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KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look
dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."
I've played around a bit with KDE 4.x (don't remember exact version) in Ubuntu 10.04, but I wasn't very impressed. It look very slick, gives a feeling of advanced tech under the hood, but:
After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.
I don't have time for this crap, a desktop environment is just one of many things you have to configure when customizing an OS, it shouldn't take a day to wander through its configuration. This wouldn't be a problem if defaults are chosen well enough that you're done with changing very few things from the default, but that's not the case. From what I understand, SuSE offers one of the best out-of-the-box KDE experiences, but hey I'm not changing distro's just to have nice defaults on the desktop environment.
To me, it comes across as a typical case of too much unnecessary complexity - users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time. And where they can easily find the most important settings. Beyond that, additional complexity just wasts memory, CPU cycles & developer time. Which is really a shame given all the effort that goes into a project like KDE. Disclaimer: that's just my current impression, maybe these things are much improved in later releases like the one reviewed here...
They seem to be planning changes. But I don't like their plans:
http://www.deansas.org/blog/2009/09/24/first-impressions-of-gnome-shell/
One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity "overlay" and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn't really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.
Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I'm not likely to forget the name of an application I've started.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00030.html
Just wanted to share a personal experience with GNOME Shell. One of its new and unique attributes is not having the window list or any sort of persistent widget that shows running apps or opened windows. This has benefits, in theory, like helping the user focus on the foreground task.
It's just worth noting that one of its potential downsides is it violates the user's mental model, which makes it undesirable, even if it *may* help increase productivity. With a window list, it's clear to the user where the window goes when it's minimized and how to show it again. In GNOME Shell, the only clear way to tell if a window is minimized is to check if it can't be seen in the workspace, but it's shown in the Overview or Window Switcher (alt+tab). Teling which windows are minimized or not may not have real benefits, but it may be too disorienting for users.
Personally I think they've lost their marbles. How does that help productivity at all? Especially in the cases where you need to use more than one window to do your work?
The killer feature for me -- seriously, the reason I use KDE rather than Gnome -- is the ability to make the panel vertical. It's the only reasonable way to work on a widescreen netbook.
(Yeah, Gnome kinda has vertical panels as long as you don't mind them looking horrible and lots of things breaking. No, I do not want to read sideways text, Gnome. And when I looked at some "make vertical panels work properly" bugs, the basic message from Gnome devs was "we don't use vertical panels, go fuck yourself".)
I understand your point. ...
But that's exactly what I have been trying for the last half year: I set my KDE to 'no panel', even 'no border'. And - loving it!
This is not to talk up KDE (which is very lousy in places) or talk down Gnome. It is the paradigm that took me some time to get used to. But now you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers
Only if someone is interested: I have the Dashboard on a mouse edge, which now takes in principle the task of the panel, except that it is 2-dimensional instead of a line (== more space, no doubt).
Another mouse edge does the 'Desktop Grid', so that I can move to another desktop, while yet another one presents all windows of the current desktop. And it is just beautiful to have all real estate 100% for the applications; with a 'panel' (desktop==dashboard) directly underneath; instead of invading the screen.
I have no clue if this will accepted by the majority (I think not); but something will need to be done against those ugly, overloaded, panels. From where one needs to drop sub-panels with sub-menus, because the total, primary, real estate is just the screen width.