Trying to get the KDE4 concept
Well, KDE4.2.4 still has some issues for me. My laptop's graphics card is of a set that cannot currently use the you-beaut window animations in KDE4 without the input freezing (this is a known issue with Intel Graphics Cards on Ubuntu systems), but it works fine if I disable the animations. The once-great Amarok music player, an application that was arguably a much better music offering than any available for MS Windows, has lost huge amounts of functionality in the shift from 1.4 to the 2.x series.
That said, I can finally sort of see the vision that KDE4 has been struggling to achieve. It's still not there, and I suspect the impending release of 4.3 won't solve all the problems either, but the whole "plasma desktop" thing is starting to make sense. The under-the-hood technologies seem interesting - the ones that are currently included at any rate (just how is Decibel supposed to work?) - but their usefulness still seems a little unclear. Krunner is nice, and integrates nicely with the akonadi desktop search - or would, if the damn thing would actually *run* without needing to correct a problem with the strigi backend (Ubuntu and Strigi disagree on where a java library file should be - easy to fix if you know about it, but not necessarily easy to discover).
I was starting to wonder if it was worth putting up with all the minor nuisances I find in KDE4. I think it is, at least for now. I like the potential for something different on the desktop. I get the impression that the full configurability of plasma hasn't yet been explored. Sure, there's the usual setup of taskbar + plasmoids, but I find this alpha release of plasma-based desktop for a notebook interesting, and indicative of there being more to KDE4 than has met the eye so far.
I hope so, at any rate.
That said, I can finally sort of see the vision that KDE4 has been struggling to achieve. It's still not there, and I suspect the impending release of 4.3 won't solve all the problems either, but the whole "plasma desktop" thing is starting to make sense. The under-the-hood technologies seem interesting - the ones that are currently included at any rate (just how is Decibel supposed to work?) - but their usefulness still seems a little unclear. Krunner is nice, and integrates nicely with the akonadi desktop search - or would, if the damn thing would actually *run* without needing to correct a problem with the strigi backend (Ubuntu and Strigi disagree on where a java library file should be - easy to fix if you know about it, but not necessarily easy to discover).
I was starting to wonder if it was worth putting up with all the minor nuisances I find in KDE4. I think it is, at least for now. I like the potential for something different on the desktop. I get the impression that the full configurability of plasma hasn't yet been explored. Sure, there's the usual setup of taskbar + plasmoids, but I find this alpha release of plasma-based desktop for a notebook interesting, and indicative of there being more to KDE4 than has met the eye so far.
I hope so, at any rate.