KDE 4.0.82 + Kubuntu Tutorials Day

Yeah, that’s my desktop. If you’re wondering how I put together three of those images to make this really cool screenshot, the application I used is called Screenie. Its a Qt application and its quite simple, just drag-and-drop.

Now, in the space between now and the last post I’ve used Kubuntu but now its back to Arch (I always come back to it I guess!). Kubuntu was quite stable with the 4.0 series. Around the time of what I described to as “Plasma Surgery”, (the time when Plasma broke with the shift to Qt 4.4) I was a bit reluctant to get into 4.1 again so I wanted to see what the other distros were doing with KDE 4.1. That brought me to my previous post on the comparision of other distros using KDE 4.0.

Kubuntu was very usable but a little short of features with 4.0.4 at the time. I haven’t checked 4.0.5 and don’t plan to. That is because KDE 4.1 Beta is out and it is reasonably stable. Its just Beta 1 and we have more than a month till the final release and what a time leading up to the release its going to be! There are rapid commits being made, bugs being fixed and polishing being done. There’s a new Plasma theme and it looks awesome. You can see it in my desktop screenshot and notice the carbon-fibre clock which in my opinion, really stands out.

KDE 4.0.82 is quite stable and I’m using the KDEmod unstable repository which gets updated weekly. Shaman is working fine and is quite stable. I’m looking forward to Shaman2 which should feature on some KDE distros (Kubuntu, maybe?) as the default package manager. Dolphin used to crash a lot and now its loading quicker than it used to in 4.0.69 (before the “Plasma Surgery”). Konqueror finally imports my Firefox bookmarks (it never used to the last time I tried, but it could have been fixed earlier).

I did try Arora (git) from the Arch repos and it looked promising. It looks a lot like Firefox but it has Safari’s address/page loading bar. Hopefully there will be bookmark importing support sometime in the near future so I can make the switch. Webkit is a bit slow for me at the moment though the rendering is a bit better than KHTML. Flash works and I hope it turns out to be a top browser.

The desktop effects are really smooth, though I hope its possible to speed up OpenGL rendering on Intel cards so I can use Cover Switch, an enhanced Alt+tab switcher (remember Cover Flow from iTunes?) to just bring on the eye-candy! What’s that I hear? Wobbly Windows? Yeah, KWin does them too. Why would you need Compiz Fusion now? You can use Compiz Fusion and there is a neat option to switch window managers under System Settings.

The state of Amarok2 is improving and I haven’t had any sudden crashes in a while though I stick to JuK for music at the moment. Quassel seems to have come among the KDEmod packages and I still can’t connect to Freenode. I really need to fix that or I’ll have to install XChat and at the moment I don’t want any GTK apps on my system. Firefox3 will find its way on though, after the big record breaking (will it be?) release tomorrow.

In case you’re wondering why I don’t have icons or the Folder View widget (which, by the way is pretty useful contradictory to anyone who thinks otherwise), its because I use the nice Alt+F2 Run Menu. Its much more productive because I can find about anything I want. If I were to tag my pictures (will do so with a stable version of 4.1) then I can search for them. With the power of Pacman+Shaman I can even install a software package with some simple commands.

Kubuntu Tutorials Day took place yesterday and unfortunately I missed it partly due to timezone and a bit of work. You can catch the logs (I know I will) at the wiki link. From what I’ve heard, Celeste Paul’s usability talk was excellent so you should check it out. In case you don’t know, Kubuntu Tutorials Day is a set of IRC sessions where the Kubuntu developers talk to the users about various ways to contribute to the development of Kubuntu and KDE. I remember there were some openSUSE users online as well for the sessions last year, so its quite sought after.

So I’ll sign off from Konqueror now. I do have a few other things I’d like to talk about but more on that in another blog.

~ by SoftVision on June 16, 2008.