KDE 4.7.0 Released 212
jrepin writes "KDE 4.7 releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance. Lots of visual polishing took place with an update to the Oxygen icons, and improved consistency between panel items such as clock and notification areas. The window manager KWin brings a new shadow system and can now run on OpenGL ES supporting hardware, making it better suited for mobile devices. Network management widget is much improved. Navigating through applications and recent files is easier with the addition of breadcrumbs to the Kickoff application launcher. Kontact groupware solution rejoins the rest of the KDE software, with increased stability, better connection to new services and sharing of communication information between more applications. Dolphin file manager has a cleaner default appearance. The menu bar is hidden, but easy to reach and restore. The file searching interface has been improved. Marble the virtual globe now has voice navigation support and a map creation wizard. Gwenview image viewer now offers the ability to compare two or more pictures side by side. Digikam photo management app brings face detection and recognition."
Re:Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Each major release is taking longer (Score:4, Interesting)
But thankfully, the KDE devs are not wedded to the 90s, and those of us who want a modern desktop still get one. Isn't free software wonderful?
Also, you say you tried a few releases. my guess is you haven't tries in a year. Which is an enormous amount of dev time. So you maybe should keep trying :)
KDE4.x is getting pretty good now. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's just a shame it took so long for it to evolve into a usable and stable desktop. After losing hope due to months of buggy, incomplete and lame releases that prevented me from using my computer in the same way(s) I could with 3.5.x, I actually switched to Windows 7 some 8/9 months ago.
I installed Kubuntu 11.04 yesterday, with KDE 4.6.2. I've not yet tried 4.7, but KDE4 is extremely good now. I just hope the devs begin to recognise that having revision numbers two-thirds of the way to the next major release is far from being an acceptable situation, and this has tarnished the reputation of KDE for quite some time to come.
Re:Personal review. (Score:5, Interesting)
> my biggest complaint is that they took away the desktop icons.
Which is why you can switch to folder view.
> it's graphics accelerated but not snappy.
It's vector graphics. Until you have built a cache of the sizes custom-rendered for your system, it takes a bit. For how long did you try KDE?
> it's really annoying to have to open eight different configuration windows
Specific examples?
I have my own problems with KDE and I am definitely not one who migrated to 4.x lightly, but your issues seem to stem from being used to Gnome and simply accepting that you can't change any settings, anyway (no, their "registry" abomination does not count).