The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 2. The focus of this release, code-named Kollege, is to fix bugs in the run-up to aKademy in late August. More here and here.
KDE 3.3 Beta 2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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We are still running Debian Woody with KDE2.2 at university which reminds me everyday how much KDE has improved since then. A big “thanks” to all the developers that helped to make KDE what it is now! For me it is just the most powerful and most useable desktop there is. KDE has many excellent apps like Konqueror, KMail, Konsole, K3B, Kate, JuK and Quanta. Features like Klipper, as you type spell-checking, KWallet, Konsole’s send input to all sessions and KIO-Slaves make KDE more useable and powerful then any other desktop environement. KDE is also really stable and gets faster with every release. I really look forward to KDE3.3!
I hope they’ve figured out a way to make it a little faster. KDE has been totally unusable for me since KDE 3. It takes at least 10 seconds to get past that splash screen. That’s just too long for me.
i stiller remember using redhat 5 with kde 1. boy were those the days of computing! back then gnome and kde were virtually identical. they’ve both come a long way, though i don’t use either anymore.
maybe this weekend i’ll give kde another look, the stable 3.2.3 ebuilds are fresh off the servers and binaries should be compiled in the next few hours.
way to go KDE, your my fav full featured X desktop
“I hope they’ve figured out a way to make it a little faster. KDE has been totally unusable for me since KDE 3. It takes at least 10 seconds to get past that splash screen. That’s just too long for me.”
Waiting 10 seconds once at startup makes it unusable?…..If you don’t like it fine..but at least get a better excuse..that one is just pathetic
KDE has been totally unusable for me since KDE 3. It takes at least 10 seconds to get past that splash screen. That’s just too long for me.
I have a patch to make it take only 0.13 secs. Is that enough for you?
C’mon, 10secs… How much can you do in that timeframe?
Perhaps you should wait for the splashscreen to finish.. 3.2.x is significantly faster than 3.1.x, and a great deal faster than Gnome was, last time I tried it.
>How much can you do in that timeframe?
Sorry pal, but BeOS boots the WHOLE OS in 10 secs or less. Loading ONLY the DE in 10 secs **is** too long. Both OSX and WinXP are also faster than KDE and Gnome (from login time to desktop).
Well as long as it’s not getting slower faster than computers are getting faster, ahem, then I have no problem with additional features. Take the money you saved by avoiding windows and buy another stick of RAM
I just installed the Baghira theme on KDE, it’s a thing of beauty if not very original.
http://kdelook.org/content/show.php?content=8692
Oh, so switching to BeOS can make your computer start 40 seconds faster. Buy, I wonder just how Be could croak while having such a feature!
I am **sure** that if KDE could start in 2 seconds, that would be a huge productivity gain!
People, get real, shaving a minute off startup, considering things only start at most once a day, means dimes. Hell, if you are really annoyed by it, don´t close it!
The reason OSX and WinXP can be faster from login to desktop is because they don’t give you any choice of DEs. And you pay for it in boot time.
I don’t know what you’re smoking, but my 500 Mhz P3 boots XP Pro *faster* than either FC2 or Mdk or even Debian or Slackware from start to Gnome/KDE DE (my Linuces run on a P4 1.4 GHz). And don’t tell me that “I don’t use the right Linux”, because I have tried a lot of them, and none boot as fast as XP (again, from start to gnome/kde DE which are more comparable to Luna).
>Sorry pal, but BeOS boots the WHOLE OS in 10 secs or less. Loading ONLY the DE in 10 secs **is** too long. Both OSX and WinXP are also faster than KDE and Gnome (from login time to desktop).
Just remember that there is a difference between speed and responsiveness. WinXP likes to go the responsiveness route. If it looks like it is faster users will say it feels faster, even if it takes the same amount of time to start all of the services and run through all the programs in the startup section of the registry. WinXP gives you the login prompt very early in the booting process, thus hiding some of the time that it takes to get everything up and running. And depending on your configuration it still has things to load before it is usable even after you enter your username and password. Gnome and KDE show you exactly how long it takes to load the environment. They don’t let you interact with the desktop until they are sure it is done.
