KDE has come a long way in usability, stability, compatibility, and features since I first used it. The latest release of the KDE, 3.2.1, was released March 9. But for this review, LinuxPlanet initially looked at KDE 3.2, which shows that Linux is increasingly competitive on the desktop.
Koming Back to KDE: What’s New in KDE 3.2?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Especially KHTML. There were large changes to KHTML betwen KDE 3.1 and KDE 3.2, and I saw almost the same number of posititive changes between KDE 3.2.0 and KDE 3.2.1 even.
Also, the Plastik style is getting more and more refined. In CVS, there are some very nice changes to the scrollbars and menus. KDE 3.3, with a new theme manager, simplier konqueror profiles, etc, along with the new kcontrol3 that is being developed, is going to rock
I’ve never really liked KDE and avoided it over the last few years for a reason I could never quite put my finger on. Gnome was just okay and was my preferred desktop simply because it seemed simple and easy to customize. Gnome’s attraction was not from any abundance of features or well integrated applications. And KDE just didn’t seem to have the right stuff.
When KDE 3.2 came out, I decided to give a try on my Gentoo Linux system. I couldn’t believe it. It was absolutely beautiful, and I had to respect the team that put the beast together. For one it was much faster than I had every experienced KDE before, very responsive. I loved the shell terminal. Everything loaded so surprisingly fast that it left me wondering what dark trickery the KDE team had done to make such obvious improvements. Configuration was much more intuitive than I remembered too. Graphics and window redrawing seemed grandly improved. Overall, the system was very spry and responsive compared to the Windows XP that I duel booted to. It actually gave Linux a really good feel and added yet another reason to prefer it over XP. Even Gnome seemed slow in comparison. Obviously I stick to Gnome for some preferential applications, and I still like what it offers as alternative, but KDE does an excellent job of presenting a solid, competitive desktop for Linux systems.
Everything is very well integrated, from office programs to PDA syncing. It’s a huge improvement over what I last remembered about it.
Although I still don’t like some features. For example, the file browser window looks way too “busy.” For the most part I prefer simple a simple interface. But I’ll forgive KDE for that. It’s doing well, and I hope the KDE team succeeds in going somewhere. One thing is for sure, they are a talented bunch of people that seem to know how to work together.
I still absolutely, positively abhore the default widget set on KDE (I forget what it’s called). Those buttons are so big, clunky, and garish, I still can’t figure out what the designer was thinking. I’m no user interface expert, but those widgets just seem to be evil. But since that can be configured too, I’ll forgive them there also.
I hope they keep up the good work. And I hope the Gnome team keeps working to keep competitive. It’s good for them both.
The widget style that I so strongly disliked was “Keramik.” I love the Plastik set. It is indeed excellent.
We use Solaris 9 at work, and Sun has recently started distributing KDE 3.1 on the companion CD; we installed it and the guys all love it, compared to any other cranky desktop on Solaris (crippled Gnome 2.0, CDE, OpenWindows). Hopefully someone will distribute KDE 3.2 with the next update of Solaris 9; this could “save” desktop Unix for us, against the tide of clueless Windows die-hards now filling our Unit.
I use the KDE built packages for woody but there isn’t a 3.2.1 download for debian. Have KDE stopped making packages for debian?
Hi
Kde binaries are never made by kde project although they list available source which are made by the distributions or other third parties. debian kde packages are available in the unstable tree
regards
Jess
but on this page, http://kde.org/download/ , there used to be a link to a debian resource but not since the release of 3.2.1
was there some definate choice made to discontinue support for debian or has the maintainer just stopped making binaries for woody?
Check here (search Woody):
http://dot.kde.org/1078855423/
Most importantly
<paste>
Re: Debian Woody
by Richard Moore on Friday 12/Mar/2004, @18:19
Ralf is busy with family stuff at the moment, please don’t bother him.
Rich.
</paste>
Looks like that real-life stuff is getting in the way.
But don’t grab the unstable debs, they are AFAIK completely different then the Woody ones (also why there were no unstable debs for 3.2 and why I couldn’t just grab the Woody ones).
Hope that helps!
“Hopefully someone will distribute KDE 3.2 with the next update of Solaris 9; this could “save” desktop Unix for us, against the tide of clueless Windows die-hards now filling our Unit.”
