KDE 3.3 Officially Released

scorp1us was one of several to note that KDE 3.3 has been released. You can also read the infopage and the requirements. Commence downloading. Features a new spell checking library, a new theme manager, and much more.

Yaay KDE!

[kmmatthews]

From the accountment page [kde.org], KWin got a button for always on top, Juk can now burn audio CDs, and Kopete can transfer files. e.g. features that I've really been wishing for (amongst many more)...

Guess I've got some downloading to do, eh? Which comes to a gripe - it's a real pain in the arse to download all the seperate files and install them. Sure would be nice if the KDE team wrote an "update" script that would check for updates and optionally download/install them. PS. Anyone want a gmail invite? mail me [mailto].. [only one left!]

Requirements

[kmmatthews]

Wow, that's a really nice requirements chart. I wish more projects
would use that. (Of course, with apt-get and dpkg, it's not such a
concern, but.)

Maybe even nicer if they would produce an .xml of it, and we could
write a tool to test the system against it - e.g. "you meet the
requirements," or "YOU FAIL IT, you need $PKG $VER."

As I type emerge -uD kde

[stratjakt]

I can't help but think that I'm feeling the same thing the mice felt when they told Deep Thought to find the answer to Life the Universe, and Everything, and it told them it would take 10 million years.

I will no doubt be equally impressed with the results as they were.

KDE's UI has some really nice looking elements, but altogether it's just cluttered and ugly. I'm talking about them jamming too much stuff in the menus, redundant menus, etc. Gnome's so much lighter and cleaner looking. Though, I like the lisa daemon (alot! why would I want to have to type mount "-t cifs //blah/blah" like some sort of caveman), and their sound thingie.

Longest Journey

[Etriaph]

Aside from patches to 3.3, I don't think we'll see another major KDE release until Qt4 is finalized and we see KDE 4 creep up beside it. So for all of us who are reveling in a new release of our favourite desktop environment, just remember to hold onto that feeling, it could be another year before it happens again. :)

Debian

[debian4life]

In yet another sign that the apocolypse is upon us, Debian unstable actually had KDE 3.3 last week. I am glad they are finally pushing the edge with that repository rather than having unstable mean "not as stable as stable" and of couse stable meaning "running packages from 3 years ago". Those of us who choose to run unstable know what the word means and we are willing to chance it.

And yes, I am a Debian user.

PyKDE and PyQt on CVS !

[InodoroPereyra]

To me, one of the most exciting developments in KDE 3.3 is the addition of both PyKDE and PyQt to CVS. Hopefully, this will boster the use of these bindings. If you haven't, give them a try.

I humbly think that KDE + KDevelop (or Qt + Designer) give a beautifull Rapid Development tool. Python fits very well with the Object Oriented KDE API. And most of the heavy work is done by Qt anyways, so I would expect that many. many usefull aplications could be written with PyKDE and PyQT, now that they are officially part of the family ;-)

Kudos and Thank You to everyone involved.

-- Don Inodoro

Re:it happend

[LarsWestergren]

Indeed... I was browsing some eyecandy at kde-look.org and suddently things started going slow as molasses. Eventually I gave up and went over to Slashdot instead, and I found the reason straight away. :-)

People are doing some fantastic things with KDE themes and especially Superkaramba. There are Os X themes, Lain themes and more. Superkaramba is a nice way of learning Python too. I'm looking forward to seeing what is new once the Slashdotting is over...

I hope it's less broken....

[Anonymous Coward]

I use ION WM, and the KDE Apps make all kinds of wrong assumptions about icon placement and break specs. I hope this stuff is fixed. Alas, the KDE apps are much better than Gnome ones.

Re: Of course gentoo

[er_col]

All of the multimedia mime things work in Konqueror (that I could see).

Yep, this is my favorite one! With KPlayer [sourceforge.net] installed, you can play nearly any online content, be it Windows Media, RealMedia, QuickTime or anything else, whether embedded in the page or given as link, even those stupid JavaScripts can't mess it up.

KPlayer right now I think is the only player that detects playlist files as opposed to direct links, so it starts MPlayer with the correct options, and it all just works!

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you were eyeing to the MorphOS 1.4.2 Desktop Screenshots showing the MPlayer port with one YMCA video and one of the actors. That Screenshot was also used on MPlayers Screenshot gallery site. If you want to look at KDE 3.3.x Screenshots please scroll down to the bottom as it was advised in the initial post.

Re:As I type emerge -uD kde

[aussersterne]

It's all about personal preferences. I find KDE's interface (once I've added a slave panel for a taskbar and made the main panel vertical, plus adding about ten additional menus to it) to be nice and usable, with everything in easy reach.

I find GNOME, on the other hand, to be uncomfortably light and clean, with nothing in easy reach, kind of like a one-button mouse or a one-button walkman... so simple that it's hard to get anything you want done, because the functionality's either missing, or requires extra steps to access.

I'd be interested in seeing research that compares peoples' living spaces to peoples' PC desktops. I wonder if you have a very empty, Zen-like living space. I myself have an incredibly cluttered (but orderly) living space; books, equipment, tools, etc. all tend to be within view on umpteen shelves, hooks, stacks, etc... bus and train schedules are posted on the wall... everything is easy to access, and easy to put away, requiring only one step ("reach").

nVidia TwinView Working?

[Hank Reardon]

I recently moved to Gentoo and did the full recompile of KDE 3.2 when I did it. I had moved from Fedora.

