Yeah, I think I will take a peek at it when it’s ready to go. Thanks for the heads up though.

Welcome to the DLR blog.

I’ll take a look at KDE 4.3 once it’s out. I’m willing to give KDE another chance so we’ll see how it goes.

Yeah, the KDE Linux Mint is on my list too. I may do an RC review of it but I was trying to make myself wait for the final release. That’s easier said than done though as it is going to be a fun review.

i’ve been a gnome person forever, but kde is the future and i love it since 4.2 (am using 4.3 rc now which is even better)

am sure linuxmint 7 kde rc will have most of the things you’re looking for
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=935

i hope to see a review of it on the final version

Gnome is built on the gtk* platform, and has seemingly infinite dependencies. As a programmer, it’s a lot to deal with, and the various versions of gtk are a really tough port to other platforms.

On MacOS X, I use the “stable” binaries from the fink package manager (an apy/dpkg clone) and since KDE apps are built on Qt, which is a really portable framework, almost all of my favorite KDE apps run on the mac, including konqueror.

On Ubuntu, my standard practice is to load the gnome “default” desktop (since so many apps require GTK libraries ) and then install kde-desktop. This (IIRC) is pretty much the same as installing Kubuntu, and solves many GTK dependencies in advance.

If you don’t like the gnome defaults, just set KDE to be your desktop, and if you don’t like Mono from MS land, simply:

# sudo apt-get remove –purge mono-common libmono0

This will remove Tomboy, so beloved of the gnome developers, but you can install gnote instead.

I have been experimenting with launchy (similar to gnome-do and Quicksilver on the mac) and Krunner to quickly launch apps, and to do a lot more. See

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-07-02-002-35-RV-KE

for some great features of krunner.

Like many others, I was accustomed to the “old style” KDE menu, and while I was starting to flood my dock and favorites with too many apps, I just moved my dock to the left side of the screen, made it “hide” itself and rely on launchy and Krunner (it’s a shoot-out at this time!)

At the bottom of the screen, I am trying SimDock 1.2, which makes the KDE desktop look like MacOS X, further freaking out visitors to my computer lab.

I suppose that the “complexity” of the GTK family (my opinion, and YMMV) makes the Mono/C# “comfy” MS world attractive to some gnome developers, but QT, after some early license issues, is now an awesome open source platform, and getting better all the time.

When I can download source code (ntasklist, for example) and on the mac, just ./configure; make; sudo make install, then life is good. (It’s based on Qt ).

I used Kubuntu from 6.04 to 8.10 but recently moved to Mandriva. KDE in Ubuntu is an afterthought and is poorly implemented IMHO. To get a good KDE experience you should try Mandriva or another KDE centric distro.

Btw I have installed both GNOME and KDE for newbies and they usually use KDE since it is an easier transition from the windows world. When I mean newbies I meant people who aren’t very computer savy not just new users to Linux. Many of them come to me with complaints of why their Windows machine are slow or why they cant save a file (disk is full )!

last but not the least – theres a lot more to a distro than the default menu style and included apps
Vikram

However, I do want to point out that this review wasn’t about KDE itself per se but about Kubuntu which happened to be using KDE. Still, some of your points are well taken and I will be bearing them in mind in future reviews.

…and I agree with others above. You are trying to review something you know nothing about and have obvious prejudices against, you yourself sort of admit that. Anyone with real KDE chops will tell you that the Kubuntu version of Ubuntu is treated as an ugly step child by Canonical.

BTW that wasn’t the desktop folder, such a thing no longer exists in KDE per se. That was a widget that displays files.

If you have a baseline of Gnome and wish to compare everything against your experience with it perhaps being in the “review” biz is not for you.
2.5/5 what is your decision tree? One of the two major desktops rates a 50%? Really? Kubuntu has its warts, I will agree with that (Adept4 needs to die in an ugly horrible way). However your lack of any KDE experience shows through on your entire “review”.

For the above posters that are new to linux and liked this … read outside of this site, there are more thorough reviews by desktop agnostics.

A lot of people swore by Mandriva, and so I switched. It manages to be much more solid, mostly by using it’s own network management tool and it’s own package manager. Bluetooth still crashes constantly.

I’m hoping that Mint 7 KDE will be the best of both worlds. I miss the widespread availability of packages on Ubuntu…

As for KDE, I think some tech people like too much to be ‘for something’ so automatically anything competing isnt as good because its different
Its a desktop, not a religion.

