KDE 4 Review

My First Impressions Of KDE4

Test System:

AMD 5600+ 64 X2 2.8 Ghz

Running 2.6.22-14-generic 64-Bit Kernel.

ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready motherboard using nForce 630A MCP chipset

Onboard GeForce 7050 videocard outputting to an old 19" Dell CRT monitor @ 1280 x 1024 @ 85 Hz using binary nVidia driver direct from nVidia website.

4G DDR2 800Mhz RAM w/ 256M shared with onboard video

So I went ahead and jumped into testing out the next major release of the K Desktop Environment: Version 4. I was told by a number of people that this would not be the release to base an opinion on in regards to the KDE 4 series, but they did release it out of beta and into the mainstream, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Now, I am a KDE person. I've tried Gnome and used it for a long time. I got really into Linux by way of (of course) Ubuntu and since Gnome was the default desktop for Ubuntu, I stuck with it for months and months. Almost a year, I'd say! But then little by little KDE won me over. It just seems to be a lot more functional, stylish, configurable and (at least for me), crashes a lot less. Of course, that last part is strictly my experience and I can't say that Gnome is a buggy window manager. Regardless, KDE is my friend and I no longer install Gnome on any of my computers, it's always KDE now. So I am pretty used to KDE as an end user and wanted to really see the differences between KDE 3.5.8 (My current version) and KDE4.

The instructions I used to install were very straight forward and required very little in way of user knowledge of the shell. It installs as an option in the session picker in the login screen where you choose your window manager (Gnome, KDE, KDE 4, XFCE, etc). So I logged out of KDE 3.5, chose KDE 4 as my Window Manager for that session and away we go.

The first thing I noticed was the new splash screen. It looks a lot more polished. It is a darker theme and makes heavy use of blacks. KDE 3.5 was very heavy on blue or white on blue or grey on blue. KDE 4 works with blue on black which is a nice change. As we got into the window manager, the background they choice is also nice: A blue swirl pattern (that I immediately changed for one of my own). Loading KDE4 was very fast. I would put it under 2 seconds from hitting enter at login to being shown the useful tip (yes, KDE4 shows Useful Tips (a.k.a Tip Of The Day)). I don't remember if KDE 3.5 did that, though I don't think it did. I could be wrong though. The startup sounds were quite nice too. Very pleasant (though scary since I had my speakers up all the way for some reason).

I closed the tooltip and was left with the desktop, which is where I wanted to be, of course. First I noticed the icons. Each icon sits on a dark background above the background.

When a MouseOver occurs on the icons, the icon brightens and a light background surrounds the dark background and the user has a little icon menu to the left of the icon itself.

The first icon (the wrench) gives you the properties for the file (General, Permission, Preview). The second icon allows you to freely resize and rotate the icon, though the icon will not get any smaller than the original size. The third icon (the 'X') seems to delete the file (and in this case I think I just deleted my SAMBA Manual PDF file). There are no tooltips to tell you what functions these mini-icons serve.

When I get a directory listing for ~/Desktop, I see that the file I thought I just deleted is still sitting there on the desktop, though now I have no idea how to un-hide it.

The desktop also contains an icon hiding in the top right corner that allows you to add widgets to the desktop. Clicking on it brings up a list of 11 widgets that I can add, but many of which are already on the desktop (like the application launcher, new device notifier, System Tray, etc). For now, this does not seem very useful and the "Get New Widgets" button is greyed out. Perhaps it will be enabled later?

The task bar is black in KDE4, which of course goes along with the theme of KDE4. When I right click on the task bar, I am given two options: "Task Manager Settings" and "Remove This Task Manager". When I go to Task Manager Settings, the only option is to show or not show tooltips. Since it is already checked, I just hit OK and we go on. (In KDE 3.5, there are of course a bunch of options one can choose from, most importantly being to configure panel which gives a plethora of options. ) So it looks as though this part of KDE 4 is still incomplete.

