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KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love
Dre writes "As announced on dotsy, the first day of the Season of Love (for us Northerners, anyway) brings us the KDE 3.0 final release candidate, KDE 3.0RC3. Besides fixes for any remaining crashes and grave bugs, this release will become KDE 3.0, scheduled to free the world in early April. Having benefitted from a week-long hacking session early this month, I can report that this release is very solid and, best of all, much snappier than prior releases, particularly Konqueror. Downloads are available through KDE's load-balancing mirror system. Since this is principally a show-stopper release, things are on an expedited schedule; more binary packages will appear in the next few days, and shortly thereafter KDE 3.0 will be tagged."
It seems to handle the load pretty well, i mean, load balancing all those 404 errors
They didn't plan on adding any new features, just to convert kde to qt3 and make sure it's compatible with gcc 3.x while still getting it out on time. In the end they not only accomplished this, it seems like there are new packages and many many new features in existing packages which crept in... and now we're hearing it's stable too? geez.
Liberty.
I guess you'll also need to write a driver for one of these to get the full KDE luvvin' effect.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
IMO the need to get some really nutty types
to go back and start writing the code in
assembly........
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Really, it is? I've looked all over my wife's XP machine, and I can't find sources to anything...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Small correction, in windows the low level video driver runs in kernel mode (mostly for performance reasons). The rest lives in user land just as in UNIX. When under unix your xserver barfs you lose your data just like when the similar thing happens in windows. In windows you reboot, the user friendly but slow and annoying way of reinitializing properly, in linux you are left to fix things manually (and usually you can).
As someone else pointed out, most of the GUI in window is explorer.exe. You can kill it and it will just relaunch itself. Usually it will forget about any taskbar icons (though the associated processes still run). Luckily it crashes very rarely these days and if it does a simple logout, login fixes it properly (similar to restarting X). All the cases I had to reboot my XP machine were related to driver issues. Both my video card and audiocard come from vendors that went bankrupt: 3dfx and aureal. Consequently the XP drivers are a bit flaky you can compare that to running unsupported x drivers and kernel modules on linux.
If under linux your X driver fucks up the screen, just shutting it down may not always fix it either since the hardware only resets properly at boot time. If that happens (and I've seen it happen under linux), you are left no choice but to reboot. What good is it if you can still telnet to the box if you were busy playing unreal?. Poor hardware support is much more of an issue under linux than it is under windows.
Either way whether X crashes (and it does) or explorer.exe crashes it is usually the end of all your running apps. You may lose unsaved data and you'll need to restart the apps. It's a pain either way and in my experience both systems are plagued by it. If I run nothing but dos boxes and wordpad in XP I can probably keep it running for months or even years but that's not why I have a PC. I like to push the drivers to the limit by running 3D games and other potentially not so stable stuff. I'm pretty sure I'll experience the occasional X crash and hw lockups under linux too given the same usage pattern.
Finally I doubt the GUI is the main issue bothering windows based servers. Probably the issue is more related to memory leaks and such in IIS. A stripped linux distro with apache is notoriously stable, nobody is denying that. But that's because apache is a good product and IIS is not. Anyway we're comparing apples and oranges now since we were discussing the minor annoyance of the desktop environment crashing which is a reality users have to live with on both linux and windows.
Jilles