KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.
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KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.
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There is a bug for kghostview http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74284
I agree that + - seems to be wrong for left-to-right languages, but that might be just what I am presonally more used to.
Better someone would have to do a real usability study on this.
I think KDE is fantastic, but the first thing I do with a new installation is spend 30 minutes changing the defaults so it looks cleaner. I've attached a screenshot of my desktop which has a konqueror window with the screenshot of the current 3.4 default desktop inside it.
Hiding the task bar applet handles is a must; having 5 dotted bars with an arrow at the top looks cluttered and horrible. There's not need for the panel hiding button on the right either because most people aren't going to use it. 4 desktops is too many in my option and should either be 2 or 3 so as not to take up so much space. The task bar icons should be set to small in my option as they just waste space that could be used for task buttons. I think the digital clock is quite ugly too and should just use a plain clock. As for konqueror, there should only be a minimum number of toolbar icons on by default like in my screenshot which makes it look similar to firefox.
I like KDE, I just don't like seeing people being put off because it looks so cluttered. I know they can change it themselves, but I'd rather the default was simple so you could make it cluttered if you wanted instead of the other way around.
You can disable a lot settings with Kiosk.
Perhaps some settings like panel hiding and system applet handle could be disabled by default. If someone wants to change everything, he/she would then need to run kiosktoo and enable stuff there.
Eleknader
Yes, the defaults tend to be very bad. Way too many things are default. And OMG, don't get me started on the toolbars!
Your taskbar looks ugly. There is no separation between eg. your pager and your taskbar. I much prefer having the applet handles set to 'fade', so there's a gap between objects in the kicker but you can't see the handles till you mouseover. There, see how useless that comment was? :-)
I think there should be visible applet handles, because most people don't know they can alter the taskbar. its easier to see that with the applet handles...
and if you know about the applets, you probably also know how to turn them off... I don't want KDE to be tuned for ME or users like me, but for newbies. but, if possible, in such a way they can access the power of KDE easy. so they can become power users :D
that's what I dislike about Gnome, it limits its users' development.
but I like your konqi setup, although I'd say make the buttons bigger. and increase the size of the kicker. maybe create two kicker panels, like gnome does? its very clean, and most newbies like it.
Not extremely important but why a trash icon on the desktop?
Shouldn't this be under "My documents" or be an icon in the system tray?
I personally belief that there shouldn't be anything on the desktop except a karamba theme.
By proposal would be the move the trash icon to the my documents map.
Who decides such kind of things?
I totally agree.
Mostly, the people who code these things decide these things...
But in this particular case, in the beta I'm running now, I can put the trash icon as an applet in Kicker. And for as long as I can remember, you can move the trash icon to wherever you want. Until I started to use a Mac regularly I didn't have any use for the trash icon, so it resided in .kde for me; there's a nice dialog in the desktop settings where you can move the trash to whereever you want.
But we're talking aboit sane defaults. Probably, now that is possible, the best place where to put it is in the kicker, but to be useful the kicker should be always at medium siza
I know you can hide the trash icon or move, that's not the point. I meant just the default settings. Personally I belief the trash icon should be in the My Document map.
Great that you can move the icon to the kicker but the kicker or the system tray gets easily to crowded.
What 'My Document map' are you talking about?
I guess they mean the default folders in their home drive, ie ~/Documents ~/Pictures ~/Trash ~/Music etc etc
But I hope the Constants menu will be placed to the left of Help...
Just like in every other KDE program.
As of 13-01-2005 CVS, KDE default color scheme is not the plastik one, but the old keramik, which looks quite ugly with the new plastik default deco. Has it been fixed?
Now, when we will stop pretending that Kate and KWrite are two separate programs? Is that a task for KDE 4?
They ARE two different programs.
Grrrr!!!! Well, call me ignorant, but it appears that most of their code is shared. At any rate, the only real advantage that Kate has over KWrite is that that it can edit multiple files in the same window. I think that should be a setting rather than a separate application. Sometimes I open up something in KWrite only to find that I need to open another file but can't do it in the same window!!!
KDE has a text editor part, and two wrappers around it. The text editor part does all of the editing (of course). KWrite is a wrapper around the part for simple editing (like notepad). Kate is a wrapper around it that adds features to make it useful as a programmers' text editor, like having a built-in console and so on.
That is the distinction. There's no need for a simple text editor to be able to dock other components all over the place, so KWrite doesn't have it, but that's useful in Kate's application domain. It's like notepad versus textpad.
KWrite is not an entirely separate program anyway. It is more a sort of a skin (simple editor) for Kate.
And I suppose the editor to remove is KEdit, as soon as Kate can do Bidi.
Have a nice day!
What about an "ioslaves:/" protocol?
Its output? All available ioslaves like audiocd, fish, smb, sftp etc.
I was reading some article on the web and found this article:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-221.html
or
http://www.google.com/search?q=polaris+xp
Basically, it describe a mechanism to restrict privileges and sandbox
any application by providing "null priviledge"
PLUS whatever GUI dialog box needs to run for any given application.
Maybe we could do something similar in KDE.
Since currently, most GUI application runs with "user priviledge",
which means any app can see any files in your $HOME directory
or mess with it.
I know that currently no one is really exploiting this,
but it might be an issue at some point in the future.
I know most people have backups, but it doesn't protect against
sending your backups to some evil adware company. =P
Sincerely,
Fred.
