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KDE GUI

KDE 2.0 Beta 3 Is Out 120

Posted by HeUnique from the go-get-it dept.
As the title says - KDE 2.0 beta 3 is out. Announcement is here. The KDE development team worked really hard to make KDE 2.0 beta 3 stable - and people who have tested the snapshots can testify about it. Grab it, test it, torch it, and please - submit bug reports. Great work, KDE team!
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KDE 2.0 Beta 3 is out! More

KDE 2.0 Beta 3 is out!

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  • Mozilla, are you listening?

    Yes, they are. The Mozilla team is considering to drop Gecko and include Konqueror's great KHTML engine for their next milestone. ;-)

    (stop bitching already, just a little piece of funny flamebait)

  • Yeah, I use vim for general editing of config files and the like, emacs is just waaay too bloaty for doing something quick like that, although I use it for editing code.

  • You can use the minicli. Press Alt-F2, and type your command: kcontrol. It's very handy.
  • Anyone fancy writing KBSOD?

    HH

  • khotkeys is included in this release.
  • GNOME's new html viewer is not based on khtml, the html part of konqueror. It is based on kde 1.x's html widget, which was dropped in favor of khtml. (I guess it had design flaws which would make it nearly impossible to implement dom/css.)


    -- Thrakkerzog

  • Re:GNU bias? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31, 2000 @03:10AM (#893268)
    Actually the bias is far less. A couple of years ago it was far, far, far worse.

    It definitely still exists though. Not only within the readership of /. but unfortunately within many of the article posters themselves. (Witness the recent poll of login managers omitting kdm.....)

    It is a shame really, IMO KDE deserves every bit as much coverage as Gnome. It really is a fantastic effort and even many of the features of Gnome were "borrowed" from KDE(don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more of this cooperation). For instance, I read recently that Gnomes new HTML engine is actually based on Konquerors!

    Also to those who complain of KDE looking like Windows, but who who evangelise Gnome and in particular GOffice and Evolution, I would ask them to look to Miguel de Icaza, who is involved in leading several of these projects and his stated(yes he has been quoted saying this, but I haven't time to find links to quotes not) that he wants to make his programmes work just like those from Microsoft. (BTW for even more proof that KDE does not have to look like Windows anymore(I admit to a vague resemblance in 1.X(though I though 1.X was more OS/2ish) check out the new widget and window manager styles, these aren't just pixmaps but coded styles that change their appearance in accordance with your colour settings!

    A lot of the criticism of KDE is unfair and misinformed, but thankfully it is gradually getting better, hopefully it will improve even more.

    I think I'll stop here, before I go even more off topic.
  • IIRC, according to Debian, linking is and always has been allowed. It's DISTRIBUTING BINARIES that they say they can't do.

    Note that they could distribute KDE libs and other
    free KDE applications under non-GPL licenses any time they want. They could very well distribute convenient source packages for GPL'ed KDE applications like they do in several other cases already (eg, Pine).

    However I don't think anything can get past the current political barrier to including KDE in any form in Debian.

    It's been a while, but that's how I remember it.

    -N.
  • Just something I've been meaning to ask for ages.

    I'm not much up on GUIs in unix... I luuuurve my command line :) Recently though I've been playing around with KDE and find it tasty. My question is probably evil enough for me to be declared anathema and outcast, but here ya go anyway :)

    Is there a way of binding the 'K' menu to the windows key on my icky windows keyboard? Since I've got one anyway, I might as well use it......

    /me puts on his flameproof underwear
  • Not that this necessarily matters...

    As of a few minutes ago, kde.org didn't mention beta 3, the mirrors weren't populated yet, and both the user and devel mailing lists hadn't mentioned that it was released.

    Corrections appreciated...

  • Anyone fancy writing KBSOD?

    It already exists and it's included. It's a nice screensaver with screens of death from various OS'es including Linux, Windows NT, Windows 9x, Amiga OS ...

    Or you could try and build a new KDE from cvs while still running it. Wait until the new kdelibs have been installed while the old kdebase binaries are still there and you can expect a lot of crashing. ;-)

  • Remember that KDE started over a year before GNOME was even thought of. They have a bit of catching up to do. Frankly have done an admirable job considering they had to develop an object model on top of C, them's the breaks. Don't be surprised that KDE is about a year ahead of GNOME in many areas, software development takes time.
  • I've been using KDE2 beta for several days now, and I'm *never* going back. It is a fact that KDE2 uses less screen real-estate than both KDE1 and GNOME. First of all, the widgets are more compact, and don't ask for more space than they require to do their things. Secondly, the panel can be auto-hidden. I've configured it so that it goes away as soon as I move the mouse away from it. Third, any status line and tool bar can be switched off.

    Ever tried the new Konsole? Remove all borders, title bar of the WM, the menu bar and the tool bar, and turn on "Full screen". Voila, you're using *every pixel* of the screen, with no crap to distract you.

    I've already found several bugs which I have reported, but no real show-stoppers except for some rare crashes of konqueror. This thing is going to do wonders for Linux on the desktop.

