LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.

KDE's appearance

[Ween]

I have had people tell me that KDE3 looks just like KDE2. Well, they werent paying much attention. KDE3 makes great strides in the little things visually that make this one very slick looking desktop. I even showed it in a lecture at my school about linux and many people were impressed and came up to me afterwards asking what that was.

Good job KDE Team.

Re:KDE's appearance

[Crypt0rchid]

Well, I don't think that _appearance_ is an important point. Things that change below the surface are more important since they change performance and usability more than a fancy GUI ;)

Just my 2 -Cents ;-)

Re:KDE's appearance

[Khalid]

Alas IT IS! and this is something that most geeks fail to understand. For the better or the worse. For many people this is the first contact they will have with a software, and this first impression has a major impact about the acceptation of a software by a PHB, like or not !!

I remember while at the university, students were fighting to do graphic or visual projects because experience has showed them that these were the projects which were rated better !!!!

This is something that the open source community is at last beginning to understand, to reach the masses, projects have got to be "pretty", with the recent integration of true type fonts, alpha blending, transparency, anti-aliasing, new good looking themes and so on.

It's just marketing ! this is what Apple and M$ have understood long time age.

Re:KDE's appearance

[spitzak]

Flashy appearance is not what users want. KDE realizes this, and so did MicroSoft and Apple at one time. "Themes" like a lot of X11 users seem to think are cool do NOT impress basic users. All the badly designed and candy coloring only impresses geeks who like to program these things because they are too lazy to program useful stuff.

MicroSoft has obviously fallen into this trap, which is probably good for Linux, as long as KDE with it's simple basic appearance remains clean. Take a look at how many WinXP users have gone through the trouble of changing the "appearance" back to the old standard. It looks to me like more than "customized" older Windows by changing the colors.

Flashy graphics only distracts from the job and I am glad that KDE defaults to none.

Re:KDE's appearance

[spitzak]

I assure you I have seen WinXP. Why do you think I said "MicroSoft lost it". And WinXP is exactly what I was talking about when I said users seem to be setting it back to the Win98 appearance.

Very few people change the window colors (they do like to change the desktop wallpaper, I agree). Get out of the computer lab and look at some real users such as secretaries. I would be suprised if you find any of them have changed their Windows boxes other than the desktop image.

I still feel that "themes" are an excuse for programmers to feel elite and avoid working on hard stuff (like the ability to render an image with fewer than 2 pages of code, or to draw UTF-8 text without hundreds of K of libraries). Making the screen look like Deep Space 9 does not make it user friendly!

Re:KDE's appearance

[friedmud]

I used E for years (assuming you mean enlightenment - and no I don't mean behind Gnome or KDE - just straight E) - But now I have switched to KDE (about 6 months ago).

I loved E and could get a lot of work done - but then I found myself spending a *LOT* of time doing simple things (like adding a new program to the Programs Menu), also I found that it ate a lot of resources (and actually was making me skip frames in 3d games). I thought I could do better so I went looking...

I am a C++ programmer so I thought QT looked interesting anyways - and as long as I was going to learn QT I might as well use KDE. Upon my initial installation (KDE 2.1) I thought "This is bullshit" - it looked like some kind of childish cartooney crap. But seing as how thousands of people use it everyday I thought, "there must be more to this".

So I went ahead and customized it (just like I always did for E - which by the way it takes longer to COMPLETELY customize E than it does KDE). What I finally worked out is something that was setup just like I had E setup - except I have a taskbar and k-menu - that are both easily configured. This is not too mention the fact that now when I install a program it automatically adds itself to the k-menu - as opposed to me hunting down the path to the binary and editing txt files in order to add it to E's menu.

I have never really looked back - I have a sleek very functional desktop that doesn't take forever to do simple things in and allows me to play my 3d-games at their finest.

You obviously haven't TRULY tried to use KDE so you can't appreciate it or properly comment on it.

Everyone has their environment - use what you like - but don't knock my environment down as "newbie trash" just because you think it has "Easy customizability, nice look, better usability" which I really can't see as a fault anyway......

Derek

Re:KDE's appearance

[BlueUnderwear]

I have had people tell me that KDE3 looks just like KDE2.

Well that's the point. The purpose of KDE3 is not to have sth radically different, but only to adapt the existing KDE to Qt3 (former versions were running on Qt2). As far as the changes to KDE itself goes, this could as well have been named 2.3

Re:KDE's appearance

[lamont116]

You get the stability and polish from a .3 release, but the marketing hype and media attention from a .0 release.

This is definitely a .0 release, then. KDE 2.2.2 was more stable (albeit slower) on my system. In particular, the panel (kicker) has a habit of going belly-up periodically, and Konqui crashes much more often than it did in 2.2.2. Still, this release adds polish, a few features and some speed. I look forward to 3.1.

Re:KDE's appearance

[ThePilgrim]

Unfortunatly joe Public does care about the looks, which is why we have flame wars over why Linux is not sutable for the Desktop yet.

If KDE 3.0 helps this then more power to them

Re:KDE's appearance

[pi radians]

Unfortunatly joe Public does care about the looks, which is why we have flame wars over why Linux is not sutable for the Desktop yet

Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.

What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.

If it had much to do with looks, Win95 would never have been so popular. That was one ugly SOB.

Re:KDE's appearance

[mark_lybarger]

where to start :).

are you saying that MSFT operating system upgrades are smooth and flawless for MOST desktop users? A quick usenet search shows [google.com] otherwise.

a desktop OS (home user, office user, whatever) is ALL about look and feel or rather useability, which includes look and feel. sure win95 wasn't the greatest we've seen, but it was revolutionary at the time. it took the "other" os (win3.1) to a new level. we all threw away those floppies of 3.1 (or put them in storage somewhere). whatever you have against MSFT and their FUD/monopoly practices, etc, win95 became quickly THE standard because it was useable, and looked good (also, MSFT forced all manufactures to pre-install it, but that's for a different day :) )

Re:KDE's appearance

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.

Yeah, but that's usually because a major OS component upgrade is done for you by Apple/Microsoft as part of a major upgrade. I could go and download KDE 3 for SuSE right now, but I'm not going to for exactly that reason, I'd rather wait until SuSE 8.0 comes out, and then I'll upgrade all at once. I am 99% sure that I won't have any problems then, because the upgrade has been done by the people who built my system, not me. With MacOS/Windows though you don't get that choice.

What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.

And somebody upgrading to the next version of Mandrake/SuSE/whatever will probably use the graphical installer, which will fulfill this requirement.

Don't get me wrong, the whole RPM dependancy thing really sucks, in fact imho software management is THE weakest area of Linux. RPM is dominant but without strange hacks like urmpi can't even match Debian or Gentoo for one-command/one-click installations (you know what i mean). That's one of the things I hate most about SuSE: no smart package management.

Re:KDE's appearance

[aardvarkjoe]

Oh, be honest. Joe Public *doesn't* update his OS. He uses whatever was on his computer when he got it until he buys another one. I would doubt that more than 10% of computer users know what Windows is beyond (if you're lucky) "it makes my computer run."

What the normal user wants is not the same thing as what the hacker wants. The whole community would be better off when people realize that "Linux for Everyone" isn't such a great goal -- when that happens, it's going to be useless for those who created it.

Change Log

[Epi-man]

In an effort to spare their poor server, here is a copy of the change log:

Changes between KDE 2.2.2 and KDE 3.0

This page tries to present as much as possible of the problem corrections that occurred in KDE between the 2.2.2 and 3.0 releases. The primary goal of the KDE 3.0 release is to port the existing codebase of the KDE 2 series to be based on the Qt 3 library.

