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KDE GUI

KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love 365

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-your-compile-on dept.
Dre writes "As announced on dotsy, the first day of the Season of Love (for us Northerners, anyway) brings us the KDE 3.0 final release candidate, KDE 3.0RC3. Besides fixes for any remaining crashes and grave bugs, this release will become KDE 3.0, scheduled to free the world in early April. Having benefitted from a week-long hacking session early this month, I can report that this release is very solid and, best of all, much snappier than prior releases, particularly Konqueror. Downloads are available through KDE's load-balancing mirror system. Since this is principally a show-stopper release, things are on an expedited schedule; more binary packages will appear in the next few days, and shortly thereafter KDE 3.0 will be tagged."
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KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love More

KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love

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  • I wonder if mandrake will change there april distro to reflect this.

    Save me some download time at any rate.

  • Well, (Score:4, Funny)

    by theridersofrohan ( 241712 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @10:58AM (#3199999) Homepage
    Downloads are available through KDE's load-balancing mirror system


    It seems to handle the load pretty well, i mean, load balancing all those 404 errors :)

    • seriously, I mean can we find a decent place to mirror anything? I still can't download mandrake 8.2 and that was 2 or 3 days ago. Seem like nobody knows how to set up an ftp that works these days.
      • I downloaded mandrake iso already, finished this morning.

        Only 8K the entire time. (-;

      • Re:Well, (Score:2, Interesting)

        by xZAQx ( 472674 )
        It's not FTP.

        Money is tight nowadays.
        And nothing is stopping you from buying a OC3 pipe, and setting up your own FTP mirror for KDE/mandrake/whatever.

        Oh, except money.

        "can we find a decent place to mirror anything? "

        I guess I just answered your question.
      • Tip for the wise... Don't trust Mandrake's download page to tell you where to find it. As soon as those listings are updated, they're slammed. Instead, try looking for places that carry older versions, very often, they'll have an un-advertised 8.2 as well.

        Personally, I rsynced it from the same place the mirrors do. Great speed, but they limit the connects to 10, so you'll have to get in line.

        I'll leave the locations as an exercise for the user.
        • I have found that mirrors which aren't based in the US are often much faster and more reliable than those that are; granted, i'm not a very good citizen for using non-local mirrors... but i've always been a bit anti-social anyway.

  • Screenshots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rutger21 ( 132630 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @10:59AM (#3200003)
    You just have to look at the Keramik [kde-look.org] theme and the Conectiva Crystal icon theme [kde-look.org]. It is going to be a bright, bright future.
    • Nice look but I think I liked it better the first time around when it was called Windows XP, or was that Mac OS X? Sometimes I think Apple was the only one paying attention to their "Think Different" ads.

    • Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:17PM (#3200533)
      Why is it that when Windows XP came out, all we heard from /.ers is:
      "Ugh, it's so candy-coated I can't stand it."

      But when a KDE theme does it 6 months later it's:
      "Oooh pretty. It is going to be a bright, bright future."

      I'm no Microsoft apologist, but come on people, make up your minds.

      • Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Insightful)

        by adubey ( 82183 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:50PM (#3200833)
        I'm no Microsoft apologist, but come on people, make up your minds

        And I think there, my friend, you have inadvertintly stumbled on to the reason why the ``Slashdot'' viewpoint seems to be incoherent: it's not a single person's views.
        • Yup... and there are still plenty of diehard KDE users (like, for example, myself) who hate that look. Luckily, the look that everybody is discussing as "KDE" is a third party, non-standard theme. Personally, I like the QNix style with the Web Window Decoration, which looks like QNX's Photon, plus a totally unique WM look.

          This is a bit like me saying "Gnome is a ripoff of Windows... look at it! [themes.org]".

          --
          Evan

      • As has already been said it was the default XP theme that is unspeakably ugly. After I installed it (free upgrade) I was able to work for about 5 min before I changed it to classic theme because couldn't stand the colours. Later on I changed it to their silver theme, shrunk the menu bars a bit and have been almost as happy as with my old mac.
      • There is one major difference: In KDE; you can turn off all the eyecandy, so everyone gets what he likes.
      • what, you new here?
      • I think it's because we like KDE and hate MS's guts. Does that help to explain it?

