Jared’s Blog

Yes, friends: I’m back. It’s been too long. A lot has happened since January 11th. I’ve graduated from college and taken on a job. So, with all those details out of the way, I’d like to give you my thoughts Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex):

I decided to install Intrepid when it hit alpha stage. It had just been too long since I had gotten any significant software updates, and I was getting itchy (and not just because I tried growing a beard…which didn’t turn out very well). I decided to give Intrepid all of the credit it deserves, and I wiped my desktop system, after cleaning up and uploading my home directory to my local NAS. I hadn’t been doing much reading on Intrepid, so I was slightly surprised to see that KDE 4.1 is the default desktop in Kubuntu now. I was slightly worried after my KDE 4.0.0 experience.

So, after installing the system, I booted it up for the first time to find a not-so-speedy desktop in front of me. Now, folks, I’m not trying to brag here, but I’m running quite a capable system. It’s an Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 4 GB DDR2-800, GeForce 8600 GTS w/ 256MB. Windows, menus, and dialogs shouldn’t lag when requested, but yet, here we are at KDE 4.1.2….lagging. Now, I’ve heard that there has been or are problems with the nVidia driver and KDE 4, so I’m going to also try it out on my T61 which has Intel’s 965 chipset (one of the best-supported video chipsets in the Linux world). So, for the time being, I’ll lay aside my issues with the desktop being laggy.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the number of annoyances that have been fixed in the months between KDE 4.0 and 4.1.2. The panel is now resizeable (though only by the mouse, not by a specific pixel height); the desktop doesn’t move if you click-and-drag in the wrong spots; I can change the window decoration back to Plastik without KDE 4 crashing; running xtermcontrol doesn’t crash Konsole (I reported a bug on that ). I’m sure I’m missing a few things that don’t bother me anymore, but those are the ones that are coming to my mind quickly.

And now, comes the part that would make most KDE developers cry (if any of them actually read my blog). I’m going to give my top 10 list of KDE 4.1 annoyances (as of 4.1.2):

1. You can’t change the font or time format (24-hour vs 12-hour + AM/PM) in the digital clock that’s on the panel.
2. Some KDE applications don’t respect my chosen widget theme (Plastik). This could be some strange Kubuntu packaging issue, but I somehow doubt it.
3. There’s no “Run” option in the classic K menu (nor does there seem to be any way to customize it).
4. There are now two “theme-able” engines in KDE 4: Plasma and Qt. Call me a traditionalist, but I like my desktop to look somewhat consistent, and that’s hard to do when some things on the desktop follow one theme, and the others follow another. Blessings on the person that created the “Plain” Plasma theme that’s on kde-look.org, as it matches my Plastik Qt theme pretty well.
5. I’m all for desktop widgets, but I don’t want my ENTIRE DESKTOP to be built from widgets. Let’s take an example of how the widget-built desktop concept could be annoying (at least in it’s current implementation). The KDE 4 panel is a plasma widget, as are all of the items on the panel (the K menu, the task list, the system tray, the digital clock, etc.). Now, let’s say I want to “lock” the items that are currently on the dock, and I want to get rid of the annoying “cashew” that’s on the far right of my dock. I right-click the dock, and choose “Lock Widgets.” Does it lock my dock? Yes. But, it also locks all the other widgets that I happen to have on my desktop. Bad.
6. I like desktop icons. The desktop is a place that I can stick things that I’m working on currently without having to dig around in an endless hierarchy of folders to get to. If you take away my desktop icons, you reduce my ability to work efficiently. The folderview Plasmoid is a nice, quick fix to the lack of working desktop icons from the KDE 4.0 release, but it’s not a perfect solution. From what I read, KDE 4.2 will allow you to fill your whole desktop with a folderview widget, but you’ll lose the ability to place other widgets on your desktop. That doesn’t sound good either. KDE Developers: it’s time to re-think (not throw away) this widget strategy before you drive away your entire user base.
7. When you try to resize plasmoids, they stretch and skew very slowly and painfully. Just moving them around can be a chore.
8. Dolphin is getting better as a file manager, but it’s still missing some things that I like from Konqueror; perhaps others feel the same way. However, there’s no intuitive way to change my default filemanager back to konqueror.
9. Things just don’t seem to render smoothly. When I see windows and menus appear, I see fragments of things that were on the screen previously for a split-second, and then the item that I requested renders. I’ll see if this is nvidia+kde4 related when I install Kubuntu 8.10 on my Thinkpad.
10. There are obvious user options missing all over the place. I detailed a few missing options earlier, but this is more of a general annoyance, as it affects the way I work all the time. For example, do I want to group similar tasks in the panel’s task list? Maybe, or maybe not, but I should have an option to turn it on and off. I could go on all night about missing user preference things, but I think you get the point.

So, there it is. My most up-to-date list of grievance. Now, I know there’ll probably be a KDE developer out there that reads this and says: “if you don’t like it, fix it and submit a patch.” People in the open source community like to think that it’s easy for anyone to get involved in an open source project, and for some projects that’s true. However, in the case of KDE, the community has been neglected as of late, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s really a community effort anymore. Maybe that’s a separate topic for another post, and maybe I’m just bitter over the path that KDE 4 has taken over the last several years, but I think many of the things I’ve chronicled in this blog post have some value, if only to help me gague how KDE 4 is improving.