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KDE GUI Programming Upgrades Technology

KDE 3.4 goes Beta 242

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-and-improved dept.
wikinerd writes "KDE 3.4 has reached its beta testing phase. The KDE 3.4beta1 is codenamed 'Krokodile' and pre-compiled packages are already available for Slackware, but if you need to compile it by yourself first check its compilation requirements."
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KDE 3.4 goes Beta More

KDE 3.4 goes Beta

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  • Anti-aliased fonts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lindsay Lohan ( 847467 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:18PM (#11354399) Homepage Journal
    Re: the KDE 3.4 Compilation Requirements [kde.org]...

    I would categorize the X Render Extension as recommended as opposed to optional. Aren't anti-aliased fonts a basic feature of any modern desktop environment?

    • Re:Anti-aliased fonts (Score:5, Insightful)

      by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:21PM (#11354433) Homepage
      Aren't anti-aliased fonts a basic feature of any modern desktop environment?
      If you have the CPU power, sure. But there are those of us that want to run the latest software on older existing hardware. I generally forgo AA on everything except for my semi-modern main PC at home. The machines at work, at the church, and my older PCs suffer too much of a hit when I use AA.

      • Re:Anti-aliased fonts (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MrHanky ( 141717 )
        Are you sure this has much to do with CPU power? I use xrender AA on my Powerbook G3 266 MHz (running Debian Sid), and it's far from shockingly slow. If I have to guess, I'd say it's because the ATI graphics chipset (Mach64, i think) is moderately well supported.

        And of course, if you haven't tried xrender on the machines lately, you could test it again. Xrender has improved a bit since it was introdused some years ago.

      • Re:Anti-aliased fonts (Score:3, Informative)

        by mczak ( 575986 )
        Actually, if you have a supported graphic card, AA fonts can be quite fast. The dri supported radeons (meaning everything from original radeon 7000 up to 9250 and all radeon igp except the brand-new of the xpress 200 chipset) for instance have render acceleration, which can speed up aa font rendering up by a factor of 10 or more.
        This particular driver doesn't support (accelerated) subpixel hinting, though.
      • That sucks, Windows 98 (win95 + ie 4 too) could get aa fonts and it didn't load things too much...
      • The machines at work, at the church, and my older PCs suffer too much of a hit when I use AA.

        Actually, most anything, including churches and old PCs, will suffer when you hit it with Anti-aircraft.


      • Yes, think of the Pentium II 233 MHz users who wish to run KDE 3.4! ;-)

        I think the question is: Should they slow down development for e.g. better text readability and visual functionality to accomodate the needs of a user base probably in minority? Or should those stick to either more bare bones, or older windows managers that were made at the time their computers were? What role is KDE supposed to have? Personally, I'd really like to have a window manager trying to compete with Mac OS X and the upcoming L
      • CPU power? What kind of innefficient algorithms are they running? I was using AA fonts under NT4 on Pentium and Pentium Pros (i.e. 200MHz or less) seven years ago. AA has always sucked (appearance-wise) under X compared with Windows, but are you telling that they're implemented that poorly at the source level too?
    • "Aren't anti-aliased fonts a basic feature of any modern desktop environment?"

      Yes, they are a basic feature. However, they in no way relate to the desktop functioning well. If you don't have them, nothing will slow down or be left useless. By contrast, many programs actually depend on ghostscript, so it is recommended. Without it, the desktop still runs, although some programs will not.

  • Meh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:18PM (#11354401)
    Kall me when there's a release kandidate.

  • Excited about KDE 3.4 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:19PM (#11354412) Homepage
    I'm looking forward to giving 3.4 a try. Why? Because on my modest hardware it seems like Qt has gotten faster over the past 2 years while GTK2 has gotten slower.
    • I think you're a little confused, actually quite confused.

      Qt and GTK have little to do with the overall speed of any desktop envirenment. Judging from the numbers of "independent" applications, I think you'll see that GTK is still a great toolkit.

      • Re:Excited about KDE 3.4 (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Sorry, no. If every GTK+ application on my system has a noticable delay even opening a menu, yet all the Qt applications are fine, that's a problem with the toolkit.

        I think it's pretty arrogant for you to call somebody "confused" for observing that GTK+ 2.0 is quite slow. Even fans of that toolkit admit that 2.0 is quite a bit slower than 1.x.
      • So you really have no basis to make this claim? Saying that GTK is "great" seems like you really dont know what the differences are in the rendering methodology of the two.

