Preview of KDE 3.5

tr_x_data writes "There is a quite interesting KDE 3.5 preview with screenshots on JLP's Blog. I thought there wouldn't be so much improvement to KDE 3.4 since everyone is working on porting KDE4 to QT4, but obviously there are quite a few changes. Look forward to "Storage Media Notification", "Adblock" for Konqueror, new Tooltips, better Workspace-Pager, and so on. Read for yourself."

Comments

It looks good...

[daviq]

The new KDE looks good. Except for the one pet peeve of mine-->the taskbar is way too huge. It would be much better at half or even a quarter of it's size. The real highlight is storage media reconizing. This is a whyI have loathed KDE-->the lack of such.

Re:It looks good...

[bynary]

The real highlight is storage media reconizing.

Is it just me, or does that media recognition window look eerily like the one in Windows XP? The longer I use KDE, the more it feels like Windows. I don't want it to feel like Windows. It seems to me that the Linux community doesn't have a creative bone in its collective body when it comes to GUI design. Can't we do better than just emulating Windows or Mac OS X?

Re:It looks good...

[davidsyes]

Two ways so modify the size of your Kicker are to right-click on it and adjust the size.

If you haven't INITIALLY done it that way, another way is to go through KControl (KDE Control Center) and then under "LookNFeel" click on "Panels"

There, you have two nice options to try in the "Arrangement" tab, subsection "Length":

click the box for "Expand as required to fit contents" and THEN set the slider to say, 50% or whatever you want. You'll still have blank space to the left or right if you've centered the bar, but it might shrink icon and things on the Kicker for you.

And, in the "Size" subsection, you can set the "Custom" option.

Now, when you go back to right-clicking on the Kicker, and you then click on the "Size" arrow, you'll see:

Tiny
Small
Normal
Large

Custom
Resizable

Resizable is nice because once you enable it, you will be able to float your cursor over the upper edge of the Kicker then when it has double-ended arrows, just resize the height of the Kicker and watch the icons increase or decrease in size.
-----------

HIDING/HIDE-MODE

Under the "Hiding" tab, you can set the "Hide Mode" and the "Hiding Animation" settings, so you can set the panel to be covered by apps or other windows you expand, and you can set the delay in milliseconds, as well as whether the covering of the Kicker should be with or without animation.

----------
Don't forget, if you've seen but not used, Kasbar.

To use it, and to fiddle with it via KControl, first right-click on Kicker and click on "Add", then "Panel", then "Kasbar".

You can resize Kasbar, but not as granularly as Kicker. BUT, what Kasbar has that Kicker doesn't (as of yet) is that you can enable and resize the icon thumbnail/preview so you can select which of multiple instances of, say, Konqueror, you have open. That is, if you have multiple instances of Konqueror Kwrite or Kate open, and you don't want to tab through them, adjust the thumbnail so you can see the actual image or text flow of that instance you want to switch to.

Right-click on Kasbar, then click on "Kasbar", then move your pointer to the bottom of the floating palette and click on "Kasbar", then click on "Configure". Yo can adjust the "Size" to small, medium or large.

On "Thumbnails", you can enable or deselect the option, but if you enable, try the slider for "Thumbnail size" and adjust to your liking. You can update the thumbnail image in increments of seconds. (You can go up to 999 seconds, but I set mine for 10.)

You can also-- as with Kicker-- enable or disable the left/right/top/bottom hide/unhide arrows.

Don't forget that you can also increase the number of virtual desktops in KControl. Spread out your apps across the desktop. As with Kicker, you can float your pointer over a Kasbar button or thumbnail and right-click it to send it to the current or another desktop.

Near to "Finally"... When you have either of or both of Kicker and Kasbar running, you can set the KDE desktop to respond to maximization of apps by either allowing or disallowing the app to cover, hide or expand to the screen's full size. If you need to keep a number of windows open without such that you can click on or use "focus follows mouse", then use "Atl+right-click" while your cursor is at the sides or corners and then adjust the app so you can avoid using Alt+Tab (to switch between virtual desktops) or Ctrl+Tab (to switch between ANY of the running apps, regardless of which desktop the are on).

Finally, when the IP stack or system resources get bogged, I find it faster to use Kasbar to switch between desktops and apps. There seems to be caching and thrashing going on when I float over and try to click Kicker sometimes. But, when I float to and click on Kasbar, BAM!!! A task or window is nearly instantly switched to. Must be a backend coding issue. Or, my 900-MHz Celery system AND my (former laptop which died) 800 MHz AMD system fell victim to KDE code.

David Syes

Re:It looks good...

