KDE4 Test Drive

Well, January 11th has come and gone. After painfully updating my system to Kubuntu 7.10, I’m ready for KDE 4. It’s big, it’s shiny, and it’s slow in downloading the relavent DEB packages. Oh well.

Just as a quick overview before I review it (and while it installs), here are some of the new features:

• KRunner replaces the third-party Katapult.
  
• Plasma widget engine brings the Dashboard to KDE, to replace the third-party SuperKaramba.
• Dolphin replaces Konqueror as a file manager. It is the new file manager for KDE 3 on my system, and it offers a dazzlingly large amount of features. This could take a while.
• The Oxygen icon set is here, too. Let the pretty pictures do the talking:
  
• Kicker is kicked off by KickOff, the new “start menu” of KDE 4:
  
• KWin gets an upgrade, with a better full-screen (a la OSX’s Expose) task switcher, live thumbnails in the taskbar, and other features:
  

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Test Drive

Well, here it is. It’s installed and running. Now, the first thing I notice: funky window decorations. It’s almost pure, milky-white with three buttons: an up arrow, down arrow, and a bit away, an X. It turns out it’s rather meaningful. Up is maximize (turns into a diamond once clicked/max’d), down is minimize, X is close. Simple. Next comes the new taskbar. It’s a little bigger than I liked in KDE 3, but you get used to it and its jet-black-ness.

The desktop’s next. It’s literally made of Plasma widgets. Icons, analog clocks, everything is a widget. Simple as that. Now, there are some fancy featurs you can implement: rotating and scaling the widget, configuring clocks/moniters/etc., but the icons bug you until you right-click on the desktop, and, from the new context menu, pick Lock Widgets. Then the icons stop moving around when you try to click ‘em.

KickOff comes next. The K button is new, too: it’s more streamlined, vector-ized… more Web 2.0-looking. But clicking it brings up a whole new slew of buttongs/tabs/who-knows-what. It’s pretty convenient, once you get used to it. Take a look at the screenshot above (in the features list) so this all makes sense. The Search bar lets you search for programs, and the Web. Just click the K, and type away (hehe… rhyming…), and it brings them up as you enter/delete a letter, all without wasting RAM on my modest 512 meg machine. Moving down to the bottom, there are 5 ‘tabs’: Favorites are your favorite programs; it’s not based on uses, but on ones you explicitly mark “Favorite” (from the right-click context menu). Applications is what you’d expect: the apps you have. It is divided into the same categories as those in KDE 3, except with fancier icons. Click one to send it and its buddies onto an animated trip to the left, while the contents of the category slide from the right. There’s now an arrow on the left; clicking it goes back. KDE now remembers where you last were, too. Type in “konq” into Search, close KickOff, and bring it up again to have “konq” still in there. Same with the Application category. Next tab: Computer. This has your removable disks (floppy, thumbdrives, etc), your hard drives, home folder, trash, and System Settings in it. Click and go. Recently Used, the second-to-last tab, is just a list of your X most recently used programs, adjusted from your settings, and defaulting to (I think) 10. Finally, Leave: this holds the Shutdown, Logout, Switch User, Lock, and Restart options.

Just as an overview of applications: There’s the new “Konsole for KDE 4″ (yes, that’s the name, and yes, it’s its own application, not to be confused with Konsole, which came with KDE 3). It has some new, useful features, such as the saving of output (much like logs, I’m assuming, or the tea application). However, the interface is a bit… kluncky? That sort of thing. At this point, you can’t put KDE themes onto GTK+ applications, including Firefox, leaving it with a Windows Classic interface. Programs are a bit touchy to start up, and I can’t tell whether icons need double or single clicks.

The only major problem lies, most likely, in my own computer: I can’t use the advanced features. It slows down so that scrolling down one notch on my wheel takes a second or two to process, and ends up choppy and not very clean.

Overall, thouth, it’s a great new KDE. The Qt 4 tookit is put to good use, and although it’s a little rough around the edges, it’s the first major release. Bugfixes are immenent.