KDE 3.0 is Out

Emilio Hansen noted that KDE 3.0 is on their site. There is no official announcement yet, but this looks like the real deal. No debian packages yet, but you can snag RPMs from various distros or src for the do it yourself. Updated by HeUnique:Here is the announcement, enjoy.

Comments

Screenshots anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have this up and running (other than the KDE developers ;-) with screenshots they can post showing KDE 3.0 in action on an average users box?

Re:Screenshots anyone?

[Rob Kaper]

I'm committing the official KDE 3.0 screenshots to CVS (and thus www.kde.org) tonight. I had some nice ones ready for the longest time, but one of theme had a style theme that isn't in 3.0 release (stupid stupid) so I'm redoing that one first, after dinner. Expect them to be there around 9pm CEST.

Re:Fist Sport

[ringbarer]

Tests have shown that the winning combination of WinXP and IE6 makes achieving Fist Sport on Slashdot a trivial experience.

Mozilla still takes too long to render the default article pages to be useful. And don't even think about running it under "1 frame a second" XFree!

Re:KDE 3.0 Scoop

[SubtleNuance]

...how about the 'auto-sync' script's log for a mirror host-operator?

Valgrind and memory leaks

[johnjones]

I am still finding memory leaks via valgrind

oh well it is a .0000000

hopefully GNOME people will profile their code like KDE did for memory leaks

because it really stablized when it was percived that memory was something to worry about

regards

john jones

Re:Valgrind and memory leaks

[mmusn]

I haven't had memory leaks in C++ in years--they are straightforward to avoid with consistent use of constructors/destructors. Where do those leaks occur in KDE code? Don't the KDE style guidelines make memory leaks impossible? If not, why not?

KDE3 -pre is in Red Hat's Skipjack

[MSG]

I tried the CVS release of KDE 3 included in Red Hat's Skipjack beta. Like a man admiring his neighbor's well groomed lawn, I've got to say that it looks *beautiful*. There's some good stuff in there.

One of my favorite features is that the panel can optionally display the "description" of each item, rather than the "name" of the application. That's far more useful for the novice user. I suggested that the GNOME panel do that about.... 2 years ago (??) on one of the gnome mailing lists, but never got around to submitting a patch myself.

Its' great

[mike_mcc13]

I'm using the skipjack beta and the cvs version was so good i killed gnome

Re:How Incredibly Discourteous

[Accipiter]

They've done this before, and had the nerve to try to pass the blame on to the developers.

Looks like this stupidity affects more than one of the editors.

Re:GNOME & KDE

[Rosonowski]

My sister (15 year old mall rat) now REFUSES to use windows, since I showed her linux. She used to complain that the box I had set up for her kept crashing, so I set up a dual-boot for her, to see if she could learn. Obviously, I wouldn't want her to become frustrated with something just because she couldn't understand it, so I set up something closest to what she understood.

She understands how KDE works, because, for the most part, it's fairly intuitive. She did use linux. Not only is this a (small) proof of viability for linux in a consumer market, but it does show where even a "bloated" window manager can have it's place.

Tell me, would you rather have a bloated window manager and the linux kernel, or windows for someone you loved?

What's the correct way to upgrade my KDE?

[antdude]

I have Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 7.2 boxes. What's the correct way to upgrade from KDE v2.2.1 and v2.2.2? Should I uninstall KDE packages and then install or use rpm -Uvh?

Thank you in advance. :)

Re:What's the correct way to upgrade my KDE?

[nitehorse]

Care to back that up?

(And no, mosfet's web page doesn't count. How about you look at the code and decide for yourself?)

Here, I'll back up the fact that it IS XRender. (code is from a CVS copy of kdelibs/kdefx/kstyle.cpp.)

