Kubuntu KDE4 Remix: An Ubuntu User’s View

This weekend as classes have started to wind down I had a bit of time to mess with my laptop for some general geek fun. Playing with KDE 4 is something I’ve wanted to do the past few months but avoided for fear of breaking things when I had too much going on to spend a full day getting them working again. Encouraged by a brief trial of the Kubuntu KDE4 Remix LiveCD I decided to give it a try.

To give a bit of background: I’ve been an Ubuntu user for over 3 years and had only given Kubuntu a try once, on a live CD back at 6.06. The most exposure to KDE that I’d really had was back when I ran Fedora for a few months as my secondary OS while I was still primarily using Windows.

If you want to follow along and are already on Ubuntu, it helps that Kubuntu is an official Ubuntu project and not a fork or derivative, installing it couldn’t be easier.

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

Walk away for a while while it installs, come back, logout, and select KDE4 at the login screen.

Appearance

KDE4 is certainly attractive, to me it has always felt that KDE valued visual polish while for the most part Gnome has treated it as secondary. The new Oxygen theme and Plasma widgets are visually appealing although Plasma is certainly not without its problems. Taking a closer look at the above screenshot shows that the clock is cut off, some of the systray icons are not properly redrawn, and the main KDE menu is drawn a bit off as well. Changing the size of the systray fixes these problems, but I can’t stand a huge tray. (I also prefer my tray at the top which caused even more problems)

KDE4 has built in compositing which (as expected) ran fine on my laptop’s nVidia 8600. It stacks up fine compared to Compiz Fusion, while it doesn’t have the wild selection of plugins, it has essentially everything I used on Compiz, and the few people I showed my desktop to this weekend were suitably impressed by “that Linux thing”.

Similarly to Gnome, the various built in themes range from the hideous to the sleek. Why someone would want their desktop to look like the antique CDE or Windows 95 is a mystery, but it seems like KDE and Gnome always feel obligated to include these themes. Of course, the Oxygen theme is very polished, and coming from Gnome the saved color schemes were a nice twist. Color schemes offer the ability to easily customize a theme, and several of the included schemes looked fairly nice, and it appears easy to make your own or get more from KDE-Look.org

Plasma doesn’t seem quite ready, I had a few instances where desktop icons would duplicate. Widgets didn’t seem to be entirely persistent, and as noted, the panel contained numerous display glitches. Reading up on plasma it appears to be a massive overhaul, they are attempting to really reshape the desktop metaphor, and so these kinks can in some ways be expected of a .0 release.

The only real problem besides the plasma glitches, was that when running non-native apps like Firefox they looked terrible. A quick search turned up the gtk-qt-engine-kde4 package that provided an added configuration section that allowed for tuning the appearance of GTK apps, which solved the problem.

Performance-wise it was difficult to notice much of a difference, this is a fairly new laptop. KDE4 did seem to come up faster from the login screen than Gnome typically does, but this may have just been an illusory perception caused by the fact that KDE gives more of an indication of what it’s doing as it starts than Gnome does.

Core Functionality

Gnome is known for hiding its configuration and even removing options, this was a major issue that Linus had criticized the Gnome developers for. It is sometimes frustrating in Gnome to not be able to change a certain setting, and I figured that it would be nice not to run into these problems in KDE.

The KDE configuration app is very impressive coming from Gnome. All of the settings exist in one place and are extremely comprehensive. The settings manager even contains a lot of the application specific settings. It’s like a user-friendly version of gconf-editor. One minor point would be that the distinction between the two tabs, General and Advanced, seems somewhat arbitrary given the placement of some settings.

Another thing I noticed was that the KDE window manager KWin has some nice options that just aren’t present in Gnome. (and a few that are but that I never knew about because they aren’t configurable so I’d never seen them) Right/middle clicking the maximize button for instance maximizes horizontally/vertically, which it turns out is default behavior in Compiz (but not Metacity, Gnome’s default WM). KWin’s multiple desktop support was nice, and featured easily accessible options from the window menu to peg a window to a particular desktop, control the window’s opacity, and a lot more. A lot of these options are available via Gnome+Compiz but take going into the Compiz settings manager and setting manually instead of clicking on the window menu and selecting. This was a nice touch that made some of the more useful features of a modern WM like KWin/Compiz accessible instead of hidden away.

Another nice feature is the new KDE menu. From what I’ve seen of the Vista Start Menu it resembles it, although I’m not qualified to comment on how it truly compares to Vista’s. I appreciated the ability to search instead of navigating the menu (on Gnome I rarely use the menu, opting instead to use Gnome Do) Saving favorite applications and having large buttons for the sub-menus is another nice touch that I think could make the fairly stale Gnome menu more usable.

In KDE pressing Alt-F2 brings up miniterm, which is much nicer than Gnome’s Alt-F2 run dialog. Miniterm allows the execution of command line one liners as well as typical launch behavior. On the other hand however, the system monitor equivalent lacked much of the information that Gnome’s provides and seemed like a weak spot in the otherwise shiny KDE4. The recent improvements to Gnome’s system monitor have made this gap even wider. (update: commenter Tsiolkovsky points out that I was seeing the stripped down version of the task manager and that KDE does in fact have a very nice task manager that can be brought up separately, he is absolutely correct)

KDE has recently adopted a new file manager named Dolphin. Dolphin is quite new and aims to be simpler than the previous KDE file manager, but I felt still outperformed Nautilus in most ways. Dolphin supports OSX-style column browsing, as well as features like split-pane browsing. I did miss the ease of remote browsing that nautilus provides as well as certain features I have gotten used to like Ctrl-S to select a pattern in a folder.

