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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."
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?
Well, that's a relief. I was worried that the newest version would suck worse than all previous versions. *whew*
AND it looks more like Windows95? Awesome!
"It will certainly be the best KDE ever."
Better than the future releases? Woah, I must download that now.
Using it since lunch. Every KDE release seems to get faster and faster. It's actually faster than fluxbox. F' plain window managers if full desktop environments are faster than them. F' twm.
So does hitting ctrl-alt-backspace automatically press the "Submit" button in your web browser?
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.
Andreas> P.S. Let's please be nice to each other, OK?
well... at least we won't have to wait too long to do a KDE-less install of RH8, then install KDE3.1 and skip the RH mangling part of it...
Is it just me or is the kde.org server extremely slow? Is this related to that downtime I heard about a few days ago?
Anyway, I do have to admit, KDE is one of the more attractive desktop environments - even better than WinXP (with its ugly green/blue combo - it don't work). I would use KDE as my main desktop environment, cause my favorite distro - Mandrake installs the d.e. by default. But I've never decided to use KDE (nor GNOME) because the two are extremely fat and slow on low-end systems. Even on my high end systems, I'd rather give up looks for power and speed.
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!
Well, I'm using KDE 3.0.4 on Debian and it works great. Stuff doesn't load immediately though, but what's the problem with that anyway? It's not like you're going to start a program just to close it in 5 seconds. When I open a link in Konqueror in a new window it appears immediately.
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.
KDE 3.1, the strongest KDE release to date, promises new goodies for just about everyone who gets to enjoy the full KDE desktop experience. Here is a sampling of what is in store for you:
Browsing with Tabs. The many fans of tabbed browsing will be delighted by this new addition to the KDE web browser ( Konqueror ) (screenshot). To simplify downloading a large number of files, a new download manager (KGET), which fully integrates into Konqueror, has joined the network package (kdenetwork). It manages any number of downloads in one window, where transfers can be added, removed, paused, resumed, queued or scheduled. A dialog displays transfer status, including progress, size, speed and estimated time to completion.
Eye Candy. The artistically-inclined KDE contributors have showered us with a basket of new eye candy. As shown in this screenshot, KDE 3.1 will ship with the contemporary Crystal icon set as well as the original new Keramik theme. The screenshot also shows the new drop-shadows. To help manage these stunning themes, KDE will provide a new theme manager with improved theme style and color decoration previews (screenshot). Menus and other desktop windows can also use attractive drop shadows, as shown in the screenshot above.
Personal Information Management. On the PIM front, the email client ( KMail ) has gained several privacy and security enhancements - namely S/MIME, PGP/MIME and X.509v3 support - in collaboration with the Aegypten project, an IT security project sponsored by the German government (screenshot). The calendar / scheduling application (KOrganizer) features a new Exchange 2000 plugin. The address book (KAddressbook) has gained the ability to fetch contact information from one or more LDAP servers. It can also print contact information and import industry-standard vCards.
While not included in the 3.1 release, the next quantum jump in KDE's email / groupware architecture is scheduled for KDE 3.2, when KDE will ship a completely copy-lefted, integrated groupware system. Currently known as the Kroupware Project, it is being sponsored by the German government and will integrate the major KDE PIM applications (screenshot, screenshot). More about this project, and some additional screenshots, can be found on the dot. KDE 3.2 will also feature the ability to use Vim as the mail composer (screenshot).
File Management. The file manager (Konqueror) has a number of new goodies, such as folder icons which reflect a folder's contents, a video thumbnail generator and a number of plugins for providing enhanced- or meta-information about various file types (e.g., images, binary packages, source code). The file search utility can now search file meta-information for searching multi-media files.
Desktop Sharing. For those who switch work stations frequently, KDE offers a new VNC-compatible desktop sharing framework. It enables users to share a KDE desktop across multiple machines (screenshot).*
Enterprise. Enterprises, Internet cafes and similar users will appreciate enhancements to the KDE Kiosk framework (the Kiosk framework provides an easy way to disable certain features within KDE to create a more controlled environment). In addition, the panel (Kicker) now supports fully customized menus.