The use of Qt 3 provides a set of new features and improvements as well as allows a long period of binary compatible releases.
General

* A lot of fixes for reported bugs in all applications
* Porting to make full use of the Qt 3 GUI toolkit
* Performance improvements in some areas
* Arts has been splitted in a KDE-independent part and KDE-bindings

Arts

* More PlayObjects (more fileformats)
* Improvements of the MIDI capabilities (alsa support)
* Integration of new GSL scheduling code
* More support for using samples as instruments (.PAT loader)
* Environments/Mixers
* Recording support in the APIs ([e-mail])
* Threaded OSS support (should run more reliable on more kernel drivers)
* Moved code to a separate CVS module

kdelibs

* KSSL: Completion of certificate and CA management tools
* KSSL: X.509 and PKCS12 certificate viewer and import tool part (KPart) - embeddable in Konqueror
* KFileDialog: URL Speedbar
* Support for Icons on Buttons in various dialogs
* A GUI Item class that encapsulates KAction attributes
* Added plugin interface for the Renaming Dialog
* Improved service activation (dcopstart)
* Support for Multi-key shortcuts (emacs-style) added.
* WebDAV support
* Plugin interface for retrieving / modifying meta information of files
* KDirLister is now cached (i.e. directory listings of ftp servers in konqueror)
* Optional emulation of traditional Mac keyboard
* KDEPrint: Improved CUPS support.

kdeaddons

* Improved stability of some of the plugins

kdeadmin

* Reinclusion of KDat

kdeartwork

* Inclusion of several themes (icon, window decoration etc)

kdebase

* KWin: smart mechanism that avoids focus stealing from windows the user is active on by windows that pop-up (M. Ettrich)
* KWin: don't crash when popup-menu of a window is still visible when that window gets closed
* KWin: don't shade/unshade (gross ugly flicker) windows that are moved fast in hover-unshaded state
* KWin: deny to the masochist the resizing of a shaded window
* KWin: automatically unshade on maximize, on restore-from-maximized and on restore-from-minimized
* KWin: work around ugly jre-1.3.1 bug with popup dialogs vanishing forever after first use
* KWin: improve moving by keyboard and bring back Ctrl-key ordered fine/coarse-grained keyboard moving
* KWin: abort keyboard moving of windows with Escape too
* KWin: no active desktop edges on resizing
* KWin: don't warp mouse pointer when touching desktop edge (with active edges enabled) if desktop isn't actually changed
* KWin: contain desktop navigation inside a box (don't wrap around from last to first desktop of a line or column)
* KWin: don't stack windows under desktops
* KWin: gracefully handle more than one desktop client application
* KWin: fix bogus gravitating for non-NW-gravitated windows on session restore (i.e., no more drifting of Xclock when started with -geometry -0-0 or such)
* don't allow +Alt+mouse to do things as if it was Alt+mouse (L.Lunak)
* any mouse button moves window when dragging titlebar, unless mouse click was popping an operations menu (this greatly improves consistency for configurable mouse bindings)
* don't show operation menus for desktop (no more move desktop to desktop 1 %-)
* KTip: center on screen
* KTip: readable on dark color schemes
* Kate: added plugin and new KTextEditor interface
* Kate: XML Plugin
* Konqueror/khtml: GUI for animated gifs: Always / Play Once / Never
* Konqueror/khtml: Major rework of the ECMAScript ("Javascript") implementation
* Konqueror/khtml: Major improviements in the DHTML compatibility
* Konqueror/khtml: Added "smart" window.open Javascript policy that skips popup banners
* Konqueror/khtml: Support for Actions in the new sidebar
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added "New directory" option
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added mediaplayer
* Konqueror/fileview: Extended tooltips for information about files
* Konqueror/popup plugins: Added "kuick", the quick copy and move plugin
* Konsole: New parameters: --nomenubar, --noframe, --noscrollbar and -tn (set $TERM=)
* Konsole: Keyboard shortcuts to activate menubar and rename session (Defaults: Ctrl-Alt-m & Ctrl-Alt-s).
* Konsole: New options: Blinking cursor, configurable line spacing, no/system/visible bell
* Konsole: Monitoring for activity and/or silence, sending of input to all sessions (cluster management)
* Konsole: History of a session can be cleared, searched and saved to a file.
* Konsole: Session types can specify a working directory.
* Konsole: Changed behaviour of "New" in toolbar, now starts session of type last selected.
* Konsole: Session buttons display state (e.g. bell) and session type icons. Double click renames them.
* Konsole: Sessions can be reordered via menu entries or keyboard shortcuts (Default: Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right).
* Konsole: Extend selection until end of line if no more characters are printed on that line.
* Konsole: Stop scrolling of output when selecting.
* Konsole: Drag & drop of selected text (like CDE's dtterm)
* Konsole: Pressing Ctrl while pasting with middle mouse button will send selection buffer.
* Konsole: Hollow out cursor when losing focus.
* Konsole: Support for ScrollLock with LED display.
* Konsole: Write utmp entries (requires installed utempter library).
* Konsole: Proper implementation of secondary device attributes, MODE_Mouse1000 and wrapped lines.
* Konsole: Session management remembers and activates last active session.
* Konsole: DCOP interface, sets environment variables KONSOLE_DCOP & KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION
* Konsole: Made embeddable Konsole part configurable.
* Konsole: KDE Control Center: Added "Terminal Size Hint" option and session type editor.
* Kicker: Implemented support for centerring the panel on screen
* Kicker: new applet: kpf - a web server applet, designed for sharing files
* KControl: Unified behaviour of root-only modules
* KControl: Rearranged dialogs
* KControl: Font Installation Assistant added

kdebindings

* added Objective C bindings
* added C bindings
* updated and improved the existing Java bindings

kdegames

* Various improvements to the games
* Generalized more functionality into a libkdegames

kdegraphics

* KDvi: Copy and paste text from a DVI file
* KDvi: Full text search
* KDvi: Export DVI files to plain text
* KDvi: Forward search with Emacs and XEmacs
* KDvi: Inverse search with a variety of editory
* KDvi: DCOP interface
* KDvi: Improved commandline options

kdemultimedia

* Noatun: Global XML import/export for the playlist
* Noatun: Winamp skin loader
* Noatun: Icecast / shoutcast streaming
* Noatun: Hide close status und tag displaying

kdenetwork

* KMail: Maildir support
* KMail: Distribution lists and aliases
* KMail: SMTP authentication
* KMail: SMTP over SSL/TLS
* KMail: Pipelining for POP3 (faster mail download on slow responding networks)
* KMail: On demand downloading or deleting without downloading of big mails on a POP3 server
* KMail: Various improvements for IMAP
* KMail: Permanent header caching
* KMail: Header fetching is much faster
* KMail: Creating/removing of folders
* KMail: Drats/sent-mail/trash folders on the server
* KMail: Mail checking in all folders
* KMail: Automatic configuration of the POP3/IMAP/SMTP security features
* KMail: Automatic encoding selection for outgoing mails
* KMail: DIGEST-MD5 authentication
* KMail: Identity based sent-mail and drafts folders
* KMail: Expiry of old messages
* KMail: Hotkey to temporary switch to fixed width fonts
* KMail: UTF-7 support
* KMail: Enhanced status reports for encrypted/signed messages

KDEPIM

* New Addressbook API (libkabc). Ported applications to use the new API
* KPilot: Rework conduits as plugins
* KPilot: Support for USB Visors
* KPilot: Extensive addition of tooltips
* KPilot: Move to .ui files as much as possible
* KOrganizer: Plugin interface
* KOrganizer: Group scheduling
* KOrganizer: Split alarm daemon in a lowlevel and a GUI frontend
* KOrganizer: pinning contacts to appointments and TODO's

KDESDK

* KBabel: Catalog Manager is now a standalone application
* KBabel: Find/Replace in all files

KDEToys

* New Applet: KWeather
* KWeather: Better reportview, support for european weather data
* KWeather: Improved report view, uses http to get the data more quickly
* KWeather: Improved METAR parser support
* KWeather: added DCOP interface
* KWeather: improved support for iconscaling

KDEUtils

* KRegExpEditor: new
* Kpm got replaced by ksysguard

KDEEdu

* New in KDE 3.0, a collection of edu(cation/tainmnent) applications for KDE

Last modified: Sat Apr 6 21:32:57 EST 2002

KDE and K Desktop Environment are trademarks of KDE e.V.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm talking about the feature where you can slide your mouse pointer to the right edge of the desktop, and a new desktop slides in, and your mouse pointer intuitively appears on the left of the screen. Does K3 have this?

