Have you ever been doing something for so long you can’t imagine that you have been doing it all wrong? I was curious this weekend and I decided to take home my laptop for a quick format. As you wonderful people know from my last post, I was less than thrilled with where the Ubuntu 6.06 Beta is headed. I have been looking into alternatives for a few weeks, and I have decided to give Kubuntu 6.06 a try. I am so glad that I did. Instead of talking about it, I have included some nice screenies below (some of this are Xgl goodness). I have scaled the images down to 320×240 in the interest of speed, so I apologize if some of the features are hard to see clearly:
This view is showcasing the cube functionality of Xgl, as well as the clean interface, I guess.
I have not been able to find a decent (feature filled) music player for a while. I hated to use amaroK inside of Gnome because of the massive resources it consumed by loading the Kde libraries. When I am in Kde, I don’t have to worry about that 🙂
My webpage is down! 😉 Seriously, I wanted to see what song was playing without having to Alt+Tab. How lazy is that?
I wanted to show this configuration page to show how absolutely superior the power management settings are to Gnome. And I thought Gnome-power-manager was the greatest thing to come along in a while…
In the fore and background you can see the number of options that one has in setting up a printer. The Gnome-cups interface doesn’t even touch this. The best part is all of the development that is being done in Ubuntu for automatic printer recognition should carry over to Kde, since it is Cups based.
More cheap Xgl eye candy. OS X users will know this feature as Expose. I know it as the Alt+Tab killer. Something Linux has missed for a while (though not as long has Windows… he he) is a true 3D interface. All of those programs are actually running, including the movie in the upper-right hand corner in real time (without lag!)
This image just goes to further show that the 3D effects are not cheap psuedo-3D tricks of yesterday. The video continues to play and conture the 3D surface as it plays. Digikam can been seen on the right workspace. It is superior to gThumb in every way. Konqueror, Kde’s browser for almost everything can be seen on the left workspace. Most of the data is thumbnailed, with mouseover previews for audio and video files.
Konqueror can also been seen in a view mode called “File Size View” which will give an idea of where all of your free hard drive space went to…
Kde has been what I have missed for so long in Linux. I am beginning to see a lot of polished programs, with more integration and ease of use. Almost all of the programs just work, and smartly configure themselves to start with your session, or close to the system tray. The laptop and power management support alone is a world of improvement. I had avoided Kde for a long time because of bad experiences with Knoppix and Kubuntu back in 5.04 using Ksynaptic, a piss poor front end to Synaptic ported to Kde. I have revisited this desktop environment to discover a world of change. The Kubuntu team, and all of the people that contribute to Kde do wonderful work.
Zone of Mr. Frosti 