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KDE GUI

Some KDE news 196

Posted by HeUnique from the it's-going-pretty-well dept.
The KDE Development team progress seems very good these days. You can now take a look at some screenshots from the KDE 2 pre alpha. Also, the KDevelop team has announced today the 1.0 Beta 1 version of KDevelop. I must say it looks very promising.
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Some KDE news More

Some KDE news

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  • Yes they will be (atleast if you are running KDE). I remember reading about a plan to export KDE style themes as pixmap themes for GNOME apps. So your apps will look the same. Also, there was talk of using the same multimedia system. I think DnD is already taken care of. Now if they can just agree on CORBA, the two desktops should be compatible with each other and that is A Very Good Thing(tm).
  • I've used Eterm, and I've used Aterm. A quick study will show you how Aterm uses less than half the memory Eterm does. It does the same stuff, too. You can go get it at this link [xoom.com]

  • Unfortionatly, isn't a mirrow of the downloads, merely the page.. :-{
  • First, I personally do not need networking and I suspect that a lot of home users (i.e. desktop users) will not need it either. Yet I cannot turn the networked architecture off and switch to something more direct and efficient and with fewer components communicating between themselves.

    I think that this statement is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how UNIX works. It is clear (I hope) that any effective display server has to be a separate process from the programs which display on it. Given this, there obviously must be some means of communication between the server and the clients. On a UNIX system this generally means opening a socket of some form, be it TCP, Unix domain, or just a pipe. This is not only the standard way of doing things, it is quite efficient most of the time; the only place where it really fails is *extremely* high-bandwidth transfers (think big pixmaps being written all over the screen), which is why shared-memory was invented. Any halfway modern app will probably detect that it's running on a local X server and use shared memory where appropriate -- ie, for bandwidth-intensive things like moving images around. (eg: *any* Imlib-based program will use SHM) The Myth2 demo is a good example of this -- on a *framebuffer X server* -- a server entirely lacking in acceleration -- I acheived a high framerate with the game running *in a window*. (I couldn't find how to clock it but it seemed like it had maxed out -- I noticed little improvement on a PII/400 with an accelerated server)

    Without networking, there's no reason to have a client-server architecture

    This is completely false. Even the kernel itself is in many ways a client-server architecture: programs connect with system calls and request stuff from it. (the Hurd just makes this explicit)
    How would you allow multiple programs to access a single display at once without some sort of server?

    I suspect all of stand-alone X desktop functionality can be written as one file for maximum speed and efficiency.
    Which functionality are you referring to?

    A networked version is only good as an option.

    But given that programs are *already*, for reasons mentioned above, connecting in a client-server fashion using localhost UNIX sockets why not make the simple jump to supporting TCP and get five times the flexibility?

    Second, I hope someone starts a page dedicated to pointing out what's wrong with X.
    Most criticism I've seen of X is a slightly more literate version of "X sux, it's too big!" or "X sux, it scares me!" There are some real warts but the "X must die!!!!" camp generally doesn't even mention them (probably because most of them just mean that specific issues need to be fixed rather than throwing out the entire system they've got so much vitriol for)

    If nothing else, it'd help X evolve in the right direction.
    Read: the one I want.

    Daniel
  • It is not proprietary.

    Not only the whole source code is out there, but any fully compliant CORBA ORB could use the same authentication setup.

  • I disbelieve that you've ever actually looked at X code, let alone had the experience to say something like this.. Why would one EVER REMOVE API's? There is no need. The performance issues with X are a completely seperate issue...
  • I was able to grab the source, but not the c refs and other stuff :(

  • The Belin project looks like a neat idea, but the usefulness of a 3D desktop environment currently escapes me. Integrating 3D with the 2D desktop seems like a very good idea, given the 2D screens we all use.

    The Berlin stuff isn't 3D, strictly speaking. Since the coordinate systems are in 3d, and it can use OpenGL as a display target (also Postscript and some other things now), yes, you probably can do a 3d desktop with it. I guess the main thing is that we don't really have any very usable 3d desktop UI paradigms yet, so it looks like we'll be doing a more "traditional" UI first. The 3d capabilities are mainly there as a matter of planning ahead.

    So, most likely (at least from what I see now), the first major Berlin releases are going to be a more or less conventional 2d desktop with some really neat features, and once they're out people are more likely to start exploring 3d UI elements with it.

    (in response to the obvious question, no, the 3d stuff doesn't really cost you anything if you don't use it)


    ---
  • Win98 *is* Win95 and IE. Shipping win98 as a product is just a Microsoft distribution mechanism designed to spread IE as much as possible. Other than that there's no real difference between win98 and win95. MS now considers the win9x platform essentially dead, remember? That's what all this hype about win2k is really about; MS is trying to move people off the win95 arch as fast as they possibly can. win95 was a mistake and has been soiling MS's reputation since the day it was released.
  • If you try to force your way of doing things down my throat, I'll use something else, thankyouverymuch.

    Single/double-clicking _definitely_ needs to be user-selectable.