I do a lot of installs at Lugfests and we noticed taht when given the choice newbies will choose KDE 7 times out of 10 and PCLinuxOS2007-2009 with KDE3.5 has been our staple the past 3 years (XFCE for older hardware).
Im not going to push E17 which is my personal choice, Im going to give people something taht they can feel comfortable with and since the whole planet has used Windows at some point, it makes sense to use KDE.

I know Mac envy runs high and we hear so much crud about certain ways of doings things just being better that Im not surprised to hear the top bar paradigm being hailed as superior. (I hate all taskbars and docks and have them disappear) But for a Windows convert?
It looks different.
THe top taskbar is offputting (even though you can move the taskbar on Windows anywhere you want), having two by default even more and the constant text on the desktop, intrusive. The GTK look and feel, the fonts, many things just feel different for Windows users. Having the various options/system settings on a drop down menu instead of across the page…many things that for some of us who use 8 desktops each day (Im counting various Windows in this number) may sound trivial but for those coming into Linux for the first time can be daunting.
I hear those people who get upset at flows and lines and the elegance of their desktop when users tell me usually “Can you make this bigger? No, much bigger!”
I know people who’ve bought Dell Mini netbooks and asking me to change the Ubuntu it came with because it looks like caca (many compare it to old 1990′s WIndows).
Im not trying to get them to embrace change, I am trying to get them to do the same things on Linux as on Windows.

Sure, its nice to be hip and l33t but people come to me when they are tired of viruses, tired of having to buy new hardware to use new OS, tired of being miserable and paying for it. And if altering or even skinning a desktop to make them confortable is waht it takes, then so be it. But KDE makes the transition smoother.

The two KDE’s we are using in our fleet of home computers are Mandriva 2009 w/KDE4.2.2 and PCLinuxOS 2009 w/KDE3.5 and my Gentoo work laptop has every Linux desktop imaginable. But then again, my customizations means the desktop looks like I want it to (I hate the windows decorations KDE uses by default and much prefer Keramik but that doesnt make it a bad desktop. Its a question of choice and personal taste).
And KDE4.3 stands up favourably to any other desktop.
You may not like how certain things are done and that’s fine too.

So please colour me unimpressed by this half-assed attempt at reporting on KDE. You dont like it, we get it. But dont pass it off as anything more than had a KDE fanboi reviewed Ubuntu’s desktop:
“My desktop can beat up your desktop.”

Btw, you can use the traditional KDE menu instead of the newer one by right clicking on the menu button and switching to the older style but the search feature of the new one is faster.
As for the add/remove tool, I think you mean kpackagekit is what Kubuntu uses and those things are a dime a dozen…. ubuntu uses synaptic, adept and some other one I believe, everybody has them and none are much better than others, some are more confusing and some are much uglier.

As for KDE being for experienced users, both my parents and inlaws are in their 70s as are 3 pair of uncle/aunts and those 10 people are all using KDE. Maybe my mom and mominlaw can give you pointers, theyve been using their first computers since Xmas with no problems. (I wouldnt recommend Kubuntu to anyone.)

Were waiting for PCLinuxOS to come out with their KDE4 version this summer and were going to embark on a project along with some high school kids this summer to do a Lugfest at a retirement home where we had installed and support Linux on their 12 common use computers. It was such a success that we’ve had plenty of demand from people living there who would like the same thing on their own computers.

It would have been a much better review if he at least touched a little about the new framework this new technology brings to the Linux desktop. The new framework will bring tremendous capabilities and features that wasn’t possible before.

It is so advanced and powerful that made Gnome jumping to start planing similar effort.

Hopefully you do a better one next time when KDE 4.3.0 is out by the end of this month.

And FYI, I have using KDE 4.2.4 for some time and I didn’t have any of the issue some of the poster here mentioned. Wireless works fine on my laptop. I believe some people had problems with it when using KWallet. There was another issue with older Intel graphics, It was fixed yesterday and I see much better performance on my older desktop since it was fixed.

Welcome to DLR, very glad to have you with us.

I think some people play WOW on Linux but I’m not sure what they are using to do it and I doubt Blizzard supports it officially though I wish they would.

The choice of desktop environments is definitely very personal. If KDE fits the bill for you then great. You should use what works for you.

Be sure to drop by the forum too. Lots of good people in there.

http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/forum

I’ve actually got Ubuntu installed on one machine at home, but since I also play WoW on that machine, it’s mostly stays booted into Windows 2000.

I recently downloaded Kubuntu 9.04 and have been meaning to install it on my laptop, but I also had real problems with the wireless support and so haven’t done it yet.

