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KDE 3.5 Released
WhiteFoxBR writes ""The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available." Here a Visual Guide to new features, including build-in ad-block for Konqueror and support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams in Kopete. "
Competition and choice is great. It's also a barrier to entry for commercial software. And given that it's unrealistic to have all software be free, let's make it easier for linux adoption to take place. Let's have one desktop/widgetset/toolkit be the standard for X on Linux. One that's always deployed with X on Linux, so people have something to code to.
All the whining about how choice is good and it makes better products distracts from a more important factor. All the competing options make incompatability and confusion unavoidable.
It is about frickin time that open source IM clients integrated voice and video. Congratulations to Kopete and KDE for implementing this LONG OVERDUE feature. Welcome to the 2000 chat world.
I'm a big KDE fan, and KDE has really improved since 3.4 when the new series just gelled. 3.5 promises to be more awesome. I especially look forward to konqueror improvements, as it's my browser of choice. I really appreciate its speed, especially on lower-end systems. Plus, it uses the KDE file picker that I find easier to use than the gnome one with firefox.
What I didn't see was much change in KDE's horrible default settings. The desktop is very configurable. Why does it have to look like some terrible pudgy windows clone? And what's with two toolbars on every app? Why not save some screen real estate for the body of the application? That toolbar for konqueror could easily be paired down to one row of icons with the location bar along side. I'm sick of a print icon on every application. I print things rarely enough off the web. That should be left to a menu, or just alt-p.
Still, if you're willing to configure KDE a little bit, it's awesome. The good news is that much of the configuration is easy, right-click kind of stuff.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
"Call me a troll"
Consider it done...
Let's have one desktop/widgetset/toolkit be the standard for X on Linux
You don't need a "single widgetset/toolkit" to make a great "user experience".
Windows actually has several widget implementations. Access has its own widget set (don't remember the link, sorry), IE has its own widget set, office has its own widget set (noticed how the scrolling bar in office is like windows 98 instead of looking like in the XP theme? The same happens for messenger BTW)
They don't have a "single" widget implementation - they just have several widget implementations which LOOK THE SAME. In the same way, you don't need gtk OR qt - you want a way to make them look the same (the usability guidelines like menus etc are another matter). Implement the same theme for both desktops and make kde swwitch to a different look when you change the gnome theme and viceversa and you're done.
Really. I love Linux, have been a user since the early 90's, but some of the language conventions just vex me. "Stable" for instance. Yeah, yeah, I know what is meant by it in this context, but it never fails to make me contemplate what an "unstable" desktop would be like, and the vision has nothing to do with BSODs. "Stable" is for relationships and isotopes, and is valid only in the context that most examples in kind are given to falling apart. It's part of the "I was happy to hear you are no longer beating your wife!" phrase family that achieves a "positive" slant only by dragging the listener through scary negative spaces. Linux deserves better than this.
It also deserves better than having its major graphics package called "The Gimp," but that's a discussion for a different day...
Mine passes, but it means nothing. Most people still use Internet Explorer, and they wont change.
The point is that some desktops or window managers will be annoying to some people because of the way they choose to work (e.g. some prefer to have lots of desktops with lots of overlapping windows, next door some guy prefers not having any overlapping windows at all, these people will typically want totally different focus/click/to-front/to-back behaviour) and often this is best achieved by choosing another desktop type. But any application will work fine all the same!
This is one of the greatest strengths of X11. Forcing everyone to use the same desktop is like forcing everybody to use the same length skis: It works somehow, but don't tell me it's good for everyone.
IMHO, in it's newer released Gnome works better in the interface than KDE (I used KDE for a long time before Gnome).
I don't know what it is, but KDE just feels "wrong" at this point. When rendering text under in icon, it often cuts it off in an odd place. Toolbars look cluttered. The default icon and widget themes (and even most of the others available) are so busy and flashy that it's often hard to discern from the picture what the function is (and in essence totally nullifying the usefullness of an icon). Things seem to lag behind the inteface when you press a button.
Don't get me wrong, KDE is a wonderful acheivement, and over time it's implemented a lot of good features, but it just feels a bit "gimmicky" to me these days. Something thats nice to look at and say "Wow. These guys do this and give it away for free.". With Gnome things look more refined. Things are less flashy, but work better for the most part (there are still some problems like the file selection dialog). I remember back in the Gnome 1.x days some group (can't remember which one) announced that they'd be supporting Gnome as the "official" Linux desktop and I thought that it was a terrible decision (Gnome 1.x was an ugly mess), but now I think it truly is the better desktop.
In the end though, both projects benefit each other.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Because the Acid2 test is totally and completely worthless in pretty much every conceivable way? I can't even begin to imagine how it's managed to obtain so much currency - seriously, passing the Acid2 test doesn't make a browser better in any way shape or form, except that it now passes the Acid2 test!
The "included as standard" is important.
...all to find out the software/feature is so immature or buggy even the most basic features requires a host of newly learnt commands and techniques.
Too often, Linux suffers from great applications and features being available to those willing to spend 5 hours trawling every project hosting website then spend several hours getting the 101 dependancy issues sorted out and then go make dinner while the whole thing compiles.
The bueaty of the KDE enviroment (and gnome for that matter) is the way so much stuff just works as expected without requiring the user to learn a range of commands & techniques which should have been left back in the 1970's. Sure, Webcam support on Linux may not be a totally new thing to us "nerds" that frequent Slashdot, but as someone who has spent days getting a Webcam to partly work (within Kopete and elsewhere), I would have to agree that with the new Kopete in KDE 3.5 it will be the first time Linux is able to realisticly claim to support Webcams.
My beef with KDE is that there are no decent looking Qt themes. Why must they all be Keramik clones???
Do you have a better idea? They aren't doing what windows is doing because they want to be like windows, they are doing it because it's a good idea. I like the command line, but if I have to switch to the command line, figure out which device is associated with my usb key, sudo mount my usb key, sudo copy and write files, sudo umount, that's simply unacceptable. I should be able to plug my key in and just use it like another mounted drive like my other hard drives or CD/DVDs. Granted, I've automated all this by writing a shell script, but it is unacceptable for any operating system to force the user to write a program that will do something as simple as read data off a device. This isn't the user's job. It's no problem for me but that's because I'm an expert. The next user will not be able to read his or her files and this is a serious flaw.
Why does it take Gentoo months after everyone else to roll out the newest version of GNOME then?
Sigh... The problem with your reasoning is that you see "Linux" as one big project and a single community. That's not true at all. Hell, Linux is not even an operating system, it's just a fucking kernel, and all those projects you mention aren't part of Linux at all, it's just the most popular platform to run them on.
Projects like KDE and Gnome have different communities, and different developers and sponsors with different goals and ideas. You can't just "pick one". That doesn't make any sense.
and that's why a lot of stuff renders better in KHTML than in Moz.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's called "freedom". You can't coerce everyone into a single desktop without destroying freedom. I realize that this is a politically incorrect idea, but since when has reality been politically correct?
All you people desiring authoritarian conformity should stick with Windows. You'll be happier.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned