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

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

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.

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.

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.