KDE base and libs 3.2.1 are available at blastwave.org and hopefully the rest of the packages will be uploaded by the maintainer soon
wow! a geek has a life outside of computers! i suppose i’ll let him away with it
Let us all remember that Woody and Sid packages have different rules.
For Woody building packages is a fairly easy thing to do, barring personal problems, since it is not a moving target.
For Sid you have several issues.
First, the KDE Maintainers wanted to make sure that the latest KDE 3.1.x security fixes make it into Sarge (Testing) for the anticipated Summer release. What does that entail? Making sure that ALL KDE 3.1.5 packages make it into Testing for ALL of Debians supported architectures. If I recall correctly that is upwards of nine architectures. This takes time.
Second, getting KDE 3.2.x into Sid wasn’t a walk in the park either. The ‘make it work’ on all architectures thing applies here as well. KDE is a fairly large beast, and it has to compete with other packages making it into Sid while depending on some of the packages it competes for time with. They also had to wait for KDE 3.1.5 packages to make it into Sarge. While the work on getting 3.2.0 into Sid was being done it became clear that 3.2.1 is going to be fairly soon and it was decided to skip 3.2.0 entirely and go straight to 3.2.1 for Sid. There were 3.2.0 debian packages available while that happened as well, available through the people.debian.org sites for the respective developers, as well as through the experimental repositories.
Oh, and along the way the KDE maintainers decided that several changes were needed in the debian directories used to help compile the packages so they spent some time reworking these in order to make the KDE 3.2.x series suck a wonderful thing on Debian.
This should go a long way towards explaining why there were 3.2.0 packages for Woody, and none for Sid, and why there are 3.2.1 packages for Sid and none for Woody.
If you really want to know all this stuff be really nice to the KDE maintainers for Debian, subscribe to debian-qt-kde form the debian mailing list and read more than you post, and hang around #debian-kde on freenode and read more than you type.
For what it is worth I am not a Debian Developer, nor a KDE developer, all mistakes are mine, with fervent apologies to all for making them to begin with.
Has anybody else checked out the “Active Heart” style that came out today on kdelook? I think it looks extremely spiffy. Its a great evolution of Keramik, and retains Keramik’s original flavor. The only thing missing is a nice, soft, panel outlike like Plastik has.
I don’t know Rayiner, it is a bit too much for me. Too heavy on the widgets. Plastik has just enough texture to make it stand out better, yet remain pleasantly flat.
From the article:
“KDE 3.2’s usability and performance has improved. One of the first changes I noticed was significantly better speed in application start-up times and Web page rendering.”
From KDE is Getting Better…. by John Reimer:
“Everything loaded so surprisingly fast that it left me wondering what dark trickery the KDE team had done to make such obvious improvements. ”
According to ArsTechnica’s Overview of KDE 3.2 http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/kde-3.2/kde-3.2-09…. :
“Thanks to Valgrind http://valgrind.kde.org/ , hundreds of optimizations were made to KDE 3.2, making it the fastest and most memory-efficient KDE released so far.”
This http://builder.com.com/5100-6375-5136747.html is an interview with the main developer, Julian Seward, and helped me understand how valgrind works.
I too find KDE 3.2.x faster than previous versions and I am pleased that we can get software with more features with better performance.
Considering the amount of work it takes to make it pretty, it seems to me like Unix must be pretty ugly
Those of you who have Mandrake 10 installed should give Galaxy square window decoration a try. It rocks in combinaton with Plastik as a style.
This is the most usable configuration that I have ever come across.
Does anyone know how to turn on the system wide spell-checking that also works on forms such as the one that osnews use?
I had it working on KDE 3.2 and Mandrake 9.2, but somehow lost that ability on MDK 10.
KDE is prefered in Europe and South America because it is more similar to Windows, making transition soft.
I don’t see how KDE is difficult to configure. This can be made easily opening the KDE Control Pannel and select some checkboxes and other widgets. Even a dumb windows user can make it.
The only problem with KDE I see is the Qt license.
Gnome 2.x is much better than 1.x but it is no better than kde 3.x.
> The only problem with KDE I see is the Qt license.
Yeah a big problem that QT was put under GNU/GPL
A lot of problems would like it to have a propritary license such as EULA 
But yes the rest is simply right. KDE offers a lot of stuff that makes it just amazing. A true Desktop solution.
s/problems/people
What Marcelo probably means is that Qt is GPL instead of LGPL. It’s an issue that’s not going to go away. That’s why you see many corporate desktops going Gnome instead of KDE.
