Thread: The all-new KDE 4.1.2

Let's talk about KDE4 first! Although we've already seen what KDE 4.1 looks like a couple of months back, that distro was a community effort. Mandriva claims their's is the best implementation of KDE4 so far by any distro vendor.
Is it? Well, that's also because Mandriva is the first major distribution to officially support KDE 4.1 out-of-the-box. Yes, this is the default desktop (not GNOME), and KDE3 is not even available in the DVD any more, but in their contrib repository online for anyone who wants to settle with that instead. So, is the wait finally over? Is KDE4 usable enough to switch over to

Mandriva has incorporated its home-grown 'laOra-Qt' style (instead of Oxygen) and the 'Aya' desktop theme. The overall colour settings give you a nice shade of subtle bluish white that is very pleasing to the eye. However, I've got to admit the laOra-Qt style still has some rough edges-I mean, literally, the edges of buttons especially are a bit rough. Or maybe I'm just a big fan of the overall Oxygen style and theme combined, and hence a bit biased. So after changing the style from the System Settings program (a redesigned version of what was known as KControl in KDE3) and also the desktop theme by right eliek--*Desktop Settings to Oxygen, I was happy.

The desktop, by default, has the the Desktop Folder View in the centre of the screen, and the Trash applet on the top left corner, where you'd usually expect Home ). The Mandriva team has put a custom menu called Mandriva Launcher (instead of the Kickoff menu or even the traditional KDE menu) like they always do, and switching to Kickoff is a matter of right clicking and selecting Switch to Kickoff Menu Style. The panel has a bunch of icons, which includes the New Device Notifier applet, Show Desktop, System Settings, Mandriva Control Centre, and Firefox. Talking about Firefox, strangely, it has 'Ask' as the default search engine in the search bar, instead of Google. Although, once you switch over to Google, and do a search using it, it'll stay the same. But I still wonder what made them switch to Ask.

The default set of applications cover all areas a typical desktop user would need. I'm sure all of you will first want to check out 000 3 to begin with. This application's UI
has been improved in places, including the addition of the zoom slider in the lower right corner. This is a handy tool as you can have a look at your whole document at one go Of course, there's much more inside. Go ahead and take a look! One silly complaint: 000 still uses a KDE3 theme, and I would have preferred an Oxygen theme this time.

Like I said earlier, the art team does have an eye for good design and the best example is the default screensaver. It's a slideshow of some of the most beautiful scenery pictures from around the world. I encountered a nice bug here: when the screensaver locks your screen after a while, and you've to enter a password to unlock it again-if you enter a wrong password, it reports some gibberish error message instead of saying 'wrong password'. The first time I encountered it, I got a bit puzzled and thought I'd done something terribly wrong as it asked to me check log files, and what not! You'll encounter this error even on the KDM screen if you enter a wrong password.

The default video player is Dragon, which is quite OK for most purposes, but I'd recommend SMPlayer to any movie buff. SMPlayer being a Qt4-based application, jells well with the overall KDE4 desktop look and feel, besides using the Mplayer backend, which makes it a much snappier alternative compared to the Mplayer UI or Xine.

The default audio player is a beta version of Amarok2. While this version is almost stable, I couldn't get certain features like Last.fm recommendations to work. It has a lot of cool UI features, but compared to v1.4.x, it still has miles to go. Overall, KDE4 is a nice experience, and you can surely use it as a KDE3 replacement, now that the KDE PIM suite is also back. In fact, considering KDE4 now even has the spinning cube 3D effect, do you really need Compiz for 3D.

That said, I must admit, the shortcut to activate 3D is not a simple Ctrl+Alt+LeftlRight arrow keys-this works, but first you should hit Ctrl+Fll. I'd like to see the shortcut keys synced with that of Compiz Fusion-just makes the life of users easier. Note that, :JD and other KDE4 effects are not active by default; activate them from System Settings~Desktop-Desktop Effects.