KDE 4.0 is a radical break from the KDE roots, with bold new design choices, beautiful icons, and a pretty look. I had taken a look at the 4.0 release via Virtual Box and decided to hold off from installing it on my machine. It was a “dog food” only sort of release in my opinion. Too rough around the edges for a general user, but good for developers to get a handle on testing their applications and begin to design new features for what would eventually be a more usable product.
I saw that KDE 4.1 had been released recently and figured that it was probably more suitable for “General Consumption”. Since trying out new desktop environments is relatively trivial in Linux, I decided to give it a try.
The first different between Gnome, my normal day to day window manager, and KDE, are the icons. Immediately after the launch, the bright, big, clear SVG style icons made the navigation pretty straightforward. The new KDE application menu button (The Window equivalent of the “Start” button) is not something I enjoyed using. Actually, it’s nothing short of atrocious. Luckily it was easy to swap it for a more traditional menu layout widget that worked like it’s Gnome counterpart.
The thing I really wanted to try out were the KDE “Widgets”. These were little applications that perform specialized functions, like checking email, displaying system resource usage, or letting you navigate folders on the desktop without opening a “window”. The problem with the widget system is that it isn’t actually fully functional. Opening up the menu and installing the widget doesn’t get it working. It doesn’t come with a lot of choices, and the choices there don’t work. Ouch.
The next thing I moved to was Konqueror, which is KDE’s browser. It is like classic Internet Explorer, in that it can also act as a file browser. You can use the optional separate file browser “Dolphin” if you so choose, but I found myself underwhelmed by the contextual menus. For example, clicking on an archived file would bring up Ark, the file extraction tool. There was no shortcut for “Extract here” like there is for Gnome. For all the simplicity they seem to be striving for, that sort of menu would have been a good edition. Instead, I found myself looking for options I assumed would exist, but didn’t know how to enable right away.
For instance, the default Konqueror browser uses tab browsing like any modern browser should. However, there is no “middle click closes tab”, and there was no option to close the tab other than the “close tab button” located near the scroll bar on the right hand side of the tab menu. I had to dig in a menu to bring up the proper “middle click closes tab” setting enabled by default on Firefox. The browser is decent, but not good enough to get me to switch.
In features, both Opera and Firefox have it beat. It lacks mouse gestures. It does render pages fairly well (even faking it’s user agent to report Firefox when need be), and has an Adblock feature. The Konqueror Adblock that is easier to set up than Opera’s, and is built in by default, unlike Firefox. That being said, it doesn’t have the massive number of Firefox plugins, or even Opera’s widgets, to make it the perfect browser. At best, it’s going to be a second or third choice for me if I had to settle.
Firefox runs on KDE, but looks absolutely butt ugly. You can enable Gnome applications to be rendered by a special KDE engine to try to prettify them, but the tabs in Firefox look terrible. Other menus also look grainy and render incorrectly if they aren’t cached. This might be due to running an proprietary NVIDIA driver. Something about NVIDIA and KDE don’t play well together.
There are a few cool applications with KDE 4.1. The theme is pretty, and there is a lot of promise with the widgets, once they actually work. I’m looking forward to when this gains some steam and gets polished. Right now, it looks so good, but has a lot of little problems holding it back. It’s more usable than KDE 3.5 ever was for me. KDE 3.5 was a mess of menus and options. I think they are moving in the right direction with KDE 4.1, but need more time to make it a smoother transition.
For me, Gnome gets the job done. It might not be pretty like KDE, but the applications work and are stable. The nagging bugs that KDE has at the moment are holding me back from switching full time, but I’m a lot closer to using KDE that I was before I had tried it out. It’s winning me over, but has a while to go before I’ll use it for every session. The only problem is that I know I will eventually go back to Gnome, but KDE is so pretty and new that I want to stick around for it to get better. Maybe when 4.2 or 4.3 hits I’ll switch.
EDIT: It seems that Konqueror also didn’t submit the post correctly when I time delayed it, so it was posted at the same time as Saturday’s entry. Since this post was finished, KDE did a major WTF? crash, and I’ve switched back to Gnome full time. It’s STILL not ready for full time use unless you ignore all the bugs. Sorry KDE, I’ll try you again some other time.
RE:EDIT: Seems the “WTF” edit was my video card dying. I’m not sure if KDE is still ready for daily use, but I wanted to clarify that.
