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KDE 3.3: A Milestone For Linux On The Desktop

Posted by timothy on from the ever-nicer dept.

comforteagle writes "O'Reilly's OSDir has published the first of a new bi-weekly column called "KDE: From the Source" from which KDE developer and unofficial North American spokesperson George Staikos will be regularly writing on issues and happenings from the KDE camp. Naturally, his first piece focuses on KDE 3.3 and its implications for Linux on the desktop."

4 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. BUGGY! by mmport80 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't get me wrong, I love KDE. But 3.3 has been pretty much a buggy experience for me. I realize it's bound to be unstable, but as far as I can see KDE is focusing more on releasing new releases, rather than fixing boring old bugs!

  2. Not too shabby... by dmayle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I must admit, I'm pretty excited about KDE at this point. I've been a longtime Gnome user, and, after trying out Qingy (a GUI replacement for getty that let's you run different sessions on different virtual teminals, like Gnome on VT1, KDE on VT2, text console on VT3, all chosen at login time.), I decided to give some of the other desktop environments a shot, since it was so easy. I've always had KDE installed, just because I wanted the flexibility (slightly longer compile times, but I just left it running overnight on my Gentoo system.), so it made it simple to try.

    I must say, I'm pretty impressed. The straight out of the box configuration sucks balls. (I had to add a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to Konsole before it was usable, but it was all centrally located and easy to do. In addition, I can't stand the default menu configuration.) The only thing I'm missing at this point is the lovely font unification that Gnome has. (At least under 2.6.0-2 and XOrg, I didn't have to do any configuration to get pretty, aliased, unified fonts.) At this point, I'm not sure if that's a deal breaker, so I'm giving it a shot.

    The real test will be when I want to make sure that Firefox is the default URL handler so I don't have to deal with that damn Konqueror opening if I don't want to (Because doing the same in Gnome was a bitch.)

    Anyway, sorry to rant, but I guess I just wanted to let all you Gnome diehards know that KDE can work. And it can be snappy, too... (Though I just started using it with 2.4.26 and low-latency scheduling, so Gnome might be snappier on this machine as well, a PIII 500 with 384MB RAM.)

    1. Re:Not too shabby... by JohnFluxx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I saw commits in kdm recently to allow you to make multiple sessions, and switch between them.

  3. Slow still? by Anna+Merikin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OK, that's all fine. But what I want to know is:

    Will KDE still clobber any keyboard repeat rate higher than 10.9 per second, like other KDEs I have used (1.x, 2.x, 3.1 on Caldera, TurboLinux, RedHat and Knoppix) do?

    Even if I put a faster rate in .bashrc, if I open a terminal (or even a non-KDE editor!) I have 10.9 cps. again.

    It makes the whole OS seem slow.

    It p*sses me off so much I have de-installed KDE on all but Knoppix (!) to get my fast keyboard response back -- and Knoppix' KDE survives only because one cannot uninstall KDE in Knoppix.