        (besides, I don't think it's the eye candy that people complained about, it was mostly animated doggies)

  • My desktop icons always get messed up on startup. However, that seems to be the only real bug in can find.

    It simply rocks.

  • kde development. (Score:4, Funny)

    by 7-Vodka ( 195504 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @11:00AM (#3200007) Journal
    kde development is very strange :)

    They didn't plan on adding any new features, just to convert kde to qt3 and make sure it's compatible with gcc 3.x while still getting it out on time. In the end they not only accomplished this, it seems like there are new packages and many many new features in existing packages which crept in... and now we're hearing it's stable too? geez.

    • Re:kde development. (Score:4, Informative)

      by mark_lybarger ( 199098 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @11:15AM (#3200109)
      just curious where you had heard that it's compatible with gcc 3.x? from what i read on kde's site here [kde.org] is that you'll want to avoid gcc 3.x and stay with 2.95 for a while.

      the fact that they're pretty much on schedule shows good project management.
      • In a CVS entry, they tagged it with "gcc3 compat fixes", followed by a mailing list posting discussing that it was now gcc3 compat.

        I dont know whether rc3 has that cvs patch in, but I would definitely assume so.

        • until it's in the released documentation, i'm thinking there _could_ be problems (not there there still might not be after that). i don't think that reading in a cvs entry(s) "gcc3 compat fixes" really says that it's been tested and works with that compiler.

          if they say on the mailing list that it's gcc3 compat, why don't the put it in the docs somewhere? as a comparison, some people have gotten the ati radeon 8500 cards to work using the gatos drivers, but... the driver authors aren't labeling it as supported. there's been changes in the code to accomadate the card, but it's not ready for mainstream.


      • I believe it was some pesky bug in GCC 3.0 that caused KDE grief (well, plus the KDE coders were trying to to an end run around some of the C++ language rules). From what I can see GCC 3.1 is safe to use with KDE 3.0.

      • just curious where you had heard that it's compatible with gcc 3.x?

        It works perfectly with recent CVS versions of gcc 3.1.
        3.0.4 is reported to work as well, but the whole 3.0.x branch of gcc isn't too good.
    • You don't know what you're talking about, do you?

      The *first step* was to port to Qt 3, *then* the new features began. This was said all along. It'd be idiotic not to add features during a rare decision to break binary compatibility.

      KDE also validated its C++ so that gcc 3 will work. However, gcc 3.0.x has bugs that sometimes cause parts of KDE (especially aRts) to fail to compile correctly. KDE can't fix that.

  • Been building this all week on FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)

    by Leimy ( 6717 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @11:00AM (#3200018)
    Checking out and updating and helping to make sure everything compiles on other systems as well. Some of the core developers have also started using FreeBSD so this may be one of the more portable KDE releases ever.

    I expect it will be a good and clean system. I can't wait for Gideon [Kdevelop's version in the works... ] From what I have built of CVS and played with its going to be awesome. :)
    • Some of the core developers have also started using FreeBSD so this may be one of the more portable KDE releases ever.

      It seems they got through a lot of the compatibility issues (primarily to do with 'su') on FreeBSD as of 2.2.2. I know things have been running VERY nicely on my FreeBSD desktop.

      Kinda funny reading all those posts about wishing Mandrake would include this or that in their distro. portupgrade is so beyond cool it's just not funny. I guess I'll be forever left scratching my head as to why the Linux world persists in sticking with RPM's. And yes, I have heard of apt-get.

  • Just In Time (Score:2, Funny)

    by ksw2 ( 520093 )
    Just when I was considering dumping KDE for Gnome (again!) they come through and string me along for a while longer. :->

    • Re:Just In Time (Score:2, Informative)

      by Pierre ( 6251 )
      I oscillate between them every six months or so.

