Brief KDE 3.2 Review

[towjamb]

Friends,
Just thought I'd give you my impressions ...

I couldn't wait for 3.2 to hit unstable so I went ahead and installed it from CVS despite the dire warnings and predictions. Certainly not for the weak at heart, this is a hack and shouldn't be attempted unless you know dpkg and some commandline. I'd suggest wait until it hits unstable.

The install:
Basically, I switched to IceWM and had to remove all traces of KDE 3.15, individually removing a few stray packages to satisfy conflicts. I further had to change apt.config's default-release to "now" and comment out all sources in source.list except 3.2CVS and Debian experimental.

During the install, Apt had a problem with efax, but adding an unstable source fixed that. I believe I had to also add kdm to log back into KDE. KDM complained that auto-login is broken but offered normal login. Everything else installed, configured itself and loaded without a reboot. All my files and personal settings were preserved. The only problem seemed to be some blank icons, dead links and missing apps -- seems dpkg zapped everything related to old kdelibs4. Most programs are available for 3.2 and I spent some time replacing them. I had trouble with conflicting version of xlibs-dev so compiling for X is out of the question for the moment.

The improvements are significant:
The taskbar is now cleaner and with more options to tweak it.

The Kmenu seems to have gotten shuffled around a bit for sanity and now features grouped tasks.

Konqueror is now even better. The Nav panel now stretches the current directory tab. The "devices" tab is prominent and gives you full control of all your drives. I'm able to eject a CD from within Konqueror with a simple right-click. No more sticky folders either. There is an FSViewPart icon in the toolbar that gives you a graphical view of folders disk space, and I've noticed that context menus are a bit cleaner and permission tabs are simplified. Copy and paste seems to reach a bit further as well.

As a web browser, Konqueror shines. Pages load and render as well as Mozilla and matches many of its features, though I have not tried Firefox yet. But it scores big in consistency with the desktop. I have no reason to use anything else.

I'm a control freak so the improved Control Center works for me. A device manager is all that's missing.

Most apps are still there and with subtle improvements. I have not tried Kontact, the personal information manager, but it is a welcome alternative to Evolution. Nor have I tried Kopete, KWallet or Juk. I'm not a coder so the new KDevelop won't get a look.

KOffice 1.3 works great and is full featured enough for what I do. It surprised me to see a Microsoft web document open up in Konqueror and with good rendering.

Lots of eye candy for 3.2 available at KDE-look.org, and check out the lastest apps at KDE-apps.org -- great sites. I chose the "Knifty" window decoration and "Plastik" widget style.

Overall:
My superficial impressions of KDE 3.2 would be of speed and style. This is a fast desktop, as quick as IceWM on my 2.5GHz machine and way ahead of XP. Apps snap open with impressive speed. Feels like I've doubled my memory. This alone is enough to please. But it now has a facade of elegance and cohesiveness lacking in earlier releases. The K-apps work better together. There seems to be effort to make them more intelligent too, as some of my errant settings and missing packages were called out or ignored in favour of defaults. I always admired the austere beauty of Gnome, and now KDE has captured some of that while retaining its superior architecture.

Get it as soon as you can. It's worth it.

[znmeb]

Friends,
Just thought I'd give you my impressions ...

[snip]

As a web browser, Konqueror shines. Pages load and render as well as Mozilla and matches many of its features, though I have not tried Firefox yet. But it scores big in consistency with the desktop. I have no reason to use anything else.

Does it render http://pdxneurosemantics.com correctly? The Konqueror I have with Knoppix doesn't. BTW, I've got both FireFox 0.8 and Thunderbird (they really ought to call it ThunderFox, I think) and I use them for browsing and e-mail. I gave up on Konqueror as a browser because of its inaccurate rendering of my web page and the KDE folks' insistence that *I* do the research on figuring out why.

[snip]

KOffice 1.3 works great and is full featured enough for what I do. It surprised me to see a Microsoft web document open up in Konqueror and with good rendering.

I don't use KOffice ... between OpenOffice 1.1, Lyx and TexMacs, KOffice seems quite lame.

[snip]

Overall:
My superficial impressions of KDE 3.2 would be of speed and style. This is a fast desktop, as quick as IceWM on my 2.5GHz machine and way ahead of XP. Apps snap open with impressive speed. Feels like I've doubled my memory. This alone is enough to please. But it now has a facade of elegance and cohesiveness lacking in earlier releases. The K-apps work better together. There seems to be effort to make them more intelligent too, as some of my errant settings and missing packages were called out or ignored in favour of defaults. I always admired the austere beauty of Gnome, and now KDE has captured some of that while retaining its superior architecture.

Get it as soon as you can. It's worth it.

I'll certainly agree on getting it as soon as you can. It's available for Gentoo now, and, in fact, the "woody" packages are available on the KDE.org web site. It seems faster coming up, but I haven't done much "stopwatch" timing of, say, application launch.

[towjamb]

Does it render http://pdxneurosemantics.com correctly? The Konqueror I have with Knoppix doesn't. BTW, I've got both FireFox 0.8 and Thunderbird (they really ought to call it ThunderFox, I think) and I use them for browsing and e-mail. I gave up on Konqueror as a browser because of its inaccurate rendering of my web page and the KDE folks' insistence that *I* do the research on figuring out why.

Your page renders equally well in Firebird and Konqueror 3.2.
I tried Firefox from Moz.org but the fonts look hideous and I can't seem to improve them. It's really fast, though.

I don't use KOffice ... between OpenOffice 1.1, Lyx and TexMacs, KOffice seems quite lame.

No, that's me.

I'll certainly agree on getting it as soon as you can. It's available for Gentoo now, and, in fact, the "woody" packages are available on the KDE.org web site. It seems faster coming up, but I haven't done much "stopwatch" timing of, say, application launch.

It *is* really good. But there are certainly issues with the experimental packages -- probably why it's taking so long to reach unstable.