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Yeah, I'm a fan, if not a user of KDE4.
The biggest changes KDE4 made were under-the-hood and initially theoretical. Workspaces vs activities was a big O_o for most people until 4.6!
A mainstream desktop environment with a tiling-capable window manager? Neat. Heck, I can't think, off hand of any tiling WM that allows you to use the mouse to adjust the layout. Scriptable with various languages? Neat!
Plasma is really cool. A plasmoid can now be run in the panel, on the desktop, in a window, full-screen... It's really really cool!
GNOME 3 seems more about superficial changes, trying to change how the user interacts with the computer... Gnome-shell is also a big monolithic... thing.
Never been a fan of how GNOME does things, and this is no exception.
Plasma-netbook has been doing this since 4.4? Well, 4.5 for sure.
With plasma-netbook, all windows are maximised, including modal dialogs. There's also no window borders or title bars, which means no minimise or maximise buttons.
On small (10" 1024x768 for example), this works wonderfully, as it adds quite a bit of extra vertical space.
On large screens (like connecting a palmtop to a 23" 1600x1050 LCD), it's not horrible, but not being able to see two windows at once can be challenging.
Personally, I find adding the standard taskbar widget to the plasma-netbook interface is pretty much the perfect UI for small screens.
Will be interesting to see how GNOME3's UI works on large screens. I can see it being useful on small screens, but large ones?
KDE4 got this right, I think, by splitting plasma up into different UIs for different uses (phone, palmtop, laptop, desktop, etc).





Member since:
2005-08-18
Personally I think this is a very interesting development. It basically does away with window management as we know it and I can see why that would rub many people the wrong way. I say they should go for it though. Maybe it will fail in a spectacualr way but at least they tried something new and if no-one tried nothing would ever happen. Then again, I found KDE4 interesting too, even from the beginning.