Slashdot Mirror
Ars Technica: Deep Inside KDE 3.2
binner writes "Ars Technica features an article 'Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2' written by Datschge and Henrique Pinto. After introducing KDE and the project's structure the authors present some new applications of KDE 3.2. After that they explain the key KDE technologies KParts, DCOP, KIO, Kiosk and KXMLGUI and give examples for code reusage and an overview of efforts to integrate non-KDE applications. For developers Umbrello, Cervisia and Valgrind with KCachegrind are introduced and of course KDevelop 3.0. An examination of licenses precedes the positive conclusion."
This series of articles I wrote with a friend might also be of interest.
:-)
It outlines some practical nicities that are a result of the technologies like KIO slaves mentioned in the Ars Technica piece, including:
Managing web sites (handling content without an FTP application, web gallery creation)
Extending Konqueror with view profiles (replace FTP/Samba applications with Konq, and browse Google easily)
Using KPrinter in any app
Enjoy
I just read up on it from Ars, and it certainly looks interesting.
I'm currently using Fluxbox, but at the moment I'm emerging kde...should take a good long time to compile everything...but I'm going to give it a run-through and kick the tires a bit.
If I don't like it, there's always 'emerge -C kde'
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
fan of gnome who always stayed away from kde and then evanutally dropped gnome in favor of fluxbox. I have to admit, that I tried the 3.2 release an I'm hooked. I will still run flux on machines that just can't hand;e KDE's needs but KDE has come a *very* long way. My suggestion to others now is to run kde if their machines are fast and flux if it is slow (like my old p3 500).
One of the nicer things about KDE is the plethora of language bindings.
There's another pointer to the Ruby bindings - and a place for feedback and such-like - here.
The Army reading list
Deep inside KDE sounds very TRONish. I was hoping for a detailed look at Master Control Program. Oh well, the article must have been posted by a NULL unit.
Are you Corn Fed?
The biggest thing for me is that KDE doesn't treat users like idiots. All the configuration options are out there if I want them, easily accessible via the menus. The GNOME people seem to have decided that ordinary users are too moronic to be allowed to configure the look and feel of their own desktops. That and all the gratuitous UI changes like exchanging the places of the OK and Cancel buttons.
Besides, with the theme set to plastik/plastig I get the same look and feel in gtk apps even when I do need to use them. At last, a consistent unix desktop.
I think it's quite obvious you missed the point of this article entirely. It refers to the nifty new features that KDE has to offer over all of the competition and it's giving you the reasons to run KDE over Gnome. I know it's tough reading all of those big words, but every now and then you should try it out.
The original generic sig.
"Deep Inside Katey Pt 3" had some of the hottest...oh, wait, I misheard. Never mind.
I used the unofficial debs from kde.org to upgrade from 3.1.4 to 3.2. Some of my favorite changes:
- Konqueror now has sane tabs - before they would have a scroll bar of sorts. I still sometimes instinctively keep only 3 or 4 tabs in Konqueror, while I'm used to several times that many in Mozilla.
- KDEwallet, once I get it properly set up, could prove quite useful for managing passwords.
- The ability to make one's taskbar transparent (I don't use this at the moment) and not the entire width of the screen (I do use this). Kicker as a whole is becoming more and more refined
- The debs I got have some nice icons, making me want to keep my taskbar bigger instead of ~Win2k sized
- I seem to notice a marginal speed increase. It's a nice trend that continues for recent KDE releases.
And now for the bad news. Some things that appear broken with my Debian setup, but I will wait to confirm with a Fedora-based install to determine if it's a packaging or KDE problem.
- One website that formerly rendered fine in Konqueror now doesn't use its pull down menus correctly. Probably a javascript issue that I haven't looked too closely at
- KMail has been a little flakey with one of my higher-traffic POP accounts, but this may not be KMails fault, just a coincidence.
- For whatever reason, my desktop occasionally gets switched to a Firefox virtual desktop I often keep open. Probably due to some javascript/focus thing with Firefox, but I hadn't noticed it before. Of course, somewhere along the line I upgraded Firefox, but I don't have the problem on a RH 8 system.
- I was really looking forward to Juk. Unfortunately, while it appears to work fine for mp3/ogg files, my install will simply not play FLACs until I try playing an OGG or mp3 first. Even then the application has crashed on me, and I stopped trying to use it and went back to xmms. I'm _really_ trying to be rid of xmms (and use something semi-full screen, preferably qt based). noatun has also been somewhat unstable for me, but that's true of every version (I think it was a problem with one of the "skins" this time). I haven't spent enough time with these to really track things down, so YMMV.