Real companies that do serious developments have no problems calculating the license cost of 1550 USD in their final calculations and forward these investigations to the end customer. I am talking here about serious companies who spent millions in payment of their employees and projects. Not a garage company with 2 people who can’t even do basic calculations. If companies have issues doing basic calculations and writing correct bills for their customers then there is something wrong in their overall company strategy.
SUN, HP, Novell spent millions for nothing every day. 1550 are peanuts. They say YES without even thinking longer than 1 second about it.
Nope, it’s not the money that’s the real issue. Corporations have a problem with relying on a small Norwegian company for a toolkit. Not only that, but if this was MS then people would be up in arms. Think about it. You don’t have to pay MS a nickel to develop c/c++/c# applications. Just download the SDKs. You pay for the IDE, and with that IDE you can develop as many applications as you want without paying MS licensing fees. Now you can bury your head in the sand and act like it’s not an issue but it is. Since your german, I know KDE is some kind of national pride thing for you, but the rest of us are realists. Paying $1500 per developer/per application is a non-starter for many companies. The best thing to happen would be for somebody like Novell or IBM to buy trolltech and LGPL it.
Hi
“Corporations have a problem with relying on a small Norwegian company for a toolkit. Not only that, but if this was MS then people would be up in arms. Think about it. You don’t have to pay MS a nickel to develop c/c++/c# applications”
QT is a very good toolkit and you do have to pay MS for several sdk’s and IDE. can you imagine developing .net apps without vs.net?.
proprietary software companies like adobe and opera have no problem paying up. its superb documentation plus support.
its also cross platform unlike MS. so stop your whining
regards
Jess
…and you do have to pay MS for several sdk’s and IDE
Nope, you don’t have to pay for the c++ platform sdk or the .NET sdk. Better go check MS’s developer website before saying such things. http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/psdk-full…
Hi
“:and you do have to pay MS for several sdk’s and IDE ”
I was not talking about the c++ sdk. In windows the product itself is paid and giving away the sdk isnt a big deal. In Linux we have several competiting toolkits. its like saying glibc comes for free with windows. what do you want trolltech to do. lgpl qt and go out of business. what commercial gtk apps do you have out there compared to qt’s innumerous ones?
let me see you backup your arguments with products
regards
Jess
Jess
There are what, about 3 whole shrink-wrapped apps out there for Linux. I’m not talking about shrink-wrapped apps. The vast majority of applications aren’t shrink wrapped. For example, we do custom client-server/network protcol conversion stuff. Frenquently, we have to send out diagnostic apps to clients in order for them and us to monitor the software. Each one of these is slightly different since this is custom stuff. We’re not going to license a toolkit for each developer for each app that we send out. Lots of companies do stuff like this. These apps have a common infrastructure but are customized for a particular clients needs. Personally, I would like to use Java for these apps, but since we’re not allowed to distribute the JRE with our hardware Java becomes a non-starter. I hope to use Mono and .NET for this type of stuff in the future – it’s a lot easier interfacing with native code anyway.
By the way, I use KDE exclusively on my dekstop at work and think it’s great – for those that think I’m a Gnome user that wants to bash KDE.
hi
They are only 3 shrink wrapped apps?
You know what I was talking about proprietary apps not just shrink wrapped stuff
ok. what about other proprietary apps
jdk is a non starter. how are you going to bundle .net then?. this is precisely the reason why .net wont take off immediately. its needs to be there within windows which will only happen when longhorn is out there.
if you want to have a quality cross platform toolkit using native widgets with support and documentation you got QT as a option for proprietary apps to buy and use. its a one time license for the company. If you dont want to use it choose gtk but dont whine because QT isnt lgpled. It wont happen anytime soon and KDE still remains very popular. Where proprietary software developers really wanted a good toolkit they dont have a problem with buying QT and they have just did that. Whats your choices. GTk?. WxWidgets?.
They havent choosen it even when it was available for zero cost?
why?
go figure
regards
Jess
We won’t bundle .NET obviously, but we can bundle mono. Those that have the .NET runtime can use it on windows and those that don’t can just use the app on the linux boxes we ship.