    (Posted from Konqueror, btw ;)

    --
  • It's official, hence the announcement, which _was_ on one of the lists, might have been kde-announce though.

    The site and mirrors will catch up. I wouldn't have made the announcement until then, but don't worry, it's for real.

  • Ok you may be right total application count for GNOME may be more than KDE's, but usable application count is not.

    For example i love KLyX, but currentle there is no working LyX port for GTK/GNOME. I can also count may others, like e-mail client...

    And mozilla is not as stable as konquereor, YET. Even on widnows i have a longer up time for it.

    And also my comment does not mean that GNOME sucks, what i meant is GNOME is still behind KDE and i want to see "KDE in Action" but i beleive that in the long run, GNOME/Mozilla will take place. Because their architecture is far better.

  • http://www.gnu.org/software/harmony/harmony.html

    Such a project exists. But the KDE project itself is currently more interested in making their environment better. You're more than welcome to join the Harmony project though. I'm actually of the opinion that the GNOME folks would have done better to work on this than compete with KDE for little other reason, it seems childish. But part of what makes life so interesting is that one person's opinion is not the only valid opinion. I wish luck to both KDE and GNOME.
  • Cool man! I like the first one the most ;-)
  • I was pleased with the progress of Konqueror in earlier releases of KDE.. I have read the stuff that Konqueror is about to support. Java is the biggest one. I haven't been able to do much with Java in Netscape as many applets cause it to hang.

    Then I have to go out and kill Netscape and restart it. I just leave the Java turned off.

    It is apparently going to support plugins for Netscape too!

    The KDE support in other window managers is growing too so you may be able to run Konqueror reasonably without running KDE. This is necessary for basically anyone with a 14" monitor as my only two beefs with KDE are bulkiness and its usage of my desktop real estate.

    I am the type of guy who bought a trackball because a mouse requires more room on my desk. So yes I am probably a little anal about all this...

    Well keep up the good work KDE team! I am looking forward to the new release!

    Dave
  • No the mouse isn't broken. ;-)

    I find it easier and faster to use keystrokes (where available). This really only applies to Window$ (my employer ia all NT)
  • I take it you haven't tried KDE 1.1.2 on a laptop, have you?

    I installed it on my dad's Toshiba Satellite Pro (P120 w/32MB RAM), and it monitors the battery just fine :)

  • Bug report (Score:3)

    by viktor ( 11866 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:36AM (#893282) Homepage
    Grab it, test it, torch it, and please - submit bug reports.

    There seems to be a bug in your software that somehow automatically crossposts any and all update announcements to the slashdot forum.

    This bug cannot lie in any of the source code files, but must somehow be a metabug (perhaps a virus?) that has infected the source code system as such. I would do a virus check of all files, beginning with the CHANGES file, since updates of that file is what seems to trigger the errorenous behaviour.

    If no bug can be found, I would guess that the source code is simply feeling lonely and in need of attention, and that this is the cause of it's many slashdot announcements. Perhaps a nanny could be appointed to talk to it, feed it and take care of it?

  • They can coexist just fine. Check this link:

    http://www.kde.org/kde1-and-kde2.html [kde.org]

    -N.
  • How often do you see KDE users flaming Gnome? Many of the posts have been more like, hey guys...catch up.....even--here, use some KDE code to catch up... But I hear a considerable amount of antagonism from Gnomers toward KDE. Worse yet, I hear them talking about its "obvious" superiority. It's becomes very tempting to enter the fray at this. KDE is better developed because it's been around longer....and it's much more stable and is developed faster because of the C++ and object architectures (DCOP and KParts). Gnome has the potential of being more light-weight and technologically superior in some respects. This is because it doesn't incur the overhead of C++ (though it's insignificant with proper designs) and because it's following KDE.. Gnomer's can learn from KDE. But I am seeing attacks on KDE with no reasoning behind them, as if Gnomer's just simply hate KDE. What is "obviously" superior about Gnome??? It crashes MUCH more than Windows 98...I know this is rapidly improving--but your antagonism and refusal to work together sure as hell isn't helping anything but degrade you. We have too much work to do for these kind of childish games....On the issue of Slashdot anouncing the Gnome improvements--I am with you full-heartedly. They should not neglect Gnome... But this Beta 3 release of KDE really is a HUGE milestone for Linux as a whole--as the new Gnome will hopefully be also. Anyway--you'll catch up pretty closely with Eazel and StarOffice. --Matthew

  • It's a banged up old PC where the motherboard is half dead, so I'm not really fussed about buying anything for it... I've got a mouse just can't plug it in :)

  • KDE 2.0 is very good, however, the fact that it tries to look and feel like that useless (shudder) microsoft OS, gets me stiring. I am only 15, but I have been using Linux for 2 years, and I now use enlightenment with my custom rewritten version of BlackBox. I do not have any of those stupid menues like Gnome and KDE, I don't want to have to mov a mouse all over the damm screen to open some program when I can simply type it. It is much faster to use a plain X11 with a single toolbar with a few shortcuts than a big tangly menu.

