What To Expect From KDE 3.1

Moritz Moeller - Her writes "As most of you desktop users already know, the KDE Project recently released KDE 3.1beta2, which will be the final development release before KDE 3.1. The good news is, KDE 3.1 is scheduled for release in just a few weeks. The following page gives a nice overview about what is coming with many screenshots. It will certainly be the best KDE ever."

Comments

Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really a shame SuSE wouldn't wait for this release before shipping their product a couple weeks before. It truly has a large number of improvements over 3.0.x. Oh well, perhaps other distros listen to their users' wishes more?

Re:Oh well

[Clue4All]

I'm not sure what crack you've been smoking, but Mandrake 9.0, _the_ distro focused on the desktop user included KDE 3.0.3.

Re:KDE hasn't far to go

[James Skarzinskas]

Please ignore the parent comment and my stupidity to post it incomplete. I'm usually seen going off on a tangent about how horrible XFree86 is, but all facts through and through; given the platform, XFree86, I am really quite impressed by what KDE has managed to accomplish, especially with the more recent betas. I am the one on the front lines complaining about horrible responsiveness is with the X based window managers, but KDE has managed to earn my respect as far as speed and feel go. I hope they release many more successful betas.

Performance

[Espectr0]

I hope they don't add just features but that they tune down the whole thing. All new apps in linux are getting more bloat now. Even the kernel has become unusable in older systems ( i know, new features require new hardware)

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this crap getting modded up? Not all applications are using KDE you know (in fact I don't use a single KDE application regularly and all my desktops run Linux/BSD).

How the Linux kernel got brought into this is beyond me. What older system do you want to run it on anyway? I have several original Pentium systems with low memory running v2.4.x just fine. Surely you don't expect them to keep legacy support around for hardware that's slower than today's wristwatches? ;)

Configuration is a problem

[peterdaly]

I don't know if they have fixed any of this yet, but historically kde and Gnome have been to hard to configure due to having too many configuration tools all named similar things.

I have problems getting the correct tool to configure things manytimes on the first try, it's no wonder new users have problems.

-Pete

Browser integration

[Jungle guy]

It is a good thing they are concentrating in improving Konqueror. Mozilla is great, but it drags on my desktop. Just like Galeon is much faster in Gnome than Mozilla.

It is kind funny, though, that KDE is integrating a browser with the desktop environment. Back when Microsoft did that with Internet Explorer and Windows, they received a lot of criticism.

Don't get me wrong there - the guys in Microsoft are guilty for their monopolistic efforts to demote Netscape. The deals with the OEM integrators are shameful. But integrating the browser with Windows was a right option made by the IT staff.

Re:Browser integration

[ProfessorPuke]

First, the people who design & write software aren't "IT" (information technology), they're "SE" (software engineering). ITs are the installers and configurizers, and they're certainly lower on the foodchain than a real SE. (At a technical institute I visited, there was a very formal hierarchy: students enrolled as Computer Engineering or EE, flunked 1st semester and switched to Computer Science or SE, and then became IT after flunking again).

2ndly, Microsoft Windows(tm) isn't a "desktop environment" (unlike KDE). After version 3.11, it because an entire operating system. Integrating a web browser into the operating system is a big technical mistake, because it infects the OS with instabilities and inefficiencies that are tolerable in a standalone application.

SE guys (like myself) get angry whenever bad design choices are made to support marketing needs. Microsoft wanted to bundle Internet Explorer(tm) and Windows(tm) into a single product for marketing purposes, so they glommed the source code together in ways that hurt performance of windows as a whole. (Anyone who used Windows98 (tm) much will remember how easy it was for IE to corrupt the whole OS). Numerous compatibilty and security problems were spawned by the "excessive coupling" of browser and OS. (So far KDE is avoiding this trap, because it treats Mozilla quite nicely)

(To be fair, they had other reasons to integrate IE- for instance, to create the illusion that it was smaller/faster than Netscape Navigator, which was forced to install all its own code)

Re:Browser integration

[dimator]

For all the flaming Microsoft gets for copying stuff, it's amazing that KDE doesn't get the same. Just looking at the screenshots, its clearly evident that windows XP's style has definitely had influence on the KDE artists, in terms of icon style, colors, etc.

Re:Browser integration

[JoeBuck]

Konqueror's integration is completely different from IE's integration. IE isn't just integrated into the desktop, but is wired deep into the bowels of the OS, using interfaces not available for other apps. Microsoft made the design as non-modular as they could on purpose, just to kill Netscape. They scrambled up IE DLL's with system DLL's, just to make it painful to remove IE.

