Slashdot Mirror
Review: KDE 3.2
Anonymous writes "Today I installed KDE 3.2, third major release of the award winning KDE3 desktop platform, on my Fedora box. I have been using KDE 3.2 RC for the past few days and the final version from today. My first impression is 'wow.'"
Mirror of article, other peoples impressions, would be most welcome.
There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark
Full-sized screenshots that are resized smaller in the HTML! Wonderful!
http://freecache.org/http://fedoranews.org/krishna n/review/kde3.2/
Because of early reports of slashdotting:
KDE 3.2
by Krishnan Subramanian
Today I installed KDE 3.2, third major release of award winning KDE3 desktop platform, on my Fedora box. I have been using KDE 3.2 RC for the past few days and the final version from today. My first impression is "wow".
KDE 3.2 provides an integrated desktop along with various applications to carry out common desktop tasks such as web browsing, email, instant messaging, multimedia, graphics, etc. Some of the impressive features which you will notice include
* Increase in speed evident from faster application startup time
* Improvements in usability and performance
* Better appearance through interface refinement
* Browser performance boost evident through better webpage rendering
Upgrading to KDE 3.2 is a breeze. If you are a newbie and want to learn how to do it, you can refer to my HOWTO. I started my installation and within few minutes I am logged into my new KDE 3.2 desktop.
The desktop is very polished and you can configure it in any way you want by right clicking on the desktop. You can setup your desktop background as a slide show so that the background picture changes at predetermined intervals. The style and window decorations are very refined increasing the overall appearance. I love plastik for style and window decoration. A better icon set is also available. Now that you can find a wide array of themes and icon sets in www.kde-look.org, you can customize your KDE desktop in any way you want. In fact, you can even select the KDE splash screen (which appears when you login) from the available choices.
The K Menu is better organized now. It is grouped into "Most Used Application", "All Applications" and "Actions". Even the applications are grouped in a much better way compared to earlier version.
The new KHotkey feature is really hot. You can create keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures for various tasks. This comes very handy. People used to such features in Microsoft Windows environment will love this feature. It is really cool to press the "Windows" key in your keyboard and see KMenu pop up in your screen.
The control center is well spruced up and better structured in KDE 3.2. Some of the tabs like background, window decoration, style etc. are redesigned.
Some of the welcome addtions to control center are
* Splash Screen - where you can select a KDE splash screen of your choice
* Wireless Network - where you can configure your wireless network. You can save upto four different configurations.
* Vim Component Configuration - where you can configure Vim to use inside KDE
* KHotkeys - where you can specify keyboard shortkeys and mouse gestures to lauch applications in KDE
* KDE Wallet - where you can configure KDE Wallet to store your internet and local passwords
* Sony Vaio Laptop - where you can configure the hardware for this laptop
KDE 3.2 has more countries under Country/Region. Also these countries are better organized. This is a very positive step in the internationalization efforts of KDE.
Another welcome feature in the control panel is the "Font installer". With this, installation of new fonts is a breeze. This is very useful for people who want to install their regional fonts and other extra fonts (many fonts are available in kde-look.org). The best aspect of the font installer is the instant preview available with it. I feel this is one of the greatest additions to KDE.
Many new applications are added and some of the existing applications have been upgraded. It is quite impossible to discuss all the applications available in KDE 3.2. I will just discuss some of the applications based on my preferences.
Konqueror: This is the central part of KDE environment. it is a web browser, file manager, network browser and so on. Konqueror has finally matured as a web browser. I feel, though many would disagree with me, that rendering of sites is somet
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Mods should read this.
This is about the state of SuSE and their kde strategy
This is about Qt and its licence.
This is about the G word
Mod the gnome/anti-qt trolls down before suckers bite!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I always get my KDE for Red Hat (and Fedora) from the kde-redhat project. The project's lead Rex Dieter is doing an awesome job of keeping the latest KDE packaged as rpms that are available via apt-get with all dependencies worked out. Upgrade is as easy as
I didn't know you had to win awards to be infamous. Anyway, here you go:
Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list to get experimental DEBs for Debian Unstable:
./ ./
deb http://people.debian.org/~ccheney/kde-3.1.95
deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde-3.2
These packages currently conflict with openoffice and koffice, I would uninstall them first.
