Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things

I have recently downloaded and installed Kubuntu 9.10 and it is great! The problem I have always had KDE is that half of the applications are much better than most Windows/Mac/GNOME apps, and half of them are about 90% as good as the other platforms. Well I have used Kubuntu 9.10 for a bit now and I must say it is giving me very little to complain about. Network has a little ways to go yet. New installer bling is great! Some great new improvements to gwenview. You will also notice that unlike in my 9.04 review I didn’t have to turn compositing off to get screenshots. (Most) compositing effects now show up in screenshots! Congrats to Pinheiro for his work on icons and theming. K3B looks great now that it is integrated into KDE4 as well as the newest air desktop theme. Kopete can now integrate with Skype. Awesome

I was disappointed that they decided not to include the Arora in this version, as I think it shows a lot of promise. There is now a Firefox installer included in the menu structure. I also installed Chromium from a launchpad PPA and even though Firefox and Chromium are GTK apps they finally(Firefox especially) are more integrated with the desktop. In previous releases Firefox wouldn’t know what to open files with unless you had GTK apps installed.

Great job KDE and Kubuntu Teams!

So I have upgraded my Kubuntu 9.04 box to the KDE 4.3 Beta and RCs and am really impressed with the progress that they are making.

Add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main to your /etc/apt/sources.list or even within KPackageKit and do an sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

They have made some awesome improvements to the System Settings control panel. They have made some awesome improvements to the information area of the kicker and changes the Wifi plasmoid that I don’t totally understand. The system tray is now collapsible. There is a new feature that allows you to peek into folders and displays some of the contents of the folder on the icon. There are now a lot of options for your desktop including using marble to display the moon as your desktop and stuff like that. I am glad to see that there is a constant improvement of KDE.