I have to agree with Futoque. Windows XP (given a machine with the proper hardware support for fast boot), does boot quite fast. However, try starting something in that period just after it starts. You have to wait for the hard-drive to thrash for a minute before you can actually do anything.
kde is a fine de in many ways (especially under the hood) but i would really like them to focus more on usability issues and declutter it a bit. to me it doesent feel very elegant at the moment.
even so the developers are doing an impressive job with kde.
It loads up system services *after* it loads the desktop, and does so in a much more parallized fashion than most linux distros do it. This unfortunatly means that your computer will be quite unusable for the first thirty seconds or so after XP boots up.
It isn’t that much more *optimized* than Linux– however, Microsoft has paid attention to system startup speeds. XP is significantly faster than Windows98 in that regard, although it just moves the work around.
But the bottom line, is still that my Mandrake 10 beta box has been sat at work doing heavy coding/serving/general office use for over 200 days without reboot. My KDE there has only been rebooted once, because I wanted to adjust the X Server for a new monitor.
How the hell does 10 seconds of extra boot time affect me at all?
Meanwhile, back in the batcave, my WinXP machine has to be rebooted every few days for oddities like IE taking 100% CPU and not letting go, processes which start and *cannot be killed* like my webcam capture app and random things like HTTP transport failing for no good reason/devices stop working and not being recognises when reset, until a reboot. That’s when the WinXP loading times might help, except that my Linux box never needs it. Whoops.
Don’t get me wrong; WinXP is miles better than 98 in terms of stability, but it still has a long way to go.
Exactly. I only reboot when installing a new kernel, or when there’s a power outage. Why would 10 seconds matter to me at all? I guess it’s a sign that KDE has matured when all that trolls can complain about is that it takes 10 seconds longer to boot up…
df
Please go spew your nonsense somewhere else, troll.
In terms of capability, X and GDI are quite comparable, with X being ahead in the flexibility department. In particular, both are pixel-oriented, non-anti-aliasing APIs. Longhorn will be a step forward, with an accelerated, anti-aliasing vector-oriented API, but then again, so will Qt4 and Cairo, and they have an advantage over Longhorn in that there is *real*, working code publically available *today*.
In terms of features, the .NET 1.x toolkit is a step behind Qt3/KDE, lacking as it does a font-sensitive, layout-managed interface. .NET 2.x will remedy this gaping deficiency, but by then, Qt4/KDE4 will be available, and judging by the information MS has made available, will achieve at least feature-parity with, and perhaps feature-superiority over, .NET 2.x.
i wish this tiresome “X sucks” myth could go away
>Seriously, I can kind of understand the point of some >trolling, but what was the point of that?
So that he can see all the funny little responses to his post and feel good about himself.
–Validus
http://www.aethar.com
… (based on “provides/requires” technique) was invented long time ago (I have an example tarball with initscripts somewhere). Why isn’t it implemented in any distro I heard of?
Are you sure winxp boots faster than win98? I doubt it… But I haven’t tested on the same machine.
I’m excited to try out KDE 3.3 when it’s finally released. I’m not one to risk system instability by playing around with Alpha and Beta versions. When I first installed KDE 3.2.1 as part of SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional I was impressed with it’s improved speed which compared to the snappiness of IE in Windows XP. After updating to KDE 3.2.3 speed improved even more.
I do hope Linux distributors will stop bundling XMMS and Juk with KDE as the default. Even if this is part of what the KDE developers would like it really is said when compared to other open source software such as Amarok ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ). Amarok is far superior to either of these audio applications and is closer to what iTunes offers for OSX and Windows users.
