KDE 3.0 Beta2 is Out

KDE 3.0 Beta2 was announced today after a delay due to a variety of problems. This new release should provide a great opportunity for those interested in helping hunt down bugs or simply seeing where the future of KDE is headed. Read the full announcement for details. "One of the major improvements brought by KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2 is the Javascript/DHTML support in Konqueror. The DOM 2 model, used to render an HTML page, is now mostly implemented, and changes to the DOM tree are handled much better. The Javascript bindings and support is almost complete, faster and more stable than in KDE 2. These changes result in a much-improved rendering of dynamic websites and is something users will immediately appreciate."

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Comments

by Rinse (not verified)

Did anyone of you notice that RH 7.1 has screenshots of KDE 2.2 on their boxes? No sign of Gnome there

By the way, I always thought that OpenOffice/StarOffice and Mozilla used their own toolkits, not Gnome or GTK. They don't integrate with Gnome in any way.

Rinse

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

No, this can only be a German/Europe thing in my opinion. I only saw GNOME screenshots on the Red Hat version available here in North America.

-N.

by Rinse (not verified)

Well, it is on the boxes spreaded in The Netherlands.
RH 7.0 or earlier has Gnome as screenshots, newer versions KDE
Rinse

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Great stuff. :)

Cheers,
-N.

by Nick Betcher (not verified)

First off, Mr. Joe Shmoe we understand that KOffice needs work. I've never commonly heard people say that KWord owns joo, etc. If you want it better, contribute (Ohh, I forgot, you need to get your mouth off of Gnome's ass first). Secondly, Konqueror *is* more standards compliant. No, I'm not talking about "who can render this webpage better", because those two aren't related most of the time. I've seen a few webpages that actually have mozilla specific table tags in them!!! That isn't a standard, because last time I checked Mozilla doesn't make the standards. I would give you an example website, but they recently removed that mozilla specific code from it, but chances are, if Mozilla still promotes that, they aren't 100% standards compliant.

Sure, Evolution "rul3z" if you like big bloated pieces of shit that suck up resources like you suck on Gnome's ass. Gimp, I'll agree, that is a good program that I use daily and we're (KDE) all waiting for Gimp to separate its frontend from its backend (it's planned for a future release, mahahaha!). Red Carpet, ohh please, my distro handles that just fine thank you very much. XChat, well, there's Kvirc for that. XMMS quite honestly isn't special (Noatun is, though). And I'm not even going to continue because the rest don't deserve mentioning.

Gnome is losing. No, it isn't dead. No, you don't have to use KDE. Hell, most of the distros that have KDE installed and used by default still use GTK for their setup tools (SuSE is one of the exceptions, though). So they haven't lost yet. (The only reason distros use GTK is because of the fact that they have lazy coders that want to use Perl and Python, pfft).

Sure, I took your flaimbait, but lets see how well I did at flaming you right back.

by Paul Boddie (not verified)

> XMMS quite honestly isn't special (Noatun is, though).

Not on my install of KDE 2.2.1, it isn't. Noatun tends to start up very slowly, spontaneously play things off the playlist, and eat CPU time like nothing else I've ever seen. It becomes necessary to switch to a console, "ps -ef | grep noatun", and kill the thing.

> (The only reason distros use GTK is because of the fact that they have lazy
> coders that want to use Perl and Python, pfft).

I got the opposite impression, in fact. ;-) But if this wasn't sarcasm, then by all means go ahead and waste your time writing several 100KLOC of application code in C/C++. One day you might actually ship your application (well after those "lazy coders" have shipped theirs).

by dave (not verified)

similar experiences here, i've never had noatun play a whole file without crashing - nice idea though.

by oliv (not verified)

while I think the original post you are replying to is a troll, I have to disagree with some of your posts, but I will argument my opinion.

>I've never commonly heard people say that KWord owns joo, etc

A few days ago, on this website, a KDE developer was spreading the myths that the troll mentionned.
http://dot.kde.org/1013130688/1013178940/1013182932/1013192225/1013205281/
When such no senses come from a KDE developer, they automatically have a "official statement" dimension, even if they are not official. That's the same when Miguel De Icaza starts trolling. He is not entitled to speak for Gnome developers, but the results is people have the impression the whole Gnome community has trolled.

>Secondly, Konqueror *is* more standards compliant.