// Here we go, use XRender in all its glory.
// NOTE: This is actually a bit slower than the above routines
// on non-accelerated displays. -- Karol.
void TransparencyHandler::XRenderBlendToPixmap(const QPopupMenu* p)
{
KPixmap renderPix;
renderPix.resize( pix.width(), pix.height() );

// Allow styles to define the blend pixmap - allows for some interesting effects.
kstyle->renderMenuBlendPixmap( renderPix, p->colorGroup(), p );

Display* dpy = qt_xdisplay();
Pixmap alphaPixmap;
Picture alphaPicture;
XRenderPictFormat Rpf;
XRenderPictureAttributes Rpa;
XRenderColor clr;
clr.alpha = ((unsigned short)(255*opacity) << 8);

Rpf.type = PictTypeDirect;
Rpf.depth = 8;
Rpf.direct.alphaMask = 0xff;
Rpa.repeat = True; // Tile

XRenderPictFormat* xformat = XRenderFindFormat(dpy,
PictFormatType | PictFormatDepth | PictFormatAlphaMask, &Rpf, 0);

alphaPixmap = XCreatePixmap(dpy, p->handle(), 1, 1, 8);
alphaPicture = XRenderCreatePicture(dpy, alphaPixmap, xformat, CPRepeat, &Rpa);

XRenderFillRectangle(dpy, PictOpSrc, alphaPicture, &clr, 0, 0, 1, 1);

XRenderComposite(dpy, PictOpOver,
renderPix.x11RenderHandle(), alphaPicture, pix.x11RenderHandle(), // src, mask, dst
0, 0, // srcx, srcy
0, 0, // maskx, masky
0, 0, // dstx, dsty
pix.width(), pix.height());

XRenderFreePicture(dpy, alphaPicture);
XFreePixmap(dpy, alphaPixmap);
}

Now, like I was saying, where's your backup? Hell, I'll even quote mosfet's web page about this one.

(from mosfet's liquid web page)

Where Liquid and KDE3's implementation differed was that KDE3 can optionally use XRender to shade the background pixmap, while Liquid will always use the blending methods I included in KPixmapEffect.

Now, mosfet has a funny position here. He says "It's not really XRender" and then he admits that we use XRender to shade the background pixmap. This is exactly what we claim. The method of transparency is chosen by the user in the KDE Control Center. There are options for Software Tint, Software Blend, and XRender Blend. Nobody claimed that these were 100% Real Translucent Menus (Just like in MacOS X!). We're still waiting for keithp and his magical X Translucency Extension before we can promise that.

But really. Don't you have anything better to do than troll about how "it's fake"?

Re:Ethics in Journalism?

[stienman]

Slashdot is a journal, and as such wants 'the scoop'. When they get 'the scoop' they post it. While it may not be nice, there are dozens of things the ftp manager can do to limit their problems. First (and most important) is to NOT RELEASE IT if it's not released. They can do this by disabling anonymous access to that directory, while enabling mirrors to log in and get access (either using IP, or ssh ftp with usernames and passwords, etc). This is something they will have to implement for following releases. It's plain common sense to give official mirrors front row seating and advance notice. Independantly run mirrors can wait like everyone else.

No one would be complaining if some other tidbit of software was available but not announced at some other FTP site.

The sooner people start treating slashdot like the Enquirer, the fewer people will complian. This site is not much more than mental candy for nerds, and provides very little real value to its users. But it is fun, interesting, and often entertaining.

-Adam

Re:Is it me or is KDE3 slow?

[DarkDust]

Actually, I find it way more responsive and faster than KDE2. I'm using SuSE 7.3 and downloaded the SuSE RPMs which were pretty painless to install with only two or three path-corrections to the /etc/profile and stuff.

Especially Konqueror is much faster and responsive now. Maybe the slowdown of the RC-version you installed was due to debugging features ?

Besides the faster Konqueror, I like the improved KMail most. I'm using the new KDE3 for half a day now, and it's really stable, no crashes yet, and I found no obvious bugs yet (as I did in 2.0). Congrats to the KDE folks, really good work IMHO.

New to Linux world (please be gentle)

[nobodyman]

So, I'm really really ignorant of all of these window managers and what the distinctions are between X11, KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, etc. I've been to gnome.org and kde.org, but I was hoping to find one big uberpage that laid it all out from square one.

