KDE 2.1 Release Delayed 1 Week

David Faure, our release manager, has announced the latest KDE 2.1 release schedule. KDE 2.1 will now be officially announced Feb 26, mainly due to popular demand and the fact that the KDE Artist Team is hard at work polishing up this release. For a preview of what's to come, check out the new KControl design. Definitely seems worth the wait!

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by steve (not verified)

yes the screenshot is beautiful.

good idea. more of these cool desgin would help to make kde the best desktop on unix/linux.

imho i often thought gnome has brilliant design-ideas (+ very good pr-team) and kde has the better technic and solutions....

i see the kde-team is ready to make cool design-stuff.

go further kde-team.

bye

steve qui

by Satyan (not verified)

You said it! That was exactly what I was thinking. I don't know if KDE will do the same as Gnome/Helix Update agent for novice KDE users to make it more user-friendly.

by Oliver (not verified)

I don't think that "cool design" like this increases the usability of a desktop. If I want to change control settings I'm not interested in watching pictures. So I dont't think that this helps to make kde the best desktop. It is more the better technic and solutions that do this.

IMHO the design of a desktop should not attract attention, it should help the user to focus on the important things.

Fortunately most of the design in KDE is configurable. For me the design of KDE 2.0 was the best design ever in KDE and I fear that the design of KDE 2.1 is a regress (after seeing the current version in CVS).

Regards, Oliver

by DiCkE (not verified)

What is there to say, it looks great!!! Take 1 or take 2 weeks it doesn't matter couse it's just getting better!!

Looking in the mirror I see various other desktop environments:)

I'm just never gonna stop being impressed......."KDE is killing Bill" *grin*.

Should of course be the rear mirror:)

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

I *just* upgraded (reinstalled to reset the RPM database) to Mandrake 7.2 in order to prepare for 2.1... I'm salivating at the thought, *but*... take your time, I think most users would tell the wonderful people who are developing the software that we will wait for greatness (because we've come to expect it? No pressure :)

--
Evan

by Rossend Bruch (not verified)

Great KDE Team ! only a few little question. What about animated menus? the 'shade' effect of W2K is perhaps the best improvement on that 'lovely' O.S. jejejjjj. Is this possible or it's a 'job' for QT?

by Shift (not verified)

It is not the more important, isn't it ? :)

by Rossend Bruch (not verified)

It's more a joke than an important mather, but I think that KDE has reached a more than acceptable madurity and little tips are important.

Good feeling and visual desing are very important for a desktop.

by Bernd Gehrmann (not verified)

It is implemented in Qt.
See QApplication::setEffectEnabled()

by Alex (not verified)

Thought this was only in the windows 2000 implementation
of Qt?!

If not then... umm...

Why has nobody used it?

by David Johnson (not verified)

'Cuz it sux! I had it on for about five minutes before I had to turn it off in disgust.

by Andras B. (not verified)

Well, my licq 1.0.2 uses it for tooltips. Looks nice or crappy, whatever you want. ;)

by Adam Dunkels (not verified)

QT already has this implemented, although you need to set an X resource ("*guieffects: fademenu") before you start your QT programs.

There are some other X resources to try:
*guieffects: animatedmenu (doesn't work together with fademenu)
*guieffects: animatedcombo
*guieffects: animatedtooltop
*guieffects: fadetooltip

/adam

by Andre4s (not verified)

Well, if ít's possible then I think kde should uwse it as default. The shadow on the crusor looks very good. Yeah i'm a w2k copycat =)

by Rossend Bruch (not verified)

Ok, Cursor Shadow and fade effect. Best improvments on w2k technologies. jejej ;)

by Nils O. Selåsdal (not verified)

And also the most irritating thing in w2k..
Good thing one can turn it off, else i'd gone mad
several months ago.. its cool for a couple of days,
but working daily with it just makes my work
slower..

by Helmut (not verified)

I'm your opinion, KDE should look on things making
work faster....
(thanks for the great desktop!)

by Marvin Pierce (not verified)

I look forward to getting the new distro as it certainly looks beautiful.

Do hope that solve the problem of the disappearing modules in the KControl centre (2.1b2) prior to release that's a real bummer that no one has been able to solve.

Great work you guys are doing!

by Syed Irfan (not verified)

if you are using the 2.1 beta 2 rpms to install on your system, you need to install the rpms again. i had ML 7.2 i did the rpm install of kde 2.1 beta 2 then there were no menus on the kcontrol, i forced install off all the kde rpms once again and its working FINE withouth ANY PROBLEMS

hope that helps
cheers
CrazyCrusoe

by Cihl (not verified)

Please, please, please don't forget window geometry control. It'd give KDE a much more polished feel.

Right now i still have to maximize Konqueror every time i open it.

