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

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: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.