  • Not all of us are mousers

    Just out of curiousity, why is it that you don't use a mouse? Is it a esthetic reason, or it simply along the lines of your previous mouse being broken and you haven't got around to replacing it?

  • Although I should probably be talking about this over on the Mozilla thread, you really gotta wonder why them folks didn't take more of a KDE approach to building a browser. Consider for a moment some of the reasons why Konqueror was able to get out the door so quickly. They took an existing shell, then concentrated their efforts towards the rendering engine.

    On the other hand, Netscape also had a functional shell. They decided to drop all of the 5+ years of development on it to start over from scratch. I personally have trouble believing that 99% of the 4.x code was so dinked that it couldn't have been salvaged to at least encapsulate the Gecko engine that's been collecting dust for over a year now.

    The lesson to be learned here is to very loudly kill the idiot who suggests taking a market leading piece of software and re-write it from scratch. Afterwards, place that person's skull atop a stick as folks are walking to their cubicles as a reminder. Joel Spolsky (as linked from that Suck article) has a great run down on this. [editthispage.com]

    Much to the credit of KDE, they didn't get sucked into the notion of rebuilding from nothing. Certainly much of their code has been re-worked, but this didn't mean throwing everything out and starting over. As a result, I fully expect to see a functional KDE 2.0 in September. Mozilla should be out some time after IE 7.0.
  • As usual I can't get the damned thing to run under Solaris.

    Another gripe is that though it's fast, stable, full of useful tools, it's still got that too chunky "my first computer" look about it.

    GNOME's slower and much less stable but boy it looks good. Come on KDE people, get your priorities right!
  • I am a GNOME fan but, i like the way KDE goes. It really looks excellent, and it has much more applications than GNOME has. I am really excited with this beta and i am waiting for Slackware binaries to come. And also GNOME port of the Konqueror (at least browser)
  • Glad you liked it. It was intended to make some people laugh, and annoy those who take the whole KDE/Linux vs Windows thing too seriously. - I guess this makes it a Troll - and what happens? Everyone laughs.
  • Oh man! Great quote. When the heck is the next
    Star Trek coming out?! Bring back TNG dammit.

    -N.

    PS

    Yeah, KDE2 is looking awesome. I've switched to it as my regular desktop. Konqueror is unbelievable. KOffice looks sweet.

    Some of the KDE modules still need work though. KPPP is not quite there for example -- no docking as in KDE1 and Pixie, though nice, does some weird resizing that sometimes confuses the WM. Pixie could use some of that extra polish that makes XV the king of image viewers (like Tab to go to next image, etc).

    The KControl hierarchy is a mess, IMHO. I hope we can fix that soon. The Corel guys have promised to look into it.
  • Is it just me, or are Linux DE's moving dangerously into the realm of "screen space wasters" where MS apps in general look selvte, (if drab) the new Linux DE's look much more, umm, crappy. KDE2 is the most egregious offendor. On the bottom of Konqueror, there is a thick status Window that nobody ever uses and you can't get rid of. Then, the frames themselves are thick. Even the scrollbar is thick. There is too much spacing between icons, and a lot of dead space in apps like KWord. What are they CODING on? 21 inch monitors?
  • If anything, we need debs of the KDE2 releases. Everything at kde.tdyc.com is outdated and terrible. KDE1 is a mess in debian, 1/2 the packages rely of libqt the other half rely on qt1g. I installed caldera linux technology preview so I could look at kde2/knq/koffice, they're very cool. Yes, i could compile from source, but I have had very little luck compiling kde from scratch under debian. I'd really love to see good, well made debs. I don't care at this point if it conflicts with kde1. SHOW ME THE DEBS!
  • (I don't clean them, I replace them...)

    Yeah, I got tired of cleaning mice too. So I bought a Logitech Trackball Marble FX instead. I currently own three of them and will never (willingly) use a mouse again.

    BTW, I usually use the keyboard shortcuts too, but mice are handy for graphics programs...

  • As usual I can't get the damned thing to run under Solaris.

    Please send your experiences to the KDE team. They are very committed to have KDE running under a multitude of *NIX flavours, not just Linux. There has been tremendous progress in the Solaris and *BSD support lately and with some constructive feedback things will even look better.

    The priority _is_ bugfixing at the moment. If you don't feel like subscribing to one of the KDE mailinglists, drop me a note at my listed e-mail address and I'll contact the developers and get your comments to them.

  • You can't GPL a trademark, silly. GPL relates to copyright, not trademark.

    And Linux (IIRC) was trademarked by some J. Random Opportunist who then received a torrential outpouring of pressure from the community and wound up turning over the trademark to Linus rather than fighting it in court.

    And as always, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

  • Re:KDE is getting there (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You mean krashing, not crashing :)
  • I've recently started using KDE and the one thing that bugs me is the lack of monitor enlargement for many things. I don't currently own a 21" monitor and one of the nice things under Windows is that you will soon be able to emulate a 21" monitor using a 15" one - tricky, but better than nothing. Considering X is the home of the GUI it seems strange that KDE is so 15" unfriendly...

    Does anyone know whether this is going to improve or not, or if there are any utilities which can help in this matter?

