KDE4 rules… better said will do one day

I’m brave man sometimes. You know, no coward nor chicken. So you know why I replace KDE4:STABLE with KDE4:UNSTABLE on my desktop machine. And voila — cool KDE4 has been ready after lunch (beans and sausages, realy healthy meal for hardcore workers). There is only one thing to say: “it’s much more better than its 4.0 sibling. Yep, it can be used now. Beer for all developers.” (OK, it’s three things to say to be exact).

Of course you have to set some things to polish it after “vanilla” installation. First – to switch off text under icons because it’s stupid. Second – switch off rubber windows to prevent beans (menioned above) jump out of stomach. And third – set plasma theme for something non-blackish.

I can say I have observed only one popular Plasma crash. It was when I’ve leaved my home desktop unlocked for doggie. He loves to play with mouse. He clicked with it like an wild masturbating monkey.

Finally – I’ve found The First Cool Usage For Plasmoids (TM). There is “Folder View” plasmoid as you can see on screenshot. With combination with The Dashboard (Ctrl+12) it really rules.

Of course there are some issues I’d like to see solved and/or polished:

• Icons in systray. Icons aren’t sorted in columns. It’s using only one column for it. (latest build fixes it).And these icons are using ugly color fragments in background. There is a bugreport for it somewhere.
• Task Panel. I like it vertical. And I’m talking about panels now! There is no minimal and maximal height of items in task panel. It’s ugly when tehre are only few apps opened and it’s unisable when there are lots of them. The bug is reported too.
• Plasmoids code – I said myself: “you know Qt well, so why won’t you fix it youtself?” So… I’m so sexy for paintEvents obsession. Sorry guys.
• Non functional webcamera. It’s working in KDE3. But when I run only one KDE4 app, it lost its abiliy to capture video. Dunno why.
• No MDI window decoration in Oxygen theme. Fixed in latest build.
• No kaffeine. OK, dragon player is cool but…You know… But Kaffeine is Kaffeine. They say they’re working on it. Can you do it faster, guys?
• No kdesvn. Ol’ good KDE3 lives still.
• I cannot force Kate to indent C++ code as it does in KDE3 version. And now I’m talking about auto curly-braces after e.g. if etc.
• Amarok2. Well, it’s under developmen. Fine. It’s still playing music. Very well. But it’s growing into something Community2.0beta, if you can understand my feelings. I’d like to listen music grind core and more deadly sounds but playlist is hidden somewhere in the corner. So I asked for New Music Player Tender 2008. Some good people pointed me for Qmmp and JuK. And the winner is JuK – tadada! OK, it has horrible (read: I dont understand it) controlling, but it takes only bits of CPU (2%, Amarok 5%, Qmmp 10%). And it counts when there are running Oracle and Postgresql databases and some code compilations.

But you rocks, people of KDE. I did not believe KDE4 will be working one day. But the success is near.

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