KDE 4 creator Matthias Ettrich, envisaged a Unix desktop with a common look and feel. KDE 4 has been released for over a year now, has it met this goal?
Have things improved since that disastrous release? Well one thing that is currently missing is a Qt 4 graphical interface for NetworkManager, the popular dynamic network configuration tool. There is an official plasmoid in the project source playground which works quite well (although not yet marked stable) and another from Pardus. Most distributions however, still seem to be shipping the Qt 3 program, Knetworkmanager. Hopefully this is something that will be resolved in the new release of KDE as it is a vital piece of software, particularly for those with notebooks.
When it comes time to browse the Internet, this is where the desktop starts to falter. Konqueror is a great program but as a web browser based on the KHTML engine, is starting to show its age. Konqueror seems to handle standard websites just fine, but when it comes to more complex websites with AJAX and complex Javascript, it just doesn’t make the cut. It cannot complete the Google v8 Javascript benchmark suite, for instance.
Fortunately there are some projects afoot to write a Qt browser for KDE based around the Webkit rendering engine (which was originally forked from KHTML). One such project is Arora and another is Rekonq, which has actually just been sanctioned as an official KDE project. With the introduction of Dolphin though, Konqueror really only has one function and that’s web browsing. Whether it will be replaced, or updated to a more capable engine remains to be seen. It might all be just be too hard and in the meantime the task falls primarily to GTK program, Firefox. Another option might be Opera, which is written in Qt but is closed source.
One of, if not the, best optical burning applications in the free software world is K3b. The project supports the usual burning tasks such as the creation of data and music images, copying and blanking CDs and DVDs, but it can also create mixed CDs, Video CDs, eMovix images, rip music, rip and encode DVDs and much, much more. The current stable version is still only Qt 3, but a Qt 4 port is reaching maturity. This is one other major piece of the puzzle which is still missing. The current Qt 4 version in source control is marked as version 1.66.0 alpha2, but despite its ‘alpha’ tag, works quite well. Most distributions are not yet packaging this release however, so most users will have to be content with the excellent Qt3 version of K3b, or use another CD burning program entirely.
What about documents? KDE has long maintained its own office suite called KOffice, which has recently released version 2.0. KOffice 2.0 is a Qt 4 rewrite of the previous stable version 1.6, but includes a great many new features. Actually, in a similar fashion to the KDE 4.0 announcement, this release is also marked as a developer preview, even though it has stable version number. The announcement reads: “Our goal for now is to release a first preview of what we have accomplished. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.”
KOffice 2.0 does not have all the features of the previous version, in fact some entire components have not made it, but will make it into versions 2.1 and 2.2. Applications which are included are: KWord the word processor, KSpread the spreadsheet calculator, KPresenter the presentation manager, KPlato the project management software, Karbon the vector graphics editor and challenger to Inkscape and finally Krita the raster graphics editor, challenger to GIMP. How well these programs work when compared to their GTK counterparts remains to be seen. Naturally many long term GNOME users will be used to the way Inkscape and GIMP work and so may want to hold onto these programs anyway. Still, Qt 4 alternatives do exist.
KDE 4 does include some other stunningly useful applications, such as Amarok. Amarok is a music player which has many great features. As with its parent project, the developers took the opportunity to make some major internal changes while porting to Qt 4. One of the most controversial was the use of embedded MySQL as a database back end. Despite some community backlash, Amarok has soldiered on and is approaching the second major release after the initial rewrite. KDE also comes with a brilliant photo management program called Digikam which, through its many great features, makes the management of your photos a snap. There are countless other applications included, all of which are of a very high calibre and integrate tightly with each other and the desktop itself.