    --

  • Cool! KDE is whats going to win over microsofties. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 1999 @02:53AM (#1771076)
    MY favoite app for linux right now is the kwm. IT rocks. I use to dislike it because its was a little bit slower then the rest of the windows managers but its getting pretty to look at with each new kde release and the new themes for it look really cool. My main reason for living it is the intergration with the kde desktop and the tool bar and everything else about kde. I really love kde as a whole bunch of programs that interact with each other. Microsoft is allways worried about the next killer app that will come out under there nose and I believe they found there match. WOrse yet its not windows based. :-)

    MY second favorite app for linux is kdevelop. I had trouble getting kdevelop .4 to install. Something about obstdc not found. I cant fidn this fiel anywhere. :-( BUt version .3 rocks on my mahcine. Its loaded with application wizards just vc++ and I can have a wizard for a kde app, qt app, or even jstu a consule app. THere is even a documentation windows so I can load a c-reference manual, kde programmer reference manual, or even just a help manual for kdevelop itself. KDe even can use emacs style key bindings. IT ROCKS. GO download it. If you can't afford code warrior this is the next great thing.


    I also have a friend who works at microsoft and he told me that kde scares the sh*t out of Steve Balmer more then any other linux app besides apache. I believe in 5 to 7years from now, kde will match if not surpass the ease of use of wibdows. KDE is allready passed windows 3.1 and is right now close to windows95 in terms of ease of use. Its still in the middle though. BUt compared to the kde beta .3 from this time last year where it was about as easy as windows 2.0 is a huge leap that scares ms half-to-death. IF this progess continues you could expect microsoft to have a terrible headache when widnows 2002 wich will ship in 2004 :-) will not be the easest to use on the block and linux will be the number1 OS in Germany, Japan, China, Korea and perhaps spain or Italy. WHo knows. All I know is that 5 years ago linux was just a toy that only cs nerds heard of. This is just my perspective on kde and how its going to change unix.

    I would love to have crystal ball and look five years into the future. I could bet you that kde will be aorund and be probably the defacto standard in xwindows managers by then with machines ranging form 768- 2 gigs of ram where the preformance drop in kde will not be that noticable compared to windows maker at that time. I imagine that linux will still run on very old machiens though so the other windows managers wills till be there. All I know is that Caldera only uses kde and has kde and qt intergrated in everything. Suse loves kde as well and even redhat who invested ing gnome also a default configuration for kde.

    In 4 weeks kde 1.2 will be done. It included lots of themes and high color icons. I cant wait for it.
  • That makes me smile...I don't use most of KDE, but I do use kfm. Faster KDE file manager is good.
  • I'd like it to handle remote sessions better... It could use some actual honest-to-God authentication and encryption of traffic, for starters.

    And I dunno so much about that "efficient" bit...
  • I found a list of mirrors. Some only have the page, some have docs and tools, some have the source. Here they are:

    ftp://129.187.206.68/pub/unix/ide/KDevelop/
    ftp://ftp.bawue.de/pub/unix/KDevelop/
    ftp://ftp.chg.ru/pub/X11/kdevelop/
    ftp://ftp.weltopia.com/pub/kdevelop/




  • Is there a real pager (fvwm-style) available for KDE? I really hate those CDE-style desktop buttons.
  • Looks nice. Too bad I can only get 640x480 on my old monitor.... :(
  • gnome is not a gui, you still need a window manager of some kind.

    It's just a glorifed tool bar.
  • I downloaded a snapshot of kde2 a few days ago, and it compiled cleanly, a few packages in kdenetwork didn't like it, but everything else was just fine.

    It looks really nice and I get the feeling that big progress have been made in the underlaying architechture. To bad it segfaulted every other minute while I was using it, but I geuss that's why it's still pre-alpha.

    Haven't tried kdevelop.
  • I couldn't agree more. I love everything else about KDE, except that panel just sticks out like a sore thumb.

    I love GNOME's level of configurability, and the way I can have my pager on the lower right with the clock, but have my menu's and shortcut buttons hanging out at the upper right...

    Plus the taskbar icons (the little icons next to the clock) need more spacing left and right, and less spacing top to bottom...

    It's only a little more configurable than the windows 9X toolbar... which says a lot. Plus it's just as ugly.

    I'd take KDE with gnome's panel and never look back.

    Doug
  • This is great stuff. There is more GUI competition within Linux than the rest of the computing world put together. I think we'll see great things from both KDE and Gnome.
  • Okay, I hate to be a nitpick, but I've seen your posts to the KDE mailing lists and I can't take it anymore.Your apostrophes show up as Z's with semicircles over them on TTF fonts. (I think that's a Czech character, no?)
  • Is there any speed improvements(specifically, in kfm)? When I tried using KDE, it was *extremely* slow on my p200...when KDE runs slower then NT 4 on my machine, you know its got problems ;-)


    --------------------------
  • As long as huge awesome apps like Office (don't tell me it's 'bloatware' and shit, you stupid zealots. Only hackers still use text-editors.)

    Lets see, Word Perferct, Koffice, Corel, Star Office. Compapred to any one of these MS Office ,IS bloatware, any flippin' Office suite that takes 4, count 'em 4 CDs to ship, could be anything but bloatware.

    Guys this is all just realism. We do this Linux thing because it's a hobby. Us hackers are the type of people who like to know what no one else knows. We like to have secret weapons to show off if need be. If everyone uses Linux, then what is the point anymore?

    I was under the impression that, that [everyone using Linux] was the point. Call me naive, but arent we doing this for the masses, to show them that there is a different if not better choice ? If you are only doing it because it is cool, then maybe you are in it for the wrong reasons. There are plenty of us out here who have put their jobs on the line and used Linux, only to prove to upper management that it is cost effective and requires less day to day support.

    And even if you are right... 5 to 7 years??? Come on! What we know of user interfaces will be NOTHING like right now in 5 to 7 years! If anything, we will sit and have conversations with our computers. I know I don't want to be looking at some dumb colorful icon while I chat with my machine. Each UI serves a purpose, and KDE will either fall or change into something that is no longer what we know of KDE.


