The Troll-Range » KDE

KDE4 will rock

Ghworg — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:12:00 +0000

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.

KDE Desktop screenshot

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.

Network-Manager Plasmoid

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.

Lancelot launcher menu

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.

Trash Settings window

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 file browser

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.

I need an idiot-proof shell

Ghworg — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:24:55 +0000

After decades of never losing any significant data, last night I deleted my Video dir for the second time in six months, along with my Music this time. Fortunately I had learned my lesson and had a complete backup this time. The first time I lost a large amount of non-critical videos I had downloaded off the internet (okay, it was porn. I said it, happy now?). This time I just lost a couple of episodes of This Week in Fun I hadn’t watched. If I can be bothered I can easily re-grab them from ODTV.

I’m not sure how I accidently deleted the stuff, I was moving my config files from being stored in Subversion to git, using this method. I must have accidently rm -rf them somehow. This is my problem, it’s incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot from the command-line.

I’ve always used a combination of the GUI and shell, my first proper computer was an Amiga 500+ which, while it had an amazing modern GUI while Windows was still stuck with 3.1, also had a pretty good shell interface. Not quite up to unix standards, but much better than DOS. So I’ve always used both, depending on what was easiest for the task.

When I switched to Windows (after my last Amiga died on me), I started using the GUI much more heavily since DOS is so underpowered. When a short time later I switched to Linux though that got reversed since the Linux GUI at the time wasn’t so hot and the shell was incredibly powerful. So I currently default to using the shell, which makes me nice and productive but also means I’m working without a safety net.

If recent experience is anything to go by, I either need to start relying on the GUI much more or I need to find myself an idiot-proof shell. Since I don’t think the latter is possible it looks like I’ll be GUI-focused from now on. This is going to be a hard transition for me, much like giving up a narcotic, but I think it is necessary.

I’m going to start this transition at the same time as I install KDE 4, which is looking excellent in my tests on my EeePC by the way. I could almost transition now, there are just a couple of things (that are in the works) that I need before I can convert. A Network-Manager controlling plasmoid being the main one.

That way I only have to relearn how to do things in one GUI, rather than learning how to do it in KDE 3.5 and then a new way in 4. I’m not going to give up the shell completely mind, just change my balance so it is 80/20 in favour of the GUI instead of the other way round.

Wish me luck.

KDE 4 finally ready for Prime time?

Ghworg — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:01:49 +0000

KDE 4.2 desktop

I’ve had a virtual machine running KDE4 from the Debian experimental repos for a while now. Every few months, when I notice some announcement of a point release I update it and give it another try. Up till now I’ve always been disappointed in some way.

I first tried it on my EeePC 701 netbook, back when 4.0 first launched. I was impressed that it ran at all on that hardware, even with desktop effects enabled, some of them at least. This is on a machine that struggles to run Windows XP, let alone Vista. While it was okay from a performance perspective, it was horribly unstable. I can live with applications crashing (as long as I don’t lose data), but parts of the desktop going boom is unacceptable. I eventually gave up on the netbook and put KDE 3.5 on it instead.

That is when I setup a VM on my main Debian laptop, at that time running Lenny, so I could keep track of KDE’s progress. I’m not one of those people who baulk at change, who objects to learning new interfaces irrespective of whether they are better or worse than what they replace. On the other hand I absolutely need my desktop to be rock-solid, any flakiness in any essential part of the OS I will not abide. On the gripping hand I want to be in control, this is why I use Linux and KDE in the first place. They allow me to configure the OS to work the way I want. I’d really like to run KDE4 on my production machines ‘cos of the shiny, but until I can be sure of its stability I won’t risk it.

KDE 4.2 just recently transitioned from Debian experimental to unstable, so I fired up the VM to give it another whirl. As I had already played with 4.2 a few weeks earlier I was expecting to have the same nearly there experience. Things mostly working but still the odd crash, but I was wrong.

KDE 4.2 Calculator plasmoid.

After two days of playing with it I have had but a single crash (kwallet), and that was just after the upgrade process so can be dismissed as an artefact. Other than that it has been completely stable and usable. I have to say, I really like it, some of the defaults are not to my taste but they can all be configured with a bit of searching through the interfaces. KMail in particular defaulted to something horrid, but on the other hand it seems to be even more configurable than the 3.5 version, so it’s a win overall.

It’s the little things that make me want to switch though, like the calculator plasmoid that can be stuck on the panel for incredibly fast access. A dictionary right on the desktop and many other useful widgets. Previous attempts at widgets on KDE (superkaramba I’m looking at you) have been mediocre at best, glorified system monitors is the best you could hope to run. The plasmoids seem to be the real deal from the built-in examples, if the community starts writing these things we should be in for some real treats.

The application launchers are a little different, and I have to say at the moment I prefer the old “start menu” style one, the fixed height of the new designs mean I have to keep scrolling to find what I want which is icky. But I’m going to give them a while, it may be just one of those things that you have to get used to, and if it turns out I still hate them the old style is still available.

Being in a VM means I can’t use the desktop effects, so I’m missing a lot of the fun stuff. So the next step is to sacrifice my netbook again to try those out. I’m hopeful that by the time it transitions to testing (squeeze), which my main laptop now runs, I will be completely happy to switch to it, it is certainly looking positive at the moment.