While some aspects of the KDE 4 are not yet finalised, there are numerous new Qt 4 applications which have sprung to life and help to make the KDE desktop more complete. One such project is Kdenlive, a video editor which holds a lot of promise. The current release is 0.7.4 which saw the light of day less than a week ago. The development is very active, but in its current state the program is already a winner. It allows users to easily capture, edit create, modify and publish their work in a variety of formats. It even includes a DVD wizard. Kdenlive is a project that has been sorely missing from the free software world, and the fact that it is a Qt application only helps boost the usability of the KDE desktop.
In a world of Web 2.0 and fancy HTML, Konqueror really is rather useless. It desperately needs an overhaul, and it’s hard to believe that such a core piece of software for any desktop is so greatly neglected. KOffice is what KDE 4.0 was, a developer preview. It might hold a lot of promise, but it’s not ready for prime time yet. So should you make the move to this new and promising desktop? Well, if you’re looking for a modern, fresh, solid desktop environment, KDE 4 really is it. The desktop itself works very well, looks great and has a many brilliant features. It really will change the way you work on your machine.
Applications for most of the tasks users wish to perform are included by default and are tightly integrated with the rest of the system. They are all of a very high caliber, work very well and have a great set of features. You just might have install some GTK applications here and there to help make it complete, but they should integrate reasonably well. As it currently stands, it might be another year or so before we see a complete KDE desktop and Ettrich’s vision attained. Stay tuned though because if the road traveled thus far is any indication, it’s going to be grand.
Christopher Smart has been using Linux since 1999. In 2005 he created Kororaa Linux, which delivered the world's first Live CD showcasing 3D
desktop effects. He also founded the
MakeTheMove website, which introduces users to free software and encourages them to switch. In his spare time he enjoys writing articles on free software.
Comments on "KDE 4: The Komplete Desktop?"
I may be dense here, but I don’t see the point in caring about Konquerer. If the rest of the desktop works well thats fine with me. I would prefer to run Firefox anyway. I’m just not sure why a desktop or an operating system thinks they need to write there own browser
when there are better alternative already out there.
I think that KDE is losing its spot as king of the configurability heap. When I ran 4.2, I noticed that a lot of the options that used to be present were missing. I also didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t use numbers to change sizes in Plasma. Having drag handles is a good idea, but it would have been nice if I could have told KDE to give me a panel that was (x) pixels high instead.
@anthonywalls The problem is that KDE integration into Firefox is pretty kludgy, too. I ran 4.2 for about 3 months earlier this year, and the failure of the KDE widgets to render properly in the pages made for some real frustrations sometimes. It would also be nice to be able to use the KWallet to store your web passwords, but there’s no way to do that, either. Ditto using KParts like FF plugins. Just running FF means you have to double install a lot of things that are theoretically handled by KDE.
the reason i chose KDE 3.x over Gnome was the integration with konqueror.
the ability to find a file on the web in one tab, view it’s contents in another, transfer files from a digital camera and browse them, all in one application is a fantastic capability.
i tried Gnome for a while but having to use a separate web browser, file manager and pdf reader is clunky.
unfortunately KDE 4 is trying to force me back to this way of working.
konqueror needs some TLC
I liked KDE 3.5. Kde 4.2 looks pretty but just doesn’t work as well. Kicker is not really that good. How many clicks does it take to start a program? More than really necessary, in my opinion. Phonon is not upto the mark. Amarok 1.4 used to work great on my laptop and desktop. Amarok 2 does not, even though I did fiddle with it, following instruction from quite a few forums. It just didn’t work. All that fiddling just to listen to some music. I’m sorry but this is simply disappointing. Amarok 2 even looks ugly. Kopete does not work like before. It shows ignored contacts from the Yahoo network. Konqueror – is it really worth using as a web browser? It’s shit compared to Firefox. It was great as a filemanager, and why not let it be the file manager and do what it’s really good at.
All this prettiness does not count if it doesn’t work right the first time. Don’t expect the users to tweak this and tweak that because they don’t have the time. I feel sad that KDE has been transformed into such a sorry state of affairs. I’ll wait of course, till things work fine. GNOME is actually pretty solid and very functional. Not pretty but the damn thing works like magic.