Yes, Control Center/Look & Feel/Window Behaviour/Advanced/Active Desktop Borders

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back

[Suppafly]

Sawfish supports both Workspaces and Virtual Desktops which are different beasts

Why make a distinction between workspaces and virtual desktops? Why not just call them all the same thing and let you be able to arrange them up down and over or just over or just up and down?

Didn't even check out the links eh?

[swagr]

I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out.

I guess you didn't even look at the links. Sign of a true professional.

KMail: Maildir support
KMail: Distribution lists and aliases
KMail: SMTP authentication
KMail: SMTP over SSL/TLS
KMail: Pipelining for POP3 (faster mail download on slow responding networks)
KMail: On demand downloading or deleting without downloading of big mails on a POP3 server
KMail: Various improvements for IMAP
KMail: Permanent header caching
KMail: Header fetching is much faster
KMail: Creating/removing of folders
KMail: Drats/sent-mail/trash folders on the server
KMail: Mail checking in all folders
KMail: Automatic configuration of the POP3/IMAP/ SMTP security features
KMail: Automatic encoding selection for outgoing mails
KMail: DIGEST-MD5 authentication
KMail: Identity based sent-mail and drafts folders
KMail: Expiry of old messages
KMail: Hotkey to temporary switch to fixed width fonts
KMail: UTF-7 support
KMail: Enhanced status reports for encrypted/signed messages

Kmail's look & feel changed quite a bit as wel

[joeflies]

Most of the new features are quite nice in kmail, notably they've made the PGP integration probably one of the best that I've ever seen in a mail client. The body markings now show PGP-info formatting when kmail's in a secure style, and the key fingerprints show up in the pop up box.

Other look & feel differences - they took out the k-gear in the Fancy headers! I liked it, I wish I could have that put back in.

Also missing - the delete Trash messages older than X days. I liked that feature too. I haven't got around to learning the expired messages feature yet.

Also - the colors and font settings are a little TOO customizeable now, it takes a bit of time to set all the colors and the fonts because there are so many different places they can be configured.

The identity features are much improved over the 2.2.2 version, everything is laid out much more clearly.

All in all, it remains my favorite client, however I do miss some of the look & feel options of the old one.

I have used it for 3 days now

[hattig]

My experiences so far (ignoring installation problems with Mandrake):

It is a good desktop environment, it has lots of features, etc. If is more polished than 2.2 for sure.

However there are some new problems. Most notably form handling in Konqueror (which is much better overall now, but I need to use Mozilla to avoid the form handling problem) when using POST instead of GET (as far as I can see) fails about 40% of the time.

I can now use non-truetype fonts at the same time as truetype fonts when using anti-aliasing for KDE apps. This is great for consoles.

The monospaced font problem has been eliminated.

GIF animations in Konqueror still have not been fixed.

Re:I have used it for 3 days now

[mickwd]

Note that the original packages for Mandrake 8.1 were quite buggy - but newer packages have been put up on the KDE site (and its mirrors) which cure a lot of the problems - Mandrake 8.1 users should check that they've got the latest packages.

I've not quite sorted out the best way of getting KDM3 to work properly yet, but the following works (note that the old KDM works fine without doing this):

a) In /etc/X11/prefdm, look for the setting up of $PATH, and add /opt/kde3/bin to the start.

b) mv /usr/share/config/kdm /usr/share/config/kdm.old

c) ln -s /opt/kde3/share/config/kdm /usr/share/config/kd m

There may be better ways of doing it, but this works for me (on 8.1).

What I'd really like to see in a review

[ChrisWong]

Too many reviews focus on installation. This review contains less info than the KDE press release. How about a little hands-on insight? How does KDE 3 compare to its predecessor in terms of startup time (with/without prelink/objprelink)? Runtime performance? Memory footprint? Can we see some numbers? It's a pity that reviews geared towards techies are often lacking in quantitative information.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[reaper20]

Agree 100% - I have no idea why people insist on KDE installation for varios *nix's to be KDE's responsibility.

The project publishes the source code - the distributions are responsible for packaging it. I've been reading on forums all over the place (and articles like this) with people having installation problems with KDE, GNOME, or some other large project.

Don't blame KDE people, blame your distro. Debian might be a little slow, but sometime soon "apt-get install kde3" will work - I mean Geez, some people are having to install the individual RPMs in a specific order, what madness is this?

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Xerithane]

I had a problem building kdelibs from cvs and from the 3.0 tarballs. This problem is KDE's fault. They have an application (kimage_concat) that is segfaulting. I'm not about to dig through the kde code, I've never looked at it before and that's not a good way to debug.

I posted a bug report, and the guy closed the bug report without any change notes or anything. The day after I posted it. It doesn't even look like they checked into the problem. There is also another problem building kdebase which is a QT problem. They are passing a KDE object into a QT function and QT doesn't have a handler for that. I'm also utilizing their qt-copy from CVS.

My stance on it is, KDE-3.0 sucks ass clowns. I would probably be a lot more happy about it if they actually looked into the bug report I submitted without closing it instantly.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Cardinal]

The notion that this comment rated as insightful speaks volumes as to the validity of Slashdot's moderating public.

My stance on it is, KDE-3.0 sucks ass clowns. I would probably be a lot more happy about it if they actually looked into the bug report I submitted without closing it instantly.

Give me a fucking break. Yeah. You don't like how your bug report was handled, so KDE really sucks. Man, go write your own desktop and see if you take the time to graciously answer every bug report you receive.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Glytch]

I only downloaded the Slack 8 packages, so I don't know if the prelink and objprelink trick was used, but KDE3 was very snappy on my poor old K6-400 w/384MB ram. When I turned on full effects, it lagged a bit and hogged memory, but was still useable. Startup time was about a minute. I imagine on modern hardware it would be much better. I would have kept KDE3 on, but I'm rather strapped for disk space. Very impressive work, and this is coming from an obsessive Windowmaker-loving efficiency nut. :)

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Matts]

It uses memory. Lots of memory. What can I say. Here's top sorted by memory usage on my main machine running KDE3, mod_perl, and a bunch of other services:

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
25910 matt 9 0 72448 28M 12724 S 0.0 5.6 12:20 kmail -caption KMail -icon kmail -miniico
9351 root 9 0 93852 27M 6532 S 0.0 5.5 697:25 /usr/X11R6/bin/X -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0
2910 matt 9 0 62600 20M 15068 S 0.0 4.0 0:29 kdeinit: noatun -icon noatun -miniicon no
11878 matt 9 0 61908 17M 13620 S 0.0 3.5 1:21 kdeinit: kate
9452 matt 9 0 58208 13M 10748 S 0.0 2.7 1:37 kdeinit: kicker
18392 matt 9 0 55504 13M 10344 S 0.0 2.7 0:13 kdeinit: konsole -icon konsole -miniicon
11025 matt 9 0 56880 12M 11748 S 0.0 2.4 0:22 kit
9446 matt 9 0 55800 12M 11184 S 0.0 2.4 1:51 kdeinit: kdesktop
9442 matt 12 0 55836 11M 9592 R 0.7 2.3 4:17 kdeinit: kwin
9456 matt 10 0 55900 11M 10044 S 0.1 2.3 1:54 kdeinit: konsole -icon konsole -miniicon
10553 matt 9 0 54516 10M 10068 S 0.0 2.1 0:05 kdeinit: kio_uiserver
31815 matt 9 0 51716 10M 7432 S 0.0 2.0 0:01 /usr/lib/kde3/bin/kdesktop_lock
17747 nobody 9 0 11960 10M 5032 S 0.0 2.0 0:02 /opt/apache/bin/httpd

So yeah, it uses gobs of memory. However I've also got it on my 128M laptop, and it's fairly kind to swap on that, and runs faster than KDE 2 did. That's just a gut feeling version of "fast", but it certainly feels that way. Though it's impossible for me to say it's all KDE3, since the upgrade also took me to kernel 2.4.18. So it could be a multitude of factors.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Rich]

These numbers are extremely misleading. You need to consider the fact that most of this memory is in fact shared. You can't actually measure memory usage of anything but the simplest application using top, as it takes no account of which pages are from shared libraries.