    Sure and "1984" came true ! These specualtions are ridiculous, The UI IS changing but ever so slowly. Wnat will keep it roughly the same as it is, is the same thing that keeps MS in power, the people. Have you EVER tried to get someone to use a different UI, or convince a secretary that uses WIN95 that Linux is better ? KDE is growing up, and they will be able to change with the time, but I disagree with you abhout the UI being so totally different in 5 years. Come to think of it I disagree with just about everything you said

  • That's interesting.. are you sure it's KDE that's at fault?

    My main workstation at home is a PPro200, with 48M of RAM, and it runs just as fast as anything else....

  • If you are not willing to improve it yourself, you are imposing your way of doing things on the developers.

    Most knives cut both ways.
  • Already, I think. I've been enjoying the fruits of both projects thus far, and I've been extremely pleased with the results. My 'doze bound non-geek friends are quite stunned when they see my desktop.

    I guess they expect Linux to look boring. :)

  • A year ago I tried KDE and was dissapointed by the memory requirement (I had only 32 megabytes -- AMD K6 200 Mhz). I tried then Gnome and still continue to use it because it fits well in my system and not overload it.

    Recently, I took the old computer of my father (486-DX 66Mhz + 8 Megs of memory) because I wanted to have a small installation for working when I am to his flat. Gnome worked with a good answer to my action while KDE really made my swap partition screamed and was terribly slow !!!

    I agree that Kde is more advanced than Gnome for the end user and is it a reason to have it eating memory ?

    I would like to have more information about the memory requirement for KDE

    I think sad to have 128 Mb of memory for having the same speed than NT with 64 Mb or Windows 9x with 32 Mb!

    La Schwarzasse.
  • Define "configurable". IMHO, KDE is every bit as configurable as, say, Gnome. They do some things differently, and each does some things the other won't... but I don't think you can say that KDE lacks configurability, especially given that (unlike certain other desktop environments) you can actually find the config files and change them yourself, without GUI help/interference.
  • Use ssh [cs.hut.fi]. It will take care of your cookie handling and can encrypt your X traffic.

    --
  • I cannot agree that X is efficient or flexible. I agree we should be very cautious about replacing it, but is definitely showing its age. It'll be interesting to see if the Berlin guys ever come out with anything useful - they do have some good ideas.
  • Most KDE developers seems to be in favor of single click, which I think is a pity. I wish there could at least be an option to allow double click, as this seems much more logical and flexible to me (one click selects, two clicks executes). Single click is much more prone to mistakes (especially when selecting multiple files).
  • It seems to me IDEs should be one of the most effective applications for open source development. A significant percentage of programmers want one on a variety of platforms, its users are mostly capable of improving it, and having an IDE lowers the barrier to new developers for projects.

    SlickEdit looks pretty cool though, it's the first place I've seen intra-line file differencing as opposed to plain old line-by-line file differencing. I've been thinking of hacking a version of diff to have an option to do that, or perhaps a post-process filter on the diff output.
  • Actually, it's not the clicking the causes RSI. It's the grabbing hold of the mouse, cutting off the blood supply. What we really need is a way to have KDE or Gnome/Englightenment completely *keyboard* driven if the user wants this. That would help a lot of us whose hands hurt. Minimise your mouse usage to maximise wrist life.

  • Maybe he's thinking as a USER??

    The idea of having 3.14 themes on your desktop maybe reasonable to anybody whose had the misfortune to see how X-Windows works, but to the average rest-of-population person it is simply silly. Why do you have to have one UI manager for the outsides the window, and one for the insides of each window? It's just plainly unintuitive, wasteful and very inconsistent from a UI persective.

    If you need further convincing, take a look at how the Mac menus appear in KDE, and then try them under a different window manager (and see how they did them -- rather unimpressive isn't it). Nope. Sorry. That they got it to work at all in the braindamage we all know and love as X-Windows (or 'The X Window System' if you must) is something to be applauded.

    APPLAUSE

    So maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Then all the better for him, and all the worse for you!


    John
  • If you find anything in KDE that can't be done with the keyboard, report it as a bug.
  • I guess you haven't heard MS is releasing another OS base on the 9x kernel, have you ?
  • You are right about the last one, my statement
    was subjective and was never meant to be more
    than that.
    But let me refrase my point: if you had one
    server, you could hard code a good portion of
    your communication protocol to speed things up.
    I hope you do not claim that X protocol is as
    efficient as a pipe.
    When I said there'd be no reason for client
    server architecture, I meant precisely that
    the user would not have a choice of servers but
    one server only. Bad wording on my part, I agree.
    I still think that a web page stating flaws
    in X is necessary. You could state what you think
    are warts, and it could evolve in _your_
    direction.

  • (Be sure you use the most recent versions! KDE 1.1.1 is better than 1.1).

    humm.... I am still with the 1.0 series, thx for the tips, I will try a recent distro.

    With a 486/8MB computer, I'm absolutely sure you won't get a decent response with either of them, anything else is bullsh*t. This is mostly due to the fact that X itself is an enormous memory hog.

    To be more precise, I have tried a Gnome + WindowMaker installation and a full Kde 1.0 installation.

    Morality of these ./ thread: use the latest version before slahdotting. :-)
  • KDE uses the 'single-click paradigm' pretty consistently, which is IMHO a good thing. Once you get used to it, you won't want to miss it.