    Apart from this gripe though, KDE is nice :)


  • > Is it a joke ?

    Yes! Well done!
  • Thanks and kudos. Most succint, clueful explanation of the Debian/KDE licensing issue I've ever seen.
  • ...your scheme isn't very scalable. Products like Mozilla would have reached Omega a long time (or at least would soon), without ever striking Gold. By using numbered Betas instead, they can spend time in limbo indefinitely, without ever having to grow up.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • I have been a GNOME fan, but know it seems that KDE is where I can really appreciate it and it is coded in C++ :)) So I am starting to think to change into the KDE field.
  • I seem to recall that there were announcements quite a bit before the first pre-betas were released. I could certainly be wrong about this, but various hints of it started popping up quite a bit before there was anything available to download. Back when WindowMaker was undergoing development I believe... It's been quite a while :-) Hardly seems possible.

    Regardless, the KDE project has had more time to work on the desktop "problem", and it's not surprising that they have come up with the better solution at this time.
  • Isn't Kde german? ;)
    Max
  • I really like it (KDE). I hope they keep up the good work.

    I like the work going on with GNOME as well, but it will never replace KDE in my heart.
  • Is it really necessary to post every release of KDE and GNOME and debian and Redhat and every other distro/user-environment on the net? Slashdot should be about Stuff That Matters! At the very least it should be just the major releases that are announced here, not endless betas or bugfixes.
  • What's new in KDE 2.0 ?
  • What the hell are you talking about? I use autohide panels with Netscape (KDE 1.2) and it works fine.
  • Actually I'm working on a small Laptop-display
    (1024x768) but KDE2 is already even usable on
    800x600!

    But not usable on 640x480?

    You may scoff, but my 2 lb mininotebook with 5 hour battery life runs this size screen. I use KDE right now (when I'm not in console mode, which is often), but I guess I'll have to switch to Gnome if 800x600 is the minimum.

    --
    Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected

  • KDE is getting there (Score:4)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:11AM (#893311) Journal
    It emulates the look and feel of Windows quite nicely. Its got the user friendliness of Windows. It's surpassed the speed of Windows. All it needs now is to crash a bit more so that it can get to the stability of Windows.

  • good, I'm happy... oh, so happy... (Score:5)

    by chowda ( 161971 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:13AM (#893312) Homepage
    The last version I tryed... my wheel mouse worked, my browser didn't crash, my sound sounded better, my monitor looked sharper, my slashdot posts were funnier, my GF looked thinner, my lawn was greener and I got a raise... I CAN'T WAIT to see what this version does for me!!
  • The way that I use this terminology "alpha" and "beta" do not really indicate version numbers. I use the term "alpha" to indicate software still under active development while "beta" indicates active development on this version has stopped and testing and bug fixing has started (i.e. no new features are added to "beta" software).

  • Whence "beta" (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:12AM (#893314)
    Does anyone know where we got the term "beta" for "nearly (but still un-) finished software"? It just seems to me that "Beta 3" is a little bit of an odd phrase. Why not "alpha", "beta", "gamma", "delta"?
    --
  • This is off topic, but the point has to be made. Like you, I think Neil's comments missed the point -- there's a lot more to KDE than Windows-style L&F. (Besides which, said L&F isn't even builtin.) But I think Neil's comments belong in this discussion, and I think its silly to blame his score on some imaginary "anti-KDE agenda."

    When I moderate (only once so far) and meta-moderate (every day) I consider something flamebait only if its a pointless comment by some idiot who has to have the last word. Actually, when I M2, I don't worry about the specific labels at all. To me, a good post is one that raises a point that a lot of people care about and that isn't off topic. A good moderator gives good posts extra points and takes them away from bad posts. Period.

    Hey CdrTco, am I doing it right?

  • <P>> Clicking on the 'K' menu brings up a menu so <BR>
    > large that it won't fit on the screen,

    <P>looks fine on my monitor; the menu is large, but that is mostly due to the fact that is has so much stuff to offer...

    <P>> side effect automatically starts the screen <BR>
    > saver

    <P>hm.. don't know what acid your 'puter is on.. that's just plain weird and deffinitely NOT happening on my system, which is (as i write this from Konqueror) running 1.92

    <P>> new version you can't change the style of the <BR>
    > title bars any more

    <P>try right clicking on them, tonto

    <P>> know it's a beta, but it's *worse* than 1.91

    <P>either you didn't get 1.92, or you never used 1.91.

    <P>get a clue
  • RTFW (read the fine webpage)
  • I fully agree with Dan, why use a mouse, there a pain in the arse. ps. youve got my last name... mailto://goose@deliveryman.com
  • alpha means feature-freeze (KDE 1.89 etc)
    beta means bug-tracking (KDE 1.9x)

    note that MS uses "Beta" for "Alpha" and "Release Candiadte" for "Beta" (and also "Consumer Release" for "Beta 2", "Service Pack [n]" for "Beta [n+2]")

  • I've recently started using KDE and the one thing that bugs me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts for many things. I don't currently own a mouse and one of the nice things under Windows is that you can emulate the mouse using the keyboard - tricky, but better than nothing. Considering *NIX is the home of the CLI it seems strange that KDE is so keyboard-unfriendly...