Rich.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Matts]

I know all about top's misleading figures.

That doesn't take away from the fact that it uses a lot of memory though. I could have showed the difference between a runlevel 3 session and an average runlevel 5 session, which would have shown more accurately how much memory it was using, but who has time to piss about doing that ;-)

KDE3 is awesome. RAM is cheap. Get both.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[MSG]

Those numbers are only misleading if you don't know how to read them. Top and ps have a reputation for misleading people stemming from users' confusion over what the different segments mean.

To clarify (I hope):
The SIZE of an application reflects the paging area that has been allocated to the application. This includes all of the text and data for the application, all of the mmap'd files, everything.

The SHAREd pages include all pages of the application's memory marked shared. This is independent of whether or not anything is actually sharing the pages. A program may be linked against Motif, for instance; it will show the size of Motif as shared space, although the memory may still be attributed entirely to that process.

The RSS reflects the RAM resident pages for the application's text and data segments. The difference between RSS and SHARED *at least* may be attributed entirly to the program. It's hard to tell if the difference between RSS and SIZE can, as well, since it could be swapped out shared pages.

As an unusual case, X also mmap's the video memory on your graphics card, which inflates its SIZE value.

I'd still say that KDE is *fucking huge*. Given the numbers from the poster, I wonder how much swap is being used. All of the processes listed have much larger paging areas (SIZE) than resident memory area (RSS), which probably means there's a lot of it out in swap. I wonder if these binaries were compiled with debugging symbols and not stripped, or something...

I hate to see the parent marked up at 5. Personally, I think it is far more misleading than the output of 'top'.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Matts]

Well I would have posted more, but getting around the stupid lameness filter is almost impossible. *shrug*.

Here's the top few lines (though obviously I'm not running the same stuff as I was before):

Mem: 514028K av, 492376K used, 21652K free, 0K shrd, 45232K buff
211052K actv, 0K in_d, 0K in_c, 0K target
Swap: 401584K av, 81888K used, 319696K free 249912K cached

Remember though, this is also a public web server, so a lot of that ram is taken up by my 10M AxKit httpd processes, which aren't sharing much at the moment due to the way I have the server setup.

Memory??

[big_groo]

I'm running Redhat 7.3 (or 7.29543994999999 1/2) whichever you prefer). I also have running gkrellm. I have a p3 533, w 655MB ram. No matter how many apps I have open my mem usage stays constant, with virtually *no* paging. Mind you, the system is using about 250 MB at all times...

Plus, it boots faster.
I know these aren't hard numbers, but it is faster.

Add apt-get support to KPackage

[Nailer]

Too many reviews focus on installation.

Damn straight. KDE could do a lot for its users by adding apt-get for RPM support to KPackage. Debian's nice, but there's a lot more Red Hat users as well as many other major distro's that are more popular, and most of these use the standard packaging format RPM (currently 3.0 is standard, 4.0 is likely to be when Maximum RPM is updated, which is likely later this year).

Already RH users are starting to get a lot of software avaliable via APT-get, including all of RH install CDs, the excellent Freshrpms archive (everything you wish you had but didn't) and Havoc Pennington's Gnomehide. Having this available through kpackage (rather than the apt-get command line, or an ugly tool like Synaptic) and creating APT archioves for KDE (I have one for my workplace - they're not difficult to create) would significantly enhance the install process.

Mike

Re:Add apt-get support to KPackage

[Nailer]

Its just you :).

Add apt-get support to kpackage for 3.1, and when it comes time to install 3.11, or 3.2, or any of the apps from apps.kde.org, you'll appreciate its advantages.

Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[wiredog]

Downloaded all the RPMS from kde.org and the README as well.
The instructions are to go to the directory you downloaded the KDE files into and do the following:

rpm -e `rpm -qa |egrep ^kde`

rpm -Uvh *rpm

This removes ALL the old qt/KDE stuff, and then installs the new stuff. The first part works, the second fails with many dependency errors. This is because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."

However, a quick check of "man rpm" reveals the "--nodeps" switch, which tells it to ignore dependencies.

Only two problems so far. One is that some programs (such as konqueror) are set R/W but not executable! (This is in the gui button thingy, they can run from the command line) . The other is that, for some reason, the default font for konqueror is greek. So I switched to helvetica.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[MSG]

What a day to be without moderator points...

You should *never* use --nodeps to install packages. The only time that is reasonable is if you've built a particular dependency from source, yourself (which you should avoid).

Certainly, you should never advise new users, in a public forum, that --nodeps is the correct way to go. They *will* end up with non-functioning installations.

...because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."

That's total bull shit. rpm absolutely, positively does resolve dependencies against both the packages already installed in the system and the packages given to install.

New users should not follow these directions. Other replies to the parent post give proper installation instructions. Moderators should lay down the crack pipe, and decrease the score on the parent post.

Installing KDE3 on RH 7.2 (a correct way)

[Nailer]

rpm -Uvh http://enigma.freshrpms.net/pub/apt/apt-0.3.19cnc5 5-fr7.i386.rpm

Put the RPMs in an apt repository, make it avaliable by http, and run `apt-get install kdebase' on all your machines. Dependencies are automatically resolved as necessary to install the package. I do this for about 25 Linux workstations, all off one repository.

There is never any reason, ever, to use --nodeps. Luckily apt-get has `apt-get install -f' which performs a `fix' install to correct this kind of bad administration.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[wiredog]

Don't know if it's the ultimate reason to upgrade, but I think it requires a fairly recent libc/glibc.

Come to think of it, IIRc, there's a RH6.2 directory at kde.org. Check there.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[saintlupus]

But this might give you the motivation to upgrade to 7.3 once it's out, assuming your system is up to the increased hardware requirements (offhand, I'd say 400 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM would do).

Ah. I was having speed issues running it on a P75 with 24M of memory. Glad to see it wasn't just a misconfiguration issue on my part.

--saint

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[wiredog]

It wasn't missing packages. It was RPM's insistence that library A has to be installed before package B, where it is highly non-obvious where library A is. Nothing in the README about the install order, and I didn't want to spend time examining each package to see just what was in it.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[B'Trey]

And then what? You find X, but it depends on Y. So now you're searching for Y, etc.

It isn't a matter of not understanding metacharacters. It's a matter of published instructions which don't work and having to manually perform tasks which should be automated. Small, sharp tools are cool. But I'm not going to go out and cut my grass with a paring knife. The issue isn't whether or not I know how to pipe ls through xargs. It's whether or not I should HAVE to.

Re:Why linux will never make it as a desktop

[KjetilK]

Well, many people have some choices made for them, for example, I'm stuck with RH. Not that I would want Mandrake anyway, it couldn't identify my video card correctly.