Not that KDE 3.2 isn't distributed in other formats besides RPMs.
Oh yes, it is. See http://www.kde.org/info/3.2.php.
I've been running Debian binaries for a couple of days now and I'm quite impressed of the increased speed & sugar of the new desktop layout. There has been couple of crashes, though.
Fetch the Debian binaries by adding the following line to your
deb http://download.kde.org/stable/3.2/Debian stable main
//SaVa
kde has had this since 3.1.1, and possibly earlier. i use it, its great :)
Ah, well... be free, little guy! I hope you have a nice life!happy happy lameness filter. i want the lameness filter not to eat my post, dangit. knock it off, filter. for a site that is *coded* in perl, you would think they would be nicer about letting you post code samples. this is getting ridiculous, you know.
Note:
Unix represents the current directory with a period (.) and the parent
directory with two periods (..), and it includes these in the list of files.
Since these are directories, not images, we use this function to strip them
out of our array of files. Cool, huh?
I've currently set this to change the background at random every time I log
into my Linux box, plus every night at midnight. I like to keep things
interesting!
It appears that Mandrake has their distro-specific 3.2 RPMs up as of yesterday.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Just use Xterm, it's 1/3rd the memory usage, 10 times faster and looks the same on any platform..
Just a little note about Gnome's file selector:
Though it may not be the greatest, you can always drag and drop your selection from Nautilus which I find kinda nice.
I flip flop between KDE and Gnome. First half of last year, I used KDE, then used Gnome since summer (mainly because all my apps are GTK+ apps). I'm going to give this new release of KDE a try pretty soon because it sounds sweet.
Linux is really shaping up on the desktop. KDE and Gnome both rock!
KDE has an article in the Wikipedia. Its got a lot of information about its history and how it works under the hood. It is still mostly 3.1 biased though, so it could do with some updating for KDE 3.2. (A Screenshot of KDE 3.2 for example).
QT is as free as the Linux kernel since they are both under the GPL. In fact, it's even more "free" because you can make closed-source programs with it (even if it means paying someone) while you don't have that option at all with just the GPL.
Now however if you're talking about BSD free, then no QT is not free. But then again under this definition neither is Linux (the kernel), gcc, etc. either. So if you're going to dump QT for not being "free" to be fair you have to dump on practically all of Linux as well.
I'll shut up now.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I to, have installed KDE today. I also installed it yesterday, the day before, and I probably will still be installing it tomorrow.
Next time I wait for the RPMs.
"oh, by the way, if you want a UI, don't forget to also download such and such at website t46."
Stop spreading FUD. I've got a Taiwan flag in mine. I'm using Gentoo and compiled source straight from KDE. If RedHat removed it like another poster said, then it sounds like you need to stop using RedHat.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
I've been using unofficial KDE 3.2 CVS debs for about 4 months. I'm loving it. For all those who are wondering about Debian/KDE, 3.2.0 will enter unstable when 3.1.5 enters testing. First, however, 3.2.0 will be in experimental. If you can't wait, however, fear not. At the Debian/KDE FAQ there are instructions to get KDE 3.2 whether you be on stable, unstable or (for some fool reason) testing. It only involves adding one or two APT sources and dist-upgrading. If you run into problems, come to #debian-kde on irc.freenode.net and ask around. The folks there are really helpful.
It can. Under KDE, if you give a filename as kbearftp://login:password@some.server.co.uk/path/f ile
then it will make an ftp connection {assuming you have KBear installed} and fetch the file for you. You can miss out the password if you're paranoid, and you'll get prompted; but there is still one layer of password protection.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
READ the story on internetnews.com they talk to KDE people and SuSe development internetnews.com Here's one of my fav lines in the piece... "KDE 3.2 is very important for many people because it offers a nice set of new features," said SuSE's Schlaeger. "It's not a revolution as it used to be in the early days of KDE, when it brought something completely new to the Linux world that wasn't there, but I think the KDE project is making steady progress."
Bittorrent link or ftps: ftp1 and ftp2
PyQT
PerlQT
Sorry not in your language of choice.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
QT was released under the GPL as of version 2.2. Just click here to read about it with the official announcement: http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php
Why did they do it in C when there is a object oriented C++ right available?
