Linux Action Show Has Great KDE 4.8 Review

[dequire]

Also, this LAS has updates and great commentary regarding the Spark Tablet! However my main reason for posting this (In addition to the obvious KDE love shown) is that they do a great job explaining and showing one of the most mis-understood aspects of all KDE-dom: Activities! For the impatient, simple forward to somewhere around the 45:00 mark of the video to get to the KDE goodness. There have been many attempts to explain and provide usage cases for Activities, including from yours truly, but the LAS guys do a super job. For many people who are more visually-oriented, seeing is better than reading, after all.

My opinion is that too many people confuse Activities with virtual desktops, when in reality a unique (task-specific) desktop is simply one part of an Activity. At any rate, enjoy!

KDE 4.8 Review | LAS | s20e07

[Snowhog]

For many people who are more visually-oriented, seeing is better than reading, after all.

I've 'never' gotten my head around the concept of 'activities'. This is is aimed at the 'visually-oriented' folk -- like moi -- I'm thankful for this link.

[SteveRiley]

Is their Chakra distro running 4.8? The wallpaper and the power management (53:12) is from KDE 4.7. Chris quickly switched to OpenSUSE which has the new 4.8 style. Is Chakra holding this feature back?

I loved Bryan's comparison of Activities to GNOME 3's desktop. "KDE empowering me to be grumpy and draconian" is obviously better than "an infintely expanding bucket of places to stick windows"

[dequire]

I loved Bryan's comparison of Activities to GNOME 3's desktop. "KDE empowering me to be grumpy and draconian" is obviously better than "an infintely expanding bucket of places to stick windows"

lol yea I liked that too. I think they did a great job explaining things. For example, I didn't know you could tie power management to Activities. That's pretty damn cool! Their only negative was the fonts and font rendering, which it, as they say, is "crazy customisable" and therefore easy to fix. Chris says he's staying with KDE for now. And Bryan says he runs KDE and Awesome. Did you guys also catch their jabs at Unity and Gnome Shell? All good stuff.

[dequire]

I've 'never' gotten my head around the concept of 'activities'. This is is aimed at the 'visually-oriented' folk -- like moi -- I'm thankful for this link.

Glad it helped you, Snowhog!

[SecretCode]

My opinion is that too many people confuse Activities with virtual desktops, when in reality a unique (task-specific) desktop is simply one part of an Activity.

Count me among those people. I am not aware of any practical advantage of Activities over virtual desktops. Logically and theoretically, they are a better concept, most of all that you can add or delete any activity not just the last one.

They both serve the same general purpose: getting windows out of your way to manage / focus your attention (an extremely important factor when working with a computer).

But every potential advantage is beset with problems.
Documents and apps do not reliably open in the activity they were in before on a reboot. They do, reliably for most apps, start on the same virtual desktop they were on.
It takes two interactions (context menu only) to move a window from one activity to another. You can move a window to another virtual desktop with single actions using a variety of keyboard shortcuts, mouse drags, and the context menu.
You can stop an activity and start it later, but it (the documentation) is not clear what is supposed to happen to open apps.

So ... will this 1h16m video enlighten me? I freely admit I have not watched much of it yet ... and I'm not likely to unless you guys rave about it enough.

[SteveRiley]

So ... will this 1h16m video enlighten me? I freely admit I have not watched much of it yet ... and I'm not likely to unless you guys rave about it enough.

The KDE review commentary begins at 48:30 and concludes at 1:12:48. It's got a lot of "Bob-and-Chuck-in-the-morning!" flavor. They're mostly effusive, singing KDE's praises, and offer only a few minor rants. It's largely commentary with only a few demos -- and most of those were on a Chakra distro that I'm pretty sure was running KDE 4.7.