Ben Mazer write a not-so-positive review of the KDE 3.2 beta. It can be found here. Our recent KDE review is here. Elsewhere, RangerRick now has a preliminary KOffice port (with some Qt font/drawing issues still to fix) to Mac OS X in addition to the recent Konqueror port.
Review Of KDE 3.2 Beta; KOffice on Mac OS X
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
what tha hell is this guy doing? The only thing taht should be faster is the generation of thumbnails.
This is a humble request to the editors of OsNews that they consider ignoring external reviews written by laypersons who mean well but whom are woefully biased.
If you want I could write a counterpoint to this review, as a devout KDE user, which is equally biased in favor of KDE. I’m sure folks would LOVE to read it. While you’re at it, why don’t you link more Mac reviews written by staunch Windows XP users, and more Windows XP reviews written by devoted Mac users. Then we could have the mother of all flame wars
Sean.
“The default setup was using 99% of my RAM at all times.”
Nope, this is the common confusion in the output of free(1). This reviewer is not taking into account the cache and buffers used; there’s no way KDE is using 255 megs of RAM.
“Not to mention that KDE’s “Start Menu” is rather useless.”
Depends. This review was mostly about pointy-clicky superficial aspects of the desktop; any power user would know that KDE’s menu includes proper alphabetical keybindings (as seen in IceWM and Windows 95). This means you can open an app from the menu easily — GNOME includes a weird, non-standard variation which means you still have to reach over for the cursor keys.
People have opinions, and this guy has his own. If you don’t agree with him, fine, but don’t shoot the messengers for posting a submitted story.
Obviously, others believe that his review was fair, others don’t. That’s true for any review of any thing. There are always people will praise a product and others who will shoot it down. Deal with it.
Yes, if you want to write a full review of KDE (not counter-arguments to other reviews please, but a full review of your KDE experience the way you perceive it), we will publish it for you.
the not so positive review is expected from a beta. I hope all problems are fixed. Personally it doesnt suprise me that it hogs uber memory lol. though 99% is skeptical. O and btw im the one with the not so right mind that actually likes kerimak!
and they even have the global menus!!!
the port seems to have moved pretty quickly. I can’t wait to download it…now if they would port Kate, that would ROCK.
>the not so positive review is expected from a beta. I hope all problems are fixed.
Unfortunately most of the problems this user has with KDE (clutter, konqueror but the kitchen sink) is not a problem of a “beta”, but the default usage of KDE. These are not “beta issues”, it is the way KDE is. It was meant to be this way and the user, simply, doesn’t like this way. And I have to agree with him in many places, as you probably read on the second review we link in the story.
“KDE 3.2 is large. It is by far the most complex beast I have ever reviewed, keeping in mind that I’ve reviewed whole linux distributions.”
>>>>>>>>
Funny. KDE is part of most distributions. Thus usually distributions can not be less complex than KDE or did he only review distributions without KDE?
“One annoying bug which I hope gets fixed is that the taskbar hiding button doesn’t seem to work. I can click to my hearts content, but nothing happens.”
>>>>>>>>>
I suppose he means “Minimize” as there is no “hiding” button. But this is working for me, why not for him?
“The old theme, Kerimak was disgusting.”
>>>>>>>
Disgusting? I can understand that Keramic doesn’t appeal to everyone but disgusting? Such a word doesn’t seems appropriate for a serious review.
“Except that a few lesser-used apps still have non-anti aliased fonts. I have no idea why, but they do. ”
>>>>>>>>>
Hu? I think me use apps which are not part of KDE 3.2 or his system is badly configured. He should have listed those “lesser-used apps” at least, so that I can check those.
“The default setup was using 99% of my RAM at all times.”
>>>>>>>>>
With buffers and cache or without? 😉
“The Wallet – This is very nice. It basically password protects ALL of your passwords for every application.”
>>>>>>>>
Really every application? Well, maybe for KDE 3.3.
“No person will use half of these options.”
>>>>>>>>
Wrong. I and others actually do use all of these options.
🙂
“Tabs don’t work as well.”
>>>>>>>>>
Anyone knows that he means? I don’t.