Multimedia. The multimedia framework (kdemultimedia) has a new video decoder based on Xine. Xine is a video framework which provides support for various video formats, such as AVI, DivX, Cinepak, Sorenson Video, MPEG 1/2 and 4, QuickTime / MOV, ASF and others.
Games. For the playful among us, KDE 3.1 will offer a number of new games in the games package (kdegames), including a golf game ( Kolf ) (screenshot), an Atlantik and Monopoly-type game ( Atlantik ), a Blackjack game ( Megami ). and a Same-like game ( Klickery ).
Ease of Use. A number of other improvements are meant simply to make the desktop easier to use and configure. For example, the application finder (KAppfinder) provides a nice tree view for selecting the applications to include in the KDE desktop menu hierarchy. Two new user notification methods have also been added for providing non-obtrusive informational messages: a passive popup window (KPassivePopup), which pops up next to the application's entry in the panel's taskbar (without stealing the focus), as well as messages which appear in an application's title-bar (KWindowInfo). In addition, the control center (KControl) has received a face lift and better organization (screenshot).
Miscellaneous. Of course work under the hood continues for KDE 3.1 as well. It provides a number of speed improvements, such as Konqueror start-up time, a number of usability enhancements by the KDE Usability Project, as well as almost 1,000 critter fixes.
More information about planned KDE 3 features is available for KDE 3.1 and KDE 3.2.
Some interesting KDE statistics: the KDE CVS source code repository consists of about 2.6 million lines of code (LOC) (for comparison, the GNU/Linux kernel version 2.5.29 consists of about 3.1 million lines of code). The KDE Project consists of hundreds of active contributors, with 300 of them translating KDE into over 70 languages (KDE 3.0.4 shipped in 51 languages). In May 2002 over 11,014 CVS commits were executed. The KDE website has 24 official mirrors in 16 countries and the KDE FTP site has 71 official mirrors in 30 countries.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
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
Both KDE and gnome are excellent. Perhaps the two large teams of people in some 'competition' is the reason why.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Yeah, it's too bad their servers aren't nearly as fast under the
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
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?
Yes. The box in my office at work, a P-II 300 with 196 megs of ram, running Mandrake 9. Mozilla takes about 5 seconds to load. My Mandrake 9 box at home, Athlon 1800+ with 512 megs is quite snappy. I think Mozilla actually loads faster in Linux than Windows.
but my P4 can open StarOffice in about 14 seconds. Mozilla (without the pre-launching stuff configured) takes 17 seconds to load
MS Word takes 2.1 (two point one) secs to load on my P3/1Ghz, WinXP-SP2; I just timed it with my stopwatch.
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?
Stick to Commodore 64, they haven't changed features in years, and are an exceedingly tight code-base. (fits in less than 64K,not meg, not gig, but K)
If you want a fast window manager combo, how about ratpoison+screen?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I should also probably add that on the Linux workstations in our labs (which each have a GIG of RAM, mind you), KDE and its associated apps take forever to load. You click in KDE and that little background-flashing-mozilla-dragon cursor will go on and on for about a good 20 seconds.
I've since switched to GNOME + Galeon, which seems a bit snappier. Plus, the fonts, good God the fonts. KDE never seemed to "remember" its font settings, and kind of had a mind of its own. It has this habit of setting the context menu fonts to a cursive calligraphy font, yet no choice exists for that on the font settings menu!
Plus, GNOME, well, I'm impressed at how far its come. It actually looks polished, and has a dab of professionalism on it -- maybe it's the whole Nautilus project, I dunno.
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.
-
Distrowatch
Here are a bunch of screenshots for your enjoyment while the current server is recovering...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I wonder who at M$ was the one who decided to buy an ad for this story. Ah well, the sweet irony of clicking on an M$ ad in a KDE story thus generating additional revenue for /. :-).
I stole this Sig
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.
Is another man's usability issue.
I have a gripe regarding the theme used in this screenshot:
UI developers: please stop using curves in widgets and window decorations unless use can use alpha blending to make the edges of the curve look smooth. I'm sorry but monitor resolution just isn't sharp enough to make curves look good without alpha blending and anti-aliasing.
Gnome to KDE: Mission Accomplished, Convert Thrilled
He's slightly right. In the current GNOME, sawfish-ui (the control center for Sawfish) has for some unfathomable reason seceded from the GNOME Control Center.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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.
