I am a new Debian/KDE user coming over from Win 7 of course. I loved the look and feel of the taskbar in Win 7. Is it possible to completely recreate this experience in KDE? I have seen widgets and so forth that some what resemble the look, but most are rather out dated. I was hopping some one can point me to some resources to recreate the Win 7 taskbar in KDE using currently active or atleast updated enough to function in KDE 4.X.

what's a Win7 taskbar look like ? remember most people here don't do Windows

what's it do and/look look like that the default or smooth or fancy or icon-only taskbars don't do?

Stock KDE taskbar operates almost exactly like the windows taskbar of Win XP in that applications are shown as long rectangular piece of text when an application is open. For example, if you open Konsole in KDE it shows up as "konsole-icon xplorer4x4 : bash" but this was Win7, it would simply show the icon for konsole in the taskbar. If the kinoole icon was pinned, it would stay there when closed. If it is pinned, it would stay there ready to be launched with a click. Here is a visual reference: http://imgur.com/MSEiQ

Now the taskbar integration goes a bit further but the icon based launched is my main priority. In Win 7 all explorer windows are linked to the folder icon next to Internet Explorer. You can also drag and drop folders from a windows explorer window and drop it on the folder icon in the taskbar pinning it to the folder icon. When something is pinned to the folder icon, you can right click and see a list of all pined folders. The pinning also applies to applications such as notepad. Notepad can be pinned to the taskbar, then txt documents can be drag and dropped to the notepad icon pinning them to notepad for quick access. Here is an example of the pinning I speak of: http://www.windowstalk.org/wp-content/u ... skbar1.png

My main goal is the icon based launcher mentioned in the first paragraph. However, the more functionality it retains from the Win7 task bar, the better. I hope that better explains it.

look at smooth, fancy and icon-only taskbars
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Fa ... tent=99737
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Sm ... ent=148813
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=144808

ps - pinning (for apps) is probably the "show a launcher when not running" option, not sure all have it as I use the default which does and no idea about pinning of folders and docs

pss - icon-only should be included in KDE by default, at least in the current version of KDE, the others might be available in a repo or will need to be compiled

Note that Icon-only taskbar was included in 4.8, Debian tends to have older versions in their stable repo. Screenshot: http://kde.org/announcements/4.8/screenshots/tasks.png

Thanks for the info guys. I am using KDE-Full from Debian Stable(yes I know it is old but it's stable) which claims to be v5.66 so I am a bit confused on just what versions thas is. Digging around on the download page, I see no repos for 4.8 binaries for debian, so I assume I am going to have to result to building from source? Also, is it possible to upgrade with out changing my xorg version? When I use the version from testing, it causes system crashes.

KDE version is displayed by clicking in any KDE app: help -> about KDE

if v5.66 is the Debian version you might be running kde 3? in which case the aforementioned task managers will not be available. In 6.0 there is kde 4.4 (as best as I can tell)

I'm not sure compiling from source is trivial so you might want to think hard about it before attempting it

Xplorer4x4 wrote:Thanks for the info guys. I am using KDE-Full from Debian Stable(yes I know it is old but it's stable) which claims to be v5.66 so I am a bit confused on just what versions thas is. Digging around on the download page, I see no repos for 4.8 binaries for debian, so I assume I am going to have to result to building from source? Also, is it possible to upgrade with out changing my xorg version? When I use the version from testing, it causes system crashes.

There is qt-kde.debian.net, but their repositories are experimental, not even unstable.

@google01103 Looks like kde-full 5.66 in Debian translate to KDE 4.4.5.

As for compiling from source, it never is Well not for me usually. When I tried compiling Smooth Tasks 2 and Icon Tasks, both gave me cmake related errors. Actually the first error was because cmake was not installed(thought this was part of Debian Base system Packages but guess not). Still, it can;t hurt to try to compile it but like I said, I was hopping some one was hosting a repo for deb binaries and I just happen to miss it. Guess I will have to sort through the debian repos to see if 4.8 is in there, but I think 4.4.8 may be the newest, or try to find a tutorial for compiling from source. Either way wish me luck

@SeaJey, thanks for the tip, but I think it may be better for me to stick with Stable or testing. However I may run a back up and give it a go anyways. Can;t hurt to test as I long as I can revert right?

when we talk compiling are we talking compiling KDE or compiling apps and plasmoids because apps and plasmoids are pretty easy it's KDE 4.8.x that I think is hard

does Debian have a package group for compiling programs?

have you thought of running something a bit more current that is stable and derived from Debian? Kubuntu and Mint come to mind

Sending this from my phone so going to be brief. Compiling kde as a whole.

package group? not sure.

kubuntu and mint, starting to consider kubuntu as I find so many ppa repos worth using but shy away as these can screw up debian very quickly.

Xplorer4x4 wrote:<snip>kubuntu and mint, starting to consider kubuntu as I find so many ppa repos worth using but shy away as these can screw up debian very quickly.

meant as a replacement for Debian not as a source of repos to what you have installed

I thought that would have been clear enough, sorry of i planed a replacment. Hoepfully kubuntu wont end up screwing up the kernel or something in the boot process every few days.

My two bits I don't know much re Debian, but I'm a long term Kubuntu user and I would recommend it for the KDE 4.8 experience, though probably steer clear of kontact/kmail for a while - not really casual user ready yet. Apart from that, the latest Kubuntu (12.04) is very easy and well supported.

Building KDE - don't do it. Very long and complicated process which will never work as well as the expert packager results.

Icon-Only Task manager Bar is the default in Kubutn 12.04 and can be configured to work very similar to the Win7 one, better IMHO. Right click applications in the task bar to "Show a launcher when not running", same as "Pinning" to the task bar. There's a bunch of other options that make for hours of fun tweaking

Enjoy.