[mpupu]

You're wrong. The artistic community around KDE is growing a lot lately. Take a look at here and see it for yourself.

Don't Interrupt

[dsginter]

The storage medium notification is not untuitive the way XP (and now KDE 3.5) does it. Basically, the user puts in a disc and then some time later, gets a notification that interrupts whatever is being performed.

A better way to do it would be to stick a little message notification bubble above the system tray. This would also prevent movies from auto-running.

A big problem with XP is that DVD movies often have crap software that auto-installs on the computers of people who don't know any better. If OSS wants to become a widely used desktop, then it needs to be better than the status quo, rather than a copy. This means that it has to protect users rather than facilitate spyware and junk.

Re:Don't Interrupt

[ssj_195]

Yeah, I prefer the old way (currently using 3.4) - add the Storage Media applet to your kicker, and when you insert a DVD/ USB Pen etc it will appear as a small icon in the kicker, which is nice and unobtrusive. Unfortunately, all USB Mass Storage (include cameras, card-readers etc) devices have the "USB Pen" icon shown. I filed a bug report about this (http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109260); if anyone else feels this would be a good idea, please chime in :)

Re:Don't Interrupt

[Microlith]

The question is what kind of window.

Currently if there's an autorun, windows runs it. Fine for installers, generally.

If it's some sort of removeable media with no autorun, it'll scan the disk then ask you what you want to do. Unfortunately, sometimes you can't tell it to do the same action every time (it hides the checkbox) or even if you tell it to do that, it'll ignore your setting and prompt you again anyway.

What'd be nice is an option for either no notification, or a simple "Your device is ready" popup that slides up from the corner of the screen like thunderbird/trillian/other software pops up then slides away without interfering.

Re:Don't Interrupt

[stilborne]

yay! this trollmeme again!

unless you consider SUSE, Novell Linux Desktop (which provides both desktops equally), Mandriva, Linspire, Xandros, Knoppix, etc, etc, etc as inconsequential "one man band" distros (well, Knoppix may still be a one person effort, not sure), then your argument is demonstrably false.

about a year and a half ago ESR claimed during a radio interview that KDE would be irrelevant by now. he basically used this exact same argument and yet .... KDE is more popular now than ever and continues to gain momentum.

i'm sure you've heard of projects like the city of Vienna?

heck, KDE is still even in Red Hat ;)

Re:Bubblegum?

[ssj_195]

I personally don't think it's too wise to ignore one DE based on its (easily and permanently, even across installs!) modifiable default setup; it's best to try both, preferably with someone who knows the good/ bad points of both to take you through it.

Personally, I've always found the resemblance to Windows to be entirely superficial, and KDE's excellent integration across a wide-range of apps and its nifty kio_slaves (along with a whole bunch of other reasons) made me fall in love with it. I'll let a GNOME fan argue the other side :)

Re:Incremental Changes

[osi79]

You don't really expect that people will do that work for you? For an overview what is going on right now, check out "this month in SVN": http://www.hoult.org/~canllaith/svn-features/14-07 -05.html

Re:Bubblegum?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but I can say exactly something else.

Look across Gnumeric for example and look at it's options. Someone wrote a bugreport about Gnumeric not following the Toolbar changes for icons, text besides icons etc. These things are even keyelement of the HIG in the version 2.0 and the bug was marked as 'not a bug' and closed.

Later on I dived into the Preferences of Gnumeric and found various really braindamaged settings that people should even care less about. E.g. DPI settings. I mean DPI ? Which normal user know what DPI is and why should it rely on an application ? Usually the DPI is set through the X server during startup or should be set globally in a small application but not through the app again.

There are plenty of other issues around GNOME, mainly small issues that summed up makes a big issue out of it. I think the people who haven't thought correctly about their applications and their architecture are the GNOME people.

KDE otoh has everything nicly and tightly integrated, the things work. Ok I agee sometimes stuff can be simpler for the user but then the stuff works, their applications behave consistent, the applications makes a solid and function experience and don't look like it's hacked up in a hurry.

Sorry to say but you don't really know what you are talking about. It's impossible to get everyone working on GNOME to pull on the same rope, as long as this ain't possible as long we are stuck in problematic issues around GNOME.

The bug that was marked as 'not a bug'.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311349

Here another bugreport that explains why 311349 indeed is a bug, including references to the HIG and other stuff.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311655

This is just one small example of many examples that I can easily throw and demonstrate.

I miss KDE 1.0

[devphaeton]

Seriously... I do.

It was light, fast, stable, and pretty enough. Using wmaker right now because XFCE4 has a few drawbacks. While I might look at KDE 3.5 just to see, i still might cobble together all the 1.0 code and try to run it on my fbsd 5.4/athlon system. It oughta fly balls!

