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LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0
fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here."
Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping
that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.
In an effort to spare their poor server, here is a copy of the change log:
.ui files as much as possible
Changes between KDE 2.2.2 and KDE 3.0
This page tries to present as much as possible of the problem corrections that occurred in KDE between the 2.2.2 and 3.0 releases. The primary goal of the KDE 3.0 release is to port the existing codebase of the KDE 2 series to be based on the Qt 3 library.
The use of Qt 3 provides a set of new features and improvements as well as allows a long period of binary compatible releases.
General
* A lot of fixes for reported bugs in all applications
* Porting to make full use of the Qt 3 GUI toolkit
* Performance improvements in some areas
* Arts has been splitted in a KDE-independent part and KDE-bindings
Arts
* More PlayObjects (more fileformats)
* Improvements of the MIDI capabilities (alsa support)
* Integration of new GSL scheduling code
* More support for using samples as instruments (.PAT loader)
* Environments/Mixers
* Recording support in the APIs (kretz@kde.org)
* Threaded OSS support (should run more reliable on more kernel drivers)
* Moved code to a separate CVS module
kdelibs
* KSSL: Completion of certificate and CA management tools
* KSSL: X.509 and PKCS12 certificate viewer and import tool part (KPart) - embeddable in Konqueror
* KFileDialog: URL Speedbar
* Support for Icons on Buttons in various dialogs
* A GUI Item class that encapsulates KAction attributes
* Added plugin interface for the Renaming Dialog
* Improved service activation (dcopstart)
* Support for Multi-key shortcuts (emacs-style) added.
* WebDAV support
* Plugin interface for retrieving / modifying meta information of files
* KDirLister is now cached (i.e. directory listings of ftp servers in konqueror)
* Optional emulation of traditional Mac keyboard
* KDEPrint: Improved CUPS support.
kdeaddons
* Improved stability of some of the plugins
kdeadmin
* Reinclusion of KDat
kdeartwork
* Inclusion of several themes (icon, window decoration etc)
kdebase
* KWin: smart mechanism that avoids focus stealing from windows the user is active on by windows that pop-up (M. Ettrich)
* KWin: don't crash when popup-menu of a window is still visible when that window gets closed
* KWin: don't shade/unshade (gross ugly flicker) windows that are moved fast in hover-unshaded state
* KWin: deny to the masochist the resizing of a shaded window
* KWin: automatically unshade on maximize, on restore-from-maximized and on restore-from-minimized
* KWin: work around ugly jre-1.3.1 bug with popup dialogs vanishing forever after first use
* KWin: improve moving by keyboard and bring back Ctrl-key ordered fine/coarse-grained keyboard moving
* KWin: abort keyboard moving of windows with Escape too
* KWin: no active desktop edges on resizing
* KWin: don't warp mouse pointer when touching desktop edge (with active edges enabled) if desktop isn't actually changed
* KWin: contain desktop navigation inside a box (don't wrap around from last to first desktop of a line or column)
* KWin: don't stack windows under desktops
* KWin: gracefully handle more than one desktop client application
* KWin: fix bogus gravitating for non-NW-gravitated windows on session restore (i.e., no more drifting of Xclock when started with -geometry -0-0 or such)
* don't allow +Alt+mouse to do things as if it was Alt+mouse (L.Lunak)
* any mouse button moves window when dragging titlebar, unless mouse click was popping an operations menu (this greatly improves consistency for configurable mouse bindings)
* don't show operation menus for desktop (no more move desktop to desktop 1 %-)
* KTip: center on screen
* KTip: readable on dark color schemes
* Kate: added plugin and new KTextEditor interface
* Kate: XML Plugin
* Konqueror/khtml: GUI for animated gifs: Always / Play Once / Never
* Konqueror/khtml: Major rework of the ECMAScript ("Javascript") implementation
* Konqueror/khtml: Major improviements in the DHTML compatibility
* Konqueror/khtml: Added "smart" window.open Javascript policy that skips popup banners
* Konqueror/khtml: Support for Actions in the new sidebar
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added "New directory" option
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added mediaplayer
* Konqueror/fileview: Extended tooltips for information about files
* Konqueror/popup plugins: Added "kuick", the quick copy and move plugin
* Konsole: New parameters: --nomenubar, --noframe, --noscrollbar and -tn (set $TERM=)
* Konsole: Keyboard shortcuts to activate menubar and rename session (Defaults: Ctrl-Alt-m & Ctrl-Alt-s).
* Konsole: New options: Blinking cursor, configurable line spacing, no/system/visible bell
* Konsole: Monitoring for activity and/or silence, sending of input to all sessions (cluster management)
* Konsole: History of a session can be cleared, searched and saved to a file.
* Konsole: Session types can specify a working directory.
* Konsole: Changed behaviour of "New" in toolbar, now starts session of type last selected.
* Konsole: Session buttons display state (e.g. bell) and session type icons. Double click renames them.
* Konsole: Sessions can be reordered via menu entries or keyboard shortcuts (Default: Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right).
* Konsole: Extend selection until end of line if no more characters are printed on that line.
* Konsole: Stop scrolling of output when selecting.
