KDE 4.0 RC2 - Random screenshots

I got the KDE 4.0 RC2 live cd off the intertubes yesterday. Its an OpenSuSE based live cd , just to showcase the KDE 4 desktop.

This post is by no means a review , or for that matter doesn't represent the whole K - suite at all . These are some random shots i took while i was checking the RC2 , that is all .


Now there is one thing that got my attention immediately. Eye candy aside , its a snappier run than other kde live distro's i have run ( notably Sabayon ) .

Setup

I have an AMD Athlon 2800+ running on an ASUS motherboard with a GB of RAM. I didn't have a blank CD-R so i used Innotek VirtualBox ( It comes as a default install with my Sabayon 3.4e ).

There is something I must say about Virtualbox. It is as easy to use as VMWare and its open source to boot . So no pangs about using pirated software. I have used qemu , VMWare and Xen . But the one that appealed to me most was Virtualbox. I don't know about its performance as a production virtual environment . But this is enough for anyone who needs to run a virtual machine for their own use.

Back to KDE 4.0. I chose 362MB of RAM ( it was a random choice made long ago , I use the same setting for all distro's i have tried out on this virtual machine ). I chose a hard drive size of a GB and attached my USB drive to it ( since i didn't want to install a shared folder add on to the KDE4.0 distro )

I tried out a few things , and i must say that KDE 4.0, when it has smoothed out, is going to beat up a lot of desktop environs out there.

Here are the screenshots (click to enlarge )

Boot

These are not actually KDE4 but they do look nice










Desktop

The desktop :D .









The SuSE style KDE Menu ( I am addicted to it ) .













Plasmoids

The KDE Widgets ( SuperKaramba re incarnate ) are called plasmoids . These are altogether nice things . Even though they are total eye candy they didn't slow down the system as i expected , even with a rotating GL plasmoid running ( the one that looks slanted is actually a rotating Image/ text thing ). There are leaky plasmoids and they might slow you down.

You choose the plasmoids ( Add a Widget) by moving your mouse to the top right , clicking on that spanner image and then choosing "Add Widgets" , which will bring up a chooser window not much unlike SuperKaramba's chooser.















Control Center

Control center actually has become friendlier !! It is now eerily similar to OS X Preferences . You choose the module you want to play with and its loaded into the same window. Its good.

Normal Prefs











Advanced Prefs











A pref module ready to get configured












Dolphin

The new file manager !! Its what i always wanted my file-manager to be. Manage files conveniently. It takes a lot of cues from windows explorer and xfce's file-manager. I still like konqueror for its incredible flexibility and power. Nothing matches that. But this program does one task , and does it very well. Hats off to the Dolphin design team . Dolphin's review alone will easily take up a post. This post is meant to show off a bit of KDE4.0 as a whole and not dolphin. So just two screens :D.












Konqueror

My favorite KDE application is sill there. still the same. Its difficult to improve on konqueror because it is probably the most stable application from the K-suite - it does many things , and does them well. My favorite web browser , file manager , all-in-one previewer , ftp browser etc etc.. the list is long.

default profile is web browsing..











Google has somehow forgotten konqueror . One of the first things I do with konqueror is to browse to gmail and make it identify itself as Mozilla 1.7 :D.










Loading the file-management profile makes it the excellent file manager we all know. I didn't snag a screen-shot because there are no radical differences form the current version ( at least it looks like there are none ).


Other Applications

The rest of the suite are there , all updated with the new Oxygen theme . They all look good to go , here are a bunch of them.

Amarok , the excellent music manager.. It looks good , looks like it has gone and mated with WIndows Media Player.












Kword - Now , this is something that has changed. Its gotten better than ever, and someday soon its gonna kick OOO Writer's ass. Seriously.











The piracy application - a.k.a Ktorrent, the bittorrent client










My USB drive showed up like this on the system tray . Its eye candy all the way ...









I like it !!

Its getting better, there are a few rough edges, a few leaky plasmoids, places where the new Oxygen theme is not that complete .. it didn't crash for the three hours i spent checking it out !! . I like it already. But i think i will wait till the next Slackware iteration comes out.


In other news , i have returned to my "home" distro, Slackware 12.0, for its sheer simplicity. I am trying Gnome ( dropline Gnome ) after a long gap , and i hope its a killer .