The test suites I see on the internet about standard compliance place Mozilla as number one, followed by IE for Mac, Opera and konqueror, and far far away, IE for Win32 and old Netscape 4. here are some links:

1- The evil test suite:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~py8ieh/internet/eviltests/
The results are here:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Epy8ieh/cgi/listresults.pl?ID=ETS

2- PNG home page - up to date
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html
or nice PNG test pages:
http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/pngtrans/
http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/alphagamma/

>Sure, Evolution "rul3z" if you like big bloated pieces of shit that suck up resources like you suck on Gnome's ass

I'll stop here, as from this point, your mail is starting to be a troll.

by Nick Betcher (not verified)

Actually, the whole reply was a troll. If you read my last comment, it's a little more clear. Hell, we try our hardest, and people like him just trying to make us disgruntled makes me angry (not to mention everything else going on in my life). Ohh well.

by Kobzar (not verified)

I understand you. I was a Gnome user for some time now and I recently switched to KDE "to give it a try". When I first had to choose, I had chosen Gnome just for the stupid eye-candy thing (nobody is perfect). After some months playing with KDE, I just have to admit that it's much better than Gnome as a desktop. It's more powerful, much more stable, Konqueror is just outsanding (it's the best manager I never used...), the tools are more polished... just to name a few.

However, and without any criticism to the developers who work so hard, I just have the feeling that Gnome has more 1st class applications than KDE to run on a desktop that is (ironically) by far inferior to KDE. The Gimp ust GTK, and so do Evolution, Gnumeric and GnuCash. And these are 4 applications I really like. Sure, kmail, kalendar, knotes are cool, but I must confess that I like the integrated approach of Evolution. I would love to see these appz unified for KDE too. Besides, I love the feature called vfolder in Evolution. I also think that Gnumeric is a great app and the best spreadsheet for Linux at the moment (yes, I found it better that SCalc). KOffice is very promising and the developers made an outstanding job in a very short amount of time (which is very promising), but I don't think it's mature enough yet to replace StarOffice or an app like Gnumeric. Last but not least, I would spent my bucks for Kapital, but as far as I know, you can't event generate Graphs and reports when GnuCash offers all of these features for free.

As a summary, I find KDE the best Desktop I ever used and all the tools provided with it are first-class appz that have no equivalent on the Linux desktop. But it looks like major "matured" appz (Gimp, Gnumeric, GnuCash, Evolution....) are written using GTK. But that's just my personal opinion ;->

Cheers,

Kobzar

by someone (not verified)

> When such no senses come from a KDE developer, they automatically have a "official statement" dimension, even if they are not official. That's the same when Miguel De Icaza starts trolling. He is not entitled to speak for Gnome developers, but the results is people have the impression the whole Gnome community has trolled.

Miguel at least had a central position in Gnome development. I'm not sure if there is this one person in the KDE community, but I'm sure it's in particular _not_ Geiseri.

by Sashmit B. Bhaduri (not verified)

Well, standards compliance is all well and dandy, but in reality, most web designers don't really care. The real standards compliance in the real world is how well a browser renders a page similiar to IE on windows. I know this is broken and all, but I think this is what Konqueror developers should focus on.

by Paul Boddie (not verified)

joe99, your insecurity is showing! Whatever made you post such a rant? :-)

by Tim (not verified)

:-)

by OpenOffice.org user (not verified)

I don't see the use of this argument anymore. I installed the latest build of OpenOffice.org, which is build 641 and was dumbstruck.

After using it for the afternoon and opening up my most complex Word and Excel documents with near perfect results (Out of the scores of documents I opened, one document had one page break missing, everything else was perfect), I have uninstalled MSOffice and am using OpenOffice exclusively.

My suggestion is, stop whining about KOffice / Gnome-Office and simply use OpenOffice.

It works ... TODAY!

by Nick Betcher (not verified)

/me looks around
Anyone getting a feeling this is the same troll? [grin]

by ABC (not verified)

Sure, all that - and you /still/ can't do basic things like insert an image into Gnumeric, or switch your default mail handler in Mozilla.

And sorry, GTK is still ugly compared to Qt. KDE looks great out of the box. GNOME looks...not bad, but not particularlly good. I've been through dozens and dozens of GTK themes, and have yet to find one that comes anywhere near the speed or quality of the standard KDE look.

by Leon Brooks (not verified)

> you /still/ can't do basic things like insert an image into Gnumeric

That's supposed to be a disadvantage? One printing firm I support gets layouts supplied to it in that most appropriate of publishing formats, (tahdaah!) Microsoft Excel... no, thanks, export as a table to something designed for laying stuff out, and add your graphic there. If Gnome's half of what it's supposed to be (and the same goes for KSpread through KDE) this should be simple to automate.

