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KDE 3.4 goes Beta

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the new-and-improved dept.

wikinerd writes "KDE 3.4 has reached its beta testing phase. The KDE 3.4beta1 is codenamed 'Krokodile' and pre-compiled packages are already available for Slackware, but if you need to compile it by yourself first check its compilation requirements."

10 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Excited about KDE 3.4 by green+pizza · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm looking forward to giving 3.4 a try. Why? Because on my modest hardware it seems like Qt has gotten faster over the past 2 years while GTK2 has gotten slower.

    1. Re:Excited about KDE 3.4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I don't pay much attention to GTK+ upgrades because not many applications on my system use it. The last big release of GTK+ I heard about was 2.0, but I just checked, and the version installed on my system is 2.4.14. This is on an Athlon 1900XP.

      I don't know why it is, but the GTK+ interface is noticably sluggish for me. Not only opening menus, but moving down the entries, and applications have a tendency to freeze and not draw properly when they are busy doing something. I notice it across the few GTK+ applications I use, but not anything Qt or KDE based.

      Make of it what you will, I'm only reporting what I see - same as the person who was accused of being "confused" about what was slower and faster on his own system.

  2. Screenshots? by schnits0r · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are there any screenshots of this? What does it look like? Is it pretty? Does it have new features both usably, and visually?

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  3. KDE 4.0... by Jameth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm actually most excited because this means that, in not too long, people will start really working on KDE 4.0. That's the release I want. 3.4 is a finalization of the 3's, really. It's got some nice cleanup of what's there and will run a little better, but almost all the features that were ever going into the 3's are already there.

    But 4.0...oh, I can hardly wait...

  4. Masive i18n by Forge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Notice how the translations are larger than everything else combined ?

    That I partially reflects the share number of languages available. It also shows how modular KDE's design is. I.e. You can strip out everything language dependent into a separate package without breaking the rest. (Yes, it compiles in English without the i18n package).

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  5. Re:Anti-aliased fonts by MrHanky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are you sure this has much to do with CPU power? I use xrender AA on my Powerbook G3 266 MHz (running Debian Sid), and it's far from shockingly slow. If I have to guess, I'd say it's because the ATI graphics chipset (Mach64, i think) is moderately well supported.

    And of course, if you haven't tried xrender on the machines lately, you could test it again. Xrender has improved a bit since it was introdused some years ago.

  6. autospellcheck on kate? by sewagemaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    does anyone have any luck with autospellcheck (spellcheck as you type, red underlining of words if you make a spelling mistake) in kate? They were saying that this was going to be released in 3.2 but it doesnt seem to be there. bugs.kde.org has closed the wishlist/feature request ticket. I'm using 3.3.1 currently. The feature's there in konqueror, kmail and kword, but for us folks that use kile (which depends on kate) as the LaTeX source editor, we would sure find it a good feature to have.

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  7. Tried it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    best new stuff IMHO are two apps: kpdf and akregator

    kpdf was pretty crappy in kde 3.3. It's a lot better now. Faster than xpdf/acroread/gpdf/kghostview. Almost as many features as Adobe Acrobat reader. Wonderful.

    akregator is a nice RSS browser that is now part of kdepim. It behaves just like kmail. I'm glad to see this part of kotnact, because thunderbird has RSS support, and I fell in love with that.

  8. Qt4 by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Qt4 is a really major change. It is most definitely non-trivial to port code to Qt4, even with the Qt3 compatiblity libraries.

    As someone facing the need to port their code to Qt4 sometime in the coming year, I'm all too aware of this.

    I wouldn't expect a Qt4 based KDE in any hurry. Even if they're already porting to the Qt4 beta, I expect it'll take them a fair darn while even after Qt4 stable comes out before they can put together a Qt4 desktop. Even then, I'll be surprised if some apps don't continue to use Qt3 for a while after that.

  9. Most of the magic is in Qt by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The really impressive translation magic is in Qt's i18n tools ( QObject::tr(), lupdate, lrelease, etc). It "just works" - you code your app in English, but mark strings as translatable and translators can translate your app using external files generated from the source that can be distributed separately.

    It's fantastic.

    Sure, there's more work involved in making external resources like HTML help translatable, but the real magic happens in Qt.