“In fact, gooeylinux.org looks horrible in Konqueror. The page is completely standards compliant.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I just checked the page at validator.w3.org at it is not valid and not completly standards compliant. So either he lied or I am too stupid to validate a page…
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgooeylin…
At this point I stopped reading the “review”.
Kate IS ported: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/about/pictures/KDE/osxtheme.png
a) He has a 2GHz P4 with 256 MB of RAM?
b) He apparently doesn´t know how to read linux memory usage. He is obviously counting buffers/cache as used memory if he sees 99% sed RAM at all times
c) There is no bottom button in Konqueror.
d) KDE has used $HOME/Desktop for ages. If other apps start throwing stuff in there it is not KDE´s fault 😉
e) KMail does have the capability to use Bayesian mail filtering. In fact,it can use almost any mail filter you can think of. You do need to read the docs, though, because it is not easy to do.
f) He praises several apps, others he says are just plain, rthen he says “everything in KDE is bloated and unintuitive”. Well, I find your review incoherent.
g) One of the comments said the review was professional????
is that a Native Aqua version or an X11 version with an aqua theme?
also, if it is native, where can I get it? I have looked for a few weeks and have not found it.
He has a pretty good overview of some of the new features. I tend to like KDE more than he did, but I would definantly read the review… Here are my 2 cents on this one:
Kopete – It’s worked well for me. Control+Return sends a new message. It takes a while to get used to, but the way Kopete does it allows you to send multiple line messages. Not too bad really…
I am very happy to see KDE/Qt apps on OSX.
One thing I want to see fixed though, is the way Qt does emulation at the Aqua widgets and themes. When Trolltech did their Qt port, they emulated the widgets of OSX 10.1 (and still in a pretty amateur way) and they haven’t upgraded their widget look since then. The widgets looks bad, the text is not centered on them etc etc (check available screenshots). I hope Trolltech listens to this and fixes the problem soon.
yeah…if you check the file name…osxtheme.png
it is not a port.
so again, I will say….it would ROCK if they ported kate of aqua.
>is that a Native Aqua version or an X11 version with an aqua theme?
Native of course.
Being inconsitent also my impression about this review. In one place he’s talking about requiring you “a high tolerance for pain and data loss” for whole KDE, at other points he is excited about KGPG, Kate and KWallet, typical programs where you can loose data when they crash (compared to other programs types like a web browser). He seems to like extreme opinions.
blah, it *is* a port. The reason it’s called “osxtheme.png” is because up until now we’ve been stuck with keramik as the default widget style because kpersonalizer is not working. We hand-edited the kde configuration so it uses the native Qt Mac theme instead (hence the name).
It is using native Qt/Mac rather than Qt/X11 under an X11 server.
if kate is native then where can I get it?
lol. read second review now. i remember reading it earlier. Nice review though again, i’ll go against the slope and actually argue for massive features 😀 . Lol. Sure it can be better organized. Mandrake I think did a nice job with 3.1 However, I still want to retain options. I love options, the more the marrier, and hence if i want to zip a website, which isnt that far off if you like collecting layouts and studying them then so be it! I want it lol.
Woah, I didn’t realize this was on here.
Anyway:
Yes, that 99% memory usage includes buffers, but this was in comparision to XFCE+buffers and GNOME+buffers, so it’s fair. I should have worded it differently, though.
By “hiding” button I mean the button on the left and right side of the taskbar, that will hide the taskbar. It doesn’t seem to work in Beta2, or at least for me.
By “tabs not working as well”, I meant that I found them to be slower than other browsers, and not have as many shortcuts/features.
for “everything being bloated and unintuitive”, if you look at the apps seperately, some are very nice, but when everything gets put together, it FEELS unintuitive. I find that too much differs between apps. This is opinion though, and you may feel more comfortable with KDE.
The rest of the complaints are just differences in opinion. I didn’t like Keramik, but its OK if you did.
And as for gooeylinux.org validating, it validated when I posted the review. You’ll notice the errors are in a news post that was posted last night, after the review.
Currently, you can get it from source + the patches linked from the wiki at http://www.metapkg.org/wiki/22/
I’m looking into packaging stuff right now, but it’ll be a while before something user-friendly is anywhere near available.
No, it is not. You are simply counting memory not used by the apps. Don´t.
That size is mostly affected by how long your computer was on, and how many apps you opened, and what files you read. Not by the desktop.
