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Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
I recently got KDE 4.2 installed and took it for a test drive. First, something about kernel 2.6.18 that I'd been using resulted in system crashes - not even Magic SysRq keys worked. Putting in an overdue new kernel fixed that and I took it for a test-run that ultimately lasted 2 days. My system isn't particularly great - 2.4Ghz Athlon64, 1GB DDR533, nVidia 7300gt, generic PATA hard drive - but KDE 4 ran like a champ. I got full and perfectly smooth compositing/transparency.
It is as you say very pretty. Endless configurability of effects/compositing/multidesktop/etc via right-clicking title bar and hitting "window behavior." However, I had to flip between 2 or 3 menus to setup my desktop switches! One to enable switching when the mouse is pressed against a side, a second to enable the plasmoid (grid/sphere/cylinder/etc) for the effect I selected, and a third to select the side I wanted to press against. That is a Bad Thing, but fixing it comes down to rearranging some menus. With compositing enabled, I of course had great fun playing with transparency and wiggly-windows and such.
I liked the "draw on desktop" widget greatly. Now, put a color picker/small pallet and line-width picker in the corner and you've got yourself a sale! This is good as both a silly toy and to let me jot down or highlight stuff for other users. Add a selectable "poweruser menu" (and name it that) that does some more sophisticated stuff and you've got a competitor for the electronic-whiteboard thing they used in some of my classes. Oh, and try to work on it's frame/capture rate. It's one of those things that's got to run smoothly.
The new colors for Konsole were nice, a bit more sedate and less glaringly saturated than 3.5's Konsole default. Kwrite was beautiful, loved the new syntax highlighting. Konqueror... Loved it to death. Canvas element support was very nice (yay, I can play most javascript games now), and at last my preferred browser has the "last session unexpectedly exited; restore?" dialog. Konqueror as a file browser - disappointing. The default is a nauseating exercise in "How much space can we waste with giant icons and whitespace." Seriously, monitors don't get too much past 1920x1200 before you go dual-panel - KDE 4 fullscreen showed maybe 120 icons whereas I just selected 250 in Konqueror. Personal opinion, I know; It was a fairly short exercise to kill the whitespace and shrink back to smallish icons.
Configuration and customizability were great, typically so of KDE. We need a tutorial here; I don't have any problem navigating through about 30 tabs to set things up my way, but new users would be either overwhelmed or never know how much their desktop could do. Even a short popup explaining what Akonadi is and why I just spent the time to let it onto my MySql installation would be nice. And why did it have a problem creating its personal database after I gave it privileges to do so? Anyway, there's so much KDE 4 can do - most people will need a guided tour.
The bad... Okay, it's simply not acceptable for my keyboard to stop working about once a day and force me to exit to console and startx again. I don't care why, not acceptable - fix it, now, or this isn't going anywhere. This is ultimately what made me end my test-drive and decide not to move my emails/etc over yet. I did however discover that KDE4's desktop restore is fantastically faster than 3.5's - kudos.
There really needs to be a "taskbar always on top" option. I spent some time looking and if it's there it's hidden so it might as well not be there. Every user of Windows and previous versions of KDE and Gnome will expect the "max size" button to cover everything but the taskbar and for good reason!
Oh yeah, scroll wheel can change window opacity - good. Letting it scroll a window down to 0% opacity and disappearing - bad, no matter how good it would be for pranks.
Ultimately, I miss my "spiffy new desktop" but it's got a few glitches (fix the no-keyboard thing and I'm back) that are enough for me to hesitate. Final verdict: Tried 4.2 beta 1, waiting for 4.2.1 so I can get my asciifish screensaver back!
As good as the whole OS world is moving towards microkernels and Linux is pushing graphics to the kernel ?
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1