What’s wrong with wxWindows. Borland is now contributing to it. I’ve used the bindings with pnet and they’re pretty nice. If wx.NET would just get rid of the MFC macro stuff and do some delegate/event type stuff it’ll work very well.
By the way, if the GPL is so great then why are the KDE libs LGPL….hmmm? The KDE foundation(or whatever the legal body behind it is) could dual-license the KDE libs.
Right! To stay competitive they have to invest. And those who see QT the fittest for what they do, are also prepared to spend ten times more for every licence.
Hi
“By the way, if the GPL is so great then why are the KDE libs LGPL….hmmm? The KDE foundation(or whatever the legal body behind it is) could dual-license the KDE libs.”
GPL is suited for QT. KDE foundation choosed lgpl because they liked it. By your logic if nothing is wrong with Wxwidgets why are their other toolkits like QT and oh my god why do these people pay for it.
What will you do if MS decides to get royalty for its RAND patents on .Net. Ditch Mono?. Recode your apps?. If nothing is wrong with wxwindows why dont you use that buddy. what?. it isnt fitted for your apps. right. thats what I was talking about. GPL isnt fit for everything. it has its place. QT is fine as dual licensed toolkit. want their software for proprietary software. go pay them. Dont want it or going to develop free software apps. choose qt or other toolkits
KDE foundation is about having a free software desktop. They dont want proprietary apps and are not going to dual license it. I am suprised that a KDE user could be so naive about their own desktop software.
I shouldnt have bothered responding when you said there are only three shrink wrapped apps when I was talking about proprietary apps on the whole.
For a brief description of license types
http://www.berlecon.de/studien/downloads/200207FLOSS_Basics.pdf chapter 2.1
KDE is actually licensed under many licenses according to this
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/licensing.html
referenced on the next page of
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2.0-development/ch…
which states that if Trolltech were to go away then “the last free version of Qt would automatically be re-licensed under the BSD free software license.”. E.g. companies need not be anymore concerned with using Qt (from a small norwegian company) than with any other OSS like GNU software.
Whatever the license, Trolltech is not in the game to give away for free their invention that they spend money on developing. But if you do not make money on your work then they don’t require money for their work. Those terms are already much better than the EULA. If GNOME were to use the same dual license then …
But I agree that the best that could happen is for someone to purchase Trolltech and remove the last ties from Qt. I would like to see OSDL take it over. That would make everybody happy. Like Novell bought SuSE. SuSE was $120 mill. I wonder what Trolltech is.
KDE foundation is about having a free software desktop. They dont want proprietary apps and are not going to dual license it. I am suprised that a KDE user could be so naive about their own desktop software.
Haha. So you say KDE doesn’t want proprietary apps, but they LGPL’d the libraries! Why not just GPL it if they didn’t want proprietary apps. The Kompany does have proprietary apps that have KDE dependencies and if someone buys a Qt license then they can produce proprietary apps for KDE too – completely closed source. Next time do your homework because you make such statements.
SuSE was $120 mill -> SuSE was $210 mill.
Trolltech would most likely be a lot less than what was paid for Suse. You know IBM has a super secret home-grown distro of their own in the works…supposedly. It would be great if IBM bought Trolltech and opened up Qt. They could set up an eclipse type project and also provide some resources for KDE.
I have been using KDE for long time now. It has many nice features and many nice applications like KMail and Kate. GNOME is also very comfortable nowadays even if it’s not so feature rich as KDE.
However, I have recently started to look these desktop environments from application developers perspective. If you select KDE/QT you can choose C++ or Python (not sure how mature and powerful this binding is). And the license of your application will be GPL. In case of GNOME there are plenty of languages to select from. For GTK there are Ada, C++ and Python bindings supported officially and over twenty “unofficial” bindings.
So, the choice is not only choice of toolkit but language and license.
Everytime KDE is mentioned on OSNEWS, some people start complaining about Qt’s GPL license. Is Qt’s GPL a valid concern and if yes, for whom is it a valid concern?
First, GNU was founded to replace properitary UNIX environments by free software. The GPL was created to ensure that the GNU UNIX environment remains free. The LGPL was later introduced to allow some commercial programs to be developed for the GNU environement. But for good reason the LGPL was initially called “lesser GPL” and people were discouraged to use it. To summerize: the GPL is the license that should be used to ensure that the free GNU environement remains free. The LGPL should be allowed if one likes to allow for commercial development and closed source software.
