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My sweet desktop environment – KDE 4.2 RC

About a month ago I installed Gentoo Linux on my MacBook Pro as I’ve become really disappointed with OSX. Being a linux user for a few years it’s hard to get used to such a limited operating system like OSX…Anyway I just want to show you some screenshots of a just released KDE 4.2 RC that is totally amazing…

Main Desktop Activity

This is where I work. I have two “Folder Views” with my Home and Downloads folders. There’s also a trash plasmoid, a big one so I can easily drop files there even when I’m drunk

Multimedia Activity

Here I have “Folder Views” of my Music and Video folders and a filtered Downloads “Folder View” where only multimedia files and folders are displayed. Those 2 icons in the upper-right corner are Amarok and SMPlayer shortcuts. Next to them is a “Now Playing” plasmoid. This is just the beginning of my Multimedia activity, but it’s already quite useful.

Tools Activity

When my Mac is on fire I go here to see the temperatures of the hardware, as well as the CPU load and system messages from the log file. I can also check out my disk usage. Oh, and there are also calendar, dictionary and calculator plasmoids.

File manager – Dolphin

I love this little yet powerful piece of an application. Dolphin is the best file manager I’ve ever used. It’s tiny, has all of the crucial features AND supports remote protocols. It also has “split view” which makes me so happy, that I don’t use Krusader (a twin panel file manager) anymore.

Music player – Amarok2

There are people whining about the new Amarok2. Personally I love it. Simplified playlist view, extended context view (with activity-like zooming!), fantastic collection browser and a decent integration with Last FM. I don’t need anything more.

Document viewer – Okular

Perfect for my needs and it doesn’t start 3 minutes like Adobe Reader.

Image viewer – Gwenview

Gwenview is terrible in KDE 3.x series, but in KDE4 it’s superior! It’s integrated with semantic desktop feature of KDE4 too so you can search and filter by tags and ratings.

Quick Access – KRunner

This is something like QuickSilver in OSX. I use KRunner to open applications or access files, but you can use it for many other tasks like calculations, spell checking, opening web bookmarks etc.

…it’s so good to use KDE again, I feel I can breath again.