Preview of KDE 3.4

comforteagle writes "In this month's KDE: From the Source George Staikos details what is to be expected from the upcoming 3.4 version of KDE. An Alpha release is due any minute so you might as well know what you're in for if you're a loyal K head. Some changes include major rework within KHTML & Konqueror, Subversion support, and Apple's Rendezvous."

Subversion support

[Nosf3ratu]

Nice to see some embedded support for Subversion. Not that I particularly like Subversion more than CVS, but it has some rather excellent features.

...no, I don't know why my Karma is terrible.

I hope...

[strredwolf]

...they fix alot of old bugs with KDE, including no auto-refresh!

Konqueror + Gecko?

[ScriptMonkey]

Does anyone know if this will include Konquerer with the ability to use the Gecko rendering engine?

Report from KDE World Summit, Day 7:

[Mstrgeek]

This is good Article dealing wih Kide written by Tom Chance

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/08/30/2 028209

Hope you find it to educational

autorefresh

[b100dian]

This is my problem too. everytime I look at KDE I get the feeling of a window manager that shivers (or refreshes) and it feels 'unstable'. Menus flickering, Icons redrawing etc. I see all these.
The problem comes when I try to find somebody that notices this too: google helps not, discussion lists either etc. Even people (like: real people) deny that they notice this refreshing/flickering.
This is one of the main reasons I avoid using KDE.. and this is one of the first times I read from somebody that he dislikes the same thing.
It's worse than a bug: it's undescribable and unreproduceable...

Re:Real Window Managers

[zenmojodaddy]

Good call. The problem I have with both KDE and GNOME is that some packages offered as part of the desktop are so dependent on various other components that they're unusable on their own. I don't use GNOME at all but have had to install the full shebang when I install Slackware, because working out the various dependencies for a few packages is just too much work.

If Microsoft integrates a browser with a file manager, or hints at integrating a media player or anything else in the OS, everyone cries foul, so why is that considered good practice in the major *nix environments?

I'd much rather see a truly modular system, so the the user is free to pick and choose a window manager, a file manager, a browser, a messenger etc. and have them all play nice together, regardless of whether they are part of KDE or GNOME or standalone projects.

For the record: Slackware, Fluxbox and ROX-Filer all the way, baby.

Rendezvous support is nice, but ...

[YetAnotherName]

... but it's the applications that use it that will matter. Over on Mac OS X, Rendezvous is what lets you stream your iTunes music or share your iPhoto pictures. Will KDE's media player let you stream music to other KDE media players on the network? Or better yet, to and from other iTunes players?

Unfortunately, the article doesn't say so.

Re:autorefresh

[grqb]

I get this too! Mostly it seems to happen when I open a window that has large directories in it...I always thought that it was calculating the size of the directory. It also happens when I'm downloading or moving a large file and it re-calculates the size of the file on the fly (every time it flickers it recalculates the file size).

This is quite annoying, I just shade the window until it stops flickering...sometimes this can take a while though...

Obligatory Futurama quote

[RPoet]

I don't say that one has to like KDE, but "I don't like the icons" is not a very godd reason...

Calculon: An Oscar, you say? That would get me out of this festering rat's nest called "television" once and for all. Let me see the script. [Zoidberg hands it to him and he speed-reads it.] No, no I don't like the font.

Re:Thanks a bunch

[netsharc]

Can't you uninstall libkdecore, and then try to update KDE, so that it installs a (hopefully good) libkdecore as a dependency?

I agree, this part of GNU/Linux still need work, the structure of Program Files\ApplicationName in Windows or Applications/SingleFileWhichIsTheApp is a lot easier to manage instead of putting everything into /usr/bin/ ...

Re:Real Window Managers

[cortana]

An app that didn't make any calls to the kernel wouldn't be able to do much...

To see what system calls Konqueror makes, run 'strace -f konqueror'. This won't catch them all, of course, becuase KDE relies on other processes to do a lot of its work. You can start an X server with xterm as the only client, and do 'strace -f startkde' to see the lot.

Of course, one can always apt-get remove konqueror if one doesn't want it installed, the rest of KDE will not stop working. Try that with Internet Explorer. :)

WRT to MSIE using 'kernel internals': is there actually any documented evidence of when/where/why it does this? Internet Explorer probably uses the "Native API" *less* than a typical Unix process would use system calls; where Mozilla would open(2) a file, IE would call the OpenFile Win32 API, which would be handled by the Win32 server (csrss.exe, IIRC).

Re:Way to go KDE and Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never had to code for it. You would very quickly realize how thin the veneer is and how much of a square peg the UI is crammed into unix's round hole.

The underside of OSX is the most fsked up nightmare you can imagine. It's two completely imcompatible OSes crammed togeather with nightmarish consequences. It's a huge pain for developers and a huge opportunity for virus writers should they ever bite.

I initially thought the same as you, "Finally, a desktop unix with a usable UI!" how wrong I was :(