Linux: KDE 4 desktop
January 21st, 2008I found this to be a very interesting article since I have been using Linux off and on for the past 10 years. I personally like the KDE desktop for many reasons. I have never cared for GNOME or any of the other desktops offered in Linux. I’m not sure what the KDE 4 desktop will be like, since it hasn’t been released yet. I hope that the user still has a choice in how it works (turning on/off animations, change the start menu layout, etc…).
You don’t have to read any further. The rest of this blog is just me ranting….
I was so annoyed and frustrated with Visa that I immediately downgraded my wife’s computer to XP. Among the many annoyances in Vista are some of the UI features Microsoft stole – I mean, “borrowed” from the KDE 3 desktop. I always hated the start menu that scrolls! KDE 3 is worse then Vista because not only do you scroll up and down, but also left to right to select programs. Its not like XP where you click on Start->Programs and a new window flies out to the right of the start window. All the scrolling is done within the same window. Anyone who has used the default KDE desktop knows what I am talking about. Animation is great to a point but it starts to get annoying when all I want to see is the info and it takes its sweet time rendering the animations to make it look pretty. It seems to me that all the fancy animations in Vista are simply a waste of CPU/GPU cycles and were put in place to force you to upgrade your hardware. The same annoying “features” exist in the current KDE desktop and I always disable them.
2 Responses to “Linux: KDE 4 desktop”
By Ryan Hadley on Jan 21, 2008 | Reply
KDE 4! You can try it out, here’s a live cd: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-4.0.php (or stop by and pick up my burnt copy).
The UI is very nice, fast and simple. I’ve only tried the live cd so far so I didn’t get a chance to see how customizable it is. Like I’ve said before, my favorite thing about KDE/Linux in general is that you can make IT fit YOU instead of my experience with Vista where I find I must change myself to fit it.
But the new start menu incremental searching rocks. The control center is greatly cleaned up and simplified. And best of all it runs so smoothly, very quick and reactive. I can’t wait to get it fully installed so I can tweak tweak tweak.
So, so far in my 10 minutes of playing with the Live CD, I’m very excited about it’s potential.
By Ryan Holder on Jan 21, 2008 | Reply
That’s good to hear. I am hoping to really get back into Linux. I have never trusted Windows. I am a paranoid sysadmin at heart
The only thing I use Windows for is gaming. For the past 4 years I have been doing windows development. Now that I am back in open source development, I would much rather use Linux.