For me, the tabs in konqueror alone were worth the upgrade. The problems I listed above may very well be other applications or the packages, and none are showstoppers. After I get my new desktop set up (still haven't finalized a distro, could be Debian, Fedora, or Gentoo), I hope to be able to report any reproducible bugs.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Hmmm. Seems your right. A hexdump of the file header hints at its history:
I'm wondering if maybe kde might be or might become the killer app for Linux? I know that anyone who happens to glance at my 3.2 desktop always asks, "Wow, what's that?". It's no longer, "Hey is that a mac?" or "How did you get XP to look like that?". I think KDE has something going that no other desktop has. It has features that are all it's own, that aren't simply attempts at copying features of other desktops.
>>> For commercial development of closed source software, the licensing fees for Trolltech are generally accepted and favored among KDE developers since this ensures support for KDE/Qt in both ways: either someone contributes code to the open source community, or he pays the developers of Qt, both which directly benefit KDE in the end.
The problem with the closed source software fees is that they are outrageous. Shareware developers need not apply, which happen to make the Windows platform what it is today. Shareware developers should not be underestimated in their importance.
To get a license for both Windows and Linux for QT you would have to pay 2500 USD minimum. Gee for that I can get a universal subscript to MSDN, which gives me an IDE, OS, Office, Windows, Windows Server, etc,etc. And what do I get from Trolltech? And SDK! Gee, yippee...
My point is that shareware developers are not against paying money. Contrary they would pay money, but reasonable amounts!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
As a long time Gnome user, and as someone who will go on record as disliking Trolltech and their business model, I must say I am extremely impressed with KDE 3.2. Whilst I still think there is some tidying to go WRT options dialog boxes, this release strikes me as a massive leap forward. The new features and the improvements to Konqueror and the Kicker and so forth are really impressive. So much so, for the first time ever I spent the day working in KDE instead of Gnome and actually enjoyed it, rather than being constantly frustrated by inconsistencies and the general looks of the desktop.
Plastik is the first theme I've seen that makes KDE really start to look like a professional desktop rather than a mish-mash of poorly concieved applications. The underlying framework (KParts, kioslaves) and QT have always been superior to Gnome's, that much I'll admit. I still think it's a shame that QT is licensed under the GPL rather than a BSD-style license, but I guess I'll live.
I might even switch permanently if KDE 3.3 brings as many improvements.
Sense 3.1 a lot of applications have been ported to use the KConfig_XT system (more will be ported before 3.3). One of the great features of this is that if you go into an applications settings it only stores those settings that you actually change. This way your home directory doesn't get filled with a zillion 1K files that are nothing more then the default values because you happen to look at the settings one day. And if you change the settings back to default it will even remove the file! Also you will notice that the configure dialogs (that use KConfig_XT) look and feel the same. :)
.netscape and .netscape6 directories in every users home directory that happens to run it?
-Benjamin Meyer
P.S. Along the same topic why the &%$* does Open Office make a
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Is it me, or are there way too many links in that article. Do we really need seperate links to the source code download, binaries download, release notes and system requirements pages?
If someone has done a study on the most effective text to link ratio, I'm sure they'd find that this Ars article is about 10x higher.
Expect KDE 3.2.1 to be released in two weeks, the changelog is still incomplete but growing till then.
Shaded and animated menus are not activated unless you select in KPersonalizer the highest eye-candy level. And neither fish, cpu display, network monitor nor timezone applet are default in KDE, they must be your distribution's defaults.
The GNOME changes have nothing to do with assuming users are idiots. They have to do with cleanliness. I'm a developer, and I understand what just about any GUI option you throw at me does, or am quite capable of figuring it out. That doesn't mean I want to wade thru page after page after page of options which have no relation to what I want to do to find the one option I'm looking for.
:)
The GNOME changes are not dumbed down, they're cleaner. Advanced users are still quite capable of changing a plethora of options, using advanced methods. Only the very commonly changed options are placed in the menues and config panels, which makes it dead easy for both novices *and* experienced users to tweak the common things.
