KDE 3.5 RC 1 Released

HatofPig writes "The KDE Project has released the first release candidate for KDE 3.5, the last of the 3.x versions. There are many added features and bugfixes such as easier Kicker configuration and many UI tweaks. Get the source, Suse packages, or packages for Kubuntu and start filing bug reports today!"

Comments

Try without installing..

[Anonymous Coward]

Here ya go, for your pleasure.

Klax

Here's a LiveCD with the new KDE RC on it. Please follow the instructions at the bottom of this page to get the best resolution/quality display of X & KDE.

At last KMail gets client side IMAP filtering...

[Homology]

The only reason I don't use KMail is that it lacks client side IMAP filtering into folders, but now it's in progress (from changelist):

Client side IMAP filtering. Till Adam , Don Sanders

Perhaps this will be completed before release, or to the next minor release. Looking forward to ditching Thunderbird.

Links for source, Suse, a screenshot

[HatofPig]

Submitter here (w00t!).

The link for the source and Suse packages didn't get through for some reason.

Also, since I can't find any screenshots anywhere, here is a (highly compressed -- don't kill my server!) screenshot of my own desktop with some of the cool features. You can see that they changed the Plastik window decoration a bit, and added a nifty "Lock/Unlock Panels" menu option to quickly hide and unhide the handles beside each applet. The new pager applet is really cool, with the ability to go transparent and show different program windows (desktop 2 has KPilot running) that you can drag around from desktop to desktop inside the applet!

So far no bugs have cropped up either, which is good. I really suggest you check it out.

Re:Links for source, Suse, a screenshot

[molnarcs]

PNG screenshots of parent poster (HatofPig).

First.
Second.

Thanks :)

Re:Links for source, Suse, a screenshot

[John Nowak]

I use Quicksilver (quicksilver.blacktree.com) which is absolutely amazing. I haven't seen anything like it for Gnome or KDE or anything else. Everything from adjusting the volume to uploading files via ftp to selecting songs from iTunes can be done with simple predictive key commands. This is what allows me to keep everything so nice and clean otherwise. :-)

Re:Links for source, Suse, a screenshot

[molnarcs]

This is how it looks like (I don't have a printer installed, so printer entry is missing). I don't see the same in gtk/gnome apps currently installed on my system (only the postscript option). I think print to pdf support might be available system wide via either cups or (more likely) ghostscript, but whether or not GNOME chose to implement it the same way across all print dialogs like KDE - I have no idea.

This is how the advanced settings look like (if you click properties in the print dialogue - normally you don't need that, for the defaults are sane, in fact, I never changed anything in those settings).

Acid2 here I come

[molnarcs]

Acid2 Test here I come :)))

Seriously - KDE has become soo good, that I couldn't work without it. I became so accustomed to its excellent apps, both for my admin work and my desktop usage.

• Scribus for newsletters from one of my sites, (is there any other Desktop Publishing software with similar quality and standards support?)
• Krita (part of Koffice) - in scribus, the edit image default app was gimp until koffice 1.4.1 - now krita begins to become a viable replacement for gimp.
• Quanta - YES!
• kdissert for my dissertation (yeah, a week ago I began using it, and I found it really helpful).
• Kmail - I didn't know it was missing imap support, I use pop access with my gmail accounts. But it is stable, fast, easy to use, feature rich.
• And the whole integration thing: kaddressbook with kmail with korganizer with kalarm with the rest of the desktop. It is simply amazing.
• Lisa to browse network shares in konqi sidebar - no more mounting/unmounting of samba shares, it works much much better than winxp's network neighborhood...
• Amarok for my music needs: is there such a feature complete player out there? Not just providing one or two features of amarok, but all - wikipedia, lyrics, easy tag editing, ipod support, dynamic playlists, visuals, and first and formost easy to use. I think amarok is the prime example against the "an app must be simple and dumbed down to be easy to use" philosophy. kmplayer
• KONSOLE! I tried replacements like mrxvt for puters where kde is not installed, and they don't come even close.
• Konqueror. And I miss the up button from every other browser :))). What I like about Konqi is its stability - there are some pages where firefox simply bails out (some flash pages) - and I don't see a separate process to kill. With konqi on the same pages (to tell the truth, there aren't that many) I can kill the offending process (usually nspluginviewer) without taking out the entire browser (and all my opened tabs).
• Lots and lots of other apps I couldn't live without - the list goes on.

I'm really really thankful for the work these people do.

Re:Acid2 here I come

[Hoplite3]

I'll go on and on:

* kdvi -- xdvi is a joke. It crashes all the time and the interface is unintuitive. kdvi is bulletproof, has inverse search (click in dvi to have it scroll emacs/kate/vim to that spot in the .tex file). Plus it has the sweet kde file picker.
* kpdf and kghostview -- while I'm here, it's worth mentioning that the whole suite of "kviewshell" programs are awesome. They embed in konqueror or run by themselves. kpdf may not render as well as acroread, but it doesn't phone home and the file picker doesn't suck.
* kile -- If you want a gentle introduction to LaTeX, look no further. This editor will set you straight.
* kio -- Not so much an application as glue. Kio allows me to save files downloaded at one computer on another via ssh. I mean, I can put a graphic I found on the net at school on my home computer securely with one click.
* k3b -- The only CD burner program worth mentioning.