I personally think it is a good thing that Qt is under GPL. I don’t want to see a lot of commercial software for Linux. I think, open source software is a very good thing and free software and in the case of KDE, a free desktop environement, should remain as free as possible. Commercial software is not a good thing for the open source community. It might boost the acceptance of Linux in the short run, but will damage the open source movement in the long run.
Now for whom LGPL is good? Of course it is good for companies that want to take free software developers work and develop properitary software. I don’t understand why people, especially Linux people think it is a good thing if companies take free software, develop properitary products, sell their stuff, make more money because they don’t have to pay for the toolkits etc. and give nothing back to the community. The GPL forces people to give something back to the developers and the community, the LGPL does not. For me this is a very bad thing. Either noone makes money with software or everyone does, but companies taking the work of free software developers and making money with it sounds pretty unfair to me. I guess, most people who advocate that are not actually open source developers.
If we really want to have properitary software, why not just take Windows or Mac OS X. Why do we need a free kernel if we don’t care if the rest of the desktop environment is not free?
Now to the special case of Qt, which is dual licensed. If you see the money you have to pay for Qt as a fee for not developing free software, what is wrong with that? At least from the point of view of free software advocates? Peronally, I really think that the Qt licensing scheme is fair and I don’t want this license scheme to be changed just because KDE then gets more market share. I don’t think it is a good thing to sell your ideals for market shares.
Well, you do not like to see too much commercial software for Linux, but I do, and so do many people. I think the problem is tha tsome people’s notion of free, as in speech, is very wrong in this case. How can Linux be really free, if you do not allow people to sell apps that run on Linux. I assure, there are kinds of software that will not be made for free because there is a huge maintenance cost at keeping them current.
Visual studio.net costs like $500. It comes with support for c++, c#, VB and provides much much more than Qt. Yet it is cheaper. Whilst Qt might be worth it in some cases, I think its value is frequently overstated. There are also many free alternatives on Windows to develop if you do not want to purchase VS.NET. All you need is a windows license, and you can get the sdk which is the most important thing. With the sdk, you can install #develop for example, which is free as in GPL, and you are good to go for .NET development. At no extra cost. To develop using Qt on windows you need to pay a lot. No wonder Qt on Windows isn’t so hot.
But when you have mono, arguably better than Qt on Linux, free, suddenly the value proposition is even less compelling.
Usually that Qt-has-a-bad-license argument is brought up by people who are not touched by the license at all (for example because they are no developers or at least don’t need a commercial license)
Well, is here any _ISV_ who couldn’t affort Qt? Following the userlinux mailing list (where at least at the beginning some ISV were subscribed) it showed that more ISV choose actually Qt instead of GTK+. This stupid Qt-License myth should really die. It’s usually just a non-issue.
“Now to the special case of Qt, which is dual licensed.”
>>>>>>>>>>
WRONG!!!! It comes in _three_ licenses. They are GPL, QPL (why do people constantly ignore QPL?) and the commercial license. Once again: many people speak of Qt’s license which never have read it. 🙁
Ultimately, QT’s licensing allows for large companies to develop happily, and for us to develop GPL’d apps happily.
The only thing it doesn’t allow us to do, is create shareware and as people mentioned, garage companies. This is intentional, because Trolltech wanted small software to be free.
Because Visual Studio is so frequently pirated for Windows, if a Windows user wants a piece of webcam software, they have to pay. If they want a good FTP package, they have to pay. When I’m developing VB apps, I needed a good FTP and an HTTP component, and an image processing library (simple rescaling). There weren’t any good free components out there, and so I had to pay £200 for them. Given a week, I could have written them myself; they were easy code… But I just didn’t have time.
Windows is blighted by shareware these days, and QT’s licensing prevents Linux from becoming the same.
P.S. As to the idea that corporations don’t want to rely on a small Norwiegen company for their toolkit, they want even less to rely on GTK’s creators, who freely change the entire toolkit on a major revision and are still instigating big changes. Moreover, these are people who have no ultimate legal responsibility, or are being funded by Sun and others, whom many of the corporations searching for toolkits are competing against.
“The only thing it doesn’t allow us to do, is create shareware and as people mentioned, garage companies. This is intentional, because Trolltech wanted small software to be free.”