So far as the gatuitious UI changes, there are clear advantages to the way GNOME has chosen to do things. The dialog button order is a favorite thing of people who wish to bash GNOME, and thus serve as an excellent example. The new button order is *easier* on people both physically and mentally. (location of button wrt mouse movements, location wrt eye movements, etc.)
Additionally, there are no "OK" buttons. If you find one, it's a bug. Which is great. If you see a dialog, what the hell does "OK" mean? You have to read the whole dialog. And deal with the fact that in some cases, "OK" is the safe option, while in others it's the dangerous option. Different apps would pop up dialogs with different OK/Cancel meanings for the same dialog action. (like quit without saving - does OK mean "OK, Save" or "OK, Quit" ?) GNOME solves the problem by mandating that you don't use OK, but put the actual action as the button label. "Save" or "Quit". Much, much harder to accidently click OK when you meant Cancel because the meanings for two apps are different.
Granted, the last bit can be done even with the Windows/KDE button order (i.e. [Save] [Cancel] vs [Cancel] [Save]), which is something I really wish both Windows/KDE would do. The GNOME/Mac ordering however makes for consistent button location, however, since the "positive" (most commonly used) button is always in the same location in the dialog, which (as mentioned above) is both easier and more efficient physically and mentally, for both novice and experienced users. KDE having the ability to change button orders (as I've been told it does) is definitely cool; it would be great if they defaulted to the more human-friendly GNOME/Mac order, and let users who refused to learn switch back to the classic order.
Lots of users and developers think the GNOME/Mac button order is "weird" because they're used to the Windows' way, but that kind of thinking doesn't ever foster improvements. Thankfully, GNOME, OS X, KDE, and most other modern desktops are willing to break the mold and do things differently, even at the risk of "confusing" users, for the sake of moving the GUI experience forward, and not keeping us all locked into Microsoft's (and others') design mistakes made a decade or more ago.
I don't claim that GNOME has things perfect. Far from it. Simply explaining the reasoning behind certain 'controversial' changes. Hopefully useful.
Oh you mean instead of new features like the wallet, which saves passwords for websites and kopete, providing the same functionality of Mozilla? Or perhaps you mean instead of new features like Kontact, which has your mail, addressbook, calendar and user-set rdf news feeds all in one place, and opens so fast you don't have time to view the splashscreen? Perhaps its just me, but I am quite pleased with new features, not to mention the speed.
Once KDE 3.1.5 makes it into testing, 3.2 will go into unstable. See KDE 3.1.5/3.2 Status Update - 20040219 and Information about Debian KDE packages
One of the best and most unappreciated features of KDE is it's inherit troll value.
I'm sorry to post such a blatantly inflammatory gripe, and please don't reply to it in kind. Just be aware that the whole KDE vs. Gnome conversation is quickly degrading to the same sort of drivel that existed in the vi vs. emacs, gui vs. cli, X vs. Y debates.
Both KDE and Gnome are reasonably good programming environments (meaning I can program in both without requiring corrective surgery or extreme pain) and they both do a good job of managing, unifying, homogenizing, and (whatever) of the desktop.
If they come from two licensing lineages, so be it. I'm not worried about the environment / license you are going to choose, I'm going to choose the one I feel most comfortable with and has licensing (at cost or otherwise) that allows me to use it as I need. I'll assume you will do the same.
Less "better than Gnome!" or "worse than Gnome!" and more "it's really great that it has cleaned up feature X" please.
I apologize for such a rant, thank you for putting up with it.
There are quite a few programs that are officially not part of KDE but are excellent KDE based programs nevertheless. For example KPlayer is a superb mplayer based media player I use on a daily basis, and I heard good things about Kaffeine as well (but that one is xine based).
I find it interesting that Mandrake that is supposed to be one of the major players that supports KDE doesn't have a package there. Nor can I find it in PLF's (Penguin Liberation Front) packages.
Anyone know what's up with this?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
KDE - rad kool 1992 Acura Integra with huge wing, go-fast stripes, bumblebee muffler, NOS, tinted windows, butt-jiggling subwoofer
Gnome - 1999 beige Toyota Camry sedan
(*I drive a Camry and I use Gnome)
This installment in the series is NOT as good as the last "Deep Inside" volume I checked out.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
...I've found that most of the smaller tools, that are typically shareware in Windows, is GPL'd in Linux anyway.
At least when it comes to hobby projects that grew into a "shareware" size project, it's very convienient to grab some GPL code here and there - and then you don't have much choice but to GPL it all, if you want others to use and enjoy it.
