KDE 3.3 Officially Released

scorp1us was one of several to note that KDE 3.3 has been released. You can also read the infopage and the requirements. Commence downloading. Features a new spell checking library, a new theme manager, and much more.

Comments

Re:Yaay KDE!

[10Ghz]

Guess I've got some downloading to do, eh? Which comes to a gripe - it's a real pain in the arse to download all the seperate files and install them. Sure would be nice if the KDE team wrote an "update" script that would check for updates and optionally download/install them.

*cough*

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 3.3 Screenshots at the bottom of that page.

Re:Yaay KDE!

[Anonymous Coward]

there is Konstruct you know which builds KDE for you. I am building 3.3 with it right now

New Features (site is slashdotted)

[Anonymous Coward]

As culled from the Announcment page:

Highlights At A Glance

Some of the highlights in KDE 3.3 are listed below.

• New applications
  • Kolourpaint, an easy-to-use replacement for KPaint
  • KWordQuiz, KLatin and KTurtle expand the list of education packages for schools and families
  • Kimagemapeditor and klinkstatus make life easier for web designers
  • KSpell2, a new spellchecking library that fixes all of KSpell's shortcomings
  • KThemeManager, a new control center module to globally handle KDE visual themes
  • The Python bindings PyQT and PyKDE are now maintained with KDE in our CVS
• Integration of desktop components
  • Kontact is now integrated with Kolab, KDE's groupware solution, and Kpilot
  • Konqueror features better support for Instant Messenging contacts, with the capability to send files to IM contacts, and support for IM protocols (e.g. irc://)
  • KMail can display the online presence of IM contacts
  • Kopete can display a "now listening to" message from amaroK
  • Juk has support for burning audio CDs with K3B
• Many small desktop enhancements
  • Tab improvements in Konqueror, including scrollwheel switching
  • An RSS feed viewer sidebar in Konqueror
  • A searchbar for Konqueror, compatible with all keyword: searches
  • HTML composing, anti-spam/anti-virus wizards, automatic handling of mailing lists, improved support for cryptography and a handy quick search bar all make their way into KMail
  • Kopete gains support for file transfers with Jabber
  • Quanta Plus has a VPL (Visual Page Layout) mode to make editing even easier
  • aRts gains jack support, and aKode, a new multithreaded audio decoding/encoding library to replace mpeglib
  • KWin has new buttons to support its full features, including "always on top"
  • Over 7,000 bugs have been closed, and over 2,000 wishes have been fulfilled
  • Over 60,000 lines of code, documentation and other contributions have been committed to CVS

For a more detailed list of improvements since the KDE 3.2 release, please refer to the KDE 3.3 Feature Plan.

Re:Yaay KDE!

[Enahs]

You know, I used to say the same thing. I recently moved *from* Gentoo *to* Debian, and I have a few things to say on the subject.

See, the thing is, Debian tries to be this safe-as-milk Linux distribution. Packages are compiled (in most cases) in the most generic way possible. There are exceptions, such as kernel images, but other than that, on x86, it's i386 all the way. That cuts down on performance a little.

Having said that, now that I've bothered to configure my Debian system, I don't notice much of a difference at all in performance.

What did I do? I took a bit of what I had learned in the Gentoo world and applied it to Debian. I'm not running syslog/klog anymore; instead, I'm running metalog in async mode. I have all my partitions mounted with the noatime option, and the reiserfs partitions are mounted with notail. I made the root partition ext3; I formatted the partition to have sparse superblocks and to use btree hash directory structures. I've added local changes to tweak harddrive performance. Finally, I audited what services needed to be running and got rid of anything that wasn't necessary. I'm not done yet, either. Doing things like switching to faster, lighter getty alternatives help, and there are other speed improvements that can be made.

Much is made of custom CFLAGS in the land of Gentoo, but the real power (if you start at stage1) is being able to build a smarter, lighter Linux system from the beginning.

These are all things that some Linux-on-the-desktop distribution could do automagically, naturally, if you're thinking "yeah, buddy, sounds *reeeeal* easy har har har." Well, it wasn't that bad, and I relieved myself of the headache of devoting my main box to building KDE packages. Some joker with a blazing-fast P4 and several megatons of RAM can do that for me. ;-D