Linked by Rahul Gaitonde on Thu 15th Jan 2004 06:40 UTC
Around 3 weeks ago, I downloaded the 2nd beta of KDE 3.2 from their FTP site. I've been using this release every day since then. The purpose of my writing this piece is not to highlight KDE 3.2's new features and applications - read the Changelog at KDE's site for that - but to give you a complete picture of how it measures up to its previous versions in terms of everyday use. Does it make me more productive? Is the command line more efficient yet? Or, even better, does it make me use the command line more effectively? Read on...
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I'm running beta2 right now, and there are a couple of things I would have done differently:
On a slightly related note, KOffice fixed its previously atrocious Bold/Italic/Underline icons 
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1) Kwin III is a regression. Its context menus are more complex (it relegates such important features as "keep on top" to a submenu!). More importantly, its not as fast as kwin II. With metacity, KDE 3.2 because *extremely* good at resize performance. Even Konqueror becomes competitive with IE! Expose lag and resize lag is something that I rarely saw with KDE 3.1.x, but now its relatively common (though, not as bad as GNOME). Unfortunately, metacity doesn't seem to be completely EHWM-compliant, which means you can't use it with some of KDE's more advanced feature (menu-at-top). Its focus-stealing prevention is also kinda broken, especially when interacting with the password manager.
2) You forgot to mention the password manager, spell-checking, and hotkey support. KDE's got a new wallet-style password manager that lets you use one password to handle all of your accounts. The spell-checking lets you spell-check text-input forms (say, in KHTML). And the hotkey support lets you do hotkeys and mouse gestures on a system-wide basis.
3) Crystal SVG 1.0 is a big improvement over previous releases, even the earlier CrystalSVG 1.0-beta2. The icon set is pretty much complete, and look very sharp. There are still one or two icons that are not great (64x64 versions of the spell-check icon, for example) but that should be fixed sooner rather than later
4) The UI is simplified, though not as much as I'd like. Konqueror is better, but still closer to IE than Safari. KMail's toolbar is close to perfect, but its context menus are very bloated. I think JuK's UI is more or less perfect (although I can't remember if that is because I customized the toolbar