>>>>>>>>>>
I think the Trolltech fathers didn’t like the idea that everyone could just grab their work, use it to make and sell some closed software, make profit and Trolltech would have nothing from it. Well, I too don’t want that others take my code, change it, sell it, and give nothing to me back. Thatfore they should pay me or give back their code changes. IMO that’s only fair.
Regarding Garage-companies: Troll tech has a program for very small (i.e. poor) ISV which can not yet affort the price. But I don’t know the details. And even for small start-up’s the price of Qt pays if they can develop more efficient and ship sooner.
“As to the idea that corporations don’t want to rely on a small Norwiegen company for their toolkit”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Also take a look at the Trolltech’s site. Even large corporations like Volvo, General Motors, Hewlett Packard and many many others seem to have no problem on releying on that small Norwiegan company for some of their projects.
Take our company for example, we’re a small company tailoring propietry applications for vertical markets. Lately we’re seeing a demand for Linux versions as well, so we needed to change from using Delphi (kylix is not good enough and discontinued).
We wanted to use QT for crossplatform devel (win+linux, and OSX would be nice as well). Note that BiDi support is very important to us (and wXwindows and GTK+ aren’t good enough in a cross platform way).
Since we need database access as well, we need to Enterprise version of QT. The DupPack on QT for 2-5 developers costs 3380$ PER DEVELOPER. If we want to target OSX as well, a license costs 4480$ PER DEVELOPER (and they’ve raised the prices lately).
Those pricings are insane, and no way affordable by us. So we chose Java instead (although we wanted to use QT). JBuilder enterprise for example costs ~half than the trio pack (we chose the developer version, since it’s more than enough for our needs, we costs even less), and gives you a complete devel enviroment, wuth dbSwing added to the mix, and the resulting code runs on the platforms.
How can companies like us afford QT ?
Very good choice.
>The DupPack on QT for 2-5 developers costs 3380$ PER DEVELOPER.
>How can companies like us afford QT ?
First ting, do realy all the developers need to work on both platforms? You can cut cost having the main development done on one platform, and a few developers doing the crossplatform porting.
Baring you beeing from a 3rd world contry, the cost of Qt are ONE-TIME. So for lets budget it as a 2yr investment you get a cost something like 4-8% of the developers pay. Including other cost like officespace, computers, taxes, administration etc it becomes an even smaller pice of the cost you have running the company. If the company can’t afford it, the company are in trouble anyway.
Hi
“Haha. So you say KDE doesn’t want proprietary apps, but they LGPL’d the libraries! Why not just GPL it if they didn’t want proprietary apps. The Kompany does have proprietary apps that have KDE dependencies and if someone buys a Qt license then they can produce proprietary apps for KDE too – completely closed source. Next time do your homework because you make such statements.
“‘
I said KDE themselves dont want to develop proprietary apps. Dont laugh without understand what you read
Jess
The GUI responsiveness and drawing was good in 3.1, and has improved even more in 3.2.
However, startup time of everything has become worse, at least on my PIII 850 MHz laptop. There’s no way I would say otherwise. The only exception is that konqueror is now kept in memory so that sometimes it will just start immediately.
Everything else starts slower by at lest 2-4 seconds. For
reference, I was using the packages for SuSE 9 which I installed via apt.
Hi
The startup has actually improved very much for all the apps.valgrind has really been used all over.
“Well, you do not like to see too much commercial software for Linux, but I do, and so do many people. I think the problem is tha tsome people’s notion of free, as in speech, is very wrong in this case. How can Linux be really free, if you do not allow people to sell apps that run on Linux. I assure, there are kinds of software that will not be made for free because there is a huge maintenance cost at keeping them current.
”
Free can mean two things english
gratis/zero cost or freedom
GNU means freedom not zero cost. There is no seperate notion of free. You can sell apps in Linux but if want to use QT to develop proprietary apps buy a license or use some other toolkit.whats your problem
regards
Jess
$1000 per head? This is expensive for me personally. How could I start a software company of 5 programmers which would need to make money on software? For example, what about a consulting company that produces business applications? This is just expensive.
QT is a much more responsive toolkit than gtk2, and I prefer c++ over c for application programming, so I wish there was
something out there for personal use.
Would about fltk?? It is licensed under the lgpl and is c++.
“The startup has actually improved very much for all the apps.valgrind has really been used all over. ”
Can you specify your equipment?
