Sunday, July 7, 2013

Netrunner 13.06 Enigma: Best KDE Out of the Box Experience

by Dietrich Schmitz

Netrunner-os released Friday, July 5th, their newest version Linux Distribution, Netrunner 13.06 Enigma.

I am going to tell you straight up, Netrunner Enigma is the best KDE-based (version 4.10.4) Ubuntu derivative I have ever used.

It's really that good.  I am serious as a 'heart attack'.  Maybe because some of the KDE 'brain-trust' also happen to work for Blue Systems who develop Netrunner?

Not maybe.  +Martin Gräßlin, is maintainer of KDE Plasma Compositor and Window Manager and is employed by Blue Systems, coincidentally.

I would also mention Blue Systems is doing coding support for Kubuntu and Mint KDE editions.

Features and Changes

Netrunner Desktop Containment (clean folderview, hidden plus/minus overlays)
- Improved KWin performance, so default enabled fx work on most low end machines
- Kate Minimap scrollbar
- Automatic KWallet Active
- Hot-Corner in lower right
- Simplified System Settings
- Removed Wine (due to less relevance)
- Alsa instead of Pulseaudio for best compatibility and performance (intel hda)
- Firefox with Mozilla App-Store
- Steam Installer-Link
- Mint Software Sources and Hardware Manager
- usual KDE goodies, Homerun 1.0, Tomahawk 0.7, etc.

So, you see, it would stand to reason that the level of 'fit and finish' as well as stability would be of high-quality in this Distro.  And, it is.  I don't know what Martin did (thank you), but KDE is flying on my Netbook with 2GB ram.  That's not what I usually get using KDE.  So, I am giggly using it like I found a diamond in the ruff.

Netrunner-os 13.06 Enigma shown on my Netbook


There are now several Desktop projects based on Qt:

  • KDE
  • Razor-Qt
  • KLyDE (pre-release)
  • LXDE-Qt (pre-release)
  • Unity (cough Mir)

And, one wonders if others will follow suit, like, for example, a port of Xfce to Xfce-Qt maybe?  Maybe so.

It seems that there has been a seismic shift and programmers are scurrying to move away from anything remotely resembling GTk.  Maybe there is good reason.  Regardless, it is all up for debate as to the merits of one GUI framework verses another.  Some swear by the GTk tool set which currently holds the majority share of Linux applications written with it.

But trends are trends.  And Qt programming is definitely on the up-swing.

If you want to experience true KDE 'nirvana' please go straight to the Netrunner website and get your copy of Enigma today.

-- Dietrich


Enhanced by Zemanta

0 comments:

Post a Comment