I thought perhaps I’d like the KDE desktop better than Gnome, which jars me in some ways. Gnome (like the Mac) has the opposite placement from Windows for the OK and Cancel buttons. Also I really don’t like the file manager in Gnome much. I realize these are small things, but figured I’d try KDE and see if I liked it’s standards better.

I’ll definitely be following your blog. As someone still trying to fully dive into linux I expect to learn a lot.

Mike

Back in the 5.04 days, there was a text installer, reasonably simple, but not that many tools. The appearance was simple. Compared to then, four years later, release 9.04 is very good indeed. What I’ve liked about it, especially in the Alpha test versions, is that I can follow along and see how the KDE 4 project is progressing. It does a good job at that level.

The 8.04 long term support release is in at least its second update, and for those who want a more stable experience, that might be the way to go. But frankly, the 9.04 release has stabilized nicely. As I mentioned, there were a few packages that Kubuntu provides that I don’t like, so I scrapped them and replaced them. Maybe that shouldn’t be necessary, but the fact that it was possible and straightforward counts for something, and for me, that was plenty. With my changes, this is a fine distro. Without my changes, I think that the Kubuntu team could have done a bit better job getting the networking to work correctly (but they were trying to use an area that, until recently, was deficient in the KDE 4 software pools – that is hopefully resolved by now; I will verify that when I get back to testing Kubuntu again in my testing cycle).

In fact I believe it was going to be the next review on the edit calendar. So I’ll get to it probably at some point over here on DLR.

But it’s nice to know that the Mandriva people are providing a better KDE experience. That’s definitely a positive thing.

There are two issues here really. The first is that the Mandriva people feel like be folks who use KDE all the time and want it to be the best possible desktop for their users, even if it takes them away from some of the defaults (eg classic menus rather than the new style and the default desktop hosting of shortcuts). The second issue is that, for some reason, KDE adaptations of Gnome centric distributions tend to omit things like Firefox for KDE but not Gnome (even though Gnome has its own browser in Epiphany). If you are prepared to be convinced about KDE, you might try Mandriva, but I agree that I would rather use Ubuntu than Kubuntu, for many of the reasons you cite.

I have started reading your linux reviews as a gentle entry into the world of Linux. As a complete nube some, (ok alot) of the terminlogy escapes me. I am happy to hear that you are beginning this blog, as I wanted to follow your writings post ET. Hers my noob question of the day: KDE/Knome. what are they and what is the difference between them? You reference reviewing one type more than another, what is the preference, if any? BTW love the wallpaper, would you know where I can find it?

Hi Brad,

Welcome to DLR. I’m glad that you are enjoying the reviews so far.

KDE and Gnome are desktop environments. Some distros use one, some use the other, some are available in both and some don’t use either one.

You can get more info here:

KDE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE

Gnome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME

Don’t forget that you can also post questions in the DLR forum too. That’s a good place to pick the brains of some of our resident Linux gurus. The link is always in the upper right of the sidebar on this blog. But here it is so you don’t have to find it:

http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/forum

Anyway, they included both desktops with the distro, as many did in those days, only they had Gnome and KDE both configured to look and function more or less the same. I had run the distro for a week or so before I even realized I was running Gnome.

After that, more by chance than anything, most distros I tried happened to default to Gnome. Today I can say it’s probably been 3 years since I’ve used KDE. But, I don’t experiment like I used to, either. Mint/Ubuntu work great, so I just use those, and they’re Gnome distros by default.

I enjoy eye candy as much as the next user, but I don’t need it as much as some seem to. To me, that’s all KDE used to bring to the party – a prettier face. Now that Gnome’s no slouch either, I don’t see a reason to chase around.

I also find Kubuntu a bit lacking for many of the same reasons. However, I do disagree on the point about Gimp being included. While I have used Gimp from time to time out of necessity, I have never really liked it. The explosion of windows when you launch it has always been a sore spot. I can only imagine what it looks like to a new user.
When I set up a distro for someone, I usually delete Gimp, and install Gthumb instead. It works just fine in any desktop environment, contains rudimentary editing tools suitable for most folks, and has a simple clean interface. It is not as feature laden as something such as Irfanview, but still good enough.

Hmmm…well I guess we will have to agree to disagree about Gimp. I still love it. I even use it on my macs via x11. But I will play around with Gthumb and see how it matches up. Perhaps it’s a good alternative for people to consider.

There were 22 updates since the last time I used it; more than the previous time, but most of them were library and browser related, always the most volatile stuff.

