko development...it would be one important step towards a more unified Linux desktop. Unified as in common standards and shared components, not unified as in lack of choice.
Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
OK, I checked out the screen shots. Looks just like my current KDE 2.2.1.
KDE is a good product, don't get me wrong. But why does it have to look just like MSFT's products?
I actually would like to work more on finding desktops/WM's that do not look like MSFT. It's interesting to see what other ideas are out there and to see who's got a fresh new paradigm on this desktop. After all, it's not really a desktop anymore.
The biggest problem with KDE (IMHO) is the unresponsive feeling - especially when starting up programs. Are there any changes to this in KDE 3.0?
I know it is mainly something about a compiler/linker issue, but what is the progress in that area?
If you don't like the style, change your style engine. If you don't like the theme, change the theme. KDE is totally customizable.
When I first used WinXP for half an hour or so I was really impressed. I though, 'this looks nice, it has more of the stability of win2000, it's really enjoyable to use and well integrated'. Then I actually began to use it properly, and discovered that it makes itself look more powerful than it really is. There are no advanced features behind the pretty GUI. When I'm back in KDE or GNOME I feel like I have a great deal of power - and I do. The options are there to do various different useful functions that just aren't present in windows.
Windows copies other people's innovations and claims it as it's own. Then people like you think that Microsoft came first and claim that linux is copying. I consider KDE more advanced than the windows GUI, not catching up (there are some deficiencies in KDE compared to Windows, but overall it is better).
Hmmm. Well, releasing screenshots certainly invites the user to view the 3.0 release as primarily visual. You can hardly fault the original post for that. But I would make two other points. First: yes, the GUI is lacking in some areas, and could stand some fixing. For example, whenever Gnome fans throw up a screenshot of Gnome and say "looky looky, we look lots better" -- well, as a KDE fan, I have to admit that Gnome does look better. But that's only the icons. Gnome has a better artist working for them somewhere, and KDE could stand to find a master artist of their own. That could be part of KDE 3. As an aside, I prefer KDE because KDE has better widgets. Ever looked at a row of checkboxes in KDE? It's obvious what's checked. Now try that with Gnome. It's not at all obvious to me. KDE has better scrollbars, too. Oh! And one other thing: KDE's default titlebars make great use of "grip" (the bumps that you can "grab" to move the object around), but the rest of KDE pretty much ignores grip. It shouldn't. When you resize a window, the bottom right corner should have grip bumps. Any area that you "grab" that has room for grib bumps should use it, it's a useful visual cue.
But there is another aspect to your post that could stand to be responded to. If 3.0 is not going to be about eye candy, and is instead about the underpinnings of the product, then what about the big criticisms that get lobbed at KDE? Will 3.0 find ways to seriously optimize its code for speed/performance gains? I just skimmed the to-do list, and didn't see speed getting much of a priority. What about reliability? I see that Qt 3 is supposed to deliver some of this. What about the built-in database that comes with 3.0? Can that be used to bring some of the BeOS file management features to Linux? And let's merge the GUI stuff with the speed issues: ever moved your mouse around the screen while an app was launching? Notice the very cool animated icon "attached" to your mouse arrow -- the icon of the app, to let you know it's launching. Well, aside from how cool that feature is, it's also slow -- you can move the mouse arrow all the way across the screen, and the poor animated launch icon will be halfway behind. I'd like to see that fixed. In fact, I'd like to see it completely integrated with the mouse arrow, transforming the arrow icon for those few seconds, to make it visually more cohesive.
To sum up: speed, reliability, speed, reliablity, icons, speed, reliability. That's what I'd like from KDE 3.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
"From the development team who tries to break every development speed record (last month they released KDE 2.2.2) comes KDE 3.0 beta 1, with lots of new features, new QT (3.0.1). It is beta 1 so expect crashes.
One argument tending away from Linux and to *BSD is the advantage of maturity. Another important trait is the slow implementation of new features (eliminating many bugs). Introduce two features simultaneously and something breaks, which was to blame?