Several reasons:
- At the time of gnome's creation C++ was slow (wrt compiled code) and unstandardised (wrt source). Well, there were standards, but the popular compilers didn't pay all that much attention to them, and in fact, the MS compilers still don't pay much attention to them. As a result, a C++-based project had an immediate speed and portability hit.
- There was and still is no C++ binary abi. When you upgrade to a new compiler, you have to recompile all your libraries just to compile a new app with it. This is ugly.
And finally and most importantly:
- The gnome programmers were all C fanboys. They didn't know C++, and didn't want to learn it. Better to go with the devil you know than the devil you don't.
It doesn't really matter nowadays. GNOME uses hacks to implement OO in C, KDE/Qt uses hacks (the metacompiler) to implement signalling in C++. Both are a bit of a kludge. And both work well. Though generally I find KDE's architectural design cleaner and easier to get into. But then clearly either can be learnt and learnt well.
Here's a mirror, folks.
People, when you mirror things for Slashdot, your home cable modem probably won't work very well....
|/usr/games/fortune
Umm, the GNOME APIs are very well-designed and extremely object-oriented. As far as raw speed goes, gtk signal propagation is many times faster than QT's signals and slots mechanism.
Gnome/Gtk apps are not procedural. They are event-driven and object-oriented, just like QT. There are many apps written in the C++ bindings of Gnome. The idea that Gnome is fine for small programs but not large programs is false, if not stupid. Please do your research before posting such an obviously unresearched opinion.
As for overhead, C++ is, in many ways, simply syntactic sugar. As I said, there are awesome C++ bindings for Gnome and the Gnome object model (implemented in C) is very good. Programming overhead to do objects in C is minimal and there are great tools for generating objects. Also the switch to using XML primary to describe the guis makes Gnome GUI generation very easy and in just a few lines of code. In my experience your argument about reimplementing the OO is largely moot.
Also wxWindows is hardly a great example of an OO gui api. It's very much like MFC, which uses a event message mapping system, unlike QT and GTK which use signals and callbacks that can be dynamically created and conneccted together. I've never liked MFC, and I don't like wxWindows. I do like QT and GTK, though, particulary GTKMM.
I Installed it and I (old one was 3.1.4). Takes longer to load and the fonts are ugly, again!. Everything else seems much the same except Konqueror which ROCKS! Starts really fast and does not crash as much as the old one (not that it was that bad). I Have not tried Kontact yet. I hope it's good as the review says because I do not like Evolution.
As a total non-geek GUI user here are my questions on KDE's usability. /home/username/*. That include all your settings too.
I would say so based on the questions, but..
1) KDE (for as long as I can remember) has had a kappfinder that locates programs on your disk. You can run it then check off the apps you wanted added to the KMenu.
2) Just drag a file and drop it somewhere, a context menu will appear and ask if you want a "copy,move, or shortcut (link)."
4) Depends if the app was written correctly. UT2003, Savage, etc. all do this then put a link in ~/.kde/share/applink/* which is your KMenu entries.
5) You can create links (shortcuts) that way. KMenueditor (right click the K menu icon, kde start button) and then do all your editing.
6) Not that I'm aware of, but you can drag-drop a folder on the panel then either add shortcut URL to that dir OR a quick browse tray like you described.
7) You can use ANYTHING you want. But what's wrong with konqueror? Hate to tell you but Windows does the SAME thing with ie. You're viewing your files in a webpage locally.
8) Of course, this is dependant on your OS. But Linux or UNIX clone has all files by default in
9) Yes, KDE has had "LISA" for a long time. It's a samba network browser for KDE.
10) I don't use Mac so can't say anything about it, but you need to look at the KDE "Control Center" and the GUI tools.
Not sure, but you almost sound like a troll. I mean KDE isn't TRYING to emulate Windows/Mac/etc. They are out to just be a great desktop environment. KDE 3.2 goes a long way towards this. I suggest you try it and spend some time using it before you pass judgement on it because it doesn't have feature 'X' or 'Y'.
No problem here -- Konsole is zippy as usual, with all the helpful stuff (antialiasing, transparency + contrast, tabbed terms) turned on.
