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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."
Now this is looking to be a nice upgrade.. as a bit of an art junky I'm pleased at the nice amount of eye candy they're including.
Roll on the release date, I just hope this nicer front-end will appeal to those non-Linux users... we might have to start doing 'interviews' with people who have switched to Linux, redress the balance a bit!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Did they finally fix all of the bugs from the 3.0 release? Have they made 3.x a little more backwards compatible from 2.x? I made the mistake of upgrading from 2 to 3 thinking that the KDE would upgrade all of my old desktops, configurations, settings, etc. - I was barely able to get my mail out of KMail, and I lost all of my filters and rules in the process. KDE may have a pretty face, but I think the development work so far ( ESPECIALLY the documentation ) is half-assed at best. At BEST.
Want to impress me? Probably not, but I'll tell you anyways; it's real easy: fix the bugs. Write real, useful, consistent documentation. Set up the KDE so that when the many, many programs that core dump do their usual crash I'm able to automatically send that to the KDE people without having to run a 20-minute wizard. Write your fucking desktop program so that people upgrading can do so seamlessly and painlessly - just because you give me an open source desktop doesn't mean you ignore everything else BUT the source code. bah
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
i was a long time GNOME user that recently switched over to KDE. i don't want to start a flame here but i think people should know why i changed over. i am one of these persons that had high expectations into GNOME 2 but i was not really impressed the first time i loaded it up. i was following a lot of conversations on *.gnome.org mailinglists and saw that the future GNOME 2.x is targeted the 'untechnical new users'. with other words they target the 'no users desktop'. they are assuming a lot of never confirmed things about their users. things like "the user don't know what a window manager is" or "the user don't know what themes are" and similar things. some of them are sounding really offensive and make you think that the GNOME developer have a bad sense for their users. not to mention that nontechnical users never heard or know what linux is. it's a shame to see how they cripple their own GNOME into a pile of shit. a lot of people that i know of left GNOME in favour to KDE. personally i never thought that this may happen for me too but i recently left GNOME in favour to KDE and i feel really happy now. i finally have the feeling to be productive. i want to thank the kde people so much.
o rg/archives/usability/2002-August/msg00261.html
.php?thread_id=1176218&forum_id=6200
here are some contexts to proof that i don't simply troll around for no reasons:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usabili ty/2002-October/msg00021.html
http://mail.gnome.
some people that got really fedup with GNOME 2.
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/g2ui.html
t his is called a GEP. GNOME 2 has a lot of these GEP's read the last paragraph and how they threaten users.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum
one of the core developers of GALEON 2 (one of the few remaining ones) left.
historically kde and Gnome have been to hard to configure due to having too many configuration tools all named similar things.
I'm confused. Since at least 2.0 (Probably back to 1.x days, I hadn't used KDE then.) KDE has had exactly one control panel app, kcontrol. It's always been in the same place on the default KDE toolbar.
Similarly, Gnome has gnomecc which is one app, and I believe has been around since the 0.40.x days.
Where are these multitudes of configuration tools you speak of?
Funny, I've had talks with 2 guys who run BSD, (freebsd and one netbsd), and both just wanted KOffice, but didnt want to bother with the (their terms) Bloat of KDE. Both came back with the same argument, If I wanted that fluff, I'd run XP.
:)
These guys will spend hours tweaking the the look of window maker and not realize thats EXACT reason why people want KDE.
But KDE goes a step further to offer all the Glueware apps people want, remote desktop control, pim syncronizers, mime type GRAPHICAL file managers, and the other countless useability features they put into the desktop.
BTW, I'm super freaking happy Mosfet is BACK, and releasing a new Liquid engine/theme for KDE. This and the new XFT2 font anti-aliasing, I could do the happy dance.
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Distrowatch
I use Window Maker (which I would probably put in league with fluxbox) on my desktop, and I much prefer it to Gnome or KDE, even aside from the speed issues. One of the reasons that I switched to linux (from an MS platform) was to try out new interfaces and see which one I found most functional. And it turns out that I'm more productive with Window Maker than I am with many full desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Windows). Having the choice of different and sometimes simpler desktop interfaces will always be welcome in my opinion.
There will obviously always be an update you "really need" to some program in the distro - now it's KDE 3.1, then probably XFree 4.3...
IMHO a lot more important is that they include gcc 3.2, since this is something you cannot upgrade later. KDE 3.1 OTOH can be very easily upgraded (of course, modem users won't like it), suse packages of kde are usually available almost immediately.
mczak
Well actually, I've been thinking of switching from KDE to something lighter. The reason is that I don't really *use* KDE. In other words, I click on the Big K menu roughly never. The apps I use are rxvt, gvim, mozilla, xmms, and sometimes konqueror for file management.
But the fact remains that Kicker keeps me around. I love the way it behaves, I can configure it easily, all my favorite tray utilities are running, I can switch desktops with no effort, etc. If I can find something similar to Kicker without all the KDE extras, I guess that would be a fair compromise.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
As much as i like KDE i dont like the direction its taking. Personally i just want a working desktop that i can tweak and turn to my liking. What i dont want is applications and settings scattered all over and 10 ways to do the same thing. Integrating net enabled applications into the desktop is a sure way to bad security and should be avoided. Integrating everything and the kitchen sink has its disadvantage when it comes to bugs that are multi dimensional. They are very hard to find and sometimes impossible to fix without breaking stuff.
Kde should concentrate on doing a great desktop and stop from integrating applications deep down into the core. You can do the same things much more shallow and not at the expence of security. Soon KDE will be its own distribution and that cant be what they strive for.
HTTP/1.1 400
Yea, I keep wanting to like KDE (and Gnome) and always try out the newest versions, but somehow I always seem to end up back with Window Maker. It's fast, clean, stays out of my way, does what I need. I'm not knocking KDE, it's an impresive piece of work, but that's the great thing about Linux (or BSD) isn't it? You get to use what you want and not what Bill or Steve think you should use.
KControl still has some issues. Some of the modules have similar names and functions. For example, there are two named Panels. Both do things related to the panel. Particularly for new users, it could be very confusing if you look at one, and don't find what you're looking for, since you may not assume that there is another module of the same name in another category for what you want. Also, some of the more advanced features still require editing the text files.
can you browse your files w/ tabs or just web pages?
i would love tabbed based directory browsing, especially if they could do the photoshop combining tabs into windows thing (of course then Adobe sues them)
ah if only my C was better (or any good at all) i'd give it a shot myself...
but is wired deep into the bowels of the OS, using interfaces not available for other apps
Otherwise, this would exist.
Oh wait. It does.
I am very happy with Debian, and I am not writing this to troll, but I don't understand this trend about private repositories. So I was hoping that someone with more insight than me could explain it to me :)