Recently with the rise of KDE 4 and especially KDE 4.1 I’ve kinda wanted to try it just to see whats really going on. Now, personally I cannot stand KDE or qt, I’m a Gnome and GTK kinda guy. So where did I start? I went to Google to find OpenSUSE’s newest alpha which I’ve heard to have KDE 4.1. So I downloaded it, burned it, booted it, and was amazed at the art went into OpenSUSE.

There was one problem at first booting up OpenSUSE on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1420n), it detected the wrong screen size, but that was perfectly fine since I’m blind anyway, it detected 800×600, but a quick looking for a config tool found out how to change the resolution, got it to 1280×800 which is more suitable for most everyone else. One other problem, it did not auto detect my internet, but after setting up a eth0 connection it worked.

The rest was a pretty good experience, I found most everything worked right, and was pretty. I liked the Oxygen style, but I changed the default Oxygen colors away from default to darker colors (Obsidian Coast) which suit my eyes better. I also liked the New? Oxygen icon set, or at least they’re new to me, last timed I really used KDE was KDE 3.5. I’d have to admit OpenSUSE did a awesome job on the appearance and stability. One thing that gets under my skin though… WIDGETS! I just cannot use widgets on the desktop, they have no meaning, even though I don’t like them I was playing with them a little bit. I deleted the panel and found out that I can do everything without a panel mostly by adding the usual widgets from the panel to the desktop. It was just useless fun though. One thing that is odd is the desktop/folder widget that displays folders in certain areas with the ability to change the size of these areas pretty easily. This widget has a use to me, I can access folders pretty fast, these folder widgets are more of a preview that launches Dolphin.

Which brings me to Dolphin, now last time I used Dolphin, it was a long time ago, but it looks like Dolphin has came a long way from where it was. I now prefer dolphin over Konqueror, only problem I had was trying to figure out how to enlarge my icons.

Remember though this is only a alpha which does make me a little sad, I kinda wanna install it on my laptop and play with it for a month or so, I’d rather wait until the official release with all of the software repositories in it. Which I’ve heard good things about Yast in the next release, before I didn’t really like it, I heard smart? was faster. I’m not big on OpenSUSE, or KDE, but I’m going to keep an eye out for this release. I’m not expecting much from the package manager though, we’ll have to wait and see. I have to say there is no, zip, zoda, comparison compared to Kubuntu, and OpenSUSE, its not eve there.. A few weeks ago I tried the kubuntu-desktop meta package and the kde4 packages on my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04.1, and it wasn’t that good to say the least. I got compiz going on it, and I have to say, there is a big difference between compiz on Gnome and KDE, I prefer Gnome and compiz of course. If I ever did decide to switch, to KDE on my laptop with OpenSUSE I would definitely use compiz though, I have to have the viewpoint mouse switcher plugin.