Fire Boar
KDE fans, rejoice. Anyone remember KDE 4.0? Sorry, didn't mean to stir up a bad memory there. Let's just forget that ever existed.
Okay, what about KDE 4.1? Well, it was a lot better than 4.0, but really, nowhere near ready for use as a viable desktop environment, let's be honest.
KDE 4.2 rolled in next. And the upgrade was mindblowing. Suddenly it worked, and while there was a fair bit of instability, it was really very good.
And now we have KDE 4.3. I've just tried a special build of Kubuntu 9.04 with it on, and I have to say that the jump is similar to the difference between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The difference is, KDE 4.2 wasn't actually bad at all.
Even from the live CD, it was snappy, responsive and demonstrated plenty of nice features. It's now also incredibly easy to theme just how you like it, and the default theme, "Air", is much nicer than "Oxygen" was.
So what's so nice about it? Probably the best thing, in my opinion, is its notifications system. They've improved this quite a lot. Notifications appear briefly by the taskbar, as a small unobtrusive box, then vanish. You can bring them up to have a look by clicking on an icon, which causes it to stay visible until you dismiss it. And notifications can be anything, from someone sending you a message in Kopete, to a simple file copy operation.
Kopete, the multi-protocol instant messenger application, has also seen a much needed improvement: now, you should only ever see one notification per person. Of course, you can still turn these off. But I think it's quite nice to have them on, if you have a large screen, because the notification is pretty unobtrusive and goes away automatically.
What else? Now we have some widgets which are actually useful! I like the pastebin widget myself: simply drag some text or a picture on it and it will give you an url to either pastebin (for text) or imageshack (for an image). Combine that with the peek feature of the "folder" widget. This allows you to hover over a folder to see inside it, you can do this recursively. Once you mouse out of it, they all disappear. So, you can use this to quickly find an image, drag it to the pastebin widget and suddenly you have an imageshack url. All this, and you haven't opened a single window yet!
There have also been a great many fixes and improvements to other applications - NetworkManager being a notable example. Its taskbar interface is a lot more slimline, and several bugs have been fixed. The whole thing just feels a lot more polished now, offering a nice-looking desktop that goes out of its way to stay out of your way.
So is there anything to complain about? Probably, but I haven't encountered it yet. Or if I have, it was so insignificant that I can't remember what it is. Everything worked out of the box, as usual, though that's something I've come to expect from the high profile Linux distributions anyway, and since this is basically kubuntu with some different packages, that's not surprising at all.
Okay, what about KDE 4.1? Well, it was a lot better than 4.0, but really, nowhere near ready for use as a viable desktop environment, let's be honest.
KDE 4.2 rolled in next. And the upgrade was mindblowing. Suddenly it worked, and while there was a fair bit of instability, it was really very good.
And now we have KDE 4.3. I've just tried a special build of Kubuntu 9.04 with it on, and I have to say that the jump is similar to the difference between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The difference is, KDE 4.2 wasn't actually bad at all.
Even from the live CD, it was snappy, responsive and demonstrated plenty of nice features. It's now also incredibly easy to theme just how you like it, and the default theme, "Air", is much nicer than "Oxygen" was.
So what's so nice about it? Probably the best thing, in my opinion, is its notifications system. They've improved this quite a lot. Notifications appear briefly by the taskbar, as a small unobtrusive box, then vanish. You can bring them up to have a look by clicking on an icon, which causes it to stay visible until you dismiss it. And notifications can be anything, from someone sending you a message in Kopete, to a simple file copy operation.
Kopete, the multi-protocol instant messenger application, has also seen a much needed improvement: now, you should only ever see one notification per person. Of course, you can still turn these off. But I think it's quite nice to have them on, if you have a large screen, because the notification is pretty unobtrusive and goes away automatically.
What else? Now we have some widgets which are actually useful! I like the pastebin widget myself: simply drag some text or a picture on it and it will give you an url to either pastebin (for text) or imageshack (for an image). Combine that with the peek feature of the "folder" widget. This allows you to hover over a folder to see inside it, you can do this recursively. Once you mouse out of it, they all disappear. So, you can use this to quickly find an image, drag it to the pastebin widget and suddenly you have an imageshack url. All this, and you haven't opened a single window yet!
There have also been a great many fixes and improvements to other applications - NetworkManager being a notable example. Its taskbar interface is a lot more slimline, and several bugs have been fixed. The whole thing just feels a lot more polished now, offering a nice-looking desktop that goes out of its way to stay out of your way.
So is there anything to complain about? Probably, but I haven't encountered it yet. Or if I have, it was so insignificant that I can't remember what it is. Everything worked out of the box, as usual, though that's something I've come to expect from the high profile Linux distributions anyway, and since this is basically kubuntu with some different packages, that's not surprising at all.
