The Plasma Netbook shell can be quite fast on a standard netbook, however many are experiencing it going rather slow. Why?

The essence of Plasma revolves around two basic concepts: Plasmoids and Containments. Plasmoids are Applets, small applications that live on the desktop. Containments are applets as well, they act as container for Plasmoids. That's it. Really. On a default desktop, there are two main elements: the Panel and the desktop itself. Both are containments in the Plasma sense.

A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.

Desktop developers are starting to understand that netbooks need different interfaces than workstations -- or even notebooks. A case in point is KDE's Plasma Netbook interface.

KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup.

So, it was pretty a long time since the last time I blogged about the KDE Plasma Netbook project... what's going on on that? you wanna videos?, you'll get videos

A while ago, Giovanni Venturi interviewed Marco Martin for the Italian KDE website (so if you read Italian, please see there for the authentic version). For our Italian-challenged readers, we are pleased to present an English translation below.

A new Plasma-based custom KDE desktop shell is designed to deliver a better user experience on netbooks and other devices with small screens. Ars takes a look at the prototype to see how it compares to the conventional KDE desktop environment.

The latest K Desktop Environment, KDE, features two modes of interacting with the desktop – the classic Desktop interface and the Netbook interface. On recent KDE-based distributions that I have reviewed for this website, the default is the classic Desktop, but switching to the Netbook interface is an easy, few seconds process.