Konqueror just uses the same classes that any other app can use. It has no privileged position. Furthermore, you can run Konqueror from a Gnome desktop.

Re:Browser integration

[Chromium_One]

For all the flaming Microsoft gets for copying stuff, it's amazing that KDE doesn't get the same. Just looking at the screenshots, its clearly evident that windows XP's style has definitely had influence on the KDE artists, in terms of icon style, colors, etc.

Funny... when WinXP first came out, I recall hearing loud bitching and groaning about how it "borrowed" look/style/etc ideas from KDE/Gnome. Now it's being said that KDE is stealing from WinXP? None of these products exist in a vaccum... elements evolving in tandem with each other may be unavoidable by now... the entire history of the computing idustry is filled with the wierdest incestuous relationships between ideas and products if you look long enough... perhaps the only way to avoid the appearrance of this would be a new interface paradigm, but every time I've heard someone bring this concept up, they've had little or nothing to back it with. Personally I don't really give a R.A.T.s ass who stole what idea from where, as long as nothing illegal was done and the result is a usable product.

Where was I going with the again? Oh hell, I've forgotten already... perhaps that in and of itself can serve as a metaphor for the entirety of this kind of debate.

Re:Browser integration

[heideggier]

Yeah I have to agree, it seems a great pity that even with OSX being out for more then 2 years OSS developers still seem content with just knocking everything off windows, when a much better approach would be to steal off someone who, at least has some taste in making a UI, This is important because Microsoft have been responsible for some terrible crimes against humanity in terms of UI design and it seems like it is going to take years of bitching on mail lists to correct things which shouldn't have been carried over in the first place.

[disclaimer: I'm aware that you can setup kde just how you like (thats why I use it), what I'm talking about here are just things which annoy the hell out of me when ever I use someone else's 'puter or set it on a default install]

Crime 1, name prefix's , see my documents, my music, my anything, kde changes this to k anything, although it seems more a case of someone just trying to keep their /src tree organised, but is something that just seem's to be taken too far, see previous posts.

Crime 2 the kicker, why does it have to be a direct port of the start menu, (which sucks when you think about it) for example, when you push the k the first icons presented are logoff and shutdown, this is terrible design, someone could trigger a shutdown dialog by sloppy clicking on the K, hell even windows XP corrected this, (why they don't remove these and place them with the applets I have no idea, that seemed the most corret solution to me, and this is how I hack it to work like). Another example, menu lists for applications, couldn't someone work out a faster and more streamlined method, then, k > internet > mozilla > mozilla, (perhaps a pop-up window or something) everyone knows that to have a human interface you have to have as few clinks to activate a application as possible, ie one. but it seems just because windows uses it everything has to be constructed this way,.

Crime 3, icons on the left and window widgets on the right, it seems that it would make more sense to align icons to the right and window widgets on the left since people read from left to right, making less likly that open windows would cover up important icons. (although this is more of a religous issue.)

Now I'm not one of those people who recon apple are the be all and end all of UI design, and kde should look just like OSX with the dock etc, for example a trash can on a IBM seems to make about as much sense as a scum in Rugby league, (although for some reasion it makes sense on a macintosh, and one of the first things do in windows or linux is hide the dame thing but please take the things that have been done right and impliment them.

btw, please don't posts follow ups along the lines of they just do what people are use to, a person living in squalor doesn't know any different

Re:Browser integration

[Metrol]

It is kind funny, though, that KDE is integrating a browser with the desktop environment.

You've got this a little backwards, though it may look very much the same to an end user.

Konqueror itself is just a shell that can embed components. One of those components just happens to be khtml, the web browser. It also embeds a media player, file manager, image viewer, and probably a few other goodies I've neglected to mention. You simply have one window capable of a variety of embeddable tasks.

Microsoft took the approach starting from the browser, then getting things to work around it. It's an entirely different approach, but the end result "appears" to be what KDE is doing.

Re:kde..gnome.. whatever

[Eric Damron]

Both KDE and gnome are excellent. Perhaps the two large teams of people in some 'competition' is the reason why.

Not Debian, for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

That damned distro still has KDE 2..
KDE 3 will be included in Debian at the time GNOME 5 and KDE 9 are being tested, in some 4-5 years (this is exacly the amount of time KDE is not seriously updated in Debian).
I'm not flaming Debian, I [still] use and love it, but I always get annoyed by the lack of updates.

Re:It's fast...