I just tried to install KDE on RH 7.1 and descended pretty quickly into dependency hell. This is really, really bad. I bet I broke many things in the attempt, and I really have no clue what I broke.

Yes, it is a valid argument that you should wait for your distro makers, but often, that is not an option.

For example, there are lots of scientific software that never make it into a distro, and making it easy to install stuff that isn't in the distro is very, very important. If distro makers think that they can always tell their customers to wait untill they get a new release out, they will fail.

And my current experience with KDE3 makes me think that RH has a very long way to go. But that doesn't necesssarily mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is ready for me, anyway.

KDE 3.0 doesn't make my laptop hot.

[marksthrak]

I've been a fan of KDE since they moved to 2.0, but I couldn't ever stand to run it on my laptop because it made the cpu fan run all the time. Not only is the damn thing noisy, the whole machine was noticably hotter.

After running KDE 3.0 for a few days, it's my cpu fan has stayed quiet and the system is no warmer than it was when I ran Blackbox.

The Cervisia interface to Konqueror is great- I don't have to worry about the security issues of running CVSWeb for all my projects.

The point is: stick to your distro

[InodoroPereyra]

It seems that the review focuses more than anything on a side issue: if you are a newbie, or if you want an easy upgrade, stick to your distro . This is the best approach in general, and I wish geeks would give this advice to people who need help and are not willing to spend time tweaking. It is funny to see people trying to upgrade everything by themselves and then complain it is not easy. HELLO: this is exactly what a distro is supposed to be intended for.

By the way, the review itself seems to me rather weak. It is mostly a "hey folks, don't do this at home" warning for newbies [linuxplanet.com]. And no, this does not fit my definition of a good review ;-)

The point is: we need package frontends

[Nailer]

Nobody starts their day expecting to use an Operating System. They expect to do work, and the most bearing on how they do that work is the application they use to do it.

Why can't I be able to install a piece of software if it doesn't come with my system? Windows can do it, Linux should be able to as well. And it can: I do it all the time, on about 25 Linux machines.

The moral of the story isn't `don't ever install anything but your distro' the moral is `we need an easier way to install packages on most Linux distros'. On RH, usign apt-get from www.freshrpms.net serves this purpose well, and if the RH KDE packages were avaliable from such a source there would be few problems with installation.

That is not a review

[ltsmash]

That article is not a review. A review is a critical report of something. The reviewer should tell us everything good and bad about the product.

That article was 20% advertisement and 80% technical support on installation. The article belongs in a README.TXT, not in a "review".

Very rough for us Noobs!

[Deacon Jones]

I purchased Suse 7.3 as it seemed to be a good distro. for those of us who are oppposed to M$ and want to use another OS, but don't want to have to spend hours upon hours learning that OS.In other words, a typical "dumb end user" when it comes to operating systems.

For the most part, its pretty intuitive--I can browse, send emails, e.t.c.

But I hate the fonts as opposed to Windows rendering of fonts. KDE is the default GUI, so I thought I would try this KDE 3.0. Here's where the newbie to Linux definitely loses out. I knew that these "RPM thingies" where what I needed to download.

I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.

Boot the computer, and I get some kind of kernel fault thing. Luckily, no serious data on the 'puter, so I reboot and install the distro all over again. No biggie, but makes me sad that I can't "see" the new KDE.

I know to all of you its a piece of cake, but (as has been noted before) if the Linux community really wants us desktop end users en masse, then it should make something like this as simple as it is in windows. In windows, if I want the latest version of something, I download an install file and double click, and I'm done.

It should be that easy for dummies like me. (as an aside, I was hoping Suse's online update would do it automagically for me, but no such luck).

Re:Very rough for us Noobs!

[spitzak]

I think if you read the comments here more carefully you would see that even experts do not consider the installation a "piece of cake".

It sounds quite scary, in fact, scary enough that I am not even going to attempt it. Sigh.

Re:Very rough for us Noobs!

[Rogerborg]

• I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.

Not just hard on the noobs. I'm an applications developer who builds my own machines and has been using *nix in one form or another for 12 years, and I still had problems moving to KDE3 (on SuSE 7.3 as well).

For example: there's no README in the mirror that I got my SuSE rpms from that explains about the WINDOWMANAGER or KDEDIR settings, although in fact for SuSE, it's actually the default DISPLAYMANAGER in /etc/init.d/xdm that needs changed (yes, I know, this is SuSE's responsibility to tell me, not kde). No /opt/kde3/shared/config/xdm directory was installed and I had to copy over the kde2 version, and no ~/.kde3 directory was created or populated. I got it all sorted eventually, except that my menu bar is missing some icons, and the menu items shown under kmenuedit bear no relationship to the ones actually shown on the desktop menu.

Because I'm a developer, I won't make the mistake of wailing "Why can't someone make it better?", because I hate it when lusers say that about my software. I'll just gently point out that I don't ship apps, under Windows or Linux, to external customers or internal ones, that require any more than a double click or a single command to install. And I do this out of pure pragmatism, because I hate dealing with support issues. Hint, hint, SuSE et al.

My own "benchmark"/review

[fabiolrs]

I installed KDE3 on my box right now, I configured it so it would be just like my old kde 2.2, installation ran with no problems at all. First login was no so fast but after I configured it it became little faster than my previous 2.2 instalation. Konqueror is much much much better! Overall performance seems to be much higher, the system looks much smoother and applications like Konqueror seems to be loading a little faster. Its also really pretty. I dont know if anyone realised that memory usage with KDE 3 opened and system idle is much lower... I frequently had like 40% of memory usage with only kde 2.2 opened now im experiencing "only" 18%... dont know if it is my poor system or a normal kde stuff... ok, ill write more when i discovery anything else...

My mini review...

[Matts]

A few days into using KDE3. Here's my opinions.

Overall this desktop kicks ass. It's really really sweet.

Kmail - a lot better than earlier attempts. IMAP actually works, and works well. There are a few wierd bugs - like their filters don't allow you to filter to IMAP server folders. And there is no LDAP support, so I have to use mozilla mail for sending internal emails to people I don't know yet.

Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.

Noatun - sorry, but this MP3/Ogg player is still far inferior to XMMS. And it crashes a lot for me.

Kate - this is a really nice editor. With great syntax highlighting, and now has all the features I missed from TextPad, bar one (macros).

Ksirc - still sucks compared to xchat, but better than last time.

Korganizer - nice. Keeps me organised, and integrates nicely with the desktop, alerting me of appointments. Haven't tried the shared appointments stuff, but it looks kinda cool (if a little clunky being ftp based).

Konq (file manager) - as a file manager Konqueror is actually really nice. The auto-previews are great (but can be turned off) - I find them really useful when searching for source files. Cervisia integration is just incredible - I can totally manage a CVS project from konqueror now, including doing visual merges and diffs, checkins, tagging, etc. Wow.

Styles, themes, look and feel - Awesome. Red Hat's latest rawhide comes with Keramik, which makes KDE look absolutely gorgeous. This desktop even makes my windows using buddies jealous :-)

All in all so far I'm very happy. It's a bit crash happy, but I expect that from this early release, and because of the fact that I'm running a snapshot. Anyway - I recommend it. Try it if you can.

Re:My mini review...

[RoLi]

Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.

Tabbed browsing is on the KDE 3.1 feature list, so it won't be a long while until you can have tabbed browsing in Konqui. Probably 3 or 4 months, but definitely still in this year.

Re:My mini review...

[gid]

Thanks for the mini review, after all it's all about the apps and the ease of use. I can easily justify a complex install process if I know the end result is going to be worth it. So install doesn't really matter to me, (as long as I know it's gonna work :)

I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)

It's just that as a web developer, I've noticed most things that mozilla can do, IE can do, so if it works under mozilla, it's almost definitely gonna work under IE, so I use mozilla. At least with the type of code I write, mostly html with a little javascript to help it out and give additional features. This could be true in konq also, but I just don't have as much faith in it (yet).