    Does anyone know whether this is going to improve or not, or if there are any utilities which can help in this matter?

    Apart from this gripe though, KDE is nice :)

  • Re:Whence "beta" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    possibly irrelevant, but potentially useful information here [apple.com] (this is not a pr0n or goatse.cx link)

  • I have to agree with most of what you said. It is really sad to see linux developers putting out products that seem to aim more towards being like windows, instead of better than windows.

    Not to put down the KDE or the GNOME teams, they are putting out the software, I am not. ;^) And they've done a really good job in some ways, they deserve a lot of credit. I use components of both KDE and GNOME at times, and while I can imagine better alternatives, I am not the coder to write them, so my bitching is completely with that in mind, and with a lot of respect for the people that are producing usable software, however much I dislike some of the choices they have made.

    Still, I personally would be so much more happy to see them working on something fundamentally different and better than windows instead, and I really think they are selling themselves and free software short.

    There has to be a reason that GNUStep [slashdot.org] is languishing, while KDE and GNOME seem to be swamped with volunteers. I can't for the life of me think of one though. I'm trying really hard too.

  • And how do you get there using the keyboard? :)

  • In the world of commercial development, "releases" are produced to secure payment.

    Usually numbered milestones are first, followed by alpha, which is the first "feature compleate" version, then "beta" which is the first major bug fix release, everything after that is a "Master Candidate". If your good/lucky the beta goes to master.

    As I said, the open / evolution style development, the releases alpha/beta mean very little.

    Thad

  • Re:makes no sense for OS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, IMHO it makes a lot of sense. Each of the "betas" can be considered reasonably stable and people who are interested in downloading and trying out the latest and greatest, but who perhaps don't want to waste time downloading snapshots that won't compile or don't know how to use cvs to update. Also with beta releases, binary packages are often produced, so people don't have to compile from source. Not everyone has the time/know how.
  • You know, I'd really like a parallel mouse...

    A lack of keyboard shorcuts (at which bindability has already been hinted) is a serious complaint. The bittersweet realization with any pure GUI is not only wha-choo-see-iz-wha-choo-get, but it's also all you get.

    talk to you later,
    -J.D.
  • I'm a non-mouser also. Well, apart from Quake, moving windows about and browsing.

    I can't believe that more people don't use the keyboard for simple things like opening/closing windows, bringing up the start menu, or equivalent, launching your web browser at your favourite search page, navigating directories in 'explorer', clipboard, menus, errr menus. Excuse me for a moment:

    When you go to your favourite bar, do you:
    open the door,
    go to the bar,
    sit down,
    stand up,
    wipe the vomit that you've just sat down in off your butt,
    ask for the beer menu,
    wait for the menu to appear,
    look up and down the menu a few times wondering where the beer you want is,
    get bored and start staring blankly at it and daydream about how nice it would be to be drinking a nice cold one right now,
    wake up from your dream realising that you've been staring at what you're looking for for an eon,
    select your beer, the thought of which has, through all the frustration, become a little less appealing.
    ?

    No, of course not!

    You walk in to the bar, make eye contact with the barman who acknowledges your entrance through the crowd with a knowing smile like you were the last to leave last night. Before you know it your pitcher and 2 glasses are speeding their way to you in the very capable hands of Alice, the new bar maid, who just happens to have finished her shift. Yum!

    Okay.
    I don't know about you, but i've been using these computer things for a while. When i need to do things that i do quite alot, like setting breakpoints, stepping, rebuilding, saving, browsing etc... I tend to learn the key shortcuts for those things (how's about Ctrl-Enter in IE's address bar), and after a while they become subliminal (or Windows-D ?), i don't have to think about which keys to press, like i don't have to think about spelling 'ls' or 'more' i just think and it appears.
    this will never be the case with the mouse. first of all you have to move your hand from the keyboard. then there's the follow the stupid pointer around the screen while reading text, recognizing/interpreting icons etc... I think the most important advantage that WIndows has over other windowing environments in the accessibility front is the fact that there's a single set of richly-features common controls and dialogs that can be easily extended by developers. This encourages applications to use common metaphors that users are familiar with. Like, for example, what does ctrl-shit-end do in your text control? It's not perfect by any means, but at least it's not like X where we have a zillion different widget sets each with completely different behaviors and quirks. I like to keep my quirks to a minimum thanks.

    In my book the one thing that killed the Macintosh's usability was the fact that every single box shipped with a mouse. Windows didn't have this luxury and so the apps were, and still are, much more accessible from the keyboard. The Mac did have standards, though, for most things. Most X apps wouldn't know a keyboard shortcut if you, well, if you wanted one...

    I just got one of those Microsoft keyboards with the row of programmable blue buttons across the top. It's key.

  • I was hoping to get something along the lines of +7 funny -3 Flamebait, -2 troll and -2 overrated.

