The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE 3.5 the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available. For a quick look at some of the new features see the visual guide to KDE 3.5. Packages are available now for ArchLinux, Kubuntu, Slackware and SuSE or try Konstruct to build it yourself.
Notable changes include:
- Konqueror is the second major web browser to pass the Acid2 CSS test, ahead of Firefox and Internet Explorer
- Konqueror can also free webpages from adverts with its new ad-block feature
- SuperKaramba is included in KDE, providing well-integrated and easy-to-install widgets for the user's desktop
- Kopete has support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams
- The edutainment module has three new applications (KGeography, Kanagram and blinKen), and has seen huge improvements in Kalzium
Stephan Kulow, KDE Release Coordinator, said: "The improvements made in the past year show how mature the KDE Project is. KDE is the most powerful desktop environment and development platform in the market. With huge changes expected in KDE 4, our next release, KDE 3.5 should provide users with the perfect productivity platform for the next couple of years."
Comments
So slow it's unusable..
Sorry, these are just words. Without a report with example file, it is useless.
You don't even mention what kind of files you edit...
And I have suggested what to do if you don't need advanced Quanta functionality, just the katepart text editor with project management. Believe me, it will not be slow in that case...
I think what he's talking about is trying to keep the software a bit stable and steady. That does not mean you can't add new features or improve it. Seriously, what more can people do to Kate?
"Seriously, I find it REALLY surprising that so meny people think that they are entitled to everything. So you use KDE, does that mean that KDE-developers should satisfy your whims? If anything, you owe to the developers"
Well, put a warning on it then that says "This software may change at any time in the future and if you don't like it, tough. I know we like to promote KDE and open source software in businesses and get people to use it, and we're happy to take the credit for it but if something isn't quite right then tough luck - you still owe us."
It's not going to work really, is it?
"Well, put a warning on it then that says "This software may change at any time in the future and if you don't like it, tough. I know we like to promote KDE and open source software in businesses and get people to use it, and we're happy to take the credit for it but if something isn't quite right then tough luck - you still owe us."
It's not going to work really, is it?"
That's not actually that different to way things work in real-life. All companies that make proprietary software have EULA's that basically say "if this software screws up your computer, you are on your own". Free software routinely ships with warnings that say "This software is shipped as is, with no warranties".
Of course users can and should report bugs. Of course they can suggest improvements. Of course they can post patches. But to make DEMANDS that things must be changed is completely out of line. Or complaining that "this software sucks!" Like I said, the software is free. They are not forced to use it. I really fail to see what grounds they have to make demands to the developers.
And the only thing the users owe to the developers is a simple "thank you". Bug reports, donations, patches and all are great way to show gratitude as well, but simple "thank you" would also do wonders. But still, even that "thanks" is not required, it's completely voluntary.
And in this case it's even worse. Apparently the original poster is using KDE for his work. In other words, KDE-developers give him software for free, and he uses that free software to earn money. And he thinks that he has grounds to make demands? He has already earned money through the use of the software he got for free, yet he thinks he's entitled to even more? And that entitlement comes from the fact that he merely uses the software (that he's not forced to use, and which he paid no money for). What is this world coming to? Seriously? I'm quite astounded by the selfishness! "Hey KDE-devels! I'm earning thousands of dollars thanks to your free software! Now, I demand that you fix these annoyances I ran in to!". It just boggles the mind.
Original poster complained that "This is amateur work!". That's not very constructive criticism. If it's so bad, he can
a) use something else
b) file bug-reports
c) fix it
d) make something better altogether
Posting "your software sucks!" is not among those options. It achieves nothing.
"That's not actually that different to way things work in real-life. All companies that make proprietary software have EULA's that basically say "if this software screws up your computer, you are on your own"."
Well, not really. It's the focus that matters. There are no guarantees with proprietary software but in order to stay ahead and to keep the money coming in they have to at some point consider why some people are unhappy.
"Well, not really. It's the focus that matters. There are no guarantees with proprietary software but in order to stay ahead and to keep the money coming in they have to at some point consider why some people are unhappy."
And that's why Microsoft is teetering on bankrupcy...
"And that's why Microsoft is teetering on bankrupcy..."
They still have to do it though.
"So, KDE-team gives you kick-ass software for free, and here you are making demands."
Please, spare us the sissy fit. The guy was making a very pertinent suggestion, and you only answer was throwing a tantrum.