Well, I just installed the beta on my SuSE 7.3 workstation, without issue. KDE3 is much snappier, it feels much mpore crisp when opening apps, windows, etc. It has apparently better font rendering. Kpilot, while unfinished, I can tell is much improved in terms of feature and interface, next up is to actually test it with my USB Visor. Konquerer file manager has much more solid support for multimedia previewing/viewing within the file manager window. As a browser, Konquerer still crashed and burned on my Chase banking web site, so Mozill 0.96 is still the way for me. It seems faster as well in KDE3, albeit initial startup is still a bit slow. I've been using Evolution 1.0 for mail, and it still works fine in KDE3. I still cannot cut and paste an URL from an Evolution email into my Mozila browser. KMail looks a bit more fine tuned and launches quicker than before, I have yet to test its use though. KDE3 it seems is primarily an architecture shift to QT3, but the results are impressive in the feel and response. Visually, while a bit cleaner, its the same KDE that you already either like or not.
He also missed the "You missed..." posts.
This space left intentionally blank.
and insert "Linux is Sooo ready" here post.
Bush's education improvements were
Check out the icons at kde-look.org
STL implementations are of varying quality. The QString is designed to work on all platforms qt is ported to and therefore has more consistent behavior and bugs ;)
As for the rest of STL, most of it CANNOT be implemented effeciently and is therefore redundant. We want to decrease the loadtime in KDE, not increase it (like advanced templetes and virtual functions does).
I noticed on the list of features that they are going to extend the keyboard shortcut mechanism to support more extended keyboard shortcuts and enable them to make DCOP calls from shortcuts. Why is this so important to me? I have a Gateway multimedia keyboard, which, for the "special" buttons sends 3-4 keycodes per button, the windows key combined with at least two letter keycodes and other modifier keys depending on the button. Until now I haven't seen a clean way of getting these keys to work (the few apps concerned with this are limited to single keycodes...). Now I can bind this to applications. Now, is there a DCOP enabled mixer that supports XOSD, or am I going to have to write one? The KDE mixer should suffice. Can't wait to get off of work and try this sucker out, for this stupid little feature alone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I agree with you, but I'd still like to see something nicer. Now the people who work on kde probably code because they like to code, and therefore I will assume that they probably aren't all that interested in messing with the aesthetics of the interface, but would rather get it working 'better'. I just wish that a couple people would get together and make a really KILLER default theme. Nothing really has to change, I mean KDE is totally theme-able, and it's not like you can't change it back if you don't like it. when I installed KDE2 and poking around the preferences, I switched to the marble theme(?). Suddenly the widgets looked slick as hell, and I think to myself "why wasn't this the default?".
..then I would've used my mod points to up your comments!
Anyhow, both KDE and GNOME are too damn slow. Log-in/startup speed, ugh...
I love KDE too, but KDE startup and application startup does seem a bit stone aged. I suppose its part of the trade off between being a fully featured GUI and ther limited features which KDE possessed less than 2 years ago. The distance that it has come is impressive. When two things happen I will be giving Windows the boot for all professional work
a) KOffice gets a Word and Excel Input/Output doc filter which works reliably. [Followups mentioning StarOffice will be ignored.]
b) Konqueror speeds up - I loved it and then its startup time seemed to slow down drastically.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Seriously, what have you done? Have you sent the KDE team any ideas? Have you drawn up any ideas of what you think a superior UI is? Given them a detailed description of what you want and why you think it's better than what they're doing now? No, I doubt you have. But, being a board for geeks, it's all about bitching and not about doing.
;)
The KDE team has always seemed open minded for new ideas, and they're always saying that anyone can contribute. For everyone out there that doesn't like the UI, GET INVOLVED! Shees, people lavish the open source/free software culture and then turn around and show they have no idea what it's about. You don't have to be a programmer to contribute to projects. I mean, if all the supposed UI and human factors experts who post on Slashdot got together, we'd have the most perfect interface possible by next May
To the KDE team members who read Slashdot, I have an idea. Each time a story gets posted about KDE, and people complain about the UI, why don't you start tracking how many people actually submit ideas to you. I'm sure it would be some interesting statistics.