Speaking of volatile, on most of the systems that I visit, I have been installing the Nightly Builds of both Firefox and Seamonkey. I am using the Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5 in upgradable form in the firefox folder on my desktop, and I am doing the same thing with Seamonkey. I am very happy with both.

No weirdness at all on this Kubuntu 9.04 desktop. Time is fine, wireless is fine; all I want to do now is change the stock appearance, which doesn’t impress me much. I know that there are some really nice Plasma appearance items – oh, wait a minute, I DID already change the appearance – it is quite nice, with a mountain ledge overlooking several green mountains and a partly cloudy blue sky – I tend to like those kinds of scenes. On Mandriva, I have a scene with a nice tree surrounded by water – a swamp or flooded scene, also quite beautiful, so you can get that with KDE 4.

Performance? Fine, solid, steady, have not seen any indications of problems at all. Navigation? Well, I’ve been working with this stuff now, so I’ve figured out how to use it effectively without a lot of menu traversal, which frustrates me tremendously. KDE 4 has the stuff you need, but you may need to do it differently than you’ve done it in the past. I’m still building up my personal repertoire in it. Meanwhile, for basic use, it is more than fine, it has all that I need. I stick with the four out of five rating; if anything, I’d kick it up, but not to 5, there were some chinks that I needed to fix; it is my fixed system that rates a 5! ;-)

@ Brian Masinick:

Kubuntu 8.10 was the first distro I can think of that at least had some of the working components in KDE 4.1 set up in a usable distribution. Maybe that is not fair; actually, Mandriva has done it, too, but they made theirs a hybrid for a long time and even recent versions looked like more of a hybrid between KDE 3 and 4 than a pure implementation. openSUSE has provided KDE builds from day one – but I’ve had trouble with them, so Kubuntu has been the main platform I’ve used to get a good idea of where KDE is heading.

Because it has been a KDE testbed, Kubuntu has not exactly been a stable partner ever since it departed from the stability of the LTS, the Long Term Support release. The 8.04 release was a good solid one – all of the Ubuntu variations, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu were (I have not gotten into all of the variations, but all I’ve used based on the current LTS have been solid).

Where does that leave me with Kubuntu 9.04? Well, you guys were talking about issues with Wireless, and I have to tell you that I fought with Network Manager and Knetworkmanager from Alpha 2 to Alpha 4. Apparently there have been some pretty long standing defects in this space, and I seemed to find them. Often, I’d have to go wired, fiddle around, and SOMETIMES get wireless going. Finally, at Alpha 4, I said “Enough is enough!” I wired up, downloaded wicd, which effectively cut off both network manager and knetworkmanager, replacing them with wicd, a generally well regarded multifunction network manager that also happens to work independently of the desktop environment, and does a good job of remembering and retaining information, but gives you the flexibility to roam, wire up, or change access points when you need to do so.

Once I did that, I only found one other issue with Kubuntu, but it did annoy me. The network time protocol daemon, NTPD, seemed to be perpetually acting up – some goofy interaction between ntpd and ntpdate client. I seemed to uninstall and reinstall them often to get the time right. Otherwise, my clock on Kubuntu kept going to UTC, which I was certain that I had NOT set, so that bothered me too.

Other than that, though, this system has worked well for me, and that even goes back to Alpha 2, quite a number of months ago. Upgrades between Alpha builds, other than wireless and NTP issues, were fine, no badly broken packages, generally good quality.

One other thing that I would like to say about that is that I have been able to upgrade a few of my Ubuntu based systems from release to release to release. I have at least one or two of them that have gone from 8.04 to 8.10 to 9.04. I’ve been able to do that with Mandriva, using the Cooker to have a perpetually bleeding edge system, but these are STABLE release upgrades and they work. I do prefer ROLLING RELEASE systems, such as Debian Testing, Debian Sid, sidux, antiX, and distros like them (and Arch Linux, the classic perpetually rolling release system, as well as Mandriva Cooker, the one cooked “Rare” at all times), but for a release upgrade system, this one does it as well as any.

Ubuntu is arguably a bit more polished in some areas than Kubuntu, which is moderately close to a clean KDE release. I think that of the three primary Canonical versions, Xubuntu is the best looking and best performing of the three, but I would not ding this release hard. I’d give it a subjective 4 out of 5. Tell me what the criteria are to get that rating. Actually, I’d like a ten point scale, with two, one, or zero points possible for five different categories. That might give us something that we could reproduce.

For me, the only dings here are initial wireless packaging and issues with the time server; all else has done remarkably well. I will upgrade my system and report back. Last time I did so, there were two or three updates, an indication of either dormancy or stability. On my system, it was stability.