Camp KDE 2010 - Marco Martin - Plasma Netbook Shell

Slides are available at http://www.kde.org/kdeslides

Abstract: In the last few years we have seen the emerging popuplarity of Netbook devices. If we look at the various offerings from a software perspective we see some different approaches: some, like the first EeePc, that attempt to reimplent a user interface from scratch, to many of today's offerings that instead attempt to give the most familiar traditional desktop to the users, which means Windows XP.
I'll briefly examine the various offerings, such as Windows XP, ChromeOS and Moblin, and finally examine what we will ship with the KDE SC 4.4 release under the name of KDE Plasma Netbook.
I will explain how the Plasma Netbook shell was born, the usability concerns about it (thanks to usability research done by OpenBossa) and how we managed, due to the modular nature of Plasma, to build something that features a large amount of code reuse (typical of the KDE framework) while providing a significantly different user experience compared to the traditional desktop.
The most significant differences will be highlighted, compared to both the standard KDE Plasma Desktop and other netbook user interfaces, to explain in more detail how the KDE Plasma Netbook's typical workflow is structured.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• campkde
• campkde2010
• kde
• plasma
• netbook