kde 4.0
Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm, geopolitics
Today a new version of the KDE desktop got released. My impression (gentoo overlay):
- They sticked to their configurability-style. The new applications I saw are flexible and very customizable. You can do whatever you want.
- Ugly
- Some MacOS
inspiredlike features with the functionality of exposé and dashboard - Lot’s of white space wasted in core apps like in the new file browser (But hey, thats ok with me, my screens are big enough)
- Most of the KDE folks are talking about really great API improvements. Lets hope this will also result in great applications. Also the gpl’ed availability of QT on MacOS and Windows may turn into an interesting thing.
- Fast and not hogging resources.
Basically I’m happy that a new beta version got released and looking forward to 4.1. Not because I’m a kfan, no, mainly because I don’t like Gnome and how it gets adopted everywhere I go. KDE is my last hope being saved from too chocolaty or orangy interfaces. An absolute dominance of one major desktop environment may be a good thing on the one hand because of the gigantic amount of redundancy those two players generated in the past. However, on the other hand, being forced into their brain dead simplicity system where you can’t change nothing because it might confuse the mythical “average user” would be true horror for me. Simplicity is certainly a good thing, but they don’t achieve a sane balance of usability and functionality like for example e17 or MacOS does where the benefit created by the simplicity outweighs the missing configuration possibilities.
My editor is my window manager anyway and as long as I can full screen terminals the linux desktop experience will be all right for me.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I installed it as package and hey, I like it. Yes, there are obviously bugs here and there, but its widely known that this release should be treated as a beta (not google beta ;) ) in 4.1 there will be everything alright I guess.
It’s more of a development desktop for me.. the gnome stuff is just nothing for “us” imo
happy new year
January 14th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
back as well. Happy new year@
Exactly. And you can’t even use it as a dev-env because its more or less like programming in word - you can’t do nothing.
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Desktop widgets were available on Linux (SuperKaramba, gDesklets) way before OS X used them, so the inspiration actually was the other way around.
And yes, the release is intended more as a developer preview than as a stable end user desktop. I have high hopes though :).
January 23rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hello Robin
Nice to have you here.
Of course. Also Steve Jobs’ very “innovative” virtual desktop (which not “correctly” implemented btw) was on X for ages (thats basically true for almost all recent features from Apple: TimeMachine -> rsync + candy, Macbook Air CD-Drive -> mount over ssh || samba + candy, bootcamp -> lilo + candy etc )
Thats why the I wrote inspired as
inspiredbecause I have many mac-readers who think all innovation comes out from Cupertino.The way how MacOSX integrated widgets on a second layer was new I think (at least I haven’t seen it in 3.5) and the kde folks adopted it in 4.0.
But as you already said the essential parts of the named feature have their origin in gnome and kde.
Me too :)