    The double-click folks should try out KExplorer (now called Kruiser), which is a nice MS Explorer clone which behaves in the 'traditional' way.
  • X needs to move forward, but I'm not sure replacing X is the answer.. They need to extend new technolgies into X, and everything will be fine.. There is also GGI, which there are X servers for, which add alot more flexibility to the graphics systems..
  • Let's see what we have here.

    1. A historically vigourous discussion topic on slashdot
    2. A link posted recently slashdotted
    3. A link to a mirror of the slashdotted site
    4. A Monday morning (Second only to friday afternoons for network problems, as we all know)
    5. And an AC virtually challenging the /. community to DoS the poor server


    You're not that site's network admin, are you? :)

  • > Memory requirements will increase with KDE 2
    > due to the Corba ORB (currently ~+5MB).

    It's just nice to know that they are thinking about the memory requirements of the system by using a stripped down version of MICO. I know that an ORB is the only way to really improve KDE and KOffice is going to be one killer app because of it. :))

    Iggy
  • This is something that really impresses me about the KDE team. KDE2.0, even in pre-alpha stage, is so much more impressive stable than GNOME. There are definitely some issues to be worked out (like the fact that all of my icons aren't on the desktop, just in a small window on my screen) but there are some really impressive things going on especially with the KOffice suite. Now the thing is- is there public access via CVS or any other means to GNOME2.0? Is there even development going on with GNOME2.0? KDE is here to stay, and they've got a real road map- there's been work going on with KDE2.0 since 1.1 was released, and maybe even a little before that.... plus, have you seen the "GNOME Office suite"? There are at least three different word processors! Where's the coordination? I hate to bash GNOME (really, I do- I use GNOME plenty and I really like it) but they don't have as much of a future plan as KDE.

    Also about the themes: I saw an earlier comment remarking about how they hoped the System style (themes are called "Styles" in KDE2.0) wasn't the default. No, it's not- the default is really impressive, and it's not a "theme" like for E or for GNOME. It's just a simple new way of making the desktop look and act a bit more futuristic. And also, about the System style itself: It is ten times more stable than any of the themes I've seen for E, save the default (BigClean) and ShinyMetal themes. The styles are really cool and not only that, but they also are functional. They work, which is more than I can say for some of the themes for the other desktop...

    All in all, I'm pretty glad to be using Linux. The months ahead are looking better and better... and to the guy who wrote that in 5 years Linux will be the champion, I doubt that it will take that long.

    Also, one last thing: Has anyone seen/used Windows 2000betaX©? Seems like the more rehashed Windows© gets, the more it looks like KDE... oh, yeah, and everybody who claims that KDE isn't as advanced as Windows95/98/NT has to remember: KDE is only at MajorVersion 1. Wait til WE get to version 4.0....
  • This is something that really impresses me about the KDE team. KDE2.0, even in pre-alpha stage, is so much more impressive stable than GNOME. There are definitely some issues to be worked out (like the fact that all of my icons aren't on the desktop, just in a small window on my screen) but there are some really impressive things going on especially with the KOffice suite. Now the thing is- is there public access via CVS or any other means to GNOME2.0? Is there even development going on with GNOME2.0? KDE is here to stay, and they've got a real road map- there's been work going on with KDE2.0 since 1.1 was released, and maybe even a little before that.... plus, have you seen the "GNOME Office suite"? There are at least three different word processors! Where's the coordination? I hate to bash GNOME (really, I do- I use GNOME plenty and I really like it) but they don't have as much of a future plan as KDE.

    Also about the themes: I saw an earlier comment remarking about how they hoped the System style (themes are called "Styles" in KDE2.0) wasn't the default. No, it's not- the default is really impressive, and it's not a "theme" like for E or for GNOME. It's just a simple new way of making the desktop look and act a bit more futuristic. And also, about the System style itself: It is ten times more stable than any of the themes I've seen for E, save the default (BigClean) and ShinyMetal themes. The styles are really cool and not only that, but they also are functional. They work, which is more than I can say for some of the themes for the other desktop...

    All in all, I'm pretty glad to be using Linux. The months ahead are looking better and better... and to the guy who wrote that in 5 years Linux will be the champion, I doubt that it will take that long.

    Also, one last thing: Has anyone seen/used Windows 2000betaX©? Seems like the more rehashed Windows© gets, the more it looks like KDE... oh, yeah, and everybody who claims that KDE isn't as advanced as Windows95/98/NT has to remember: KDE is only at MajorVersion 1. Wait til WE get to version 4.0....
  • I don't need it -> it's useless to me -> there must
    be an off switch for this option (either run time
    or compile time or both).
    Also, anyone who cares about privacy and security
    will not connect any of their PCs to any network.
    You can have a lowly peice of sh*t for networking
    and do real work offline. Floppies, zips, CDs etc.
    were created to facilitate info transport if
    you absolutely have to xfer something, but
    preferably leave your computers offline 100%.
  • Sorry about that.... ::slaps self in face:: d'oh!

  • I personally prefer single click. I started experimenting with "buttons" on my Mac. I find it easier: rubberband to select (or click the name) and click the button to open.

    Now with NT/IE 5.0, you don't even have to click to select, just pause over a file and it is selected. Hold shift to select multiple files or control to select non-contiguous files.

    KDE's single click is going with the trend. It is easier and less confusing for a naive user. Lots of users that I work with do not know if they have double clicked fast enough. I see it all the time...users double click, waits 10 seconds and wonders why nothing happened and double clicks again.

    Double click should be an option though: I've seen die-hard Mac and PC users double click URL links on an HTML page.

