Along with the development environment, Datschge and Henrique Pinto look at the large number of new KDE apps, the project structure, and even the philosophy behind KDE. If you are thinking about checking out KDE 3.2, are a long-time user, or just want to know what’s up, this review has everything you need to know.
KDE 3.2 Review at ArsTechnica
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Rather than give a comparison to previous KDEs, Gnome, or the user experience it gave a comprehensive summary of the KDE community, history of the project, technologies, etc..
KDE is coming along well; functionality, core modular design, less clutter from one release to the next, and more polish on areas that were once far too complicated. I hope that this trend continues as they move towards a 4.x version in the far future.
That being said, I do still prefer the less “in your face” visual design of most Gnome apps in comparison to their KDE kounterparts. Take for example this screenshot of Kontact http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/kde-3.2/kontact.png
Its very, errm, colourful with everything in the interface in a seemingly cluttered manner. Compare the application to Evolution and there is no competition.
Now, I am a Gnome user and perhaps prefer the “less is more” look and feel. Do the KDE users out there actually prefer this colourful and cluttered look? Or is it just appear cluttered to me because of the apps I’m used to?
That’s a good question – I think all depends on what you are used to. I’m a KDE user (and fan) – and to me, the new, more colorful changes are pleasant, especially in korganizer.
Well, what you see as clutter is mostly due to starting kontakt. If you start all those apps separately, than I think you would find the interface clean and easy to navigate. At least, my girlfriend didn’t have any problem finding her way through korganizer. I don’t see the advantage of starting everything together, most of the time, you’ll work in one window at a time. What matters is the underlying integration of these parts (kmail/korganizer/ for instance). BTW – you can start the koffice suite similarly (the koffice workspace), but for what end? Anyway, this is just rant, for who says you have to start it that way? Its just an option…
Almost a week ago I upgraded from FreeBSD 5.1 to 5.2, I was to lazy to make it earlier. I had also decided I would try to get away from all those toolkits and just try to use ONE, and since the code quality and layers of code seemed better/less for KDE I decided it was the way to go.
So since 4 days or so my machine happily runs KDE 3.2 and a few other apps instead of evilwm/ratpoison and a weird mix of apps. Even konqueror seems usable, so I haven’t had any need for mozilla yet, I guess Apples safari have given KHTML quite a push.
Back in the days then I was considering one of those snapshot-desktops I was against KDE quite a lot because it looked way to much Windows and Gnome look so awesome, however I didn’t liked the approach at all end ended up with the minimalistic windowmanagers instead.
But as had already been said I run KDE now and love it, the apps are great, everything works together, there are nice IDEs for the environment and after quite a lot of tweaking it also looks great:
http://hem.bredband.net/johkru/kde9.png
http://hem.bredband.net/johkru/kde10.png
Thanks a lot to the KDE team and ogalaxyo for explaing quite a bit of both gnome and kde earlier.
“don’t see the advantage of starting everything together”
>>>>>>
I often change back and forth between korganizer, kmail, and knode. With Kontact it is convenient to have to start only one application and then be able to easily change between the different components. I see no advantage in having kmail, korganizer, and knode open as standalone apps all the time. With Kontact I have less clutter in the taskbar. 😉
Also the different parts are not loaded until you actually use them, so kontact is not the big memory monster some people think it is.
Regarding the colours: I too like them more than this grayish look of evolution. But at least with Kontact (or KDE apps in general) it’s very easy to change the colours the way I like.
@Hagge – for the first time, Konqueror became my default browser. I would remove Mozilla allthogether were it not a dependency for mplayerplug-in (wich bothers me a lot – using FreeBSD 5.2 myself as well). I also noticed that now my favorite kde icon-sets are in ports (under ports/x11-themes).
Andreas wrote: “I see no advantage in having kmail, korganizer, and knode open as standalone apps all the time. With Kontact I have less clutter in the taskbar. ;-)”
Good point
And the nice thing about kde (one that some folks in the ‘other’ camp fail to see as advantage) is that it lets us have both our ways.
You could use KMplayer instead of mplayerplug-in, does the same (and a lot more), doesn’t depend on Mozilla, and integrates nicely with KDE and Konqueror.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jjvrieze/kmplayer.html
use if, also tried kaffeine but it’s damn slow on my machine, I’ve had the same problems with xine on a sun a long time ago, is xine crap or what?
I got the themes and stuff from kde-look and others, didn’t checked/thought of x11-themes..
I am supprised that kcalc (the calculator program) does not have an obvious square-root function. I know one can raise a number to 0.5 to get the square root, but this is not so obvious to many [ordinary] folks. I wish this could be changed.
Cb..
that’s just a good looking site. (appearance wise)
Ditto Charles,
Infact I thought I saw a square root function in the source of KDE 3.2 ……. It looked to me that the square root function was there but there is no obvious way to use it.
I’m just starting out learning C ( I know QT is C++ ) so I must have obviously been wrong.
