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.'"
I'm using a release candidate of 3.2, so naturally I kept 3.1.whatever handy in case 3.2 didn't work out. Hah! I *tried* to go back to 3.1, and just hated it (I had loved it before trying 3.2).
So far, tabbed browsing in konq and kwallet are my favorite features, but I haven't had much time to dig around looking for KDE easter eggs. I'll bet there's more neat stuff in there!
Yes, I could turn off anti-aliasing. But I've used it in Konsole since pretty much always and have never seen this problem.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Whenver something breaks in Gnome. Since I live on the Debian unstable branch, that's about once every 6 months or so. It's gotten a lot better from the last time I used it. It's a lot faster and doesn't feel nearly as awkward as it used to. Their default window manager also seems pretty smart about focus handling and stuff. It's also very pretty. All in all I'd say I could just as easily go either way on the desktop these days.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Most people are confused about desktop enviornments and Window managers, thats why you often get people saying KDE is big and bloated, when its not. KDE, does by the way have its own window manager, its just that it is transparent to the user, and in KDE 3.2 it has a really good one.
You will find oozes of new features and fun in the new Window manager, such as kool keys, fat borders, Window below others, and much much more. My favourite one is the abillity to have borderless Windows. But don't worry, you can get them back by pressing alt+f3.
So give it a whirl if you like managing your windows by right clicking any window title bar in KDE 3.2.
Of course, the elegance of the result is still debatable, but fortunately, there are lots of language bindings available.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
It's only fair since Nat and Miguel started their rumors here to post this. This is big news folks. Apparently SUSE has a much stronger say on the Novell Desktop than what we were led to believe by Miguel and Nat.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
A couple of days ago, I emerged KDE 3.2 on my Gentoo system. Aside from a wierd ALSA bug that I had to fix, the upgrade from 3.1.5 was pretty painless.
Anyway, my thoughts on the latest iteration of my chosen desktop. Let's just say that KDE 3.2 should raise eyebrows in Cupertino and soil pants in Redmond. There are numerous small eyecandy improvements, plus tons of little usability-enhancing features in common areas of the system (for example, Konqueror has a vastly improved file-manager sidebar that gives idiot-proof access to local partitions, printers, and even network shares). Some of the new applications debuting in this release are truly excellent, as well (like the slick iTunes-clone JuK or the lovely multiproticol IM client Kopete). Finally, some rather extensive optimizations seem to have taken place throughout the system, as KDE now seems more responsive than in the past (true, some of these optimizations are "cheating", like the option to keep an instance of Konqueror preloaded, but it's still a nice option to have).
Anyway, congrats to the KDE team on an excellent release, and thank you for proving once again that UNIX on the desktop isn't just a wild fantasy, it's a real-life joy.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Wow. I'm impressed that the entire page actually loaded, instead of just timing out. So the server was able to at least send me a couple bytes every second to keep timing out, that's impressive.
... those "thumbnails" on the review page? They're not; they're just the pics they link to, resized a bit using img width= height= ... I didn't know people were still that stupid, especially given that at least one was full desktop sized.
... they were kind of boring. Everything was of empty windows; a little data to make things look, um, real would have been nice :3 It also hit me that KDE seems to have more K-programs than GNOME has G-programs now, which is just ugly.
I was kind of shocked to see what they were doing with the screenshots though
That having been said, I didn't find the screencaps even particularly flattering; not that I dislike KDE (though I don't use it), but
The Microsoft accusation is also, nonsensical, BTW.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"Another welcome feature in the control panel is the "Font installer". With this, installation of new fonts is a breeze."
Why should installing fonts require a special applet? Was it really so difficult to drag and drop font files into ~/.fonts with konqueror? I thought that approach was pure simplicity and elegance; put fonts in this folder, and they just work.
Ok, so I am not exactly someone who is well known in the Linux community. I am also not exactly the best writer in the world, so this "review" will be a bit terse...
First of all, getting the new KDE was troublesome. Obviously, the prime site - ftp.kde.org - was a touch busy. However, NONE of the mirror sites (in the US anyhow) had it at all. One site had the directory structure for 3.2, but NO CONTENT. The other US sites didn't even have the 3.2 directory structure. In other words, the KDE group was woefully unprepared to actually release the software.
I was finally able to download from ftp.kde.org - at a whopping 7.6k per second. Yep, that means that they were REALLY BUSY. I was on an unloaded T1 so it probably wasn't congestion at my end.
I finally got the whole package set downloaded and installed. That part, at least, was fairly painless. The fact that I'm running Slackware on an old P3-700 laptop notwithstanding...
