Hey Brian,

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

Hi,Jim. You ought to try Linux Mint 7 KDE, its being beta testing you can still download it and try it. Its the best KDE 4 I have ever used.

Well, the general consensus is that Kubuntu is the redheaded stepchild of Canonical :-P

Hi Manny,

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 agree with “kubuntu” review, but not with your opinion about KDE4

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

I used gnome while KDE was basically being rewritten from scratch, but now that KDE is very stable, and gnome is being taken over by Mono zealots (a technology patented by MS ) I am back to KDE and extremely happy to be back.

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 ).

@ Jim Lynch:
Jim,

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

@ Jim Lynch:
Freakin Sweet!

Welcome to all the folks that found this review on Linux Today. Thank you all for coming by and sharing your thoughts. Your feedback is very helpful and you raise a number of good points. I will make it a point to spend more time with KDE and to look more closely at what it has to offer desktop users.

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.

“It’s definitely a change of pace for me booting into a KDE desktop rather than Gnome. The first thing I saw was the Desktop folder open. I closed it as I dislike having it open.”

…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.