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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!
Just turn off or uninstall what you don't need.
I find it very stable, and rather surprisingly lightweight considering all the bells and whistles it supports. The current version is one of the best versions of KDE of all time, IMHO.
Nobody I know uses the semantic desktop, its simply a developmental toy, and most people turn off the indexing functions, since they pretty well know what is on their machines and where it is. They've even been browbeaten into deep-sixing their "activities" for the vast majority of users that simply wanted multiple desktops without all the widgets. (Its still there, but mostly caged and toothless).
It does everything I ask of it, and gets out of the way when I don't need it. Their Kmail, which use to be one of the best email MUAs has fallen to unusable status of late, in the midst of another re-write, but Thunderbird and several other are there to pick up the slack.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"if the desktop bling gets in the way of a smooth user experience then the deskop is not doing its job."
Agreed, which is why KDE is the only desktop I'll use. Everything else has had too many features ripped out mercilessly to be a productive environment. KDE is the only thing left for power users, it seems. It lets me, from the GUI without having to fart around with some obscure desktop-specific config tool:
* Control which desktop newly opened windows go to as a function of the app. E.g, all email windows go to desktop 2, editors and shells to desktop 1, and so on.
* Provide regex-based configurable clipping behaviors when selecting text from any app.
* Provides an extremely rich set of GUI-settable key mapping and key macro prefs, such as mapping caps lock to control (a necessity for touch typists), where this requires some xmodmap stuff in most desktops. In KDE, it's just a checkbox. Or the key bindings *I* want for changing between virtual desktops.
* Provides keyboard controls for everything.
* Is endlessly configurable, for adding new task bars, putting what I want in them, and having them where I want them to go.
And so on. Sure, somebody is bound to say, "hey, but you can do that one in this desktop!" but it's missing the point. Any time I've tried another, it's inevitable that sooner or later I look for some feature which just isn't there. KDE, what I want has always been available.