Re:I've been using it for the past week
on
KDE 3.2.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Konqueror in 3.2 has been vastly improved..
- rewritten tab support - a lot faster - better standards compliance (many patches from Safari)
It's replaced Firebird as my main browser. I can't say that Konqueror renders as many pages as good as Mozilla yet, but it's getting there. Hopefully with Apple's Safari/Webcore 1.2 coming out in a few months and more syncing between KDE and Apple, Konqueror in KDE 3.3 is going to be great.
> And please people - don't flame each other. We have no so large user base. We have to cooperate, at least in some level, exchange ideas, etc. I like that fact that we can choose - KDE or GNOME.
Indeed.. and there is a subconscious copying of good features between KDE and GNOME as well. KDE 3.2, for example, includes the transparent panel feature that's been in GNOME for a while, and GNOME 3.0 (2.8?) will include a new IPC system that closely mirrors that KDE has been doing for a long time.
Re:Is Kopete equal to Trillian?
on
KDE 3.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, Kopete and Trillian are quite similar in terms of feature set and functionality. Trillian Pro however does a few things, like RDF feeds, email checking, that Kopete doesn't do (yet..).
The main difference between Kopete and Trillian is the interfaces. Kopete tries to be HIGHLY integreated with the KDE desktop, and thus doesn't support skinning. It strictly ahears to the KDE style guide. Trillian on the other hand, looks quite cool with it's skinning, but it doesn't try to blend in with the rest of Windows.
> I was wondering: Is KOffice based off the Star Office code like Open Office, or is it new development?
Nope.. koffice predates the open-sourcing of StarOffice by a few years. However, historically, it hasn't been ready for primetime because of lack of developers and consistant rewrites (the core of kword being rewritten all the time, krita being rewritten 3 times over the last 4 years), certain apps gets dumped in favor of even more rewrites (killustrator versus karbon14,etc..)
> And is there significant difference in functionality, or is it mostly UI differences?
OpenOffice has a significantly greater mass of features, but koffice is lightweight. Until recently, I perferred using koffice more, but I actually used OpenOffice more. That's starting to change now though, koffice 1.3 is pretty nice.
Yeah, I personally think that koffice 1.2 and before should have been pre-1.0. Koffice 1.3 is a lot more stable however.. it's been delayed for a LONG time now, for good reasons: mostly stability problems have been fixed.
Yeah, I think Xandros chose to use Mozilla because of it's rendering prowess in relation to Konqueror 3.1. Konqueror 3.2, with a whole bunch of Safari fixes, starts to bridge the gap between itself and Gecko browsers. I'd expect Konqueror 3.3 (and the next version of Safari) to bridge it fully.
I'd like to seen them at least use MozFirebird though, it behaves more like an KDE app than Mozilla does.
> Development time is reduced because you can re-use existing packages.
I think you're meaning development time of the desktop environment (gnome), rather than development time of applications.
GNOME needed to take existing parts and cobble a desktop environment out of them mainly because of it's founding: KDE was already out and a danger in becoming the standard Free Software GUI but was based on a toolkit with non-free (in 1997) licensing: Qt.
I think GNOME 2.x mostly got rid of that attitude, since GNOME was already pretty much established to stay. You can see results in decisions like dumping sawfish for Metacity, for example.
have you tried recent versions of kword, like the soon to be released koffice 1.3? The biggest problem in importing Word documents to kword previously wasn't that it didn't have enough features (it has most of the needed features since koffice 1.1), but display problems. kword 1.3 adds the necessary WYSIWYG to handle Word documents as well, as say, Abiword. Of course, libwv2 is not as mature as OpenOffice's filters, but it won't matter in koffice 2.0 anyways since, like future versions of OpenOffice, OASIS is being used.
> People will compare Konq to Mozilla (which has in a way become a de facto GNOME browser), but I will call Mozilla a leader here.