Really, really, really, don´t defend it, you look worse.
I compared to a freshly booted PC with only the default apps running.
I tried to make sure I compared only default memory usage. Its not perfect, but its somewhat accurate.
If you wouldn’t jump on me, you’d see I said that there was no felt slowdown, so memory usage wasn’t a big deal.
Also, on XFCE4 right now, with a bunch of apps running, and 3 hours of uptime, I only have 200MB of memory usage.
> most apps do not close when you press the close button or exit, they just go into the background.
Konqueror preloading? Applications docking in the system tray?
> Tabs don’t work as well.
Explanation?
> Also, by default, there is a sound for basically every click you make.
This is not the default and only happens if you select the highest eye-candy level in KPersonalizer. Don’t activate all whistles and bells yourself and complain after about it!
> This is especially disheartening, as there are sounds that SHOULD be there missing, like in Kopete.
What the hell? You can configure sounds for 8 different Kopete events.
> Applications are extremely inconsistent.
Disagree.
> Why do I need 3 different preference menus for each application? You never know where to find the option that you want.
Does he mean that you configure shortcuts with “Configure Shortcuts…”, toolbars with “Configure toolbars…” and the rest in “Configure Application…”? Why has he problems finding shortcut configuration then?
> This is especially a problem because KDE by default comes with lots of useless apps.
This guy would be a lot happier if he would have only installed kdelibs+kdebase+kdepim to have a GNOME 2.6 comparable application set.
> Kopete – It’s worked well for me. Control+Return sends a new message. It takes a while to get used to, but the way Kopete does it allows you to send multiple line messages.
IIRC you can define Return as shortcut for “Send Message” in “Configure Shortcut…” if you prefer that.
The problem with that site seems to be that the newsreader of the frontpage does not use the same HTML-output the rest of the site uses. It seems the problem is solely the one smilie that found its way on the front page. It is a minor detail, though, and I would really hope for a review where the writer isn’t accused of lieing and being a clueless idiot if some readers don’t like his opinion.
No, it is not accurate at all, because you are not measuring what you are saying you measure.
You say you are measuring the memory usage of KDE, and you are counting disk cache and buffers.
I won´t bother anymore, but really, don´t you see that?
You even say “KDE hasn´t gotten any lighter” and follow with a number that doesn´t measure KDE´s size.
If you don´t agree with me, that´s ok, it´s just that you are wrong.
by that do you mean end of 2004?
There are some things that jump out of you, it seems taht every feature that he liked he credits another DE for it first.
“The desktop in KDE has some issues. Now, KDE shares the same desktop (~/Desktop) as GNOME, so on the surface it appears to be a good thing.”
HELLO, KDE always has that path, it’s GNOME that didnt.
I’ve only skipped to see how long it is and just found that out. I will actually read it now.
> the way Qt does emulation at the Aqua widgets and themes. When Trolltech did their Qt port, they emulated the widgets of OSX 10.1 and they haven’t upgraded their widget look since then.
Call me confused. The KWord screenshot shows a tab widget with the tabs centered in the middle. I thought that is the new look of OSX 10.3? So you seem to be wrong with your statement.
It still does have some points that are reallly not exchibited on my system, like the ram usage and still some confusions.
“But there are lots of nice things about Konqueror though. The actual file manager can now have tabs.”
It had this before too.
But overall it seems like a decent review and brought up some valid points, though I still think that the author was misinformed about several thins as I mentioned. Still pretty fair.
No, I am not wrong with my statement. 10.3 does not have tabs anymore, it has button-tabs. Also the stripes on the background of the Qt windows are too strong, and fonts are all wrong etc.
Definitely not the look of Panther! Tabs are not centered that way (but vertically, in the middle of each tab).
Eugenia said it better than I did.
“By “hiding” button I mean the button on the left and right side of the taskbar, that will hide the taskbar. It doesn’t seem to work in Beta2, or at least for me.”
