KDE 4 – a week in action
Monday, May 19th, 2008I have long been impressed by the concepts underlying KDE. However, at the same time I found myself vaguely annoyed with the amount of screen space taken up by various buttons and menus. I often wondered "why can’t this be a little tidier?"
The new KDE 4 release appears to have solved quite a few of my grumbles. There are several elegant new concepts at play in this desktop that make it easier to find things. The first time I saw KDE 4 in action was when Adriaan compiled it on his laptop. It had bugs, sure, but it was fast and obviously well thought out.
Now the desktop is getting more stable and moving towards version 4.1, a release for the general market. In honour of that – and in honour of all the times I said "I like KDE and I want to use it more" – I have decided to trial KDE 4 as my primary desktop for this working week.
Day one has begun.
My first impressions are that I like the Dolphin file manager, I can’t quite work out how to use the new Plasma desktop (why won’t my files delete and why can’t I drag and drop into applications?), and everything runs at a nice speed.
Oh, one slight bug. When I clicked a text file in Dolphin it opened the document in an editor called KATE and also opened a little window saying "KDEInit could not launch ‘/usr/lib/kde4/bin/kate’."
Strange, that.