KDE4 Released, Not Really Ready Already
So I’ve been seeing the pictures of KDE4, but haven’t really had a chance to play with it until now. But write-ups over at places like Ars have led me to believe it’s usable, if not stable.
Sitting at a laptop running KDE4 on Ubuntu 7.10 I can assure you this is not the case.
While the technology behind this desktop feels like it might, someday, be impressive it’s currently a steaming pile of not-ready-yet. If this was my introductory experience to KDE i’d run, not walk, screaming and not look back.
Configuration options for most of the stuff that needs to be configured are missing, display glitches abound, and my clock currently contains a flashing garbage block where the last digit should be.
Also, every other character makes the quad desktop switcher in the corner flash on and off like a mad strobe light.
I don’t even have a dock panel on the dock. There’s no option for the dock in the config screen either. Instead, I had to get a widget of my dock that sits on the desktop. Underneath everything else.. which is quite obnoxious.
The default icon set and theme aren’t thrilling, either. If you’ve seen any KDE4 previews, that’s what you’re getting.. and nothing else. If this is our future then I think I’ll hold onto the past until it’s not filled with rubbish, thanks.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
The new version is usable just fine here. I also first tried it on Kubunutu, but had many problems with it. After a suggestion of a friend I tried it on Mandriva 2008 and here it works a lot better. So it looks like (K)ubuntu still has some packaging problems with KDE 4.0.
As for the display issues I would gess it is the dislplay drivers that could be buggy, maybe even the Xorg itself. KDE 4 series uses a lot of new technology for displaying graphics and has already uncovered a lot of bugs in Xorg and display drivers. So make sure you have all the latest versions of those, and even the latest versions still have some known bugs that will have to be fixed. KDE developers can’t do much about this.
Oh and it looks like you didn’t use KDE 4.0 long enough to discover that you can drag plasmoid widgets directly to the panel. So no need to have them only on desktop. And if you have them on the desktop you can simply press Ctrl+F12 and they immidiately pop into the foreground.
I myself find this very first version from the completely new series of KDE quite OK. I still remember KDE 3.0.0, which had far less new features and changes but was still worse then KDE 4.0.0. And just look at how awesome KDE 3 series is today. I’m confident that KDE 4.0 will quickly stabilize, get up to speed with KDE 3.5 and the excellent foundations allow it to surpass it quite a lot on all fronts.
But yes for now KDE 4.0.X is targeted at developers, brave users that don’t mind using cutting edge software and for active users who are willing to take some time and help make the desktop better by reporting bug reports and in any other way they can help.
January 31st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Heh, that’s why I keep op-ed on the weblog instead of doing article formats
. I couldn’t get the drag-drop functions working.. I figured that a user should be able to bring the widgets to the doc in that fashion, given the lack of other configurations.
So I’ll chalk it up to Ubuntu and Xorg for now, until I’ve got a newer version on here. Thanks for the heads up
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