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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.'"
...they included screenshots in their review? And then submitted it to Slashdot? Server suicide, anyone?
His second impression was, 'Noooo... my poor server, what have they done to you...'
Now, will you stop lurking and tell us something about the site, you bastards!?
--Leo
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article basically starts off with the _really_ important stuff:
"You can setup your desktop background as a slide show so that the background picture changes at predetermined intervals."
Yes! This was the one missing feature I was waiting for! Finally, I can switch to KDE!
Urgs...
This is not a review. It's just a rehash of some parts of the kde3.2 announcement enhanced with a few screenshots and personal comments.
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.
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."
Infamous is when you're more than famous. This desktop KDE, he's not just famous, he's infamous.
But the Gnome folks stick to their procedural programming style APIs which are fine for simple programs, but for larger programs it just means that the programmer has to reimplement the OO overhead.
... ... which means it runs on a larger number of platforms than that C++ of yours you only barely stop short of calling a silver bullet. ... and wrappers for other languages can be written more easily.
You don't know what you're on about.
1. Gnome and GTK are both object oriented APIs.
2. C is for Compatability
3.
4.
Gnome developers chose C because it works. Everywhere.
And don't forget stepping up to C++ leaves C developers out in the cold - especially if you make any sort of use of templates. That goes for moc too.
Even wxWindows has a GTK port. Where's the KDE/QT port?
So stop laying shit on the "Gnome folks".
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.
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."