Re:My mini review...

[Matts]

I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)

Yes, this is possible. If you have all the right extensions installed, you can just tell konqueror to use kmozilla. I'm not sure if this has been ported to KDE3 yet, but it worked under KDE2 - I can't find the option now.

Re:My mini review...

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Try View->View Mode->KMOZILLA in konqueror.

Of course kmozilla does not work as good as khtml in konqueror, but it's nice to see that you could switch if you want to.

Re:My mini review...

[IamTheRealMike]

Now this is what that review should have been like. Instead of lots of fluff about his specific problems, the review should have had what this post has - direct opinions, facts and advice in equal measure about actually USING the product, as opposed to simply installing it.

I suppose it just goes to show that reviewing something is actually a skill, not something that just anybody can do.

Thanks for a great mini review!

Tabbed Browsing - one word - OPERA

[gosand]

Although it can't render some of the sites that Mozilla is capable of, I love Opera. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, ability to stop popups, and speed! Sweet. I use Moz as my backup, then Konqueror, in case some page won't render with Opera. And if those fail, I just launch my Linux version of IE.

Just kidding - I have to boot up the Win box for that. :-)

Re:My mini review...

[Rich]

It's automatic. Go to a directory that contains a cvs checkout then click on the cervisia button in the extras toolbar. You find the cvs view embeds itself in konq, and the menu options/toolbars appear.

Rich.

KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[Zocalo]

I for one am not surprised that the installer and reviewer had such a bumpy ride - what an ugly way of resolving RPM dependencies, and judging by the comments elsewhere other people must be using a similar approach. The simplest way I've found so far to upgrade or install a package such as KDE that is packaging into lots of individual RPMs is as follows:

1. Get all your downloaded .RPMs into a directory together and sort them out - do you really need all that stuff installed? Fewer RPMs = fewer dependencies.
2. Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
3. There are two types types of dependency to resolve - the first to deal with is packages you need but do not have installed, usually libraries and so on. Generally I go to RPMFind and find out what I need and then grab and install it.
4. Next up is stuff that is incompatible with the new software - in this case, if you are removing KDE2x then anything that specifically requires KDE2x is probably broken and is best uninstalled, at least until the new version is up and running. Uninstall these packages with the command "rpm --erase <package>" and either get updated versions later or add them to your install directory now.
5. Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
6. You should now have a much smaller dependency list (or even none). Simply repeat the last two steps a few more times and the test install command should eventually return you to the prompt with no errors after a lot of disk thrashing.
7. Time to install! Make sure you are root, or can at least update the files, the run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"

It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[electroniceric]

Good general summary, I thought I'd add the following:
On both RedHat and Mandrake, KDE RPMS have to be installed in order:
arts, then kdelibs, then the rest, with kdeaddons last.
I found the Mandrake 8.1 packages for this release to be so buggy that I went back to building from source - worked MUCH better.

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[mickwd]

For anyone running Mandrake 8.1, note that the original, buggy packages available via the KDE web site (and mirrors) have now been replaced by updated packages. Many of the bugs have been fixed and they are also *considerably smaller*.

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[Suppafly]

and redhat people wonder why debian people are just waiting for the .deb files. "apt-get install kde3" is going to be so much easier and it'll work.

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[MSG]

Red Hat Linux users can get apt from freshrpms.net, and use that, as well.

I've been using apt to update my systems for a while now, and it *rocks*.

Gentoo Linux

[omega9]

For all you Debian users waiting around for debs, I'm in Gentoo. So your apt-get can bite my emerge kde.

Compiled from source w/ all dependencies all in one command. Suck it.

Now be a predictable Debian user and mod me down for bashing your golden cow.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[volsung]

Now be a predictable Debian user and mod me down for bashing your golden cow.

Ha! Your Jedi reverse-psychology tricks have no effect on me.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[greenfly]

Heh, so is it done compiling yet?

Re:Gentoo Linux

[be-fan]

In that time, I could install and configure a dozen debian setups... Gentoo is a great distro, but there is no way in hell I'd ever survive the compile times. I'm a "install tools as I need them" kind of guy.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Quok]

Let me just point out that there's no reason you HAVE to "survive" the compile. Gentoo's install comes in three stages. You can compile everything from scratch (as I did, which is stage 1), or you can download binaries and immediately have a usable barebones system, and compile everything else (stage 2), or you can just download binaries for everything (Stage 3). Even once Gentoo is installed, you don't have to compile everything from source. Just use "emerge --usepkg kde" instead of "emerge kde" to download and install available binaries. The auto-dependency stuff is nice, too. RPM support is in there, but not by default. If you really want/need it, just go ahead and emerge it in. Really doesn't take all that long, you know.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[be-fan]

The problem is that binaries on Gentoo aren't released nearly as often as on other systems, and aren't as comprehensive. Gentoo is a source-based distro at heart.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Daniel Stone]

As soon as calc and I finish sorting out things like how the KDM session-setting stuff works, you can leave my bloody cow alone. :)

Re:Gentoo Linux

[omega9]

What's the upgrade path on gentoo like anyway?

emerge --update world

Does it all.

Mirror

[pknut]

i've put up a mirror of the article at www.dovehouse.fsworld.co.uk/linuxplanet/1.html [fsworld.co.uk].

My Experience on SuSE 7.3

[alistair]

I have been running the KDE RC2 and RC3 releases on SuSE for some time and the final release for over a week now. I had to say I have had no problem installing any of them using YAST (yet another set-up tool, SuSEs config manager). All that was required is download the packages, select "Add Packages" in YAST, tick the required packages and hit F10 to install, YAST took care of the rest. After this all I had to change were the KDEDIR and WINDOWMANAGER attributes and startx booted directly into KD3.

The package does then ask you if you want to use your old KDE settings. I chose yes but I wonder if this was the right thing to do, if you do you will notice almost no changes visually, you may be better ajusting your setting to a more KDE3 look and feel.

The only problems I encountered were that a number of desktop icons (applinks) no longer worked. I haven't worked out a pattern to this, Netscpe 4.7 continued to run but 6.2 would not start. In every case manually recreating the link worked.

The main improvements for me have been;

• The Konqueror Web Browser now has superb Javascript support and very good control on pop-up windows. It feels very fast, in many cases (but not all) faster than Mozilla 0.99 at page rendering.
  
• KMail is now an excellent mail client, and much, much faster than Mozilla at reading IMAP mailboxes and messages. I haven't managed to corrupt any of my mailboxes yet, it seems to handle nested folders without the problems that older versions suffered from. The only think I found missing is support for LDAP autocomplete of mail addresses.
  
• Support for dual screens / dual head graphics cards, this was good in KDE 2.22 but has been further improved in KDE3, I haven't found any prompt / dialogue boxes which are displayed across both screens.
  
• The Konsole Terminal Emulator is much nicer, and works happily with anti aliased fonts. Font support is much better generally, and the Kate Editor XML extension is much appreciated.
  

I haven't managed to crash KDE3 yet, and spent 26 hours this weekend using it to upgrade 7 Solaris servers worldwide using about 20 terminal sessions plus several Java / X applications on 8 virtual desktops. As the main point of this release was the upgrade to Version 3 of the QT toolkit, I suspect we won't see all the benefits until 3.1 / 3.2, but all credit to the KDE team and testers for an excellent desktop management system and set of applications.

nice desktop

[mrm677]

Too bad I get consistent KDE application crashes (Control Panel, etc.). Is KDE3.0 less stable than KDE2.2.2?

Arts w/ esound?