My experience is otherwise and I can’t understand how anybody could say definitively.
I wait at least 2 more seconds on average for apps to display themselves in kde 3.2 on a PIII 850 laptop.
Every other day..give it a rest people!
Hi
I use a pII with 128 MB of ram. real low end system.
License cost is not 1000$ fixed rate. Trolltech has negotiated prices available. You might try contacting them specifying your requirements if you really interested in getting QT.
That said there are other toolkits available
GTk, WxWidgets, FLTX, Fox toolkit and several language bindings for each of thesee. QT is the only one thats commercial and under GPL. The others are under LGPL or something similar. A comparison article was available in freshmeat. google for it
QT is attractive for full cross platform nature , documentation and support from trolltech and its a c++ based toolkit. If these are not attractive choices you can choose some other ones mentioned above. Remember that KDE libraries themselves are available under LGPL and they dont restrict you against GPL incompatible licenses like PHP or for proprietary software development.
regards
Jess
First ting, do realy all the developers need to work on both platforms? You can cut cost having the main development done on one platform, and a few developers doing the crossplatform porting.
So yu at least agree that the value is even less in that case. The Java solution enabled you to get much the same tools for all the developers for much less.
I tell you, once mono is up to speed, Qt shall have a tough time justifying its high prices. and mono is right there already. It works and there are apps to prove it already.
Since Qt is licensed per developer, a company really needs to have all its developers using the same tools. You cannot say developer so and so does not work on win32, when he is working on the same app.
Hi
”
I tell you, once mono is up to speed, Qt shall have a tough time justifying its high prices. and mono is right there already. It works and there are apps to prove it already. ”
Buddy. MS has patents on everything under .NET. its licensed under RAND and MS can charge a royalty for it anyday. If you dont like QT use GTK, Wxwidgets, FLTK or fox toolkit. mono is just a legal minefield unless you get your lawyers to confirm otherwise.
regards
Jess
Does anybody here know what happened with the “Stop Animations” context menu for images in Konqueror 3.2.1?
This great feature was the only reason I prefered Konqueror to Mozilla for day to day browsing, but it seems to have been removed. WHY?
Oddly enough, in CVS, it appears to be still there, only in the root context menu, not the image menu. Doh!
That’s even better.
Thanks!
When Microsoft is selling Visual Studio .NET, they aren’t selling an API. They are selling an IDE. And to sell and IDE, they have to compete with other IDEs, like Borland. The API however is free, and the last I checked, so is the SDK. And why shouldn’t it? They make their money from selling Windows, not from selling licenses to their API. Their APIs becomes Windows selling point indirectly, because applications that uses those APIs would run on Windows.
QT however isn’t using the API to help sell another product. Their API/toolkit is their *product*. Any other things, from KDE using it to cross-platform capability is just features used to help sell it. If they offer Qt for free, they don’t make money from KDE in the similar fashion as Microsoft making money from Windows. Sure, they can sell IDEs, but anything that would fit OSI’s guidelines for a open source license and would meet the approval of the blokes at FSF would open up Qt to competition. In other words, theKompany could easily build and sell their IDEs. IBM can do that to, and the same with SuSE. Heck, anyone can do that – just like how Borland can build an IDE for .NET with far less restrictions.
Profit potential? Nyet.
Remember, Trolltech has to fund their developers. They don’t get paid by nice compliments. Or good deeds. They are paid by pure hard krones. Giving Qt for free to commercial developers ain’t gonna help that, no?
P.S. Personally, I would love to see some big company buy out Qt instead of wasting money (enable flame shield now) on GNOME/QTK. They get a good API out in the open, decrease in a subtantial amount their development cost and increase the allure of Linux for ISVs by making it easier to maintain one main branch of development for three platforms. Trying to get GTK to technically match Qt anytime soon would take more money.
Yep, I too would like a big company buy trolltech for a lot of money. The developers could make out bandits and work on open source for the rest of their lives if they wished – or work on whatever the new parent company wants them to work on. I don’t decry Trolltech for charging money for their product. Duh. Unlike a lot of the KDE fanboys I actually want people to make money off of open source. Notice all the comment around here about KDE and qt don’t want proprietary apps running on the platform. That’s a bunch of bullshit. Probably socialists.
Hi
“Unlike a lot of the KDE fanboys I actually want people to make money off of open source. Notice all the comment around here about KDE and qt don’t want proprietary apps running on the platform. That’s a bunch of bullshit. Probably socialists.”
