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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.
Well, I don't think that _appearance_ is an important point. Things that change below the surface are more important since they change performance and usability more than a fancy GUI ;)
;-)
Just my 2 -Cents
Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
CD handling no longer breaks the automounter
Runs well on modest hardware
Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
KMail no longer corrupts its mail files
Default browser handling works all the time
K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
By the way, the review itself seems to me rather weak. It is mostly a "hey folks, don't do this at home" warning for newbies. And no, this does not fit my definition of a good review ;-)
This will undoubtedly get modded down as a troll (KDE vs. GNOME, blah blah blah) but I wish the KDE developers would take a look at what Ximian has done with Red Carpet as far as installation and upgrading packages go. There really is nothing easier than getting GNOME installed and keeping it up to date than with Red Carpet (which also has a nice feature of including non-GNOME "channels" such as Red Hat, Evolution, etc., to keep a variety of software up to date).
I know that installation code is the least sexy piece of code to be working on, but the end result is definitely worth the pain involved.
Agree 100% - I have no idea why people insist on KDE installation for varios *nix's to be KDE's responsibility.
The project publishes the source code - the distributions are responsible for packaging it. I've been reading on forums all over the place (and articles like this) with people having installation problems with KDE, GNOME, or some other large project.
Don't blame KDE people, blame your distro. Debian might be a little slow, but sometime soon "apt-get install kde3" will work - I mean Geez, some people are having to install the individual RPMs in a specific order, what madness is this?
This is definitely a .0 release, then. KDE 2.2.2 was more stable (albeit slower) on my system. In particular, the panel (kicker) has a habit of going belly-up periodically, and Konqui crashes much more often than it did in 2.2.2. Still, this release adds polish, a few features and some speed. I look forward to 3.1.
Unfortunatly joe Public does care about the looks, which is why we have flame wars over why Linux is not sutable for the Desktop yet
Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.
What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.
If it had much to do with looks, Win95 would never have been so popular. That was one ugly SOB.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I've been using KDE 3.0 since the day after it came out, and here's my review of it.
Konqueror - much improved. It really is nice to have a web browser tightly integrated into the OS (unless you're an illegal monopolist, that is) and this version of Konq is way better than the last one. JavaScript support is much better, it certainly seems to work on all the sites I frequent now, and the weird layout problems with form elements have been cured. Oh, and its rendering engine is a lot faster. Sweet. Now all I'd like is tabbed browsing and it's damn near perfect.
KMail - not hugely different, just tightened up here and there. Seems to be a bit faster if anything, especially on big folders and messages with huge attachments, and the look and feel's been tweaked a bit.
Cervisia - this is the killer function for me. We make extensive use of CVS and now Cervisia, which was an awesome CVS client anyway, is integrated into Konqueror. You can choose to switch into CVS view in any directory containing CVS information, as smoothly as switching between icon view and list view. Unimaginably useful.
Kicker/Panel - one of my biggest bugbears is gone, namely that quickbrowsers can update themselves without requiring a restart. There's a bug in them, though, that causes them to freeze the whole Panel if they get stuck viewing a folder (e.g. if an smbmount-ed folder has been disconnected). Looks like a fix exists and will be in a forthcoming release, so I'll survive.
Desktop switching - Fantastic to have this back, I had missed it so much. You can now set it to switch desktops when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen.
Incompatibility with KDE 2 apps is really the only serious issue I can think of. Not all third-party KDE apps have been ported yet and they won't work. I mostly use Java apps and KDE's own apps (like Konq and KMail) so it doesn't really affect me, but it's something to watch out for.
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
MicroSoft has obviously fallen into this trap, which is probably good for Linux, as long as KDE with it's simple basic appearance remains clean. Take a look at how many WinXP users have gone through the trouble of changing the "appearance" back to the old standard. It looks to me like more than "customized" older Windows by changing the colors.
Flashy graphics only distracts from the job and I am glad that KDE defaults to none.
The author lost a lot of credibility when he mentions the ability to disallow javascript popups in konqueror and "Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens." in th elist of what's new. It's painfully obvious the author has little experience with what he is reviewing. I will give him credi tint hat he's partially right for both. A new METHOD for blocking popups was introduced (smart), and focus code has changed somewhat.
/opt. He's talking about grepping through the rpm's looking for certain files. It's not so tough. Simply install the arts rpm, the kdelibs rpm, and th ekdebase rpm and you got yourself a very basic installed kde. I'm not exactly sure what it is he was trying to do.
Also I'm not an expert with rpm as I rarely use it but his method for installing kde3 is insane. I use SuSE rpm's to try out rc2 simply because I didn't feel like compilin git at the time, and the installed to
Beyond the install process there's only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual use and performance of kde. Nowhere are aditional things such as new kio slaves like sftp, performance enhancements to konq, the much improved css/js handling, etc. I think he covers the new features of kmail (which btw filtering does not work with imap folders yet which is bothersome). Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik and a couple of new icon sets (these icon sets were previously available as seperate packages).
This review could have been a lot more informative than it was and really is a waste of space. Putting a little more time into something called a review should be required. This is more of a dumbed down installation guide.
rpm -Uvh http://enigma.freshrpms.net/pub/apt/apt-0.3.19cnc5 5-fr7.i386.rpm
Put the RPMs in an apt repository, make it avaliable by http, and run `apt-get install kdebase' on all your machines. Dependencies are automatically resolved as necessary to install the package. I do this for about 25 Linux workstations, all off one repository.
There is never any reason, ever, to use --nodeps. Luckily apt-get has `apt-get install -f' which performs a `fix' install to correct this kind of bad administration.