KDE Version 4.6.0 Released - Integrates Support For Mobile Devices

KDE team has released version 4.6.0 of its flagship product - The KDE Desktop. This is a major release that  brings lots of improvements, and  which promises a far better user experience.

The notable enhancements you will find in KDE 4.6.0 are as follows -

A new Activities system has been introduced in the KDE Plasma Workspaces. This helps you to demarcate your activities on computer into different categories like Work, Home, Recreation, Web browsing, etc.Dolphin file manager gets Faceted Browsing - This allows Dolphin to give you better search results by reading the meta data of files.KDE games have been spruced up. Gwenview (The image viewer) and KSnapshot (The screen capture tool) have received Social Networking capabilities. This means you will be able to share your snapshots and pictures to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook etc from within these tools.KDE in 4.6.0 gains "Mobile build target" which allows for easier deployment of applications on mobile platforms.
As of now experimental builds of KDE applications for various mobile platforms like MeeGo, MS Windows Mobile and Symbian can be found on the web but are currently unsupported.
With the mobile build target capabilities gained by KDE applications, this is bound to change for the better.

You can read the official announcement from KDE for the full details.

And if you are itching to try out KDE 4.6.0, I would strongly recommend a Linux distribution which has a rolling release because these Linux distributions bring changes far more quicker than traditional Linux distributions which follow a 6 month release schedule.Arch Linux, and PCLinuxOS support a rolling release.

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GNOME 3.0 Has Been Officially Released

GNOME 3.0 has been officially released. Ushering in a radical desktop experience, GNOME 3.0 is all about usability, and it promises a distraction free computing experience for end users.

GNOME 3.0 desktop is designed in such a way that it can run on a variety of modern computing devices including PCs, tablets, cell phones, and what not. The defining technology for GNOME 3.0 user experience is the GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces a unique user interface that makes computing simple for the lay person.

For example, try moving your mouse pointer to the top left corner of your screen and GNOME Shell puts you into the Activities Overview. The Activities Overview helps you open new applications and also switch between open windows.

In fact, you can easily open any application or manage open app windows from within GNOME 3.0 with no more than two clicks of your mouse. In many cases, a single click of your mouse would suffice.

GNOME 3.0 desktop has an integrated search facility some what similar in functionality to Gnome Do that allows you to launch applications, switch windows, and open recent documents and settings. Why, you can even search Wikipedia and Google from within GNOME 3.0 Activities view.

Here are a couple of GNOME 3.0 screenshots -

Integrated Calendar & Task Scheduler

Accessibility settings at your finger tips

The features mentioned above merely scratch the surface of what GNOME 3.0 has to offer. For the full set of features read the GNOME 3.0 release notes.

After trying out a GNOME 3 Live CD, I feel the GNOME team has indeed struck gold. The three years' of planning and development culminating in the GNOME 3 release lives up to its promises of providing a distraction free, productive computing experience to the end user.

You can download Live CDs of GNOME 3 from its website. OpenSUSE and Fedora images have been provided.

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