The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1.4, a maintenance release. This release provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and two security vulnerabilities in KDM, among other fixes.
KDE 3.1.4 Released
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It seems like very little is fixed to be posting an update.
My poor dialup connection. 🙁
a) The changelog is not complete and will likely never be. Perhaps it will be populated within the next days.
b) KDE offers xdelta diffs of the source tarballs troughout the whole 3.1.x series.
Even if the changelog is not complete, you should take into account that this is a maintenance release, not a major release. Probably only security/bug fixes. Any exciting new feature probably will be delayed until KDE 3.2 (due november I think).
What exciting new features are in the works? I don’t follow KDE very closely, but it seems like GNOME has been getting the lion’s share these days: Dashboard and Storage come to mind. What have the KDE hackers been up to?
(It seems so trollish, sorry. I ask this honestly. Inform me.)
-Erwos
Well, I was comparing it to KDE 3.1.3. That had 10x more fixes/features.
And I never though that the changelogs weren’t updated
I’ll give them a while before I complain. 
True. This is only a fairly minor maintenance release from the 3.1 branch. Development has been steady; 3.2 will be a huge improvement in every way. Currently, it’s supposed to be done in December, but I wouldn’t count on it.
> What have the KDE hackers been up to?
– A new MDI system that can switch between a canvas with sub-windows, seperate windows and tabs on the fly. Brings consistency to many apps, too.
– A comprehensive wallet sub-system for storage of passwords and such.
– Huge improvements in the KHTML layout engine.
– Many, many, many speed improvements in Konqueror.
– Much improved tabbed browsing and sidebar panel support in Konqueror. KSVG has moved into kdegraphics, so Konqueror will display SVG natively now.
– A major rewrite of the window manager, KWIN, for compliance with freedesktop.org standards and better handling of multi-head scenarios. Relevant to that, the style preview in KControlCenter is now capable of previewing window decorations.
– KMail has become *a lot* snappier. Many new functions, too. And let’s not forget Kontact, a personal organizer including mail functionality from KMail.
– Usability improvements: Some uncluttered context menus (more to come when the release is nearer), fairly consistent setup wizards for many applications.
– Inclusion of new software like Kopete, a multi-protocol instant messenger, KGPG, a great GUI frontend for GnuPG and Umbrella, an UML modelling tool. Some others, too.
– Let’s not forget KDevelop and KOffice. Though released independently, we have the same guys working on these apps. KDevelop is a world-class IDE, and KOffice has seen nice improvements since version 1.2. Much better import filters, for example. And there’s a new app that’s going to be included in the future, Kexi, a database management frontend with support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Oh, and there’s Quanta. Quanta will have a working WYSIWYG editing mode in the next major release.
That’s only some things that come to mind. It’s almost impossible to summarize. There have been literally hundreds of thousands improvements, optimizations, additions and bugfixes. KDE is a pretty big software project.
KDE 3.2 (I’m running the latest CVS, so this is from my experience with it) has a few cool things in the way of new features:
1) Kontact is KDE’s answer to Evolution and Outlook. Its very nice right now, but the non-mail components need a little work. Earlier releases suffered from kind of a schizo feel, because the Kontact app itself is just a KParts housing for seperate mail/address/etc components, but recent releases feel nicely integrated.
2) There’s kwallet, which is a desktop-wide system for managing passwords and personal information.
3) Some nice apps like Kopete and JuK are now part of the KDE project itself. Both are great apps — Juk in particular is a great media jukebox that doesn’t suffer from the “doesn’t look like anything else on my desktop” problem that WMP and MusicMatch do.
4) KSVG is incldued, which should allow SVG icons and widget themes.
5) My personal favorite — the menubar can now be docked in a panel, so you can set it to hide out of your way when its not in use.
There’s tons of other stuff — I haven’t used 3.1.x in so long I really can’t remember what else has changed
Check out the weekly CVS digets if you’re interested.
The biggest change in 3.2, though, is massive amounts of polish. Everything is much faster — on my machine redraw is non-existant in most apps, including complex ones like KOffice and KDevelop. Even Konqueror is catching up to IE in the redraw-speed department. Menu clutter is down significantly in many apps, though some, like Konqueror and Kate, are still closer to Microsoft than to Apple.
Both Dashboard and Storage are not part of the GNOME project.And there are a bunch of improvements for KDE 3.2.
Also, usually the changelogs show very little of what is actually fixed.
Hey,
I’m running kde cvs. However I can’t find where to set the menubar to be macos style.
Help?
Taras
Heh. That’s pretty funny. They moved it! I had it in my settings file for a long time, and I didn’t notice when they moved the configuration.