Maybe you know he's right?
>Kate just became unusable and unreliable for office work.
Did you test any of the beta and RC releases to verify that Kate still was usable and reliable for office work?
Have you reported the bugs now?
> One of the arguments of free software is the quality of code - that you don't have to rush to keep deadlines.
Wasn't it rather "release early, release often"?
By the way, Mozilla works.
btw... Kate works
Did anybody here tried the new Kate? It's absolutely useable, despite what has been written here.
How do I open my .kateprojects? Can you show me?
1) rm -rf /
2) Install Windows and re-type from memory =) . --Guaranteed-- Notepad / Wordpad won't change at all in the future...
Note: DO NOT run step one to see what it does, as it will erase your entire filesystem.
I'd actually like to know about a few features that seem to be missing from the new version of kate. Before I upgraded to KDE 3.5, kate had the option to replace tabs with spaces on save... I can no longer do this. Also, I am unable to force newly opened documents to open under the current kate instance. Perhaps I'm blind and haven't been able to find the options (Which could very well be true), but through an hour or so of searching, I've found nothing. This is probably the wrong place to ask, but at the same time it seems well on topic. Why did these features disappear?
If libpoppler are going to have dependencies on cairo and glitz should we look for other options ?
Good question I think.
But for 3.5 you really don't need libpoppler anyway. It's only used for some metadata extractions and such in the pdf file-ioslave or something like that. KPdf renders pdf's nicely whitout it.
> If libpoppler are going to have dependencies on cairo and glitz should we
> look for other options ?
no, there is noting bad about cairo nor glitz
There might be nothing wrong with them, except that they are not needed in KDE. If libpoppler insist on including libraries that duplicates qtlibraries (arthur) we should look at it and see if it should be forked, or amended in an even better way for KDE4.
That reminds me, if we are going to get rid of arts can we finally get rid of glib as well :).
Doesn't D-BUS use glib?
Nope, it doesn't.
Gstreamer uses glib.
So? There are no plans to make Gstreamer a requirement for KDE. Optional backend yes, but not required. Besides looking at the status know, Gstreamer are not even capable of replacing aRts.
Maybe that's why it's so crashy :)
Seriously, even the Gnomers think Gstreamer is crap (just read Gnomedesktop.org from time to time), that sould tell something...
Unfortunately, there is no real replacement, so we'll have to use something we know it's not-very-good (to be kind) just because there's nothing else better... I hope NMM can be a viable solution for KDE4, even though I doubt it.
The plan is to make KDE4 independent of multimedia backend, making it possible to use aRts, NMM, MAS, Gstreamer or whatever else the developers feel like adding. To me the best alternatives looks like NMM or aRts, quite frankly. Since Gstreamer still are no real replacement. The Gnomers have fiddled around with Gstreamer for 5 years or so, and still not been able to make it an unified solution for their sound needs. Not exactly giving confidence.
Personally I think NMM looks like the best alternative, the technology simply looks amazing. And judging from a quick glance at the amoraK code, the NMM plugin looks seriously much simpler compared to the Gstreamer one. Perhaps anyone having studied the code closer knows different, but that was my impression.
If you are interested in trying NMM, they have a live CD: NMM-Oppix
http://www.networkmultimedia.org/Status/NMM-Oppix/
And you have KMediaNet, a set of applications to help use Network Mutltimedia Middleware (NMM) in KDE. http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=30100
"The plan is to make KDE4 independent of multimedia backend, making it possible to use aRts, NMM, MAS, Gstreamer or whatever else the developers feel like adding."
It's not really the independence from the back end, although tht comes as a side-effect. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of abstraction layers, but in KDEMM I think it's essential. It will provide a much, much better programming interface for developers so you won't bind yourself to a difficult to maintain and moving C (or other) API. You can simple do something like object -> play(parameters) in a familiar way which is what people will want.
IMO we should move qt-copy to _use_ glib and cairo and strip arthur from it. Since qtk+ moves to cairo as well, that will save some memory when using a gtk+ app on KDE.
Besides cairo is developed by good people and sooner or later will be part of X anyhow. I really wonder what the real reason is that some KDE developers are so allergic to libs used by other DE's. It's about the API that a toolkit offers to their developers not how the toolkit itself solve it. And the latter should be shared as much as possible w/ other tk, efficiently wise and not further dividing us developers in two camps
IMO we should rewrite KDE in GTK. That will save some memory when using a gtk+ app on kde.
