KDE 3.2 Alpha 1 Finally on FTP

An anonymous reader cut-and-pastes from the announcement: "Stephan Kulow finally managed to get the last bits of the KDE 3.2 Alpha 1 codenamed 'Brokenboring' including KDevelop 3.0 Alpha 6 on the ftp server (the mirrors should soon pick it up). There won't be any binary packages for this release because the KDE 'P(a)i' release is coming out soon. Everyone using it is asked to compile it with --enable-debug, so we can get valuable feedback. There is a new unstable version of Konstruct to install it."

Comments

KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[Anonymous Coward]

The progress that these guys have made in 5 years and the sheer volume of quality code is simply amazing. What are these guys doing right as compared to all the other projects? They even stick to their development and release schedules better than most commercial companies. And despite everyone calling for the death of C++, KDE is the shining example of what can be accomplished in that language. I seriously doubt it could have been constructed in any other language and produce as quick and relatively error-free code as these guys have produced.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[RoLi]

What are these guys doing right as compared to all the other projects?

In my opinion, the KDE guys are just a bunch of hackers that do it for fun with not much political, religious and legal considerations.

Technical considerations are always number 1 for KDE. As an example, KDE has chosen QT because of it's clean design - despite the license which could have been interpreted as incompatible (or just evil) by some at that time. (Today it's GPLed)

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[tonyt]

And despite everyone calling for the death of C++, KDE is the shining example of what can be accomplished in that language.

ahem, while leaning heavily on moc.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[IamTheRealMike]

Hmm.. well, desktop-neutral software is neither an issue for KDE or Gnome, so that point is moot.

Maybe not for the KDE or Gnome projects, but the point is certainly not moot for their users, who often wish to use these apps and have them integrate nicely.

And, incidentally, they're both horribly bloated and sluggish applications. Frankly, I think KOffice and Konqueror/KHTML have a better long term future, especially now that KOffice will be using the OpenOffice XML document formats and Apple is helping to develop KHTML for their own browser

That's nice, but my (desktop neutral) project website stats show Konqueror usage to be about 3-4% typically, with Gecko based browsers taking about 60% and the rest being Internet Explorer, so it's not there yet. The hypothetical desktop of the future is nice, but the desktop of today is dominated by Mozilla and OpenOffice, for better or worse.

OpenOffice and Mozilla are both projects where old, tangled proprietary code was thrown at the community. KOffice and Konqueror, in comparision, are fresh starts.

Well, I would quibble with that on two points, the first one being that Mozilla was in fact a fresh start itself, and the code, while not always a thing of beauty, isn't as bad as is often made out (I've written patches for Mozilla). OpenOffice, yes, quite probably, but then again it takes time and effort to accrue all those features and filters, and there's no guarantee that had KOffice gone through years of development and got all the features of openoffice that it too would not be seen as bloated and complex.

On the other hand, the apparent technical and usability advantage of KDE at this point does make me question why GNOME still needs to exist as a seperate project. Is there truly a good reason to not roll them into one unified desktop environment at this point?

Certainly, there are many. For one, not everybody agrees that KDE has a technical and usability advantage. I know quite a few people who find Gnome easier to use, more elegant UI wise and so on, and I know quite a few people who find the KDE frameworks more technically elegant than Gnomes.

More to the point, attempting a merge, or cutting off one project, would lose the community a lot of dedicated and smart hackers, a loss we really can't afford.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[arose]

Fluxbox? If you want a window manager get Ion.

GNOME myths

[Anonymous Coward]

"GNOME is a great community project"

Equals:

"Without the backing of Red Hat and Sun, who do almost all of the work, GNOME would be like FVWM or AfterStep -- a few hard-core users but no major developments ongoing. KDE is far more popular, and yet doesn't have massive companies paying programmers for it! KDE is a true community project; GNOME is only surviving because of money. If Red Hat and Sun go down, would GNOME survive? Not likely."

a native port of kde on osx

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone know if someone is working on a native port of kde to osx?

Re:a native port of kde on osx

[Ranger Rick]

Depends on what you mean by "native". KDE is already working with X11 on OSX.

We're still working on making it build with Qt/Mac.

Will this have the Dreamweaver killer Quanta 3.2?

[Surak]

Eric Laffoon recently made comments in his story about meeting Wil Wheaton statements about GUI capability in Quanta 3.2. If, so the 3.2 release could be a very important milestone for KDE, because it will mean that Dreamweaver finally has competition on Linux for those web developers still stuck on using WYSIWYG html editing tools.

Kolab groupware

[esarjeant]

Kolab is looking interesting, and if you combine this with Kontact you could just have the real Lotus Notes killer. With MS Exchange support, the extensibility of Kontact would make it easy to integrate in a Lotus Notes environment as well.

Ostensibly these look to be part of KDE 3.2, has anyone done the download/compile/install yet that can confirm/deny this.

This is great stuff, btw. I'm excited that KDE is tackling these kinds of applications, I may just switch back from Moz once the kinks have been worked out.

Microsofts Nightmare.

[Qbertino]

I had a close look at post 3.0 KDE at the LinuxTag earlier this year. I'm still very much a windowmanager fan with E, Fluxbox and Windowmaker on my favorites list. But after I had a guy from the KDE booth show me all the stuff that I can change and activate to get KWin (KDEs WM) away from the default of emulating MS Windows crappines and closer to E/Windowmaker/Fluxbox usability features I thougt I'd give a pure KDE enviroment a chance on Debian Woody with KDE 3.1. It o\/\/nZ0Rz nearly every other desktop I've worked with.
The conlusion is that with a proper setup there is no doubt what so ever that KDE kicks MS Windows up and down the street usability wise in every possible detail. It takes me about 30 seconds to get any Windows desktop user conviced that MS days as a monopoly are counted.
Further on: Ralph Nolden showed previews of what brewing with the 3.2 version of KDevelop and some other goodies. Apart from built-in support of something like a dozen and more programming languages there is a lot of stuff that will cause me to migrate from 3.1 to 3.2 asap.