Shareware makes Windows what it is today? Huh? If I look at my programs they're usually either a) Free (as in beer, not speech) or b) Full-blown commercial. What's shareware? Mirc and a few other, not much.
Unless you count those that are "trial" or "evaluation" versions, but they are typically what I'd consider full-blown commercial, stuff like e.g. Paint Shop Pro doesn't strike me as standard "shareware". That'd be more like Mastersplitter or some such tool someone whipped up on a slow day.
If anything, it is the lack of shareware that makes Linux what it is. Somewhere around there's this tool that'll do what you want, or reasonably close, and it's free. And you can tinker with it until it *does* what you want.
What I really miss on Linux is the juggernaughts... when you *know* GIMP etc. just won't cut it, but there is no real powertool available, no matter what you're willing to pay.
In addition, you can take the "the market knows best" position. Trolltech is a business, trying to maximize profits. Issuing shareware licences would cost them basicly nothing. Since any company would want free profit, why aren't they offering one? Either Trolltech is irrational, or there simply is no interest, no volume.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
imo the KDE people should take a step back and see what they're doing. all those pretty menus and shiny lights and a multitude of buttons and applets. neat, but useless. instead of new features (which KDE has enough already) they should focus more on the interface and how to make it more efficient.
:-)
If you were to read the article, and read the press announcements that came with KDE 3.2, and indeed try KDE 3.2, you'd find that they have done just that, as well as provide interesting new features. For example:
- KWallet, a new feature but one that makes using passwords and secure form data anywhere in the system much more efficient
- Cleaning up of lots of right click menus
- Cleaning up and improving kmenu
- Improving tabs in Konqueror
- A new universal side bar, which apparently is a lot more efficient for some people
- Even better integration of existing KDE technologies like klipper and kio_slaves into many KDE applications
The list goes on and on, but mostly they are small changes so you either have to use it to notice, or read through CVS changelogs. Next time I suggest you check before making loud statements like that
KDE is not slow. Only those who have not yet tried 3.2.0 could make such a statement. I understand why this meme is out there, since I myself wouldn't touch KDE with a 10 foot pole in the 2.x days. It was slow as molasses then. Do remember, Apple distributed the changes they made in KHTML back to Konqueror. The difference in speed is amazing.
As far as bloat, KDE is as bloated or as svelte as you make it. DO_NOT_COMPILE is your friend. For those on binary distributions, try Debian, which lets you pick and choose exactly which KDE apps are installed, allowing just as much choice as DO_NOT_COMPILE.
I'm a Gnome user, but I decided to give KDE 3.1.5 a try about a month ago. I wanted to like it, but I felt the interface was too ornate. I eventually gave up without giving KDE a truly earnest go of it, but I will probably give 3.2 a try on another box. The main reason I gave up was because I had to repeatedly minimize and maximize Konqueror to get the main scroll bar on the right to reappear. It would disappear whenever I opened a new page. Still, I was impressed with Konqueror's quickness.
In a nutshell, I like Gnome because of its simple interface. I use the default theme in 2.4.2.
What's next?
GNOME - Pre-teen midgets gone wild XXX?
Sorry, *tired*.
4 years ago: "Bahh, KDE is too much like Windows, it sucks, real men use Gnome because it can use all my 3 different windowmanagers!"
Now: "Bahh, KDE isn't enough like Windows, it sucks, it doesn't even have a registry-knockoff, you should use Gnome because it's even more dumbed down than Windows XP!"
It doesn't matter what KDE does, there will be always the KDE-haters who will hate it by heart.
Also the anti-KDE retoric seems to depend more on Gnome than on KDE itself, it changed by 180 degrees in the last years.
atleast they got rid of noatun or whatever that crap that KDE media player was. Good god! was it awful. :)
You dont know the pain of being a kde user and having to run XMMS!
oh well i use itunes on OSX now
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
About installation ease of use, I guess.
I've read a lot about KDE and KOffice, enough to try and get it to work on my little Cube (mac). For a couple of weeks I've tried a number of approaches.
- First, install Yellowdog on my main machine. No Go, unless they'll get the Boot from Firewire Disk problem resolved. I'm not convinced I have the skills to install this on my main computer on the main hard-drive.
- Next: installing the OS X "native" alpha, which indeed installed nicely but managed to do exactly nothing.