      I'd say overall I'd say KDE has a slight edge but for the panel. May have to try KDE again for a while - until gnome2 :)

      The cool part is how easy it is to switch back and forth.
  • I found it funny that you can watch the mirrors work. I found an directory (http://download.uk.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3 .0rc3/SuSE/7.1-i386+kde/) that was half-full (4 packages), which I found somewhat interesting. I reloaded and it had 5 packages. You could just watch the packages grow ... (and not slow as well, it seems the mirrors have some massive bandwidth to the central site).

  • Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)

    by Captain Large Face ( 559804 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @11:33AM (#3200209) Homepage

    Screenshots are available for KDE 3.0 here [kde.org].

    These shots go to show that Unix and Linux systems are more than capable of competing with the eye candy UIs of Windows XP and MacOS X.

    • Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Insightful)

      by biostatman ( 105993 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:48PM (#3200821)
      I'm as much of a screenshot hound as the next guy, but being able to compete on "eye candy" is not, IMHO, a positive virtue. I want the GUI to compete on ease of use and innovations that makes people more productive; whether that results in more "eye candy" or not.

      While the shots are nice, and KDE3 is indeed looking great, I would be really happy if the following (at a minimum) were addressed (esp. if this could be done in a standard way between GNOME and KDE):

      Common Keyboard Shortcuts
      A Modern Clipboard
      Good Drag & Drop
      A Very Simple and Functional Menu System
      Good Keyboard Navigation (ironically, one of the best things about MS Windows Explorer)

      If Linux is to be adopted on the desktop, I think these are the issues that ought to be trumpeted (if they are worth trumpeting).

      • One other nice thing (may already be in KDE3, I dunno) is the ability to change your desktop resolution and color depth via a little GUI applet ala Windows.

        Telling Aunt Tilly she has to run XF86config to go from 1024x768 to 800x600 won't fly :)
      • A Modern Clipboard

        WTF? Is a "modern" clipboard anything like the Windows one, where you can copy/cut and paste once, and that's it? If that's the modern approach, I think I'll stick with the obsolete ones, where I get a clipboard history and can define actions for specific selections.

  • I have RedHat 7.2 w/GNOME on my laptop and Mandrake 8.2 w/KDE on my desktop. Weird enough, a few days ago my GNOME desktop freezes and I couldn't do the CTRL-ALT-BCKSPACE , nothing worked. Then yesterday, my KDE freezes and I couldn't do anything either. I had to reboot.

    I remember the days when they weren't so damn bloated and when Linux meant "fast/light/stable". Nowadays with recent distros, it takes over 40 seconds to boot into Linux. Linux is becoming more and more like Windows.
    • Nothing in the linux architecture prevents the problems that have plagued windows. So it is not surprising that when linux desktops were much less feature rich they were generally more faster and bugfree. With less LOC and a similar amount of defects/KLOC you get less bugs, it has nothing to do with code quality.

      With both KDE and Gnome growing in size there are more bugs to squash, more design issues to work out. Linux does not have a 16 bit dos legacy so it does not have to face BSOD's however also the more UNIX like kernel design gives you some stability.

      However, memory bloat, usability bugs and stupid design are not unique to the win32 environment and are generally very portable. It is very easy to make the same mistakes when programming a KDE application as it is to do when programming an win32 application.

      For the past few years, a fully featured linux desktop (i.e. not twm or some other lightweight wm) has been typically slower than a fully featured win32 desktop on my machine. Windows XP typically boots faster than it takes me to get a KDE 2.x desktop up an running from pressing the power button.

      I've had several versions of Mandrake on my machine over the past few years. I found them to be buggy and unreliable (reminding me of the days I ran win95). I've experienced segfaults of the installer, corrupted rpm databases (mostly because of rpm drake crashing) and other very significant show stopper bugs on what Mandrake considered release worhty. In case you are wondering, I have an off the shelf Dell machine. Life isn't exactly wonderfull on win32 but a win2k machine feels a lot more mature and stable than a Mandrake machine.