If it isn't, get coding!

by Pablo Liska (not verified)

maybe you dont know how to configure your colors, but check out this screenshot of a non-tacky liquid (from mosfet).

this can be reproduced with a combination of patches (pablorg / button patch) from kde-look.org

by Craig (not verified)

Myth your not a total loser. Truth your just another RMS/FSF pathetic Troll.

by Daniel Stone (not verified)

Nothing more than a stupid troll who also cross-posted to DebianPlanet.

Yeah, he has some good points; I use AbiWord and Gnumeric close to daily. I don't care, I'm not religious. KDE works for me, I like KDE; I was in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time and I became its maintainer.

GNOME people are excellent, as are KDE. To summarise one very senior GNOME person: "None of us have anything against each other, it's just the stupid trolls on Gnotes and the Dot. I wish they'd FOAD."

I wish they'd FOAD, too. Trolls, FOAD.

And KDE people, if you're thinking about being l33t on Gnotes: don't. It's stupid, and wins no friends. In fact, everyone will think you a dickhead for it. I hate to be saying this, but I have no doubt that someone will troll Gnotes soon. *sigh*.

-d

by Anonymous (not verified)

> Nothing more than a stupid troll who also cross-posted to DebianPlanet.

In the /. thread about KDE 3.0 Beta 2 he posted it at least four times. :-(

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Well, first of all it's Gnotices :-), and second, Gnotices is a censored/moderated forum like LinuxToday and has been for many months now. This is probably another reason why more trolls have moved here.

Cheers,
-N.

by Carg (not verified)

Censorship and Moderation are two different things. Gnotices is not censored, but moderated.

Oh, and this is not the reason you have more trolls here. The they're trolls here in the first place is because there's no system implemented to stop them.

I really doubt anyone ever said "Oh, I can't troll on news.gnome.org now. So I'll go to dot.kde.org".

by not me (not verified)

> I really doubt anyone ever said "Oh, I can't troll on news.gnome.org now. So I'll go to dot.kde.org".

You do? I have no doubt that this sort of thing happens.

by ac (not verified)

There seems to be _way_ less trolls out here than on most sites with these so-called anti-troll systems.

Oh, and you must not have been around much, there has been a lot of cross-trolling between Gnotices and dot.kde.org in the past.

by Carg (not verified)

"There seems to be _way_ less trolls out here than on most sites with these so-called anti-troll systems."

That's not my point. Trolls exist _everywhere_. You must do something to stop them. You can't just sit around.

Look at the size of this thread for example. A lot of people got angry and they didn't have to be, if there were a moderation system.

"Oh, and you must not have been around much, there has been a lot of cross-trolling between Gnotices and dot.kde.org in the past."

I come only ocasionally.

by Etriaph (not verified)

Ok, on Gnumeric. You're comparing a product that has a team of 32 members (Gnumeric) to a product with a team of 4 members (KSpread)? For the number of people hacking away at KSpread (one of them being David Faure, who I'm sure isn't putting all his keystrokes into it) it's a far superior product. If we had the same kinda team on KSpread as we do on Gnumeric, Gnumeric would have to just quit.

KDE Users don't think GTK+ is ugly, on the contrary. GTK+ theme support was added to KDE because we think the GTK themes are nice looking. We do however think that some of the GTK+ widgets (file selector anyone?) are horrible. Now, on the subject of toolbars. The GUIs that KDE developers have put together are industry standard. It's far more intuitive than GNOME applications, and as far as I'm concerned more logically considered. I think you should reconsider some of your accusations after you use KDE for a while.

Now Konqueror, I mean holy crap. I don't use anything else. It's fast, it renders 99% of the HTML I find perfectly, I can view Flash animations and Java applets, what the hell else would I want to use? A web browser that doesn't integrate into my desktop (or yours for that matter, Mozilla isn't a GTK product)?. Considering KHTML and Konqueror are entirely community developed I would say they are incredible. Is KHTML and Konqueror getting better? Yes. Are they HTML 4.0/CSS Level 1/ECMAScript 1.2 compliant? Yes. Are there bugs? Well of course, and Mozilla isn't bug free either I'm sure. Look at the accomplishment, you'll understand why KDE users are so loyal.

On the subject of Nautilaus, I have only one thing to say. I don't like it. I honestly, and truly, think it's unusable. When trying to open a directory of mine with 500+ mp3s in it it took about 15 seconds to parse the listing, order it, and display it. With Konq it was rather instantaneous. Mentioning Nautilaus didn't help your argument any.