On starting up the new KDE, one thing that becomes clear almost immediately is that it is MUCH SLOWER at the initial loadup. Probably a 20% time increase. Not painful though.
Things that I like about the new KDE - yes, application startup feels faster. I also liked that KDE recognized an app (Pan) locked up and wasn't responding and offered to kill it for me (when I tried to close the app window).
Some things just simply don't work though. The RDP protocol implementation inside Konqueror doesn't like Windows Server 2003 at all.
When you install the new KDE, it does you a "favor" and resets your media associations to use Noatun and Kaboodle - inspite of the fact that neither of these apps play modern video files very well if at all.
Overall, it's not too awful, but it's not a compelling upgrade either.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
The difference is easy to understand:
The GPL provides freedom for the software. The software is treated as an anthropomorphic entity that can be enslaved and freed, much like slaves of the 18th century.
The BSD provides freedom for the developer. It treats the developer as an enlightened individual who is able to make the decision whether to return changes to the community or to close the changes into a proprietary app.
I was taken aback by the significant speed improvements. 1st time I've ever done a KDE upgrade and really noticed the changes. The Plastik Style is finally a pleasant, harmless change of pace, the bouncing activity icons are actually cool this time. I still find the file manager far more versatile than the one found in gnome. Overall well worth the install. I just did a wget on a mirror for SuSE 9 RPM's ,removed some of the development RPM's I didn;t need and did an RPM -Uvh *.rpm. Worked great. I'll admit, it's the superficial thinbgs I like and notice, ie better looking penguin icons for the kdm login manager and a cool choice os splash screens, etc.
I'd been running Slack 9.1 for a long while with Dropline Gnome, still the most beeyootiful Desktop environment, but it doesn't have the functionality of KDE. I like both projects thhough, hopefully Novell can give each the room to do their own thing, even if KDE gets the nod as the preferred Novell/SuSE desktop.
A review should add new information or insights which are not obvious or stated in the programm's own announcement.
Take a look at the reviews at ArsTechnica, for instance at this one about Mac OS. The multipage review contains background information about the inner workings, some words about usability, differences with previous versions, information about performance, balanced and substantiated views about what should be improved and an informative conclusion. That is what I think should be considered a review.
God, I hate that about Windows. If I ask my computer to open two windows of the same folder then it should do it! Windows assumes what I want and tries to second guess me (oh, you don't really want to open that folder again, do you?). KDE does what I tell it to do, which IMHO is what a computer should do. It is not the computers job to read my thoughts and try to figure out what I "really" mean.
Here's a situation where this particular "feature" annoys me. Since the default explorer file manager doesn't have view splitting it is necessary to have many folders open in order to drag and drop files. If I have "my documents" open and I'd like to drag something to a subfolder I'd like to open up a second copy of "my documents", navigate to the subfolder, and drag my files. Windows won't do this, I have to navigate away from "my documents" in order to open a new copy, which disrupts my workflow and is irritating. Of course, all of this is totally unnecessary in Konqueror, where view splitting and tabs make life so much more enjoyable.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
I think Gnome is easy too, but I find that it's very simple. Now, simple isn't always a bad, but I've found Gnome to be a little *too* simple for me.
Frameworks and blah blah programming stuff aside, I find myself more at home at a KDE desktop then a Gnome one. It seems to just have more ways to customize your desktop then a Gnome setup. And, it's got a lot more applicaitons included, many of which I use and like a lot.
It's 100% user preference, and if you're really into Gnome, then by all means use it. KDE just seems to tie things together better, it's got more features, and it's got a much more agressive release schedule.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm not usually a licence zealot, and I've never actually bothered to comment about these sorts of comments before, but there is something I just don't understand. I'm sorry if you think this is a troll or flamebait - it's not, I just get frustrated when I see uninformed opinions of this nature.
The above complaint also applies to the Linux kernel and we are all perfectly happy to call that free (as in speech and beer). The same applies to QT - free speech and beer if you abide by the terms of the GPL. In fact, a large amount of open source software is exactly the same, but apparently some people have redefined "free" to mean something different.
So you can't use the free version of QT to make proprietary software. Big deal. Get over it.
Rant over.
I agree, doing object orientation by ideom is really ugly. But there is something called gtkmm that puts a true objectoriented wrapper around the gtk libraries. That ought to improve the situation. Gtkmm uses pure C++ instead of some language extensions requiring preprocessing like QT.
But even so, I feel more at home using QT, but that is perhaps just me.