Works perfectly for me on kde 3.2 beta2 on gentoo. What doesn’t work is adding non-kde applications to the panel (unless they’re on the K-menu; at least it’s easier to edit that than in previous versions.) There’s a few annoying bugs, and KDE is bloated and not particularily secure, but it’s gotten faster, and I personally find it to be the prettiest desktop I’ve used, although some people here disagree strongly with that. Konqueror is something I have mixed feelings on; I used to hate it, but it’s not too bad as a filebrowser. audiocd:/ lets you rip music cds to wav, ogg, or mp3, which is sort of neat, although hair-raising in an application that is supposed to be a web browser, to me. Consistancy isn’t a huge issue to me; if I can click and it does something reasonably intuitive, I’m ok; I have no problems running firebird as my web browser even though it’s not QT based. Likewise, I don’t see the difference between aliased and anti-aliased fonts for the most part; I notice extremely bad fonts, but some antialiasing (not all) gives me a headache after half an hour’s use. People vary.
I never post to this, I usually just read, and whenever I use linux I use kde, and always liked it more than gnome, and the people who use kde are getting defensive here but the guy has a number of legitimate points.
The system sounds in KDE are AWFUL, I always found them annoying and unhelpful, I go to kde-look and look for a new sound theme but there basically is none.
There are too many programs included in the default kde installation, it never made sense to me why you would have 2 or more mp3 players in the installation by default. Microsoft doesnt distribute windows with more than one media player, and although wmp is a lousy program, at least there is only one, and you can get more elsewhere if you please. I still havent seen a media player that works in kde, the last time I was using it I gave up on playing video and installed kmplayer, which I think kde needs a native clone of.
The control centre is poorly organized, and seems to have a replication of configuration menus to those of program configuration menus…why would you put the same konqueror configuration menu in the control panel for kde when a konqueror user can access it from konqueror?
Keramik was ugly, and I dont know if that changes at all with 3.2, but plastik looks much better.
I always had some problems with kdes pdf program, colours or rendering being off, and unlike the rest of kde it seems to suffer from a lack of options compared to acrobat.
I dont know about konquerors new rendering, and I know kopete is in beta still so I wouldnt expect it to work as well as stable programs but both left something to be desired previously.
I could keep going but I could see where he was coming from with much of what he said, and I think it would be wise of kde developers to listen.
“Also, KPDF doesn’t seem to have the ability to anti-alias PDFs. KGhostscript does, but it it had trouble opening ALL of my PDFs. These PDFs have no trouble opening in every other viewer.”
KPDF isn’t really ready for primetime yet, at least not in the betas. KGhostView is still the way to go until it matures.
“And most importantly, MANY pages do not render properly.”
Yes, there are some regressions in Konqueror vs 3.1.x, because of the large changes to the HTML engine. By the time it is released, these should be ironed out, and rendering quality should be on a par with Safari, or even a bit better.
“I wish it would have an option to use “locate” instead. This uses the file database, and is instant.”
“Kopete – This is the instant messenger client. The word for it is buggy.”
This is due to its beta nature. The last stable version of Kopete is not buggy, and things should be fixed by the release.
“NoAtun/Kaboodle – These lack features. The interface is very clean, but that’s because it can barely do anything.”
Noatun and Kaboodle are pretty crappy. Noatun is the slowest media player on earth. JuK seems to be the popular one for playing audio files, and kmplayer or kplayer are better for video. kplayer’s icons are a bit weird, but kmplayer is very clean and to the point.
“An app like Juk is useful for its music sorting/searching capabilities, but if it cant recognize id3 tags properly, it’s useless.”
I personally thing JuK is wonderful. Its very straightforward and to the point. I always found iTunes a but cluttered :- But it seems to have no problem recognizing my ID3 tags, though I ripped all my CDs in Arson, so that might be the reason.
“If you can’t tell already, I find everything in KDE to be bloated and un intuitive.”
See, that’s what I don’t get. The review, up till now, was generally quite positive. Indeed, you complained more often about a *lack* of features, rather than too many. I agree the KDE interface lacks polish, but its a strech to say that *everything* is bloated an unintuitive. Lots of programs are rather polished (Quanta, KDevelop, etc) while many are not.
“Why do I need 3 different preference menus for each application?”
Have you ever used Visual Studio? There are like half a dozen places to set preferences, and the “Project Options” item moves every release. KDE is the first desktop to do preferences right — one menu dedicated to preferences, with things broken down into “general settings” “editor settings” “shortcut settings”, etc.