Also, having an all in one chat messenger such as Kopete is nice but so would having one that supports VOIP and WebCam for popular chat protocols such as MSN Hotmail and Yahoo. This has become a common tool used not only by home users but also by businesses for conference calls/seminars. For now I continue to avoid Kopete at all cost since it even lacks picture I.D. used by other open source messengers such as aMSN.
A universal video codec player such as Real Player 10 (soon to be ported to Linux) or even MPlayer to be the default KDE media player would be better than having Kaffeine or Totem on top of Xine. Sure Xine offers codecs but it’s no where near the level of some other players.
KDE developers also need to work with highend software companies such as Alias (Maya) or Softimage (XSI). Maya’s Help docs server works beautifully with Mozilla but is difficult to use with KDE Konqueror. Alias already acknowledges the Mozilla team contribution for the Linux version of Maya in creating better browser compatibility. Hopefully KDE will also be part of the open source developers helping to make such software more compatible with their own software.
Features such as I mentioned may not be on the most important to do list for some developers but it is important to a lot of end users. It can even make the difference between a consumer using Linux in their daily life instead of just taking a glance at it then never returning.
>(based on “provides/requires” technique) was invented long >time ago (I have an example tarball with initscripts >somewhere). Why isn’t it implemented in any distro I heard of?
I think Gentoo supports this? Anyway I’m pretty sure there’s an option for it, maybe it’s not actually implemented yet. I enabled it once when I was still using Gentoo (great distro btw) and I didn’t notice any difference. Also, I know Knoppix backgrounds DHCP requests
Also, boot times in Linux are very important to people who have their main computer in their bedroom and it makes a lot of noise. I turn my computer off when I’m not using it because otherwise it gets very annoying (esp at night). Also people who run Linux on their laptops reboot more often. It will be nice when the ACPI stuff gets better and suspend/”hibernate” work perfectly (they don’t really work on mine, but every few [kernel] releases they work better).
Anyway just my $.02
~Jake B
>Amarok is far superior to either of these audio
>applications and is closer to what iTunes offers for OSX
>and Windows users.
IIRC Amarok will be shipped in KDE 3.3 along with Juk.
>For now I continue to avoid Kopete at all cost since it
>even lacks picture I.D. used by other open source
>messengers such as aMSN.
Are you sure? Kopete does support picture avatars.
I am amused by reading all the excused people are making for why XP loads faster than Linux/KDE. If you want to know what services are booting and when, then give an application called bootvis a spin, it will benchmark your boot and graph out what process are starting, how long it took them to start, and CPU and I/O loads dirring the boot.
A very good windows application for tracking down bottlenecks in the boot process.
A default install of Windows XP (non EOM modified) boots using about 56 megs of RAM.
Boot any given Linux distro and run free, it handles memory differently, but you will see you are using about 180 megs of RAM to boot the OS and load a GUI.
Maybe someone should pull some hard data and write an article on this, it might be an interesting topic of discussion.
Use Software Suspend. apm works wonderfully reliably.
“Boot any given Linux distro and run free, it handles memory differently, but you will see you are using about 180 megs of RAM to boot the OS and load a GUI.
”
thats load of crap. go find someplace else to troll
I am excited to try KDE 3.3… I am hoping that there will be less clutter, because that is really the only thing about KDE that annoys me (besides Keramik as the default theme)
THe KDE team sure does power out those releases fast it seems.
“Boot any given Linux distro and run free, it handles memory differently, but you will see you are using about 180 megs of RAM to boot the OS and load a GUI.”
I don’t know why a sort of technical site like OSNews attracs so many clueless people and trolls…
I’m writing this on a laptop with only 64 MB RAM, using Debian Sid, XFCE4 and Opera. Works fine, can even run OpenOffice (but I wouldn’t run it at the same time as Mozilla).
“Boot any given Linux distro and run free, it handles memory differently, but you will see you are using about 180 megs of RAM to boot the OS and load a GUI.”
Where’d you get that number? I’m running (Gentoo) Linux and KDE with 128 megs of RAM.
It’s just faster than gtk2. Gtk2 is simply slow on my 900Mhz Duron.
And KDE has become a little less cluttered recently. Is it just me or have the spaces between menus gotten larger in some styles?
But when it comes down to it, it’s all about the speed vs. gnome for me.
“Boot any given Linux distro and run free, it handles memory differently, but you will see you are using about 180 megs of RAM to boot the OS and load a GUI.”
He is not completely wrong : Linux hates unused memory, and fills it up real fast with cached data from the hard drive. The more memory you have, the more Linux will use (up to whatever it has had to read on the hard disk).
So Linux may work on low-memory machines, without much cache, but will guzzle RAM like crazy on high-memory machines and not touch the disk much.
Cheers.
If you’re using 2.6, you can actually configure how much Linux prefers to shrink the disk cache vs. swapping.
There’s a value stored in /proc/sys/vm/swappiness — it’s an integer from 0 to 100–the lower the number, the more the kernel lets apps shrink down the disk cache rather than use swap space. To see your swappiness, just cat it–the “file” just contains the number, in plain text.
You can change it just by echoing a number to it (i.e.: # echo NumberHere > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness).
I find a swappiness value of 15 helps Linux run much more smoothly–very little swapping, and the disk cache will be kept small if you have a lot of apps running.
It’s quite useful, and some custom kernels have a patch to autoregulate the swappiness depending on how you’re using the system (it originated in ck-sources, and some other kernels use it).
“He is not completely wrong : Linux hates unused memory, and fills it up real fast with cached data from the hard drive. The more memory you have, the more Linux will use (up to whatever it has had to read on the hard disk).
”
he is wrong because he says it will somehow use 180 mb as base requirement. my 64 mb system running redhat 9 right now says thats trolling
I was able to run KDE 3.2 and Gnome 2.6 on a 266MHz P2 with 48Mb of memory. I won’t say either of them ran well (that would be a bit too much to expect anyway), but it is doable.
FVWM2 of course flies on that little box (no swap usage at all right after I have logged in), and since I pretty much only use rvxt + Emacs on it, I could probably use something even smaller like evilwm.
It’s all about how many unneeded background processes you have running. Slackware is great in that respect – it pretty much starts nothing at all per default.
Jon – I can’t say I totally agree with you. I have my main desktop PC, an Athlon 1ghz with 768 mb sdram. I have an aging Compaq Armada 1750 laptop with a p2 333 mhz cpu and 128mb of ram. I booted up Libranet 2.8.1 on my Laptop and Windows XP on my desktop unit. XP was faster, but not by a whole lot, maybe 10 seconds at most. Considering the speed differential between the two units…I also remember having to boot my PC up (Libranet 2.8.1 again) after a brown out on our power supply. One of the other people at home booted their PC up (running Windows 2000). Her PC started up 2 or 3 seconds faster than mine. And she’s got a Athlon 1800xp cpu with 384mb of ram on her machine. So again, not a great deal.
Gnome and XFCE and IceWM do start up quicker than KDE I do admit. Gnome 2.6 is lightning fast. Much faster than KDE, despite what some people say. But KDE is not that slow. And as others have pointed out, you only have to boot up once a day 😉 KDE loads faster when you log out and log straight back in (as opposed to booting up from a cold boot).
KDE has also improved speedwise from 2.2 to 3, to 3.1 to 3.2. Every release has been more solid, faster and less buggy with MORE features. What more can you possibly ask for?
If you’re bitching about 10 seconds startup time for your desktop environment you’re seriously pedantic.
Dave W Pastern
If people insist on comparing bootup times, then i think it would be important to install an amount of software on your windowsXP machine that is comparable to your linux machine.
