Software Review: The KDE 4.6 Desktop Environment

“Hidden Treasure:

“A lot of the improvements in 4.6 are behind-the-scenes stuff
that the casual user will never really notice. Most important is
the move to upower and udev for back-end support, replacing the
deprecated Hal. After installing KDE 4.6 I was able to uninstall
Hal altogether. Additionally, the move to Akonadi, which will keep
all your PIM information in a nice neat database, is finally coming
to fruition, although the implementation has been delayed because
the 4.6 edition of the KDEPIM suite wasn’t quite ready yet. It’s
supposed to ship with KDE 4.6.1, which will be out later this
month.

“Performance:

“The last couple of KDE 4.x releases have featured performance
enhancements, but 4.6 is by far the most pronounced. It’s much
snappier than KDE 4.5, which was by no means slow. Performance was
a major problem with the early 4.x releases, but I’m happy to
report that KDE is now every bit as peppy as any other
full-featured desktop environment. At least part of this is due to
dramatic improvements in the Kwin effects; finally KDE has
compositing window management that’s worth using! The difference is
immediate and striking.

“The Look:”

Complete
Story