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

[RoLi]

Yet, it pales in comparison to the accomplishment that "could have been" if they had collaborated with the Gnome team (or verse visa) to create one standard desktop.

Which is? IMO KDE delivers a complete desktop without any major shortcomings. Could you come up with an example?

Also GNOME was started because at that time QT was not GPLed and the goal was to replace KDE/Qt.

"Replace" means "destroy" in the software world which isn't a very good start for cooperation.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[TomorrowPlusX]

So?

The moc is a hack that brings key c++ functionality to even the most mediocre c++ compilers. What's wrong with that? Sure, the syntax is different, but at least then there's no confusion about what's going on.

Have you ever tried to do *heavy* templated c++ code and have it be cross-platform? Have you written complex code relying on functors and it work on dozens of different c++ compilers? Good luck, chief.

All the moc does is use preprocessor trickery to make sure that functor mechanisms are completely functional regardless of compiler. Sure, it hides string invocation of methods in a SIGNAL() and SLOT() macro. Big deal. It works, beautifully, and between KDevelop and KDE's autoconf scripts, it's all hidden.

If you don't like the moc, why don't you go out and fix all the compilers for all the platforms that Qt runs on.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[JimDabell]

Yes, in case people aren't aware, KDE, like most projects that use the Qt toolkit, rely on a preprocessor to do a little of the work. Specifically, the C++ language is extended slightly to cover the concept of slots and signals, which is a very expressive way of coding up a GUI application.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[swillden]

Yet, it pales in comparison to the accomplishment that "could have been" if they had collaborated with the Gnome team (or verse visa) to create one standard desktop.

I disagree. The two desktops compete (even though they say they don't), trying to keep up with one another, stealing each other's good ideas and enhancing them with their own. The result is much faster progress on both that would have been achieved by either individually.

Further, it's a mistake to think that both GNOME and KDE are drawing on the same limited pool of development talent, for two reasons. First, the set of C programmers and the set of C++ programmers are pretty much disjoint. Sure, the syntax has common roots, but philosophy and approach are worlds apart, and pushing the camps together would just create massive infighting. Second, competition generates excitement, excitement generates interest and *interest* is what drives open source development.

Your statement holds the implicit assumption that if a KDE didn't exist, the KDE developers would have been hacking on GNOME, and vice versa, but I'd be surprised if there would be more than a bare handful for whom this is true.

Now we have two competing desktops with the users sitting on the sidelines waiting for a winner.

Who's sitting and waiting? Both environments are very usable (IMO, both are far superior to Windows), and users are free to pick the one they want. Or, in the case of the newbie or the corporate desktop, have one picked for them.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[Xerithane]

You're defending moc when your parent was dissing C++.

He was even dissing the variances in multiple C++ compilers. That is the reason for moc. You need moc to make sure that it all compiles no matter what your compiler is. There are still a lot of things that are different between compilers (g++ supports array indexing with unsigned longs, VC6 doesn't, for example) and moc takes care of a lot of those.

It makes C++ easier for doing cross platform development.

Tell you what, next time I hear someone slagging off the Windows kernel, I'll explain at great length why Windows Media Player isn't as bad as they're making it out to be.

The only reason why you would be doing that is because you don't understand what moc does.

moc generates C++ code, sparky.

Re:KDE most impressive open source project - ever

[RoLi]

Well, the most obvious one is that's something of an all or nothing proposition. You're either a KDE app (which almost always means C++) and have access to the infrastructure provided, or you aren't. That poses problems for Wine, OpenOffice, Mozilla - not to mention all the desktop neutral software out there like XMMS, Gaim, mplayer and so on.

Well that is pretty much the nature of the beast: Of course only KDE-aware apps can use KDE-specific features.

But I agree that for example GTK-prgrammers could have written wrappers to use KDE-dialogs etc.

That's one side of it, a valid side. But really, the KDE guys made it inevitable when they chose to give two fingers to the philosophy that had made the free software movement possibly in the first place. Having built an entirely free software platform, there were a lot of people who weren't pleased with the idea that it might be compromised by Qt.

While I agree that the original Qt-license was not perfect, I think KDE has chosen a right balance between being open and getting things done - which also made Linux successful in stark contrast to all the GNU-fanatic projects like the Hurd. So yes, Qt's former license was a concern, but not big enough IMO to stop using KDE.

This kind of I-only-care-about-licenses-if-it-concerns-me and get-things-done attitude is exactly what Linux and KDE have in common and which is to a great part reason for their success.

A similar example are binary-only modules in Linux, which were allowed by Linus but most likely not by RMS.

Brokenboring?