      If I want a stable linux environment I generally do not install Mandrake but Debian. However "user friendly" is not a well understood concept in the Debian world and nothing is straightforward in Debian (though given enough time you can figure it out). However, I'm comfortable with a commandline and know how to work my way through the piles of howto's, newsgroup messages and such to get a working KDE 2.2.2 installation running ontop of XFree 4.2, with sound support and a working DSL connection (none of which is easy if you start out with a potato cd and an obscure isa network card). I even enjoy doing so but I wouldn't recommend Mandrake or Debian to windows users. Well I actually did recommend Mandrake to a windows user a few months back and of course the installer blew up in his face (segfaulting halfway). He gave up on it after that.

    • I wanna see kernel32.c... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wee ( 17189 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @01:05PM (#3200948)
      Linux is becoming more and more like Windows.

      Really, it is? I've looked all over my wife's XP machine, and I can't find sources to anything...

      -B

    • I'm using RedHat 6.2 w/fvwm2 on my work machine and a slackware-ish homebrew w/fvwm2 on my home machine. The Linux GUIs we used to have we still have. It's just that people have the choice of using more bloated things. The beauty of using open source software is that you don't have to switch to the latest UI every couple of years. If you miss the old days, you can go back. You'll probably actually get a lot more done, too.

      I'm running 2.4.18 and 4.0.(3?) on my home machine, and fvwm has never run nearly as well. The only time it's stopped responding, I needed to wiggle the keyboard connector.

  • Mirror of the dot.kde.org page (Score:4, Informative)

    by sc0rpi0n ( 63816 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:19PM (#3200563)
    Mirror of the dot.kde.org page [tudelft.nl]
  • Is it just me, or is all the kdenetwork stuff missing from the distribution builds? The RedHat RPMs directory doesn't seem to include KMail.

  • It is aptgetable already (Score:2, Informative)

    by rsd ( 194962 )
    For those of you already running Conectiva Linux, it is aptgetable already.

    If you run the CL snapshot version just:

    # apt-get update
    # apt-get dist-upgrade

    If you just want to get the kde stuff:
    Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

    rpm ftp://ftp.nl.linux.org/pub conectiva/snapshot/conectiva main kde

    and then run:
    # apt-get update
    # apt-get install task-kde

    If you want to fully upgrade to the snapshot version:
    add this line instead:

    rpm ftp://ftp.nl.linux.org/pub conectiva/snapshot/conectiva main extra orphan gnome experimental games kde

    and then:
    # apt-get update
    # apt-get dist-upgrade

    Enjoy!

  • The "focus problem" that I've been whining piteously about for so long has been fixed, so I can now actually post to Slashdot with Konqueror in KDE3...

    KDE3 at this point seems to be in really good shape. There are only 1.5 problems left that I can even think of at the moment...(maybe less...)

    The ".5" is the clipboard and cutting-and-pasting. Right now, it seems a bit inconsistent in some spots (especially cutting-and-pasting from within kmail [i.e. message source or headers when reporting spam]), which is annoying, but not fatal.

    The other problem isn't KDE's fault - I just can't get Quanta to start under KDE3 is all (is Quanta dead? Development on it seems to have sputtered to a stop at the moment [though about once a week CVS shows a change to a configuration file or something of the sort]...)

    Otherwise, I consider myself "officially" using KDE3 full-time now. I'm quite pleased with it. Konqueror in particular seems to have gotten significantly better (and I think it was pretty good before) at dealing with the more esoteric web-sites that used to give it problems (javascript/ecmascript support is greatly improved...)

    • What's the focus problem?

      I have no problem posting to /. from the KDE2 version of Konqueror. (Maybe because I use click-focus instead of hover-focus. I have a Windows mindset--sue me.) I rarely do, though, because Konqueror has trouble rendering a lot of /. pages correctly. Rendering issues are the main reason I don't use Konqueror more. If these are addressed in KDE3, Konqueror is ready to kick some serious butt.

    • The other problem isn't KDE's fault - I just can't get Quanta to start under KDE3 is all

      So I guess it's really only half a problem as well then. You can tell a physicist, they will never use 0.5 and Quanta in the same sentence.

