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.

Comments

KDE's appearance

[Ween]

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.

Re:KDE's appearance

[Crypt0rchid]

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 ;-)

Re:KDE's appearance

[Khalid]

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.

Change Log

[Epi-man]

In an effort to spare their poor server, here is a copy of the change log:

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 .ui files as much as possible
* 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.

Didn't even check out the links eh?

[swagr]

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

I have used it for 3 days now

[hattig]

My experiences so far (ignoring installation problems with Mandrake):

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.

What I'd really like to see in a review

[ChrisWong]

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.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Rich]

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.

My mini review...

[Matts]

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.

KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[Zocalo]

I for one am not surprised that the installer and reviewer had such a bumpy ride - what an ugly way of resolving RPM dependencies, and judging by the comments elsewhere other people must be using a similar approach. The simplest way I've found so far to upgrade or install a package such as KDE that is packaging into lots of individual RPMs is as follows:

1. Get all your downloaded .RPMs into a directory together and sort them out - do you really need all that stuff installed? Fewer RPMs = fewer dependencies.
2. Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
3. There are two types types of dependency to resolve - the first to deal with is packages you need but do not have installed, usually libraries and so on. Generally I go to RPMFind and find out what I need and then grab and install it.
4. Next up is stuff that is incompatible with the new software - in this case, if you are removing KDE2x then anything that specifically requires KDE2x is probably broken and is best uninstalled, at least until the new version is up and running. Uninstall these packages with the command "rpm --erase <package>" and either get updated versions later or add them to your install directory now.
5. Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
6. You should now have a much smaller dependency list (or even none). Simply repeat the last two steps a few more times and the test install command should eventually return you to the prompt with no errors after a lot of disk thrashing.
7. Time to install! Make sure you are root, or can at least update the files, the run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"

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!

Gentoo Linux

[omega9]

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.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[MSG]

What a day to be without moderator points...

You should *never* use --nodeps to install packages. The only time that is reasonable is if you've built a particular dependency from source, yourself (which you should avoid).

Certainly, you should never advise new users, in a public forum, that --nodeps is the correct way to go. They *will* end up with non-functioning installations.

...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."

That's total bull shit. rpm absolutely, positively does resolve dependencies against both the packages already installed in the system and the packages given to install.

New users should not follow these directions. Other replies to the parent post give proper installation instructions. Moderators should lay down the crack pipe, and decrease the score on the parent post.