Just installed 2009.1 Alpha

Story: Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Alpha 1 releasedTotal Replies: 4
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tracyanne

Dec 27, 2008
3:47 AM EDT
Running it with KDE4.2. Posting from it in fact.

Still not impressed with KDE 4, it's a lot better than previous releases, but the additional functionality isn't the really useful stuff, it's mostly eye candy. You can now have icons on the desktop, for those that use desktop icons, although the waste bin still has the silly fly out panel when you mouse over it.

1) There still appears to be no way to add icons to the quick launch bar, for example. If there is some way, it's neither obvious nor simple, I certainly can't find it. This was one of the reasons why those I showed KDE 4 to rejected it.

2) Dolphin is still crippled, it is still missing functionality that is built in to KDE3.x

3) the thing in the top RH corner that is supposed to make creating custom desktops, doesn't really provide any useful functionality. All desktops are either one or the other, which is rather pointless. When it's possible to create each desktop, 9 in my case, such that it provides different sets of functionality, then it might be useful.

That's just some stuff I've found while testing Mandriva 2009.1 Alpha. Other than that it's a good solid Alpha that one expects from Mandriva. If the functionality isn't there, I'll more than likely upgrade anyone who's interested to 2009.1 with KDE3.5.10, I've got the process pretty sorted, you install GNOME, then you install task-kde3, along with all the media and printer packages, that way you don't get all the Dolphin stuff overriding the Konqueror functionality.
jezuch

Dec 27, 2008
7:17 AM EDT
Quoting:There still appears to be no way to add icons to the quick launch bar


I think I did it (in KDE 4.1), but it was on my work laptop and I don't remember how at the moment ;) But on the other hand I didn't find a way to *rearrange* icons there and it was very annoying.
tracyanne

Dec 27, 2008
8:15 AM EDT
Which just goes to show KDE 4 is not in the least intuitive.
hkwint

Dec 27, 2008
3:23 PM EDT
KDE4 is more than the GUI. But it's just as when Microsoft introduced .NET: You have to wait before developers learned how it works and start using its features; and just as users rather continued using VB6, there will be KDE developers and users who rather use KDE3.

I remember being rather impressed when introduced to all new KDE4 frameworks - of which nothing is even mentioned by TA by the way. I don't use KDE myself, so my guess is the new frameworks are not used that much at this time; which is a bit sad to hear about a year after the release of KDE4.

(Of course there are lots of differences between KDE and Microsoft, it's only to show things take time).
tracyanne

Dec 27, 2008
6:13 PM EDT
@hk, tell us about these frameworks, please. All I know about KDE 4, is that I can't do the things I want to do, as the GUI tools to do so seem to be either crippled (there by making it impossible) or the process for doing so, so convoluted as to be barely usable.

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