Besides gtk is developed by good people and sooner or later will be part of X anyhow. I really wonder what the real reason is that some KDE developers are so allergic to libs used by other DE's. It's about the API that a toolkit offers to their developers not how the toolkit itself solve it. And the latter should be shared as much as possible w/ other tk, efficiently wise and not further dividing us developers in two camps
For the K classes, yes why not. Remains the Q classes that are also part of the KDE SDK
But don't get me wrong, idea was to keep the API. Rewritting in GTK is thus not an option. For (text) drawing classes in KDE, it might make sense though.
indeed, you _are_ drunk :D
> It's about the API that a toolkit offers to their developers not how the toolkit itself solve it.
Exactly! And as most people would agree, the trolls are the best when it comes to creating easy to use APIs.
> I really wonder what the real reason is that some KDE developers are so allergic to libs used by other DE's
IMHO easy to answer. It's C. It really hurts programming against a C API when you are used to Qt.
Kopete has an indirect dependency on glib too.
Of what part of Kopete are you thinking here?
The webcam support, it test for it when configuring. It's supposed to be no glib no webcam, but it's broken and tries to build webcam support anyway. There are actually no way to stop it from trying to build webcam support:-)
I guess that will depend on how portable cairo and glitz are. If they can't be offered natively on all platforms KDE 4 will be supporting porting it to Qt's Arthur may well be the better solution.
There is already a preliminary Arthur backend in poppler cvs.
This is very frustrating;
Konqueror/khtml renders the Google-sites fine, but due to some incomplete check for useragent Konqueror users get a stripped html-site.
Changing useragent isn't trivial for a lot of users (they even don't know what it is) so the "out of the box experience" on Google-sites is lame.
There are so many Konqueror-users and quite a lot of them have send Google a request to add Konqueror to the useragent-check, but they even get no response or a bot autoreplying on the mail.
What the *beep* can we do to make Google listen?!? The Konqueror-developers have contact with Safari-developers. Maybe they have some sort of entrance in the almighty Google-organization.
Hopefully Google actually checks those emails and doesn't just send them to /dev/null. So keep sending them mail about it, and keep your UA on konqueror!
> Konqueror/khtml renders the Google-sites fine, but due to
> some incomplete check for useragent Konqueror users get a
> stripped html-site.
Konqueror 3.5 does NOT render google-maps and gmail correctly. Changing the user-agent does not help very much.
See this posting:
http://dot.kde.org/1133270759/1133300616/1133302228/1133457470/1133504061/
That does not mean Konq is wrong, google is sending various versions of the website to the different clients. So you will not always get correct html.
This really is something google must help with.
works fine for me, both gmail and google maps work fine with useragent set to firefox, displays perfectly with none of those problems mentioned
There is an update to Konquer to solve this problem?
Konqueror crashes when I access the nfl.com site. Also, if I go to a site that streams live radio (www.xtrasportsradio.com and www.hot92jamz.comm, the stream works, but once I try to surf to another page Konqueror will crash. I use PCLinuxOS, but I mentioned this on their site and someone tried it using Kubuntu and it crashed as well. So it's not a distro problem. Actually, I think this bug creeped in with the 3.4.3 release but I'm not sure. I need to make a bug report about it, so what is the best way to capture some helpful info about the problem to pass on to the developers? This is a pretty annoying issue since I'm a big sports guy. :) Other than that though, things are looking great!
Might be the audio player is crashing. I've tested your links with konqueror with an installed kmplayer plugin and there are no crashes.
What plugin are you using for audio?
Thanks Koos. I believe I'm using mozplugger. PCLinuxOS has all the multimedia pre-configured (which is great), so I can't say for sure. But I am fairly certain mozplugger is the audio plugin.
I guess you should report this by PCLinuxOS, they give konqueror a bad press with that plugin.
works fine here, except for the fact i see and hear nothing... but it doesn't crash.
Did have to search too for the audio, but on www.xtrasportsradio.com click to enter and then 'Listen Live' for left menu and then 'Click here to listen to XTRA Sports AM 570' in red letters in black rectangle. On
www.hot92jamz.com one of the items has a 'LISTEN LIVE' link and when clicked there comes a 'Click here to listen Hot 92 Jamz!' link
xtra sports whatever works fine here.
same with hot92jamz.com (gentoo, kde 3.5). using kmplayer.