KDE 4.5 beta brings window tiling, new notifications

“The developers behind the KDE desktop environment have released
the first beta of version 4.5. Although the major focus during this
development cycle is stability, the release also brings some nice
new features and user interface improvements.

“One of the additions that I’m particularly enthusiastic about
is support for tiled window management in KDE’s KWin window
manager. This feature allows users to snap windows together in
non-overlapping arrangements and resize them together, much like
the behavior of Ion and other tiled desktop environments. The
feature was implemented as a Summer of Code project last year and
was finally merged last month. I’ve long been a fan of tiled window
management, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing this feature
land ever since work on it was started.

“KDE 4.5 is getting a new panel notification area that is
designed to be more consistent and functional. This feature is
based on a D-Bus protocol that the KDE development community has
submitted to the FreeDesktop.org organization with the aim of
making it a cross-desktop standard. Although the upstream GNOME
community has rejected the protocol, it has been adopted by
Canonical and is used to power the new application indicator
feature that is included in Ubuntu 10.04.”

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