KDE 4.3 Looking Good
I just installed KDE 4.3 and it's looking good. Some features returned that I was missing. You can now once again display applications by name rather than description in the K-menu. You can now enable a nice kcontrol-like tree-view in the System Settings.
Some things are still missing though... like different wallpapers on different desktops. There are "Activities" which can have different wallpapers, but I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm supposed to be using them. I also lag and/or crash every time I Zoom Out in the cashew, possibly thanks to 3840x1200 screen resolution. I'm going to assume Activities are still a work-in-progress.
I was horrified to open Kopete and see that configuring the contact list window now uses the same completely broken configuration dialog that Amarok 2 uses for their playlist. Oh how I hope someone rethinks this.
There's a new Qt and Plasma theme in KDE 4.3 that looks pretty nice. Overall every release of KDE4 seems to become more stable, more polished, more eye-candy (if you want it).
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I'm running KDE 4.3 RC3 (4.2.98 in the kde-testing overlay) & am able to have different wallpapers on different desktops. Are you sure you didn't just miss the option?
Where do you see the option? I have KDE 4.2.98 RC3 also. I don't see anything there when I right click the desktop, Desktop Settings. I have "Desktop Activity" and a place to name the activity, then a plasma theme dropdown, then some Wallpaper options but these affect all desktops.
When I right click while in a particular monitor and go to Desktop Settings, I'm able to configure the settings (including the wallpaper) for just that monitor.
Also, how are you configuring your multi-monitor setup? Since I'm using a laptop that is often disconnected from my external monitor, I manually run XRandR when I'm at home, rather than using xorg.conf.
Oh, I can set it per physical monitor. What I want is to set it per virtual desktop.
I've always used TwinView for dual monitors. Never had any problems with it.
I am wondering about your experiences with another user interfaces. Have you been using some window manager? Floating, tiled, stacking or dynamic? What was your journey thru desktop enviroments and window managers? What do you think about all that possibilities of choice? Would you make a blogpost about your experiences?
Ah, my bad. I guess that's not supported yet. My guess is that the most obscure features of KDE 3.5 won't be supported in KDE 4 until 4.5 (though I have found 4.3 to be adequate for the most part).
The only thing that really bothers me now is the lack of "completeness" among significant 3rd party applications, such as Amarok and K3b.
@dum8d0g Oh yikes, I've used almost everything at some point. I'll try to make a blog post.
Per-workspace wallpapers are something I always envy in xfce. If you know any way to get them working let me know.
I think what's planned is for activities to be able to be bound to a certain desktop. This way you could set a specific wallpaper to a specific activity and bind that activity to a specific desktop.
What activities are for is grouping (plasma) widgets together. I actually quite like the idea and find it useful. It needs some polish still though. But from what I can tell from the KDE Planet, it seems like polish is slowly being introduced :]
Separate wallpapers (per virtual desktop) ARE supported on KDE 4.3.
Click on the "cashew" and choose "Zoom out" -> in the dialogue that pops up in the corner when zoomed out choose "Configure plasma" -> tick to select "Different activity for each desktop".
Now not only you can have different wallpapers per virtual desktops but also different widgets and, for example, you can configure one desktop to be standard and the other in "Folderview" mode, you can have an ordinary wallpaper on some desktops and "Globe" or "Virus" on others etc.
@knef Cool, thanks. Clicking that option literally crashed X though. Hope they make the GUI for configuring activities a bit less heavyweight at some point.
@knef: Awesome! I've been waiting for that option for months (which may as well be centuries in FOSS time).
just curious brian but why dont you use fvwm anymore?
Many treasons...
The only thing FVWM has that I'd ever want right now is fine-tuning of window placement and focus policies, but KWin gets you pretty close even in that area. KWin is actually extremely powerful and customizable (and it's all via a GUI rather than the FVWM language, which is very arcane).
@Brian: The so called ZUI (Zooming User Interface) is thankfully about to be radically changed or maybe even removed. I don't think that there currently is a consensus about whats going to happen with the "Virtual Desktops vs. Activities" issue but I hope and believe that it is going to be much more intuitive than the current state.
@tanghus That'd be great. I'm running 4.3.2 right now and the "ZUI" is still very painful.
I was anxiously awaiting the new System Tray rework and it hasnt changed an iota from 4.2.
The icons are still way too small for any person with bad eyesight and the system tray widget is as incomplete as it was before.
I thought with DBusSystemTray we'd have more control on teh system tray icons and its seems not.
This was my one big feature need and only the reason why I upgraded ASAP.
My wife asked me if I was kidding about upgrading to a newer version because she says it all looks the same to her.
I do find that 4.3 feels faster.
Thanks for the hint how to have multiple wallpapers. I would have never thought of looking there. (shouldnt this normally be under the wallpaper settings?)
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