To me it's quite evident: If OSS is the hauting horde of MS executives sleepless nights, the current and future KDE is the chief Boogieman of them all.

For the non-technical

[Telex4]

For those like myself who can't program in C++, but who can install this alpha version, or any other versions before 3.2 final, there is a lot you can do to help KDE:

* Report bugs. If you find something crashes, doesn't work as you'd expect it to, or there's a feature you think is missing, report it at http://bugs.kde.org.

* Submit documentation. Lots of apps in KDE will have out of date documentation, or none at all. If you understand how to use just such an app, consider writing documentation for it and submitting it to KDE.

* Submit translations. If American English isn't your native language, consider translating the text in applications to languages you feel confident with.

More can be found at: http://www.kde.org/support

I love TrollTech

[alexhmit01]

When did I call TrollTech evil? I am a happy customer, sending them thousands of dollars/year, and using Linux desktops based upon KDE?

They DO care about writing quality code. They also have HEAVILY supported KDE development to create a market for their API as cross-platform.

What about that is evil?

The fact that the resulting desktop is made available for free under the GPL makes it great. They provide for "free," albeit restricted for development, environemtn, to push their product.

What a great side effect of the invisible hand! In their creation of a market, everyone gets free benefits.

The only thing that I would like from Qt is a better RAD environment to work with. One of our project upgrades was going to be moved from Cocoa to Qt, which was cancelled because certain limitations in using Qt for RAD development. I look forward to new versions of Qt, they keep getting stronger.

BTW: as a commercial licensee of Qt, I am REALLY happy that a lot of the KDE core is on Trolltech's payroll. Each version of Qt incorporates more functionality that was handled at the KDE level, and KDE is upgraded to use the new Qt. That makes the features available to those of us wanting Qt's cross platform benefits.

The Qt/Mac GPL release was also great (although, obviously, with Panther including X11 in the OS, they had no choice, as Qt/X11 on Panther would hit the dreadful "good enough" level without Qt on board). I look forward to the Qt/Mac KDELIB port being in the main tree, and being able to install KDE apps under OS X for my power use.

Alex

Re:Don't let the source code compilation scare you

[infolib]

Another route is Knoppix with KDE CVS. Never tried it though, YMMV, yada yada...

Btw I don't think KDE should take all the honour for Konstruct. After all it was "inspired by GARNOME" - good to see idea exchange across the major Free desktops.

Re:Will this have the Dreamweaver killer Quanta 3.

[manyoso]

Yes, it will be in there and Nicholas is working on VPL support. That is the WYSIWYG functionality that we're all awaiting. Both Quanta AND KDevelop have _drastically_ improved in 3.2.

Also, keep an eye out for Juk (KDE's answer to ITunes) in this new release. It is an incredibly cool jukebox program that has automatic tagging and vFolder playlists.

Re:portage woes and fp

[Sir_Stinksalot]

I am not a Gentoo fanboy and your right I don't understand all of the cflags I use but I try. I don't push gentoo on everyone I meet. As a matter of fact to a newb I reccomend JAMD or SuSE. Gentoo is for those that want to learn but not go full bore with LFS. I personnally use Gentoo because its easy to install stuff without dependancy probs and I can get up to date stuff. Debian is cool like I said I use Knoppix (installed) on my laptop which is a Debian unstable easy to install and use distro. But at home I have bandwidth and horsepower to spare so I use gentoo which works for me. But please use what works for you. If interested in Gentoo try it but don't give up on it til you got it installed and functioning all the way just like any distro you want to try. But I got to say if you want to run Debian try out knoppix and install it to the harddrive its sweet fast and easy.

Re:Good for technically uninclined.

[standsolid]

To tell you the truth, I don't really use KDE for it's amazingly straight-forward and simplistic user interface that most users (including non-technical) can really appriciate. I don't even use it for it's incredibly nice built-in tools like Kmail for email. Nor do I use it for the fast, lightweight, renounded KHTML engine you find in Konqueror -- the same engine used in Apple's Safari webrowser. Not only do I have KDE users making sure they can open their banking accounts online, but i have the 15 other mac users to do that for me to ( :D joke ppl ). I use Konqeror's KIO Slaves to get my work and play done faster, better and easier. I use karmera:// to get all my digital images, fish:// to get around nfs bullcrap, audiocd:// to rip my audioCDs to ogg quickly.

You know, you may not call me a "technical user", but I do a couple "technical" things. KDE enpowers me to write scripts that interact with my KDE programs using dcop. Quick and easy GUI automation -- even for the "non technical users". Oh and have you EVER programmed FOR KDE? it's simply amazing! Very easy to use and a robust toolkit to use. Much easier to learn than GTK(2) or MFC were.

Now you make call me names and tell me i sould use *box -- but you are missing an amazing featureset using tools that you just happen to pick up and add to your "desktop environment". It might be time for you, oh great master of GNU/Linux, to give KDE another try.

<sarcastic>
it's not that hard to install it, all you have to do is open a "command line thingie" on your uber-blackbox system and type in "sudo urpmi kde"... unless that's for the "real techies" -- in which case you can use Drake's control center
</sarcastic>

dont' call my Desktop n00b, n00b

love, standsolid