LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0

KDE's appearance by Ween · 2002-04-09 02:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

I have had people tell me that KDE3 looks just like KDE2. Well, they werent paying much attention. KDE3 makes great strides in the little things visually that make this one very slick looking desktop. I even showed it in a lecture at my school about linux and many people were impressed and came up to me afterwards asking what that was.

Good job KDE Team.

--

Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln

Re:KDE's appearance by Khalid · 2002-04-09 03:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

Alas IT IS! and this is something that most geeks fail to understand. For the better or the worse. For many people this is the first contact they will have with a software, and this first impression has a major impact about the acceptation of a software by a PHB, like or not !!

I remember while at the university, students were fighting to do graphic or visual projects because experience has showed them that these were the projects which were rated better !!!!

This is something that the open source community is at last beginning to understand, to reach the masses, projects have got to be "pretty", with the recent integration of true type fonts, alpha blending, transparency, anti-aliasing, new good looking themes and so on.

It's just marketing ! this is what Apple and M$ have understood long time age.
Re:KDE's appearance by friedmud · 2002-04-09 04:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

I used E for years (assuming you mean enlightenment - and no I don't mean behind Gnome or KDE - just straight E) - But now I have switched to KDE (about 6 months ago).

I loved E and could get a lot of work done - but then I found myself spending a *LOT* of time doing simple things (like adding a new program to the Programs Menu), also I found that it ate a lot of resources (and actually was making me skip frames in 3d games). I thought I could do better so I went looking...

I am a C++ programmer so I thought QT looked interesting anyways - and as long as I was going to learn QT I might as well use KDE. Upon my initial installation (KDE 2.1) I thought "This is bullshit" - it looked like some kind of childish cartooney crap. But seing as how thousands of people use it everyday I thought, "there must be more to this".

So I went ahead and customized it (just like I always did for E - which by the way it takes longer to COMPLETELY customize E than it does KDE). What I finally worked out is something that was setup just like I had E setup - except I have a taskbar and k-menu - that are both easily configured. This is not too mention the fact that now when I install a program it automatically adds itself to the k-menu - as opposed to me hunting down the path to the binary and editing txt files in order to add it to E's menu.

I have never really looked back - I have a sleek very functional desktop that doesn't take forever to do simple things in and allows me to play my 3d-games at their finest.

You obviously haven't TRULY tried to use KDE so you can't appreciate it or properly comment on it.

Everyone has their environment - use what you like - but don't knock my environment down as "newbie trash" just because you think it has "Easy customizability, nice look, better usability" which I really can't see as a fault anyway......

Derek
Re:KDE's appearance by spitzak · 2002-04-09 09:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

I assure you I have seen WinXP. Why do you think I said "MicroSoft lost it". And WinXP is exactly what I was talking about when I said users seem to be setting it back to the Win98 appearance.

Very few people change the window colors (they do like to change the desktop wallpaper, I agree). Get out of the computer lab and look at some real users such as secretaries. I would be suprised if you find any of them have changed their Windows boxes other than the desktop image.

I still feel that "themes" are an excuse for programmers to feel elite and avoid working on hard stuff (like the ability to render an image with fewer than 2 pages of code, or to draw UTF-8 text without hundreds of K of libraries). Making the screen look like Deep Space 9 does not make it user friendly!

Didn't even check out the links eh? by swagr · 2002-04-09 02:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out.

I guess you didn't even look at the links. Sign of a true professional.

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

--

-... --- .-. . -.. ..--..

What I'd really like to see in a review by ChrisWong · 2002-04-09 02:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

Too many reviews focus on installation. This review contains less info than the KDE press release. How about a little hands-on insight? How does KDE 3 compare to its predecessor in terms of startup time (with/without prelink/objprelink)? Runtime performance? Memory footprint? Can we see some numbers? It's a pity that reviews geared towards techies are often lacking in quantitative information.