“Applications are grouped strangely, and you have to scrub the whole menu to find what you want.”
As opposed to the Windows start menu where things are grouped by… oh wait, they’re not grouped at all!
“This is especially a problem because KDE by default comes with lots of useless apps.”
KDE includes a lot of appications in its distribution, but you don’t have to install them all. Just install kdelibs and kdebase, and install any other apps you need seperately.
I generally agree with your conclusion, though to a lesser degree. I find KDE to be less polished than GNOME, but not to the point of unusability. Certainly, its no worse than many popular Windows apps. I’m staring at an IE window now, and I’ve got buttons form AIM, “Mobile Favorites” (whatever that is), Media (from my web browser???), etc. And don’t get me started on Word’s overabundance of toolbars and menus, and totally illogical menu placement (Page Setup under File instead of Format???). While Windows is hardly the highest UI polish bar to aim for, people seem to find it usable, so I don’t think KDE is *that* bad in comparison.
> KDE is bloated and not particularily secure
You mailed [email protected] your findings?
I am currently running KDE 3.2 from CVS, which has had a lot of bugs fixed from beta 2 already. Keramik has been revised, and is now the best looking theme (in my opinion) for KDE. I don’t like plastik. Keramik will be the default for kde 3.2 as well.
The crystal icons are being constantly improved. They truley are wonderful icons.
A lot of the menus and control panels have been cleaned up and re organised but without removing features like Gnome did. Some of the most obvious ones include the desktop, clock and style panels.
One of the best features is the improved Window Manager included in kde 3.2. It is more usable at higher resoloutions and include a lot of cool features such as borderless windows.
KDE is constantly improving and I am looking forward to the KDE 3.2 release. If you have any problems or complaints remember that it is still in beta and you should provide to the KDE developers to help fix it.
Many IM-client dont send with Enter. This guy should investigate before writing things like: “There is a reason no other IM client does it this way.”
Many ICQ-based Clients send with control+enter. Get a clue before writing “reviews”!
“Kfind – This may seem like an odd thing to bring up, but it’s still missing a feature I really want. Kfind is a GUI frontend to “find”. That means that it searches the whole harddrive in real time. This takes a VERY long time. I wish it would have an option to use “locate” instead. This uses the file database, and is instant. Something like this is really needed.
Again this is not true. Kfind the minute you open it, has at the bottom a checkable option “[ ] use file index” I really wish that this guy used KDE more before reviewing it.
To be fair to Ben, aka “Contrasutra” (on other Linux forums) – its just his own opinion as a lightweight Linux user – as to the appropriateness of allowing such “reviews”/opinions onto widely read sites, well, OSnews seems to support publishing personal views from lightweight users/others as long as they meet certain criteria and a basic level of adequacy/relevance – fair enough – gives the chance for the ordinary bloke/gal in the street to “contribute” at this level.
>>”Again this is not true. Kfind the minute you open it, has at the bottom a checkable option “[ ] use file index” I really wish that this guy used KDE more before reviewing it.”
I did not see that/realize what it was. I’m sorry. Is this a new feature in 3.2? Like I had said, I haven’t used 3.1 in a while.
As for the comments about me praising it and then saying its completley bloated/unintuitive, like I said earlier, as individual parts, KDE has lots of great things, but the way it is put together makes the interface get in your face a little too much.
I probably shouldn’t have been so harsh on some of my words.
“the last time I was using it I gave up on playing video and installed kmplayer, which I think kde needs a native clone of. ”
I’m confused. How could something be more native than kplayer? Yes it’s a frontend to another program, but mplayer is toolkit agnostic. Sure there’s an option to use gtk for a gui, but it’s not like anyone’s forcing that anymore than kplayer is being forced on anyone as a qt based gui.
Does anyone know if mouse gestures work? They don’t work for me by default. In KControl there is a KHotKeys section. But I’m not sure what to do with it. There is no help yet.
In his review, he claims that his website is standards compliant – and it is Konqueror with the problem, but checking the review page on validator.w3.org shows that his page is not compliant at all.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgooeylin…
Perhaps you could at least glance at the rest of the thread next time?
Please?
I can’t say that this review was very balanced or even well-researched. I have been using KDE 3.2 beta 2 at home for a week now and haven’t lost any data. I have had the odd crash, but that’s to be expected in a beta.