@anthonywalls
While I agree with your comment, thanks to konqueror we had khtml rendering engine, being webkit a derivative from it and safari and chrome being based on it. I won’t dismiss such an effort.
Regards.
My big frustration with KDE4 is that migrating from KDE3 seems to be hard, at least for me.
I use kontact a lot for calendar, contacts, and E-mail, and even the weather. There doesn’t seem to be a clear way to move all this information from KDE3 to KDE4.
Oddly enough, I also use konsole a lot and the changes in that program caught me by surprise. Currently, I run 5 different tabs under konsole (I use ssh a great deal). I distinguish the tabs with different background colors. I think this may be possible in KDE4, but it is complicated. It looks like I would have to invent 5 different profiles — yuch!
Anyway, my major beef is no one ever thought about how to export a KDE configuration and import it somewhere else, or perhaps they have, but I missed it.
> Although he currently uses GNOME (due to his disappointment
> with the KDE 4.0 release), Linus Torvalds said: “This ‘users
> are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of
> GNOME is a disease…
This notion is outdated… Too many things changed in Gnome since then and although I still have parts of kde3 installed and I’ve kde4 installed on second PC all my new installations use GNOME only…
There is no way in hell I would even think of installing a KDE based distro for any of my customers. It is so far from done, it’s not even funny. I have tried to like KDE4, but have yet to find any distros version that is usable. Sure, it looks good, but I want my computer to run good. KDE4 is still junk. Gnome for me is reliable as the sun rising.
I used to have KDE but now I’m using GNOME because it is supported by Ubuntu (which I currently use). It is very important to me that everything just works or is going to work in the future. But frankly speaking, both KDE and GNOME have a lot of little but annoying flaws in their design. They both lack simple functionalities present in other desktop environments known from Mac or Windows. But the real problem is, I think not, in KDE or GNOME but in Qt and GTK, where there is no coherent way of programming GUI applications.
I’d just like to say one thing in defense of Konqueror 3.5. It is the only (major??) graphics based browser that allows me to easily run more than one instance.
By running more than one instance, if a real browser crash occurs (which happens to me on konqueror, opera, and Mozilla-based browsers), I lose only the pages open in that particular instance. (With sometimes 60 open web (or local) pages, losing them all I more than inconvenient–even if some of the browsers allow you to automatically reopen the pages you had open.)
Randy Kramer
I think there are some important (imho) points that the author is missing when talking about KDE.
One of these, for example, is network trasnparency: it’s something really great, you can open and edit *any* file from almost *any* network share from *anywhere* as it was a local file. All the apps will see it as a local file, so you can use it to do some cool drag and drop between apps and put togheter data from alla round the world. And yes, it works with KDE 4.2.
The integrated spell checker is another great feature of KDE, imho. It’s everywhere and lets you switch easily the language so you can write also to your friend in Germany or in Spain. It’s nice to know that they’re working on a feature to switch automatically the spell checker language, to make the user’s lie easier.
There’s also a nice password manager that collects and keep in a secure archive your authenticatin informations.
The nepomuk semantic desktop and the desktop search system is also cool and very useful. It’s almost something unique at the moment. At the moment it works mostly in dolphin and in gwenview, and they’re working hard to integrate it with other apps, like amarok and digikam (I love them).
But I understand that the project is running so excitingly fast that it’s difficult for almost anyone to follow its advancements. For example, I just upgraded to KDE 4.2.4, and got the new K3b, marked “1.66.0″ (no beta, no alha, it’s stable!).
The javascript engine of the new konqueror still needs some work, but now you can use konqueror to browse your mail on gmail and do most things on facebook, for example. The results in the V8 Benchmark Suite aren’t so different from firefox, but it still fails on the last test.