    KDE is designed to be a users UI, and single click is the simplest and easiest UI (IMHO). I DO think that they should default close to be on the opposite side of maximize/minimize as on the Mac--Much superior (how many times have you accidentily clicked the X instead of maximize? How many times on a Mac?)
  • Adding a option to make the program support double clicking, probaly wouldn't be too hard--so feel free to implement it yourself.

    Remember Kommander/Kfm uses a different idea to what files are -- it treats folders as if they were web pages (and you can modify the look and feel if you know how to), which is a totally radical deparature from anything Microsoft or Apple has ever done (which is invovation in my book). Since, most people agree the web is going to an important part of the future, we want to make the desktop easy to use and act just like the web (no matter what protocol you are using). What's nice about Kommander/Kfm is it treats a web page like files, you single click them to launch them.

    Yes, this is different to what you may be used to in the old days, but I think this is a gui improvement.

    With this new paradigm, you select files using the rectangle box, just like in the old days, but you can't do it with single clicks anymore (just like with web links).

    Internet Intergration is a good thing in my book. ;-)
  • > X is efficient,

    *cough*bullshit*cough*

    > What more could you want it to do?

    Antialiasing, alpha blending, higher-level protocols (sending widgets over the wire, not just their shapes), coordinate transformations, resolution independence, device independence.

    There you go.
  • I sincerely hope that that last screenshot that shows the "system" theme isn't the theme that kde uses out of the box. Lemme tell you a secret about themes:

    They suck. They're hideous, garish, clashing, and make your entire professional body of work look like some 3L337 kiddie's toy. I hate them. Everyone I've shown them to sneers at them.

    At least this is true for well over half of them (I have seen some nice ones, E's default theme these days is a nice one). If this is made the default KDE theme, I hope to god distributions will change it to something they can demo without embarrassment.
  • Ok, I just have to second the advice that you switch to KDE1.1.1 or better to improve speed, but I'd also recommend trying WindowMaker + KFM (the KDE file manager). With WindowMaker you already have the dock, background manager, etc, so you don't need a panel or kbgndwm or anything like that. KFM with the new KDE 1.1.2 hi-color icons looks damn cool and it fills in that empty space on the left side of the screen (I use dock to the right, clip at the bottom) that always seemed so asymetrical.
    Plus, KFM by itself only needs a few megs of memory.
    --JZ
  • It is turning out real nice, but in this early stage (there are LOTS of new features and changes) it is still quite unstable. Many bugs, and it moves slow. Not all of it, but the KControl Panel thing is the worst offender, and always has been. Oh yeah, I am speaking of the snapshot I downloaded on Friday, so I mean the new stuff.
  • Yep. Even troll got pulled into this game and came up with themable qt ( unnecesary bloat for toolkit) I guess they wanted to match GTK which first came out with that madness ( it seems like themes and related stuff was more importand to GTK crowd than having properly working toolkit in the first place - on the other hand, default GTK is so ugly that , I guess, they had to come up with something to fix that.)

    Yep, you are right, most themes are ugly like hell ( specially those toolbar buttons - uhrrrr)

  • I haven't really had that many problems with Netscrape lately. It's of course still moderately awful, but 4.51 only crashes occasionally (maybe once every day or two). The only problem I have is that it obviously has memory leaks, because one time I took a look at it's resources, and it had grabbed 192 megs of memory for itself. I didn't notice until I couldn't open a new app.

    I've noticed that it became a LOT more stable once I upgraded from Suse6.0 -> 6.1. I'm not sure why that would be, but it was. Maybe some problem library netscape depended on started behaving? No clue really. I'm reasonably happy it, and just waiting for Mozilla to become usable.
  • Try SlickEdit - very nice ( almost like MS IDE )
  • Run Ktop. Mine shows that total memory consumption with X, KDE, and 3-4 small apps running is about 24 MB. I have a Celery 300A with 64 MB and much of the rest of my RAM is used for buffering and caching. So I presume that it would run quite happily in 32 MB. I won't be surprised if 2.0 with KOffice uses more, because of MICO.

    No matter how much programs I start I've never seen a single byte getting swapped. But I don't complain :)
  • I'm sorry mr. anonymous but you are mistaken. Last time I checked there was indeed a plan to convert GTK themes to KDE (most likely just writing a GTK-Style theme which could read the pixmap themes). But also, there was a plan that when you run a gnome app, KDE would take the current theme, convert it to a pixmap based theme, and tell the GNOME app to use that theme. It's a bit of a hack, but it will work.
  • This "GUI Designer" theme building program, really excites me, and I hope it will live up to it's name by building powerful, quick and useful themes.

    As a long time Kaliedoscope (a themeing program for the Mac OS) user, I often used a themeing program known as Kdesigner, which made building themes, relatively easy (well, not that easy, but it wasn't rocket science either).

    Well, this should lead to dozens (literally) of both good and bad themes for KDE, but since everybody will have a choice this will be a good thing.
  • They will try hard to ship KOffice in the same time frame as KDE 2.0, since they both need quite a bit of work (we are looking at around January '00 from what I have heard).

    KOffice, according to what I have been reading is starting to have some stablity work done on it already, and doing some hookups in some of the apps. True KSpread and Kformula need some work, but KWord and KPresentor look as they will be well ready by the time of KDE 2.0.

    KImageShop sounds nice, as does Killustrator. These also seem like important KDE-2.0 desktop apps.
  • That may be a issue of how well the X Server supports your hardware (including things like Hardware Acceloration) -- most X Servers aren't good on all hardware -- for example XFree86 isn't the fastest or the best on several video cards.