        If you knew the frameworks that drive these to graphics engines, you would know that Qt is far more advanced. Qt Faster? probably but its apples and oranges. GTK more usable? Sure is but that comes at a price.
    • Seriously, this comment has no technical merit what so over. How does "I tried GTK2 and its slow" get modded to the top?

      Install XFCE [xfce.org], and then try to tell me that GTK2 is slow.

    • Re:Excited about KDE 3.4 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @09:10PM (#11355477) Homepage
      I'm looking forward to giving 3.4 a try. Why? Because on my modest hardware it seems like Qt has gotten faster over the past 2 years while GTK2 has gotten slower.

      Why has this piece of flamebait been modded informative?

      Try and say something about KDE 3.4, the story, or KDE's speed in general.

      A post comparing old versions of KDE to old versions of GTK is a troll. A pathetic one at that.

  • Screenshots? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by schnits0r ( 633893 )
    Are there any screenshots of this? What does it look like? Is it pretty? Does it have new features both usably, and visually?

    • Re:Screenshots? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:39PM (#11354618)
      plastik as the default style
      SVG wallpapers now possible
      kicker refactored and with a new cool animation
      kdm now themeable
      experimental traslucency windows
      HAL support
      little polishing on the menus
      ability to download and install new themes directly from the desktop
      trash applet in kicker and trash, media, settings kioslaves
      kpdf almost completely rewritten
      emoticons in kmail
      systemtray icon hiding in kicker

      still, too many icons on the konqueror toolbar. luckily it doesn't take too much time to remove them. but it should be the default..
      anyway, 3.4 is gonna be one of the best kde releases ever.
  • I was hoping for a release using Qt 4 - mmm, double buffering....

    I'll patiently wait :)

    • Qt4 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @12:00AM (#11357504) Homepage Journal
      Qt4 is a <i>really</i> major change. It is most definitely non-trivial to port code to Qt4, even with the Qt3 compatiblity libraries.

      As someone facing the need to port their code to Qt4 sometime in the coming year, I'm all too aware of this.

      I wouldn't expect a Qt4 based KDE in any hurry. Even if they're already porting to the Qt4 beta, I expect it'll take them a fair darn while even after Qt4 stable comes out before they can put together a Qt4 desktop. Even then, I'll be surprised if some apps don't continue to use Qt3 for a while after that.

  • oh crap... (Score:5, Funny)

    by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:26PM (#11354501)
    just when you thought debian sarge was going to go stable some time this year...

    • You hadn't heard? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:44PM (#11354660) Homepage Journal
      Debian's auto-release script is hard-wired to a Brownian Motion Vector Plotter and a realy hot cup of tea. The release after next will be out sometime last year.
    • I was just thinking that. The only brought 3.3 into -testing like a week ago.
      • Even when Sarge FINALLY DOES get released (actually it's so late I'd say when it 'escapes') it will be so long in the tooth as to be useless. I gave up on Debian about 1.5 years ago when testing wouldn't install any gnome or kde packages (it was broken for at least 6 months) and looked for something else. Fedora core was too buggy, slackware was interresting but has too few packages so I would have ended up building alot of stuff from source or installing rouge rpm's. I finally just went with Gentoo.

  • KDE 4.0... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jameth ( 664111 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:29PM (#11354527)
    I'm actually most excited because this means that, in not too long, people will start really working on KDE 4.0. That's the release I want. 3.4 is a finalization of the 3's, really. It's got some nice cleanup of what's there and will run a little better, but almost all the features that were ever going into the 3's are already there.

    But 4.0...oh, I can hardly wait...

    • Re:KDE 4.0... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Galahad2 ( 517736 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @08:19PM (#11355011) Homepage
      If you're wondering, here [kde.org] is a feature plan for 4.0.
      • I looked at it - hardly seems like a worthy feature list to jump major versions with.

        • Re:KDE 4.0... (Score:5, Informative)

          by chill ( 34294 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @08:38PM (#11355201) Journal
          KDE changes major number when they break binary backwards compatibility.

          The major change will be the move to QT4. KDE major release numbers match QT major release numbers.

        • Re:KDE 4.0... (Score:3, Informative)

          by Mornelithe ( 83633 )
          Well, that's hardly a complete list. Most developers aren't thinking about KDE 4.0 yet, because they're working on KDE 3.4. Once 3.4 is released, and all the stuff from the 3.4 feature plan that couldn't be completed is pushed to the 4.0 plan, and everyone makes their new forecasts for 4.0, you can then comment on the amount of new features.