Hmm. Come to think of it, Kmail and Knode do seem to work right. Is this a KDE problem at all, or just a Konqueror problem?

by HoHa (not verified)

There has been an option to save window size/position for Konqueror in ("view profiles" or so) for quite a while...

by Chris Bordeman (not verified)

Why in the world isn't this the default then??? This is not something I should have to go configure!

by Alex (not verified)

This should work:
--- load up a brand new konqi
--- maximise it
--- use "Window - Save Webbrowser Profile" to save
Worked for me...

Yup, I admit, not the most natural way of doing it,
maybe it should be in ktip?

Alex

by Johann Lermer (not verified)

If saving the window size would be the default, then I would complain! But an idea could be to have a (global?) switch to automatically save (or not) window sizes and positions

Johann

by Brendon Leese (not verified)

hmm, right clicking on the title bar and selecting "Store Settings" always worked for me... well nearly always........

by David Faure (not verified)

Hmm, you would ? :}

I was planning to make Konqueror auto-save the
window size in the profile after 2.1.

(In the profile, so that file-manager windows
and web-browsing windows can still have different sizes).

Of course the current "Save View Profile" option does that, but people seem to have a hard time finding it (and not getting it to remember the current URL, i.e. doing it on a blank new window).

by Shift (not verified)

Where are the useful functionnality of KDE1 with the mouse click on the top of a window ?

- left : select + in front
- middle : above
- right : only select

by not me (not verified)

Right in the control center, under Window Behavior, along with tons more options for your tweaking pleasure. Check out the attatched screenshot of the relevant Control Center module.

by Shift (not verified)

Ho Ho !!

I am tired : it's 02:00 in France :)

Of couse, it is configurable but I am not sufficently intelligent to go to the "window behavior section"

What am I doing in an Engineering school ? :)))

by Jarl E. Gjessing (not verified)

Fine, use time to Polish it.
It's important that the UI is attractive, and not boring.
You're doing a fantastic job.
My oppinion is that Linux got much better after having KDE.
Just two thing that annoyes me:
Tooltips keeps popping up in the panel.
I cannot remove them, and if I move from one button to another it keeps poping up with no delay.
Second I keep starting to do a logout, because the
Kmenu is moved donw into the K-button and when I release the mousebutton it is done over the logout item.
Thanks for the best WM EVER!!

by Richard Moore (not verified)

Please explain what you mean about the the tooltips - I don't have this problem. Which version of the code are you using?

The second problem you raise is fixed in the CVS IIRC. Like all bugs, please tell us *exactly* how to reproduce them or it is very difficult for us to fix things.

Cheers

Rich.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

I see the tooltip problem too. KDE checkout from this afternoon, clean user account with all default KDE settings. Qt 2.2.3.

Hover mouse over a kicker button until a tooltip appears. Move pointer over kicker, tooltips pop up immediately and "feel" in the way. It is a bit off-putting.

-N. (who has had tooltips off, forever, but can't find how to toggle the setting anymore)

PS Does anyone know how to turn on favicons in the latest Konqueror?

by puetzk (not verified)

ditto, 2.1beta2-0128 (debian packages)

It seems to be somwhat focus-related, as moving the focus to another applet in the kicker (say, krunapplet's commandline) fixes it. Moving focus to another window doesn't change anything though.

by gis (not verified)

Hover mouse over a kicker button until a tooltip appears. Move pointer over kicker, tooltips pop up immediately and "feel" in the way. It is a bit off-putting.
I think that's just how tooltips work, even in Windows. Same happens in every toolbar. Imagine you want to check out all the tooltips for every button and you have to wait two seconds for every tooltip. That would suck :)

PS Does anyone know how to turn on favicons in the latest Konqueror?

Hmm, you're the second one to ask that... it should be on by default (it is). Check your kdeglobals:
[HTML Settings]
EnableFavicon=true
Unless you have explicitly set it to false, it should work just fine.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

I test new KDE snapshots on a new user account, with all KDE configuration wiped. Yesterday's Konqueror CVS has no favicon support on by default, and I can't find the GUI option that used to be there and let me toggle favicon on/off. Was that removed, if so why? I imagine some people will want to turn off favicon support as it's non-standard.

Also, has anyone found out how to turn on and off tooltips from the control panel yet? I know that used to be possible... (Btw, Netscape/Motif and GNOME do not have the tooltip behavior described, didn't have Windows around to test though.)

Cheers,
Navin.

by gis (not verified)

I test new KDE snapshots on a new user account, with all KDE configuration wiped. Yesterday's Konqueror CVS has no favicon support on by default,

That's the problem actually :) There was a bug -- favicons only worked after the first start of konq -- the iconloader didn't consider the new favicons directory during icon-lookup. Just fixed that.

and I can't find the GUI option that used to be there and let me toggle favicon on/off. Was that removed, if so why? I
imagine some people will want to turn off favicon support as it's non-standard.

Why would you want to turn it off? The config-option is still there (kdeglobals, [HTML Settings], EnableFavicon=bool).

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Thanks for the fix! I'll test it out when I get a chance to update....

As for disabling favicon, well, *I* don't want to. But some webmasters don't appreciate phantom requests for http://site/favicon.ico , and coupled with the fact that this is a non-standard feature, I think it would be nice if this could be easily turned off in Konqueror.

