One of my favorite parts of KDE's new look is the Keramik window decoration. At first I didn't like the chunkiness of the buttons, but the style is beginning to grow on me like XP's Luna eventually did. Keramik is great for people who have monitors that can handle a resolution of 1024x768 and up. Not to say that you can't use Keramik with a smaller monitor, it's just my personal preference to choose a window decoration that takes up less space when I'm running in a lower resolution. This was the same complaint I had with XP's Luna interface. There are plenty of other of nice-looking, space efficient window dressings to choose from in KDE, so users with smaller monitors have a choice if they feel Keramik is too beefy.
Figure 4: Voluptuous Keramik
Putting the O in OS
With the little time I've had with this latest KDE release, I managed to notice some good functional enhancements. Konquerer now has tabbed browsing which Mozilla and Opera users love so much. The Control Center is more organized and more powerful than ever. There also appears to be a new "Desktop Sharing" feature of which I didn't get a chance to test. Konquerer now has some really cool file previewing options. For example, rolling over thumbnails of documents and images causes an even bigger version of the thumbnail to be shown along with the file's attributes. There is also a nifty new folder animation. If you're interested, a nice detailed list of new features can be found here.
KDE also comes stock with a plethora of handy system administration utilities. There is a utility to add and remove users, to check how much disk space you have left, to see how hard your processor is working, to mount/unmount file systems, to see detailed information about your computer's hardware, and much much more. The aforementioned utilities provide standard UNIX/Linux services, but KDE makes them available in easy to use graphical interfaces. This gives one the choice of being able to administer one's machine mostly from the desktop, instead of from the command line. Combine these great tools with the top notch KDE Control Center and it's evident KDE 3.1 may be a big winner among Linux desktop pundits (and command line rookies).
Still a lot to be done
It's going to be interesting to see if team KDE can get 3.1 out before January 2003. According to their release schedule, it looks as if 3.1 might even be ready as early as late November, or early December. It seems the releases leading up to 3.1 have been on target thus-far, so I don't see why we won't be able to play with a stable 3.1 any later than this Christmas.
After several days of hammering KDE 3.1 RC2, it's evident there's still a lot of quirks to be worked out, but if team KDE can nix the problems reported here and the majors in their bug database -- in the tradition of progress, this will truly be "the best KDE yet."
About the author
Corey Taylor is a computer science student at UMass/Boston. He dreams of one day being worthy of the title "software engineer," but for now he is satisfied with all things Internet, and especially website development and design. For more information about what Corey is up to these days, visit his website Gemineye.biz and sign up to the newsletter.
- "Introduction, Installing Qt and arts"
- "Installing kdelibs, Setting up the environment"
- "Fonts, Icons"
- "Window dressing, Putting the O in OS, Conclusion"
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