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KDE 3.1 Released
Ashcrow writes "KDE 3.1 was released early this morning and boasts new usability enhancements, VNC-compatible desktop sharing, tabbed browsing, and a new download manager, among other enhancements.
You can read the release anouncement here and start downloading from the closest mirror. Kudos to the KDE Team!"
what an awesome (and of course slightly :) behind schedule) release.
tabbed browsing is an excellent that i love to use in moz. i notice it in konqueror, but the hot keys are different. perhaps there's a way to change them, but after months and months of using ctrl+t to get a new tab, i konq uses something different. i'm curious why not use the "standards" the moz dev team included. yeah, there's probably not an rfc for hot keys on opening a new browser tab, but something i use daily is standard.
another thing. i test drove konqueror in rc6, and pop-up windows were enabled by default. i guess this just makes the user find out how to turn them off? most people might not even know that they can turn them off. i think pop-up s/b off by default.
all in all - a very well polished desktop. the kde team delivers quality code as usual!
Ask RedHat. Or didn't you read the KDE binary package policy?
(Just so you know, the KDE developers gave binary packagers plenty of time to get their packages together. If RedHat didn't bother to, that's RedHat's fault. 3.1 has been delayed more than enough already, but it's out now, so it's time to celebrate.)
Well, no RedHat packages, which is not surprising considering the 'treatment' that KDE was subjected to by RH.
Also, I never managed to get the Win key mapped to anything in KDE 3.0.x. I wonder if the situation changed. As I recall, KDE wanted a 'Win' modifier and xmodmap did not have any knowledge of a modifier called 'Win'. Rather unfortunate.
Well, it integrates into KDE, for one. It doesn't look like ass, for two.
Nothing, it uses email to send the invitation (although it can be configured to send over other methods, iirc). However, it's a lot easier to simply type in the invitee's email address and let krfb set up the VNC server, and send the email with instructions on how to connect. It automates things so that the user doesn't have to know anything about configuring a VNC server.
Has anybody else come to the same conclusion that OS X's Aqua or Jaguar are starting to feel boring and lame while open source UIs offer more innovative and fresh themes all the time and ever more often? I honestly think so. I don't see anything cool in Jaguar anymore. No pun intented.
VNC is nice to have (but would I ever use it), some might like tabbed browsing, etc. etc., but that's nothing like finally having good javascript support, better and faster rendering in konqueror.
I'll wait for 3.2 with upgrading.
Every time I read about how "Linux is not ready for the desktop", I just laugh. It's KDE that's the real desktop star, and yes it is ready! I've been using KDE at home since KDE2 came out, and find myself using Windows at work less and less.
When Windows XP came out, I gave it a fair shot. I didn't boot Linux/X/KDE for 3 months. Outlook was a giant pain, compared with KMail. IE was a nightmare, and I had to install Phoenix to escape unwanted programs and scripts. Easy CD Creator had me longing for X-CD-Roast. And XP crashed way too often.
Now KDE is getting even better. The SSH stuff is exactly what I need! Life is good.
I've been a long-time GNOME user, and I'm just about ready to try something else.
I recently made some new themes for my GNOME2 desktop and was stymied by my GTK1 applications that... well... just wouldn't cooperate.
I'd previously made some GTK1 themes that more-or-less matched the GTK2 ones, but I cannot figure out how to convince GTK1 apps to use certain themes under my GNOME2 desktop environment. It's completely opaque.
There are so many apps I use that are still GTK1 (Galeon, Evolution, GAIM, etc etc etc) that my desktop is just plain ugly right now.
I'm getting fed up, and am trying to find something that will give me a nice even look & feel across applications. My main fear is that KMail and Konquerer won't be good Evolution/Galeon replacements.
In the end, I'll probably go OS/X, but I really hope it doesn't happen.
fifth sigma, inc.