Also, it's interesting but maybe the kde folks have been holding themselves to a very high standard *because* of that bug. Maybe it just forced them to write code as slim as possible and when that bug is removed it will really pay off :)
Liberty.
I don't really know why you want Gecko so much
A number of sites I visit won't work under Konq, but work perfectly under Galeon. That plus the fact when I've got 1/2 dozen browser windows open and the software dies with Galeon it retrieves them upon next boot but with Konq I lose them all and have to start hunting for them all over again. Hence my switch. These two factors oughtweigh by a wide margin any slight increase in speed.
In fact I now prefer Galeon to IE. The first reason is the tabbed browsing option. Secondly, my IE locks up the parent page until its pop-up window has loaded. This makes browsing very frustrating under Windows. Now if only plugins installed automatically...
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yes. At first sight, KDE looks a lot like Windows. KDE is supposed to make the switch from Windows to Linux easy.
However, there are true advancements. Those are not eyecandy. You won't see them at first sight. But if you begin to use KDE, you'll soon love them.
F.e. there is the kio layer. Any KDE program can load from and save to any file service. Open a script in your IDE directly from a FTP server and save it back to the server. kio accepts plugins. If you write a Freenet plugin, any program can load from and save to freenet.
And this is just one example. Look at how programs and components can be integrated using kparts. Or at how nationalisation is done.
I also like KDE, but when I first installed it the memory usage was horrendous. I have 512Megs of memory and when KDE would load I would be left with about 50 Megs! (This is with almost everything else shut down, just X/KDE running) Gnome leaves me with alot more Memory, which is good because I hate having to leave X to compile something I just downloaded. Under KDE it will take about 3x as long to compile as under Gnome!
That's all. Hope I didn't ask too much
It's pretty depressing to see how slowly KDE and GNOME are evolving. As much as I love Linux, I must admit that Windows and Mac OS X have nicer GUIs. Since they're evolving faster than the Linux desktops, I wonder if we'll ever catch up.
;)
I'll fall for the troll. It's been a while since I chased one
What great innovations has Microsoft made? Windows 95-2000 looked identical, and although winxp may be different, but to me it looks like a toy and the only feature that they put in that I liked was the item grouping on the taskbar which gnome has (not sure about KDE).
If you want to truly compare who is evolving faster load up a august 95 copy of linux and see what X looked like then, then install a current one, and I think it is should be pretty apparent that the linux desktop has come a lot farther.
dewke
Oderint dum metuant
SVG Icons, SVG widgets, 60fps animation on widgets and icons, genie effect,motion blur, alpha channeling,morphing animation windows widgets and menus, full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface. Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease. And when you have 1-2-3-4ghz CPUs and 512-1gig of ram it makes absolutely no sense why you should be worrying about your resources.
Its time to update the GUI, and make use of this new hardware. Why have 80s style GUI and software on 2000+ hardware? Really the GUI and software hasnt changed much since the 80s except for games, development tools and $10000 photoshop like tools.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You've got to love the fact that KDE offers Objective C and Java bindings.
People tend to forget but you don't have have java bindings under Windows!!! (Well, unless you want to lock yourself up with MS broken Java implementation.)
Of course, this is rarely used, but the mere fact that it is available is amazing. I don't know about Objective C and windows though... How does that work?
I currently use fvwm2 because kde 2.x doesn't support more than one kde session per user per machine.
Has this changed in kde 3?
___
Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
Actually, KDE's icons are great in the sense of an icon designer. The key term is usability, not looks. GNOME2 appears to go the same route, and it is looking pretty similiar to KDE2's icons. Compare these two screenshots:
icons of gnome2:
here
icons of kde2:
here
Notice gnome2's new toolbar icons. I think this is a great step in terms of usability. GNOME 1.x's toolbar icons were photorealistic and therefore, quite horrible from an icon designer's perspective.
you mean something like this?my desktop
This is my desktop, with modified iKons. check out KDE-Look for the complete, unedited iKons icon set. You will also notice a poll on the comments page, the author asked if iKons should be the default icon set for KDE3...
anyway; a lot of independent graphic artists are creating stylish, cartoonish and photo-realistic icons.