We only ask people to pay QT if they think they want the toolkit to develop proprietary apps or use an alternative toolkit. The moment trolltech is bought by another company QT would automatically fall under BSD if that ever happens.
One more thing. Free software has nothing to do with socialism.
check gnu.org/philosophy.
Either under it completely or just shut up
regards
Jess
Application startup is faster for me (P3-450MHz)
2-4 seconds is *a lot*, this is a known problem if your /etc/hosts doesnt resolve properly… Make sure your network and hostname are all set up correctly.
Hi
“Stop getting your panties in a bundle Jess.”
Namecalling?
How cheap can you get ?
regards
Jess
Hi
I dont need to work for them to ask you to pay up or shut up. If ever i see you around here getting cheap with name calling and sexism you dont deserve to be a discussion on licensing.
Get the troll out of here Eugenia
regards
Jess
>>
Application startup is faster for me (P3-450MHz)
2-4 seconds is *a lot*, this is a known problem if your /etc/hosts doesnt resolve properly… Make sure your network and hostname are all set up correctly.
<<
Thanks for the advise.
Actually, it’s much worse when the /etc/hosts doe not resolve right. This is more of a system problem then a kde problem. It happens under gnome as well or even if one attempts to login through a console. Perhaps it has something to do with pam?
Seriously, the startup time is slower for me for kde 3.2. For example, it takes konsole 1-2 more seconds to appear from the time I click on it. The same goes for konqueror when clicking to get to my home directory.
If you say it’s 3.2 is quicker than 3.1 in terms of startup, perhaps the packages for SuSE 9 were compiled with debugging symbols and other things. I don’t know for sure.
Maybe I should compile myself, but kde takes a looong to compile.
We have no problem paying for a product (heck, we’ve bought JBuilder copies), the problem is with QT’s outrages prices (see my previous post here), which hold a very high barrier for commercial QT/KDE and cross platform development (like sepcialized apps for vertical markets).
I dont need to work for them to ask you to pay up or shut up. If ever i see you around here getting cheap with name calling and sexism you dont deserve to be a discussion on licensing.
Ahh, so even though you have nothing to do with Trolltech you now can decide who has to pay up? haha. “If you ever see me around here…”. Hmm, I didn’t see the announcement that you now work for OSNews. Try again hon. Also, work on the english.
Hi
If you think QT pricing is high dont buy it. use an alternative toolkit. Dont deride it because a lot of people buy it and use it for good.
When people decide to talk about panties I dont need to work on my English. Stop being sexist and avoid name calling.
I am not telling you to buy QT but if you need to use it in a proprietary environment you got no choice. You can use an alternative toolkit or shut up.
regards
Jess
And that’s what we’re doing, we chose Java instead, with JBuilderX which gives a complete devel environment, and no way we’re gonna ever consider QT again.
You still ignore the fact that they pose a very high barrier for companies to develop non GPL apps for KDE. Add to the fact that if you wish to develop with another lang binding (like PyQT), you have additional cost to QT’s license.
Hi
Yes. Thats their choice for licensing and I can see quite a lot of companies buying it like adobe and opera. If java fits your need good for you
regards
Jess
If your company has only one customer and that customer needs only one small app – then the price of Qt may be too high. But what kind of company is that? The price of Qt is a one-shot lump sum per developer seat independent of how many apps you develop and/or sell.
If you are a startup and don’t know if that app that you want to develop will sell then the price of Qt may be too high to purchase a license right away. And you don’t have to. As long as the Qt app that you’re developing stays within the 4 walls of your company then Trolltech does not require that you purchase a Qt license (AFAIK).
Jess, it is a problem, since Trolltech holds a sort of monopoly on commercial development for KDE. If you want to develop commercial applications for KDE, you MUST pay the overpriced Tag. Someone gave here an example of shareware developers, which relates to that.
Clause, IIRC, the license forbids you to develop against the GPL version of the library and later link to the propietry one.
The argument about one price lump is not a convincing one. as a business owner, you must justify the expense. When JBuilderX gives a complete devel environemnt cross platform and for less then half a price, you can’t justify buying QT cause it’s one price lump. One can argue that I should purchase only Mercedes for company cars, it’s one price lump (not a very good analogy,but delivers the point).