By the way, did you report any of the bugs you found at bugs.kde.org?
Everyone who complains about consistant interfaces…
Ctrl-Enter is the KDE default for sending a message be it Kopete, or Kmail. It can easily be changed to be consistant with other IM clients (but not the rest of KDE)
Konqueror is the fastest browser I have used bar none (including firebird, opera, and many many others (on faster machines no less)) and seems to render almost all pages correctly (one of the few that doesn’t is forums.bioware.com (and if you use one of those buttons (HTML Settings) and disable Javascript it renders ok.)
As for GooeyLinux.org’s front page, I see no differences between konqueror and opera’s rendering (aside from some style diffs, but that happens between the two browsers anyway)
Instability has not been an issue (and I have been using cvs builds since before beta1) (only if I do something stupid (which btw, gnome will also die on) like remove the hostname from /etc/hosts)
As with most reviews somewhat disliking KDE, Many haven’t used it that much, and more importantly: expect it to work the way MacOS/BeOS/Windows/GNOME/CDE do. After all, it’s the reviewer’s opinion, but so is mine to say that theirs is wrong.
Unfortunately most of the problems this user has with KDE (clutter, konqueror but the kitchen sink) is not a problem of a “beta”, but the default usage of KDE. These are not “beta issues”, it is the way KDE is. It was meant to be this way and the user, simply, doesn’t like this way. And I have to agree with him in many places, as you probably read on the second review we link in the story.
I thought editors should be unbiased? People posting here have the same right to either bash or praise the review as the reviewer has the right to bash or praise KDE. But an editor, I think should never take sides. I do not wish to offend Eugenia at all and would like to appologize in advanced if I did. This is just how it sounds to me.
My wish for the new year: Please read the reviews before linking them on your site.
I for one prefer to read reviews written by someone who actually knows what he is talking about but this simply doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Just some examples:
– KDE is more complex than entire distributions he reviewed? Yeah, sure.
– KDE is using 99% of memory? There have been a lot of posts about this point and the claim is simply wrong.
– Now, KDE shares the same desktop (~/Desktop) as GNOME? It’s the other way around but you are right that it is annoying if this leads to problems but I don’t see why this should be kde’s fault.
– Pressing enter will not send an instant message, but start a new line. There is a reason no other IM client does it this way? As has been pointed out before this is simply wrong as there are many IM clients that behave that way for a reason. If you don’t like it, simply change it.
– Kfind. He wishes it would have an option to use “locate”? It does. Sorry, wrong again.
– KDE comes with to many apps installed by default? And again I’m wondering who is forcing these people to install all those apps they don’t want? If you don’t want them don’t install them!
– One thing that must be mentioned is that Konqueror is SLOW? One thing that must be mentioned is that this is simply WRONG. I’m mainly using firebird and Konqueror and there is no speed difference as far as I can tell at least on my system.
“the last time I was using it I gave up on playing video and installed kmplayer, which I think kde needs a native clone of. ”
“I’m confused. How could something be more native than kplayer? Yes it’s a frontend to another program, but mplayer is toolkit agnostic. Sure there’s an option to use gtk for a gui, but it’s not like anyone’s forcing that anymore than kplayer is being forced on anyone as a qt based gui.”
Ok, if thats so, thats great, but why then isnt it in the standard kde distribution, and why isnt the effort going into making it the standard player? I had to emerge it separately from kde, is that going to change?
Everyone who complains about consistant interfaces…
Ctrl-Enter is the KDE default for sending a message be it Kopete, or Kmail. It can easily be changed to be consistant with other IM clients (but not the rest of KDE)
Konqueror is the fastest browser I have used bar none (including firebird, opera, and many many others (on faster machines no less)) and seems to render almost all pages correctly (one of the few that doesn’t is forums.bioware.com (and if you use one of those buttons (HTML Settings) and disable Javascript it renders ok.)
