Trying out KDE 4.1.4
Ever since the first public beta releases of KDE 4.0, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the day that KDE 4 would be marked Stable in Gentoo Portage, so I could start using it. That day still hasn’t come yet, but my curiosity got to me, so I decided to give the Testing version a try. It happened to be KDE 4.1.4.
The eye candy in the KDE 4 line is really impressive. Even without translucent windows and other advanced effects, the styling of everything in KDE 4 really brings it in line with Windows Vista and Mac OS X. No more cartoon-like 2D windows, menus, buttons, etc. Everything looks sharp, glossy, and ready for the next generation of Linux developments and “Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac” flame wars.
I confess this isn’t the first time I got to poke at KDE 4. I tested Kubuntu with KDE 4 last Summer, although I was very busy and it was too buggy for me to keep playing with for very long. One of the first things I noticed was the rewrite of the Application Launcher (a.k.a. the KDE equivalent to Windows’ Start Menu.) It’s very different from the KDE 3 version. I’m a student of User-Friendliness, a.k.a. User Science, and to me, the new Launcher takes too many mouse-clicks to access applications and to log out, shut down, restart, etc. Two clicks to shutdown my computer was acceptable, but 3 or 4 clicks is just silly. I wish when the buttons on the “Leave” tab are clicked, they would immediately do the appropriate action, instead of bringing up another window asking me to click the same thing again.
But that’s really the only implementation problem I’ve found so far. Overall, I’m quite pleased. Still, I wouldn’t recommend KDE 4.1.x for usage by the general public. KDE 4.2 was just released a couple of days ago, and it should be making its way into the various distributions over the next several months. This version is said to be the first of the KDE 4 line to be ready for general consumption. Let’s hope so! The 4.1 line still lacks some features that were in KDE 3 and, I would say, has some stability and memory leak issues on top of that.
Seeing all this advancement in KDE makes me wish I knew C++ so I could get in there and have some real fun! Maybe it’s good that I don’t… I can see how it would eat up a lot of my time.
-Curtis
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