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KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative
jrepin writes "KDE released the first beta for its version 4.9 of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 include, but are not limited to: Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, many improvements in Dolphin file manager, deeper integration of Activities, and many performance improvements. The KDE Community is committed to improving quality substantially with a new program that starts with the 4.9 releases. The 4.9 beta releases are the first phase of a testing process that involves volunteers called 'Beta Testers.' They will receive training, test the two beta releases and report issues through KDE Bugzilla."
I was recently forced into installing GNOME 3 (who knew printing required removing GNOME 2); after trying for a while to get Sawfish working again in the deprecated fallback mode, I gave up and tried KDE again. I have to say that I was surprised: KDE 4.5 was unpolished and painful to use whereas 4.7 is pretty slick. With the GNOME 3 developers catering to some seemingly mythical user, it's nice to see the other major desktop using user feedback to make design decisions.
Hey! The GNOME 3 team DOES use user feedback, you insensitive clods! After they print them out (which requires GNOME 3, as you've seen), they shred them and turn them into fine bedding for their various rodent pets! And the rodents, in turn, whisper great design ideas to the developers!
That is one option. There are hundreds more, including using synaptic or apt to download and install kde (assuming that you already use 'regular' ubuntu). Or on the other end of the spectrum you can also create a linux-from-scratch 'distro' and compile the whole packet. That makes for days on end filled with joy and fun, and it is very educational as well!
I dont know what the options for Amiga are btw...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Not to mention Opensuse is a very good distro with full KDE support. (They do Gnome and other flavors as well).
I happen to think Opensuse does KDE better than anyone else, but that's just my opinion.
Having long ago gone the "educational" route, I'm perfectly happy to start with a well thought out distro these days, and have 4 of them on this machine, in (Virtual Machines), including some pretty old school ones running nothing graphical.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If you want "bleeding edge, but upstream", then nothing beats Arch.