[essiescreet]

This is awsome, with a name like this how can it be anything other than... er... great, hmmm, what a name.

a native port of kde on osx

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Don't let the source code compilation scare you!

[nighty5]

The KDE team have done a fantastic job at providing the necessary tools for even a slightly tech savvy user to upgrade to the latest development release.

Checkout Konstruct to learn how to run a simple script to download, verify, compile and install the components to get KDE working on your machine.

Doesn't work for me....

[stephenry]

I try to download it the other day, but my KBrowser was having KTrouble downloading the KFiles from the KFtp.

:: SIGH ::

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Man, and 3.1.3 finally finsihed compiling on my 233-MMX just yesterday...

O-well...

Re:Screen shots

[!the!bad!fish!]

Here, that wasn't very difficult you know.

Live CD with this alpha release?

[d-Orb]

I think it would be advantageous to provide a Live CD with the alpha/beta releases, so that people can get into debugging the code straight away (I for instance, cannot download, compile and use KDE easily due to disk space, bandwidth problems. I could however, use a Knoppix version with the alpha release to test around).

Searching around shows the DragOS Project, but I haven't had time to check it. Does anyone know of similar efforts?

Re:Live CD with this alpha release?

[Vexalith]

It strikes me that maintaining an entire Linux LiveCD distribution might be a little too much even for the KDE developers. It could also lead to nasty places, like an "official Linux distribution" for KDE, which is not a place I want to see any desktop environment head towards.

Re:Live CD with this alpha release?

[Hieronymus Howard]

Anyone who isn't capable of compiling an alpha release certainy shouldn't be considering using one.

HH

Lame K name jokes here!

[LMCBoy]

Everyone who's going to post a lame joke based on the fact that many KDE apps start with "K", please post them under this thread.

Here, I'll start: "hey, didja ever notice how a lot of KDE apps start with 'K'?! What's the deal with that? Ha! Ha! Ha! Those KDE guys aren't very 'K-creative' Ha! Ha! Get it??" There, that's about the best one I've ever read, actually.

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.

Re:Good for technically uninclined.

[Vexalith]

Quite the opposite opinion here. KDE is great for those who like to fiddle with settings, but I'm seeing here another release with yet more options to fiddle.

I like the ability to customise, but it has to be said some of the menus in konqueror and konsole and various other core parts of KDE are a bit messy at the moment. I see they're working to improve the situation in konqueror's file management mode but I still think a lot more could be done.

A lot of the options in kcontrol could be better grouped and so be more intuitive and obvious, without removing things completely. If the devs could do this, then I'd might switch, since for me KDE now looks good (with Plastik, hopefully the default in KDE4) and is much faster than it used to be.

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.

Re:Microsofts Nightmare.

[fault0]

Yes, and in kde 3.2a1, with khotkeys2, you can even define mouse gestures and attach dcop scripting calls, keystrokes, mouse movements, etc.. etc.. to any KDE app.

You could, for example, define a mouse gesture to tell kwin to close the current window. Or, you could define a keystroke a tell kdevelop (or any app using dcop) to open a new project and add a bunch of files to it.

Oh yeah, media keyboard support is also better in this alpha.

Not so altruistic

[alexhmit01]

1. I love KDE - when we run Linux desktops, they are Mandrake/KDE desktops

2. The KDE project is a quality project, I never liked GNOME's politics. The KDE team had the "harmony" project to create a GPL'd Qt replacement, just in case, the GNOME team could have worked on that instead of going after KDE in a holy war.

3. We have one developer licensed on Qt (triple platform) and one other that is probably being added to Qt development.

HOWEVER

The KDE team was a bunch of Trolltech guys. At least in the beginning, those pushing KDE development were from Trolltech.

The Trolltech team was out to create a cross-platform API and push it. KDE was their way of creating a Unix desktop using their libraries. The whole plan was to make Unix desktops credible (this was in the days where engineers would have a Solaris Workstation for engineering, and a Windows desktop for Groupware/Productivity apps), so that they could sell Qt. This was also before MS Office completely owned the market (remember, Office 95 was their first big hit, and it wasn't until the time of Office 97 that MS had a defacto productivity monopoly b/c Wordperfect died).

The KDE team was formed by Trolltech to create a marketplace for a Unix/Win32 cross-platform toolkit.

In addition, Motif/CDE had an established market. Trolltech was pushing Qt/KDE as a replacement, going after the entrenched Unix market. The goal was to push to Engineering focused Motif/CDE out for a Qt/KDE environment that would do productivity AND Engineering. That would let corporations build their internal applications (where people spent a LOT of time) in a cross-platform manner, for the engineers to be able to use.

