KVery KCool

by on March 31, 2008 in Desktop

Wow, looking at this just goes to show the incredible work the KDE team have done with KDE 4.x. Free software in action. Stunning. :)

  • http://stuartaxon.com Stu

    Goodness… for the first time I’m tempted to give it a go… seriously worth looking to see what ideas can be borrowed from the competition every year or so (or where they can be exceeded).

  • TheMole

    Hmmm, did my sarcasm detector just fly of the chart?

  • jono

    TheMole – you – I really mean it. :)

  • http://nermal.org Nermal

    All that polish and they can’t even ensure the default font allows the tab text on the menu to fit in the tab. :roll:

  • http://gwallgofi.com JGJones

    I still will continue to use Gnome (I’m not someone that bother tweaking their desktop much now) as the the last time I was in KDE, I ended up spending too much time configuring every little thing…:mrgreen:

    Latest KDE does look stunning and I’m trying to resist them…argh…they’re evil ;) . Sure there’s some graphical glitches but I know they’ll have all that fixed up soon.

  • http://stuartaxon.com Stu

    Yeah I still much prefer the sensible defaults way, to the 50 different levers per dialogue of KDE

  • http://wolfger.wordpress.com/ Wolfger

    with all the glitz and glamor, KDE4 is still inferior to KDE 3.5 from where my computer sits. :sad: Hopefully some day it will mature, and be even better than its older brother.

  • hias

    @nermal: yeah, your right. luckily it’s just the middle of the release and at current revision (792xxx) it’s fixed.

  • http://nermal.org Nermal

    @hias: excellent – while developers might appreciate the beauty of the underlying code users would spot glitches like that and be under the impression it’s not very well made – especially managers / people in the the work environment – even if underneath it’s very solid and well built.

  • Jonas

    @Stu,

    Good news for you then :) The settings dialogues have been streamlined A LOT (system wide settings as well as those for individual apps), and it is a lot easier to find the thing you need or want to change. And the need for that has lessened IMO. The defaults are sensible, at least in Hardy and in my opinion, but still there if you want them. Well, most of them anyway…and I’m sure those that are missing will return eventually.

    Still, sensible defaults is a tough call. I have yet to see any OS or DE that I haven’t felt the need to tweak in one way or the other. Including Gnome from 1.4 or so up to the latest, KDE 3.something up to my current 4.0.2 install, MacOS (MacOS X or otherwise), Windows for workgroups up to Vista, or my old trusty AmigaOS. None had defaults that suited me or the way I wanted to work. Sometimes it only took changing some settings, at other times I had to rely on more or less stable hacks. So yeah, provide defaults that are as sensible as possible but make it easy to change too.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean KDE 4 will be good for you anyway but the old and admittedly confusing jumble of settings is gone.

    Now if only firefox could look as good in KDE as it does in Gnome…but I blame firefox for that. Every other gtk-app I’ve used look good (using the gtk-qt-engine) so I can only come to the conclusion that firefox is doing something wrong somewhere…

  • deech

    Most of the discussion is a matter of taste i would say. Sensible defaults are a nice thing to have. But I will only look at gnome again once they come up with a chat client that has webcam support. Functionality goes before sane defaults I think. Its nice to talk about online desktop and all, but for now I would settle with just one gnome native chat client that allows me to use my webcam. There are a number of nice chat clients for gnome (emesene, pidgin, empathy) but NOT ONE of them has webcam support…

    So my vote goes to KDE because Kopete webcam support just works! Now that is a sane default I would say :) I am using 3.5 now and cant wait to move to KDE4.1 once its out.