KDE2 review and reviews ?

[MADHATter7]

So what is your general opinion on KDE2 ? I have been using it since Monday evening and I think it ROCKS ! It runs faster than my Helix-Gnome does & seems to use less system resources. (Very important on my old system) Because of this, Netscape 4.75 flies. (A big improvement for me)
However, it does take awhile for KDE2 to load up, and it has crashed on me twice. (when switching themes - both times)
And, it was a general pain in the a** to install. I run RH 7 & downloaded all the rpm packages & wound up having to remove ALL KDE1 packages AND libraries to get the thing to install. (They wouldn't update - Oh Joy !)
Also, the icons were messed up, some on the desktop were not there, some in the menus were way to large. (easily fixed, though)
But those are my only complaints. (so far)
All in all, I say download and install. It is well worth it. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

[elbows]

I agree, KDE2 is pretty nice. I didn't have any real installation issues, but I built it from the tarballs (on rh6.2). I have used RPMS in the past but had some trouble wi/ the RPMS for rc2 and I wanted the better performance anyway.
I haven't used gnome much so I can't really compare, although I like the general look of KDE a lot more than gnome.
The apps are great, too... I use kmail and konqueror all the time (although there is some javascript stuff I have to use netscape for).

[SKoL]

Where can you get the RPMS for KDE 2.0?

[Strike]

heh, no offense, but it seems like the only thing you gained was speed and that doesn't seem like much of a big improvement. With an increase to a new major version number I would expect a lot of new neat features. Plus, you seemed to have lost a bit of stability there ... that's kind of important to me in a WM/DE.

I'm still going to be cyncial about DE's in general and stick with just Enlightenment.

[Cdc28p]

Originally posted by MADHATter7:
And, it was a general pain in the a** to install. I run RH 7 & downloaded all the rpm packages & wound up having to remove ALL KDE1 packages AND libraries to get the thing to install. (They wouldn't update - Oh Joy !)
Also, the icons were messed up, some on the desktop were not there, some in the menus were way to large. (easily fixed, though)
But those are my only complaints. (so far)
All in all, I say download and install. It is well worth it. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

What exactly was the installing problems you encountered? I tried to compile KDE2 since the Mandrake RPMs gave me so much trouble on my Mandrake 7.1 system. I had no problem compiling and installing QT, kdesupport, kdelibs, but got the following when doing "make all" on kdebase:

....
kbookmark.h: 29: kglobal.h: No such file or directory
...
kbookmarkmenu.cc: kaction.h: No such file or directory

Did this happen to you? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

[TaeShadow]

Originally posted by Strike:
With an increase to a new major version number I would expect a lot of new neat features.

Oh, no, there are lots of new features! The entire structure of the environment is new. The programs interact with each other in a very cool way. It's faster, looks a *lot* better.

[MADHATter7]

Cdc28p:
If there was a problem to be had installing KDE2, I had it. I had an entire list of "no such file or directory" and "kde<package name> could not be removed because <package name> requires" and the like.
I had to remove all KDE packages and then install all the KDE2 packages. I tried everything else I could think of, but...
(I have a more detailed post on this in the General Linux Forum, under the topic KDE2, How do you install this. (Or something close)

Strike:
You are right, with a major release there should be new features and enhancements plus stability and everything else. AND THERE IS. This is the most complete DE I have ever used. The speed increase, as it turns out, seems to be marginal. (Still a little faster than Helix) KDE1 would absolutely CRAWL on my system. KDE2 has a lot more new features than I can name here. BUT THE STABLILITY IS IMPORTANT. However, I'm glad to report I have not had another crash since. All in all, stil very pleased.

SKoL:
I got the rpms (expressely for RH 7, others were available) from the list of mirrors on the KDE site. I personally used the ftp://sourceforge link in the America/Generic heading....

All:

KDE2 (or even Helix-Gnome) running on Red Hat 7 is hard to beat !!!! http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

[farrow]

Did this happen to you? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Did you try downloading kdebase again like I said in your other thread about this? Cause, yeah, it happened to me, but downloading kdebase again made the problem go away. Apparently there were some bad tar.bz2s on release day(as far as I can tell), even at ftp.kde.org no less...try downloading and trying to build again and see if that works.