Saturday 5 February 2011

KDE 4.6 review

I was eagerly awaiting for kde 4.6 because I would be able to remove hal from my system after installeing it. So, as soon as kde 4.6 was available on Arch linux repositories, I got it installed. I was thrilled by some features and disappointed by some others. This review is about those.

Pros:
- The first thing I noticed was faster response. It spurred my interest in finding other improvements in kde 4.6 over previous versions. I do not know the reason why I am experiencing faster response; yet it is the best feature for me.

- Finally, KDE guys have done away with HAL. My other desktop environment, Enlightenment had switched to udisks, upower etc. So, I have been waiting for KDE to get rid of it.

- ksnapshot is improved. It is allowing two nice options:
     * hide mouse; and
     * hide window decoration.
KSnapshot

- KDE 4.6 has some delights in terms of graphics. The new wallpaper by Nuno is really cool. There are icons for compiled html files (chm) and also for portable compiled format(pcf) files. There is a new pointing cursor too.

Cons:
- I found a funny problem with knotes. I had saved a note as "typing <td>"; but it was transformed to "typing ".

- There are no icons for jpeg files yet. Neither are there any icons for deja vu(djvu) files.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I run gentoo, installed kde 4.6 day before yesterday. It is the coolest kde version till date. HAL's gone and there is a remarkable improvement in overall speed. Dolphin has better search integration, kde workspace is truly multidimensional, each workspace can have it's own set of application and desktop customization.There is social media integration in gwenview and ksnapshot.

srikanth Krishnakar said...

neoxy how many days did it took to compile KDE-4.6 on your machine ? I am planning to switch to gentoo, how much time does it take to get install with KDE profile ?

Phoenix said...

@Srikanth: I was trying a Gentoo install recently. With a decent connection, you should have your KDE ready on Gentoo in a day.

If you are experienced with KDE, do not go for the KDE profile, use the desktop profile and add required flags to package.use. This way you will have more control and only those packages that you need.