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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.
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
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.
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
-... ---
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ;-)
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
For all you Debian users waiting around for debs, I'm in Gentoo. So your apt-get can bite my emerge kde.
Compiled from source w/ all dependencies all in one command. Suck it.
Now be a predictable Debian user and mod me down for bashing your golden cow.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens.
I'll tell you, that's the single biggest thing that's been pissing me off lately. Sounds like it's time for an upgrade...
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
i've put up a mirror of the article at www.dovehouse.fsworld.co.uk/linuxplanet/1.html.
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.
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?
> 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
Too bad I get consistent KDE application crashes (Control Panel, etc.). Is KDE3.0 less stable than KDE2.2.2?
Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
Check your system. Sounds like you have a problem. I've used KDE 2.x.x for, well, as long as it's been around. Very appropriately, the "bug free*" wallpaper is almost correct.
CD handling no longer breaks the automounter
Again, *you* have a configuration problem. Check the mailing lists.
Runs well on modest hardware
Uh, it's always done that since version 1. If you want to run KDE on a low-end hardware, use lightweight themes. Same goes for ANY desktop environment or window manager.
Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
That's an original artwork. And if you're going to bitch like this, why not say "concept of object oriented desktop no longer ripped off of Mac OS."
KMail no longer corrupts its mail files
I have this complaint about mailers other than KMail.
Default browser handling works all the time
Try elaborating.
K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing
Oh, this is a problem unique to the KDE project, eh? Go out and blame the GTK people if you REALLY want to throw stones like these.
Go get a clue and stop you bitching. If you don't like it, go use something else. The rest of us will greatly enjoy our KDE 3 experience.
Why bother.
Am I just missing something here, or is there still really no way to have artsd use esound as its output device? I have no sound card in my Linux box, and I run esound on my Win2k box for sound output over the network from Linux... but artsd doesn't seem to be able to output to esound! This seems like it would be a pretty obvious feature to me.
Or, failing that, is there any arts-compatible sound daemon for win32?
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)
Some people get so upset about a little light-hearted jibing. I expected Funny points, if any for this post. If someone thinks it's insightful, well, geez, that's not my doing.
To be fair, I have had these problems under KDE as shipped with RedHat 7.2, no special configuration done here, and these problems haven't surfaced under WindowMaker/X, my daily desktop. But you might notice that these are also a very small number of problems, overall. A system with 5 problems is pretty swell.
But, c'mon, you don't expect me to believe that the default desktop picture on KDE (2) wasn't at least 'heavily inspired' by Mac OS X's, do you? Everyone I know that's seen them has noticed the 'strong similarity'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How do you know what database they are using?
creation science book
Even though support is there, it still doesn't have everything. You can only switch desktops horizontally, not vertically. Back in the day, I used fvwm, and grew quite fond of having a 3x3 desktop. If only this was configurable...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
>> Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
...
>Working on KDE 8 hours a day... never seen that. Check your X installation.
Works just fine with WindowMaker...
>> Runs well on modest hardware
> K6-200 32Mb without a flaw.
Wow, your system must be significantly better tuned than mine. If you have any tips, please share.
>> Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
> You aren't using KDE from a distro, are you?
Um, doesn't most everybody?
>> Default browser handling works all the time
> Guess what? It works all time.
Geez, that's good to hear. I must have been imagining that one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Wow! You can browse and watch AVI's at the same time on a 500Mhz processor! Windows can do that on an old P90. On anything above a 500Mhz machine, NO desktop should have ANY lag. On my 1.5Ghz machine, KDE 2.x is still agonizingly slow (so much so that I switched to GNOME, which is as slow, but at least apps start quickly) to the point where using it is irritating.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
I'm running Redhat 7.3 (or 7.29543994999999 1/2) whichever you prefer). I also have running gkrellm. I have a p3 533, w 655MB ram. No matter how many apps I have open my mem usage stays constant, with virtually *no* paging. Mind you, the system is using about 250 MB at all times...
Plus, it boots faster.
I know these aren't hard numbers, but it is faster.
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.