Imagine my surprise when the TwinView stuff suddenly quit working and all of my windows suddenly wanted to maximize across all of the monitors.

Has anybody had any luck with 3.3 and the TwinView extensions? It looks from the nVidia docs like TwinView responds to the Xinerama queries, but KDE didn't seem to respond to them correctly. It did work under Fedora, and Gnome has no problems with Xinerama at all.

Re:As I type emerge -uD kde

[Anonymous Coward]

Drawers are teh pwn. No doubt about that. When it comes down to it, that's the reason I chose gnome (and it seems to run and startup a hair bit faster). I have all of my 'office' stuff in one drawer, all of my sound stuff in another, graphiccs in yet another, so on and so on. I've got about 7 drawers, all stacked on the right side right under gkrellm, a couple menus, often used programs (like Eterm)and a pager on the left, and a taskbar on the bottom, all strewn across two monitors. It's the only way to have it, AFAIC. Everything I use day to day is within two ckicks and about 600 pixels at max.

Re:New Features (site is slashdotted)

[Sunspire]

I feel your pain, not only is it ugly, it shows a lack of imagination. No doubt someone will reply that GNOME does it too. Not so! GNOME has really progressed on this front in just a few years. There's really no mainstream g* applications left that the user needs to be aware of, except maybe gaim and the gimp.

A modern GNOME desktop is now build around the following components
Mailer: Evolution
Browser: Epiphany or Firefox
Office suite: Open Office
File manager: Nautilus
Music player: Rhythmbox
Media player: Totem
Firewall: Firestarter
CD burning: Coaster
Vector drawing: Inkscape
IDE: MonoDevelop or Eclipse
Archiving: File-roller
IRC: x-chat
etc.

All nice unique names. If you see gSomething in a menu, file a bug so we can get rid of it!

éxpose, komposé, expocity

[sewagemaster]

it'll be interesting to see whether Komposé [kde-apps.org], aka éxpose [apple.com] clone will make it into the next version of KDE...

Is it just me

[Julian Morrison]

...or does this seem a rather small list of changes for a point release? Not that I'm complaining, improvements are always nice.

Did they fix the memory leaks too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try staying logged in for awhile without eventually seeing all the memory eaten up. True, one can just log out, then log back in to reclaim the memory, but this is a kludge. If one has several windows open with specific tasks (that won't come up automatically on log in) it's a pain to get resituated.

It's an annoying problem that I've seen with different hardware and different kernel versions, so I know it's KDE. Mark this as troll or flamebait, but that won't make this any less true.

Re:Spell Check?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offtopic but if I didn't know how to reverse a command, I would probably 'man' that command, and then go to the "SEE ALSO" section - if you read man with a vi like editor, then "shift + g" skips to the bottom which is close to it.

Re:Debian

[bfree]

Well seeing as though Etch is going to be the first release to come after the major shake-ups of adding testing and creating debian-installer it will be interesting to see just how long Etch takes to release after Sarge. Once Sarge is released there should be no real reason for releases not to start being kicked out far more quickly, as even now Etch is forming in unstable ready to become testing/etch as soon as sarge is released.

Apart from the whole Free/non-free issue for documentation and firmware (or at least my understanding is that firmware is the source (oops, bad pun) of the other issues), I don't know of any other major plans for etch which could cause a long release cycle?

Of course, now is also the time that the concept of testing gets its own first real world test to see if it serves it's purpose! Perhaps nothing will change and etch will release sometime around 2006.

So to be a bit more on topic, Debian should hold 3.3 in unstable, let it into sarge if it makes it in time (presumably only if other delays creep in) but otherwise get sarge out and get working on bringing etch out asap. Even if etch comes out too quickly, at least it will show debian that the system works and they can start to plan their release cycles more accurately!

Re:Did they fix the memory leaks too?

[MikeCapone]

I have 192 megs of RAM and leave my old AMD K6 on for weeks and sometimes months at a time (reboot when there's a new kernel out, actually) and performance and memory usage barely deteriorates after all that time, so I guess that the memory leaks that you are experiencing are not coming from KDE but from other apps.

Why is this in the "linux" section?

[chegosaurus]

There are other OSes you know. Please don't disregard them, or the work of the people who make KDE a cross-platform desktop.

For all the complaining linux users do about Microsoft's monopoly and open standards, a lot of them are all too quick to disregard or put down the other Unix style OSes, and to write code that won't compile without sys/linux.h.

Fortunately the KDE people don't think that way.

Re:Yaay KDE!

[Mr. Jaggers]

Yep, Enahs, please do. Don't forget a mention of hdparm to enable ATA133... easy thing to overlook.

I've always run distro's like slackware that were pretty close to the metal, and was plenty comfortable with installing anything from source that needed updating, from binutils and the kernel up to AfterStep and TeX... since just after kernel 1.0 or so.

hdparm is one of those things that Red Hat people never think of because installers do so much work for you these days. I remember shuddering at the thought of X based installers... how could it even know ahead of time if the monitor was multisync or not?? Ludicrous!!!

I now also do Gentoo on my home workstations, but the same install of Slackware on all my older machines, and Debian servers at work (not my decision, but that's OK, Debian's cool too).

At any rate, I find out (late 2002, mind you!) that *all* my disks on my machines were running ATA33 or 66!! It never dawned on me for a minute that I had to turn it on, even though I conciously disabled auto DMA use in the kernel config.

I was so pissed at myself I actually broke a keyboard...