KDE has released the first Alpha of what will become KDE 3.4. You download it, read the schedule, look at the planned features, report bugs or help in any other way.
KDE 3.4 Alpha 1 (‘Leverkusen’) Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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From the schedule of planned features, it looks like 1/4 of the features are already implemented, 1/4 are in progress and 1/2 are still to be done.
Really looking forward to KDE 4 as it is based on Qt 4 and will have a nice speed boost.
It’s http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.4-features.html
I know this discussion is on KDE 3.4, but what is planned for KDE 4 and how is QT 4 going to speed it up.
There isn’t any discussion about KDE 4 planned features yet, and there won’t be one until KDE 3.4 will be out.
Anyway, QT 4 is going to speed up KDE just because QT 4 itself will be much faster.
From http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq09-qt4.html:
The combined effects of many low-level improvements already in place in Qt 4 mean that applications will have executables about 10% smaller, will start up 20% faster, and will consume about 15% less memory compared to Qt 3.
My bad. I thought that KDE 3.4 would become KDE 4. Now did I read that somewhere or am I just imagining things?
ya. you are imagining that. kde 3.4 is last in the 3.x series. the next one will be called kde 4 and will break binary compatibility to add new features and remove unmaintained cruft like arts
During development of KDE 3.3, it was said to be the last in the 3.x series. Thus the next one tentatively 3.4 would become 4. The developers then changed their minds and decided that 3.4 will become the last in the 3.x series.
…at last!
Its sad that it takes like a year or so to really use this feature [I know I know, transset. But I don’t want the whole app to be transparent.] Anyone knows when this comes to Gnome? Haven’t seen it in any Changelogs so far…
That was already in KDE 3.3 Alpha and reverted later because of problems (with[in] Qt).
for the disabled 🙂
I am not going to install it but for the people that do please post screenshots
Mockup’s GUI is already using (in the HEAD trunk) Qt 4.
I feel Qt 4 is faster than Qt 3 but double buffering is a pain. When you resize a window of Tracker (that has only a QIconView) you can see the window repainting itself.
This is annoying and I hope Qt 4.0 will support Xorg stuff such as Xfixes and Xdamage.
KDE migration to Qt 4 will be hard because many things have been changed, so don’t expect KDE 4 near.
The only thing I don’t really like about KDE is how it includes a billion applications (that are redundant) in each component – noatun, kaboodle, and juk for example, or the three text editors, etc. aside from that and the default iconset (which is easily changeable) i don’t mind it.
I’d love to believe that Qt 4 will be faster than Qt 3, but I don’t see it happening. I’ve tried both preview releases and window resizing as well as scrolling in viewports/listviews was a magnitude slower. But, being preview releases, I’ll just hope they were really bad preview releases. I didn’t check on the memory usage so far, but I wouldn’t be suprised if it has gotten actually worse with GUI apps…
How can they be so sure of such claims in such an early state of development, after all?
But god, I hope I’m so very wrong…
Just dont install the packages you dont want If you dont want Kate or Juk dont install them, some distributions make a very big bundle I think of KDE but distributions like SuSe let you choose most of the apps, some of the apps like Konqueror are not optional but now you can choose to have gecko as renderer.
I hope there would be a minimal DE like XFCE for QT. Sometimes less is more.
That would be the ultimate desktop indeed.
Your complaint shouldn’t be against KDE (who only develop and make available the source code of the applications), but against whoever packaged your KDE distribution – after all, ti’s they who decide what goes in the packages.
in debian for example, if you just want kasteroids and not all kdegames, you apt-get install kasteroids. If you want all kde games, you apt-get install kdegames.
In slackware however, you only have the kdegames package (which I never install anyway).
And you can always compile everything yourself and install only the apps you want
Looks like it may almost be as good as Gaim. But it’s still missing what I need; a really good logging mechanism. The history plugin doesn’t seem to work for me.
But the visuals are so cool!
Does anyone have screen shots i heard there are major gui changes in some applications or was that just a rumor.
Yea, one I’ve wanted for a long time, kasbar as a kicker applet.
All good responses, so I will modify my complaint to this – too many distros package the large monolithic packages the the source uses! more distros should do what debian does
Yes, as long as they keep both options available (like debian does, more or less!). I kinda like just installing “kdeutils” and getting all of it. I can see the other POV though, cuz I’ve been there before
Then again it’s easier and less time consuming to package the big monoliths than it is to make individual packages for each app..
Hey at least it’s not one big “kde” package that installs absolutely everything!
I want some screenshots!
It doesn’t work by default, I think you should first disable it and then enable it again or something like that – then a View History item appears in each contact’s context menu.
Thats whats missing imho
The job of the distro, not the DE developers. Some distros have very, very good pkg managment tools (don’t know how I lived before Fedora and Yum [and its gui Yumi]).
People keep telling me apt-get is really good, too. However, I was so used to the rpm pkg names, that apt was really cumbersome for me cause I’d always have to go looking up the pkg name…
The three text editors are a bad example though. 2 Text editors are a good thing IMHO (a small one and a powerful) and kwrite and kate fullfil those two tasks and use the same rendering engine anyhow so it’s not really bloat. Kedit is necessary because kate/kwrite still lacks bidirectional text support afaik (I remember seeing it in the todo list for 3.4 but I also remember seeing alarms for knotes in the todo-list for 3.1…).
I’m also in favor of 2 media players (one for audio complete with library, in other words amarok (better than juk imho), one all purpose, kaffeine)
If you want a low-pain way to try the beta (report some bugs!), install it using Konstruct. One command fetches the source, compiles it, and installs it completely seperate from your existing KDE so you can check it out safely.
I’d imagine the preview releases would have debugging code turned on, which always makes things slower.
Nah Mockup will be better?
😉
http://www.mockup.org/projects/befree
http://www.mockup.org/projects/artwork
:B
Hi,
Just checking out those mockup screenshots/icon-sets, I’d have to say they look very nice – definitely something I’d want to try when it releases.
Also, on another note, I’m moving from Gnome to KDE – the pain of compiling Gnome, first using the BLFS guide, then using JHBuild was…ughhh. All those stupid libraries, all those stupid APIs, blah. And Garnome is a space-chewing, convoluted, clunky, hack of a solution, at least for me. (although kudos to Waugh for a great job with Ubuntu – very slick and beautiful).
Does anybody know any good beginner’s guides to KDE? I don’t mind reading thourgh a lot, as long as it’s locatable (eg I’d prefer a few nice, thick guides, in the style of the FreeBSD Handbook, rather than spending hours searching mailing lists and Usenet) – does anybody know of such guides for KDE (never used it before, except a few minutes on Knoppix).
Thanks,
Victor
Have you looked at the documentation that comes with kde? There is quite a lot of it, and it can all be accessed from within the kde help center. This includes the full range of application manuals, and i think there is some getting startet info, etc, as well. (can’t check right now)
Then there is the documentation pages here: (the docs listed there is probably available inside the kde help center as well)
http://www.kde.org/documentation/
Then there is the KDE wiki which contains some info as well, it can be found here:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php
And if you wish to chat with others users, or some of the developers, you can use the kde irc channels, a list of them can be found here:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=IRC+Channels
But i think getting startet is very easy, it is finding some of the more hidden power that can be a challenge 🙂
Another example being a *custom* install of Mandrake – you can strip out much/most of the un-wanted k-apps – can actually get a nice KDE’d Mandrake (with alot removed) for around 1.2 gb – 10 minutes pruning though, but worth it
Thank you! That works. Bye bye gaim.