KDE 2.2 beta 1 Review

[Warren Togami]

Today I tried KDE 2.2 beta 1 on my Mandrake 8.0.  Please check out this
screen shot.
http://www.mplug.org/archive/2001/kde22beta1.png
In particular look for:
* Anti-Aliased fonts
* New Nautilus-like features in K file manager
* Windows XP taskbar behavior

You can read KDE's official page on the subject at
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-2.2-beta1.html , but here are the
things that I noticed most.
* Performance!  KDE 2.2 *feels* faster and smoother than KDE 2.1.1.
* Konquerer file manager has many added features that brings it at par with
Gnome's Nautilus in the bells-and-whistles department.
* Full support for anti-aliased fonts.  Within the Konquerer web browser,
fonts have a gorgeous... almost MacOS X feeling.  Unlike in Nautilus,
anti-aliasing fonts does not seem to degrade performance.  Things look even
better with true type web fonts from the Font Deuglification HOWTO.
* A controverisal new feature in KDE 2.2 is the Windows XP style taskbar
where each running program is shown in the taskbar, and all open windows of
that program are selectable in a drawer menu that pops up when you click it.
I often right-click and open links in a "New Window", although this may
confuse many Windows users.  This behavior introduced in KDE 2.2 and Windows
XP is actually how things behave in MacOS 9 and X web browsers, so this is
not a new concept.  You can see this on the bottom of the screen shot.
*KDE's khtml engine is very good, but Mozilla's gecko is still seems faster
at rendering pages.  Fortunately you can use Mozilla's gecko rendering
engine within the Konquerer web browser with a simple plugin.

Key Newbie Usability Features
Many features were introduced into KDE that are important to the acceptance
of Unix as a mainstream desktop platform by the average user, although many
seasoned Unix veterans may hate them.  These features are of interest to me
because I am in a position where I am trying to show users that Linux
desktops are usable and intuitive.
* Application Feedback - For years Unix lacked something as simple as an
"hour glass", telling the user that programs are loading or thinking.  The
lack of application feedback of this nature has been a constant annoyance
and barrier for new users, who would idiotically click on the Netscape icon
five times because they don't see any indication that the program is loading
just because they are used to application feedback in all mainstream Windows
and Mac operating systems for nearly 10 years.  Although I am sure this is
configurable, KDE 2.2's application feedback displays a tiny version of the
icon of the program being launched next to the mouse pointer, giving the
user some indication that the program is being loaded.  I see this is a
welcome improvement to the mouse pointer in Windows 2000 with a tiny hour
glass floating next to it, because it tells the user that something is
occuring, and which program is doing that.
* Double click to open stuff.  Previously KDE 2.1.x had NO OPTION to set
double clicking in the environment because KDE developers hated it.
Evidently, enough stupid Windows users nagged, and they added the feature in
a new Windows 9x "style".  Although this would aid in the transition for new
users to become comfortable in a Linux desktop, I personally would not
enable this feature because KDE is just so much enjoyable without it.
Although many of us may hate this feature, the key thing here is flexibility
and choice for those who may like it.

Conclusion
Although I see some major usability, performance and visual improvements,
there seems to be many nasty bugs so I don't recommend people trying this
unless you seriously know what you are doing.  Installation required
figuring out some non-obvious things with RPM with conflicts with already
installed but incompatible packages.  After installation, it seemed to have
killed KDM's ability to login in runlevel 5 due to a typo in their included
scripts.

I have a feeling that after they ironed out all these issues, the final
release of KDE 2.2 will be very sweet.