Hope it will be in Debian/SID asap 🙂
Ah, here it is! The option has moved to Desktop->Behavior. It actually makes sense now
Anyway, if you want the autohide behavior, set the MacOS style menubar and add the “Menu” applet to a panel. The menu applet will automatically capture the menubar and you can put it wherever you want.
Can’t wait until KDE 3.2 is released. Hopefully very soon KDE will be completely X11 free so that all one requires then is qt rather than having to compile X11 as well which would be snappier responsiveness on the Mac and other non-X11 platforms 😉
Try doing a little research first.
You don’t want them to use X11? OK, then KDE will magically cease to work on every video card out there.
There is a reason X11 is a standard.
Not to mention ALL of KDE would have to be rewritten from the ground up to use some magically new standard thats going to appear somewhere.
Actually I think he may have a point I saw Kate and I think KDE itself running on the Mac without X11. You obviously need it for Linux, but KDE itself is not tied to linux, rather to QT which works with Quartz and GDI.
I may be wrong in some of the details, but the statement that KDE is not tied to X11 directly may be true.
There are some X11 dependencies in KDE. Mostly the window management, of course.
I think he’s referring to getting X-less KDE running on Windows and Mac, which aren’t terribly good XFree86 ports. KDE on UNIX should still use X, because its a standard, and with recent releases of KDE, performance is excellent.
PS> If you have a performance issue with X, please post your configuration. FYI, my configuration is the following:
Dell Inspiron 8200
2GHz Pentium 4-M
640MB of RAM
4200 RPM 30GB hard drive
64MB GeForce4Go
Gentoo 1.4
KDE CVS (September 7)
ThinKeramik KStyle
I don’t think that the changelog (as shown this moment) is too short for a maintainance release.
> I don’t think that the changelog (as shown this moment) is too short for a maintainance release.
It has been updated – it only had five or so entries at first
.
Try doing a little research first.
You don’t want them to use X11? OK, then KDE will magically cease to work on every video card out there.
KDE -> QT -> X11
Most of KDE compiles against qt without the need to call X1ib, however, there are parts that make direct X1ib calls. IIRC, a poster a while back pointed out that KDE was trying to make their code completely xlib independent so that KDE fully relies on qt meaning on then can recompile it against qt for Mac or Windows.
That is what I meant by my original statement:
“Hopefully very soon KDE will be completely X11 free so that all one requires then is qt rather than having to compile X11 as well which would be snappier responsiveness on the Mac and other non-X11 platforms ;-)”
There is a reason X11 is a standard.
Not to mention ALL of KDE would have to be rewritten from the ground up to use some magically new standard thats going to appear somewhere.
Read before you post please.
You wrote…
KDE -> QT -> X11
Most of KDE compiles against qt without the need to call X1ib, however, there are parts that make direct X1ib calls. IIRC, a poster a while back pointed out that KDE was trying to make their code completely xlib independent so that KDE fully relies on qt meaning on then can recompile it against qt for Mac or Windows.
So are you sayig that one day I could replace explorer.exe with KDE version?
That would be cool.
So are you sayig that one day I could replace explorer.exe with KDE version?
That would be cool.
Yeap and once QT for Windows is opened up, however, what would be even better is stripping NT right back to its kernel and build up from there 😉
The magic changelog now includes dozens and dozens of fixes!
Speed, speed, speed
And comparing to 3.1.0 even CVS HEAD has less bugs.
Last time I checked, KDE had over 5000 bugs. When KDE-3.1.* was released, it had about 2500 bugs or so. Your statement above confuses me.
KDE doesn’t have over 5,000 bugs it never did, it has close to 5,000 bugs, (missing about 300 bugs) but these bugs are not all confirmed. The number of confirmed bugs and wishlits is 3,300 .
KDE 3.1 was released with about 2,500 confirmed bugs, not total bugs. If you would count the unconfirmed number of bugs it wouldn’t have been very far from 5,000 either.
In addition, a large number of bugs are found after release so just because it was releaed with about 2,500 bugs does not mean it didn’t actually have 5,000.
I also see people who submit bug reports for KDE only to find that once they replace their shoddy memory modules they find that the problems no longer persist. A while back a user was complaining about SuSE Linux instability and KDE bugginess, I then asked him to run memtest86, 1 day later he admitted that he had a shoddy memory module which was causing the problem. Once he replaced the offending memory module, all the instability and buginess spontaniously left.
X-less KDE will be availible soon. It’s from http://www.directfb.org. They are working to replace Xfree with directFB. Someone is working on a QT port.
But it only works on some video cards. Matrox are the best supported, followed by ATI and the NVIDIA support isn’t good.