Have you tried Konqueror 3.2? I used Mozilla(Firebird) as my main browser for a long time, but Konqueror 3.2 is vastly better than 3.1 was. It's still not as good as Mozilla in terms of rendering, but it bridged the gap quite fast in a year (probably because of Apple).. Now that KHTML/webcore is being developed in a faster pace than Gecko/Mozilla is, I'd expect it to catch up in 2004.
> AbiWord and OpenOffice (soon to be Gnome-ified) blow away KOffice
Uhm, so install a modern desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. My family uses a Debian with KDE solution, and they actually find it easier to use than their old OS (Win98). If you don't want to work in properly configuring KDE or GNOME, just install a Home-oriented Linux distro like Xandros/Lindows/Lycoris.. they are incredibly easy to use!
Indeed. In fact, perhaps GIMP should just raise all windows once one window is raised. This is how Mac PS behaves.
Often I've seen GIMP developers point to Photoshop on MacOS and it's lack of MDI; the big mistake is that they forget about the Mac-ish application oriented behavior, compared to GIMP's rather lacking document oriented behavior (isn't very good for image processing applications; often people have to bring in _many_ layers from other documents; this is what Windows's MDI and MacOS's "raise all windows of program" upon focus of one window acheive)
> With its innovative dockable palettes GIMP really sets the par above Photoshop and likes.
Uhhhhhhhhhh.. these "innovative" palettes have been around since Photoshop 3.0.. I beleive it was Aldus who first implemented it in PageMaker; Adobe later bought Aldus (and sold off FreeHand, since it competeted with Adobe's own Illustrator)
- The GTK drawing logic in this GTK engine is a simple blit, which is *extremely* fast. Thus, the performance matches the performance of the Qt Style Plugin. - Other platforms work like this- see WindowsXP's uxtheme.dll and MacOS 8.x/9.x/OSX's Appearance Manager. - With both Qt and GTK, you can get function stacks about 30 function calls (I've seen this quite a few times while gdb'ing some apps)
There was a way to do this several years ago (Qt could use GTK pixmap themes), however, a few things happened:
- qt 3.0 appeared, with a new widget theme layer - gtk 2.0 appeared, with a new widget theme layer - nobody cared enough to port it, probably because of the abundance of kde 3.x themes (in comparison to kde 2.x themes)
> With the recent non-X11 KDE port to Mac OS-X (cocoa based) does this hack permit Gnome apps to be compiled to run on the MAC too?
Theoretically, but there is a great deal more than that for gtk to truly integrate with OSX (menubar, dock, bundle support, etc..) and there are easier ways (like using the Appearance Manager directly).
Which is why, uh, this is not released by Apple. Notice that there are about six web browsers (i.e, IE replacements, now Safari replacements) on OSX, and ten file managers (i.e, Finder replacements) on OSX.
konqueror is more than a web browser.. it's also a file manager. Think WinIE/Windows Explorer (not MacIE). The HTML library made for Konqueror was khtml. Instead of porting Konqueror the app, Apple ported khtml the html library. Apple really didn't need a file manager when they have the Finder (which is a lot less capable in many ways to Konqueror, but I digress..)
> but it seems like a lot of effort for a small result.
Note that this isn't a port that relies on X11, but is native. Freeing KDE of X11 dependencies should allow KDE to be easier ported to Windows (without, ehm.. Cygwin)
Also, porting Konqueror seems to have been a first step in porting the rest of KDE.
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Konqueror in 3.2 has been vastly improved..
- rewritten tab support
- a lot faster
- better standards compliance (many patches from Safari)
It's replaced Firebird as my main browser. I can't say that Konqueror renders as many pages as good as Mozilla yet, but it's getting there. Hopefully with Apple's Safari/Webcore 1.2 coming out in a few months and more syncing between KDE and Apple, Konqueror in KDE 3.3 is going to be great.
> And please people - don't flame each other. We have no so large user base. We have to cooperate, at least in some level, exchange ideas, etc. I like that fact that we can choose - KDE or GNOME.
