Slashdot Mirror
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.)
Is this really the right catagory to post KDE news in?
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
In Linux word, bug fixes are called "improvements". Don't dare to use this word when talking about Windows in ./
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
1200 seems a bit on the high side, did they just count all cvs commits or something?
;)
and yes, I did not RTFA
1200 changes, including over 600 times that color was changed to colour and back again... :-)
"What's the point of going abroad, if you're just another tourist..."
More or less. It's been in Debian Sid for some time now. I can't say I've noticed that many improvements, since KDE already worked pretty well for me. Konqueror seems slightly faster, and doesn't always crash when using a certain functionality on a certain Web 2.0 site.
I'm not an expert on grammar so I may have misread the summary myself, but KDE 4 has actually been being developed for a good while now. Pretty much all of KDE has been ported to using Qt4, DBus has replaced DCOP, etc. Lots of work on the new frameworks in KDE4 has also being accomplished, as well as improvements to the already existing ones as well.
The fix to Kopete that lets it use Adium skins is definitely welcome, as there are a ton of Adium skins.
However, I wish they had spent their time making Kopete compatible with Gaim's plugin architecture rather than a basically glitzy UI improvement. At least last time I checked, Kopete was completely incompatible with OTR encryption, and it looked like it was going to stay that way. (The reason I heard was that something about the existing Kopete plugin structure doesn't allow plugins to actually orginate messages, just modify them as they pass through, and OTR uses specially crafted messages to initiate connections and resend data. Or something like that; don't quote me on it directly.)
Seems like the request is still open on Bugzilla, I encourage people to vote, as IMO this is a major limitation of Kopete versus Gaim. Kopete definitely looks nicer than Gaim, but it's not as functional because of that.
Actually, I'm not sure why they don't just rebuild Kopete to use the libgaim backend, like Adium does (and Proteus, and Fire...). Maybe there are good reasons for not using it, but it strikes me as serious wheel-reinvention.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
KDE Universal Network Tool...
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.
/.'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.
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
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.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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.
Kudos to the team for realising that not everybody likes to do things _your_ way. Hrm, Gnome; take a look.
GNOME is the very example of this in action. How? All the KDE apps I've ever used have a million preferences, in a dozen different dialog boxes. (Can't decide whether we should use Enter or Control-Enter? Make it a preference!)
As you say, not everybody likes to do things your way. For KDE geeks, sifting through a million preferences to fix keybindings must be fun. For us GNOME users, we'd rather just use the darn app. If it uses Enter or Control-Enter makes no difference to me (and it's easy to adjust), but having a reasonable number of preferences makes the app actually useful.
Real example: Back when GNOME was just adding CD burning, and it was broken for a release, I looked around for an alternative program. The KDE geeks seemed to rave about "k3b" (what kind of name is that?), so I figured it would work. Unfortunately, it had so many preference dialogs and wizard steps I couldn't actually get to burning my CD. (I've been running Linux since Slackware was new, I'm a programmer, and I have a computer science degree from a top-ranked school; I'm no computer idiot.) I've got better things to do with my time than sort through all these dialog boxes because some KDE developers couldn't agree on what's a reasonable value and punted all these stupid decisions to the poor user.
In the end, I burned my CD from a shell. At least with a manpage, you can search for the option you want. KDE is a huge step backwards: it neither takes care of the messy details for you (as GNOME does), nor does it allow quick searching to find the flag you want (as the shell with man(1) does).
This is not to say that GNOME always does things the way I would; it doesn't. But GNOME does exist, so for people whose "way" isn't "sift through a million preferences", GNOME is pretty nice.
As per your spacing example: this shows that, no matter what you pick, *somebody* is going to be offended. Unless you write the whole thing in Lisp with hooks everywhere, you're going to always end up with something that somebody doesn't like and can't customize. It sounds like you won't be happy until all of KDE is preferences.
That said, I have 2 gripes.
Firstly, it seems to take up a relatively large amount of memory for what it does. I *just* fired it up, and it's allocating 121M with 45M resident (FreeBSD/AMD64). And that's with *only* 2 accounts being active (one Yahoo! and one Google). And after a day's work with those 2 accounts, it sometimes get way out of hand and I need to restart it.
And last, it seems to lag/spinlock (or whatever it's called) all the time. Every time, without fail, I initiate a chat window w/ someone, it hangs for 5-to-15 seconds (giving me the KDE "not responding -- terminate or keep running?" dialog 50% of the time). Every single time. Never any such lag with the other 2 apps mentioned above. I've used Kopete 100% for over a year on 3 different machines, i386 and AMD64, but all of them FreeBSD.
Anyone know of any solutions to these?
(WTF is up with still needing 2 paragraph tags between the 1st and 2nd paragraphs?!?)
Method of processing duck feet
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.
Acid2 is *not* the end-all be-all of CSS. Passing it doesn't mean something has great CSS support, nor does failing it mean you have poor CSS support. Konqueror does well at the CSS selectors it supports (unlike IE), but there are a lot it simply doesn't do. I've done some CSS development, and Konqueror doesn't hold a candle to Gecko, especially when you get into the more obscure CSS2/CSS3 things.
Konqueror also doesn't have Mozilla's extension-writing community. CSS isn't the easiest-to-use standard I've ever used, and having extensions to make development easier far outweigh being able to see a smiley face on some intentionally-wrong HTML test page.
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.
Based on the screenshots at kde.org, I'd say it's anything but "instinctual". The first line in an email is not "To:", as with every other email client in the world, but "Identity", which is "Default (Default)". I don't even know what that means. Then "Dictionary: English [british]" [sic] (why, do they think I'm going to alternate between English dialects?). *Then* comes "To", but note that even though this is the one field you'll always fill out, it's the only widget on the screen without a mnemonic. There's a checkbox called "Sticky" -- I don't know what this does, or even if it's related to the "Identity" popup it's next to (am I a sticky individual?). The list goes on and on.
I guess it's one of those "intuitive once you learn how to use it" things, which is another way to say "unintuitive".
KDE has produced an admirable amount of code, and they do great at some things (like memory usage, as you point out). But it kills your credibility to suggest that KMail is "instinctively intuitive", just as it would strain my credibility if I was to claim that GNOME is as responsive as KDE (it's not, I know). Neither KDE nor GNOME is completely ahead or behind the other, and both have things they can learn from the other. In fact, that's true of everything in life: nobody is better at everything, and everybody has something they can learn from you, and vice versa.
...that can run on a computer with under a GIG of ram?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Ok, I'm really not out to start a flame war so take your mouse off that mod button for a second.
Generally KDE is great. I use it on my Linux boxes and we use it in our labs. Konqueror is the best damn general purpose browser (except web) out there. It handles just about any protocol you can thing of and does a great job (except http) of it.
But it seems to me that KDE is starting to become more and more like the Windows "windows manager" where "one program" does it all. In Windows that would be explorer.exe along with IE and now perhaps media-player. With KDE now talking about better multi-media integration, etc., one wonders if we have not been down this road before.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it does seem that KDE (and perhaps GNOME) is headed down the same path as MS and many other projects has previously. That is, towards one very large, does a bit of everything, and perhaps does no one thing really well, application. Is this a cycle that all software seems to follow? Take Mozilla for example. Start as a just a browser, build to a one suite to do it all application, split into parts that independantly handle designated tasks better than the all-in-one.
At some point will we see a fork of a KDE Light or some such project?
Just some rambling thoughts.
Whoever put this here probably take screen-caps of his tricked out KDE and calls it a "BSD screenshot".
axis discrepancy indicates hexagons beyond control anomaly
1200 possible bugs!