KDE4 Applications

A desktop environment is in many ways defined by its applications. Although it is possible to run KDE apps on a Gnome desktop and vice versa, things tend to work better when they are native. I took a look primarily at the core applications: web browser, IM client, document viewer, terminal, media player, text editor.

The standard KDE Web Browser is Konqueror. Konqueror was also until recently the default file manager and is immensely powerful. Konqueror is based on KHTML which is the predecessor to WebKit. It rendered most pages fairly well, and was certainly usable. I couldn’t get along without Firefox for long, although a fair comparison would be to Gnome’s Epiphany which I felt that Konqueror blew away. I also spent time using Konqueror as a file manager which was nice. The fact that it supports split views, tabbed browsing, and inline previews was extremely nice. For example, it can open PDFs using a KDE subsystem called KParts that allows KDE apps to embed one another as components. (KParts seems quite cool, and is presumably why the terminal is embeddable everywhere such as the file browser and text editor).

I had never really heard much about KDE’s IM client Kopete so I figured that it didn’t stack up to pidgin. It certainly doesn’t have the protocol support, which I think is a shame because it seems like otherwise it could be a real contender. I’ve been using Pidgin (or it’s previous incarnation gaim) longer than probably any other piece of software (except perhaps counting Mozilla with Firefox) so making the switch would be a bit tough as I’ve just gotten used to it. Kopete has some unique features including conversation theme support like OSX’s adium, and has some unique plugins (including one that displays LaTeX formulas in conversations).

Although not yet a true KDE4 application, AmaroK warrants a mention here. AmaroK is easily the best Linux music client and with an upcoming Windows, will likely be the best music player on Linux. AmaroK has great library support, an easy to use plugin system with a rich suite of plugins. AmaroK (alongside Kile) was one of the two KDE applications that I have used heavily from Gnome.

At first I didn’t think I’d bother talking about the terminal, as I’ve never thought much one way or the other about gnome-terminal. konsole however includes features like searching output, monitoring for activity/silence, and bookmarking. Given how much time I spent in the terminal, now that I have these features I’m not sure I’ll be able to give them up. Terminal transparency doesn’t work unless you pass –enable-transparency which I thought was strange, but isn’t really a show stopper as I don’t typically use a transparent terminal, and it’d be simple to alias a konsole command to include this option if I did.

Similarly to the terminal, it’d be easy to overlook the document viewer coming from Gnome’s evince. I should say that this is in a way a testament to evince’s ease of use that it is so out of the way. Despite being scores better than acroread I’ve always wanted more out of my PDF reader. I never understood why I couldn’t easily annotate and bookmark my PDFs, Okular, the KDE4 document viewer remedies that problem. Okular is based on libpoppler, the same library that powers evince, and so it’s rendering should be just as good as that of evince. At the same time however, it offers highlighters, post-it notes, and bookmarking that make reading a PDF book a lot more practical. For some reason however, search did seem broken, which is a big problem that should definitely be fixed.

Kate is the KDE text editor, and puts Gnome’s gedit to shame the way that gedit puts Notepad to shame. Features like split windows, embedded terminal support, and code folding make Kate resemble a serious editor for developers. I can understand the desire to have a simpler editor however, and it seems like by default Kate might be a bit overwhelming for someone that is looking to just edit some simple text. (although I do question how often that happens these days when it seems like most users looking for simple text editing would go to a word processor)

And just to explain my omission of word processors: I didn’t get a chance to test KOffice. From what I’ve read KOffice 2 (the KDE4 edition) isn’t quite ready yet, and Kubuntu uses OpenOffice by default. Kubuntu does ship with an Oxygen theme for OpenOffice however that makes it look native.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately the erratic behavior of Plasma is going to keep me from making the full switch over to KDE4. The fact that I seem to prefer Dolphin/Konqueror over Nautilus and Konsole over gnome-terminal seems like fair reason to seriously consider switching. The gedit/kate differences matter little to me as I prefer Komodo Edit as my editor in general. Also, I’m fairly convinced I’m going to use Firefox, Pidgin, AmaroK and OpenOffice no matter which desktop environment I’m using so the various offerings in these fields don’t have a huge effect on my opinion. KDE is certainly visually attractive, and I have a feeling that I’ll start using more and more KDE apps, and by the time the Intrepid Ibex release hits, I’m very likely to give Kubuntu another real try. By then KDE 4.1 will be released and I’d expect that a lot more KDE3 apps will be KDE4 native.

One thing to take away from all of this is that in the era of the modern desktop it really isn’t too scary to mix and match. I have been back in Gnome now for a day and have given Dolphin a try as well as showing off the LaTeX plugin in Kopete to a friend. Just as I’ve never had real problems using AmaroK in my several years on Ubuntu, it doesn’t seem like I’ll have much trouble at all should I start to prefer things like Okular over Evince or even sticky note application KNotes over it’s counterpart Tomboy. This also makes the idea of switching less frightening, just as the availability of Open Source applications like pidgin and firefox eased my transition to Ubuntu, the fact that I didn’t have to give up any of my Gnome apps from KDE and vice versa will make what might be a transition over to KDE4 relatively pain free should the time come.

In conclusion, kudos to the KDE and Kubuntu team for building fine products. I’m understanding of the bugs in Kubuntu seeing as Kubuntu 8.04 was the first distro to ship with KDE4. I regret that I didn’t have more time to test out some of the other apps that are less important to me like KOffice and KPlayer or any of the KDE games. Also, if I overlooked any really cool KDE applications I’d be glad to hear from readers as I admittedly just pretty much went with what showed up in the menus after a default install.

Popularity: 100%