The only items appearing on the taskbar to the right are the system clock, the klipper clipboard tool and an application that shows which external devices are connected via USB.

I did have on major issue with the taskbar/panel. Some applications, when I load them, appear almost black on the panel while others have no problem. An example is KLibido, the KDE newsgroup binary downloader. (Of course, as I write this blog, the behavior has changed and the graphic appears normal on the taskbar.) Watch out for this visual bug.

The application launcher has been reworked and now seems to be sectioned.

When we click on the big K, we get 5 sections: "Favorites", "Applications", "Computer", "Recently Used" and "Leave". When we hover over any one of them, the corresponding information pops up above. The section descriptions are self explanatory. But when you go to Applications, you get a top level menu for your basic application types (Internet, Utilities, Graphics, etc) and when you hover or click on those, you get another menu that replaces (not pops up next to) that menu with the applications in that sublevel. To get back to the previous level, there's a small bar to the left of the menu you need to hover or click on. To me, that's somewhat irritating, though some may like it. The other thing that irritates me about this new way of doing things is that when you get to the application level you want, you are not given the applications by their names (for instance, if I want FireFox, I have to go to Internet, and in that level, I see the firefox icon, but it is called "Web Browser". Only when I hover over it do I see FireFox in very small letters underneath that. However, SwiftFox is SwiftFox, not Web Browser. So I guess it only works for some (default) programs.

Desktop effects (compiz) seems to be turned on by default. This actually makes things a bit slower for me and I'm not sure why as it doesn't make things (like moving windows around) any slower on normal KDE with compiz enabled. And this is only with one of three effects turned on (and the effect is "Improved WIndow Management" out of the other two "Shadows" and "Various Animations") When I turn off desktop effects and hit apply, the taskbar disappears. When I turn it back on, the screen goes black and it waits for me to hit the Accept Settings, which I can't since I can't see anything. So now I am stuck without desktop effects. (BUGGY!!!)


Note: I have no problems running desktop effects in KDE 3.5 or Gnome.

The System Settings menu is pretty much the same as in 3.5. Appearance, Desktop, Notifications, Splash Screen, Window Behavior, About Me, Accessibility, Default Apps, Regional & Language, Network Settings, Sharing (Samba), Date/Time, Display, Joystick, Keyboard & Mouse, Sound.

One odd thing is when I go into Display/Power Control. The labelling is a bit misleading. "Settings for display power management". Options are: "Standby After...", "Suspend After...", "Power Off After..." Power Off After? My monitor is from around 1997. Do newer monitors have the ability to be powered off by the computer?? Did I miss something?

Konqueror looks REALLY nice this time around. The contrast is great, it looks streamlined and it renders web pages beautifully. It also seems to be the default file manager for KDE4.

Actually, most KDE4 native applications look really nice.

Overall, KDE4 looks like it could be something really nice. Unfortunately, I think the graphic designers for it are trying a little too hard to emulate other operating systems, which I think is a wrong direction to go. We (the users) want innovation, not imitation. It's looking a lot more streamlined (one of the reasons I like KDE over Gnome anyway). It is not memory intensive. Just booting up into KDE4 with nothing running (just the basic services), this is the memory useage:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3793264    3524452     268812          0     219972    2913972
-/+ buffers/cache:     390508    3402756
Swap:      3028212      29924    2998288

Not bad at all. But so far it has nothing in it that would make me stick with it and not KDE 3.5. It does, unfortunately, integrate itself into my KDE 3.5 menus and vice versa. The same way Gnome does to KDE and vice versa. It'd be nice if it didn't but.. *shrug*

A major bug I found for this release so far aside from what I have already posted is that kdesu does not accept my password. So any time I try to start a KDE program with root privs, it tells me my password is incorrect!! Major bug.

Well, back to KDE 3.5 for me. I will continue upgrading KDE4 from the repositories as new updates come out, but I don't think it will be very useable until at least 4.1 - it feels as though this release was rushed and until it doesn't feel that way, I see no reason to use it other than beta testing.