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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
You just have to look at the Keramik theme and the Conectiva Crystal icon theme. It is going to be a bright, bright future.
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 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.
Screenshots are available for KDE 3.0 here.
These shots go to show that Unix and Linux systems are more than capable of competing with the eye candy UIs of Windows XP and MacOS X.
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?"
You know, I thought exactly the opposite thing when I installed WinXP. I thought its default look/feel/whatever was extremely reminiscent of a certain few Linux (and other UNIX bretheren) Desktop Environments.
Now, regardless of who copied who, what difference does it make anyway? I _like_ the way KDE 2.2.2 looks and feels. Similarly, I like WinXP way more than its predecessors, much for the same reason. Well, that and XP doesn't crash quite so much.
As for IceWM, I've never much cared for it.
Lets not forget how many times MS has been caught ripping off other folks' ideas. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. If someone did come up with a totally different GUI style, the likelihood that its going to be accepted and used by everyone is pretty small. People don't like fooling around with stuff they are unfamiliar with when they are trying to get stuff done. Thats why I use WinXP and KDE 2.2.2. I am comfortable with the UI, and I can focus on getting things done, instead of fucking around for hours on end trying to figure out how to do x. Its for that reason that I've never really cared for Enlightenment, IceWM, or Gnome. (I only include Gnome here because its had a nasty history of throwing SegFaults for no apparent reason).
Back for a moment to how KDE3 seems such a blatant ripoff of 'Doze. Have you installed KDE3 and played around with it? Neither have I. It would make sense that KDE would most resemble Windows simply because it uses QT, which is also compatible with windows. Furthermore, if it is the aim for Linux to provide viable competition in the Desktop market, there needs to be a desktop environment that is just as pretty as windows, but is more stable. Damn, isn't that what KDE is? I would think that all Linux fans would appreciate something that contributes to the cause (dominance of Open Source/Free Software/etc), even if is not exactly their cup of tea.
What exactly is a legitimate Linux user, pray tell?
If the next version of KDE was to be name KDE XP, it'd probably be a pretty smart marketing strategy, assuming there are no legality issues with using the letters X and P consecutively.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Mirror of the dot.kde.org page
And, will it have the fixed linker? That would give KDE's performance a nice boost
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
> AFAIK in KDE 2.2 you cannot simply drag and drop to the "floppy device" icon in the desktop.
;)
:)
Just implemented this yesterday... quite a concidence
konq_operations.diff
Apply this patch to the KDE 3 sources (current CVS, or 3.0-final
when it's out). It's a tiny bit late for inclusion in 3.0, given the size of the patch (which mainly moves code around though).
Feel free to test and report problems to me
Actually, if you look at the mailing lists - you'll find people from IBM (who compile KDE on AIX), SGI (Irix), FreeBSD, HP-UX, Sun (Solaris), and even Mac OS X!
The KDE Development team doesn't have the machines to try the code on other things then Linux, but non-the-less - most of the time people manage to compile KDE from sources with 90% of success with few small problems that are being discussed and fixed within short time.
Hetz (Heunique)
"Not true. In windows, the GUI code is intimately linked to the kernel, and cannot be separated out."
Why is there not a -1 anti-informative mod? This statement is 100% wrong. The windows desktop is a user level application that can be stopped and restarted at will with no interruption to the kernel or kernel services in any way. In fact a hell of a lot of "crashed" windows can be recovered by bringing up the task manager and starting a new process called "explorer.exe", rather than blindly hitting the reset button like a monkey.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I've been playing with both. I can certainly say both offer great speedups over their current stable versions. However, I must say that KDE3 feels a lot closer to release quality than Gnome2, even though Gnome2 supposedly has a sooner release date...
Everything in KDE (at lleast as of RC2) seems to work, I haven't seen any crashes. All the utilities and such seem pretty complete.
Gnome2, as of a few days ago, still seemed broken in so many ways. On log out, the panel always segfaulted. The appearance is, well, pretty crappy compared with KDE (one font selector, which doesn't seem to work right). Gdm is completely broken (the daemon continuously restarts, and the configuration tools are broken and won't even start. Sawfish 2 doesn't seem to want to even pull up any configuration applets. Interoperability between Gnome2 and Gnome1 apps seems ok, until gGConf comes into play. If gnome1 installed gconf is running, Gnome2 apps screw up, if gnome2 is running it's gconf, Gnome1 apps that are GConf aware mess up. All this is my own machine, with gnome prefixes differing between 1 and 2, but under the same configuration, KDE is good to go... Maybe at release time, we will see a different story. Both show great promise.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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