KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a first look

The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what’s new, I’ve downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far.

KDE’s release notes tout the following (main) features of the 4.6 release:

libplasma now does does something with QML for widgets on devices – why this is the number one feature listed on a PR release about the new release I do not know. It’s hardly sexy;
the reintroduction of activities, which now includes starting and stopping applications as part of an activity. This sounds interesting – more below;
optimization of Kwin. The release notes say that this will LEAD to smoother window management and more stunning desktop effects. So I’m guessing these aren’t in this release;
faceted browsing in dolphin. What I think this means is that you can filter particular files by various categories in a folder view;
git plugin for dolphin – yawn;
introduction of akonadi to the PIM applications.
KWIN Optimisations
This is actually really hard to show, because any screen capture program I use to show the improvements will be jerky and completely defeat the purpose. However, I can say on my desktop running an NVIDIA card, using the 256.53 version – for some reason the 260 series has a few issues on my machine – is smoooooooth. No tearing on wobbly windows. That eternal bug bear, resizing windows is smooth, even if I have the wobble on resize thing going. Basically, on an NVIDIA card, Kwin compositing performance is awesome.

On my intel 945GM desktop things are slightly different. There is definite improvement in most areas. However, wobbly windows are now unusable and even moving windows with the wobble turned off is jerky. I’m not sure if I’m alone on this or not, but hopefully this will be fixed in subsequent beta’s.

Filters in Dolphin

This is actually quite cool. I think this is what the release notes refer to as “faceted” browsing. It allows you to filter progressively on various categories, including filetypes, time periods, size as well as text in the filename, or inside the file. This can be really useful for finding files in large directories or file systems. Particularly when you’re looking for a particular file, but don’t know exactly what it is – you just know that you’ll know it when you see it. I am going to have a further play with this to see what else it can do, but finally we are seeing how nepomuk can be incorporated into KDE apps. I just hope they add this to the file open dialog.

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