They’re working so hard and so fast that most of the times as you open a bug report or ask a new feature it needs really little time to see the bug resolved or the new feature implemented. So I think that the thing that at the moment it’s really great about KDE is not the software itself, but the communitiy around that software! (who said “social desktop”?) ;-)
As I understand it there were very good reasons for a major rewrite of KDE. My compliments to the KDE 4 team, I know it was a lot of work, as any major rewrite would be, and I thank you. I will continue to use KDE 3.5 until KDE 4 gets a bit more of it’s expected polish.
I must protest to the Konqueror bashing. With respectful nods to Nautilus and Dolphin, Konqueror is the best file manager I have ever seen. I love the service menus, transparent FTP usability and split screens. I have to disagree with the KDE team making Konqueror the default web browser as Firefox is hard to compete with.
I am sure that Dolphin works much better than Windows Explorer but Konqueror will always be my file manager.
I do not understand why the KDE team and the Koffice team is breaking the stable/unstable release standards and expecting everyone to say hey it’s okay. They put out a product that is still not ready for prime time, but versioned it as such, possibly because of the strides that the Gnome desktop was making.
I really like the KDE 3.5 series. I really liked the control that O had over my environment. I especially like the fact that I could set a different wallpaper or background on each virtual desktop and center the pager on the panel/taskbar. I also really liked the really easy way to add KDS applets or programs and non-kde programs to the panel. Those features, along with many others that I was used to are gone.
I never really got into gnome. I am currently using the XFCE system and have found a lot to like with it. I have a few gripes, but nothing major. I don’t see myself going back to KDE unless the aforementioned features return.
Just my two cents worth.
Glenn
Having user GNU+Linux over the past ten years, I have used many desktop/windowing environments. I’ve used openbox, fluxbox, enlightenment, xfce, GNOME, and KDE versions 1 through 4.
I still find myself coming back to KDE, and my primary computer currently has fluxbox and KDE 4.2
Sure, the upgrade from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.2 was a bit of a surprise, but since I’ve messed around with so many different desktop/window managers, I enjoyed the struggle.
I use Konqueror as my primary web browser, only using iceweasel (yup, I’m using Debian) or Opera (and I use non-free software, too…. I am an evil freedom-hater!) for those websites that would render better in those browsers. I prefer Konqueror for its integration with Kmail and the whole KDE (the department of redundancy department says that I should say KDE environment).
After several weeks of KDE 4.2, I have decided to stick with it, rather than return to KDE 3.5.
I recently started using KDE and so far I like it. For years I had been using Gnome on Fedora. When I upgraded to Fedora 11, I logged in and installed KDE to start playing around. So far, I like it and I may continue to use KDE for a while. I guess it was just time to change and try something else.
As far as Konqueror goes, well…I will use FF. I have used Firefox as my default for a while and I like it. On Windows I use FF, and in Linux I use FF. A stable browser, very expandable with all the Add-ons, and just simply a great browser. KOffice needs some work, but in time it might be worth using.
Nice article.
Personally, I was a fan of KDE3.x. I am not sure if I am a fan of KDE4.x which does not work well with my the hardware I have. Eventually 3.x is gonna reach end of life, while the old hardware is still alive.
If KDE does not work on older hardware, I am forced to shop for something else and find XFCE/GNOME..
If Kubuntu does not support KDE3.5 anymore, I am forced to try out Xubuntu..
One of the main reasons for moving to Linux (from M$$) is older hardware for home desktops.
Personally I\’ve long since forgot about konqueror and use Arora as my main webbrowser. It\’s a lightweight Qt/Webkit browser that, while still quite new, is really quite a joy to use.
