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KDE 3.4 goes Beta
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."
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.
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...
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).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
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.