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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."
here they are, for beta2.
Can we have some screenshots? Every version of KDE i've ever seen has been, well, sort of inherently ugly-- the worst abuses of the motif, windows, and aqua mindsets combined. You can skin over the windows-ness, of course, and skin the puke-grey color scheme out of the icons, but that doesn't change that there seemed to just be very little engineering of details in KDE, and little things-- the relative placement of buttons, layout, fitt's law considerations, stuff you can't skin over-- seemed to be more or less unimportant to them. And when you're designing a gui, almost all of what makes the difference between being pleasant to use and feeling like you're fighting with the computer to get anything done comes in tiny, tiny details..
I mean, well, ok-- that's a decent bit unecessarily harsh. They did a wholly acceptable job, a better job than i could have done, and the thing was refreshingly usable. I didn't want to use it, though, and i didn't. It just for one reason or another felt more natural and nimble to use bash than kde-- which is saying a LOT, since i am a native mac user and one of the more rabid proponents of the spacial file manangement metaphor you're going to find. But kde just felt so *clumsy*...
Then again, i haven't seriously used KDE since 1, though my brief experience with KDE2 failed to impress me. So, have things gotten better? Can anyone convince me that KDE has learned from mistakes and improved seriously?
Can i have some screenshots? I couldn't find any of version 3 on kde.org.
--super ugly ultraman
Try this: http://www.kde.org/screenshots/kde300shots.html
Your statement is so full of irony it isn't funny.
"MS spent millions(from what I understand) studying GUI's and making them look better"
So it is okay for kde developers to essentially 'steal' the ideas and push it in a free product and that makes us better then Microsoft because it is linux and not windows.
Oh well. I just said i thought it was strange how the linux paradox is feeding from the windows look and defended as such. Yet windows is so horribly bad for whatever reason and just because this is KDE it is great.
We all have opinions like we all have assholes. You can certainly do in windows what you can do in linux and vice versa. Just find it funny as emulation is just a way to show appreciation for a superior product. (yet any linux user will try and prove that invalid). Just like people try and emulate peoples ideas, procedures, knowledge and resources, they do it because of the reason you said, someone spent millions developing a product that works, looks great and sold it to the market.
Just my 2 cents.
Not specific to the screenshot, but the print dialog is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.
The taskbar system is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.
Even the HELP SYSTEM is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.
The background *is* the default Mac OS X background.
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?
When is Linux going to stop aiming to be JUST LIKE WINDOWS! and do something "innovative" in the GUI area?
Oh, that's right. THEY WON'T, simply because all those open source programmers are PROGRAMMERS and know nothing about UI design!
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.