KDE 3.2 will also feature the ability to use Vim as the mail composer
But will EMACS 21.3 feature the ability to use KDE as the window manager?
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...
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
dang. you are right. ROX rocks. it rules my world. It's fast, neat. snazzy. wowzer. HuzzAH!
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
> You click in KDE and that little background-flashing-mozilla-dragon cursor will go on and on for about a good 20 seconds.
What exactly are your system specs? On my athlon xp 2200+, 512mb ram, it takes less than two sections to load anything (abiet KDE itself). If you have comparable hardware, you might have something misconfigured.
You have missed an opportunity to upgrade your unstable box to 3.0.4.
3 .0.4/Deb ian
l
The KDE mirrors have Debian packages available for both Sid and Woody:
ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/
Add that to your apt.sources and party on. I believe it's a good idea to remove 2.2.x entirely before doing the 3.0.x upgrade.
FAQ here:
http://davidpashley.com/debian-kde/faq.htm
I haven't really been following this religious debate, but i'm dying to know: is it the KDE/Gnome developers who are competing with one another or the KDE/Gnome users who are creating this illusion of competition by engaging in some stupid holy war over a GUI...
I guess people will fight over anything these days...
-- Jim
Hey, I said i'd never run a Microsoft OS again and i'm sticking to it. :)
-- Jim
> The interface it totally off (IMHO) compared to RedHat's BlueCurve theme. Buttons and icons need some work so that if feels more sleek.
I'm not a big fan of either the _looks_ bluecurve or keramik. But imho, both are quite sleek. Have you actually tried the KDE 3.1 betas and felt the "feel" of keramik? It's pretty nice, although I still prefer lighter themes. Note that keramik is not actually default in KDE 3.1. It's just an option in kpersonalizer.
> Also, KDE should decide if they want a start menu or a application dock. Having both just doesn't look right.
?? Can you elaborate? Having both seems to be a valid compromise between presenting the user with not enough options, and presenting the user with too many. Anyways, kicker is customizable, and you are free to remove either the k-menu or the "dock-like" features.
> and had one ugly ass kid. I couldn't even begin to imagine a Beowulf of these.
Again, KDE 3.1 is customizable. If you don't like something, remove/change it.
Sometimes pure logic brings us to conclusions that we may find difficult to accept. I know a lot of technically knowledgeable people are uncomfortable with the notion, but here it is: KDE (and other Open Source software, of course) is an enormous act of love.
Open Source software is people working for the benefit of other people. That's love and love is beautiful.
Okay, those who wish can go back to feeling negative or cynical.
Apparently they're waiting for gcc 3.2 to be the default compiler before they upload kde 3 to unstable. As to what's holding gcc 3.2, go figure. I read somewhere that they're waiting for glibc 2.3, or was it the other way around.
For reference, .debs have been available for every single KDE 3.0.x release from -rc1 onwards. If you read the FAQ, or even done something really simple like asked debian-kde, or apt the bot, you'd know this. But instead you seem content to spew incorrect crap all over Slashdot.
Please, grow up.
The poster further down is right, the transition to g++ 3.2 has to be complete before KDE can go in; the alternative is renaming every library, which will be much more painful (trust me). Plus, the maintainers just don't have the time.
-DanielS, occasional KDE package monkey
I've used a number of pre-compiled KDE rpm builds from SuSE over the years. Some of them absolutely fly, some are as sluggish as hell. KDE performance is significantly affected by how good or bad a job the packager does of compilation, and whether or not the options chosen suit your architecture (Intel/AMD). Consequently, I will only trust a speed comparison now between installations that are freshly compiled the same on the same system.
The GNOME folks have made some decisions and have justified those decisions.
So you disagree with them, is it really such a big deal that they aren't targeting their work at you? Does everything have to be about you?
By and large the GNOME folks seem pragmatic and thoughtful about the whole thing. To quote Havoc: Basically I think their approach is sound. They are creating a simple, stable, usable desktop environment. If you want to add complexity on top of that as a user (by choosing a different Window manager, or using a tweakui style addon that manipulates configuration options that are normally hidden) then fine, you can do that.