  • GNU bias? (Score:5)

    by Taurine ( 15678 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:43AM (#893329)
    I am beginning to 'smell the coffee' as far as moderation on /. is going. If this comment were posted to a discussion about GNOME, it would be equally funny. But that's not the moderation it would get. It would be flamebait. I guarentee it. Is it because GNOME fans moderate it this way here to further their anti-KDE agenda, or is it that KDE people read KDE stories and can laugh at themselves?

    Glad to see that people still dare to make jokes around here anyway (nothing beats a bit of geek-humour ;-), and Go KDE! I will begin downloading this as soon as the smoke stops coming out of my nearest mirror! Now where did I put my last KDE2 build script...

  • On time, Under budget (Score:5)

    by Metrol ( 147060 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:44AM (#893330) Homepage
    When was the last time you could say that about a software project, much less one of this scale? Based on the last update on the KDE site, we should be along the following time line...

    3 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 (14 August)
    6 weeks until KDE 2.0 Final (4 September)

    With so many projects out there with as of yet undetermined schedules, it sure is nice to see folks like over at KDE show how it's done. Set a realistic schedule with achievable goals and stick to it.

    Mozilla, are you listening?
  • The fatal mistake of mozilla was that they HAD the rendering engine (and still have). They tried to do too much with it. For example, someone's just knocked together a mozilla based browser with a simple fontend -- what most of us waht. Again, we don't mozilla to do our mail -- though it would be nice to have it to render html mail.

    Basically, the mozilla project had what they needed over a year ago (i.e. the new rendering engine etc.) but have been faffing around with fancy bits and pieces that they wrongly thought essential for a first release.
    John

  • Well firstly because my PC is so fucked I can't plug my mouse into it... :)

    But seriously although a mouse is a useful tool for many things it is just a hell of a lot more convenient to use the keyboard for most tasks, even in a GUI - task switching, menus, navigating around dialogs etc. Its quicker and doesn't require me to move my hands from the keyboard.

    Up until a while ago I was using Windows, which has a pretty decent set of k/b shortcuts - you don't need a mouse at all and in general the shortcuts used are consistent across applications (except for Borland products...). Moving to Linux and KDE I've found that keyboard shortucts are a lot more hit and miss, and application consistency has a long way to go.

    And getting used to Emacs finger contortions is taking a while as well... :)

  • That Real World link is a total 404... Figures :)

    Ah, must have been a relative link in the HTML from the Jargon File. Here's the link for your enjoyment =)

    Real World [tuxedo.org]

  • But if you have a look at their release schedule [kde.org], you can notice that the release of Beta3 was planned to happen on August 24th. O.K., it is just 1 week late, I think it is one of the few projects which are only one week late.

  • Agreed (Score:1)

    by mattc ( 12417 )
    I agree.. while I find it hard to believe anything could top helix-gnome, I'd still like to try KDE. RMS already said the license stuff was a non-issue.. so what is holding back the debian packagers?? I guess I'll just have to compile it from source.
  • You can do this now in XFree86, (and hence KDE); you just set your virtual desktop size larger than your chosen screen resolution.
  • On the KDE site, there is only 1 year old screenshots. Is there anything newer out there?
  • As I said, the open / evolution style development, the releases alpha/beta mean very little.

    They are still useful in indicating to your users/fellow developers how stable a release (by which I mean a numbered tarball/package) is likely to be. Calling a development release a beta release seems to drag a bunch of users out of the woodwork and throws up a pile of bugs. This is a pain, but it's a heck of a lot better than finding the bugs *after* the release is declared "stable" . . .

  • RMS already said the license stuff was a non-issue.. so what is holding back the debian packagers??

    The fact that the Debian developers are not RMS.

    On short, they believe that the QPL and GPL conflict in such a way that there _is_ no valid license for KDE and that they therefore cannot include it. They would include it the linking of KDE to Qt was more explicitely allowed in the license and they would put in right in the main distribution, not even non-free.

    But let's not debate on the license issue, please. It is not going to be solved here on Slashdot, it is not going to contribute to KDE _or_ Debian. All it will do is generate a lot of flamebait.

    Let's concentrate on the fact that KDE2 is one of the crown jewels of OSS at the moment and that there _will_ be Debian .debs, even though Debian won't be the team distributing them.

  • Building on Solaris (Score:3)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:09AM (#893340) Journal
    Read this thread [kde.org]. An engineer at Sun has a page with the tweaks he needed to get KDE to work on Solaris. Note that the beta is from a week ago, so you may need to get new snapshots or CVS updates to get this to work. (Or you may not -- I have no idea.)
  • Sorry about your solaris problems, but in case you haven't tried Beta 3, I really suggest taking another look at it. The icons for almost everything have been totally revamped and look much more 'mature', and I've heard word that the startup screen is getting a makeover as well as Konqueror's buttons.

    Once the servers crawl back to some semblance of their former selves, I suggest downloading it and taking a look. If you can get it to run, that is... I could've sworn people on the mailinglist had fixed the Solaris compile probems though. Try it on Linux, it works best there (big surprise, eh? ; )
  • Miguel also said that UNIX sucks. More likely it's his approach at the project which is sub-optimal, for instance an object oriented language lends itself to writing object oriented environments. Procedural languages, well, don't.

