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| The Desktop with some Notifications |
My
last review of KDE 4.X was a bitter disappointment, as KDE 4.4 refused to work. Period. Follow the jump to see if this version of KDE works out any better.
The first thing I notice is that KDE 4.5 does, in fact, work. Yay! (A word of warning to anyone who wants to install KDE on top of another DE:
do not use KDM, as it will cause problems.)
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| The Cube effect |
The theme carries over largely unchanged from KDE 4.4. However, the most noticeable change is the superior integration of icons into the system tray — whereas before, icons used to look blocky and out-of-place, now they are all-white and more rounded, integrating better with the panel theme. Along with this comes better integration of GTK+ applications into the system tray, as well as better-looking (and less intrusive) notifications. Unfortunately, GTK+ applications themselves still don't integrate well with KDE, though this can be remedied by applying any one of the numerous GTK-to-Qt themes. On a related note, Firefox and OpenOffice.org still don't integrate too well by default, though OpenOffice.org at least shows icons (instead of blocks of text), and Firefox's integration problem can be solved by using the Oxygen KDE theme.
Desktop effects work well, and I now believe that KWin is pretty darn close to feature-parity with Compiz. KWin also has a side-by-side window tiling effect (that some people say was taken from Windows 7). Also, activities are now much more useful because one need not zoom out anymore to manipulate activities — the button to manipulate activities is in the "cashew" upper-right menu.
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| Firefox and OpenOffice.org tiled side-by-side |
This is the first time that I've actually played with widgets for more than a minute. The weather applets have improved noticeably, as they now display more detailed information in more locations than before. The RSSNow and News widgets are handy, but I would like to see them automatically fetch feeds from Akregator (considering that otherwise, they are very well-integrated with Akregator). I would like to see some desktop blogging widgets added as well; the only widgets that are remotely related to this purpose are all for Twitter or Identi.ca.
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| A bunch of Plasmoids (widgets) |
Surprisingly, there were no Plasma crashes. I think the KDE developers have finally gotten this stability thing down.
With GNOME 3.0 looking to experience the same issues as KDE 4.0, KDE 4.5 is a very easy-to-use, feature-filled, stable, and fun experience. I would recommend it for anyone who wants some more shiny toys on the desktop (because GNOME looks a little too simple); it's even available to try on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. I'll probably be using this for a while anyway.