  • KDE3 vs. Gnome2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @02:22PM (#3201625)
    I've been playing with both. I can certainly say both offer great speedups over their current stable versions. However, I must say that KDE3 feels a lot closer to release quality than Gnome2, even though Gnome2 supposedly has a sooner release date...

    Everything in KDE (at lleast as of RC2) seems to work, I haven't seen any crashes. All the utilities and such seem pretty complete.

    Gnome2, as of a few days ago, still seemed broken in so many ways. On log out, the panel always segfaulted. The appearance is, well, pretty crappy compared with KDE (one font selector, which doesn't seem to work right). Gdm is completely broken (the daemon continuously restarts, and the configuration tools are broken and won't even start. Sawfish 2 doesn't seem to want to even pull up any configuration applets. Interoperability between Gnome2 and Gnome1 apps seems ok, until gGConf comes into play. If gnome1 installed gconf is running, Gnome2 apps screw up, if gnome2 is running it's gconf, Gnome1 apps that are GConf aware mess up. All this is my own machine, with gnome prefixes differing between 1 and 2, but under the same configuration, KDE is good to go... Maybe at release time, we will see a different story. Both show great promise.

    • Re:KDE3 vs. Gnome2 (Score:3, Informative)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      Another point I wanted to make, this time in favor of Gnome :) Galeon is a truly top notch browser. Konqueror is ok, but everything renders with mozilla's engine, and khtml sometimes falls short. Additionally, Konqueror seems to completely dismiss the notion of tab browsing. Though so many people want it and request it, it seems like the stance they take is "no, tabbed browsing is not good UI design, it's not as easy to use, even if so many users think it is". Of course, this is unsubstantiated claim, but it feels that way. I just don't get how so many people can dismiss concepts in UI design through supposed expert research that tells users they don't know what they want.

      • Re:KDE3 vs. Gnome2 (Score:4, Informative)

        by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Thursday March 21, 2002 @03:06PM (#3202080) Homepage Journal
        Konqueror is ok, but everything renders with mozilla's engine, and khtml sometimes falls short.

        In Konqueror, go to View, Vide Mode, and pick Mozilla instead of KHTML. It's been there for most of the 2.0 series. Konqueror is just a framework for loading plugins. Mozilla's engine has been a KDE plugin for quite awhile.

        I just don't get how so many people can dismiss concepts in UI design

        It's hardly dismissed - the code is already finished, and tabbed browsing is an option in the KDE 3.1 release (it was judged too fundimental a change for the 3.0 release). Do a search, and I'm sure you can find some screenshots.

        --
        Evan

        • Cool, I thought I remembered that from KDE2, but the option seems to have disappeared in the 3.0 branch... Or else moved. If it has moved, could someone tell me where?
  • Listen KDE and GNOME by default have configurations that are similiar to Windoze.

    It does NOT mean that you have to live with your desktop set this way. The control center for GNOME is confusing in its placement but KDE is logically laid out (the only bad part is that with KDE you get an insane amount of dizzying options to choose from).

    I live with GNOME because I use primarily GTK+ or GNOME apps and have it set with a CDE style main panel and a menu panel above (which is kinda like Mac OSX but the usability is light years different and yes this is not the configuration for those short on screeen real estate).

    However, I have KDE set up for my wife because I could make it look very XPish to cut her learning curve and SuSE 7.3 actually has a fairly tasty looking default look. You can play with the styles and Windows decorations and end up something that look very unique.

    If you don't like the desktop environments then run WindowMaker. It looks good and is very traditional in the Unix way it does things. You can go to the KDE control-panel and set the kde apps to have NeXtStep look and choose one of the many GTK themes so the Gnomish apps have a Step feel to it. That way you still get the uniformed feeel except for the stock icons.

    The great thing about Linux is that you have a zillion or so different choices in the way to do these things.

    Its also what makes it pain in the ass for the common user trying to figure what is best for them. :->

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