Now about KWord. Our list of filters are smaller, so is our list of developers, that's sort of understandable. No, and I don't really see a need to. I haven't had someone send me a .rtf file in a very long time. Can I read .doc files? Absolutely, and that's pretty good too. Will KOffice improve? Yes, it will. Do most KDE users care so much if they can read .rtf or .doc? Not too too much no, we're more interested in read .kwd files which KWord does just fine with, as it is its own format. I use KWord all the time to type up anything I need to. My Resume is in KWord format, and it prints out beautifully. When I want to show my resume to an employer, I print it to .pdf format and post it online. I have a ball.

Now, your last point. I don't think GNOME is going to lose, and I don't think that's a good perspective anyhow. GNOME and KDE should continue to develop seperately and give each other friendly competition. Do I think KDE is better? Absolutely, and so do a lot of the big distros. Do I think KDE has better infrastructure in their API for developers? Damn right. It's based on a really great cross-platform GUI toolkit called Qt. Now you're right Qt isn't community developed, but I'm glad for that. It's open source and available to us, which is nice. It's commercially developed, commercially QAed by professionals. I think that's a great model. A for-profit company creating an open source product that we extend to create an open source desktop. I wouldn't want to touch the code for Qt, the folks at Trolltech have it covered.

Next time you decide to come to a kde.org-based website I would suggest that you do your research first and actually consider all the facts before randomly flaming KDE. It's the best available desktop for any UNIX or UNIX like platform available today. It's not my opinion, it's a fact. GNOME is great too, but lacks what KDE has, which is power, intuitiveness, applications, clarity of common development perception (Njaard and Neil arguing excepted), organization, and a general desire to provide the very best any modern desktop should.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Mod this up! :-)

by Neondiet (not verified)

<<<<
Nautalus was once critised as being a slow, dog, rah rah.. well it was,
yeah it was slow,...but it has improved, but it seems kde users still like
to think that. Well if it makes you happy. Nautalus is very themeable

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/ximian-south-metatheme.jpeg Its a
welcome change away from the Windows File Manager look.
>>>>

What made me laugh was the web site this bozo quoted has its very own Nautilus speed poll (http://jimmac.musichall.cz) where only 3% rate it "fast enough" and a whopping 61% rate it a "slow".

There's egg on your face Joe99

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

:: ximian-south-metatheme.jpeg
:: Its a welcome change away from the Windows File Manager look.

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=931

is the KDE port of the theme. You can also find ports of Gorilla and the Gnome 2 standard icons.

I'd like to take a moment and mention the feedback I've gotten from the Gnome community since I started maintaining ports of the Gnome icons to KDE. I recieved one email from a blithering moron whom I can't quite tell if he was a KDE or Gnome user (he was using Pine). I got three emails from Gnome users thanking me for the icons so they can have their KDE apps look the same as their Gnome desktop, and six emails from KDE users saying thank you for the excellent icons. Two emails, however, were what impressed me the most. They were from Jakub himself (together with tigert, the main Gnome artists), who first asked some technical questions, and then (after I replied voicing my thanks over his implicit approval), basically said that the more options available, the better, even calling this packaging of his icons for KDE a "good thing".

You can also see that the feedback on kde-look itself is overwhelmingly positive, including answering my call for help regarding a technical problem.

Trolls - chew on this - you're trolling for your "teams", but your "teams" aren't competing... everybody is working towards the same goal, but it can be a shared goal. We're building houses next to each other, not fighting over a single lot.

--
Evan

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

What technical questions would a GNOME developer have regarding a KDE icon theme?

Just curious -- good work!

Cheers,
-N.

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

He just asked the method I used to convert from Vector to bitmaped icons. In that email, he also said it was good to see them available for KDE users too. That email made up for a lousy day that day.

--
Evan

by andrew (not verified)

Well said, Evan! I agree wholeheartedly.

~andrew

by Jesper Juhl (not verified)

Sounds like you don't like KDE very much. Well, there's a simple solution to that - don't use it.

It seems that you are much more fond of Gnome and favor various GTK apps over the QT equivalents - so use them.

It's (still) a free world so you can just pick and choose. Go with what you like best. But don't beat on others becourse they happen to like something different.

