isaacj87
July 10th, 2010, 10:17 PM
So, the dust has finally settled and RC2 has been released. It's been a couple of days and I wanted to really play with RC2 before saying anything. So far, I'm actually having more problems with RC2 than RC1. However, it could be due to the fact that I'm running openSUSE 11.3 RC2 or something got lost in translation during packaging. Regardless, here are my thoughts:
What's good?
- Fast. KDE has always been a hog on my netbook, but on my desktop, it feels right at home. The speed of the environment has increased and RC2 feels nice and lively. Kwin has improved dramatically and the animations are smooth. Plasma doesn't feel heavy (not that it really did in 4.4) which is great.
- Feature-rich. It seems all the technologies that the devs have been busily working on for the last couple of years are finally coming together. Plasma is pretty damn great. Desktop searching and tagging works as it should and the menus are complete and easy to navigate.
- Notification area. I know, an area as small as this is usually overlooked. However, the system tray has been vastly improved. It's actually useful now instead of being bothersome.
- It's all coming together. It's hard to believe that KDE 4.0 has transformed into this. Amazing.
What's bad?
- Graphical glitches. While the animations have improved, they still seem to jump a bit. My Nvidia card and the proprietary driver could be to blame, but it's annoying nevertheless. I'm not getting shadows for my drop-down menus. Also, while I love the new blur effect, it is inconsistent. Certain aspects of the plasma workspace have the blur effect enabled, while some don't. Widgets don't receive the blur effect which is odd.
- Wasted space. In OSX, the menus will adjust and resize depending on the content presented in the window. I wonder if this is possible with Qt. It seems like there's a lot of padding everywhere.
- Buttons. If you look at the Plasma's "Air" theme, it has different buttons than those found everywhere else. The buttons found throughout are rectangular, harsh-looking and could probably be "smoothed" out.
That's all I can think of right now. Mostly I complained about superficial problems. The actual core technologies in KDE work pretty well and I'm bored now that I'm not running into as many problems. Surprisingly, that's actually a good thing. It's a shame that openSUSE isn't taking quite an ambitious approach to their distro that Ubuntu is, but I love KDE. And KDE runs best on openSUSE. Overall, my experience on KDE seems no different than Windows 7 or OS X's user interfaces. The KDE devs have created a modern, attractive DE and it's pretty impressive. I've included the obligatory picture. Enjoy :)
What's good?
- Fast. KDE has always been a hog on my netbook, but on my desktop, it feels right at home. The speed of the environment has increased and RC2 feels nice and lively. Kwin has improved dramatically and the animations are smooth. Plasma doesn't feel heavy (not that it really did in 4.4) which is great.
- Feature-rich. It seems all the technologies that the devs have been busily working on for the last couple of years are finally coming together. Plasma is pretty damn great. Desktop searching and tagging works as it should and the menus are complete and easy to navigate.
- Notification area. I know, an area as small as this is usually overlooked. However, the system tray has been vastly improved. It's actually useful now instead of being bothersome.
- It's all coming together. It's hard to believe that KDE 4.0 has transformed into this. Amazing.
What's bad?
- Graphical glitches. While the animations have improved, they still seem to jump a bit. My Nvidia card and the proprietary driver could be to blame, but it's annoying nevertheless. I'm not getting shadows for my drop-down menus. Also, while I love the new blur effect, it is inconsistent. Certain aspects of the plasma workspace have the blur effect enabled, while some don't. Widgets don't receive the blur effect which is odd.
- Wasted space. In OSX, the menus will adjust and resize depending on the content presented in the window. I wonder if this is possible with Qt. It seems like there's a lot of padding everywhere.
- Buttons. If you look at the Plasma's "Air" theme, it has different buttons than those found everywhere else. The buttons found throughout are rectangular, harsh-looking and could probably be "smoothed" out.
That's all I can think of right now. Mostly I complained about superficial problems. The actual core technologies in KDE work pretty well and I'm bored now that I'm not running into as many problems. Surprisingly, that's actually a good thing. It's a shame that openSUSE isn't taking quite an ambitious approach to their distro that Ubuntu is, but I love KDE. And KDE runs best on openSUSE. Overall, my experience on KDE seems no different than Windows 7 or OS X's user interfaces. The KDE devs have created a modern, attractive DE and it's pretty impressive. I've included the obligatory picture. Enjoy :)