    What that means, is that Windows 95 has better video drivers then XFree86 (or what X Server you use) for your hardware.

    Yes, some people with certain X Servers claim that they get far better preformance with X then with Windows 95.

    When will we get better X Servers? When people convience there graphic card makers to support X development, by putting teams of people to improve things like XFree86. If enough people do this, your graphic's card vendor will feel required to improve it's XFree86 preformance.
  • I can attest to that. KDE and GNOME seem to work pretty good on a machine with only 32 megs of RAM.

    If your machine doesn't have at least 32 megs of RAM, you can probaly still run KDE/GNOME but the preformance will be slightly slower (and likely unusable).

    But the fact is, RAM is cheap. Virtually anybody can afford a machine with at least 64 megs of RAM, alot of new machines come with around 128 megs.

    When people say Linux can run on a 386 with 4 megs of RAM, just remember they are referring to a min. equiped setup -- just the basics, with no X or anything.
  • He said that KFM was fast. Geez...
  • Actually, you CAN do somethings with Motif apps displaying on KDE. On the KDE Styple control panel, there's an option to apply fonts & colors to non-KDE apps.

    I love watching jaws drop when I pop up HP OpenView (Motif based) on my KDE themed desktop. With fonts, colors and window decorations all the same, it looks very much like KDE OpenView!

  • Lets see, Word Perferct, Koffice, Corel, Star Office. Compapred to any one of these MS Office ,IS bloatware, any flippin' Office suite that takes 4, count 'em 4 CDs to ship, could be anything but bloatware.
    You sound like an idiot! Have you tried these programs? They don't have nearly as number of helpful features as Office. Their UI is not as nice (although each have their plus sides), Koffice (oh please. I compiled the latest build. sheesh), Star Office (oh god no) and Word Perfect (for linux) are as SLOW AS HELL. They each crash more then a Win31 server would if it were running slashdot during a flameout!

    Have you EVER tried to get someone to use a different UI, or convince a secretary that uses WIN95 that Linux is better ?
    You speak as if it is the secretary who is foolish for not using Linux. How is Linux better for a secretary then Windows? I can not think of a single reason! Is it faster? Nope, not office apps. Is it more stable? Nope, not it's office apps OR it's GUI. Is it as user friendly? HA! Don't even get me started! Is it cheaper? Yes. Do secretaries pay for their OS? No!

    For those who are wondering: read my above comments which incited this attack. I use Linux, I hack for Linux, I love Linux. But I also an not so foolish as to follow the sheeps ass directly in front of me. It is you people (whom make such pathetic attacks) who will end up ruining a fine hacker OS. MS can just sit back and watch us eat ourselves to death.
  • Having two GUIs is great, except when there is an app for one and not for the other. Well, you could run it, but... isn't this all about looks anyways?
  • Look here:
    http://www.de.kde.org/webmirrors.html
  • Since Window Maker supports the KDE-Hints, this is a great compromise. I also have the panel switched on.

    Just replace "kwm&" by "wmaker&" in the startkde script. Works fine for me.

    Konrad
  • You should go to Berlin [berlin-consortium.org].

    With Berlin you get antialiasing, alpha blending, higher-level protocols, coordinate transformations, resolution independence, device independence and much more.

    I am already giving my X its first farewell kisses, Berlin will sure knock it out once it is usable.

    P.S. Some people think Berlin is a 3D-Desktop, it is not! Quote from the FAQ about the use of OpenGL:

    We're using the parts we would have to write anyway to accomplish our goals -- arbitrary linear transformations, subpixel coordinates, multiple colorspaces, anti-aliasing, transparency, NURBS, Z-ordering etc. Things like 3d surfaces, multiple light sources, phong shading, texture mapping, and even perspective projection are all turned off in berlin, which makes it run much faster.
  • Anyone got kdevelop mirrors? Server seems to be massively /.ed.
  • The only complaint I have about KDE is the panel app. My reason might seem lame to some, but I don't like being limitted to one panel. In Gnome (I use KDE, btw) you can stick panels all over and if you use WM, you can stick little wharfs(?) all over too. It is not always useful, but I have found that in KDE I have filled up my panel, ran an app that goes into the tray, and I can't see it because an icon is in the way. And on top of that, there are more icons I want to put in the panel! Well, that was my only real gripe with KDE. Besides that, it can do anything my little heart desires.

    But I wouldn't say it "sucks so much."
  • KDE is great, but it will not destroy Microsoft. Microsoft makes more then Windows. That's where their power comes from. As long as huge awesome apps like Office (don't tell me it's 'bloatware' and shit, you stupid zealots. Only hackers still use text-editors.) need all of Windows special Win32 features, Microsoft will sell Windows. And worse then that, as soon as programming KDE or Gnome or any Linux thing stops being fun (if Linux becomes #1), everyone will stop coding for it. Some new little OS will catch hackers' eyes and it will become the Next Big Thing.

    Guys this is all just realism. We do this Linux thing because it's a hobby. Us hackers are the type of people who like to know what no one else knows. We like to have secret weapons to show off if need be. If everyone uses Linux, then what is the point anymore?

    And even if you are right... 5 to 7 years??? Come on! What we know of user interfaces will be NOTHING like right now in 5 to 7 years! If anything, we will sit and have conversations with our computers. I know I don't want to be looking at some dumb colorful icon while I chat with my machine. Each UI serves a purpose, and KDE will either fall or change into something that is no longer what we know of KDE.

