KDE 3.3.1 Released

Michael Pyne writes "It's finally out, KDE 3.3.1 has been released with many bugfixes and translation improvements! Those who just want to start downloading can visit the KDE 3.3.1 Info page, which also includes packages for Red Hat, SuSE, Conectiva, and Yoper." wikinerd adds some details, writing that the new version "fixes a number of bugs in Konqueror, improves JuK and enables VPL in the Quanta webpage editor. The new Plastik theme is very fast and may become the default style in 3.4."

Comments

kdegames bugfixes

[y2imm]

* kreversi: Fix against possible cheat (#90195)

Cheating at reversi? Does anyone take it that seriously? That has a girlfriend, or a dog, or even a friggin fish or two.

Re:PlastiK!?!

[JabberWokky]

It's available in 3.3 right now. It has very subtle animations, nice low contrast in points that shouldn't stand out and high contrast for the items (like slider bars) that you want to see. Buttons have a soft glow when you mouse over them, the critical ones (close window) glow red. Progress bars have a very subtle stippling that moves as the bar grows.

Very nice looking, totally rendered on the fly and surprisingly fast, even on slow machines (no pixmaps to load, so it's got a small memory footprint, too).

--
Evan "And blackbox/fluxbox also works with KDE"

Hey, KDE, pay attention to keyboard use!

[KWTm]

One thing about the KDE desktop I wish would improve: more emphasis on use of the keyboard over using the mouse, so that I don't necessarily need to have a mouse to use the GUI.

When I used Win2k, I could flip open the Start Menu and start a program with a few rapid keypresses: Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P for MS Paint (you have to organize the Start Menu so that each entry starts with a unique letter). You can flip to another window and maximize with Alt-Tab, Alt-Space, X.

With KDE 2.x, you couldn't even select a program with a letter key --either cursor up/down or click with the mouse.

With KDE 3.x, you could now navigate with letter keys --it could tell when you had typed enough of a menu entry to make it uniquely identifiable.

HOWEVER --it wasn't fast enough to catch my keystrokes. For example, setting up my KDE menu to mimic the MS Windows menu, I could type Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P --but I could be finished typing all keystrokes before that danged menu actually popped up on the screen and sluggishly said, "Huhh?? You gonna press a key? I'm waiting for your keybpress you know..." So now I end up having to take my hand off the keyboard to click with the mouse. It's damn annoying.

This is again the case with KDE programs like Krusader, a Norton Commander-like "clone" that is handy enough for me to rely on, but just aggravating enough to be a thorn in my side. It's not officially part of the KDE main package, but it should be --maybe the main KDE developers would pay more attention to the interface part of it.

I have to say that, as GUI-based as MS Windows was, you could do almost everything by keyboard without the mouse. You can't do that with KDE, and I wish I could.

Now for the footnotes:
1. I don't use Windows any more. I've been using Mandrake Linux since v8.1.
2. I don't hate KDE. It has many excellent features such as redefinable keystroke shortcuts. This is the main reason I use KDE; can someone tell me if GNOME has this yet?
3. On using keyboard instead of a mouse: "If you were a *real* geek, you'd use the CLI." Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, I'm sure you get off on ASCII pr0n. There's a place for the GUI, and a place for the mouse, but not necessarily at the same time.