Regarding your other observations, you can turn launch feedback off if you don't want it. KDE will never be finished, as more and more users demand more and more features. I hope they keep implementing them as optional features. Eye candy is great, as long as it doesn't get in the way. Just turn some of it off, enjoy the speed gains. Try KDE with the preemptible patches from e.g. Texstar if you want more speed. Stability has never been an issue on my box.
What about Unicode support? GNOME 2, based on the new GTK+ will supposedly support Unicode all over the place. Is this true with KDE 3/Qt 3 also?
I recently tried Windows XP, and it offers great support for Unicode. It is time to get the UNIX desktop moving in that way. I know it's not much of an issue for the English speaking world, but it is a very important thing for most of the non-English users.
There's a workaround for not losing all your Konqueror windows when one crashes. Instead of opening new windows from the Kongueror menus (main or right-mouse) do this: Open the new window from the system menu or panel shortcut (however you launched Kongueror originally). This seems to separate the processes so that each window lives separately. If one crashes it won't take them all down. Good luck!
Try http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/kde.txt instead...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have yet to be able to render java pages correctly with konqueror. The cnn.com/QUICKNEWS pages never renders the headlines correctly. I would very much appreciate if this was fixed or if someone could tell me what my dumbass maneuver has been. I am using FreeBSD with KDE, and have built the jdk. It still will not use it correctly even though the java option is set correctly in the konqueror options.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
You should try TightVNC (www.tightvnc.org). It's OSS, and has more GUI configuration and integration into Win2000. The 'Tight' part is about low-bandwidth.
that XP is trying to look more like KDE ;-).
This is something I've been seeing eversince I installed my first distrubution.
You click thourgh the installation and say ask yourself wether you need that particular app or not. In the end you install almost all of them.
Even if you don't, the K-Menu (hitting the K-Button) is packed with programms. Which is great !!!
But I would love to see a feature like windo$ has:
If you get to Programs you just see the recently used apps and by hitting a small arrow you get all of them.
And then once again: KDE-Team: I'm impressed !!!
I don't know where you find the time for all this work but WE LOVE IT. keep it up yooo
matt
ps: where can I change the background image for the konsole
This is as another poster pointed out a Mandrake bug. I am running Mandrake 8.1 right now. It has been a while since I fixd the problem, but basically the default version of courier is awful. Try some other versions (maybe load MS tru-type fonts) or try Arial. I don't remember having problems with the changes not sticking though.
Spencer Ogden
...or (horror of horrors) compile glibc yourself with Jakub Jelinek's prelinker patches, if you can find them (they seem to have disappeared off the net).
The dynamic linking of libraries is by far the biggest cause of KDE program startup slowness. A big desktop environment has a lot of shared libraries to link to an application at runtime, it's expensive computationally (particularly for C++ libraries), and the way the glibc dynamic linker works right now, it's done every time an application is started or a library is dlopen()'ed (such as when embedding a KPart). It can also cause swap thrashing on machines with limited memory (the entire library must be read into memory to perform the address relocation, only after relocation can the VM drop pages of the library) and obviously, disk contention between this swapping and the application loading can slow things down even further.
What the prelinking patches do (don't get them confused with the objprelink hack which, while useful, is not a long-term or efficient solution) is move the linking time from application startup time to system startup time. A tool runs at system startup, immediately after ldconfig runs, which loads and relocates libraries in its search path, then notes down the relocation addresses. Then, later, when the dynamic linker is asked by an application to load a library, it simply uses the values that were cached earlier. Any libraries that have not been 'prelinked' are simply relocated as normal. The linker also makes sure that non-prelinked libraries are not relocated into the same address space as any prelinked libraries that are not currently loaded.