          KDE 4.0 will be based off of Qt 4.0, so that's already a major jump right there, and it means that things like pluggable rendering backends including an OpenGL backend
        • There will be alot more changes than that in 4.0. They just didn't list them all, because they haven't decided everything yet. Hell, 4.0 is still very much in the air. And I bet that feature-plan for 3.4 doesn't list all the changes either.
      • That list is very preliminary and very incomplete. Notably, there are no kdelibs improvements listed...
  • KDE's site is pretty slashdotted right now and unresponsive and I can't find info on this release.

    What does 3.4 include? Features? bugfixes? etc?

    • Re:Features? (Score:3, Funny)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      Yes, it has features and bugfixes. Oh, you wanted to know which ones!!! Well, why didn't you say so? I haven't the faintest.
  • Does it use DBUS yet? Thats what im waiting for... better hardware response. I dont mean to complain, but everytime i try to unmount a usb drive, etc. my windows using friend makes snide remarks about Linux... its starting to drive me nuts. Usually im not running anything that should be accessing it either (the most used command on my computer is pkill -9 konqueror, lol).
    • That type of function has nothing at all todo with DBUS in its current state. You should be looking into hotplug. My stock Gentoo install, which I have hardly tweaked at all, automagically mounts and unmounts my USB drive, no problems whatsoever.

    • Re:DBUS ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
      Huh? I use KDE on FreeBSD, and I can unmount a USB drive in about a tenth of a second with one mouse click. Under Windows (XP) it usually takes me ten or more seconds and four mouse clicks. Sometimes, maybe one in twenty, it takes up to a couple of minutes to unmount with the entire system frozen in the meantime. And this is the system everyone says Unix should emulate? No fscking way!

      p.s. DBUS may or may not be a good idea, I haven't looked into it closely. But I'm not expecting any performance increases

  • Masive i18n (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Forge ( 2456 ) <kevinforge.gmail@com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:36PM (#11354588) Homepage Journal
    Notice how the translations are larger than everything else combined ?

    That I partially reflects the share number of languages available. It also shows how modular KDE's design is. I.e. You can strip out everything language dependent into a separate package without breaking the rest. (Yes, it compiles in English without the i18n package).
    • The really impressive translation magic is in Qt's i18n tools ( QObject::tr(), lupdate, lrelease, etc). It "just works" - you code your app in English, but mark strings as translatable and translators can translate your app using external files generated from the source that can be distributed separately.

      It's fantastic.

      Sure, there's more work involved in making external resources like HTML help translatable, but the real magic happens in Qt.

      • That's not all! Different users on the same machine can have their desktop and apps in whichever language they choose, as long as the relevant i18n pack has been installed. Some other programs support this behaviour too (eg: give out different messages according to $LANG).

        Having localised builds sucks, IMnsHO. OOo and Firefox are only available in one language at a time. I don't want to install two complete copies and start fiddling with paths, so I'm limited to only one language.

        -- Steve

  • KDE (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TechnologyX ( 743745 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @07:42PM (#11354647) Journal
    Say what you want about KDE, but after playing with 3.3, I finally made the switch from GNOME to KDE. I especially like the level of integration in between apps, the transparency settings for menus and applications, and KDevelop. Gnome is awesome too, especially 2.8, but KDE just seems to have more polish to it.
  • I actually compiled this about a week ago, seems like. Took me about 20 hours of course (like 15 without QT, seems like).... It seemed a little bit unstable to me, but then, I've never been great at diagnosing the exact problem in Linux =)
  • it may byte you in the ass..
    I guess I need to build a screw around machine. I have so much trying beta on my production machine. I get up each day and tell myself, "Well now, everything is working fine. Let's fix that!"...

  • Ich bin Schnappi das kleine Krokodil (Score:4, Funny)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @08:41PM (#11355232) Homepage Journal
    If this release is named "Krokodile", I think the default startup music should be "Schnappi! [theomahachannel.com]"

  • autospellcheck on kate? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sewagemaster ( 466124 ) <sewagemasterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @08:58PM (#11355384) Homepage
    does anyone have any luck with autospellcheck (spellcheck as you type, red underlining of words if you make a spelling mistake) in kate? They were saying that this was going to be released in 3.2 but it doesnt seem to be there. bugs.kde.org has closed the wishlist/feature request ticket. I'm using 3.3.1 currently. The feature's there in konqueror, kmail and kword, but for us folks that use kile (which depends on kate) as the LaTeX source editor, we would sure find it a good feature to have.
  • Where's the list of features in this new version? Or should I just be excited that it's a higher number?

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