KDE 4 rev 823000

KSplash

KSplash went through some cosmetic changes in order to fit with the new Plasma theme. Nothing to complain about here, the new nice background, non-interupting progress bar do their jobs.

New KSplash

However, there’s a few things I don’t like about the KDE 4.1 KSplash worth mentioning. First of all, there’s way too much space between the icons. It might sound minor but I still think the window should be shrunk in order to look better or ship more information about the KDE boot progress. Some progress bar showing the percentage of loaded features would be nice. The most common textual information about the currently loaded component would do as well.

KRunner

No doubt that KRunner is the most interesting and widely used KDE 4 component. It’s a real pearl among KDE 4.1 features. It allows to run anything we like. It’s plug-in system is well-thought to allow improving its already large feature-set. I used to present show to use it to send a letter to a selected person or jump straight to some web page of choice. This time KRunner got two more interesting plug-ins. One of them is the capability of searching through Amarok music collection.

KRunner and Amarok collection

Thanks to the second plugin, we can check the spelling of any given word getting the suggested replacements as the result. Neat.

KRunner and spell checking

Additionally, KRunner got three new icons which stand for (from the left side) its configuration, running a system monitor and closing (killing) selected window. There’s no such thing as a perfect app, though, at least when I’m reviewing it. In my compilation there is a small error. After entering a keyword and then clearing the query, the KRunner window tries resizing itself, leaving junk on the screen.

Error when resizing KRunner

Oxygen or Bespin?

Oxygen style

I well remember the days when I was very critical about the Oxygen style. There were lots of bugs, in consistences and wrong decisions made about it. Today however, I can’t say a bad thing about Oxygen. The progress bar is awesome, so are the elements placed in Group Box. All looks nice and shiny… well… all except a few things.

In order to show you my visual preferences I’ll present my favorite KDE 4 style which is Bespin, first.

Bespin style

Bespin looks equally admirable. And it features two more details that I would love to see in Oxygen. These are the scroll bar and a common button. I have to say they do rock in Bestin and I cannot say this about the Oxygen. If only Oxygen copied those two, I would call it ideal. Here is how this looks on a mock-up:

Oxygen + Bespin (mock-up)

Here is yet another comparison of the two themes in Dolphin:

Dolphin - Oxygen

Dolphin - Bespin

One last thing I miss in Oxygen is its configuration options. They are very poor indeed. The only thing I’m allowed to change is the looks of the scroll-down tree elements. Unacceptable!

KWin

In the race after fancy visual effects, KWin also takes its part. As a long time Compiz user I can write that KWin is doing pretty well in comparison. Of course it cannot compete with Compiz by the number of plugins, but what makes it special is the fact that it integrates seamlessly into KDE and its general usability and speed is significantly better as well.

Cover switch ( Plasma applet in the back )

There are still unresolved issues, though. One of them can be the improper shading in “wobbly windows: effect.

Improper display of shade for wobbly windows

In case the visual effects of KWin and turned on, minor hang-ups appear here and there and playing with the environment. The situation is strange since my video card is quite a strong GF8800 GTS. It’s especially noticeable when opening large windows. Opacity changes experience irritating delays, there are issues with disappearing and re-appearing windows and so on. I noticed that those errors usually appear when the rendering method Texture from Pixmap is set. When I switched to Shared Memory this was hardly an issue.
Another problem is window maximization and returning to the original size. Here the delays can be even a second or two and they are unrelated to the rendering mode. I’m only wondering if this is my personal problem or the issue appears for many other users as well. Feedback is welcome here.

Plasma

Let’s go through the traditional overview of the most recent Plasma applet changes now.

Folder View is an applet displaying the contents of the selected folder on desktop. A new featured was added here — the possibility to scroll through the results. But what is still missing is the option to move directories. Currently after selecting the folder icon we are redirected to Dolphin. May it be that it’s a feature?

Folder View

Folder View config

The System Monitor worked quite well this time, presenting the information I asked it to.

System Monitor

Timer is a new Plasma applet giving as a functionality of… a timer. The extra feature is that we can tell it to run a program or script when the configured period of time passes.

Timer

A very nice add-on is another new applet called Toggle Compositing. It’s a simple switch of the visual effects of Kwin. Handy on desktop.

Toggle Compositing

Notify is another novelty in Plasma. I did not manage to make it work, but its use seems obvious — system alerts. Hope to get my hands on it next time.

Notify

I was waiting for a day when someone finally implements a docker for KDE 4. Peachy, because this is the name of the applet, is meant to be an exact copy of the Mac OS X applet. It’s quite fresh so both its look and behavior leaves a lot of room for improvement. It doesn’t seem likely that it will be stable for KDE 4.1 release. But it’s a good sign anyway and I’m waiting for a more polished version to come.

The most interesting new applet I found was Previewer. It functions one goal — to preview any type of content It’s enough to place any icon in this applet and we automatically see its preview (as far as its content type supported, of course).

Firefox 3 in KDE 4

As Firefox 3 was released just a while ago, I decided to test how it behaves in KDE 4. I tested two skins which make is more KDE-ish. The first one, found on playground, could only replace the icons. I expected a bit more…

Firefox 3 - Oxygen style (playground)

The other one, however, found in the Mozilla extensions, exceeded my expectations

Firefox 3 - KDE 4 style (Mozilla add-ons)

Summary

Except for some minor annoyances described above — and they are not so much annoying anyway, please excuse the screamy title — I can frankly say that KDE 4.1 is something I’m looking for anxiously. Just like for many of you, for me the release day of KDE 4.1 will be the last day of KDE 3 serving my desktop. As far as the stability is concerned — it’s acceptable. We shouldn’t forget that the KDE team still has a month to fix the issues, release Beta 2 and RC1 which should give them a lot of additional feedback. One thing is certain: if KDE 4.1 doesn’t yet convince you, KDE 4.2 will, I’m dead sure about it