The next major version of glibc will hopefully include library prelinking by default, but I haven't been following glibc development closely enough to know for sure. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Note that it's not just KDE that will benefit from this, Mozilla will gain a great deal (it, like KDE, is mostly C++ code split into many shared libraries) and even GNOME will benefit a little - doing the dynamic linking on C libraries still costs processor time, although it's much less than with C++ libraries.
The next biggest cause of KDE startup slowness is icon loading - currently every app has to search through the entire set of available icons on startup in order to load the icons that it needs. Not very efficient. Given that KDE has several hundred icons available already and that is likely to increase over time, it needs a solution. Waldo Bastian is apparently working on an icon server for KDE 3.0, which will do that search once, cache the data, and then respond with appropriate icons when an app asks, rather than forcing the apps to do it themselves every time. I'm hoping it also makes it easier and faster to do image compositing (overlays and so forth) with icons.
To sum up: glibc 2.3 together with KDE 3.0 should make a huge improvement to app startup (and KPart embedding) time, and, assuming the KDE guys are tight with their code, may even make KDE 3.0 usable on machines that couldn't effectively run KDE 2.x.
You can't tell the difference between useful and useless cookies from the clients perspective.
Many sites store the actual info "contained" in the cookie on the server. (this is mostly a Good Thing, since sending to much useful information back and forth in cookis is dubious from a security point of view.)
This means the actual cookie only contains an id so the server can identify the user and find the relevant information.
There is no way the client can notice any difference between this cookie and a useless cookie since all the action takes place on the server.
So, while I agree that it would be a very nice feature, it's just not doable.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
What!? Interesting +1, Flamebait -1, Troll -1!?
I'm a troll now for posting an opinion!?
Your asses are going down in metamod you childish KDE partisans.
Mod me down again. I dare you.
You might like to know you've inspired me. My new goal in life is to code day and night for Gnome and destroy KDE! Up the revolution!
---
First of all, bothe KDE and Gnome are fine products, blah, blah, blah...
I used to use Gnome and Sawmill(/Sawfish) as my desktop manager, and was always
looking for ways to speed up performance, but had recently found another solution:
don't use a desktop manager.
For the past few months, I've been using Blackbox with a few other utilities
(bbkeys, Rox, etc.) for key binding and those times I want a graphical file manager.
It's great, since I don't have any memory allocated to things I won't use.
I know many/most of you out there aren't using either Gnome or KDE, and was wondering
your opinion on it. What have you missed/wanted from using a DM?
I like it so far, but the idea of dropping half a grand on Redmondware sort of defeats my purpose in buying a non-Wintel machine. Trolltech's site says that Qt3 comes in a Mac OS X version, but I'm fuzzy on how much of KDE is Qt "skeleton" vs C "muscle." Could someone make a SWAG at how much effort would be involved in creating a working KOffice for the Mac?
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I love how you pointed out a few neat features, but I want to add some. The ability to turn everything off. that neat animated applet is launching icon next tothe cursor? I dont want that, I want it turned off. I want a way to make KDE as fast as blackbox or as bloated as XP. if you add a feature it should be mandatory to code in a DISABLE_FEATURE checkbox or function somewhere.
I'm all for eye-candy and coolness (how about rendering the whole desktop in OpenGL with alpha shading and bump mapping? that would look awesome!) but forcing things down peoples throats that are not needed is plain silly, and is a trademarked Microsoft tactic. it has no place in any open source code.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"that neat animated applet is launching icon next tothe cursor? I dont want that, I want it turned off."
Then do so: Control Center ==> Look & Feel ==> Launch Feedback
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Clearly, Trolltech will do as they wish.
Consider the possibility that marketshare would grow if porting were simplified by greater use of standard components.
Haven't done any benchmarks, so I'll bow to your opinion on efficiency. Today's redundancy could be tomorrow's requirement, though.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Probably you only read it when it's been slashdotted. It's normally fine...
