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?

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

[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.

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.