KDE 4

This month's Linux Journal includes a preview of KDE 4 - the next release of our preferred Window manager for all our Linux desktop machines. It makes depressing reading and I hope some of it is down to the writer but all he seems to really be concerned about is the eye candy, which he spends most of the article discussing.

And it seems there's quite a lot of that. The most disturbing quote was:

One minor concern about the new style [Oxygen, the default style for KDE 4] is how much screen real estate it seems to use. We looked at KDE 4 on a Lenovo Thinkpad at 1400x1050 pixels, which seemed adequate to the task but not over generous. People still using 1024x768 or lower resolutions may struggle with the defaults.

My desktop has two 1600x1200 displays so I've got a lot of real estate there but I'm lying here typing this on a 1280x800 laptop and I've another here with an 800x400 display. I'm sure it will be possible to get things under control by fiddling with settings (as it is now with KDE 3) but for tiro users this is going to be a problem. Surely KDE could be made smart enough to Do The Right Thing by default?

The thing that sounds interesting is a new sound framework called "Phonon" but he was unable to look at it in any depth as it wasn't compatible with his sound card but it sounds like it either replaces or sits on top of ALSA.