You should try to:
1) Fiddle with the conf (font family and size -- I use Andale Mono 8pt here, excellent readability/size ratio; transparency; bidi text...) to see if something in particular seems to trigger the slowness;
2) Submit a bug. Random slowness in some configurations is NOT normal. If it's a regression since KDE 3.1, do indicate so.
Hmm, you may want to make sure that your Konsole got compiled with the right font support, now that I think of it. Does the command 'ldd `which konsole`' yield links to libXrender.so, libfreetype.so and libXft.so.2 (not sure about that list, but that's already a start)?
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Try aterm. It does pseudo transparency as well.
Quack, quack.
In fact, the MS compilers still don't pay much attention to them.
Their most recent compiler (VS.net 2003) is much more standards compliant than you give it credit. Besides compiler limits, there are only five noncompliant aspects of their compiler. Most complaints that people had with the lack of compliance in VisualC++ were fixed in the 2003 release.
GCC 3.3 isn't fully standards compliant either. Reading through the 3.4 changes it looks like they've been working on some of the same issues. C++ in general is a very complicated language. There are very few compilers that implement every aspect of the language. It's generally more important to fix the compiler bugs that affect real code than to implement the aspects of the language that are very rarely encountered.
And there are Qt bindings for it. Plus you can code for OSX.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Check out http://www.kde-look.org/.
Good even if you don't use KDE, they have lots of Linux related wallpapers for instance.
One app I have fallen in love with is
SuperKaramba, a clone of Windows XP Samurize. It enabels easy Python scripting of widgets on the desktop, enabling such things as weather forecasts, system information, Mac OS X style dockers on your desktop, or even some very beautiful themes complete with new toolbars, XMMS skins etc.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Yes it is.
(I'm not sure that that's a canon link. Ruby bindings are now in official KDE CVS, I've noticed. This may be a project predating that).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
1. Applications are all reachable from the "K" button on the desktop, and are orginized by category.
/home folder. To quickly browse your account, click the "House" button in the file manager.
2. Yes. Drag a file to the desktop, and when the menu pops up, select "link here"
3. Yes, providing the application provides one
4) Files are installed by single clicking rpm files, entering your root password and if it all works it should work (In mandrake linux at least).
5. Right click the "K" button and click menu editor. This will give you an advanced interface for editing menus, including drag and drop.
6. Yes, its called the Quick Browser. Choose that from the "K" button to see a hierarchical view of your folders from the menu.
7. Click the "house" icon on the panel. This will give you a explorer like interface
8. Yes, they are kept in the
9. Yes, there is an Icon called network on the Desktop.
10., Yes, Install the Kdenetwork package, then In Control Center go to Network and Internet category to configure networks.
So yes, KDE can do all of these things, and more that Windows/OSX cant.
1. Have applications been consolidated into an Applications or Programs folder, or do I have to hunt for them scattered all over the place?
...
/home/username (with username being, err, your username). Konqueror defaults to viewing the contents of your homedir, but you can go up a level easely if you want to. The question is: what's the point. You don't need to view the rest...
Applications are nicely organised by theme (e.g. "Internet" which contains your webbrowser and email client, "multimedia" which contains your media player). I think this is *much* more user-friendly than Windows.
2. Can I make aliases, shortcuts or their equivalents by right clicking or modifier key dragging the original?
Yes you can.
3. Do applications have a unique icon identifying the executable, so I know what to double-click to launch the program, or what to make the alias from?
You don't have to ever touch an executable file if you let your distribution's package manager do the work. If you don't you can use KAppfinder to update your menu automaticly.
4. Can I install an application by dragging an icon of the application to the Applications or Programs folder, or by double-clicking an installer icon that I can download as a single file from a website?
Yes you can. Most distributions come with a package manager of some sort that enables you to search and install packages (and it's dependancies) with a few clicks. Packages you download from the internet work the same way. You really don't have to compile things if you don't want to...
5. Can I add and remove items from the start menu (or whatever KDE calls it) by dragging and dropping to and from the menus? (A dialog box would be an acceptable alternative.)
I don't know if drag&drop works in 3.2, but KDE comes with a Menu Editor.
