OSNews.com: The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review

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OSNews.com: The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review

Posted by Navindra Umanee on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @10:19
from the not-as-fast-as-dos dept.
Rahul Gaitonde has written a fairly comprehensive review of KDE 3.2 Beta 2 for OSNews based on his 3 week trial. "The target machine - my only computer - is a Pentium II 266 MHz with 384 MB RAM, with an Intel i810E chipset. [...] The first thing you notice when you start up a few apps is - 'Boy, this is Fast!'. KDE 3.2 is significantly faster than 3.1, and certainly way faster than Gnome 2.4 on my machine. It reminds me of the kind of responsiveness that Windows 98 used to give me on this same configuration few years ago (minus the crashes). Konsole opens up almost instantaneously, and Konqueror takes only about 3 seconds the first time. I was afraid that the increase in bloat with every release of KDE since the 1.x series would one day prevent me from using this computer at all with KDE. I'm glad the guys over at KDE have so splendidly allayed my fears." The review has a lot of screenshots and other information on the release. As usual, Plastik gets huge props.

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.

Not a bad review but...
by brockers on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @11:31

A couple of grips:

--------------
I can't bookmark individual text/PDF/etc files in KDE's Bookmarks, only folders. If I can bookmark an HTML page, why not any other type of file? This limits its usefulness. Also, Bookmarks and History ought to be available only in Konqueror's Web Browsing profile.
--------------

This is wrong. I currently have dozens of text files bookmarked in konqueror. In addition removing them totally from the universal sidebar is just plain stupid. I like being able to open a web-page without starting konqueror separately beforehand,accessing my mount point that are commonly used, remote computer connections over ssh (via fish://user@location.com), commonly used documents, etc.. etc... etc.. Hell the MAIN use of universal sidebar it the dang bookmarks and history tabs!!

-----------------
Two words: Drop them. Kaboodle and Noatun are pathetic. They are nowhere as functional as XMMS
-----------------

Smoking crack did you say? I understand that most people like XMMS because it is identical to winamp but it has NO WHERE NEAR the features or functionality of Noatun. Period! To say such a thing means that the review has no idea what the features and functions of Noatun are.

-----------------
At the beginning of this article, I asked, rhetorically, if KDE 3.2 would enable me to use the command line more effectively. The answer to this strange question is yes. Presenting KDialog.
------------------

Can you say KDE 3.1

Just my .02

brockers

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: Not a bad review but... by optikSmoke on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @13:07
Re: Not a bad review but... by ac on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @13:46

Re: Not a bad review but... by J on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:02
Re: Not a bad review but... by LaNcom on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:20

Re: Not a bad review but... by John on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @15:18

Re: Not a bad review but... by LaNcom on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @15:55

Re: Not a bad review but... by theorz on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @20:19

Re: Not a bad review but... by ac on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @20:34

Re: Not a bad review but... by Anonymous on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @21:26

Re: Not a bad review but... by Mike on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:03
Re: Not a bad review but... by JC on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:21

Right on about Noatun by Anony Guy on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:55

Re: Not a bad review but... by kosh on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @21:37
Re: Not a bad review but... by KDE User on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @23:24

feelings of ditto by c on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @02:02

Re: Not a bad review but... by James Richard Tyrer on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @16:41

Re: Not a bad review but... by lazarus on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @03:33

rpm
by JC on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @13:37

> "An upgrade to this beta is a simple matter of 'rpm -Uvh ./*.rpm --nodeps --force'"

Lol. Why to use a rpm system if you use --nodeps and --force ?

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: rpm by Mike on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:07
Re: rpm by James Richard Tyrer on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @17:38

please drop kedit
by ac on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @13:42

Just drop it, users don't want it and get confused by it. And since kwrite
is just better (yes I wanna generalize), just drop kedit, or move
it to kdeextragear. So the ones who really prefer it can still use it.
At least don't ship kde with it. Shipping it bloats kde.

Other nice thing, for the windows explorer used people...:

Could konqueror show the available space of the current partition
in it's status bar? Definately a big + in comfort!!
RMB on a file is not really intuitive to find our the free disk space...
Or is it and I am on crack?? ;-)

Apart of that, looking forward to 3.2, it just seems to rock!!
Thanks to all the contributors

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: please drop kedit by LaNcom on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:12

Re: please drop kedit by anon on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:26

Re: please drop kedit by cies on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @02:08

YUP, drop it by Alex on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @10:30

Kedit
by Leon Pennington on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @13:47

I think their is a problem with bidi support, and I like Kedit. Its useful for all those little tasks. Kate I use for programming, and I don't like filling up the open pages bar, nor waiting for them to load when I just wanna had an /etc file.