:>(
inv+x^2
I don’t know about kde 3.2 but in 3.1’s kcalc you just have to click Inv + x^2 if you want to use square-root. IMHO there _should_ be a button to do this directly.
The article made my try juk aswell, excellent application, away with xmms ;D
I think inv x^2 is straightforward enough. But the buttons should display their inverse functions like hardware scientific calculators do. Maybe somebody does not know that sqrt is the inverse of x^2.
Thanks for the tip. Does it work (with apple.com trailers for example)? Not that mplayerplug-in works right now. I know I had to do something with it while using Mandrake a year ago to get it working. Anyway, all I can see now is a box inside the browser (both mozilla and konqi) with playback controls, but actually nothing happens when I press play. BTW – portinstalling kmplayer right now
I’d like to say that it was a great article detailing many fundamentals of KDE operation! that the piece appeared in ArsTechnica is a sign of KDE and Linux being recognized as viable solutions for the desktop.
This is indeed a great article.
It really summarized well the architecture behind kde.
Maybe somebody knows off hand the answer to the following question.
Why is d-bus being developed if dchop exists. Is this due to a technical problem
or is it some other issue such as politics or licensing?
> that’s just a good looking site. (appearance wise)
If you don’t mind the big advertisements, which are mostly flash, and so keep popping up nice little annoying windows telling me to install flash, then yes.
I’m glad we don’t have those things over here at osnews.
I love ars, I eagerly await their linux.ars every months or so. I use the adblock plugin for firebird/firefox to block all ads on their site. It looks better that way, all black, so you can concentrate on the text.
Hi
DCOP is a kde specific framework for messaging. DBUS is a very similar technology that is meant to be shared by free desktop applications and is actively incorporate into gnome. Licensing was not the reason for this change. integration is
Rahul
This is precisely the kind of evangelism that KDE needs. They even have pretty box diagrams showing the KDE architecture. In my experience, people *love* box diagrams. That explains why all the Longhorn and OS X articles are always full of box diagrams
Yes, kmplayer 0.8.2 supports Click-To-Play, as well as Javascript.
I’ve been using KDE more often lately. I like many of the DE’s and WM’s available for Linux (spending lots of time in PekWM), but there is one thing about Konqueror I haven’t figured out. The drop down history list found on the back button seems to be just part of the graphic and doesn’t work for it’s intended purpose. I’m figuring there is a go back in history function everyone else uses, but I haven’t found yet. I’m not a history window or keyboard fan.
Just hold down the button for half a second, and the back history will pop up. KDE drop-down buttons aren’t like XP ones — there is not a seperate part of the button that activates the drop-down.
Thank you for that tip, I would have never figured that one out. That pretty much solves my only KDE issue. Cheers!
GNOME seems unwilling to face the future and help make its technolgoy interoperable. KDE developers have already made the GTKQt engine which lets GTK applications look like Qt ones.
The Fuse Gateway allowing non KDE applications to use KDE’s powerful Kioslaves.
The QtGTK library also integrating GTK and Qt.
KDE also plans to adopt D-BUS in KDE 4 in order to provide a universal DCOP like standard.
GNOME on the other hand seems disinterested in the progress of desktop Linux as a whole.
I also don’t like their elitist attitude.
as Rahul said, one goal of DBUS is to promote integration across the application stack. however, this doesn’t just include GNOME, it could be used by any GUI app/framework. for that matter it is useful for things without a GUI such as the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) currently in development and eventually perhaps things such as more conventional/common daemons, e.g. web servers, database servers, etc.
additionally, DBUS addresses certain issues DCOP in its current version doesn’t such as network authentication/ transparency.
so DBUS aims to simultaneously improve upon the DCOP design while increasing it’s availability to non-KDE/non-GUI applications so that they can integrate better with KDE (and vice versa)
“That being said, I do still prefer the less “in your face” visual design of most Gnome apps in comparison to their KDE kounterparts. Take for example this screenshot of Kontact http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/kde-3.2/kontact.png
Its very, errm, colourful with everything in the interface in a seemingly cluttered manner. Compare the application to Evolution and there is no competition.
Now, I am a Gnome user and perhaps prefer the “less is more” look and feel. Do the KDE users out there actually prefer this colourful and cluttered look? Or is it just appear cluttered to me because of the apps I’m used to?”
How is that cluttered? Kontact IMO has a pretty clean UI, more so than Evolution too.
I just checked out Hagge’s screenshot, very nice, everything blends so smoothly
To bad it’s not the default look ;D
Anyway, in KDE you can set:
* Window decorations
* Widget style
* Icons
* Wallpaper
* Color scheme
* Special background for the bottom panel
* Special background for konqueror file browser
So there are not only “themes”, if there are anything you don’t like just replace that part, for example I’m not found of the keramic widget style which is grey with “golden” scrollbars, but you could easily just get a blue color scheme and the golden scrollbars would be blue instead..
Same for the bottom panel, thought it took me a while looking out for a window decoration which would make it darker at first before I noticed it never changed color and apparance