You can have more than one user on the same desktop. Like say you've got a friend who's a linux n00b across the world and you wanna help him/her. He/she can just activate shared desktop, you connect to it, and boom there's another cursor in there. Or ideally at least.
VNC allows like you to run GUI remotely, just as ssh allows you to shell remotely, but the difference is, more than one person can be controlling the same display. It'd be like having two people typing on the same shell line, cept it's a lot more useful in the GUI world than in the console world.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
Well, personally I think the Aqua widgets look better than the Keramik ones (if you ignore the stripes! argh!). However, I prefer the Mist theme for GTK2 above all those, they look good, clean, and imho pretty sophisticated. They look good while avoiding being theme overkill. It's completely personal opinion though, these things always are. I think Keramik is a bit fat.
You raise a good point wrt theming though. Sure, everybody thought Aqua was cool when it first came out, and I guess many still do, but looks are about fashion and taste, and fashion changes. I remember when Windows 95 came out I thought it looked brilliant!
Now everything supports theming, new "in" styles come and go like anything. I know you can hack theming support onto MacOS, but without actual support from Apple that's all it is, a hack. I wonder if that's really a good idea in the long run. Maybe they'll introduce charged for visual styles, to give value add.
The developers of KDE have been discussing the subject of UI enhancements lately. This discussion was caused by the jumpstart of a project (slicker)) which tries to radically change the UI, which so many people are used to.
In time, I guess you will see less and less feature copying and more and more innovation. And if something innovative is good enough for mainstream, will it be accepted?
The speedup in 3.1 is very noticeable. It looks great but also everything is much more responsive then before. :) but it feels so much different (i.e. better). The only issue I had before was that KDE was always slower compared to windoze running on the same machine but that difference seems to be almost completely gone.
I don't quite understand the complaints people have about KDE looking like windoze. Yes, it has windows
Senor, what do you speak of?
Your distro will handle this, install like you install any other package (or port if you use OpenBSD)...
BTW, It's not available yet in the Slackware-current tree. Since I just installed 3.0.5a yesterday, I guess I'll dump it and try 3.1r5, WTH...
Yes, that's right, your favorite mirror for your distro has 3.1-some-prerelease available under current... Leave the poor KDE site alone, you won't be able to get it to compile and install right anyway...
lr
I say, "catch up before moving ahead." Users expect X to be in a good desktop, and KDE would be best implementing X before moving onto Y and Z. In some ways, KDE is up to Windows XP (video previews in the file manager), but in others it is not even at Windows 95 yet (easy folder sharing). Of course, sometimes it is beyond everything (kio_fish).
As far as copying goes, KDE (and most open source software) make no qualms about copying. They just take what they feel is best in all cases. Often, Windows does things a nice way so they copy. You don't reach the top by avoiding good ideas.
However, I do sometimes feel the way you do, in that there is not enough innovation (but I can justify it, by saying KDE is still in the "catch up" phase). Even so, what kinds of things would you prefer added to KDE? What kinds of innovations do you speak of?
Lest anyone be accusing Red Hat of animosity towards KDE, note that RH's kernels are also behind the latest releases from Linus, and yet nobody ... well, nobody worth listening to -- claims that RH has it in for Mr. Torvalds' little project. I think it's far more likely that RH just has a rigorous QA process with the aim of releasing no package before its time than that they hate KDE. By the way, when the update for security problems in a recent version of KDE came out, RH came out with them in a timely fashion. This (3.1) release has lots of new neat features, but it's not a security update. Perhaps they believe (rightly, IMO) that users can wait for shiny new objects.
Besides, have you looked at how many packages it takes to install KDE? Eeep! I suppose up2date can handle that. Of course, the upgradability issue is there with GNOME; and I can't recall off the top of my head when RH has offered a point-release update for GNOME that wasn't security-related [ that's a hedge -- I can't recall when they have release a point-release update for GNOME period ].
