GeekSpeak: August 12, 2002

If you find a feature missing in the K desktop environment, come back in a couple of months. Its surprising how quickly new capabilities can make their way into a piece of software when its developers neednt concern themselves with selling software updates timed for some holiday release date.

Last month, the KDE Project made available an alpha release of KDE 3.1, and, sure enough, the package included the No. 1 feature on my KDE wish list: tabbed browsing in Konqueror, KDEs native Web- and file-browsing application.

Id expected to find tabbed browsing in KDE 3.1, but the software includes pleasantly surprising goodies as well. KDE 3.1 will offer Windows XP-style desktop sharing, powered by Virtual Network Computing, and a utility for setting display settings. The display settings utility was particularly pleasing for me, since this is the sort of tool thats typically offered on a per-distribution basis, with each "distro-maker" taking a separate path toward enabling it.

The new features are too many to list here, but you can get the full scoop at www.kde.org. Better yet, you can download the source code for free and give the KDE 3.1 alpha a go on your own machine.