Anyway, I wish that the KDE people could get their act together on usability. As they
clearly have a technical edge over Gnome this is
really sad they they doesn't do better in this area.
Look at the navigation toolbar of Konqueror and compare that to Epiphany or Mozilla. In KDE the toolbar looks crowded. Some icons are very similar to each other. E.g. they use looking glasslike symbols for both search and zoom functions. Why not use a pair of binoculars for the search function instead.
The icon for changing fonts is an image of two T:s close together that looks like an antenna. Of course the T stands for text. But in how many countries is text called something that starts with T? I would guess that a picture of an "A" would be better as it have a more distinctive form, and it is also used in many other desktop environments to denote font changing facilities.
It would also make it less likely that the symbol with the two T:s close together refers to true type fonts only.
If the toolbars are crowded, the context menus are even worse. E.g. in the right menu button menu of the konquerer file manager you have both a "Move to trash" and a "Delete" item. Wouldn't it have bin better to just have a "Move to trash" item, and then configure the trash to perform the correct action this would have bin more in line with the desktop metaphor. On the your normal desktop you put things you don't want in the waste basket, and then you decide when to empty it.
Even if most things regarding usability is as bad as they used to be in KDE, there is at least one major improvement in KDE 3.2. The menu that pops up when you drop a file over a folder now gives you the alternatives "Move Here", "Copy Here" and "Link Here" and "Cancel" instead of "Copy Here", "Move Here"... This great since move is a much more common operation than copy for most people.
A positive side effect on changing the order in this menu is that the lack of icon for the "Move Here" item doesn't look so bad on the first item as it did when it was the second menu item.
The menu still have a dominating red cancel button. That button is probably the first thing the user sees when he drops a file over a folder, and the menu pops up. To me its somewhat unclear why this menu needs a cancel button in the first place, all other menus seam to be able to do without it. And second why does it have to be that eye catching. After all in most of the cases "Cancel" is not what the user is most likely to do.
So, if you need a lot of functionality but doesn't care about usability KDE is for you. In a way this is in true Unix tradition, there is no limit to what you can do, if you just could find out how. In my opinion there is few if any desktop environment that can rival KDE in configurability and number of functions.
Even though the usability could have bin better KDE 3.2 contains a lot of improvements and it is well worth the trouble of upgrading if you run some previous version of KDE.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
I shouldn't have said "KDE 3.2"; I should have said "the KDE 3.2 release packages" because most of the bugs are with the applications released.
Let's see, I've only been using it for 3 hours so far and I've got:
no sound
kopete crashes
pixieplus doesn't remember its window location anymore
the file browser hide all the context menu selections in sub-menus, making the context menu HIGHLY inconvenient now
my desktop is ugly; some of the icons in the new default set are just plain ugly, and my desktop no longer seems like a "theme" as much as a hodge-podge of images.
the login window also hides the selection to launch old KDE 3.1 and the other desktops; it used to be right on the dialog, but now it's buried in sub-menus.
The "loading" dialog also uses a funky color scheme that hides the progress percentage.
In fairness, I should say that, aside from the sound issue, I guess it's not very buggy, but it IS a HELL OF A LOT MORE ANNOYING than it used to be. It seems VERY, VERY *NOT* polished.
By tomorrow I should be happy with it again, assuming I can fix my sound issue.
...by "mimicking" the tried-and-true operating system design concepts of UNIX.
This isn't the whole story wrt. VC++.Net 2003 (phew!). It still accepts many non-standard constructs (its treatment of typename appears rather odd), allows various pieces of invalid syntax, has very aggressive name resolution (namespaces, what namespaces, it'll find something) and does some things that violate the std (allowing non-const refs to temporaries for instance). This leads to all sorts of pain when trying to port code originally developed with VC++ to other compilers. It's a lot better than it used to be however and the next one will likely be closer again.
So, Gnome is written in C AND it is object oriented?
The Gnome developers coded objects/classes with C?
Thanks in advance for the info
Steve
While I agree that we shouldn't be mimicking Windows, what do you mean by this:
"You'd think that a good GUI would be trivial."
When in fact, it's not. Very rarely are UI engineers actually have any background in human factors, when they should be experts. UI engineers are more often software engineers, and may or may not have any knowledge of human factors or user interface design.
I assume that you do know that by mimicking Windows, these projects can get more traction with existing Windows users ? I really don't think that you're suggestion that both the GNOME or KDE teams should focus entirely on building a new and non Windows-like (or Mac, for that matter) UI....are you ?