KDE 3.2.1 Released

TheSurfer writes "The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.2.1, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.2.1 ships with lot of bug fixes since KDE 3.2 and is available in 49 languages (now including Bengali, Icelandic, Japanese, Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Latin Serbian and Tajik). Sources and contributed packages are linked on the KDE 3.2.1 info page."

Comments

What we "gnomers" say

[Overly Critical Guy]

(no more bloated interfaces, but still with all the features, what do you gnomers say now?)

No more bloated interfaces? Tell me, what's been removed? Same interface that 3.1 had.

3.2 added more sidebar buttons, more of what GUI designers like to call "cruft." Load up Control Center some time--you've got like a hundred items in there, grouped within groups.

Also, you have a single "K" menu. This is goofy and amateur. Gnome has a seperate Applications pull down menu for programs, and an Actions menu for logging out, restarting, and so forth. The K menu has at least three redundancies, Preferences, Control Center, System, etc. And most application groups have a "More Programs" group for some reason. This is extremely confusing, and also a hindrance to power users who just want to find what app they need to run.

Also, I have to click once on hyperlink desktop items and wait three seconds as a Home folder loads. Gnome requires that you double-click like every other sane GUI, and I get the window *instantly*.

There is simply no good reason to have your web browser be your filesystem browser. One program is designed to retrieve graphical content via an HTTP protocol and display it, while the other is designed to display folders and manipulate files through moving, copying, and so forth.

I find it hilarious that people bitch when Microsoft integrates Internet Explorer but find it perfectly acceptable that Konquerer be integrated into KDE. What happened to the whole "but newbies will use what's already there by default, and that flies in the face of choice" argument that we always hear against Windows?

I'm not even going to get into the spacing issues (try telling an application menu to remain at the top like MacOS--then shoot the cursor up and click--there is a space of a pixel up there that doesn't register as a click, defeating the whole purpose, because Mac users are used to slamming the mouse up and hitting a menu which is faster than pinpointing a menu attached to a floating window), the spacing between menu items, the layout of buttons (OK, Cancel is evil...not to mention that things like Cancel should be on the left, Save and Quit in the middle, Exit on the right, and the buttons should not be equally spaced...Cancel should be moved to the very left while the other two should be grouped together), and so on and so forth.

You asked what we gnomers say to it...I responded how this gnomer feels about KDE 3.2. Other opinions may vary. Gnome 2.6 is due out later this month. Look to it for a CLEAN, elegant desktop designed not to get in your way but to let you actually operate your computer, instead of giving you a thousand-and-one ways to create pretty screenshots for kde-look.org that aren't even usable as daily interfaces. Gnome isn't perfect, but you can tell it's focus it to be a clean and elegant interface, not a huge massive sidebar-button-filled convoluted interface with a name like "KDE" and apps like "Kouger," "Kroupware," and "Kallery."