KDE 4.1 : First Impressions

Okay, this is something I had been wanting to try for quite some time now. Before I begin, let me tell you that I have been a GNOME fan ever since I have used my Fedora Core 3, and KDE 3.x has never appealed to me. But since KDE 4 looked a lot different in the screenshots from its predecessors, I wanted to give it another chance. And KDE 4.1 turned out to be a bundle of pleasant surprises all the way through.

Installation:

I wanted to install KDE 4.1 on my existing Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) Hardy. This softpedia article provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it. And the bundle of pleasant surprises opened up right from the installation stage. The installation proceeded without a single hitch from the beginning to end, something I admit, I wasn’t expecting at all. All I did was follow a few steps from that article and I was ready to login to KDE! It didn’t even need a reboot! Mind you, I might be one of those luckier ones here, because as the comments in the article tell you, not all of them had everything working for them. I changed my session to KDE and logged in, and was greeted by a beautiful splash screen and an unusual looking desktop. And I was on my way to start playing with a brand new approach to using my desktop.

Things I liked:

Let’s quickly get to the things I liked in KDE 4.1. First of all, the desktop looks great. And I mean really stunning. The default wallpaper’s great, the color combination’s good (some say it looks too much like Vista, but I am not complaining), there’s a new way your desktop icons show up and overall, there’s only one word to describe it: Refreshing. I quickly headed over to the start menu (or main menu or K-menu or Applicaton Launcher or whatever it is called). There was another of those surprises awaiting me. The menu is grouped into different categories with little tab-like things which switch when I hover over them. Certainly beats the hell out of GNOME’s three different menus which eat up all of my panel space. And best of all, there is a search bar waiting for me to type the first few characters of the application I want to open. Kind of like Launchy built into the start menu. Next I proceeded to try out the desktop widgets. They are very similar to Google Desktop’s widgets, except it is easier to dock them anywhere you want. I admit the number of widgets provided is not much, but it will only get better. I decided an analog clock will look nice on mine. Then I played around for a while with the desktop settings. Another surprise. Instead of an image, I can put a slideshow of images as my wallpaper. So I gave the path of my wallpapers directory and set the timer to change it every two minutes. You can only imagine how interesting this is going to make my computing experience (all the wallpapers I have are of pretty actresses). I headed towards the file manager now. Another thing that made me smile. A tabbed file manager, which looks like the Xplorer2 I use on Windows! Good God, I have had dreams like this! The run command brings up a tiny Launchy like window, and even does exactly the same things as Launchy, with the drop-down menu and all that. I can see KDE becoming a very useful and productive desktop.

KDE 4.1 Desktop (Not the default wallpaper!)

Things I didn’t like:

Having sung praises of KDE, I must admit there are some things I didn’t like. The toolbar and the titlebar of the windows look as dull as ever. Sure, you can customize almost anything in KDE, but why does such a beautiful desktop have such sad looking windows? Adding stuff to my panel and rearranging them was a major pain. The widgets moved erratically and I wondered more than once how a particular widget got there when I definitely didn’t want to put it there. I breathed a satisfactory sigh only when I got all the widgets where I wanted and locked them. I won’t dare to move them any time soon for sure! Another feature I didn’t like was how Dolphin (the file manager) insists on opening everything on single click. Hey, I come from a Windows (gasp!) background, and I like to double-click stuff, ok? How do I change it? Also the Application Launcher (or K-menu, etc) shows me gibberish for a fraction of a second before loading my menu. Is my hardware too old for KDE 4? Maybe. I don’t know.

Final thoughts:

In spite of all these shortcomings (mostly minor, as you must have observed), I have to put KDE 4.1 under the “Exceeds Expectations” category. So where does this put me, the die-hard GNOME fan? I’ll put it this way: Yesterday when I was logging into KDE, a window came up asking me if I wanted to make KDE the default desktop. I thought for a moment, and clicked on  “Make Default”.

Don’t worry, I am not saying everything is over between me and GNOME. I’ll be following its releases closely, and who knows, I might switch back if it gives me a better desktop experience!

Tabbed Browsing for your Folders

There are some of us out there who feel that the days before tabbed browsing was discovered, the world was a sad, sad place. It’s almost like going back to the stone ages. The way tabbed browsing has simplified managing our open websites is truly amazing. This made me reflect sadly on the fact that we can’t do such a thing with our Windows file manager (I’m talking about XP here. I have no clue what Vista offers). So often it happens that we have so many folders open that our taskbar is completely cluttered with them. Managing those open windows is more trouble than it is worth.

And that set me thinking. How wonderful it would be if the folders I open just open inside a tab and not a separate window. It would make the job of managing them really simple. As it turns out, there are some ways you can do it. Here are a couple of them:

• Chuck your default file manager and use a new one. Try Xplorer2.
• Use your web browser to open folders. In fact, in IE if you type a path in the address bar, it will open the folder right there. Firefox does too, but the interface is really bad. Type c: in both IE and Firefox and you’ll see what I mean. So I suppose using IE7, which has tabbed browsing, pretty much solves the problem. But for people who prefer firefox, you might want to install this add-on. It brings the native windows look when you open folders in firefox. Here’s how it will look:

So that’s one problem solved. But all this makes me wonder why there should be two different things called web browsers and file managers. Why can’t there be one elegant interface to both?