Indeed.. and there is a subconscious copying of good features between KDE and GNOME as well. KDE 3.2, for example, includes the transparent panel feature that's been in GNOME for a while, and GNOME 3.0 (2.8?) will include a new IPC system that closely mirrors that KDE has been doing for a long time.
Yeah, Kopete and Trillian are quite similar in terms of feature set and functionality. Trillian Pro however does a few things, like RDF feeds, email checking, that Kopete doesn't do (yet..).
The main difference between Kopete and Trillian is the interfaces. Kopete tries to be HIGHLY integreated with the KDE desktop, and thus doesn't support skinning. It strictly ahears to the KDE style guide. Trillian on the other hand, looks quite cool with it's skinning, but it doesn't try to blend in with the rest of Windows.
> [-] graphical interface for WiFi.
KDE 3.2 includes that now.
> [-] point and click install of software. (general feeling that that doesn't really work)
depends on the distro
> is this a good time to switch from windows? i have no idea. maybe? it depends on individual needs.
yes
> I was wondering: Is KOffice based off the Star Office code like Open Office, or is it new development?
Nope.. koffice predates the open-sourcing of StarOffice by a few years. However, historically, it hasn't been ready for primetime because of lack of developers and consistant rewrites (the core of kword being rewritten all the time, krita being rewritten 3 times over the last 4 years), certain apps gets dumped in favor of even more rewrites (killustrator versus karbon14,etc..)
> And is there significant difference in functionality, or is it mostly UI differences?
OpenOffice has a significantly greater mass of features, but koffice is lightweight. Until recently, I perferred using koffice more, but I actually used OpenOffice more. That's starting to change now though, koffice 1.3 is pretty nice.
Yeah, I personally think that koffice 1.2 and before should have been pre-1.0. Koffice 1.3 is a lot more stable however.. it's been delayed for a LONG time now, for good reasons: mostly stability problems have been fixed.
Yeah, I think Xandros chose to use Mozilla because of it's rendering prowess in relation to Konqueror 3.1. Konqueror 3.2, with a whole bunch of Safari fixes, starts to bridge the gap between itself and Gecko browsers. I'd expect Konqueror 3.3 (and the next version of Safari) to bridge it fully.
I'd like to seen them at least use MozFirebird though, it behaves more like an KDE app than Mozilla does.
> Development time is reduced because you can re-use existing packages.
I think you're meaning development time of the desktop environment (gnome), rather than development time of applications.
GNOME needed to take existing parts and cobble a desktop environment out of them mainly because of it's founding: KDE was already out and a danger in becoming the standard Free Software GUI but was based on a toolkit with non-free (in 1997) licensing: Qt.
I think GNOME 2.x mostly got rid of that attitude, since GNOME was already pretty much established to stay. You can see results in decisions like dumping sawfish for Metacity, for example.
it's tabs in 3.1 sucked however. It's a lot better in 3.2 (pretty much like how Moz/FB does tabs)
have you tried recent versions of kword, like the soon to be released koffice 1.3? The biggest problem in importing Word documents to kword previously wasn't that it didn't have enough features (it has most of the needed features since koffice 1.1), but display problems. kword 1.3 adds the necessary WYSIWYG to handle Word documents as well, as say, Abiword. Of course, libwv2 is not as mature as OpenOffice's filters, but it won't matter in koffice 2.0 anyways since, like future versions of OpenOffice, OASIS is being used.
> Is Safari completely merged for 3.2?
No.. but some big portions of it are.
> How is the relationship between Apple and the
kde project?
Good.. the khtml developers and apple have a private mailing list where they roll changes back between KDE and Webcore.
Abiword and kword use the same library for .DOC documents (libwv2), so support for MS Word documents is comparable.
> People will compare Konq to Mozilla (which has in a way become a de facto GNOME browser), but I will call Mozilla a leader here.