Solutions to the problem are in the works:
objprelink
ELF prelinking by Jakub Jelinek
See a discussion on why Gnome is having similar problems
I concede that the browser icons in the Gnome screenshot look as sucky as KDE's icons. But look at Gnome's folder icon. Look at Gnome's icons in the task bar (the larger icons, probably 48x48 pixels). They're beautiful. The shading behind the folders, the gradient on the folder itself, these are gorgeous icons. In the words of Steve Jobs, these are "lickable" icons. Don't underestimate the power that beauty has to make a work environment more livable and comfortable. KDE needs this.
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But that's only the icons. Gnome has a better artist working for them somewhere, and KDE could stand to find a master artist of their own.
:)
I know there are a lot of technical reasons for GNOME and KDE not working together, but to-be-sure the icons are portable if you like them that much!
Perhaps it's more of a political thing though...
I find it rather amusing that everybody used to bash the hell out of Opera for using MDI, always bitching about how stupid/evil it is. And now then Galeon does it (tabbed windows are just a limited form of MDI), everybody now thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
What do you mean by limited form? With a true MDI I couldn't have several windows that may or may not contain tabs. With tabs it's really possible to choose practically anything between pure MDI and pure SDI - I can keep everything tabbed inside one window (MDI), not use tabs at all and keep everything at separate windows(SDI) or have several windows with a few tabs in each, for example having 'fun' material (slashdot, comics, miscellaneous sites) at one window tabbed and at another workspace all serious stuff tabbed inside one window. How's that limited or done with pure MDI or SDI? :-o This really gives a nice freedom of choice compared to either extreme.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
...And my vote, not having seen all the other themes, would be that yes, this should be the default icon set. It's far stronger than the existing one, but it isn't flashy or obnoxiously kewl. It's just great. The real experts (I'm just a guy who cares enough to make a post or two, not an expert on the system) should decide if iKons falls apart as you drill down into obscure areas (are there icons for everything? or just enough to make the desktop look good?). Or, if it really shines all the way through. If so, I'd be seriously considering this "pre-built" solution.
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One thing I noticed with KDE is whenever I would try to launch a sound file from Konqueror, if the media player wasn't already loaded, the media player would load, begin to play what was on the playlist, and then a few seconds later it would stop playing that and start playing the song I requested from Konqueror. It's really annoying.
Also there are inconsitencies between the closing action on apps that use the status dock (sometimes it kills the app, sometimes it just hides the app window).
Any fixes on these two fronts before I go and update everything?
thanks, shadwalk@operamail.com!
No, I think that the GNOME project is doomed. In fact, I knew they were doomed the moment that Sun and HP endorsed it.
Why? One word explains it all. CDE.
It was supposed to unify the desktop. Take over the world. Destory Microsoft.
What really happened was that it got stagnant and eventually died.
I already see this happening with GNOME. Just a year ago, I would see new things out for GNOME all the time, whether it be new packages, new features, or what not. Now, I see new things like once every two months.
I've said this before, and so have a lot of other people. But, the momentum of the GNOME project has gone down tremendously. It is going towards stagnation.
This is why I think that KDE will ultimatly succede.
Ive never tried this but i'd assume winME would run like a dog if at all on the small p166 (64MB ram) i have here at work which is:
:-)) only using 1gig this includes sendmail,fetchmail,tpop3d,Zope,mysql,postgresql,GN Ue, apache, perl, python, php ... plus a lot of default games, the entire koffice suite, fontends for the databases.. the list goes on.
a mail server, web server, smb server, runs 2 databases.
and defaults to use kdm to login (im trying to make it easy for people here to admin it if im not available).
and kde2.2 is really snappy on it.
when kde is starting up there isnt a noticeable speed difference between it and my duron 900 at home.
yes the apps take a few seconds to load but when they are open they are nice and quick.
i did try the same setup with 24megs of ram, and had to turn off Zope for kde to be even barely usable but 64megs is definately sufficient.
i would even say 32megs should be fine as long as you arent running any other heavy processes.
and this is debian install (installed everything from apt-get
i also have a few copies of different kernel src.
i dont see how your setup could need so much in the way of resources.. now ive never installed redhat but im assuming you can select what you do and dont want installed. and i bet it installs a lot of stuff most people wont need. (of course you probably just said install everyting).
