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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!
Yes, probably -- though I think they use SVN now.
/. blurb does not, is that there were 333 bugs closed from 3.5.4 to 3.5.5. That makes it half as evil!
What the article mentions, but the
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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."
well, it should be "colour" I'm sick of having to addopt the US spelling when doing anything computer related.
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.
A useful changelog is not just a list of each and every commit, for that you just use the history log of the repository. A changelog is a compact and informative overview of changes without going into the nitty gritty details.
Thing is, with KDE you have the option to install/deinstall individual components. You don't *need* to run konqueror, kwm or any particular K app. The KDE apps are "tightly integrated" where that means "work well together". Not "integrated" in the microsoft sense, where they're non-optional...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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)
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence