I’ve been running KDE 3.2 fulltime since the beta 1 release on a laptop and a desktop machine. The beta was pretty much stable except for a few wierd problems, that they have definitely sorted out by now in the current RC1 release.

Having just installed it clean on my new harddrive I have had the opportunity to see it as a new user would. Which is pretty impresive. At the end I will also describe the installation procedure for Gentoo Linux

Updated with KDE 3.2 Final installation instructions

Java Support

As I am a Java coder I was impressed that it autosensed my JDK an added the java plugin, associated jnlp (web start) and added the Java Web Start control panel to Settings.

Kate

Kate the advanced programmers text editor has been improved even further (it was already great). It now sports a IntelliJ IDEA like mode called IDEAL that I have previously seen in KDevelop . The built in Shell (yes I know emacs does this too) is very usefull. For the past year I have been using Kate for all my C projects and I can see that I will continue to do so. Actually I’ve been using it for all of those pesky xml configuration files as well. Its pretty usefull that you can create a project, to contain all of your project wide conf files in one place.

Plastik

Plastik is great. I have been going between Mosfet’s Liquid and Keramik, switching when I got fed up with one. So now I have a new one. It looks good, its simple and it appears fast.

Wallet

Wallet is an encrypted store for storing passwords, formdata and also your own notes etc. While there have been various tools similar to Wallet before, this is completely integrated into your desktop and konqueror. The only real annoyance, which I guess is true for any such tool is that at times if you blindly hit “remember” it remembers a bit too much. I have found that I every now and again need to go in and delete form data manually, but not really very often.

Konqueror

Konqueror supposedly has many new rendering improvements from Apple’s Safari. I am sure it does, but I havent really noticed any real difference yet to be honest.

What I like is the improvements to tab handling. If you go to the “Web Behaviour” tab in the control panel, you can customize it. I’ve got the following:

• Open Links in new Tab instead of new window
• Open new Tabs in the background
• Open as tab in existing Konqueror when URL is called externally

All of this means that I no longer have tons of konqueror windows open, when I open urls sent to me in email or when people create new windows when linking to external sites.

kGPG

kGPG is superb. This used to be a seperate app, but is now a standard feature. What can I say, I love it. It is the single best PGP gui tool for unix that I have seen. It brings just about all the functionality of the Windows PGP applications to X. There are still a few things that you cant do directly in the gui, when editing keys and it brings you to a command line, which might be confusing for new users.

KMail

KMail is as always improving. Besides the obvious such as Evolution like virtual folders and as you type spell checking, there are lots of little improvements that you might never notice. For example the other day I was sending an email to someone where I ment to attach a file, yet I forgot. Kmail noticed I had the word “attached” in the mail and asked me if I meant to attach something. I know its only sugar, but I like it.

My main problem with kmail is still the piped filter support, which essentially freezes the gui until a filter returns. I use SpamAssassin with the spamd daemon option, piping each message through spamc. Particularly this is a pain, when I am in the middle of writing an email.

Other improvements

The power management applet has improved. It looks like KDE is fully ACPI (or whatever) compliant. You can configure things such as what happens when you close the lid. I have to say though that while it does suspend my computer, it doesnt always bring it back. However that is more than likely not KDE’s fault, but probably something in my configuration of my 2.6.1 kernel.

Installing on Gentoo Linux

I use Gentoo the ultimate geek linux distro. It is very easy to install. Just follow the following steps:

• sync your portage tree with emerge sync
• Uncomment/add the following line in /etc/make.conf:
  
  ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86”
• Edit /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask remove all the lines masking out kde 3.2.0
• run emerge /usr/portage/kde-base/kde/kde-3.2.0.ebuild
• Go to work, bed, Liquid or whatever you do in between long builds.

Then reboot and you should be ready to play.

Update: Right after posting this I just realised that KDE 3.2 final has been released the site is heavily loaded right now, so I havent been able to read the changelog betwen RC1 and final. Anyway cool and congratulations to the KDE team. I will update my gentoo instructions above, the minute I have verified that portage has got the updates.

I have now updated the instructions above to install kde 3.2.0 final. Note at the time of writing it is still masked, so you have to perform the unmasking step mentioned above. This should change in the next day or two.