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?

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

[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: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? ;)

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.

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.

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.