    I'm amazed that GNOME is as far along as it is, and while there's more to be done, we should remember it takes more effort to do this sort of thing in C than C++. (Remember too that the KDE project was around for at least a year before _it_ was released.)

    Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. I use it daily, and think it has the best chance to "win the desktop" for 'NIX if anything on X will. They've done a lot of things right, and created a wonderful environment which has allowed me to quickly assist many people getting into UNIX for the first time.

    That doesn't mean that GNOME isn't headed in the right direction. They just need time. I look forward to seeing what they have in store for the coming year.

    For now, isn't having a choice wonderful?
  • (do you want parallel or PS/2?)
    Last time I checked Linux did not support parallel mice (correct me if I'm wrong :-), maybe the guy owns one and cannot use...

    On a more serios note - shortcuts is a too nice feature, and I miss some very much when they are not their. My personal favorites: <Alt>-1 ... <Alt>-0 on WindowMaker - tremendous help with desktop utilization.

  • Go to http://www.mosfet.org/kde2action -Jerry
  • Ah, but not KDE 2.0, it never pops up correctly because it is treated as a window, and when it pops up, it doesn't get focus, so it ends up behind the top window.
  • August 24? Wow... it's a whole month early!

    (yes, I know you mean July :)
  • I HATE autohide panels. They're so inconvenient. Both KDE1 AND GNOME are still aweful screen hogs compared to Win9x. You can make the panels smaller, but then they look ugly. You can make it auto-hide, but that never works correctly with netscape.
  • KDE is okay... Sorta... Maybe for Windows users... It'd be better if they fix those licencing issues. Any news on the QTL/GPL business Debian were going through with KDE/QT?
    Neurotic: Person who builds forts in the sky
    Psychotic: Person who lives in those forts
  • There can be several beta releases. A product doesn't have to go "gold" (or indeed, "gamma") immediately after the first beta, see it as a phase, not a release - after all "alpha" is die-hard developer stuff only and never really gets released (KDE2 has been that way for a long while as well).

    There are also several golden releases for a product, mostly small improvements and bugfixes (often the x.01 and further releases).

    Interesting that you bring up "delta". I've always seen that as indeed another phase after "gamma" or "gold", where a product is mostly unmaintained and ready to die. Netscape Communicator would currently fall in that category.

  • Actually, the look and feel of KDE 2.0 will be much more like winblows. no more mac style toggles on the directory tree, thank god :) but the coolest thing for me will be the new laptop support features (KDE has always run fine on laptops once you get past the nasty X configurations) PCMCIA support, as well as the ability for KDE to monitor a laptops battery are a breath of fresh air

  • Re:Whence "beta" (Score:5)

    by Migrant Programmer ( 19727 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:22AM (#893351) Journal
    From the Jargon File [tuxedo.org], we have:

    beta /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ n.

    1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with `in': `in beta'. In the Real World [slashdot.org] , systems (hardware or software) software often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers. 2. Anything that is new and experimental. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).

    Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.

  • > Considering *NIX is the home of the CLI
    Command-line interfaces predate Unix by many years. TOPS-10 on the PDP-10, for example, came out in 1964.
  • As a programmer, the way I was always taught was that Alpha is when the software is still being developed by programmers. (Private) Beta is the state when it is 'complete' in the eyes of the programmers and they want someone in house (non-programmer) to test it to pound out the bug. Public beta was when you sent the software to some third party people (who are independent of the project) to test it. Originally, Gamma was what we now call a public beta. Basically it's that third layer of testing when you send it far and wide for everyone to test. In the open source world we seem to have condensed everything to CVS (Alpha) and Beta (Private Beta - Gamma) and all of it's public. (Not bad, just different.)
    Planetes
    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
  • alpha is a product release with known bugs/missing features

    beta is a product with no known bugs or missing features

    The beta is usually sent out when the development team can't find more bugs or can't find bugs fast enough.
  • use khotkeys... its not in the base kde distribution as it's regarded alpha...
  • Considering *NIX is the home of the CLI it seems strange that KDE is so keyboard-unfriendly...

    Ahh, but KDE has nothing to do with *NIX except that it runs on top of it. Why not try running WindowMaker instead? iirc thats a window manager which capable of doing allmost everything with the keyboard. Like allways; choose software which works for you, not because all your friends seem to like it. ;)

  • Re:Keyboard shortcuts (Score:4)

    by Rob Kaper ( 5960 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @02:25AM (#893357) Homepage
    I've recently started using KDE and the one thing that bugs me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts for many things.

    K -> Control Center -> Look & Feel -> Key Bindings

    Not everything can be bound, but play around with KDE2 for a while and you'll notice that _a_lot_ is configurable.

  • And how do you get there using the keyboard?

    Since you asked..

    Alt-F1 opens the K menu. From there, use the arrow keys to go to Control Center, hit Enter to load it. Hit Alt-Tab to switch windows until you're at it. Use arrow keys and Enter again to navigate through the modules. Use tab to switch between the widgets and use space/enter/etc to change the settings.