I feel somewhat like Homer Simpson when he tried to drum up business for the bowling alley (first reading advanced economics, then introductory economics, then finally websters dictionary).

Anyone got a link or two?

Re:Gnome Panel and descriptions

[MSG]

I know about the tooltips, but that doesn't help novices much. Can you imagine a novice user looking at the menu for the first (or second, or ...) time and mouse-over'ing every item? (Ooo, what's this? Ooo, what's this? etc.)

KDE's panel can now display the comment *as the menu label* which is what I suggested to the GNOME devel group way-back-when.

Re:Give them a chance...

[BorgDrone]

Also, you have to wonder how half the news on the front page has been reported weeks before by other news organizations, yet stories like this that would probably be best reported late are always reported early.

Does the name "murphy" ring a bell ?

Re:How Incredibly Discourteous

[pbryan]

With due respect to your position, the KDE group should know by now that if news like this is leaked and there's a credible place to verify it (e.g. an FTP site), it will be reported on by sites such as Slashdot.

The onus is on anyone who wants to keep a secret, and steps should be taken to keep it that way until they're ready for its announcement, and IMHO this includes the KDE development team.

A possible solution? Put the distribution on a mirrors-only site, let it propogate to the mirrors, put it up on your FTP site last.

In my opinion, what the KDE group faces is the ante for participating in the information freedom, everyone collaborates, communicates and participates age.

One thing that's starting to annoy me about debian

[gid]

Let me start out with saying that I think the Debian people are doing a good job with the resources they have. I love the distribution and the ease of upgrades. It takes a lot of time to package something correctly ahearing to all the Debian rules, but it's starting to annoy me how if I was just running Redhat, I could be running KDE 3 already, whilst it'll probably take another 4 months or so for KDE 3 to make it into sid. Maybe this is one of the downfalls of Debian, because of the strict packaging guidlines, authors aren't willing to release .debs because of the ammount of time it takes to package them.

I suppose I could just grab and compile it myself.

Why not post it to Usenet?

[Dr. Spork]

Look, obviously, a ton of people will be downloading this, and the people hosting it are just volunteers who support KDE out of goodwill. I think major releases like this should just be posted to usenet. I mean, 100 Megs (or even 700 megs for all the different binary distributions) is barely a drop in the usenet bucket, everyone would get excellent transfer rates, the ftp would be for people without usenet access, and everyone would be happy!

Also, it would be an important example of how usenet binaries serve and important and legal purpose.

I would really support a Slashdot code of ethics that says: you can't announce major software before the developers do unless you have already posted it to Usenet.

So...why should I get this

[CosmicDreams]

There has been a lot of discussion about KDE 3.0 here, but I haven't found one bit about why 3.0 is better than 2.0.

Heck, I can't even find that on KDE's site.

They'll probably have that up soon. Can someone fill me in on why 3.0 is a must-have.

Release Party!

[ThatComputerGuy]

Head over to #kde on irc.openprojects.net for the release party :)

Differences between Gnome and KDE?

[Bilbo]

Didn't we just finish saying that the reason why we want Linux to succeed in a world of Windoze boxes is that, real competition forces all contenders to get better over time?

Seriously, I don't want to start a flame war, but I've tried to run KDE a couple of times, and I keep switching back to Gnome. I'm not saying that Gnome is better than KDE, but I have yet to find a compelling reason to throw out all the experience I have with the Gnome tools and way of doing things, to learn Just Another Window Manager.

My question is, what does KDE offer that Gnome doesn't? Why should I make the effort to switch?

Re:One thing that's starting to annoy me about deb

[Anonymous Coward]

and where are these packages, kind sir?

1.0 is correct, 2.2.2 isnt

[anno1602]

No, the arts-2.2.2 is incorrect. The real version of arts shipped with kde 2.2.2 was 0.4 or 0.6, kde3 ships with arts 1.0. So your distro numbered the arts after the kde version numbers and not the arts version numbers. If they keep it up, it shouldn't matter (and you'll get arts-1.0 sold to you as arts-3.0), if they don't, go hit them with a stick ;-)