As for GooeyLinux.org’s front page, I see no differences between konqueror and opera’s rendering (aside from some style diffs, but that happens between the two browsers anyway)
Instability has not been an issue (and I have been using cvs builds since before beta1) (only if I do something stupid (which btw, gnome will also die on) like remove the hostname from /etc/hosts)
As with most reviews somewhat disliking KDE, Many haven’t used it that much, and more importantly: expect it to work the way MacOS/BeOS/Windows/GNOME/CDE do. After all, it’s the reviewer’s opinion, and which desktop people use is their choice.
I would like to see someone who is extremely knowledgable with KDE write a review or article enlightening me on what is so great about KDE.
I honestly feel uncomfortable with KDE and I chose to use fluxbox, then start kdeinit and then use KDE apps such as KATE and Konqueror file manager. (Apps appear to load faster this way than when I actually startkde, of course preloading in KDE 3.2 will enhance all this further).
I won’t say there are inconsistencies in KDE, but it needs a thorough polish.
eg. When in Konquorer File Manager mode, do not give me options for konfiguring web browser stuff. That is definate clutter.
Konqueror has the idea of explorer.exe and is supposed to be better technically, but the UI has polish problems as I just mentioned.
PS: Does anyone have a clue why LAN Browsing in konqueror does not work in Fedora Core 1 or any redhat release prior to this. I always start the Lisa service but it still doesn’t work. This is with either a Personal and/or Workstation install.
http://www.gooeylinux.org/ …
http://www.home.fh-karlsruhe.de/~meja0011/tmp/gooeylinux.org-mozill… mozilla1.5
http://www.home.fh-karlsruhe.de/~meja0011/tmp/gooeylinux.org-konque… mozilla3.1.4
Can’t understand why that “looks horrible in Konqueror”.
Thats not yet konqueror3.2 but sould be quite the same in html-rendering.
s/mozilla3.1.4/konqueror3.1.4/
Actually, the site looked fine in Konqueror 3.1. We tested when building it.
The main problem with Konqueror 3.2 is that the background colors aren’t there. Looks odd.
So yeah, I guess some major rendering changes were made.
I agree with a lot of the review’s content, particularly about KControl (hint, hint, try settings:/ in konqueror) but it was somewhat unprofessional.
– For example, quoting from the review..
> Since this is an early beta, the instability was expected, and I won’t talk about it any further
So why did the reviewer talk about it later?
Also, I noticed quite a lot of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. Just going through the article once more would have fixed much of these.
Here is an example of how tabs look on OSX using Panther and Jaguar… also notice the dimming of the stripes between Panther and Jaguar.
on Panther:
http://www.digitalcalamity.com/software/CalcAssist/screenshot1.jpg
on Jaguar:
http://homepage.mac.com/hohmug/osx101/101g.jpg
I hope the KDE/Mac team gets around to fixing this, as well as making the toolbar handle different (no standard one I beleive on OSX.. perhaps use MS Office v.X’s one).. also make the toolbars dock/float at the TOP of the screen by default, instead of the window (too much Windows-ish like..). From other Qt/Mac applications I’ve tried, Qt 3.3’s is nearly there in everything else.
Yes, major rendering changes were made in 3.2. Much of Apple’s Safari code was integrated, and a lot of other changes were made by the KHTML team. The regressions should go away as bugs get squashed in KHTML.
shame the guy who did the port of Koffice to Qt/Aqua all that time ago, as seen here http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/archives/000072.html, didn’t keep the code around, when it comes to Qt people are forever reinventing the wheel to try and get around some problem or other, just look at those people trying to port to win32 so that GPL’d Qt apps can exist on win32!
Desktop – The desktop in KDE has some issues. Now, KDE shares the same desktop (~/Desktop) as GNOME, so on the surface it appears to be a good thing. This is especially annoying with the “Start Here” button that is on every GNOME desktop. This does not work in KDE. Since KDE knows that GNOME has this, they should hide it by default, or make it open up the KDE Control Center. Having it just be a broken file is not very professional.
This isn’t a problem as you can just change the path in the Control Centre (System Administration > Paths) to something else like .Desktop so that you don’t get the broken GNOME items.
When is this project ever going to get some traction.
http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/index.html
I hope some developers can help this developer out.