    Go ahead and argue, but this is how things always turn out. Shit. That's quite a comment! I don't think I have ever posted so much at once!
  • Nice to see I'm not alone.
  • Few minor nits. First off KDE 1.0 was released over a year ago, you are probally thinking of GNOME, which I think was at 0.3 around a year ago. Second, KDE 1.1.2 (not 1.2) is more than a month off. I think it's closer to two at the moment.
  • you are too stupid.

    you want one theme that will work on Gnome and E at the same time? what have you been smoking? Do you even know what you are talking about?

  • KDE2 looks pretty... but gosh, don't all those fonts look ugly and pixellated?

    When is Linux going to learn how to anti-alias fonts, similar to what SmoothType (" http://kaleidoscope.net/greg/smoothtyp e.html [kaleidoscope.net]") does for the Mac?

  • So fricking what ? Are you willing to settle for less just because somebody is trying make money out of their software ??
  • Yup, the server is having a bit of trouble today. Too much good publicity ;) Try http://fara3.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~smeier/kdevelop_ho me/ [uni-potsdam.de] for a mirror. Please, please, report bugs so that KDev 1.0 non-beta will be as clean as possible! --JZ
  • First, I personally do not need networking and I suspect that a lot of
    home users (i.e. desktop users) will not need it either. Yet I cannot
    turn the networked architecture off and switch to something more
    direct and efficient and with fewer components communicating between
    themselves. Without networking, there's no reason to have a client-server
    architecture, I suspect all of stand-alone X desktop functionality can be
    written as one file for maximum speed and efficiency. Maybe then mere
    mortals could compile X without excedrin. A networked version is only good
    as an option.
    Second, I hope someone starts a page dedicated to pointing out what's wrong
    with X. This comes up many times over and there needs to be an up-to-date
    X critique. If nothing else, it'd help X evolve in the right direction.
  • Does anyone know if the KDE and Gnome guys have agreed on a common IDL interface? It's great to have two CORBA based desktops, I just hope that we can mix and match the applications.
  • Are older KDE 1.1X apps going to be compatible, or is an upgrade path necessary?
  • In one of the new KDE screenshots, I noticed that a terminal window had a translucent background (i.e. you could see the background through it). I'm pretty sure I've seen this feature in Enlightenment, but is it possible (easily) to get it with current builds of KDE?
  • So many improvements have been made to the whole OS in the last year that linux is finally being seen as a potentially viable desktop OS. X is good, but it isn't good enough to form the basis for a desktop OS. I'm suprised that none of the current desktop groups are looking to replace it, because if they don't, someone like Be, Amiga, Apple or Microsoft is going to do it. It will be proprietary and the winner of this competition will form the basis of the next (or reigning) great monopoly.

    If your going to say that consumers (no not consumers like you, the ones who simply use the computer to play games or browse) are going to care if the GUI is free [as in freedom]. They will not.

  • It amazes me when Open Source advocates defend The X Window System. It makes you wonder if anyone has bothered to look at who controls X.

    The X Consortium is a closed group of members with a membership fee of $50,000/year to do any significant work on X. X is far from the nice open development environment of traditional open source applications.

    This is why all sorts of development has gone into what goes ontop of X rather than what goes in X and is the reason behind projects such as Berlin. It's simply not possible to get things added to X unless you have some serious weight behind you... especially the sort of radical changes the Berlin folks are doing.

    Of course, I am biased in this :)

    --
  • KDE has been easier than Windows for about a year now already... where have you been?
  • Will GTK (gnome) and KDE themes be compatible or are there any plans for them to be?

    I think competition in the desktop environments is great and some people may prefer coding in GTK and others may prefer Qt but for the end user who may not have much experience would like to set the theme once and then have the theme applied to both GTK and Qt apps. This will mean that they can use their favourite desktop environment but still have the same look and feel. At the moment the motif (Netscape) apps look different from the GTK apps (the GNOME utilities, GIMP, etc) and the KDE apps.

    There's nothing much we can do about motif but it's use is decreasing so it's not too much a concern but having the same themes between GTK and Qt is the way to go.
    --
  • its primary real weakness... in the default GNOME setup, you have two conflicting interfaces: GNOME and E. I have to say that, while I like E as a windowmanager, I don't think it's an appropriate default GNOME wm. KDE's biggest strength is its presentation of a unified interface, since kfm and the rest _are_ integrated. wm independence sounds good on paper, but the wm is too central to the interface to build a unified look&feel without involving the wm. GNOME needs to come up with a small, GTK-based wm, that makes sense.
  • Well, the screenshots look awesome (drool...) but there's one thing about KDE 1.1 that really annoyed me: The default "single-click to open/execute." Despite RTFMing several times, I couldn't find any way of changing that to the "standard" double-click behavior. I know, I should've gone into the source and fixed things, but there were games to be played.

    1.1 also had some warning about "security hole in libmedia.so, so KDE's system sounds are turned off by default." If this were fixed, it'd be excellent--the standard system speaker beep gets really annoying. I also noticed that the old kvt doesn't seem to be on the panel. Have they finally managed to get konsole working correctly?

    And is there really a need for kfm to be able to run Java? It'd be cool, yes, but probably of limited utility unless you used kfm as a Web browser...

  • I am running KDE at the office, on a P120 and it does not come up quite as fast as my P2-300 running NT, but it is within a second or two. Sounds more like a probalem with the install, not the program itself.
  • the X protocol, running locally, is far far more efficient than a pipe. It uses shared memory. Pipes are much much slower than SHM.
  • I am not an X - Pert. (hehehe) :)

    Is it me, or does X seem a little sluggish...
  • If you'll notice Microsoft these days spends a LOT of time and effort on the _appearance_ of responsiveness. In fact you could probably say that they consider the appearance more important than the actuality. That's why Word's toolbar shows up long before it's ready to handle any clicks... if you click it during that time you just have to wait, but if you don't, it *seems* like it was ready for you.
  • It means you're not BOUND to future versions.