* Konsole: Drag & drop of selected text (like CDE's dtterm)
* Konsole: Pressing Ctrl while pasting with middle mouse button will send selection buffer.
* Konsole: Hollow out cursor when losing focus.
* Konsole: Support for ScrollLock with LED display.
* Konsole: Write utmp entries (requires installed utempter library).
* Konsole: Proper implementation of secondary device attributes, MODE_Mouse1000 and wrapped lines.
* Konsole: Session management remembers and activates last active session.
* Konsole: DCOP interface, sets environment variables KONSOLE_DCOP & KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION
* Konsole: Made embeddable Konsole part configurable.
* Konsole: KDE Control Center: Added "Terminal Size Hint" option and session type editor.
* Kicker: Implemented support for centerring the panel on screen
* Kicker: new applet: kpf - a web server applet, designed for sharing files
* KControl: Unified behaviour of root-only modules
* KControl: Rearranged dialogs
* KControl: Font Installation Assistant added
kdebindings
* added Objective C bindings
* added C bindings
* updated and improved the existing Java bindings
kdegames
* Various improvements to the games
* Generalized more functionality into a libkdegames
kdegraphics
* KDvi: Copy and paste text from a DVI file
* KDvi: Full text search
* KDvi: Export DVI files to plain text
* KDvi: Forward search with Emacs and XEmacs
* KDvi: Inverse search with a variety of editory
* KDvi: DCOP interface
* KDvi: Improved commandline options
kdemultimedia
* Noatun: Global XML import/export for the playlist
* Noatun: Winamp skin loader
* Noatun: Icecast / shoutcast streaming
* Noatun: Hide close status und tag displaying
kdenetwork
* KMail: Maildir support
* KMail: Distribution lists and aliases
* KMail: SMTP authentication
* KMail: SMTP over SSL/TLS
* KMail: Pipelining for POP3 (faster mail download on slow responding networks)
* KMail: On demand downloading or deleting without downloading of big mails on a POP3 server
* KMail: Various improvements for IMAP
* KMail: Permanent header caching
* KMail: Header fetching is much faster
* KMail: Creating/removing of folders
* KMail: Drats/sent-mail/trash folders on the server
* KMail: Mail checking in all folders
* KMail: Automatic configuration of the POP3/IMAP/SMTP security features
* KMail: Automatic encoding selection for outgoing mails
* KMail: DIGEST-MD5 authentication
* KMail: Identity based sent-mail and drafts folders
* KMail: Expiry of old messages
* KMail: Hotkey to temporary switch to fixed width fonts
* KMail: UTF-7 support
* KMail: Enhanced status reports for encrypted/signed messages
KDEPIM
* New Addressbook API (libkabc). Ported applications to use the new API
* KPilot: Rework conduits as plugins
* KPilot: Support for USB Visors
* KPilot: Extensive addition of tooltips
* KPilot: Move to
* KOrganizer: Plugin interface
* KOrganizer: Group scheduling
* KOrganizer: Split alarm daemon in a lowlevel and a GUI frontend
* KOrganizer: pinning contacts to appointments and TODO's
KDESDK
* KBabel: Catalog Manager is now a standalone application
* KBabel: Find/Replace in all files
KDEToys
* New Applet: KWeather
* KWeather: Better reportview, support for european weather data
* KWeather: Improved report view, uses http to get the data more quickly
* KWeather: Improved METAR parser support
* KWeather: added DCOP interface
* KWeather: improved support for iconscaling
KDEUtils
* KRegExpEditor: new
* Kpm got replaced by ksysguard
KDEEdu
* New in KDE 3.0, a collection of edu(cation/tainmnent) applications for KDE
Last modified: Sat Apr 6 21:32:57 EST 2002
KDE and K Desktop Environment are trademarks of KDE e.V.
It is a good desktop environment, it has lots of features, etc. If is more polished than 2.2 for sure.
However there are some new problems. Most notably form handling in Konqueror (which is much better overall now, but I need to use Mozilla to avoid the form handling problem) when using POST instead of GET (as far as I can see) fails about 40% of the time.
I can now use non-truetype fonts at the same time as truetype fonts when using anti-aliasing for KDE apps. This is great for consoles.
The monospaced font problem has been eliminated.
GIF animations in Konqueror still have not been fixed.
The instructions are to go to the directory you downloaded the KDE files into and do the following:
rpm -e `rpm -qa |egrep ^kde`
rpm -Uvh *rpm
This removes ALL the old qt/KDE stuff, and then installs the new stuff. The first part works, the second fails with many dependency errors. This is because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."
However, a quick check of "man rpm" reveals the "--nodeps" switch, which tells it to ignore dependencies.
Only two problems so far. One is that some programs (such as konqueror) are set R/W but not executable! (This is in the gui button thingy, they can run from the command line) . The other is that, for some reason, the default font for konqueror is greek. So I switched to helvetica.
Best Slashdot Co
They work like a charm, and it took all of about 1 minute to install.