For those of you who absolutely must have the latest, then take a look in the "rawhide" directory of any RH mirror, e.g. this one.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I was a long time GNOME follower. Knowing GNOME 1.x and 2.x of it's best but I must admit that KDE 3.1 is the best Desktop Environment that I've seen so far.
- It's fast,
- Clean,
- Consistent,
- Really integrated,
- Usable,
- Beats Windows in certain situations on length.
I belive that with the 3.1 release of KDE that there is no real future for GNOME and I sometimes wonder why they still work on it and put so much effort into that project. GNOME will never comes out of the 'development' phase. Once an application looks halfway usable (still in development phase) it then starts to get changed once again which then makes it unusable for the next couple of months again.
There are a lot of nasty issues in GNOME even now in the stabilized gnome-2-2 branch which will get released in 2 days.
- Log in as user under console (not gdm) and then enter startx to load up X and GNOME then try to immediately log out. Nothing happens for the next 3-5 minutes. Then one time the logout dialog pleases itself to show up and let you log out (even this doesn't work seriously often). This problem has been announced on bugzilla.gnome.org and hasn't been fixed till yet.
- Gnome-Terminal install the bluecurve theme and fullsize it. The theme disappears.
- Bonobo and Glade toolbars are looking differently get a look here.
- Documentation for programmers. There are still no sign for usable GNOME 2 documentations, how should a programmer get into GNOME 2.x development when he knows shit about howto use the functions and what purpose they have. There is the API reference manuals for all libraries (still unfinished and incomplete), there are old documentations for GTK1 and GNOME1 and there is the GTK 2 tutorial which only describes the first 20% of the Toolkit but nothing more. No documentation explaining Gnome-VFS, Bonobo and other complex things. You've been told to 'use the source Luke' all the time but it's hard spending 3 months into buggy code of others to get a clue how things are made and then adapt maybe buggy code to your own project because you don't know it better howto use these things.
- Still nothing as simple as a Fileselector yet,
- Still no snap to grid feature.
- GNOME is mostly a hacking around when I have the mood to it or when I feel that I need to tweak this and that. There is no real roadmap or featureplan such as in KDE even months ago I was able to read and KNOW what will be in KDE 3.1 and even now I know what will be in 3.2
GNOME are hyping and making shitty things such as 'open recent' features look like its a revolutionary progress in the desktop while on the other hand its a little gift from KDE.
Sorry to come over with the same shit all the time but people tend to compare KDE and GNOME all the time so do I. I really like KDE and I also like GNOME very much (used to be a GNOME follower) but all this is soo sad. Now seeing KDE 3.1 and compareing it with 3.0 then I ask myself wow. What's wrong with GNOME ? 2.0 and 2.2 is no big step if you compare it with the changes made in KDE.
Well this can endlessly be expanded. I appreciate and welcome the work of the GNOME developers they are definately trying to do a good job but imo it's not enough for the public. And it makes me sick reading all the shit from GNOME zealots replying to KDE people how much mature GNOME is (which it definately is not). Fancy themes and icons doesn't make a good desktop environment.
The do have one. It's called Konstuct.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Good for you lucky people with Linux boxes!. Here I am stuck up with Windows.
Hey is someone porting it to Cygwin;)?.
Is there a KHTML port being planned?.
Yes, am stuck in windows!
No, no vnc over ssh ATM. (I think that ssh tunnels are pretty hackish btw, ssl should result in a smoother user experience).
RDP support is currently in CVS - but there is no RDP server for X11, and it would be a lot of work to write one... rather expect the ability to use X11 as protocol with a UI like VNC.
Don't get tooo excited by the mime support. :) Also, for me and few others, the kde interface doesn't work, so you end up having to use the gtk message box to enter the password.. Plus the cancel button doesn't work, the error handling is bad, and sometimes both kde and aegypton want your password.
:)
It isn't supported by default - you need to use Aegypton(wrong spelling - close enough).