I have preferred KDE for years, but KDE4 has really blown it. Usability is MUCH worse than 3, (poor contrast between elements, slow, lack of old capabilities) are just the beginning. The real problem is reliability, I have to reboot several times a week because my desktop is locked up. At work I have no control and must use it but at home I went back to KDE3. In the past we bragged that we didn\’t release new stuff just for flashy new useless features (ala MS Vista) just so we could have something \”new\”, but that seems to be what KDE has done. In the past I never even tried Umbutu because it was Gnome based, however the other day I loaded it on a box and tried it. It is obvious why it is so popular. The installation was so SMOOTH, (the partition manager was particularly clean) and it came right up. And everything (except connecting to a secure wireless network) just worked. In fact my only 2 complaints were:
1. I like to see what is happening during installation, startup etc. and that wasn\’t even an option.
2. No package selection, and I would be loading packages till Christmas otherwise.
In summary I think that KDE is slitting their own throat, for most people I think what the 1st criteria is that the software work, 2nd that capabilities that they have grown used to shouldn\’t be arbitrarily discarded, finally add new features (with capability to be turned off).
I\’ve been using KDE 4.3rc1 for the last few weeks, and I\’ve been pretty astounded at the enhancements. The problem many people have been having with the lack of configuration options is quickly disappearing- its rare that I\’ll think \”I don\’t really like that functionality\” and not be able to find an option to change it.
And the Konqueror bashing is getting old- its new features (built-in ad blocking, the ability to use WebKit as a rendering engine) have made it a very usable browser.
Plus, it\’s finally becoming stable- generally, when I\’ve tried it out in the past, I usually have to give up and return to 3.5 because of the more severe bugs. Now, the very few troublesome bugs I\’ve found are easily recoverable.
It seems things are finally coming together for KDE 4, and I think that everyone who has given up on it will be in for a surprise if they try the latest releases.
Well, we\’re on to 4.3.4 now and still waiting for KDE4 to be a practical everyday desktop.
I have been a KDE person for many years. Tried a few others but always came back to KDE. When it got to 3.5 I was totally happy with it, this seemed to as close to the perfect desktop as I could ask. However I got a new computer which required a later kernel for the chipset and so was forced to move on. If I\’d known then what I know now, I\’d have gone elsewhere. Now I find myself the victim of lock-in.
I use Kubuntu. \’Hardy Heron\’ provided a KDE3.5 desktop on a solid Linux kernel with deb package management, a system that gave lots of power to users without requiring geek knowlege. To achieve this that power has to be provided through the desktop environment, now that KDE4 has removed much of the power are we expected to become geeks in order to offset sound when playing video (as was easily done with Kaffeine in 3.5, but cannot seem to do with any player in KDE4) or any of the dozens of other things a user may want to tweek. I expect to not have to be a geek, also if I want a morons system I would have installed MS-Windows.
I\’m still scared to move the mouse near the top-right of the screen. To run the risk of accidentally clicking on that cashew which will almost certainly bring my system crashing to the ground. The desktop equivalent of digging a big hole in a main road and leaving it unfenced. Whos bright idea was that?
Regarding Konqueror, okay it\’s not a great browser. But to me it not a browser, it\’s \’accidentally\’ become a great file manager. (Shouts loudly hoping KDE/Konqueror team hears – \’Forget thinking of konqueror as a browser, it\’s a file manager\’.) It\’s way better than than Dolphin rubbish being foisting off on us, please don\’t drop a valuable asset.
However the thing that really bugs me about KDE4 is the lack of choice. I conjure up the picture of bright lights being shone into my eyes while, behind them, a Stazi officer screams \’You VILL work ze vay we tell you to!\’. I started listing examples here but gave up and deleted them as this has to fit into one post. Suffice to say \’Where has the flexibility gone, and why?\’.
Also, I have learnt to live with no sound from my computer. \’arts\’ worked perfectly well but I find \’phonon\’ works intermittently at best. For the past two weeks I haven\’t had a squeak out of my computer. WWhy \’fix\’ something that wasn\’t broken?
I\’d have changed to Gnome months ago but Ubuntu threaten to pull my whole system down in order to install it.
So KDE4s big success has been to change me from a big supporter to a raging hater.
Anyway, not all is bad. I can end on a positive note. K3b is still by far the best burner going and kdenlive is a brilliant addition.