The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 1. As another step towards the aKademy in late August, this release is named Klassroom.
KDE 3.3 Beta 1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
There was quite a big speed increase between KDE 3.1 and KDE 3.2, and I noticed another, if smaller, speed increase between 3.2 and 3.3b1.. good stuff.
KDE 4.0 is supposed to become faster and leaner still– probably due to a lot of old cruft being removed from KDE 2.x days and Qt 4.0 having a lot of optimizations.
Actually, there are some speedups in 3.3. There was quite a bit of work on reducing flicker and whatnot in Konqueror, along with some work on certain applications (eg KMail) to make them faster.
“Usual “Placebo effect””
Doesn’t seem like it– I have both installed, and KDE 3.3 seems a lot snappier.
You guys scooped dot.kde.org on this story
screenshots will be appreciated.
slashdot picked it up too
“Where can i get Slackware 10.0 packages?”
wait for sometime. you will get it from either kde.org or slackpackages
have they started implementing gstreamer and all the other wonderful f.d.o standards in KDE so they can interoperated with GNOME.
I know it’s slated for 4.0, but it would be nice to see how much work has already been done.
“have they started implementing gstreamer and all the other wonderful f.d.o standards in KDE so they can interoperated with GNOME.
”
first of all fd.o is not about creating standards. there is no requirement or any implicit understanding that everything in fd.o is to be shared amoung DE’s.
however kde already supports gstreamer backend in Juk, Amarok and possibly other programs. its not yet decided whether they would choose gstreamer or nmx or something else. there is a broad understanding that gstreamer would be a good choice but kde people want a stable api for about 2 years which the gstreamer devels said would be difficult to handle
I installed KDE 3.3 CVS yesterday, and it is faster than kde 3.2, besides the speed, most of the changes aren’t noticable. The workspace switcher looks nicer and the control center has a new theme manager. There are probably loads of changes to KOffice and KDEPIM, however I only compiled and installed kdelibs and kdebase.
I also tried out Gnome 2.7.2, soon to be 2.7.3, again not much change, the panel applet options have changed and you can disable spatial view from Nautilus.
Anyways, keep up the good work, looking forward to final release.
Started? There is already much of fdo stuff in KDE 3.2!
Are there ebuilds for Gentoo???????? 🙂
I compiled both KDE and Gnome in my Gentoo box, using the same non-aggressive cflags, and I can say Gnome 2.6 is noticeably slower compared to KDE 3.2. However, I think it’s not Gnome’s fault, rather Gtk’s. IMO, Qt is just awesome, and version 4 will be 30% faster according to Trolltech… I’m impressed.
please stop it! it’s an endless fight… i’ve installed gnome and kde on my gentoo box, this thread is about kde improvements, not about which one is better… please stop…
It’s good to hear about further speed optimizations – do you know if they did something about kwin, too? IMO, it’s always been one of the weakest parts of KDE. First, it’s by far the slowest window manager I’ve seen anywhere – not only on resizing, but when I open e.g. some dialog window, I can actually see the window decoration gradually appearing on the screen, especially with Plastik: the buttons/icons on the title bar (with the slow flickering effect) etc. This makes a very bad impression on the overall KDE speed. With other window managers, it’s instant. And secondly, kwin has always been quite crashy, too. But other KDE parts are excellent.
As for GNOME 2.6 vs. KDE 3.2 – KDE is much faster and more efficient. GTK+ 2.x is slow. Startup times can be better with GTK/GNOME apps, but KDE is getting better in this area, and I hear 3.3 should be a slight improvement again.
Kde optimized with the gcc symbol visibility patch
You should really try GNOME 2.6 or later. It’s much faster than any of current releases of KDE in terms of startup time, overall system response and resource requirements.
Odd.. KDE 3.2 (have not tried 3.3) works quite fine on my P3/Katmai 500, but GNOME 2.6 is quite sluggish. I don’t think it’s a gtk issue since my main desktop, xfce4, runs fine. I’m on gentoo btw– I don’t *think* it has a screwed up GNOME.
I never ran KDE 3.1, but as far as I remember, KDE 3.0 was slow on this machine, while GNOME 1.4 was really fast. Apparently the KDE guys figured something out and the GNOME guys didn’t. Oh well, I don’t particularily like either of them 🙂
I’ve noticed that KDE 3.2 seems to be miles faster than Gnome 2.6 on my Slack 10 box. I don’t know if its GTK or Gnome itself but I have a suspicion that its GTK.
> besides the speed, most of the changes aren’t noticable.
I guess you will notice more in your daily work. Otherwise http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.3-features.html is a good list what to look for.
> There are probably loads of changes to KOffice and KDEPIM
KOffice is not part of the KDE development/release cycle anymore.
OFFTOPIC:
I too believe that qt displays things a bit faster than gtk+ currently does. However, I personally prefer the gtk+ “slowness” if the flickering of qt won’t go away.
For example, when over 6 urls are in the konqueror URL bar, the popped-up URL selection thingy (I don’t quite now hot co explain the history-pop-up…) will flicker every newcharacter I type.
gtk+ apps do feel more solid to me. They don’t flicker on me (at least, not with the theme I use).
Since I’m no developer, I couldn’t tell what the technical advantages are from that standpoint. However, the feel of solidarity of the gtk+ widget is what made my wife stop complaining about her desktop… i.e., “Why is this screen always flashing? (flickering) Windows didn’t do that.” My assumption (which could be horrible wrong) is that gtk+ widgets redraws slower because it may require caching of the widgets to prevent flickering.
ON TOPIC:
Go KDE team! KDE is really coming along well. There are several things about KDE (namely io slaves and kprinter) that I (a GNOME user) am jealous of. Also, I think the KDE PIM team is doing an amazing job with Kontact.
As for GNOME 2.6 vs. KDE 3.2 – KDE is much faster and more efficient. GTK+ 2.x is slow. Startup times can be better with GTK/GNOME apps, but KDE is getting better in this area, and I hear 3.3 should be a slight improvement again.
I’d say the start up issue has to do more with the issue of pre-binding and C++. IIRC, linux distros along with FreeBSD still don’t use pre-binding for some reason.
I have noticed kde performance being fast just after reboot, but after days/weeks uptime it starts to be slow (never tried this with other DE’s), so I guess if I did a fresh install of kde3.2 (now using 3.2), it would appear faster at first..
And by slow I mean application startup times and window changing, start-menu responsivity etc.
GTK+ needs performance optimizations. I hope the performance issue is known among the GTK+ crew and that they are working on it.
As for Qt (or is it a KDE issue?), the flickering must go. It really does reduce the overall impression in regards to KDE.
I use XFCE4, by the way.
Why not make a way to use KParts on Gnome and bonobo on KDE? (I don’t if it’s done now, but I think it’s not) This would lead to a real “evolution” in the parts (best wins user base).
> As for Qt (or is it a KDE issue?), the flickering must go. It really does reduce the overall impression in regards to KDE.
Can’t remember where i heard it, but QT4 is supposed to be double buffered everywhere, so the flickering should go in KDE4.
I haven’t experience any flickering in KDE (3.2.1), must be lucky I guess.