Desktop icons aligning properly yet?

[pestie]

Have the KDE people figured out how to make the desktop icons line up properly yet? I'm sorry if this sounds like another "Why can't KDE be like Windoze?" whine, but when I turn on icon auto-arrangement in Windoze, I get nice, neat vertical columns of icons. Do the same in KDE and I get some quasi-random scattering of icons. I have no idea why that is. If I right-click the desktop and select Icons > Sort Icons > By Type, it works fine. But the auto-arrange seems to use some completely different arrangement algorithm that creates multiple columns, some of which aren't even full, and some of which only have one icon. WTF?

Re:Bloat

[Anonymous Monkey]

but really, who needs an icky looking Mr. Potatoe Head game as an included part of a desktop environment

When my sister in law's kids com over and want to play with the computer I load up Mr. Potatoe. After all, one of them is OCD and my copy of Civ or Sim City is a bit too much for him, and the other one gets hyper if allowed action games. Mr. P. keeps them happy during computer time (20 min each)

Re:Bubblegum?

[Hoplite3]

I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.

More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.

I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.

An example from gnome is the hidden type-in box in the file selector. It's extreme (type-in isn't that ugly a thing to have in a selector!), but once you know you can hit "/" and just enter a path, it is really cool.

Gnome's new "three top-level" menus is also pretty cool, if you've used it. It helps to take the clutter out of the menu.

(Not to say I love everything gnome. The KDE apps are much better in general. Konqueror is more useful than nautilus to me. Konsole is worlds better than gnome-terminal. KDVI is without peer.)

Oh, I should say something nice about 3.5. The changes to konqueror are great! It cuts the fat out of the menus. Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code, but the UI should be different in each mode. This is a very positive change for konqueror.

I think KDE needs a new default icon set

[crivens]

I'm glad they're slowly tidying up the interface. My current pet peeve is the default icon set is really ugly. I know that you can replace it, but when I look at the KDE screenshots I don't get excited at the improvements to the interface or to Konq. I am put off by how ugly it looks with the icon set.

Re:I think KDE needs a new default icon set

[Quattro Vezina]

Agreed.

That horribly bright WinXP-clone icon theme needs to go if KDE wants to gain any credibility.

I recommend Slick as the new default. It already comes with KDE, so there's no need to package anything new. It's also the single best icon set out there--it's very sleek, and it's also quite unique. I've yet to see any other icon set that resembles Slick in any way. Did I mention that it lives up to its name?

It would also be nice if KDE were to adopt Slick's subdued colour scheme as their main colour scheme--that sickeningly bright blue is disgusting, and only hurts KDE's reputation. For the record, I was pretty pissed when KDE changed the welcome pages (shown when you first load up Konqueror, Akregator, KMail, etc.) in 3.4 to that sickening blue. I liked the subdued tones of the old welcome pages, and the new ones clash horrifically with my colour scheme.

I don't even use KDE as my desktop anymore (I'm a happy Ion zealot now), but the vast majority of GUI apps I use are KDE apps, and I like my screen to look good.

Re:Bloat

[taylortbb]

The KDE website has a list of upcoming features at:

http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde- 4.0-features.html

Judging by how many items there are on that list, and that this is a port, not a re-write, I think that KDE4 will be full of features. Though there are some which could go, really minor useless ones.

Re:Bloat

[mrchaotica]

Both DEs are designed around a functional, reusable framework.

Bloat is the fact that each is designed around a different framework, so they don't get reused as much as they should be because you have to install both to get all your applications to work.

KDE looks more and more like a poor Win imitation

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they try to make it look like windows? If I want windows I use the genuine item, not some clone!.

The standard KDE settings are getting worse and worse, you need to waste time to change them. For example recently they disabled the delete contextual menu, if you dont enable it yourself, it is a disaster. The KDE trash is not very functional, if you move some items from other drives or partitions to the trash the items are copied to the partition where your home directory is, in the trash directory, and only then you can delete them. Why dont they make a trash directory on each partition like in MacOS and Windows?. What happens if I want to delete a 12GB directory from a removable drive and and my home directory has only 8GB available?. KDE tries to copy the thing to the trash but there is not enough storage for that. The file manager is useless, the only solution is the rm command.

