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."

Comments

Mandrake's april release

[Red Weasel]

I wonder if mandrake will change there april distro to reflect this.

Save me some download time at any rate.

Screenshots

[rutger21]

You just have to look at the Keramik theme and the Conectiva Crystal icon theme. It is going to be a bright, bright future.

Re:Screenshots

[Rentar]

Not specific to the screenshot, but the print dialog is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

Surprise, they do the same thing, besides this Print dialog has some functions that the windows one doesn't (like hiding the lower half, filtering printers and doing HTML-Settings ('though I don't know what to find there)). Btw, which windows printing dialog do you mean? I know that there is a default, but I just tried 3 programs: Mozilla 0.9.9, Notepad and Word 2000. And each of them had a different printing dialog)

The taskbar system is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

Just 'cause the one who did the screenshot likes it that way. The default looks different and you get much more functionality.

Even the HELP SYSTEM is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

You mean "exactly the same" as in "using HTML to store & display linked documents"? Wow, quite invoative from Microsoft. Beside, again windows is not consistent (Word doesn't use the default-windows help system), whereas KDE is.

The background *is* the default Mac OS X background.

Granted, but this is definitely not the default in any distribution

You're going to tell me that the round, bubbly blue title bars (whose construction are directly lifted from Windows'), were not directly inspired by the latest OS's from Apple and Microsoft?

Yes, I am. Creative use of the SHAPE-Extension for windows decorations have been around much longer than OS X and Windows XP. Take a look at Blue Steel, and theme that came default with Enlighenment 0.16 (which according to Freshmeat came out October 1999, long before anyone thought about Windows 2000). It has a shaped (i.e. not strictly rectangular) title bar.

When is Linux going to stop aiming to be JUST LIKE WINDOWS! and do something "innovative" in the GUI area?

As soon as you do some work in this direction. This is Open Source after all.

Oh, that's right. THEY WON'T, simply because all those open source programmers are PROGRAMMERS and know nothing about UI design!

I doub that the one who did Keramik is a programmer. Even if he is, he is also a great artist.

There's a REASON you won't find any UI features in KDE that haven't already appeared in Windows or Mac OS. Microsoft and Apple pay people who deserve the money BIG BUCKS to design UI's and perform focus groups.

You do now that both Microsoft and Apple also have programms that perform very poorly in usability tests? Take a look at the Interface Hall of Shame. There are quite some MS-products in there (and even Apples Quicktime). Sometimes they even make a bad UI for political reasons, which you most probably won't find in open source projects.

Hm ... so much work for a Troll, but I think it's worth it.

Re:This is a great step forward for the OSS interf

[Anonymous Coward]

Give latest 2.4 kernel with preempt a try
and KDE3.0 with all the optimisations on
and it really does give XP a run for its
money! :)

Alex

p.s: why is this -1? Its far from a troll!

Re:Responsive Enough?

[Leimy]

I found Konqueror works much snapier and the improved KHTML is way faster than the one from KDE 2.2.2. [KHTML is the renderer for konqueror web content].

The whole system does seem to run more cleanly and smooth. And that's just from a CVS built over two weeks ago. I imagine what is there currently is much better and is why I still have my home PC building it right this moment.

what happened to our Linux GUI's?

[WildBeast]

I have RedHat 7.2 w/GNOME on my laptop and Mandrake 8.2 w/KDE on my desktop. Weird enough, a few days ago my GNOME desktop freezes and I couldn't do the CTRL-ALT-BCKSPACE , nothing worked. Then yesterday, my KDE freezes and I couldn't do anything either. I had to reboot.

I remember the days when they weren't so damn bloated and when Linux meant "fast/light/stable". Nowadays with recent distros, it takes over 40 seconds to boot into Linux. Linux is becoming more and more like Windows.

When can we expect GCC 3.1?

[10Ghz]

And, will it have the fixed linker? That would give KDE's performance a nice boost

Re:This might be the straw...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a K6II-450. X, KDE3, kernel 2.4.18 w/preempt compiled from source, and it is smokin fast, much faster than kde2. RAM is cheap, if you use KDE3 you will likely want to add a bit more RAM.

Re:Well,

[xZAQx]

It's not FTP.

Money is tight nowadays.
And nothing is stopping you from buying a OC3 pipe, and setting up your own FTP mirror for KDE/mandrake/whatever.

Oh, except money.

"can we find a decent place to mirror anything? "

I guess I just answered your question.

Mirroring on Sourceforge

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

How about mirroring on Sourceforge?

Re:Screenshots?

[TandyMasterControl]

maybe not ugly but definitely amateurish in places. Fortunately for me, I don't know what Fitt's law is, so we needn't argue about whether or not it makes me a GUI guru.
My genes make me a GUI guru. ;-)

Now hear my whine(s).
If I had to use Keramik it would drive me crazy with its hyped contrasts. (I haven't used the original OSX aqua for more than a couple of minutes so I couldn't say whether it was just as bad.)

That second screenshot is right down there knocking on the door of ugly. The way the darker blue is used inside of the lighter frame is just wrong. Maybe if I could control the ratio of one value to the other I could live with a monochromatic scheme inverted like that, but the way they did it and those title bars? Unh-uh.

In all the screenshots of Liquid that I have seen , the nice color gradients could not hide that perennial KDE theme atrocity: discrete little button surrounds for every icon in the toolbar, with all the buttons jammed hard together to the left.
Ugh. This one is the vomit-maker. Thankfully the button boxes aren't part of the default KDE theme, but they seem hard to avoid when you leave the default KDE theme. Half of the themes have this eyesore of a billion little outlined buttons in the toolbar.
Many a Gnome theme and app has the same problem. Look at Bluefish using something like a GTK aqua theme. Incompre-fucking-hensible.
The law this violates is called Tandy's Paradox: the human eye/brain apparatus follows lines unconsciouly -autonomically. Therefore, the more you as a GUI designer try to set off adjacent things with little bounding lines , and especially lines that change direction making angles and closed figures, the more busy and less clear things actually become, unless: a) The closed figures are few in number and large; or b) the closed figures are set off with a grid of spaces that give a pleasing interval of figure to ground allowing the eye to stop, offsetting the busyness (but wasting screen real estate in the process and requiring more code).
Legibility is not a matter of taste.
Try to use as few lines and separate 3d modelled surfaces as humanly possible in your GUI, then eliminate 50% of those remaining. Now you're right.
Well I think that's enough for today.