It is much easier to start simple and add complexity than it is to start complex and add simplicity for those that crave it.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
To simplify downloading a large number of files, a new download manager (KGET), which fully integrates into Konqueror, has joined the network package (kdenetwork). It manages any number of downloads in one window, where transfers can be added, removed, paused, resumed, queued or scheduled. A dialog displays transfer status, including progress, size, speed and estimated time to completion.
Does it come with the required bandwidth?
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.
Here solve your very own problems without any C++ what so ever. Heck, just use the Gnome icons if you prefer them. They work just as nicely under KDE.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
this shouldn't be a surprise, but: you can switch from A4 to US Letter size paper in the print dialog or the print control panel. as for the rulers, right click on one and be happy to see you can switch to inches (among other choices).
the defaults may be european, but that might be because the people who wrote those features are in europe.
you may also want to expect your American distro maker to set it up for Americanized defaults.
>Apparently they're waiting for gcc 3.2 to be the default compiler before they upload kde 3 to unstable.
Well, I have 3.2 on a stock Mandrake 9.0 setup on an Athlon-XP 1600+ and the compiler craps out say once in every 15 compiles (of average-sized files). Last night I was compiling the multimedia package of kde3.1 beta2 and had to start a while loop of makes because one big file (artsmodules.cc I think - some 13,000 line computer generated file) kept choking it to death. It's such the annoyance.
One more thing. Windows XP and 2k both profiles application launch. So when you run an application you have runned before, the OS will preload libraries it know the application will ask for during launch.
If we were to do the same, we would have to merge binutils and KDE. (With the current expansion rate of KDE it can't be far off)
What do you mean kde 3.1 is around 10-20Mb?
Okey, so I have activated debugging info, but anyway my installation of KDE takes 2Gbyte!, and this is without the i18n-stuff which totals 800Mbytes.
I guess without debugging and i18n you could get KDE 3.1 down to a few hundred megabytes, but not much less. KDE is huge in every sense of the word.
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.
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 :)
You can't re-implement IE without using IE, because IE is part of the OS. That's his point. If you wanted to write a combination file manager/web browser with all the functionality if IE, you would need to write one from scratch (like mozilla or konq), and then it wouldn't integrate with the OS - thus not gaining the benefit of being pre-loaded with the system libraries, etc.
You can, of course, use the existing components and APIs for HTML rendering, file access, etc. However, thats not a replacement for IE - that is IE.
Since you're brave enough to try Qt 3.1 beta, you should try FreeType 2 from CVS. They've got some really cool stuff in the autohinter that works much better than disabling hinting entirely.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE Is only that large if install *everything*. Otherwise, it probably can fit in 20MB. Besides, you're 2GB figure is *way* off. I've got a Gentoo install with O3-optimized (read: larger than usual) binaries.
/usr/kde/3.1 gives me 278,468 KB /usr/qt/3.1 gives me 54,452 KB
du --total -s
du --total -s
In total, around 300 MB, not bad considering that this is a full KDE 3.1 install, which includes a browser, mail client, PIM, office suite, two imaging apps, several games, several educational programs, a couple of multimedia players, a dozen utilities, half a dozen network clients, Postscript/PDF viewer, a CD ripper, and an MP3 jukebox!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Hmm, debugging shouldn't really make things 10 times larger. Maybe it's some weird GCC/C++ interaction. Either way, what, then is your point? Windows programs don't ship with debugging built in (and only developers should enable it anyway), so it's quite right to say that KDE is rather slim.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Joe-Bob says: Check it out. (Your memory, that is.)
Hmm... it's a network managed workstation so I don't have root access, but thanks for the suggestion.
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.
I was only arguing against the 10-20Mbyte statement, because kdelibs+kdebase in themselves takes up a significant amount of space.
You didn't read what I said. Yes, you CAN do that but it will always be intrinsically larger and less efficent than IE - and it won't integrate with the OS the way IE does and can. because all those calls are integrated into the system libraries. Using them is using IE. For example - windows key + e opens an explorer window - Explorer is a component of IE (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it). You can't bind that key combo to your application. IE is a file manager as well as a web browser - type "C:/" into IE sometime - so thats why I talked about file access.