I never said it was easy to fix. I simply pointed out that it has been done before many times, so it can't be all that hard. If OSS software is so great, why can't they beat MS in performance (one of their weak areas!)?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sawfish supports both Workspaces and Virtual Desktops which are different beasts
Why make a distinction between workspaces and virtual desktops? Why not just call them all the same thing and let you be able to arrange them up down and over or just over or just up and down?
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.
Just kidding - I have to boot up the Win box for that. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In any case, if you just download a bunch of RPMs, it is the supplier's responsibility to make sure you get a complete set. The KDE distributors should either put up all the RPMs in a single directory, or they should at least supply a script that tells you what packages you are still missing. So, in that sense, it perhaps belongs into the review, though it probably shouldn't take up most of a KDE3 review. After all, once this is part of distributions, the install will simply not be a problem anymore.
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
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.
Nobody starts their day expecting to use an Operating System. They expect to do work, and the most bearing on how they do that work is the application they use to do it.
Why can't I be able to install a piece of software if it doesn't come with my system? Windows can do it, Linux should be able to as well. And it can: I do it all the time, on about 25 Linux machines.
The moral of the story isn't `don't ever install anything but your distro' the moral is `we need an easier way to install packages on most Linux distros'. On RH, usign apt-get from www.freshrpms.net serves this purpose well, and if the RH KDE packages were avaliable from such a source there would be few problems with installation.
I don't think I agree with you. Kpackage is already available, and supports apt just fine, at least in Debian, and presumably it should work fine for Redhat et al as well.
Packaging and distribution of software is exactly the job of a distro, because what's a distro if not a neat collection of nicely packaged software scattered about the net? Ximian has usurped the job of the distro with RedCarpet. Not that I think this is totally bad, but I think they should have kept their focus on the tool itself, rather than the service through the tool. Sadly, this is their plan to make money (best of luck to them) but it does duplicate the functions of the distros.
I, for one, will never download Ximian packages on to my Debian box because Ximian will simply never do as good a job supporting them as the Debian maintainer will. I'd imagine this is true for just about all distros.
All in all, I think KDE is right not to work on a package like RedCarpet. I think a graphical installer along the lines of installshield would be a good project, perhaps as a frontend to compliment apt and Kpackage, but on the whole I think the strength of the KDE project is that they have focus. They know what they want to provide: the best desktop environment for UNIX, and they seem to be doing it. There's no attempts to sell services or any such thing, they are simply building the best software they can to suit themselves, and the results have been fantastic. They know that their job is not to package software and set it up for people to download easily, that's the job of the distro. Instead, they provide a tool like KPackage which integrates as a frontend for the distro's system, and they leave it at that. KPackage itself can, and will, be improved, but it will never attempt to provide all that functionality itself. And if one day we're all using KPackage or RedCarpet as frontends to apt downloading either rpm's or debs as set up by your distro (which appears to me to be the way things are headed, thankfully) then I think we'll all be better off for it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I just tried to install KDE on RH 7.1 and descended pretty quickly into dependency hell. This is really, really bad. I bet I broke many things in the attempt, and I really have no clue what I broke.
Yes, it is a valid argument that you should wait for your distro makers, but often, that is not an option.
For example, there are lots of scientific software that never make it into a distro, and making it easy to install stuff that isn't in the distro is very, very important. If distro makers think that they can always tell their customers to wait untill they get a new release out, they will fail.
And my current experience with KDE3 makes me think that RH has a very long way to go. But that doesn't necesssarily mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is ready for me, anyway.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I don't know what kind of trade-offs they are making. KDE 3.0 has so many features that I'd guess they're trading speed for features. The difference probably is that Microsoft can implement lots of features and keep them fast while KDE (with less resources) can implement lots of features and make them slow. In that case, is that the kind of trade-off they should be making? It's not just an efficiency thing. There is NO machine that will run KDE 3.0 at an acceptable speed for me. I'm not asking them to make it usable on a Pentium 90, but at least make it usable on my 1.5 GHz Athlon. It is probably *your* setup. Win98 is a good deal slower than Win2k/XP. BTW, I'm on a debian box as well.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Anyone got 3.0 working from the tgz's for slackware 8.0..... /opt/kde3....but it never gets past setting up inter process communication....and kdeinit fails to startup....?
I did the install changed the KDEDIR to
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.