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KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th
VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."
Konq was the killer app for me, I have to confess I'm a little worried about Dolphin becoming the default file manager. I've not used Dolphin much yet, but it will have to be pretty damn good to match what Konq could do. Will I still be able to have terminal, web and file panes all within the same tab? How about dragging images from a website to my /home within a single window, or middle clicking a file or link to open it in a viewer in a new tab? Konq allowed me to keep the amount of open windows to a minimum. I guess time will tell and I should start playing with Dolphin.
I should note that I bloody hate Dolphins (my ex loved the damn things). They aren't as cute as you think, they smell of fish and have attempted genocide on porpoises and even attack humans. Why is it that every crystal swinging hippie who lives 1000 miles from the sea wants to be a marine biologist? Dolphins!
I still wonder who or what that mythical power-user is, because I don't think I ever met one in person. The skript kiddie that spends 6 hours per day hunting themes and posting screen shots to forums? Some of the most knowledgeable and experienced developers I know barely change anything in their computer's configuration, even keeping the default OS X desktop image.
I love the KDE backend (dcop, kio-slaves, et al.); {I am a little worried that it might provide an avenue for malware in the future a-la Windows}.
Good news: the memory footprint of 'Strigi' is supposed to be lower then Beagle
Great news: You can install/use KDE4 without 'Plasma' (KDE 4 eyecandy)
Awesome news: KDE-based apps should work on Mac & Windows (properly ported)
Firefox has done an awesome job of weening people off Internet Explorer as "The Internet", as more killer-apps (Amarok I am looking at you) become available on Windows it will be easier to get folks to switch.
I use Fluxbox as my WM with KDE-base and KDElibs for my backend. Conky is as fancy as it gets for my eyecandy. I look forward to KDE4 because of all the good stuff that I can make use of. I just hope to $deity that they keep the eye-candy as optional. I am not looking forward to their whole concept of active-desktop/"its where you work dude"/make it an experience that people can interact with.
Rule #1) The DE/WM is HOW you access your programs, and should be invisible to the process.
Rule #2) Just because the median processor/ram is 42-times more powerfull then it was x-years ago does not mean that your programs can be 42-times more bloated.
Rule #3) Keep everything optional. Just because you think that everybody on the planet is stupid for not wanting something, does not mean everybody actually does want it.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
In between these two extremes there are people who actually use their computer. You don't have to change everything to make yourself more comfortable.
Here are a few things that I tweak/use regularly:
- Window manager: sloppy focus for the mouse, no autoraising or anything. If I want to raise a window I'll click on it, thank you very much.
- Decoration: I drag close icon to the left, with the right being sticky/minimize/maximize.
- Desktop: new desktops come with big widescreen monitors. I usually remove taskbar, put the panel in bottom left corner and put KasBar in the top right.
this way the space on the left is completely free - and is the size of the regular 4:5 monitors. Great for VNC, reading papers or having a big terminal.
- On my notebook I changed desktop background to be a slideshow that changes every 20 minutes. When you concentrate on something you will perceive these to go by much faster - after 10 or 20 it is likely time for another meal.
- Konqueror !! The first thing I chased down on Kubuntu Gutsy is how to switch away from Dolphin. Doplhin is fine manager if you don't have many files. Konqueror is the best thing after the shell tools - with the order being reversed when you have images. Right now I have a window open, with several tabs open in different simulation runs, some showing particular documents and this all mixing transparently the documents on my local systems with those on remote systems (using sftp://). And if you are writing a webpage you can have local source in one table, destination public_html in another and a test display in yet another. Just drag files from local to remote when you are done editing and click refresh to display the results !
- Konsole - the first thing I do is kill the menubar and everything else that uses up space, though I now keep the tabs. There is much misunderstanding about terminals. What they are is the perfect (and only) way to display a matrix of symbols with perfect control of individual elements. If you make an image you can squeeze more info into it, but you cannot tell which exact pixel is that dot unless you use a magnifier and kruler. And, of course, you can dump output from find/grep and see it align visually.
- Sessions in Kate are wonderful if lists of files you are editing extend way past screen.
- I set my default viewer to gwenview - so I can change files by using a scrollwheel. If you have many similar files rotating the wheel makes an animation (I could just make a real animation - but why bother typing)
I think this is about it - does anyone else has tricks to share ?At first I agreed with you two, but then I started thinking.
o My wife spilled water in my keyboard (which I love, so I don't want to replace). The left control key doesn't work, so I have X configured to rebind the capslock key ask control.
o I have tons of non-standard apt repositories configured for different programs that I want to keep up-to-date automatically.
o I configured a 32-bit chroot environment so run WINE and Opera work with a 64-bit OS.
o I have a few locally-compiled apps, some of which I've added shell support for.
o I've customized the keyboard shortcuts, albeit mostly to mimic windows. I prefer Win+R to Alt+F2, so shoot me.
o A buncho of UI adjustments (mainly the Kicker)
OTOH, I do still have the default background.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
The point is not to change everything. The point is to be able to change everything. If you look at my desktop, it isn't much changed from the default. I have an extra kicker panel on top with a few useful applets and I use the Polyester style, but other than that I haven't tweaked things much.
However, there are dozens of little tiny obscure features that I use and love, and that wouldn't exist if KDE weren't so configurable. Examples: I have a "stay on top" button on the window titlebars, which I use fairly often, I have several windows configured with custom settings through "Special Window Settings" (to make them show up on the right desktop, for example), I've disabled icons on my desktop altogether, I've tweaked my keyboard shortcuts and configured the extra keys on my keyboard for common actions, and a whole bunch of other little things that I've added over the years. These are less than 1% of the available options, but the point is that they're the 1% that I care about.
So wait, they're adding a bunch of features, making it multiplatform (via QT4) and it's going to be faster. Maybe they can pass on some programming pointers to Microsoft. I'm amazed how quickly Compiz Fusion runs on my discount laptop, I only wish Vista would run as quickly. Flashy doesn't have to mean slow.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.