6. Can I add a directory to the start menu and have its contents displayed heirarchically when I click on it from the start menu?
Yes you can. I use it to browse my music folder. It also gives you an entry to open it with your file manager or in a terminal.
7. Can I use a file browser aka Windows Explorer or the Mac OS X Finder instead of a stupid web browser window to find files on my computer?
Konqueror is not (only) a webbrowser. It's more like a frame that holds many applications, be it KHTML for webbrowsing, the file manager, the SMB browser,
I think konqueror in file manager modus is a nice file manager, and I read it was improved/cleaned up in KDE 3.2. But if you don't like it, there are a slew of other file managers you can use.
8. Are home directories put in a Users or Accounts folder off the root so that I can find them easily?
Your home directory is located in
9. Can I find Windows networked computers by double-clicking a Network neighborhood icon or its equivalent?
Yes you can. KDE has a SMB-browser for ages, and the new konqueror should make browsing for shares even easier.
10. Can I set up sharing on my computer, define workgroups, etc. using a configuration tool like Mac OS X's Network and Sharing preferences pane and the Directory Access utility?
Yes you can.
I think you should play with KDE for a while. It does more than you think...
Specifically, having tried many times to use Sun's (vastly faster then GCC) compilers to compile KDE and found that it's impossible due to a combination of GCC specific extensions or at least syntactic laxity and other GNUish bias I've had to give up.
:-)
I'm forced to compile the whole thing with the highly sub-optimal (for SPARC) gcc/g++.
I wish that programmers wouldn't depend upon the lax syntax of the world's favourite compiler and optimise their code specifically for systems which are already fast enough not to make much difference when it degrades performance on those which absolutely need the greatest acceleration to make them usable.
Sorry for the rant.
My compile of KDE 3.2.0 at work on the Sun Ultra 10 has been going for a day already and I've just got QT, arts and kdelibs compiled. I should have a working system by the middle of next week, assuming I don't find any show stopping Linuxisms (which I usually do during KDE builds).
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
I have been using the release candidate from http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/, on Fedora FC-1, since it has native mp3 support.
It is very fast.
I managed to crash Ktouch (Typing tutor program) once, but couldn't reproduce the crash. I haven't found other bugs.
Konqueror now seems to offer integrated spell checking when writing on forums such as slashdot, which is nice, since English is not my native language. I think A-spell is used, so many languages are availably.
The "kde-wallet" is a very nice, and seemingly secure way to store on-line passwords and forms.
All in all, I like it a lot.
On FreeBSD Unix, I portupgrade or install from the ports. On Slackware Linux, I slackpkg.
:-)
KDE 3.2 is available at your local FreeBSD and Slackware Linux mirrors. (As always)
"my @files = readdir(WALLPAPER_DIR);
.. from the list (see note at end)
.. from the list (see note at end)
# strip . and
@files = File::Spec->no_upwards( @files );"
That is really cool, I missed that function! But you can make that more efficient for big directory lists:
So:
# strip . and
my @files = File::Spec->no_upwards( readdir(WALLPAPER_DIR); );"
Cheers,
Tels
I just think that wrapping up your objects into a nice OO layer makes UI development much easier.
So do that. www.gtkmm.org
Just because gnome is written in C, doesn't mean there aren't C++ wrappers for it.
A few notes:
1. KDE uses freetype to render fonts. You can use any truetype font you like, and they're beautifully anti-aliased. And, if you'd RTFA, you might notice that KDE 3.2 includes a new font manager to make font configuration even easier.
2. About X being 20 years old... yes, the framework is. UNIX is 34. GCC itself dates back to 1987. But you know what, I'm not running the original iteration of the X window system (nor are you, I hope, running Windows 1.0). Xft renders my fonts beautifully, and I've set KDE to use Xrender to draw transparencies. You might also note that zoom (a la Mac OS X) and rotate (a la fake Movie GUIs) are being coded into X as you troll. These are features that windows has yet to be clued in on.
3. I haven't personally experienced any of the theme-crashing bugs you claim, but even assuming you're right, I'll take KDE, which comes with Plastik, Keramik, and all the built-in QT themes out of the box over WinXP which lets me select from a whopping 3 color schemes and 2 widget styles.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."