[Dr. Sp0ng]

Am I just missing something here, or is there still really no way to have artsd use esound as its output device? I have no sound card in my Linux box, and I run esound on my Win2k box for sound output over the network from Linux... but artsd doesn't seem to be able to output to esound! This seems like it would be a pretty obvious feature to me.

Or, failing that, is there any arts-compatible sound daemon for win32?

My two penn'orth...

[deepstephen]

I've been using KDE 3.0 since the day after it came out, and here's my review of it.

Konqueror - much improved. It really is nice to have a web browser tightly integrated into the OS (unless you're an illegal monopolist, that is) and this version of Konq is way better than the last one. JavaScript support is much better, it certainly seems to work on all the sites I frequent now, and the weird layout problems with form elements have been cured. Oh, and its rendering engine is a lot faster. Sweet. Now all I'd like is tabbed browsing and it's damn near perfect.

KMail - not hugely different, just tightened up here and there. Seems to be a bit faster if anything, especially on big folders and messages with huge attachments, and the look and feel's been tweaked a bit.

Cervisia - this is the killer function for me. We make extensive use of CVS and now Cervisia, which was an awesome CVS client anyway, is integrated into Konqueror. You can choose to switch into CVS view in any directory containing CVS information, as smoothly as switching between icon view and list view. Unimaginably useful.

Kicker/Panel - one of my biggest bugbears is gone, namely that quickbrowsers can update themselves without requiring a restart. There's a bug in them, though, that causes them to freeze the whole Panel if they get stuck viewing a folder (e.g. if an smbmount-ed folder has been disconnected). Looks like a fix exists and will be in a forthcoming release, so I'll survive.

Desktop switching - Fantastic to have this back, I had missed it so much. You can now set it to switch desktops when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen.

Incompatibility with KDE 2 apps is really the only serious issue I can think of. Not all third-party KDE apps have been ported yet and they won't work. I mostly use Java apps and KDE's own apps (like Konq and KMail) so it doesn't really affect me, but it's something to watch out for.

Re:My two penn'orth...

[Rich]

- Tabbed browsing is scheduled for 3.1 (see the release plan).

- KDE 2 apps *will* work. You need to keep your old kdelibs and unset your KDEDIRS env variable (so it finds the correct info from the compiled in default).

BTW Glad you like the Cervisia integration stuff. I was wondering how many people would find it useful, looks like the answer is quite a lot. :-)

Rich.

On Windows?

[secondsun]

Since the QT toolkit is "free" as in beer for windows, what are the chances of having some one port KDE3 to windows to replace explorer.exe like litestep does?

Summers

Re:On Windows?

[jilles]

Kde 2.2.1 is in the works for cygwin. It's been taking a while already so I gather it's a non trivial effort that requires quite a bit of patching. Personally, I'd love having KDE on my windows box coexisting with all the window apps I need to run, but beyond the coolness factor I have no use for it really :-).

Re:On Windows?

[RelliK]

QT is *not* free on windows. You might be able to compile it under cygwin though.

My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

I finally broke down, and while reinstalling Gentoo on my main desktop, went ahead and merged KDE 3. I haven't ever used a "desktop environment" other than ion and zsh before, except to briefly install and then immediately uninstall in a tooth-chattering rage, so this will be the longest (about 6 hours) that I've used either KDE or Gnome so far.

It's technically very impressive, although by dfault it is certainly a HCI trainwreck of epic proportions. Given a relatively small amount of fiddling, though, it can be rendered very usable.

Things that I like so far:

kcontrol is amazing. It hasn't crashed yet, it's very well organized, and almost everything that I could possibly want to control is in one location, using a single UI. This might be the best thing about the system.

konqueror is also very good, although I have a couple of beefs with the web operation.

konsole is a competent xterm replacement.

The panel is very easy to manage, as far as things like that go. I'm used to starting programs either the old-school way (emacs &), or via ion keybindings, so I tend to ignore kicker, but in the interests of maybe learning something useful, I horsed around with it a bit last night.

Things that bug me:

konqueror apparently doesn't allow you to really, seriously, no, I'm not kidding force a single set of fonts for all web pages to use, or to disable popup windows. I tried the CSS/customize panel, but I'm not interested in changing the rendering of pages except for disallowing font size and style changes, and enabling custom CSS pretty seriously b0rks colors. And even after disabling all popups in the Javascript panel, stopping and restarting konq, I would get the occasional popup.

I also dislike having konq's toolbars shared across the wildly different tasks of file management and web browsing. I like the previews and the ability to do some file stuff via a nice click 'n drag interface, but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE, as at least Windows can present you with a different interface to folders and web pages. I know about the View Settings; but they don't extend to the toolbars. Is it possible to define new toolbars? I want different choices, different layouts, and different interfaces on my toolbars when I'm doing very different things. This ought to be the default.

There's way too much clutter. Too many menus, too many choices on the root level of those menus, too many redundant window decorations -- for instance, why do I need to be able to click in the upper left to get the same exact menu as right clicking on the title bar?

I DON'T WANT THE WINDOWS KEY-BINDINGS. Why can't I get emacs keybindings for text editing, without changing the "shortcuts" en masse? And why isn't the shortcut editor smarter? If I enter a key binding that's already taken, instead of refusing with the unhelpful message that that binding is already taken, why not change it (after all, that's more likely to be the behavior that people want) with a warning that my new choice overrides the old one?

The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.

Overall, from someone who has used twm far more than either kde or gnome, I have to admit to being very impressed. I don't know if I'll stick to it, but it certainly Doesn't Suck That Much Hardly At All, which, given the dismal state of pretty much every computer program written, ever, is more than I could have expected.

Best,
(jfb)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Things that bug you:
* Setting fonts
Should be possible, with a custom (manual - read vim/emacs) stylesheet

* custom toolbars for different tasks
See Window-> administrate view Profiles

* too much clutter in window decoration
Just remove all buttons you don't need as an experienced user in the settings for your windows decoration.

* Starting apps without kicker:
ALT+F2 opens the best part of KDE: krun

* Windows key bindings bother you
Choose unix scheme in kcontrol->LooknFeel->key shortcuts to get emacs like key bindings

I am glad you like KDE. Use bugs.kde.org to report any bugs or usability issues. Also check out dcop and kdcop if you are a hardcore user.
Try e.g. dcop $(dcop|grep kate)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

Good stuff, thanks. I forgot to mention that I'm very impressed with krun as well. Good call.

Best,
(jfb)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

> See Window-> administrate view Profiles

But what I want is to have, say, the main toolbar be text only, with a Location widget, when I'm looking at HTML, and when I'm browsing the filesystem, have a totally different set of options. Possible?

> (fonts) Should be possible, with a custom
> (manual - read vim/emacs) stylesheet

emacs doesn't scare me off, but oughtn't this be an option in, say, the accessibility panel? Not everyone who's font needs are different is going to want to write their own CSS. Both Mozilla and IE make this a simple one check-box operation.

Thanks for the reply, and I'll be sure to try some of this stuff out later.

Best,
(jfb)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

Thanks! I'll check that out when I get home tonight.

Best,
(jfb)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

I could easily have missed it. I'll check it out tonight.

Thanks,
(jfb)

Re:My first day with KDE 3

[nosferatu-man]

Right, I understand this, and it's very impressive *to a developer*. But from a user experience standpoint, it's pretty much just broken. Admittedly, the dysfunction of a unified file/&c browser is an argument that I've lost, but on my personal workstation, darn it, I WILL retain control.

Ironically, this problem arises because the http rendering control is so well done, that to load mozilla on top of the already large and in charge KDE environment seems pointless.

Best,
(jfb)

The Linux Planet review is not very well done.

[entrigant]

The author lost a lot of credibility when he mentions the ability to disallow javascript popups in konqueror and "Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens." in th elist of what's new. It's painfully obvious the author has little experience with what he is reviewing. I will give him credi tint hat he's partially right for both. A new METHOD for blocking popups was introduced (smart), and focus code has changed somewhat.

