Jayce
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Well, KDE 4.10 is out. I have always had a soft spot for KDE but it never really caught on full time. It still had a clunky feeling to it in certain regard. Any time a new release came out and there was buzz about it, I'd try it, but always came back. Over the years I've gotten really set in my Gnome Shell, and later, Unity ways. Unity has come a tremendous way and it'll undoubtedly only get better. I still have some Unity crashes now and then but when it gives me issues, it always seems to self recover flawlessly. That said, after I kept hearing about the new speed and whatnot of KDE 4.10, I decided it was time to try it out.
Now I would like to say both systems I have Kubuntu 12.04/KDE 4.10 running on have SSDs, but my comments of comparing speed come from existing installs that are on these very systems. I have room on both my laptop and desktop for another partition, which allows me to install an independent vanilla instance of Kubuntu and mount my home directory accordingly. This way I have two operating systems completely independent of one another that share the exact same home partition where my files are. (Damn I love Linux)
I first noticed that KDE 4.10 is fast. Like, no joke. If I click on a PDF in my home dir, it just opens. Period. The second I click it is the second I am also viewing it. I never thought Unity was slow, and quite honestly Unity is pretty damn impressive, but there's no denying that I'm sensing a speed bump here. It could be a semi placebo effect from the single click behavior of KDE, where a single click opens it, but quite honestly I think there's more to it than that.
KDE is ridiculously customizable. No joke, it's almost obnoxious how much you can customize. I do find that they make decent use of their space and system settings menu in an effort to keep things organized despite how extensive the features list is. Changing the full appearance of KDE took me a few tries to understand since the actual theme was in one place, window border in another, and icons in another, but overall they were easy to get to and relatively self explanatory. I found it exceptionally easy to go in and download a new icon theme. No more root overriding to /usr/share/icons or /usr/share/themes. Just hit up the built in menu, download, and bingo. It's selectable. Well played.
While I find KDE's default layout to be extremely well thought out and extremely user friendly, I do find it to be a little meh for my personal tastes. I always find myself placing the bar along the top edge. On top of that, I've grown to love the icon based application selection, which is something that Unity, W7, and OSX have going on. I just think it makes better use of taskbar space. A Chrome icon is enough of an identifier. I don't need to see a Chrome icon with text citing "Chrome - Tech & Computer Forums..." in it, which only takes up more space. Doing this allows me to feel as though I CAN indeed have all of my notification icons in the taskbar without feeling as though I'm cramping the other side where my active applications are. To do this you need to remove the current task manager and then search the widgets for the icon based one. Simple as that.
Another minor thing that I'm a huge fan of is the 1/4 screen snap feature. We've all seen the snap feature in Unity and Windows 7 where you can snap it left/right and it'll take up 1/2 of the screen. That's great and all, but I often have so many apps open that I like to pile more and more into my 2nd monitor. Unity has the CTRL + ALT thing where you can hold CTRL + ALT and press numbers in your number pad (1, 3, 7, 9) which will resize the window accordingly. That's great, but that's not even an option on my work laptop, which would require tricky Fn keys to hit the number pad. By the time I play that twister-esque finger button pressing game I could just manually resize it and be done. But in KDE, I can snap the window based on where on the screen my cursor is. If it's on the upper side of the left half, it'll snap to the upper left corner, etc. Along with that is the screen edges, which are SUPER useful. I'm on a laptop now with a monitor plugged in on the right. As a result, I set the two outer-most screen edges (left of laptop, right of monitor) to display to me "all windows" in a preview sort of layout. This is a feature I've always loved, and it's super handy having this with the ability to customize it to any screen edge/corner. Very nice.
I've always been a fan of systems that are easy to use yet allow me to do so much more. That's why I love Ubuntu, because it's an easy to use operating system that gets down and dirty each time I fire up a terminal. That being said, Kubuntu takes it to another level. I have a super, SUPER feature packed and extremely customizable operating system which allows me to do anything else I could hope for in Linux. I don't want to speak too soon, but KDE 4.10 just might be the final bomb shell which pulls me away permanently. So far, so good, but time will tell.
If you haven't tinkered with it, I certainly recommend it.
Now I would like to say both systems I have Kubuntu 12.04/KDE 4.10 running on have SSDs, but my comments of comparing speed come from existing installs that are on these very systems. I have room on both my laptop and desktop for another partition, which allows me to install an independent vanilla instance of Kubuntu and mount my home directory accordingly. This way I have two operating systems completely independent of one another that share the exact same home partition where my files are. (Damn I love Linux)
I first noticed that KDE 4.10 is fast. Like, no joke. If I click on a PDF in my home dir, it just opens. Period. The second I click it is the second I am also viewing it. I never thought Unity was slow, and quite honestly Unity is pretty damn impressive, but there's no denying that I'm sensing a speed bump here. It could be a semi placebo effect from the single click behavior of KDE, where a single click opens it, but quite honestly I think there's more to it than that.
KDE is ridiculously customizable. No joke, it's almost obnoxious how much you can customize. I do find that they make decent use of their space and system settings menu in an effort to keep things organized despite how extensive the features list is. Changing the full appearance of KDE took me a few tries to understand since the actual theme was in one place, window border in another, and icons in another, but overall they were easy to get to and relatively self explanatory. I found it exceptionally easy to go in and download a new icon theme. No more root overriding to /usr/share/icons or /usr/share/themes. Just hit up the built in menu, download, and bingo. It's selectable. Well played.
While I find KDE's default layout to be extremely well thought out and extremely user friendly, I do find it to be a little meh for my personal tastes. I always find myself placing the bar along the top edge. On top of that, I've grown to love the icon based application selection, which is something that Unity, W7, and OSX have going on. I just think it makes better use of taskbar space. A Chrome icon is enough of an identifier. I don't need to see a Chrome icon with text citing "Chrome - Tech & Computer Forums..." in it, which only takes up more space. Doing this allows me to feel as though I CAN indeed have all of my notification icons in the taskbar without feeling as though I'm cramping the other side where my active applications are. To do this you need to remove the current task manager and then search the widgets for the icon based one. Simple as that.
Another minor thing that I'm a huge fan of is the 1/4 screen snap feature. We've all seen the snap feature in Unity and Windows 7 where you can snap it left/right and it'll take up 1/2 of the screen. That's great and all, but I often have so many apps open that I like to pile more and more into my 2nd monitor. Unity has the CTRL + ALT thing where you can hold CTRL + ALT and press numbers in your number pad (1, 3, 7, 9) which will resize the window accordingly. That's great, but that's not even an option on my work laptop, which would require tricky Fn keys to hit the number pad. By the time I play that twister-esque finger button pressing game I could just manually resize it and be done. But in KDE, I can snap the window based on where on the screen my cursor is. If it's on the upper side of the left half, it'll snap to the upper left corner, etc. Along with that is the screen edges, which are SUPER useful. I'm on a laptop now with a monitor plugged in on the right. As a result, I set the two outer-most screen edges (left of laptop, right of monitor) to display to me "all windows" in a preview sort of layout. This is a feature I've always loved, and it's super handy having this with the ability to customize it to any screen edge/corner. Very nice.
I've always been a fan of systems that are easy to use yet allow me to do so much more. That's why I love Ubuntu, because it's an easy to use operating system that gets down and dirty each time I fire up a terminal. That being said, Kubuntu takes it to another level. I have a super, SUPER feature packed and extremely customizable operating system which allows me to do anything else I could hope for in Linux. I don't want to speak too soon, but KDE 4.10 just might be the final bomb shell which pulls me away permanently. So far, so good, but time will tell.
If you haven't tinkered with it, I certainly recommend it.