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
Uh, KDE doesn't take over 20 hours to compile.
Here are the times from http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/kde.txt
:
kdeaddons: 6 min
kdeadmin: 7 min
kdeartwork: 2 min
kdebase: 82 min
kdegames: 21 min
kdegraphics: 11 min
kdelibs: 55 min
kdemultimedia: 31 min
kdenetwork: 27 min
kdepim: 9 min
kdeutils: 18 min
kdetoys: 4 min
kdoc: 1 min
koffice: 55 min
Umm, that's total bullshit. The STL (SGI's version anyway) is actually quite fast. It is certainly faster than most reimplementations of the standard data structures. Also, templates often speed up code rather than slow it down. Take, for example, a generic linked list structure. Say there is a Walk() method that lets you iterate over the list. Without templates, you pass a function pointer to the data structure and you incur the cost of an indirect function call for every item you iterate over. If each call does relatively little (as most comparison functions for generic data structures do, for example) then you totally blow code performance. With templates, however, the compiler can inline these small functions into the template, and you get rid of the overhead of the indirect call. As for virtual functions:
A) The STL doesn't use virtual functions. It's template-based.
B) Its just an indirect call. For most non-trivial functions the cost is negligible.
Now, don't get me wrong. C++ can lead to bloated code. However, it can also lead to very fast code. C++ pushes a lot of work on the compiler. The compiler can often do things to make high-level code perform as well as dirty/hackish low-level code. The template data structure I mentioned above is nice and clean. Yet, it is just as fast as writing seperate linked-list data structure for each object type (which even the Linux kernel doesn't do!).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How does every gnome or kde story result in an absolute kde/gnome brawl? If there is a problem with oss software, the way to fix it is try to get to the root of the problem and fix it, or help someone else fix it; not posting random rants on slashdot at every opportunity. The other type of post i often see on stories like this are posts repeating EXACTLY what is said in the changelog! Really...if you have nothing good to post about, do not post at all!
Oops. I somehow managed to think that this was about Mozilla. I don't know how I got the misleading idea. ;) Dunno how tabs are implemented in Galeon, so can't really comment about it.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Well, I have not checked the source, but even if we assume that HTML there is not on a par, other browsers do not choke on it...
You couldn't really use templates in KDE, since the virtual functions are essentially set up as a clean callback method. A draw callback, for example, isn't implemented as function pointer, but overriding a virtual Draw() method in a view object. The two techniques are so similar at the low lever, however (deference a pointer and call the function found there), it should be possible to make KDE's load performance no slower than GTK+ or Xt's.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE primarily uses Qt's classes because they are much more standard than the STL.
Huh? Let me read that one again...
That's what I thought you said. Go get a dictionary and look up the word "standard".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Umm. Okay. Well, since you posted as an anonymous coward, I have no idea if you're a KDE developer or just some nerd like me who has an opinion. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that regardless of who you might be, if you really think the best solution is to let Gnome be the superior tool here, well okay. I disagree with you, but you're free to have an opinion.
I don't see any conceivable way you could say that Gnome's icon of a folder is less usable simply because it looks better. That's absurd.
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Not according to the auhor, although he could certainly be lying. At this page (about 5 screens down) he writes:
If true, then I have no problem with this. Blatant copying is not legal, but "clean room" reimplementations have been upheld in court -- this is what Apple did to Xerox, and what Windows did to Apple.
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I used to use WindowMaker, but moved away when things I didn't like (removal of --enable-single-icon especially) started to happen and KDE got AA text and a working browser.
.fvwm2rc files that I thought were really nifty... But now the thought of wasting an entire weekend to make my desktop behave the way I want just seems insane.
I could never go back to FVWM or FVWM2 (which I used when I was new to Linux) -- I used to spend entire weekends on this huge crazy
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
haha, i was modded down for being honest.
the truth hurts, doesn't it?
I would expect similar arguments from Redmond.
Clearly, Trolltech is a serious group of coders; perhaps they could do their own high speed, low drag STL implementation.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear