Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th Jan 2008 20:09 UTC
KDE 4.0.0 has been released on January 11th, after a number of delays; the months preceding the release, the KDE developers tried very hard to downplay expectations. KDE 4.0.0 was just the first release in the KDE 4 series, and such, should not be seen as the best possible representation of the KDE 4.0.0 vision. So, when I installed KDE 4.0.0 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation last Friday, I knew what to expect: KDE 4 Developer Release 1 (yes, I am a BeOS guy - how did you know?). Read on for a few quick first impressions.
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Member since:
2005-09-21
Thom is having a bad day I guess..
Where are these bold fonts? I don't see any in my install. Dolphin has the current directory in bold.. I can't see anything else. Kickoff doesn't have any bold fonts. And just because you don't like it doesn't mean its unusable. It has had some fairly extensive usability testing, which may not be the be all end all, but its worth a lot more than personal opinion. Also the menu is not a fixed size, and animation in transitions is not confusing, it helps you figure out what is happening (lots of studies have been done on this, look up visual momentum).
The funny thing is, the one thing you praise (Krunner), I think is far worse than it could have been. Anyone that has used Launchy (on windows) knows that as far as keyboard launchers go, Krunner is bottom of the barrell. Luckily krunner will be very very different in KDE 4.1.
Also, try the "Obsidian Coast" color scheme. I think it looks absolutely fantastic.
As for KWin. It is definitely better on a fast computer. I had to turn it off on my laptop and the EeePC, but on my desktop at work it flies (Geforce 7900 so nothing special). Works so much better than Compiz ever did. Compiz has fancier effects, but its buggy as hell, and the traditional window manager features are mostly missing.
I agree with you on Konqueror. I used it a lot in 3.5, but in 4.0 its just too buggy. I hope they replace it with a webkit based browser soon. Otherwise Firefox 3 is pretty decent as well.
Also Okular is fantastic. It still has some bugs but it's already way better than any other PDF/document viewer I've ever used. Same for Gwenview.
Overall I'm happy with KDE 4.0. Plasma is buggy, but I wouldn't trade it for 3.5 already.