One might be able to set something like this up with the -u option to kdesu, thus running an untrusted app under the "nobody" account. Or a special "sandbox" user created just for this purpose.
Going further, one could imagine a graphical frontend to setting up a chrooted environment in which suspect apps could run.
In the context menu of an application icon (on your desktop, K-menu,...) you can select a user (e.g. nobody) to run the program with.
That's all you need. (This has been available since KDE 3.0 (or KDE 3.1))
Unfortunately it's hidden very well.
I would ask to people how many of you hate the fact of that KDE brings Digital Clock as the default option. Please, be consistent with the look provided by your Look&Feel artists and change it to the clean (anti-aliasing fonts) clock !!!!
Thanks. ;))
Yes, it looks horrible in a clean style as plastik.
I also wish that i could display the date in _smaller_ print underneath the time...
In Configure clock in the Display part set the Date checkbox and change the font and fontsize in the Date box(Alt-h if you like). Wish granted.....
It looks quite nice in my pseudo-MacOS config, but I agree that it's ugly with the defaults.
I fully agree and one of these should really be merged into cvs:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=18543
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14423
The old one sucks big time, it looks simply awful.
KDE 3.4 should have a good looking analog clock, pleaaaaaase!!!
I was wondering if there is around some KDE tool similar to Synaptic (http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/). In negative case, would be interesting a port or something like that because is a very cool tool.
http://webcvs.kde.org/kdenonbeta/ksynaptics/
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=17286
Oops...embarrasing. Should have looked closer.
*hides somewhere far away*
Description:
KSynaptics is a control center module that enables users to take full advantage of their mobiles' synaptics touch pad.
It depends on the XFree's synaptics driver and offers the following features:
*adjustable pressure sensitivity
*tapping configuration / smart tapping
*mouse button emulation
*circular scrolling
Check it out, if you prefer Qt, there's also an Qt-based version available.
That has *nothing* to do with what he was asking. He was asking about the apt-get front-end that is installed by default w/Ubuntu, for example.
Good try, but I think kpackage is more like synaptic in this case. However I do prefer synaptic to kpackage.
Oh!! You _DID_ realize. I thought the embarassment comment was from the original poster. Sorry man, didn't mean to rag on ya!
Kapture (http://webcvs.kde.org/kdenonbeta/kdedebian/kapture/README?view=markup)
is also an APT frontend.
Yes, there is. The Adept package manager is similar to Synaptic, but is written for KDE using qt, rather than gtk. The home page is at http://web.mornfall.net/adept.html.
A screenshot can be found in the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adept_Package_Manager
Why is it so hard to create a usable free desktop for unixlike environments.
They always seam to focus on the needs of the sysadmin, and not the users. In real working life, sysadmins are fewer than ordinary users. So why not make interfaces that take this into account. We need to start to speak their language, and map models artefacs they feel familliar onto the unix stuff we use as sysadmins
E.g Most users will never need to navigate the entire file system tree. They need some place for their own files, some place to rech the files of other people. And here the key word is people. Users should not need to know that John have his files in /home/john. or /home2/john or some other unix related way. They should just be able to get the files John is prepared to share with them in one sinle place, e.g. the folder "Other Users Files/John" regardless
of where they are stored in the filesystem. In the same way the user needs to find their own documents and the applications, and add on hardware in a uniform way.
Apple is doing a wonderful job at this in Mac OS-X. Unfortunately they have forgotten the sysadmin, that still needs to see the unix system underneth the useroriented surface.
Most people here would probably call this a dumbed down interface, but guess what, most people are not that smart, and if they are, they probably have better things to do than learning how to adapt to the computer sciens guy or the sysadmin way of thinking.
... gmail would work in Konqueror, I would reduce the bloat on my desktop further by getting rid of Firefox. I know, I know Firefox is the hottest thing around but face it, despite its sleeker code, its very huge on memory. I am sticking to it *only* because I cannot access my gmail account in Konqueror. Otherwise, there is nothing to stop konqueror now!
Since KDE 3.3.2, Gmail works in Konqueror.
Take a look at http://osdir.com/Article2722.phtml for visual proof ;)
Thanks for the link. However, I have tried 3.3.2 as well as the latest source from CVS and I get an error that konqueror could not load the page. After pressing 'Ok' on the error dialog, KDE crash handler comes up.
Maybe i'm missing something but it would be great if a kde developer would post details of how to get it working.
In the meanwhile, here's a screenshot of the error dialog (from KDE 3.3.91)
I get the same error frequently on gmail, but not always...
Ummm dunno, I get the error each time. Oh and an update, I downloaded Mandrake 10.2 beta and the KDE 3.3.2 version in it works perfectly with gmail (Konqueror, I mean). Now how come a bug that's probably fixed in 3.3.2 crops up in 3.3.91 again? Or am I missing something?
Thanks for all replies.
Can we have joe-blow friendly names for the kio slaves? So that smb:/ or lan:/ could be called, say, "Network" or something. My example reeks of Windows but its just because that the most obvious one that comes to mind.
The idea is that in place of entering smb:/ in the Location bar, it should show the Mnemonic there. I know there's Konqueror profiles but I wonder if the "technical" names of kio-slaves could be hidden by default?
It would go far in making KDE more average-guy/gal friendly than it already is.
Sorry if I haven't spelled it out accurately. I hope the smart developers get the idea!