KDE4 will rock

I’ve been playing some more with KDE4 v4.2 mainly Debian unstable in a VirtualBox VM, but also a Fedora 11 beta livecd on my main laptop and installed on my EeePC. The most important thing, stability, is definitely there now, it hasn’t crashed on me at all. I really could pull the trigger on the switch-over today if I had to, but I’m going to wait a little while longer. There are still some not essential but nice-to-have features missing but it is eminently usable as-is.

All the hardware I’ve been testing with has had either no 3d-acceleration, or practically none in the case of the EeePC. I was hoping that VirtualBox’s new opengl acceleration feature would let me use some of the desktop effects but while it is apparently sufficient to run compiz it is no enough to handle KDE4s effects. So I have yet to experience the full-on KDE4, and won’t until I make the switch proper.

To control Network-Manager there is no stable tool, but there is a plasmoid in Debian experimental. It works for the most part, but sometimes playing with the settings can make it crash. Not critical since it restarts automatically and the underlying network connection isn’t affected by the crash.

There is no bluetooth support yet, not a deal killer, but I do use it to sync my phone contacts and transfer the odd file so I’d like to wait till something is in place for that. I saw some mentions of bluetooth in the Fedora GUI, but couldn’t get it to actually talk to anything. That might be due to the wireless switch on my laptop though, as it has both a hardware and software switch which both need to be enabled to make bluetooth transmit.

Both in my VM and on my EeePC sound did not work out of the box unfortunately. No matter what I did to try and configure Phonon, which is the replacement for ArtsD in 4, it just wouldn’t output any sound. In both cases the fix was to install the xine backend to replace the gstreamer one. After which sound worked perfectly.

When I booted the Fedora live CD the sound did work out of the box, but when I looked what it had done differently, I found that it was using the xine backend by default. The conclusion I’m drawing here is that gstreamer is shit.

I’ve found Lancelot to be excellent, once I realised you can resize the menu. Lancelot is an alternate to the regular “Start menu” style launcher. While the normal launcher has also been altered to a new style I don’t like it so much. If you are trying out KDE4 I’d suggest giving Lancelot a go, I think it is the better of the two. Both have built-in search, but the mechanism of navigating the tree works better in Lancelot.

The slide mechanism in the main launcher means that when you’ve gone into the wrong branch and want to back up one you have to move to the far left and click a little line that is a back button. In contrast in Lancelot you can still see the previous level in the tree and so it is much easier to recover from mistakes (of which I make many).

It still doesn’t work so well when there are too many entries on one page, having to grab the scrollbar and scroll is unacceptable. I’ll have to either edit the menus to prevent that or find some way to shrink each entry so more can fit at once. I don’t really need the double line entries with the description, the app name is enough for me.

And for those who don’t like either and want the old start menu back, an applet for that is still there too.

Date-based deletion of items in the Trash is an excellent idea, if that means what I think it means. I’m hoping it means that regardless of how much is in the Trash an item will be deleted permanently after $TIME_PERIOD of being in there. That will satisfy the OCD part of me that can’t stand the disk being used up by stuff I don’t need any more.

As I’m intending to use the GUI as my primary interface when I do the switch for real, in large part for the safety net that the Trash can gives you it is important that it operate correctly. I hate the implementation on Windows where the Trash is practically always full. I end up manually emptying it at least once a day, which removes a lot of the point. I need to wait for a few days to confirm it works how I hope.

Dolphin works well, I much prefer having separate apps for file-browsing and web-browsing. Combining the two in Konqueror always felt confused. I don’t want to see my web bookmarks when I’m looking at my Music/ dir, but hiding them meant losing them when I was browsing the web. Now I can just keep Konqueror for the web and Dolphin for local, much neater in my opinion. The preview feature seems to slow things down too much for my taste, but I’m sure that can be switched off somewhere. I just haven’t looked for that setting yet.

Browsing in general is a little slow, but I’m putting that down to being on slow or virtual hardware. On a decent machine I’m betting it will be snappy enough, I hope.

The Dragon player that comes with it seems dreadful, that will have to go. Particularly on the Fedora boot where it couldn’t play anything on my system due to not having any codecs installed. I presume it had the OGG Theora codec, but who has videos in Theora format laying around? I’ll need a KDE4 or QT4 based GUI for mplayer, or at worst I’ll fall back to using the command-line for launching videos.

Of course the biggest reason to upgrade to v4 is the revamped patience card game which can now play the 3-card variant of Klondike! I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be running KDE4 on free ATI drivers with KMS, and that day is within sight.