KDE 3.0 doesn't make my laptop hot. by marksthrak · 2002-04-09 03:06 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've been a fan of KDE since they moved to 2.0, but I couldn't ever stand to run it on my laptop because it made the cpu fan run all the time. Not only is the damn thing noisy, the whole machine was noticably hotter.

After running KDE 3.0 for a few days, it's my cpu fan has stayed quiet and the system is no warmer than it was when I ran Blackbox.

The Cervisia interface to Konqueror is great- I don't have to worry about the security issues of running CVSWeb for all my projects.

That is not a review by ltsmash · 2002-04-09 03:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

That article is not a review. A review is a critical report of something. The reviewer should tell us everything good and bad about the product.

That article was 20% advertisement and 80% technical support on installation. The article belongs in a README.TXT, not in a "review".

Very rough for us Noobs! by Deacon+Jones · 2002-04-09 03:11 · Score: 3, Interesting

I purchased Suse 7.3 as it seemed to be a good distro. for those of us who are oppposed to M$ and want to use another OS, but don't want to have to spend hours upon hours learning that OS.In other words, a typical "dumb end user" when it comes to operating systems.

For the most part, its pretty intuitive--I can browse, send emails, e.t.c.

But I hate the fonts as opposed to Windows rendering of fonts. KDE is the default GUI, so I thought I would try this KDE 3.0. Here's where the newbie to Linux definitely loses out. I knew that these "RPM thingies" where what I needed to download.

I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.

Boot the computer, and I get some kind of kernel fault thing. Luckily, no serious data on the 'puter, so I reboot and install the distro all over again. No biggie, but makes me sad that I can't "see" the new KDE.

I know to all of you its a piece of cake, but (as has been noted before) if the Linux community really wants us desktop end users en masse, then it should make something like this as simple as it is in windows. In windows, if I want the latest version of something, I download an install file and double click, and I'm done.

It should be that easy for dummies like me. (as an aside, I was hoping Suse's online update would do it automagically for me, but no such luck).

--
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig

Re:KDE is a monopoly by boltar · 2002-04-09 03:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

But the KDE team doesn't intend to lock you in to
their system by bundling konquerer because only their browser can access/run some given feature. Also mozilla dying would make no difference to them
because they make no money no matter how many people use KDE.

Mirror by pknut · 2002-04-09 03:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

i've put up a mirror of the article at www.dovehouse.fsworld.co.uk/linuxplanet/1.html.

Re:A helpful hint: by gazbo · 2002-04-09 03:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

It does have a lot of bugfixes, and IMHO the beautiful look and feel really proves wrong all of the FUD about GNU/Linux not being ready for the desktop.

As you say, it was bound to break something (in your case useradd) but that's a small trade-off. Also as another poster pointed out, the only problems the author had were because he hadn't followed the installation instructions exactly, and so had dependency problems - of course you need to install the packages in the right order, any idiot could tell him that

An even better point though is that though useradd was broken, because it is Linux you are able to take a template copy of a home directory, and write a script so that when you want add a user you can replicate the functionality. I'd love to see you try that when the new user on Windoze breaks after an update.

Every day Linux just gets so much easier for newby desktop use - surely we've now reached the same level of ease of use as Windoze?

On Windows? by secondsun · 2002-04-09 04:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Since the QT toolkit is "free" as in beer for windows, what are the chances of having some one port KDE3 to windows to replace explorer.exe like litestep does?

Summers

--
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.

My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 05:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

I finally broke down, and while reinstalling Gentoo on my main desktop, went ahead and merged KDE 3. I haven't ever used a "desktop environment" other than ion and zsh before, except to briefly install and then immediately uninstall in a tooth-chattering rage, so this will be the longest (about 6 hours) that I've used either KDE or Gnome so far.

It's technically very impressive, although by dfault it is certainly a HCI trainwreck of epic proportions. Given a relatively small amount of fiddling, though, it can be rendered very usable.