A couple or releases ago they introduced 'My Computer'. This is not Windows, there is no need for this. 'My Computer' in KDE is a bad Windows imitation and does not function like the regular KDE file manager. In the File Manager if you open a terminal from the tool menu, the location in the terminal is the same as in the window. If you opened the terminal from /mnt/hda8 in the terminal you are in /mnt/hda8 (very clever, I always liked this, since KDE 1, in 1998). It you do this from 'My Computer', in the terminal you always remain in your home directory. That is, if I navigate to /mnt/hda8 from my computer and open a terminal from the tool menu, the location in the terminal is in my home directory,not in /mnt/hda8. The notations of partitions in My Computer are confusing. Accdording to the UNIX tradition I dont give names to different partitions (again, this is not Windows, there is no need for it, I identify the prtitions by their device names: /dev/sdb4, /dev/hda8, etc). In My computer two partitions with exactly the same size and no windows style names have exactly the same name, say '10.2 GB Volume'. Why dont they put the pathnames /mnt/sdb2, /mnt/hda4, etc. The way it is, 'My Computer' is totally useless, better trash it.

Other inconvenience is produced by KDE automounting removable drives: for some obscure reason the removable devices mounted by KDE do not show up when I use the df command (Why?).Actually, I dont need automount, I usually disable it, if I attach an external drive, I read the name of the device given by linux from dmesg and mount it from the command line wherever I like, this way the mounted thing would show up in df, it is easier to figure out what is going on.

Re:It looks nice

[snorklewacker]

Long as it's configurable, unlike gnome, I'm fine with it. I'll keep the buttons in the order I'm accustomed to.

When was the last time someone asked you a "no or yes" question? Dialogs should support natural idiom, including those of English, and not the whims of some developers, regardless of how many single-sourced HCI studies they can cite.

Re:Bloat

[stilborne]

> Have you seen a list of things that will be
> removed from KDE4?

i haven't either. perhaps you could educate all of us ;)

if you're afraid KDE4 will be "KDE, without the features" then perhaps you're thinking of that "SimpleKDE" fork thing or perhaps you just got wrong information.

we are certainly aiming for a more usable KDE, but not a featureless one. popular perception aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Re:It looks nice

[stilborne]

yes, we prescribe meaningful verbs whenever reasonable. you'll still find situations where 'Ok' is the best fit, but most of our dialogs do use verbs these days.

if you'd like to help police this, you're more than welcome to join the project =)

> Politics I guess is the main reason for not
> doing this

no. it's because we've done it this way forever, as has the DOMINANT desktop: microsoft windows. there's little to be gained in practical usage from switching the buttons around, except to annoy users who are used to it the other way around.

i'm highly unimpressed at GNOME for having broken this otherwise consistent placement of buttons on X11 by opting for a theory that in practice is largely nascent in benefit. fortunately now Gtk+ allows you to switch those button orders at runtime in its dialogs, thanks to SUSE wanting Gtk+ apps to look proper in a KDE desktop.

> with nice and clear icons and a nice solid feel
> to things.

=)

Re:Bubblegum?

[iamwahoo2]

I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.

I disagree, so that blows the whole "everyone" argument out of the water. I find Gnome to be uglier and less useful. I think Gnome's goals of simplicity are good, but those of us who are used to the power and supposed "complexity" of KDE find it addicting. I hope that KDE and Gnome continue to be different along the lines of power -vs- simplicity. This means that there is something that suits both types of users.

Re:Bubblegum?

[nickos]

"Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code"

How does it make technical sense for a file-browser and a web-browser to "use the same code"? I've never heard a good reason for this and believe that KDE just copied Windows in this respect. Microsoft made Windows behave this way so that they could more easily make the claim that IE was an integral part of Windows and could not be removed.

Re:Incremental Changes

[msh104]

my personal points of love since 3.0 are mostly found in kontact. (kerberos support in pop3/imap/smtp) and ongoing improvements in the groupware scene. kde text to speech was also a quite fun addition with many potentials. (but I would like a better backend with support for natural voices...) konqy fixes are render bug every release and speed has increased nicely overall. all in all I think there will just be less announcements like when we got our first kmail release or kopete messenger, simply because most apps are already there. I think kde is slowly getting to a point where more and more time is spend on polishment. the major framework is getting there where it should be. but don't get me wrong... getting everything cleaned up is VERY important.

Re:Konqueror?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Google maps has been working pretty well for me for the last month or so. For some reason I don't get the intial "default" map of the US that I get in Firefox when I connect, but otherwise typing in addresses, GPS coordinates, etc into the search bar and/or getting directions seems to be working for me reasonably well in Konqueror.

If you add "fc=1" to your query it'll bypass that obnoxious "you aren't using a 'supported' browser!" warning, too (e.g. "http://maps.google.com/?fc=1").

YMMV - I'm a compulsive updater of KDE and I'm running a recent SVN build.