/Jesper

by KDE Developer (not verified)

Are you on crack? Or just solvents?

by ch (not verified)

to the guy who build the deb's for debian :

could you not make a system to make daily builds from the whole kde thing,
if it does not compile out of the box ok , but some snapsshots have to compile
out of the box. it would be very nice for devel work, and it would be no more work than to write a script.

greetings and have fun with the debian packages and your gf, :D

ch

by someone (not verified)

You haven't read previous posting: Spending the packager a fast computer may help.

by Daniel Stone (not verified)

I now have SSH access to an AthlonXP 1800+, but I'm not about to suck all his bandwidth, seeing as he's been generous enough to donate use of his box. I also want to copy as little stuff as possible, seeing as stuff gets wget'ed by me at work to do final tests, then scp'ed home so it can get picked up by ftp.cs.umn.edu by rsync. Unfortunately, the link I have at home is charged by the meg, so I pay twice for every lot of KDE stuff that gets posted up. Not cheap.

by Jens (not verified)

Can I speed you up by giving you access to another AthlonXP 1800+? ;-)

Seriously, do you have a time frame for when .debs will be there? A week perhaps? I'd like to have a chance to report my favourite bugs before 3.1 final is out.

(I'm asking what time you plan on, not that you promise anything, because I don't expect promises from a volunteer.)

Thanks! :)

by Julien Olivier (not verified)

If I'm on http://dot.kde.org/1013639318/addPostingForm, typing "Enter" into the comment field just brings me to the search form as if I had clicked on "Search" ! More over, dropping a file to the Desktop doesn't make it appear. Even if you refresh the desktop. But if you log out/in, it's here ! Are those two bugs Mandrake-related or just normal bugs from a Beta version ?

by Joe (not verified)

I just tried Beta2 this morning, hoping that KMail would let me filter messages into folders on the IMAP server... but not yet it seems. This is a deal-killer for me. Back to using Mozilla-mail. All in good time right?

by Schwann (not verified)

Filtering with IMAP should be done on the server, not at the client. Or do you use your IMAP-account just as POP3-account, and just download your mails?
(but I would also like to see this feature...)

by Eric E (not verified)

Right, but it's frequently difficult to get any sort of big mailhost to let you run your own procmail rules. I looked for simple user-space filter routines a while back and had no luck. What would be coolest is if KMail could set up procmail rules.... That'd be pretty OK.

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

Some IMAP servers have their own filtering script engine, called sieve.
If your server has that, it beats the hell out of procmail :-)

by Johannes Wilm (not verified)

all servers I know about run exim. now if i could just get kmail to safe its filtering information in a .filter-file on the server...

by Alejandro Vargas (not verified)

All I have to say is kmail seemed to be good, but is as bad as outlook in the related to imap. Fortunatelly there are another mail clients that works ok.

I don't think depending on the server for filtering is the right thing to do -- not every server will support sieve, etc. It seems ridiculous that kmail will filter new pop3 messages and not imap. When a new message shows up, kmail should download the header and process the filters. Sometimes it's nice to move certain messages offline.

pop3 is not a solution for me either -- I use kmail on my home/main computer and use webmail when I'm away. pop3 tends to download the same messages over and over again. It isn't good enough to just download the new messages either -- if I read a message on webmail, it is no longer marked new, and it wouldn't get downloaded.

Beyond filtering, kmail should also save local copies of all imap messages. When connected to the server, it should compare the headers to update any status information (replied, etc.). I hate waiting for messages to display after I've already viewed them before.

by Anonymous (not verified)

You will be pleased by KMail 1.6's IMAP, including disconnected IMAP.

by NÉMETH Balázs (not verified)

KDE 2.x series introduced an excellent feature: web archives (*.war)
I loved it very very much, and I used it often. I have about 65-70 war files.

But! I cant find this feature in KDE 3...

Can anybody explain it?

Konqueror -- otherwise -- get matured. I enjoy the browsing with it. But there is some little feature, what I miss:

1. tabbed browsing (planned for KDE 3.1)
2. Stop animations with ESC (ok, I can stop them in preferences, but it is general)
3. word selecting (and copying to clipboard) with double-click and row selecting with double-click + click
4. font size increasing/decreasing with Ctrl + / Ctrl -

Are 2-3-4 planned in any version of KDE 3?

Other problem: Java never started in Konqueror for me... I tried kaffe, but no succes :(

The Information in KDE Control Center is very simple (ugly). For example Devices. Is it a hated area in KDE development?

The KDE print subsystem is wonderful!

I dont't like the obligatory folder list in KMAIL (Inbox, Sent, Drafts). These folders are always at top level, but there should be only 1 toplevel folder, named -- for example -- Local Folders/Mail (like in Mozilla), and Inbox, drafts, etc. should be subfolders inside!
Is it possible?

Thank you, if somebody can answer my questions....