New KDE 3.5.5 Features 1,200 Changes

lisah writes "Just two months after its last update, KDE has released a new maintenance and bugfix update. KDE 3.5.5 boasts over 1,200 changes including speed improvements to KHTML, an update of Kopete 0.12.3, support for Adium themes, and improved support for Yahoo! and Jabber IM protocols. KDE 3.5.5 also now offers extensive support for over 65 languages. Just a day after the release of 3.5.5, developers say they are already looking toward the release of KDE4, which will include improvements in multimedia, hardware integration, and more." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)

Comments

Komplaint about Kopete.

[B5_geek]

For anybody who has followed the mailing lists know that the developers decision to change the 'message-send' default-key (from Ctrl + Enter to Enter) has met with a lot of resistance and complaints, but thankfully it is changable. Although kinda difficult to find as it is not obvious at first glance.

This I can live with because it is a variable that _I_ can change. Kudos to the team for realising that not everybody likes to do things _your_ way. Hrm, Gnome; take a look.

What I can't stand is a change to the code that eliminates a or space character at the end of a message. They have actually gone so far as to have the code actively delete and space or null characters at the end of a message.

Gaim, and ICQ allow these actions by default. IMO i think Kopete devs went into a monkey-see monkey-do and just copied what MSN does.

For me the deal-breaker is the space-character issue. Since I (like many of you other /.'ers) grew-up using BBS's, we all remember how difficult/annoying it was to try to have an online conversation with the sysop in the full-duplex windows, so as a good habit we all started adding and 'extra' ENTER to notify the other person that we were done talking. This habit has stuck with me throughout my IM'ing life. The only medium that this method doesn't work is IRC.

For example:

My desired Output:

Person 1: this is a sample message that I would type in an IM window (Enter)
(Enter)
Person 2: And this would be the reply, nicely seperated (visually) from the previous message.(Enter)
(Enter)

######

Kopete's new-default behaviour.

Person 1: Now converstions can/will look very cluttered.
Person 2: Despite KDE's past behaviour of allowing users to setup whatever setting they wanted to use.
Person 1: I have spoken with the dev's on freenode, but they had a holier-then-thou attitude that was very similar to the heated conversations that took place regarding the ctrl+enter vs Enter 'send-message' debacle.

GNOME is falling futher behind.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a user of GNOME since 1.2, but a coworker suggested recently that I try this new release of KDE. I must admit, I am very impressed. This is the first time I've used KDE in perhaps six years or so, so I really hadn't kept up to date with its development.

I think the biggest difference I noticed was its speed and responsiveness. One thing I notice with my GNOME 2.16 installation is that applications will sometimes gray out their entire window for perhaps half a second or so, often after maximizing the window or sometimes upon a dialog box opening. This just isn't the case with KDE. The GUI repaintings are near-instant, as far as I can tell.

The most impressive feature is their web browser, Konqueror. It completely shames Firefox, Galeon, and Epiphany. Besides being a lot faster, it used a whole lot less memory. At one point I had 16 tabs open (I counted them) and a download going, and according to top the memory usage never exceeded 45 MB. Meanwhile, I can open five of those same sites in tabs with Firefox 1.5.0.7, and memory usage skyrockets to 112 MB.

The CSS support of Konqueror is also better than that of Gecko. It passes the Acid2 test, which to the best of my knowledge, Gecko still cannot do.

KMail is another great application. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but its usability is far better than that of Thunderbird or Evolution. With the GNOME applications you have to take a moment to think about what you want to do, and how exactly to accomplish it, with KMail it's blatantly obvious. You just click instinctually, and often times it does what you want it to.

At this point, I think I might stick with KDE 3.5.5. I hadn't realized how poorly GNOME was competing, but now that I do, I don't really see any reason to go back to GNOME. Simply put, it cannot compete with KDE based on features, speed, responsiveness, and other significant factors.

Re:GNOME is falling futher behind.

[RAMMS EIN]

``KMail is another great application.''

Especially the feature that reminds you to actually attach an attachment.

Re:GNOME is falling futher behind.

[Sloppy]

I must admit, I am very impressed. This is the first time I've used KDE in perhaps six years or so, so I really hadn't kept up to date with its development.

This is almost identical to my experience. I tried KDE around 2000 and thought it was very, very lame. So I used GNOME for a few years, and then switched to XFCE on both my "fast" desktop and slow laptop.

Then one day (about a year ago, I guess?) I wanted to look at some KDE features so I installed it on my laptop, and found it wasn't that bad. XFCE wasn't the only desktop that was fast enough for my laptop anymore. Now I'm using KDE on both my machines, and have been pretty satisfied with it.

Konqueror is both good and bad. On my laptop, it is way, way faster than Firefox. I can't take Firefox seriously. Konqueror still has a few problems, with threading or locking I think. I've noticed that sometimes if something is taking a while, I want to switch to another tab, but the whole app (not just that one tab) is unresponsive until the slow thing finishes. That's not good, and makes me want to write a konqueror replacement (though I guess the "correct" thing to do is to fix konqueror and submit patches).

kmail looks good to me too. I'm probably going to eventually switch from Sylpheed to kmail, after I get all my old mail moved from local folders to a local IMAP server.

Re:Is that gross changes or net changes?

[orcrist]

Colour was colour before it was reduced to color. ...
and it was color before *that* ;-)

From Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: 1color
  Pronunciation: 'k&-l&r
  Function: noun
  Usage: often attributive
  Etymology: Middle English colour, from Anglo-French, from Latin color; akin to Latin celare to conceal

I love it when British-English fanboys start talking up the 'seniority' of their dialect. :-)

-chris

P.S. See also my rant about English dialects (yes, they are *all* dialects)