    I guess I didn't express myself clear enough. Imagine that 'you' is a software company that would like to embrace and extend the source code without giving away theirs. With GPL 2.0 this is suposedly impossible. But if a future version of it appears which contains a legal backdoor than the company in question could take advantage of it.

    Is this a danger only I am able to see or is it just my imagination?

  • Ok, enough with word games. I suggest eliminating
    the IP header to reduce message size. A pipe does
    not require headers, does it?
  • But let me refrase my point: if you had one server, you could hard code a good portion of your communication protocol to speed things up.
    I still don't get it (although you'll probably never read this since it's such an old article :) ) How can it be more hardcoded than..well..hardcoded? That is--we code into the code what bytes to send when (xlib) and what to do when we get them. And what does 'one server' mean?

    I hope you do not claim that X protocol is as efficient as a pipe.
    Well, on a local computer the X protocol uses filesystem sockets, which I believe are essentially fancy pipes. So there's no IP overhead, just the protocol itself. I freely admit that I don't know much about the low-level structure of the X protocol, but I believe that it's rarely used to draw single dots on the screen -- in those cases you use SHM. Higher-level structures -- like boxes, lines, text, and server-side pixmaps -- are much more common and bandwidth-efficient (you have to send relatively little information to specify a box compared to what the server does with the information. Pixmaps cached on the server are even better)

    When I said there'd be no reason for client server architecture, I meant precisely that the user would not have a choice of servers but one server only.

    I still don't get this. You mean we'd throw out all XFree drivers except one, or that there would be a single canonical implementation of the protocol? Neither one sounds like an especially good idea to me -- the second is more reasonable but not so good as a way to get a new standard (pretty much every common protocol I can think of has multiple implementations)

    I still think that a web page stating flaws in X is necessary.

    The main things that spring to mind are an ugly font-handling system, a need for better authentication systems, and inflexibility in color-handling. XFree could use a good, intelligent tool for picking the Right Video Timings, but that's their problem, not a problem with X in general.

    I still feel like you're confused about something. Basically -- you have to have a client-server architecture anyway, pretty much any protocol can work over multiple transport mechanisms (TCP/pipe/local socket), and all the different protocols are already in libc and don't get paged in unless you use them so it doesn't make X any larger. And UNIX sockets are efficient enough for anything but extremely high-bandwidth stuff (think pixmaps and Quake), which is what SHM is for. Not supporting network is just unnecessarily crippling your server.

    Daniel
  • I was going from the high-level approach, thinking
    that every bit of flexibility has its associated
    overhead. Thus, removing networking would gain me
    something if only .1% faster execution.
    One approach would be to compile X into
    programs and to pass requests on the same stack.
    I have a large HDD and can fit 20 times what is
    there now, so many chunks of X code lying around
    would not be a problem for me. But I agree that
    this is ugly and has its own problems.
    However I do not see anything wrong with using
    shared memory for every last bit. It'd be faster
    and could only be done locally.
    Lastly, I am starting to agree with a position
    that we need to move to openGL-based rendering,
    or in some other way move display management into
    hardware. Software is just too slow no matter
    how efficient it is.
  • It was sort of hinted at by the mention of Konqueror's capabilities, but possibly the most important improvement in KDE 2.0 will be the inclusion of KOffice [kde.org]. Apart from the spreadsheet which is somewhat low-key, the tools ( word processor/DTP [kde.org], presentation [kde.org], vector graphics [kde.org], formula editor [kde.org], etc.) look to be, if not directly feature competitive, at least in the same ball park as the big guys. And KOffice uses KOM/OpenParts for embeddablity (is that a word?).

    Not to take away anything from any of the other free software projects...but these guys truly amaze me; they are taking on Microsoft, not with words, but with deeds.

    --

  • I guess this means you don't know what XAA is, and you don't know how XFree 4 and AX/MetroX are set up.
    • XAA (X Acceleration Architecture) is being reworked by the XFree86 Group for XFree 4 to help speed up many common drawing operations. A version of it is already implemented in XFree 3.x's XF86_SVGA server.
    • MetroX/AcceleratedX do not have "device-specific" servers, they have modular drivers that the server loads at runtime to support the display device(s) in your system. XFree86 4.0 will work in the same way (with an ABI so that modules can be provided that will work on XFree86, no matter what x86-based Unix(-like) system you're using).

    I'm assuming you weren't aware of most of this. Now you should be.
  • There is more GUI competition within Linux than the rest of the computing world put together.

    Correction, you mean UNIX, not LINUX!

    Linux is not the only OS that can run KDE, Gnome, etc... Don't count my IRIX and FreeBSD boxes out yet, I am quite happy with them, and have no intention of converting them to Linux.

  • X is efficient, flexible, and runs completely separately from the kernal. Its networked display capabilities have still not been matched by Windoze or the Mac. Xlib has served as the basis for Athena, Motif, Openlook, GTK, and QT interfaces. What more could you want it to do?

  • They haven't agreed on a common use of CORBA, yet, AFAIK.
    One reason is that the Gnome guys use some kind of proprietary protocol to do
    the authentification (implemented directly in ORBit). I don't say
    they're wrong, but it's a problem when you want to use other ORB than ORBit.
    --

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