Of course xp is booting really fast on a plain install, but add visual studio, office, a personal firewall (no flames please – on windows you need it..), av software … and suddenly it takes much longer to get to a usable state than slackware (10.0 + kernel 2.6.7) on the same machine…
GoboLinux ( http://www.gobolinux.org ) has parallel booting. But then, the default setup boots in about 5 seconds anyway, it’s ridiculously fast.
All the people saying “well I run Linux on 8k of RAM etc. …” and nobody bothered to just past in the data from free? Did you post your replies from windows? Here is mine from Gnome, KDE, and Fluxbox. Removed most of the services I don’t need from the box (including sound, no drivers for SC). I am running crond and sshd on boot (no crontabs though).
Here are my numbers for Mandrake 10 if the board does not reformat the data. Each case was taken by restarting and running the console native to that DE to run free. Maybe if I get REAL bored, I will remove my passwords and time these and windows on the same box.
uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.3-4mdk #1 Tue Mar 2 07:26:13 CET 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
Gnome
[jim@localhost jim]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515132 164924 350208 0 6896 77728
-/+ buffers/cache: 80300 434832
Swap: 1035176 0 1035176
[jim@localhost jim]$
KDE
[jim@localhost jim]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515132 124356 390776 0 6220 70488
-/+ buffers/cache: 47648 467484
Swap: 1035176 0 1035176
[jim@localhost jim]$
Fluxbox
[jim@localhost jim]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515132 80156 434976 0 4048 47708
-/+ buffers/cache: 28400 486732
Swap: 1035176 0 1035176
[jim@localhost jim]$
This is not by any means a scientific test.
The board ate most of the data, here is the short version of used memory from free.
Gnome
164924
KDE
124356
Fluxbox
80156
I wonder if we’ll see another KDE 3.3beta live cd from OneBase. That would be just great!
http://www.ibiblio.org/onebase/onebaselinux.org/Community/phpBB2/vi…
In their announcement KDE asks for help with testing of this beta 2 release. The drag is if binaries are not available but they are
http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=unstable/3.2.92
except for Redhat/Fedora – as usual – maybe because of BlueCurve.
There will be binaries if RedHat or the KDE RedHat Project uploads them. This has nothing to do with BlueCurve like you suggest.
Your windows system uses 162m to boot? My main comp (w/ 512 RAM) uses about 80 meg to load a full working desktop (XPpro). My secondary box that only has 96 megs of RAM and uses shared vid, uses about 56 megs of RAM to load XP. The smaller backup box is unmodified.
I am running retail copies of XP Pro, I have a distaste for the OEM copies that come with the computer and bunldle software I don’t want.
I hate to say this Jim, but you numbers are incorrect. Allow me to educate you:
Let’s look at the output of free shall we? In your case (with KDE):
[jim@localhost jim]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515132 124356 390776 0 6220 70488
-/+ buffers/cache: 47648 467484
Swap: 1035176 0 1035176
You then told that it’s using 124MB of RAM. Looking at the output it would indeed look that way. But the number is wrong. Here’s why: you are looking at the “Mem: used” portion of the output. But that is the WRONG place to look! That figure includes the RAM that is being used as buffers and cache! Linux uses unused RAM for buffering and caching. If the system REALLY needs that RAM, it gets instantly released to the apps. RAM used for caching and buffering is RAM that is available to the system. But instead of just sitting there doing nothing, it’s used for caching and buffering if it would be otherwise unused.
If you want to look at your REAL memory-consumption, you have to look at the “+/- buffers/cache” portion of the output. In your case it shows memory-consumption like this:
GNOME: 80MB
KDE: 47MB
Fluxbox: 28MB
So, Your Linux-system with KDE seems to consume about 47 megs of RAM, not 124MB!
fact is that XP boots fast but my gentoo is faster in booting to the kde logon screen then booting with a fresh xp.
i agree that xp brings up the desktop realy fast when u login but after u installed most of your software it gets slower and slower my kde on the otherhand the more i update the faster it gets, 1,2,10,30 programs it all doesnt mather.