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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."
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.
This is awsome, with a name like this how can it be anything other than... er... great, hmmm, what a name.
anyone know if someone is working on a native port of kde to osx?
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.
I try to download it the other day, but my KBrowser was having KTrouble downloading the KFiles from the KFtp.
Man, and 3.1.3 finally finsihed compiling on my 233-MMX just yesterday...
O-well...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
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.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
[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...
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.
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)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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.
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