” Now, KDE shares the same desktop (~/Desktop) as GNOME, so on the surface it appears to be a good thing. This is especially annoying with the “Start Here” button that is on every GNOME desktop. This does not work in KDE. Since KDE knows that GNOME has this, they should hide it by default, or make it open up the KDE Control Center. Having it just be a broken file is not very professional.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A sollution to this problem was already proposed on KDE’s mailing list. But it has to wait for until after KDE 3.2
Huh are you talking to me? I think you got your subject headers mixed.
A few months ago, I put my two nephews (12 and 14 years old) on Slackware, with KDE as their desktop. Their father banished Windows on the home network after being riddled with viruses. How did the boys take to KDE? Like ducks to water! OK, I guess they must be a special case of those people that can handle non-intuitive interfaces? Yeah right. How come every time something new comes out with KDE, all these Gnome hacks who wish it was as good as KDE get on this site and start running the most popular GUI down? And it’s always the same dumb argument about hid. Well Gnome may have hid, but I don’t care for any of the rest of it. I find it slow, boring, and limited in configurability. Oh, by the way, I put Gnome on the 14 year old’s PC. His verdict? “Lame”.
umm….that is the exact same port that was linked to fool.
I’ve seen a lot of people on this board claim that the writer is biased against KDE, but I just don’t see it. The author gives KDE credit for what it does well (speed, Plastik, SVG icons, Kate, etc.) and complains about things like poorly organized menus, lack of consistency, and overabundance of options. He even takes a shot or two at Gnome (poor speed, SVG icon support). Aside from the memory non-issue and HTML rendering issue, I think the review is mainly giving his opinions which doesn’t necessarily indicate bias, just preference. The fact that I’ve seen the same opinions in other reviews indicate that others share similar preferences.
Well, the reviewer likes almost all apps, yet later everything is unintuitive.
The memory is a non issue, except that he says KDE is bloated. When someone makes a claim that can be measured, and his only objective support is obviously wrong, it´s an issue to me at least.
He even says it is bloated, but responsive. How is it bloated then? I mean, if bloating is not related to responsiveness and memory usage, what exactly *is* bloat?
Size of the binaries on disk?
i think you people are misunderstanding the Desktop!
the folder Desktop was adopted by KDE and then by Gnome, and it is a standard as specified by the freedesktop.org
Sadly, KDE launchers/shortcuts are different from the GNOME ones, so some icons may be broken. BUT, instead of using the desktop for shortcuts, if you use it to place real files/documents whatever, then it works perfectly. Leave the shortcuts for the menus and the panels
The two reviews about KDE 3.2 beta 2 have their points, but I think the second one (from Eugenia) merits more attention according to its good quality.
The problems section is very good read, as it should give KDE developers ideas to consider and points to look at that otherwise could pass unnoticed to them.
The problem with the too small spacing between words in menu bars, and the lack of some kind of line separator between toolbars should be taken into consideration, as the usability/aesthetics of the apps suffer a lot (as seen in picture 1 of the review, http://img.osnews.com/img/5410/kde1.png ).
On the other hand I don’t think the big amount of options in the KDE control center is a problem, though the organization of the main categories in a big tree makes things hard to find at times. I prefer the organization of categories as an icon view (by icons in a panel), like in GNOME or in the detailed view of winXP.
Also, the 3 or 4 theme-related options currently scattered in the Control Center should be unified under one option, maybe using one panel with 3 or 4 tabs for them, like in GNOME 2.4, or in some other coherent way.
Anyway, the clarification of the controls, possibilities and such in many Control Center categories are very welcome, like in Background or Screesaver.
Overall a very good review that should deserve more comments and attention.
(Ah, I also think the Plastik theme looks very good and should be the default, though ThinKeramik in KDE 3.1.3 is not bad -once the bubbles around window titles are removed :-).
“What KDE really needs is a “Start Here” like GNOME. It has all the common settings well organized and easy to find.”
How nice! If the start-here of Gnome would actually work properly… the built-in start-here:/// includes a link to another built-in named “Server Settings” – which strangely doesn’t exist.
Yes, Gnome might be very consistent, very clear, but it works like hell. On the two computers I tried 2.4 on, the Sound Recorder crashed at startup. But the error dialog was fully HIG-compliant. How useful… not to mention that Metacity sometimes switches to a seemingly random window when you close a dialog or message box.
Additionally, I have not had any problems with viewing his review using Konqueror, and the fonts of KDE looked great even in 3.1.