- Finally I've tried the X11/fink route which was very entertaining (if you're into that kind of mind-numbing fun) but in the end - despite following lots of advice I didn't really get from faq/help/manuals/fora, it managed to do just the same: nothing.
Now why would I share this with a bunch of geeks who can do this with their eyes closed?
Not to be humiliated by you, I'm already quite used to "you're stoopid, zat's ze problem" comments.
But to make you aware that a no-nonsense/no command line/no "first install this, then that, then go through the manuals, then ask help" installer should be highest priority in every project that tries to bridge the gap between superhuman users and regular users.
Of course I'm stupid. But I'm also quite adept on my own platform, I've been using it for the last 20 years (god, I'm old).
Let's wrap this up and tell you what I'm now considering, and please remember that I'm not a regular patient. I'm one of those people who still wants to use something even after being told he's actually too stupid to even install it. The normal reaction - I think - would be to feel better about ones own OS and think less of the one that doesn't want to be friends with you.
My next options are:
- waiting a couple of months until I can safely install Yellowdog on a Tangerine iBook I still have here, but which is still needed as backup machine for me and my wife in case our computers blow up.
- waiting a couple of months until the "native" darwin version of KOffice is out. I think they take installation ease of use very seriously. Although ultimately useless, the installation process was painless. That at least is pleasantly reassuring.
What I'm not going to do: tinker and tinker until I get KOffice to work under the X11/Fink setup. It's just too much of a hassle. There's no joy, and in the end I already have everything I really *need* to enjoy my computer. Curiosity can kill some other cat.
Rant over, have a nice day!
I think, therefore I am...I think.
i've been using kde3.2 for a while...
..
Today this rather wonderful dialog popped up just after I clicked to send an email in Kmail...
Attachments?
Often its the little things that really make the difference.
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I would love to see some of the lower-level KDE features made available to gnome through some kind of thunk layer. For example, blending gnome-vfs modules into the KIO subsystem, or blending KIO slaves into the Gnome VFS subsystem would be very very useful to me.
Theming integration is also cool. Right now there is a gtk theme that uses the current KDE theme engine to draw the widgets. I would love to see a QT theme that uses the current GTK engine to draw widgets. Then a program like KDevelop might actually fit into my desktop.
Another pipe dream that is slowly being worked on is a way to call methods on objects from the Gnome framework to the KDE framework and vice versa.
politically correct? who cares =) over at kde-look.org you'll find several icon themes for KDE that originated in GNOME (now that we share a common icon spec, this will become trivial in the future) as well as several cross-desktop widget and window themes.
The tabs in the new Konqueror are indeed much better than before, but still not as nice as the tabs in Mozilla.
As with many KDE widgets (toolbars, the file list browser in konqueror), the tabs seem to flash a lot before settling down. Maybe it's my slow PII-233 processor, though it seems like KDE3.2 finally got the app load time down to a reasonable level even on this box, so I think the processor's not the problem.
I think the problem with the Konqui tabs is that they are sized based on their label data, but the label data isn't available until the page actually gets loaded. They then do a sort of cute animation to expand or shrink the tab as necessary, but in the meantime the thing gets painted umpteen times.
Mozilla just seems to use equal-sized tabs, all shrunken as needed to get them all to fit. In a sense this is less elegant, but it works beautifully. No flashing, plus you get a nice animated 'downloading' indicator on each incomplete tab.
I've always been a KDE fan, but I took a look at a recent GNOME release (2.6? MDK10.0 beta), and GNOME seems to have no redraw issues. I don't particularly like the way GNOME looks, but it still seems more 'solid' on my slow processor due to this level of attention to detail.
Probably, widget redraw problems are in TrollTech's court. But with kde3.2 (and the beautiful Plastik theme) solving most of kde's aesthetic issues, it'd be nice if somebody put the screws to TT about widget redraws. (don't lots of kde programmers work for TT?).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I run it on my 300Mhz P2-laptop and it's fast enough. I also tried it on my 1GHz P3 laptop, and it ran REALLY fast.
On my laptop, full-blown KDE-desktop with Kopete and Konsole uses about 50 megs of RAM (well, that's an estimate. Running CLI-only showed about 5 megs of RAM being used, adding Xfree, KDE and Konsole in to the mix, bumbed that figure to about 58megs. So I would say that KDE might be using under 50 megs of RAM, rest being used by Xfree Konsole and Kopete. I don't consider that to be that much)
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.