[tempest303]

hahaha, right. I have no doubt that this is faster than previous KDE releases, but you're smoking crack if you think that KDE is actually faster than any of the *box WMs (flux, black, open, etc)

Glad to hear it is getting zippier, though. GNOME and KDE are ok speed-wise, but they could both stand to get better. The 2.5 kernel becoming stable (in the form of 2.6/3.0) and put into distros will help too, with all the preempt, new schedulers, etc. Those also really provide nice speedups for GUI latency.

Everyone always says this

[JoeBuck]

Because a GNU/Linux distribution consists of a huge number of independently developed components, there will always be some cool new upgrade to some important package that comes out just a bit too late to make the cut. In many cases, "too late" can mean "two months before ship date", or even more, for any distributor who bothers to do testing before shipping. Waiting doesn't help, because then someone else upgrades their package, and so on. GCC, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, Apache, mysql, etc. all have their own schedules.

In any case, if 3.1 has cool new stuff, you may want to wait until 3.1.1 for the bugs in the cool new stuff to be fixed. This is no shot at KDE, the same is true for all other big projects.

Re:BSD and KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

While Mosfet might be a decent programmer, he's about as stable as a Windows 95 beta.

While he always praises Linux and KDE, he switches back and forth ALL THE TIME. Every other week its, "Well I'm no longer developing under Linux anymore". Next week, "I'm back".

Kind of reminds you of Ross Perot.

Integrated Groupware

[MBCook]

I relalize that they have a theme going, naming things starting with a 'k', but surely someone else out there things that "kroupware" isn't the best name for a groupware program. "kgroupware" would be ok, "kooperate" would be good, even "kommunity", but "kroupware"? I had the kroup a few times as a kid and it wasn't fun. I like KDE, but if I have get the kroup to use it...

OK, OK, it's a bad pun/joke, but I hadn't seen it yet, and you've got to admit, there are better names they could use.

I don't like the look, it smacks of XP

[pair-a-noyd]

The graphics have the disgusting look of XP.
They look childish, cartoonish.

It looks like it was designed with either little children in mind or simpletons. Probably both.

IF I try it, I will NOT be using the childish looking gui.

I have a serious dislike of M$ products, why would I want my Linux to LOOK like M$???

This is a poor choice in skins/themes and should be deep sixed!!

Useablilty

[e8johan]

Since there has been much discussion of the "Linux on the Desktop" issue, I feel that the Kiosk framework will give KDE a real edge!
This is really what I miss when I try putting Linux boxes in an environment with computer illiterate users wanting to poke around. They try fiddling with the settings just as they do on the Windows boxes. Their fiddling around has been great for me as a admin since I've gotten a great argument for upgrading to later (more lockable) windows versions, thus not having to cope with the notoriously unsafe, crashing, generaly sucking Win9x boxes. Now I run Win2k locked down so that they hardly may move the mouse and I long for the day when I can get them to run Linux boxes without letting them fiddle around and come crying about some "lost icons" or something else.

Great Looking User Interface, hope they use it

[malsdavis]

From the screenshots on that page, KDE has certainly seemed to undergone a much needed default theme upgrade, to bring it in to par with the look of the other 2 modern OS's (windows XP and Mac OS X). The only thing is though that everytime a new KDE comes out I remeber having liked the great new look in screenshots I saw only to find that the look was due to some hard to find (and even harder to install) theme and the theme put on by default was the same out-dated grey, Windows 95 style one. I just hope that THIS time a new stylish theme like the ones in the screenshots is put on by default.

Sounds like hardware trouble

[Chip Salzenberg]

Intermittent gcc errors are a classic symptom of a memory problem; gcc, entirely by accident, is one of the best memory testers around. I used to work for VA Linux, and parallel kernel compilations were a standard part of our pre-ship burn.

Joe-Bob says: Check it out. (Your memory, that is.)

I need a WM that understands multi-tasking

[mvpll]

Well I lasted from 2.0 to 3.0, but I'm afraid it is time for me to change from KDE.

My problem is I want a sensible window manager. What I consider to be a sensible window manger is one that allows me to stop anything from stealing window focus.

The whole point of having a window manager is so that you can run multiple windows. If I'm typing something I expect my keystrokes to go to the currently selected window not to whatever self-important application that decides to raise itself and steal the focus.

I don't care if other windows are raised over my currently selected window, I simply want my keystrokes to go the window that I have explicitly focused on.

Otherwise I might as well only run one application at a time to ensure no random keystroke redirection and would hence have no need for a window manager.

Re:BSD and KDE

[jeremyhu]

Mosfet can do whatever the hell Mosfet wants. It's called volunteer work, and you're not paying 1 cent for it.