Have you tried Konqueror 3.2? I used Mozilla(Firebird) as my main browser for a long time, but Konqueror 3.2 is vastly better than 3.1 was. It's still not as good as Mozilla in terms of rendering, but it bridged the gap quite fast in a year (probably because of Apple).. Now that KHTML/webcore is being developed in a faster pace than Gecko/Mozilla is, I'd expect it to catch up in 2004.
> AbiWord and OpenOffice (soon to be Gnome-ified) blow away KOffice
OpenOffice is also soon to be KDE-ified.
> to being something my grandma can use.
Uhm, so install a modern desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. My family uses a Debian with KDE solution, and they actually find it easier to use than their old OS (Win98). If you don't want to work in properly configuring KDE or GNOME, just install a Home-oriented Linux distro like Xandros/Lindows/Lycoris.. they are incredibly easy to use!
Indeed. In fact, perhaps GIMP should just raise all windows once one window is raised. This is how Mac PS behaves.
Often I've seen GIMP developers point to Photoshop on MacOS and it's lack of MDI; the big mistake is that they forget about the Mac-ish application oriented behavior, compared to GIMP's rather lacking document oriented behavior (isn't very good for image processing applications; often people have to bring in _many_ layers from other documents; this is what Windows's MDI and MacOS's "raise all windows of program" upon focus of one window acheive)
> With its innovative dockable palettes GIMP really sets the par above Photoshop and likes.
Uhhhhhhhhhh.. these "innovative" palettes have been around since Photoshop 3.0.. I beleive it was Aldus who first implemented it in PageMaker; Adobe later bought Aldus (and sold off FreeHand, since it competeted with Adobe's own Illustrator)
It was not a project, but was rather part of KDE itself.
There isn't much of a performance loss at all.
- The GTK drawing logic in this GTK engine is a simple blit, which is *extremely* fast. Thus, the performance matches the performance of the Qt Style Plugin.
- Other platforms work like this- see WindowsXP's uxtheme.dll and MacOS 8.x/9.x/OSX's Appearance Manager.
- With both Qt and GTK, you can get function stacks about 30 function calls (I've seen this quite a few times while gdb'ing some apps)
There was a way to do this several years ago (Qt could use GTK pixmap themes), however, a few things happened:
- qt 3.0 appeared, with a new widget theme layer
- gtk 2.0 appeared, with a new widget theme layer
- nobody cared enough to port it, probably because of the abundance of kde 3.x themes (in comparison to kde 2.x themes)
> With the recent non-X11 KDE port to Mac OS-X (cocoa based) does this hack permit Gnome apps to be compiled to run on the MAC too?
Theoretically, but there is a great deal more than that for gtk to truly integrate with OSX (menubar, dock, bundle support, etc..) and there are easier ways (like using the Appearance Manager directly).
Because Koffice has only been *working* on OSX for less than a few days..
> Which is odd because I thought the QT for Mac was supposed to use the OS X native widgets.
It is using Native widgets and such, but:
- the Qt version in use is BETA
- they just made the native widget style code work two days ago. Very little work has been put in that direction yet.
Which is why, uh, this is not released by Apple. Notice that there are about six web browsers (i.e, IE replacements, now Safari replacements) on OSX, and ten file managers (i.e, Finder replacements) on OSX.
konqueror is more than a web browser.. it's also a file manager. Think WinIE/Windows Explorer (not MacIE). The HTML library made for Konqueror was khtml. Instead of porting Konqueror the app, Apple ported khtml the html library. Apple really didn't need a file manager when they have the Finder (which is a lot less capable in many ways to Konqueror, but I digress..)
> but it seems like a lot of effort for a small result.
Note that this isn't a port that relies on X11, but is native. Freeing KDE of X11 dependencies should allow KDE to be easier ported to Windows (without, ehm.. Cygwin)
Also, porting Konqueror seems to have been a first step in porting the rest of KDE.