I installed KDE3 on my box right now, I configured it so it would be just like my old kde 2.2, installation ran with no problems at all. First login was no so fast but after I configured it it became little faster than my previous 2.2 instalation. Konqueror is much much much better! Overall performance seems to be much higher, the system looks much smoother and applications like Konqueror seems to be loading a little faster. Its also really pretty. I dont know if anyone realised that memory usage with KDE 3 opened and system idle is much lower... I frequently had like 40% of memory usage with only kde 2.2 opened now im experiencing "only" 18%... dont know if it is my poor system or a normal kde stuff... ok, ill write more when i discovery anything else...
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
A few days into using KDE3. Here's my opinions.
:-)
Overall this desktop kicks ass. It's really really sweet.
Kmail - a lot better than earlier attempts. IMAP actually works, and works well. There are a few wierd bugs - like their filters don't allow you to filter to IMAP server folders. And there is no LDAP support, so I have to use mozilla mail for sending internal emails to people I don't know yet.
Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.
Noatun - sorry, but this MP3/Ogg player is still far inferior to XMMS. And it crashes a lot for me.
Kate - this is a really nice editor. With great syntax highlighting, and now has all the features I missed from TextPad, bar one (macros).
Ksirc - still sucks compared to xchat, but better than last time.
Korganizer - nice. Keeps me organised, and integrates nicely with the desktop, alerting me of appointments. Haven't tried the shared appointments stuff, but it looks kinda cool (if a little clunky being ftp based).
Konq (file manager) - as a file manager Konqueror is actually really nice. The auto-previews are great (but can be turned off) - I find them really useful when searching for source files. Cervisia integration is just incredible - I can totally manage a CVS project from konqueror now, including doing visual merges and diffs, checkins, tagging, etc. Wow.
Styles, themes, look and feel - Awesome. Red Hat's latest rawhide comes with Keramik, which makes KDE look absolutely gorgeous. This desktop even makes my windows using buddies jealous
All in all so far I'm very happy. It's a bit crash happy, but I expect that from this early release, and because of the fact that I'm running a snapshot. Anyway - I recommend it. Try it if you can.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The package does then ask you if you want to use your old KDE settings. I chose yes but I wonder if this was the right thing to do, if you do you will notice almost no changes visually, you may be better ajusting your setting to a more KDE3 look and feel.
The only problems I encountered were that a number of desktop icons (applinks) no longer worked. I haven't worked out a pattern to this, Netscpe 4.7 continued to run but 6.2 would not start. In every case manually recreating the link worked.
The main improvements for me have been;
I haven't managed to crash KDE3 yet, and spent 26 hours this weekend using it to upgrade 7 Solaris servers worldwide using about 20 terminal sessions plus several Java / X applications on 8 virtual desktops. As the main point of this release was the upgrade to Version 3 of the QT toolkit, I suspect we won't see all the benefits until 3.1 / 3.2, but all credit to the KDE team and testers for an excellent desktop management system and set of applications.
> I'm talking about the feature where you can slide your mouse pointer to the right edge of the desktop, and a new desktop slides in, and your mouse pointer intuitively appears on the left of the screen. Does K3 have this?
Yes, Control Center/Look & Feel/Window Behaviour/Advanced/Active Desktop Borders
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
These numbers are extremely misleading. You need to consider the fact that most of this memory is in fact shared. You can't actually measure memory usage of anything but the simplest application using top, as it takes no account of which pages are from shared libraries.
Rich.
Let me just point out that there's no reason you HAVE to "survive" the compile. Gentoo's install comes in three stages. You can compile everything from scratch (as I did, which is stage 1), or you can download binaries and immediately have a usable barebones system, and compile everything else (stage 2), or you can just download binaries for everything (Stage 3). Even once Gentoo is installed, you don't have to compile everything from source. Just use "emerge --usepkg kde" instead of "emerge kde" to download and install available binaries. The auto-dependency stuff is nice, too. RPM support is in there, but not by default. If you really want/need it, just go ahead and emerge it in. Really doesn't take all that long, you know.
> Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik
It does not, Keramik was not released with KDE 3.0.
just did the upgrade - not for the faint of heart.
/usr/X11R6/bin/kde still points to /opt/kde2/.. /opt/kde2 /etc/opt/kde2
/opt/kde3, I don't know whether other distros get themselves into the same kind
I took the SuSE 7.3 build from the KDE site, and
it created a hell of a mess.
Problems include:
-
- Desktop icons and panel entries disappearing
(the automatic upgrade of the settings didn't
work)
- KDE unstartable through kdm, till I copied over
the share/xdm directory
- all the SuSE customisations are not there,
I copied them over, both from
and
- the kdmrc file complains about several unknown
options and the kdm config was garbled.
- KDE cannot find default configs
- rpm hell avoided using --nodeps, there were
several packages missing.
Much of this has to do with SuSE's attempt to install into
of trouble. The other half has to do with the
customizations SuSE makes to the desktop.
Still, I cannot confirm what others wrote:
1) There are extensive changes in the programs,
it's more than a 1-1 qt 3 upgrade. Just read
the release notes.
2) It's not a shoot and forget installation
at all, at least not on SuSE systems.
Use at your own risk. A properly distro-installed
2.2.1 or 2.2.2 should be good enough for 98%
of the users.