Alex

KDE Developers Anonymous

[ThyTurkeyIsDone]

[This is an update of my earlier post on this subject, which I won't link to because this is much better. Mod me up if you want to protest against the gnaming kraziness; don't mod me down if you're humor-challenged.]

KDE Developers Anonymous

Hello group, my name is Klark and I'm addikted to the letter K... As is the kase with many of you, I've always been krazy about komputers and like many of my fellow komp sci students, I was looking forward to a suksessful kareer in the field of information and kommunikation teknology... but my troubles started when I diskovered open source software and the wonderful kommunity around it and got kwite seriously into KDE development... At first I didn't komprehend the effekt this would kome to have on my life as a koder - it wasn't really konspikuous initially when I started to spell more and more kommon words with a k, sometimes even with a kapital K... But then my kolleagues began to wonder why I kouldn't spell korrektly. They asked me, "Are you on krack? Kut the krap!"... some even went as far as kalling me kompletely krazy! What kould I do? I must admit, I'm a kolerik person, even kwick-tempered you might say... okkasionally I would get inkredibly angry and kuss and kurse at my ko-workers... People should judge me by the kontent of my karakter instead of just kriticizing what they konsider kurious spelling! Other times, I would just retreat into a korner and kry kwietly by myself... However, it wasn't until they kicked me out of my kalligraphy kourse at kommunity kollege and I lost my job on akkount of my unkooperative konduct that I finally realized I had to kome to terms with my problem... so here I am, this is my koming-out... I know my kase is a komplex one, but I do hope it is kurable...

To the whiners about one unique desktop

[vadim_t]

Stop whining. It WON'T happen.

Windows has one GUI because it's made by one company with one central management. KDE and Gnome are different teams, that work in different ways, use different languages and have different ideas. To expect that just because you think one desktop is needed that they'll leave whatever they're doing and start coding your ideal desktop is foolish. Deal with it, most OSS developers work on things because they like working on them, not because they're working for the common good.

Besides, there can't be a perfect WM. I don't want KDE 3 on a P166, there I'd use IceWM or Enlightenment. I don't want IceWM on my dual Athlon either, where I can use that extra power for something useful. I also don't like Gnome, while many Gnome users probably hate KDE.

Heck, how does anybody expect that we can somehow get independent developers to agree on one unique project when the world still hasn't managed to agree on one unique measure system?

It's odd really. In the poll that's here right now the options are in kg, and half of the posts in it is whining: "But where Americans! Why isn't it in pounds?". Then go to a KDE discussion and somehow now half of the discussion is whining about that we need a single standard.

Re:KDE's connection to SCO.

[RPoet]

KDE is made by Trolltech, a Canopy Group company.

KDE is not made by Trolltech, but by a network of around 200 regular contributing individuals around the world. Two or three of these work on Qt for Trolltech, and contribute to KDE in their spare times.

(Yes, I've been trolled, so what)

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

Matthias Ettrich and Warwick Allison (just to name a couple of KDE developers) were open source KDE developers first and only after their great acheivements in KDE were they hired by TrollTech. The same is true for most of their other employees - they cut their teeth on the open source KDE platform first. The original KDE team was pretty indifferent to licensing issues and they only cared about using the best written GUI software platform available at the time, namely Qt.

TrollTech is not the self-serving evil company you make it out to be. They actually care about writing quality code - and it shows in their products.

And no, I'm not a TrollTech employee. I've just used their software in the past commercially and was very impressed by it.

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:portage woes and fp

[Sir_Stinksalot]

Just curious have you ever used Gentoo? I mean its not just the optimizations, that make gentoo great, its the fact that you can get up to date software faster than the mojority of distros. CVS and experimental software are a breeze. And the fact that you can just type a command and come back later with it working is great. I have a knoppix system install on my laptop and so I am familiar with the apt-get system. It is nice when you set it to use the ultra-unstable software so you can actually use something recent but _I_ still _think_ its a bit more of a pain to use apt than portage. Gentoo is actually faster installing small programs than most distros since I dont even have to know where to get it. And the large stuff like KDE well I just go to bed and at the latest its ready to roll when I get back from work. I am not trying to convince you to use Gentoo just trying to say your statement sounds quite ignorant. And if you use Debian the way it was designed you won't get KDE 3.2 for another 3-5 years.

Re:Screen shots

[twener]

Just visit the screenshot pages of the major/new applications: Kontact (2, 3, 4), JuK, Kgpg, KAddressbook, KBruch, Kig, Kopete, KVim, KCacheGrind, Umbrello, KDevelop, Plasktik,