Things that I like so far:

kcontrol is amazing. It hasn't crashed yet, it's very well organized, and almost everything that I could possibly want to control is in one location, using a single UI. This might be the best thing about the system.

konqueror is also very good, although I have a couple of beefs with the web operation.

konsole is a competent xterm replacement.

The panel is very easy to manage, as far as things like that go. I'm used to starting programs either the old-school way (emacs &), or via ion keybindings, so I tend to ignore kicker, but in the interests of maybe learning something useful, I horsed around with it a bit last night.

Things that bug me:

konqueror apparently doesn't allow you to really, seriously, no, I'm not kidding force a single set of fonts for all web pages to use, or to disable popup windows. I tried the CSS/customize panel, but I'm not interested in changing the rendering of pages except for disallowing font size and style changes, and enabling custom CSS pretty seriously b0rks colors. And even after disabling all popups in the Javascript panel, stopping and restarting konq, I would get the occasional popup.

I also dislike having konq's toolbars shared across the wildly different tasks of file management and web browsing. I like the previews and the ability to do some file stuff via a nice click 'n drag interface, but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE, as at least Windows can present you with a different interface to folders and web pages. I know about the View Settings; but they don't extend to the toolbars. Is it possible to define new toolbars? I want different choices, different layouts, and different interfaces on my toolbars when I'm doing very different things. This ought to be the default.

There's way too much clutter. Too many menus, too many choices on the root level of those menus, too many redundant window decorations -- for instance, why do I need to be able to click in the upper left to get the same exact menu as right clicking on the title bar?

I DON'T WANT THE WINDOWS KEY-BINDINGS. Why can't I get emacs keybindings for text editing, without changing the "shortcuts" en masse? And why isn't the shortcut editor smarter? If I enter a key binding that's already taken, instead of refusing with the unhelpful message that that binding is already taken, why not change it (after all, that's more likely to be the behavior that people want) with a warning that my new choice overrides the old one?

The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.

Overall, from someone who has used twm far more than either kde or gnome, I have to admit to being very impressed. I don't know if I'll stick to it, but it certainly Doesn't Suck That Much Hardly At All, which, given the dismal state of pretty much every computer program written, ever, is more than I could have expected.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.

Kmail's look & feel changed quite a bit as wel by joeflies · 2002-04-09 06:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

Most of the new features are quite nice in kmail, notably they've made the PGP integration probably one of the best that I've ever seen in a mail client. The body markings now show PGP-info formatting when kmail's in a secure style, and the key fingerprints show up in the pop up box.

Other look & feel differences - they took out the k-gear in the Fancy headers! I liked it, I wish I could have that put back in.

Also missing - the delete Trash messages older than X days. I liked that feature too. I haven't got around to learning the expired messages feature yet.

Also - the colors and font settings are a little TOO customizeable now, it takes a bit of time to set all the colors and the fonts because there are so many different places they can be configured.

The identity features are much improved over the 2.2.2 version, everything is laid out much more clearly.

All in all, it remains my favorite client, however I do miss some of the look & feel options of the old one.

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by Suppafly · 2002-04-09 06:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

and redhat people wonder why debian people are just waiting for the .deb files. "apt-get install kde3" is going to be so much easier and it'll work.

Add apt-get support to KPackage by Nailer · 2002-04-09 10:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

Too many reviews focus on installation.

Damn straight. KDE could do a lot for its users by adding apt-get for RPM support to KPackage. Debian's nice, but there's a lot more Red Hat users as well as many other major distro's that are more popular, and most of these use the standard packaging format RPM (currently 3.0 is standard, 4.0 is likely to be when Maximum RPM is updated, which is likely later this year).

Already RH users are starting to get a lot of software avaliable via APT-get, including all of RH install CDs, the excellent Freshrpms archive (everything you wish you had but didn't) and Havoc Pennington's Gnomehide. Having this available through kpackage (rather than the apt-get command line, or an ugly tool like Synaptic) and creating APT archioves for KDE (I have one for my workplace - they're not difficult to create) would significantly enhance the install process.

Mike

17 of 310 comments (clear)