Also I'm not an expert with rpm as I rarely use it but his method for installing kde3 is insane. I use SuSE rpm's to try out rc2 simply because I didn't feel like compilin git at the time, and the installed to /opt. He's talking about grepping through the rpm's looking for certain files. It's not so tough. Simply install the arts rpm, the kdelibs rpm, and th ekdebase rpm and you got yourself a very basic installed kde. I'm not exactly sure what it is he was trying to do.

Beyond the install process there's only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual use and performance of kde. Nowhere are aditional things such as new kio slaves like sftp, performance enhancements to konq, the much improved css/js handling, etc. I think he covers the new features of kmail (which btw filtering does not work with imap folders yet which is bothersome). Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik and a couple of new icon sets (these icon sets were previously available as seperate packages).

This review could have been a lot more informative than it was and really is a waste of space. Putting a little more time into something called a review should be required. This is more of a dumbed down installation guide.

RPM hell, but it's avoidable

[mmusn]

Yes, dependencies with RPMs can be kind of a pain, but there are a bunch of scripts and tools that help you resolve them automatically. The per-file dependencies in RPM also have their good sides compared to the alternatives. For ready-made distributions like RedHat, they work fine.

In any case, if you just download a bunch of RPMs, it is the supplier's responsibility to make sure you get a complete set. The KDE distributors should either put up all the RPMs in a single directory, or they should at least supply a script that tells you what packages you are still missing. So, in that sense, it perhaps belongs into the review, though it probably shouldn't take up most of a KDE3 review. After all, once this is part of distributions, the install will simply not be a problem anymore.

Re:All I was able to see

[Linux Freak]

This will undoubtedly get modded down as a troll (KDE vs. GNOME, blah blah blah) but I wish the KDE developers would take a look at what Ximian has done with Red Carpet as far as installation and upgrading packages go. There really is nothing easier than getting GNOME installed and keeping it up to date than with Red Carpet (which also has a nice feature of including non-GNOME "channels" such as Red Hat, Evolution, etc., to keep a variety of software up to date).

I know that installation code is the least sexy piece of code to be working on, but the end result is definitely worth the pain involved.

Re:All I was able to see

[krmt]

I don't think I agree with you. Kpackage is already available, and supports apt just fine, at least in Debian, and presumably it should work fine for Redhat et al as well.

Packaging and distribution of software is exactly the job of a distro, because what's a distro if not a neat collection of nicely packaged software scattered about the net? Ximian has usurped the job of the distro with RedCarpet. Not that I think this is totally bad, but I think they should have kept their focus on the tool itself, rather than the service through the tool. Sadly, this is their plan to make money (best of luck to them) but it does duplicate the functions of the distros.

I, for one, will never download Ximian packages on to my Debian box because Ximian will simply never do as good a job supporting them as the Debian maintainer will. I'd imagine this is true for just about all distros.

All in all, I think KDE is right not to work on a package like RedCarpet. I think a graphical installer along the lines of installshield would be a good project, perhaps as a frontend to compliment apt and Kpackage, but on the whole I think the strength of the KDE project is that they have focus. They know what they want to provide: the best desktop environment for UNIX, and they seem to be doing it. There's no attempts to sell services or any such thing, they are simply building the best software they can to suit themselves, and the results have been fantastic. They know that their job is not to package software and set it up for people to download easily, that's the job of the distro. Instead, they provide a tool like KPackage which integrates as a frontend for the distro's system, and they leave it at that. KPackage itself can, and will, be improved, but it will never attempt to provide all that functionality itself. And if one day we're all using KPackage or RedCarpet as frontends to apt downloading either rpm's or debs as set up by your distro (which appears to me to be the way things are headed, thankfully) then I think we'll all be better off for it.

Re:KDE is a monopoly

[boltar]

But the KDE team doesn't intend to lock you in to
their system by bundling konquerer because only their browser can access/run some given feature. Also mozilla dying would make no difference to them
because they make no money no matter how many people use KDE.

New Fix

[Anonymous DWord]

Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens.

I'll tell you, that's the single biggest thing that's been pissing me off lately. Sounds like it's time for an upgrade...

Re:A helpful hint:

[gazbo]

It does have a lot of bugfixes, and IMHO the beautiful look and feel really proves wrong all of the FUD about GNU/Linux not being ready for the desktop.

As you say, it was bound to break something (in your case useradd) but that's a small trade-off. Also as another poster pointed out, the only problems the author had were because he hadn't followed the installation instructions exactly, and so had dependency problems - of course you need to install the packages in the right order, any idiot could tell him that

An even better point though is that though useradd was broken, because it is Linux you are able to take a template copy of a home directory, and write a script so that when you want add a user you can replicate the functionality. I'd love to see you try that when the new user on Windoze breaks after an update.

Every day Linux just gets so much easier for newby desktop use - surely we've now reached the same level of ease of use as Windoze?

*This* shit is "insightful?"

[Lethyos]

Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason

Check your system. Sounds like you have a problem. I've used KDE 2.x.x for, well, as long as it's been around. Very appropriately, the "bug free*" wallpaper is almost correct.

CD handling no longer breaks the automounter

Again, *you* have a configuration problem. Check the mailing lists.

Runs well on modest hardware

Uh, it's always done that since version 1. If you want to run KDE on a low-end hardware, use lightweight themes. Same goes for ANY desktop environment or window manager.

Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX

That's an original artwork. And if you're going to bitch like this, why not say "concept of object oriented desktop no longer ripped off of Mac OS."

KMail no longer corrupts its mail files

I have this complaint about mailers other than KMail.

Default browser handling works all the time

Try elaborating.

K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing

Oh, this is a problem unique to the KDE project, eh? Go out and blame the GTK people if you REALLY want to throw stones like these.

Go get a clue and stop you bitching. If you don't like it, go use something else. The rest of us will greatly enjoy our KDE 3 experience.

Whoa, slow down Tex

[bill_mcgonigle]

Some people get so upset about a little light-hearted jibing. I expected Funny points, if any for this post. If someone thinks it's insightful, well, geez, that's not my doing.

To be fair, I have had these problems under KDE as shipped with RedHat 7.2, no special configuration done here, and these problems haven't surfaced under WindowMaker/X, my daily desktop. But you might notice that these are also a very small number of problems, overall. A system with 5 problems is pretty swell.

But, c'mon, you don't expect me to believe that the default desktop picture on KDE (2) wasn't at least 'heavily inspired' by Mac OS X's, do you? Everyone I know that's seen them has noticed the 'strong similarity'.

Re:Changelog I was hoping for

[bill_mcgonigle]

>> Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
>Working on KDE 8 hours a day... never seen that. Check your X installation.

Works just fine with WindowMaker...

>> Runs well on modest hardware
> K6-200 32Mb without a flaw.

Wow, your system must be significantly better tuned than mine. If you have any tips, please share.

>> Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
> You aren't using KDE from a distro, are you? ...

Um, doesn't most everybody?

>> Default browser handling works all the time
> Guess what? It works all time.

Geez, that's good to hear. I must have been imagining that one.

Re:What a maroon

[mgkimsal2]

How do you know what database they are using?

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl

[be-fan]

Wow! You can browse and watch AVI's at the same time on a 500Mhz processor! Windows can do that on an old P90. On anything above a 500Mhz machine, NO desktop should have ANY lag. On my 1.5Ghz machine, KDE 2.x is still agonizingly slow (so much so that I switched to GNOME, which is as slow, but at least apps start quickly) to the point where using it is irritating.

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl

[be-fan]

I never said it was easy to fix. I simply pointed out that it has been done before many times, so it can't be all that hard. If OSS software is so great, why can't they beat MS in performance (one of their weak areas!)?