I got a nice surprise this morning when I woke up — a note in my inbox that Banshee 1.0 alpha is available. Our own Aaron Bockover has a lot to say about the new release over on his blog:

This is the first release that shows off the hard work we’ve done on rewriting the core of Banshee. There were a number of critical flaws in previous releases due primarily to the fact that writing custom data models for the GtkTreeView was not possible until very recently in Gtk#.

We took some much needed time to redesign the database layer of Banshee to be able to deliver powerful model/query/cache level features and provide a framework to build on for years to come.

I decided to ditch the GtkTreeView and it has paid off. On top of this model sits a slick new list view rendered using Cairo. We control 100% of the drawing, so we can take this thing anywhere we want in the future – things you can only dream of with the GtkTreeView. You’ll already notice some nice GUI “bling” when using the view – try reordering columns.

With all of these core architecture changes, what we have now is a truly flexible framework for developing our prized Banshee.

Even though I’ve been a diehard fan of Amarok for some time, I’ve been playing with Banshee on my laptop for some time — and was happy, except that it had a serious glitch in organizing my music. For some reason, the version of Banshee shipped with 10.3 wouldn’t sort tracks in the right order.

I took advantage of the one-click install this morning first thing, and I’m glad to see that little problem has been sorted out nicely. So far, the 1.0 release looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As Aaron points out, 1.0 alpha is not yet at feature parity with previous releases — but they’re working on it.

Speaking of one-click install — all you happy 10.3 users can grab it right away too:

Also note, if you install it with one-click, it will be installed in conjunction with the previous Banshee. It will show up with a different icon under the Multimedia menu in GNOME, or run from the command line as banshee-1.

Big thanks to Aaron and all the rest of the Banshee team!

Just a quick reminder — there’s a KDE team IRC meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, March 12) at 19:00 GMT/UTC.

The meeting happens on Freenode at #opensuse-kde and the following topics are on the agenda for tomorrow:

• openSUSE-KDE Easter egg painting
• talks at LinuxTag and Akademy
• kdepim testing results
• KDE 4 blocker list revisited, topics for 11.0
• potential SoC projects
• old action items

Also, the following standing items:

• We should think about our future work (see KDE/Challenges)
• KDE4 packages and development environment on openSUSE
• Identifying SUSE specific issues vs upstream issues more closely
• Bug reports against KDE component

Barring emergencies (it’s the week before BrainShare… lots going on in Novell-land this week!) I will be there. Hope to “see” you there as well.

In case you missed the news, a new minor release of KDE is out — KDE 4.0.2 was released on Wednesday.

This release includes improvements for Plasma — the panel can be resized and options have been streamlined a bit to make it easier to use, and there have been some improvements to KHTML. A full list of the changes is available on the KDE Web site.

KDE 4 will be part of openSUSE 11, but you don’t need to wait until the openSUSE 11 release to get KDE4 goodness right now, though. As with 4.0 and 4.0.1, we have packages available for one-click install on openSUSE 10.3 and Factory right now, and instructions to install KDE 4.0.2 are available as well.

If you haven’t test driven KDE 4 yet, I strongly recommend taking a look.

Just trolling Planet SUSE and I see that Andreas Schneider has released source code for csync, “a user level file synchronizer to provide roaming home directories for Linux.” This might be something very interesting…

I use several Linux boxen, a laptop and a couple of desktop machines. I’m always interested in better ways to sync my info and data between them.

I’ve been hanging out in #openSUSE-project for a few days now, and the question posed to me most frequently is what desktop are you running? I guess this is usually a straightforward question — pick a desktop you like and stick with it, right?

Right now, I’m using KDE on my main desktop. Let me show you it:

I’ve got a dual-head video card, and two 20″ Dell widescreen monitors — which openSUSE 10.3 had no problem detecting and putting to work. (I like a LOT of screen space…)

But I’m also running GNOME, on my spiffy new work ThinkPad. And I use Xfce on my desktop from time to time, too. Why? A couple of reasons — one, it’s a habit from my days as a freelance writer to run multiple desktops. Being familiar with more software meant being able to pitch and write more articles.

Two, I want to kick the tires, so to speak. When a new release of GNOME, Xfce, or KDE is out, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (Kudos to the openSUSE team for having KDE 4.0 and 4.0.1 packages out fast, fast, fast!)

Also, over the years, I have gotten to know a number of GNOME and KDE developers and contributors, and I want to be able to see what they’ve been working on and give an honest opinion if I’m asked. But, mostly? It’s the fun. I enjoy using KDE and GNOME, but for different reasons.

So, what’s on your desktop, and why?