It doesn't integrate particulary well, and for me was a pita
Oh, and I keep getting bad signatures on mailing lists. Other people do as well - I'm not sure why - I think it is to do with the =20 being done incorrectly, or the language encoding or something.
But otherwise it is really cool - I can't wait till it is polished. I grumble a lot, but I love it really
I usually try KDE every new release, and after some time, I wind up going back to GNOME. I'm just more comfortable with GNOME. I can't explain it.
But these KDE releases are knocking the socks off those little GNOME feet with features. Some things that caught my eye, in order of coolness: kio_fish, VNC integration, and a file selector dialog that doesn't suck.
It's very impressive, and it's terribly exciting to see this rate of polish being added to these big projects. Congrats to the KDE team for another (hopefully solid) release.
Jason.
> What this does is provides a KDE-based VNC viewing program
What does it do that vncviewer doesn't do?
Scaled windows, better cut and paste support, no *XResource shit...
I used to use vnc with KDE... then I found out about krdc... I have never looked back.
Interestingly, the new kdrc in CVS HEAD also supports RDP right out of the box, and I hear rumblings of Citrix now and again too (using Citrix's libs, IIRC)
Personally I use apt-get (RPM version) and point my sources.list to here (Don't tell them I just anounced it on /.)
Personally I like the Keramik window decorations, but I despise the widgets.
I use the KDE default widget set (HighColour Default I think it's called), Keramik for the window decorations, "Desert Red" for the colour scheme (I get so sick of blue or black-based schemes) and Noia for the icons. I'm not a big fan of transparency, but I have just a hint (96 or 98% opacity) for the menus -- what the hell, it's kind of neat and I have the processor power for it.
Screenshot is here. The IM app you see is Psi, the best damned Jabber IM I've run across. I'm not the author, but I have contributed a few patches to help the project.
The vnc desktop sharing idea is a pretty cool one (using it for support is an XP idea, i believe), and is something Gnome could do with. I think it'd be a good project for Red Hat to get involved with. So, if you purchase a high level of support from them, and you *really* can't solve a problem you're getting, you can call tech support and they could remotely do it for you in front of your eyes. Theres money to be made there I think.
As for KDE, well it's got a load of new features etc....but it's....still....ugly. Sorry.
i wish i was but oh well
Back when Microsoft and IBM were buddy-buddy pals, they were working on something called "CUA", a TLA that stands for "Common User Access" (do a net search on it for details -- there ARE plenty of books out there on it) This is where things like ctl-c for copy, ctl-v for paste, and the like came into being
Basically, Microsoft has proven the concept -- make the same keystrokes map to the same (conceptual) action all the time, and users will like/learn/adapt/adopt your software that much faster. Unfortunately, by the time you implement the majority of these "common" features, you're "desktop" environment tends to look pretty homogenous when set next to any other desktop. (of course, that is probably how it should be anyway -- the "desktop" environment is merely a way to get to the data on a system, not the system itself...)
Microsoft has pretty much always muddied the waters when it comes to the distinction between a "user interface" and the "system interface" [better known as the "operating system"...] By tightly integrating the user interface with the actual OS code, you create the impression that the user interface itself is indeed "the OS" -- IBM kept a tacit distinction between "OS/2" and the "Presentation Manager" [you could, for instance, build a text-based version of the PM and substitute it instead -- you end up with something that looks amazingly similar to Unix on a mainframe box...] Linux just proves that this "distinction" is certainly feasible -- the implementation of the user interface can be completely seperate from the OS (and as interchangeble as a set of tires on the family car...)
OK, I'm rambling now -- time to let the mod-trolls do their worst to these comments...
As a long time KDE user, I have to say it really isn't. KDE seems much more Mac (classic Mac, not OS X) to me than anything else. The KDE-bundled applications are very non-Windows like. They tend to be simple and streamlined, rather than bloated and complex. KWord, for example, is very elegant, like WordPerfect, rather than like MS Word.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...