With all the hype around Unity and Gnome 3, KDE fans might be having a lousy time and feel ignored. We are bored with those two anyway ;-). Its time for a change. KDE fans rejoice!! KDE has many very cool and useful widgets which you can add on your KDE desktop or in your taskbar. Lets have a look at the top 5 widgets.
Lancelot
This is a great alternative for the default KDE menu. IMO it should be default menu on KDE since it is much better than the original one. The good thing is that this is in the repository now so you can install it easily. Lancelot can help you to chat with your friends (it is integrated with Kopete) or you can access your email (it is checking your KMail) or you can open recent documents or maybe you can access a particular space on your HDD. Fairly simple to use but still allows some advanced options.
Smooth tasks
I didn’t use it a lot before but now I am starting to become a real fan. What it does is that instead of showing the whole name and icon of a program in the task bar, it shows only an icon. That is a big space saver. When you hover your mouse pointer over it, you will get a small pop up with a window preview and guess what…you can actually close your window from it.
There is a small catch. You need to compile this one but that is really easy – all you need to do is to unpack the package, open file Install and copy/paste text from it. 🙂 When you finish the whole process you will find this widget where the other widgets are residing.
CWP
Customizable Weather Plasmoid – For me, this one is the best of all weather plasmoids. It is not installed by default so you need to do that. It is in the repository so just use KPackageKit or some other program and in a few clicks you will have your widget. You can place it on the desktop or in your task bar where it will look just great. You get a long list of weather service providers. So just pick one you prefer most.
System monitor
Great plasmoid for tracking your system processes. In this widget you’ll get six segments – CPU monitor, HDD status, Hardware info, Network monitor, Memory status and Hardware temperature. This is the default widget and you can add it easily. Good thing about this one is that you can turn off the segment you don’t want to use and to leave just those you like or need.
Quick Access
This is another time saver which I use regularly and I just love it. There is no need to call for Dolphin all the time but instead you can access your files and folders directly from the taskbar. You can find it among your other default widgets.
If you think there are better widgets than these, we would love to know about them. Don’t keep your opinions to yourself.
