KDE 4.1 review

Let me be honest. On the very first look, KDE 4.1 is a like a cold breeze on a hot,muggy day (GNOME). Unfortunately, that is about as far as I can go with regard to positives. About three and half days of KDE and I have enough content to write for a review.

1. Prasanna made this point on hig blog and I agree with him. The windows look sad, in particular the toolbar and especially the titlebar. This is a huge disappointment in comparision to the desktop which looks great.
2. I like the idea about making the desktop widgetized. The default widgets that are available to the user are limited in number. But thats okay. Nothing much to complain here too. But, somehow, the whole idea of being able to change the wallpaper when th widgets are locked, seemed pointless. Logically, I would have arranged the widgets in such a manner that they go with my wallpaper. So I would like to lock the wallpaper too when I the lock all the widgets. This is not a bug really. But this is some sort of an enhancement.
3. Now comes the real dirt. I tried playing some audio files using Amarok and I discovered that the audio gets muted after every 30 seconds?!! WTF! I tried looking at the audio configuration and it seemed to be fine. I checked this on GNOME (using Amarok again) and playback was fine here. I checked this out in some forums and people did actually complain about this problem albeit in different ways.  Some guys had problem muting the sound. Some had the sound muted the whole time. These guys had tried installing KDE on Hardy Heron. After some serious checking and experimentation, I was able to get the playback working on KDE again! But as far as the whole experience is concerned, this is really a show stopper!
4. I don’t like the application launcher that KDE offers. Actually cant blame anyone here. After using Launchy, every other application launcher looks stupid !
5. Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, can be pretty irritating at times.
6. Moving the widgets on the main panel can be a pain.

I am sure that I have faced more issues than the ones that I have mentioned. Overall, KDE is not for me. I will still be using it for a while before I move over to GNOME. GNOME might look sad, but it is a lot more stable right now and that is more important at the end of the day, as compared to a flashy looking desktop with bugs.

Update: Just discovered that Synaptic Package Manager also crashes with KDE. After installing your packages, if any, the details window is expanded even though you did not ask for it. The remedy is simple: Just kill the process ’synaptic’ using its process id (you have to use sudo as this can be done only as a super-user). Cheers!

KDE 4.1

Prasanna’s post on KDE 4.1 motivated me to try out the installation on my system.I was kinda bored with the GNOME desktop experience that Hardy Heron was offering. To be honest, initially I was not really sure if I could get KDE 4 running on Hardy Heron. Especially because the site clearly mentions that the platform is unstable for debian based systems(link). But this link on softpedia was just what I was looking for.

I will write a more detailed review on this after I have played around enough with this KDE release.

For now though, the desktop looks kewl!