KDE has some awesome apps. If you've ever tried qt/kde programming, it's clear why. Things are (mostly) simple and the API's are well laid out. It's just ... cool.

There are some problems, namely the default configuration does a poor job of selling KDE to new-comers. Memory use is a bit out of hand. I tried to start 3.4 on a laptop with 192 MB, but gave up after 30 minutes of watching it load. Resource use has fallen slightly, though. And no one ever said KDE was "lightweight". However, 3.5 is moving in the right direction and fixing some of these problems.

When the transition from 3.3 to 3.4 happened, the changes were small and subtle, but the quality of the desktop really improved. It was like they crossed an important line of usability. 3.5 promises to be better yet.

Even if you don't run KDE, run some of it's applications. You'll like what you find.

Re:Acid2 here I come

[darkwhite]

And on and on...

Here's another testimonial to how much KDE rocks. When I started exploring the desktop options on Linux, I was very unhappy with Gnome's suite of apps and design methodology. I was just as unimpressed by XFCE's minimalism and other WMs' total lack of desktop component integration. Then I saw KDE 3.3 and was somewhat interested. By the time 3.4 came out (with lots of polish upon 3.3), I was hooked. At 3.5, I'm a fan, and KDE 4 will rock the world of desktop environments.

But as I found out very soon, KDE's strength is not just in the desktop itself but also in the apps: as the parent posters say, development is easy and integration of standard components is thorough. For instance, every app that needs to do text editing uses the same text editing library component (Kate KPart) and so the awesome power of the Kate editor is available in all text editing apps.

The KDE apps I've come to love and use every day:

* AmaroK, Konqueror, Konsole, Kile, Quanta, K3B, KPDF (bring on the kviewshell integration though!) were mentioned before.

* Kdevelop offers an awesome C++ development environment, not to mention powerful development for KDE.

* Kopete and Korganizer very nearly match the functionality of Trillian and Outlook, respectively, with the obvious advantages. Step aside, Gaim and Evolution.

* Kate is, once again, an awesome text editor. I used to like UltraEdit and grudgingly learn Emacs. Then I saw Kate.

* Kaffeine is the most polished video playing front-end in all of Linux. Using MPlayer and Xine directly? What a joke. (I do of course respect the MPlayer and Xine teams' back-end development efforts)

And on and on...

There is a massive number of useful applications for KDE. I, too, am truly thankful for the work of all the developers who made this desktop possible.

Re:Acid2 here I come

[molnarcs]

That's a distro problem, not a KDE problem. For years, I ran kde (till 3.4.x series) on a 700Mhz Duron with 256SDRAM and it was snappy. Start up time was reasonalbe as well (less than 20 secs).

I saw comments complaining about RAM hungryness of KDE. This is quite ironic, since at that time (Konqueror failing on some important sites I used) I used Firefox, and only when starting FF up did the OS begin swapping, especially with multiple tabs open. Now I wouldn't run KDE with 128, but 256 is enough if you don't use many GTK apps.

I maintain a small lab of computers. New ones run WinXP, old ones (old celerons and pIIs with ~64 Mb RAM) are used solely for browsing the net: gaim (also the only IM app on the XP machines), gftp, and webbrowsing. They run FreeBSD with blackbox and a simplified menu (only 5 apps, and a short description of how to operate them sticked on the wall above them). I installed Firefox - and it simply didn't work. Start up time was horrible (~minute), rendering time also, and the entire system came to a crawl if you opened up a couple of tabs. Same with epiphany and galeon. I tried konqueror as well, and it was actually faster, start up time included (which considering that it had to load all supporting libs at start time, is pretty impressive) and it used less ram than any of the above. But of course, the final solution was to use Opera.

I think KDE is pretty usable if you have >192 RAM. Now I have 512, which is better of course, for you can preload 4 instances of konqi for instant startup, and have all sorts of useful and useless apps loaded by default when KDE loads (amarok, kweather, kmail, kgpg, korganizer + kalarm, kcpuload, a fullscreen console instance, antialias for fonts, etc.) + lots of eyecandies. But if you switch off parts of the eyecandies (transparent menus, konqi background, content in moving windows, etc.) KDE is usable on a low-end computer as well (I seen it work pretty well on a 450Mhz celeron with 192 RAM and a TNT2 card).

I have to emphasize that in all these cases, I used vanilla kde (kde on slackware or kde on FreeBSD) - so you can be pretty sure that when you encounter 30 minutes startup (or even 1 minute startup - it didn't take that long on the 450Mhz machine) it is the distribution's fault: lack of proper Quality Control. They don't check if the supporting libraries are configured correctly, they don't test, don't integrate, well, don't do anything except for creating an .rpm once it finished building it seems.