Lots of changes in the office of late. Just after I got home from my road trip, I migrated my desktop machine to Arch Linux, mostly (and it pains me to say this, really it does) because I wanted to use KDE again and since the KDE 4 jump, Kubuntu has just been utterly unusable. (Really, I didn’t want to say that.)
Arch has been great, so great that I’m in the process of migrating my laptop to it as well. I’m not going to do a full review right now, but maybe later if enough people want to hear my take. One thing I will say is that the KDE packages are first-rate. There is a thriving KDE/Arch community, and the quality of the packages really tells the tale. Blazing fast. Crash-free. No, Guerrilla Tech won’t be offereing Arch machines or service any time in the near future, but personally I’m already completely sold.
(Oh, and I’m posting this using Bilbo Blogger, a new blogging client for the KDE desktop. We’ll see how that turns out and maybe do a review on it later too.)
But what I want to talk about is KDE 4.3! Holy shit it’s so full of awesome! High points for me:
- You can now tie activities to virtual desktops, a feature I’ve been holding my breath for since 4.0.0. This is so tight!
A little explanation there for folks who don’t know what the fuck I just said. A “desktop activity,” as best I can explain it, is a fancy name for a profile. You can customize your desktop style, wallpaper, what widgets appear where, your panel layout, everything that the Plasma desktop handles can be tied to an activity (note to lazyweb: is there a better definition for this?).
Okay, so what? I’ll tell you. So let’s say you’ve got four desktops set up. One that’s typically your “home base,” let’s say your email client and web browser usually sit there, then one for your work, one for media, and one for games. The way virtual desktops traditionally work, these designations are pretty arbitrary, really they’re just labels for where you tend to park stuff.
But in KDE 4.3, you can set up each of those desktops differently, customized to your workflow. Maybe you want to use different wallpapers for each one, or Folder View on 2, 3, and 4 (all pointed to different folders, natch) and nothing but a weather widget and a globe on 1 (yeah, you know I’m still a sucker for the globe), or smaller panels on the desktop you use for media, or a mail notifier widget on every desktop except the one that your mail client actually sits on. The sky’s the limit.
Do I sound excited? I am. I just discovered this last night, as a matter of fact, and I’m still tweaking it. If you want to try it out, go to the cashew, select “Zoom Out,” then select “Configure Plasma” from the left hand menu and select “Different activity for each desktop.” I’d love to hear from folks about more creative uses for this feature. I’m so excited about it I could pee.
Anyway, other advancements:
- Keyboard shortcuts have been improved dramatically (but I still can’t figure out how to bind PrintScreen to KSnapshot)
- You can now hover over a folder in Folder View and a window pops up allowing you to navigate your directory structure right there, without having to open a file manager. I had not previously used Folder View, but I’m giving it a try now that it has this feature. When you combine this with a different Folder View on different desktops, you can drag stuff between them, into other folders, you name it. This is tight.
- KWin effects keep getting better. The new “Slide Back” effect shows your windows sliding back (duh) when another window gets focus. This does not translate well into a screenshot or a verbal description but rest assured it is fucking sweet looking.
- Kmail can (finally) insert images inline into email.
- The new bug reporting tool is great, and makes it easy for even beginners to contribute meaningful bug reports, by providing a three-star rating to the quality of the data gathered and hints on how to improve it (for instance, it’ll tell you if it doesn’t find the debugging symbols for a program), and walks the user through the entire bug reporting process. I like this a lot. It’s little things like this that keep me excited about new KDE releases.
I could go on and on about this release. This has been billed as a “not as radical” release as previous 4.x releases, but even so, almost 2000 feature requests have been impemented, and over 10,000 bugs closed in the last 6 months. You can check out the announcement here (the link is to the 4.3 release announcement; the 4.3.1 release has since shipped, and that means I’m a lazy blogger) and see for yourself.
To the KDE team: Congratulations. Really, really, from the bottom of my cold black heart. You guys have gotten such an incredible ration of shit from various corners of the free software community since the 4.0 release. You’ve had your technical acumen and intelligence insulted, you were told (Plasma/KRunner/Folder View/insert new feature here) was a stupid idea that no one would use, you’ve been called nasty names. You’ve caught it from downstream, end users, the tech press, you name it. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. And with every release you’ve filled the gaps and squashed the bugs and kept moving forward.
To release something as innovative and game-changing as KDE 4.3 doesn’t just take good code, or neat compisiting effects, or a nice theme, or a flagship app. It takes balls. It takes the courage to keep pushing the envelope and moving forward when every voice you hear tells you you can’t, or you shouldn’t, or you’re wrong, or that’s stupid. Gentlemen, ladies, thank you for writing the code, and having the vision, and squashing the bugs, and drawing the icons, and doing the work and getting it right. And thanks for finding the nerve. Congratulations.
-p.