And also, I imagine however unlikely it seems now, that the favicon feature may have security exploits or DoS exploits, and having an easy way for the user to turn this feature off might be desireable.

I understand that you can turn it off in kdeglobals, though.

Cheers,
Navin.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Okay, now it works but there's still a problem.

The default mini-icon is now the ugly "question mark" instead of the regular web document icon. You can reproduce this by going to http://slashdot.org/ or any site that does not support favicon.

Cheers,
Navin.

by gis (not verified)

The default mini-icon is now the ugly "question mark" instead of the regular web document icon. You can reproduce this by going to http://slashdot.org/ or any site that does not support favicon.

Did you update kdelibs/kio as well? There was another fix.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

That works! Thanks for your patience...

Cheers,
Navin.

by gis (not verified)

And also, I imagine however unlikely it seems now, that the favicon feature may have security exploits or DoS exploits, and having an easy way for the user to turn this feature off might be desireable.
There is no special code to get the icons, it's just using a KIO Job to fetch the icon whenever you open an http URL (and you don't already have the icon). It's nothing but one more additional request to the webserver.
The config option apparently was removed because it would be config-overkill and would be rather confusing than helpful.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Well, Konqueror permanently saves favicon.ico somewhere, I believe. That *might* be an issue. (filesize itself may slow down konqueror performance... dot.kde.org itself employs an oversized favicon.ico which is unfortunately currently out of my direct control)

Also what if it's gibberish? People routinely put gibberish in that file, check http://www.slashdot.org/favicon.ico, for example. I know there's no problem *now*... I'm just worried about future possibilities and the possible need to conveniently turn the feature off.

Anyway, it probably isn't that much big of a deal... The default is perfectly fine by me and hasn't been a problem so far.

Cheers,
Navin.

by gis (not verified)

Well, Konqueror permanently saves favicon.ico somewhere, I believe
I think it performs some auto-cleaning after an icon hasn't been used for a certain time. Can't check at the moment tho.

Regarding gibberish... right, that might be a reason. But then, I can't really imagine visiting a site that purposely uses a gibberish favicon :)

by Chris Bordeman (not verified)

KDE usability is getting better all the time, but here are a few areas I'd like to see improved:

I'd like to see maximized windows behave like they do on windows: lose the left, right, bottom, and top borders except for the title bar with it's icons, and make the window unmoveable (like in fullscreen mode) until I restore. An important thing usability-wise is to be able to zip the mouse over to the right edge to click and drag the scrollbar, _without_looking_ to determine the width of the border first. To do so requires the border to not be there. And don't do 1 pixel like in windows (why do they do that?).

Also, I'd _love_ to be able to adjust the size of those tiny scrollbars.

Thanks guys!

by KDE User (not verified)

This is very annoying and restrictive behavior for Linux/Unix people! Not being able to move or resize a window is Very Bad.

However, you can turn this Windows bug ;) on for yourself in the Control Panel at: Look&Feel|Window Behavior|Advanced|Allow Moving and Resizing of maximized windows.

by not me (not verified)

That doesn't do it. It does indeed prevent you from resizing or moving a maximized window, but it doesn't completely remove the window border. The bottom border is still completely there, and there's a 1-pixel border along the sides that prevents you from just sliding the mouse to the edge to access the scrollbar. It's the worst of both worlds!

I'd really like a "Don't show window border when maximized" feature instead of the feature we have currently. Then you could still resize the window with Alt-RMB-drag but there would be no wasted space and the scroll bar would be completely at the right edge of the screen, so you could hit it immediately when you shoved the mouse to the right edge.

This is a real usability issue, GUI experts know that the most easily accessed place on the screen is the very edge.

by Øystein Heskestad (not verified)

Have you tried deselecting "allow Moving and Resizing og maximized windows" under window behavior in Control Center ?

by Chris Bordeman (not verified)

I hadn't seen that, but it really should be default so that you don't accidently move out of 'maximised' position/size. Someone said that restricting movement here is not good. In this case in fact, it is important. After moving a maximised window, it becomes marked as 'restored' again, losing the previously recorded 'restored' size and position. This sucks because users like predictability and simplicity, and this is just confusing.

Of course, I could just not move the window, but if I can I will, even when I shouldn't, because I'm not thinking. Making it unmoveable keeps me from accidentally moving it, if I want move it I restore first, move, and size like I want; I don't lose the original size/position info and it simplifies things.

The most important thing, though, is to hide the borders (but not the title bar) when maximised such that screen real estate is not lost, the complexity of the display is reduced, and I can easily access elements at the edge of the screen w/o looking like the scrollbar or a special toolbar.

by Zeljko Vukman (not verified)

Tiny scrollbars?
Open *.themerc and go to [Misc] section and add:

ScrollBarExtent=20

or whatever number of pixels you want. Reload theme
and you will have 20 pixels wide scrollbar.
Enjoy ;