    There! :-)

  • Re:Recent Screenshots? (Score:3)

    by Rob Kaper ( 5960 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:39AM (#893373) Homepage
    On the KDE site, there is only 1 year old screenshots. Is there anything newer out there?

    These are five minutes old... ;-)

    Showing Konqueror, KMail, the Alt-F2 minicli, Konsole and KControl.

  • "Kde 2.0 is already a year behind schedule. A whole year was lost messing with CORBA shit, but everybody seems to forget that. "

    A year delay is pretty insignicant compared to the rest of the industry. Look at NT 5, Mac OS X and Windows 95, all released several years later then their orginal planned release date. Not to deny the fact that they have had great improvement over the past few years, as has KDE. KDE 2 beta3 in August 2000, versus an pre-Alpha snapshot one year ago is a totally different beast. KDE 2 today has many new features, it is faster, better designed, and just works better(TM)..

    "Sadly, third party developers of Kde apps which work fine with Kde 1.1x have been unable to port their apps to Kde 2 because the base libraries kept changing from week to week or even from day to day. Hopefully there will now be binary and source stability in the infrastructure, but based on failure of Kde to deliver that stability despite promises to do so months ago I suspect that the infrastructure will keep changing in incompatible ways right up to the final release date."

    This is true. KDE project clearly noted with these snapshots, that they were highly experimental, and were testing grounds for new technologies, not the actual release. Today, as of the feature freeze of two weeks ago, the API should be considered completely stable -- nothing is bound to change that would break apps for at least 3 or more years. Now is the time KDE app developer should be porting to KDE 2, before it was risky, as it was known that things were broken.

    "Since Kde got motivated to actually start releasing 2.0 betas progress has been good. The current snapshots are very usable right now."

    Yes, things have gotten alot better, now that they are actually working on a release. The technology and framework, and code was there, so now was the time for them to start focusing in on a release. I have to agree it's comming along nicely.

    "However, everybody seems to forget that Kde is much more than what is in the official packages. There are literally hundreds of excellent Kde applications written by people who are not part of the Kde core development team."

    Yes, I have to agree. The biggest examples are things like Quanta+, KVirc and KDevelop. However, I use many smaller ones quite often, like Kweather and KBill too. Now that the API is stable, hopefully developers will continue bringing these apps to the next generation of KDE.

    "So much time has now gone by that it's a wonder these developers have not abndoned Kde and moved over to the Gnome camp where changes in the base libraries have been incremental and apps can also be incrementally upgraded to stay compatible."

    You lost me there. Is this the GNOME that uses GTK+, the library that has had 3 source and binary incompatible stable or in the line to become stable releases in the past 3 years. KDE and Qt have only had 2. Break libraries and software from time to time is neccessary, unforently, progress, and stable design demand it. At least with OSS, the port is not too difficult in most cases.

    "If Kde does not do more to make these independent developers feel more involved and appreciated (like providing decent descriptions and links to the application home pages and download sites from the official Kde site for heavens sake) Kde may lose these developers."

    Have you ever looked at ftp.kde.org or even around at www.kde.org? On ftp.kde.org, I see lots of KDE apps that aren't included in the main KDE distro. Many quality ones too. devel-home.kde.org hosts several KDE application projects, some are not in the main KDE pacakges. Non-main KDE applications are frequently announced on kde-announce@lists.kde.org.

    "Kde doesn't seem to care. It only seems to care about a few prima donna deveopers working on core components who have corporate sponsors. Certainly these hardworking and very talented people must be accomodated, but that is only part of the picture. "

    That's not how KDE comes up with there main packages. They take the best, and put in there, even from the non-core developers. They send crap that doesn't work to kdenonbeta, and don't include it the packages -- even if it's from the core developers. If somebody writes enough good patches, or enough good software, they become a core developer. It's not an exclusive club that you make it sound.

    "Kde seems to have forgotten what made its application framework so attractive to so many developers - a sense of participation. There now seems to be a sense of elitism or even exclusion, and a boys club mentality that will be Kde's downfall if a concious effort is made to keep it in check."

    No, that's just wrong. I think you should refer to my above comment..

    Disclamer: I am NOT a KDE developer, just an enthuist who enjoys working with K Desktop Enviroment Technologies. I believe they have worked hard to create an awsome desktop enviroment, one with exterme flexablity and usablity, in some respects far superiour to the commerical desktops. I am a long time Mac user, and enjoy working with high quality user interfaces that work for me. I have used Helix GNOME, WindowMaker, E and several other software pieces, however I still enjoy KDE the best.

    Thank You.

  • You don't own a mouse? Wow. We've really gotta do something about that. You should go down to your local "Olde Computre Shoppe" and buy at least a cheapo two-button mouse. You can get 'em for around $5.

    Then again, if you're too lazy to do that (or if you can't afford it) send me an email and I'll be more than happy to go out, buy you a cheapo mouse (do you want parallel or PS/2?) and mail it to you for free. My treat. Just let me know. I can't stand seeing people go mouseless...

    --

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