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Ars Technica goes hands on with KDE 4.5 official release

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The developers behind the KDE project have officially released version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection. The update brings some improvements to the environment’s stability, performance, and functionality. The KWin window manager and Plasma desktop shell have both gained some particularly significant new features in this release.

The panel notification area in the Plasma shell has been overhauled with the aim of simplifying the manner in which notifications are presented. Notification bubbles for completed actions and ongoing operations are accessible through a single streamlined drop-down menu. It will show a count of the current notification bubbles and will display a busy indicator when there is a long-running operation in progress. You can use the notification area to control and monitor the progress of file operations and other similar activity.

The notification area also got a bit of a visual overhaul, with new monochrome icons that look better in the transparent panel. Although the new consolidated notification system is a nice functional improvement, the look and feel could still use some improvement. In the above screenshot, you can see a redundant progress bar with a slightly different time estimate, inconsistent spacing, and a number of other minor issues.

Read the rest at the source ( Ars Technica)

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