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Re: Kedit by ac on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:07

Re: Kedit by Nicolas Goutte on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @08:28

Re: Kedit by me on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:38

Re: Kedit by Leon Pennington on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:46

Re: Kedit by me on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @00:04

Re: Kedit by Leon Pennington on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @00:33
Re: Kedit by Dieter Bercx on Sunday 01/Feb/2004, @10:13

Re: Kedit by Source on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @14:47

Re: Kedit by Mark Dufour on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @01:18
Re: Kedit by Rischwa on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @03:46

Re: Kedit by john on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @10:28

Re: Kedit by Haakon Nilsen on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @15:07

Re: Kedit by Jos on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @22:38

Re: Kedit by Leon Pennington on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @00:28

Re: Kedit by cloose on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @00:43

Re: Kedit by Jos on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @02:09

Source of speedups?
by steve on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @16:35

I follow kde cvs digest and lurk on kde-optimize, but somehow I
missed the source of the performance improvements all the
reviewers are talking about. Besides konqueror pre-loading, what
caused the speedup?

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: Source of speedups? by Navindra Umanee on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @19:04

Re: Source of speedups? by JC on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @19:25

Re: Source of speedups? by Rayiner Hashem on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @20:13
Re: Source of speedups? by Derek Kite on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @22:40

Re: Source of speedups? by Derek Kite on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @22:48

Re: Source of speedups? by muleli on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @23:28

Re: Source of speedups? by Josef Weidendorfer on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @02:00

Re: Source of speedups? by Nick on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @08:41
Re: Source of speedups? by Leon Pennington on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @10:52
Re: Source of speedups? by Matthias Ettrich on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @13:57

DCOP
by Spy Hunter on Thursday 15/Jan/2004, @18:58

Can Kuickshow be instructed to start a slideshow with DCOP? If so, it could be made into a service menu item like he suggests in page 3.

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: DCOP by Carsten Pfeiffer on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @12:50

OT: disabling some programs
by hatsch on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @00:17

hello there sorry for my offtopic post,

but i would like to know, if there is a way to disable certain programs when compiling kde from source,

any gui (or implemented in konstruct (i've never tried this because i use gentoo)) where you can choose which applications should be installed.

eg:

kde-games:

Kasteroids (y)
Kbounce (n)
...
KPoker (y)
...

and so on.

kde would be more slick and navigation with k-Menue would be better because only apps needed would be installed..

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: OT: disabling some programs by ralph on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @02:55

Re: OT: disabling some programs by hatsch on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @05:04
Re: OT: disabling some programs by Anonymous on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @10:41

Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't
by Erik Hensema on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @03:23

Plastik is IMHO a very nice looking theme. It however does lack contrasting colors. Everything is gray, and almost the same shade of gray too.

On my system I changed two colors and now it looks MUCH better. I have made the title bar of the active window light blue and made the buttons somewhat darker:

'Active Title Bar' is set to #1B7EE2
'Button Background' is set to #D5D7DC

Makes the theme prettier to look at and more usable, IMHO.

Here is a screenshot I prepared: http://hensema.net/tmp/shot.png

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't by Romain on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @07:40

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't by Malcolm on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @18:34

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't by tetabiate on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @07:35
Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't by Miles Robinson on Wednesday 21/Jan/2004, @09:19

New languages?
by Elektroschock on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @10:20

Do you know whether new languages can be added in the releases 3.2.x? There still is no internationalization option for nds (DE, NL, DK regional language) support.

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Re: New languages? by Nicolas Goutte on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @11:10

Re: New languages? by anonymous on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @01:15

Re: New languages? by Leon Pennington on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @04:30

Re: New languages? by anonymous on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @07:32

Re: New languages? by anonymous on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @07:36

Re: New languages? by Thomas Diehl on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @02:25

Re: New languages? by Nicolas Goutte on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @09:06

Re: New languages? by Thomas Diehl on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @23:48

KDE needs a decent media player (framework)
by Jan Vidar Krey on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @14:45

Don't get me wrong, we already have a few good ones like noatun and kaboodle.
Noatun seems to me like a plug-in toy with a hairy interface, so of those
I prefer kaboodle as it has the easiest GUI.

But KDE needs a more generic framework for extended funcionality, like streaming.
Gnome is in the process of building such a media framework, GStreamer.
This can probably be adapted by KDE at some point, but I'd like to point the finger to the VideoLAN project over at http://www.videolan.org/.

This is already, and has been for quite a while, a very promising media framework with lots of potential.
The VideoLAN client is ported to tons of platforms, it plays most media formats (without any external win32 DLL dependencies), it's pluggable, and extremely powerful when it comes down to streaming (multicast, relaying, multi-protocol, video on demand).

The VideoLAN client is based on a generic C/C++ library, so writing a KDE front-end is easy. In fact, it's already done but it's AFAIK not maintained and the GUI isn't the greatest.
VideoLAN has a plugin for Mozilla, I'd love to see a KHTML plug-in for integrated Web-TV applications.

Well... I guess that's work for KDE 4.0? ;)

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Re: KDE needs a decent media player (framework) by Anonymous on Friday 16/Jan/2004, @22:37

Splashscreen?
by anonymous on Saturday 17/Jan/2004, @05:47

I'm having problems with the Splash screen as well (just freezes on 'starting interprocess communications', and I'm using KDE CVS.

[ Reply To This | View ]

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