KDE 4 – Third Time’s the Charm?

Having recently upgraded to Jaunty, I thought it might be time to give KDE another try. I have been a little tough on KDE in the past, but I have always maintained it has potential. Time to see if 4.2 can finally deliver!

Earlier posts on KDE:
A Second Taste of KDE: Laptop Flavor
My first taste of KDE…

This is all based on the Kubuntu 9.04 desktop, not Project Neon or anything like that – I do welcome information about alternative KDE apps and upcoming changes!

Dual Monitors (Dual Cards)

This is an area where KDE is still not quite up to speed. It seems that KDE doesn’t support separate X screens, unless they are joined by Xinerama. I don’t want to beat them up too much about it, because it seems to me there’s a whole lot of fingerpointed between various parties on how exactly to handle multiple monitors. I really would like to see someone take charge of this area, because this is still a frustrating issue in almost all environments.

I run 3 monitors on 2 nvidia cards; usually I run [1|2][3], where [1|2] are joined with Twinview and [1|2] is one X screen and [3] is another. XFCE supports this fine, with the caveat that maximizing and opening windows on [1|2] was a pain, because it was always in the middle of the two monitors.Compiz can work around that for a large part, though.

Under KDE, this arrangement left [3] solid black with an “X” shaped cursor. Enabling Twinview brought up the third monitor, but that raises performance and compositing problems.

Right now I am running [1][2][3], 3 separate X screens with Xinerama, and it works out well enough.

Torrent

KTorrent is comparable to what I was using (Deluge). The main problem there is that the blocklist support is goofed up – it won’t load the most common blocklists. I haven’t found a good solution for that.

KTorrent

The interface is a bit complicated; for example, ordering a queue takes place in an entirely different panel (down there at the bottom), rather than a simple queue number in the “main” panel where the torrent information is presented (top right). Also, notice in the top that there are multiple panes – there is basically a web browser integrated there with about a half-dozen pre-set torrent search engines.

A final issue is that I can’t seem to examine the files inside the torrent once the download starts; often when getting a large, multi-file torrent, I want to look “inside” the torrent and perhaps open a specific file that has completed. If this is possible, I can’t see how to do it in KTorrent.

Kopete

This is the replacement for Pidgin, but apparently it does not support IRC (yet?). It used to I think, and there are IRC clients for KDE, but I liked only having to mess with one chat client. Outside of that, Kopete seems fine.

Dragon Player

This is a decent media player, but for some reason it “skips” — A LOT — when doing things like dragging windows, scrolling windows and so forth. Now, I’m not sure this is totally the player’s fault, it might be a particular mix of some other things, but I never noticed this sort of “skipping” with other players under other configurations.

When I say “skipping”, I mean the audio is smooth, but the video “stutters” as other window activity occurs (moving, dragging, scrolling) – sort of a Max Headroom sort of thing only on the video side. Crazy annoying.

Okular

This is a pretty nice graphic viewer. To my surprise, it came up as the default for .cbr/.cbz files (scanned comic book archives in .rar or .zip format). This would be a perfectly fine replacement for Comix – IF it would automatically open up the next comic book. When you have a bunch to read through, it is a bit inconvienient to “Open File” every time.

I understand that Comix is absolutely focused on that one specific niche, and I’ve seen some other apps that are focused specifically on .cbr/.cbz, but right now I am focused on the “out-of-the-box” experience.

Oh and if you could move through the pages with the mouse wheel – that would be nice, too!

Dolphin

Dolphin

Dolphin is a very-well done – if not the best – KDE application I’ve used so far. It has lots of features:

• Information pane previews are well done, morphing from one icon/preview to another as different files are selected; most media types can play, and text files show actual contents in preview.
• Split/Unsplit views – I love me a split-pane file manager sometimes
• When copying files, if there is a name collision, Dolphin can automatically suggest a new name – very nice!
• Breadcrump path at top of viewer is nice
• The panels are very nice, allowing a folder tree view and even a terminal that sort-of syncs with the GUI part.

There are a few minor issues with Dolphin:

• Sometimes the “breadcrumb” path turns into a regular input-style widget. I’m not sure why, nor was it immediately obvious how to toggle the style. (Settings  > “Configure Dolphin” > “Editable location bar” doesn’t seem to work)
• The “single-click to open” behavior is a bit tricky to get used to at first – only at first, though, after a few days, I’m pretty comfortable there.
• The interface is quite complex, perhaps overly so. For example, the panels are detachable – I guess someone might find that useful. This is not a problem of just Dolphin, most of KDE seems struggling a bit on how to expose all the customization options in a non-overwhelming manner.

Amarok

Amarok still feels about beta-level in terms of implemented features – mainly because the podcast and media player support is not complete. It works well enough as an audio player for a local music library, and has some nice touches like tracks fading out instead of cutting off and so forth.

I consider it inferior to what I had been using (Rhythmbox), and I’ve even been giving some other audio players a look lately (Songbird right now, which also has poor podcast support, sadly.)

Panel

The KDE Panel – the “menu bar at the bottom” is right nice.

The notifications are nice and well done – I like Dolphin sending things like file copy/move notifications to the panel, instead of a pop-up dialog. It really reduces on-screen clutter and gives an “integrated” feel to the desktop.

Another cool panel feature is the little file browser – called “Quick Access”, I think – a very nice pop-up file browser that lets you navigate to a file without having to start up Dolphin.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I haven’t been able to figure out how to set up keyboard shortcuts. There are a couple of keyboard shortcut options in the system settings: “Standard Keyboard Shortcuts” and “Global Keyboard Shortcuts”. Under “Global Keyboard Shortcuts” there are several drop-down options like “Amarok”, “KMix”, “KWin”, “khotkeys” and so on. Couldn’t figure out how to set up a shortcut to do something like, launch a shell, though.

In Summary

I’ve been using KDE for 2 weeks now – it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but usable. I wouldn’t actually recommend the KDE 4.x environment at the point, to be honest it’s still much closer to “release candidate” status than “.2 release” status.

That being said, at least 4.2 is usable, whereas I couldn’t stand 4.0 or 4.1 for more than a day or so. I’ll be sticking with KDE for a bit more, hoping that 4.3 and related applications continue to improve.