Last night I installed KDE 4.1 on my bare-bones Debian Lenny (Testing) System and much to my disbelief I actually quite like it. Recently I’ve been using Openbox on this computer, because it’s fast and looks quite nice too; I think Openbox is a decent step up from Fluxbox.
I remember being put off of KDE 4 the first time I tried it because despite it looking quite nice I found it buggy. I couldn’t configure the panel and a few other things; it was just simply in-complete and kind-of embarrassing. I was actually pretty annoyed because KDE 3 had developed so much since version 3.1.4 that was current when I first discovered Linux back in 2004…
Well anyway… this is just a brief comment for now, I’ll write more once I find things that start to irritate me!
A couple observations:
Good:
* Konqueror as a browser seems to be improved, that’s what I’m using to write this… I seem to be trapped in code mode though, rather than having all the pretty icons I can switch to in Firefox (Iceweasel….)
* Comic Strip widget… nice!
* Desktop effects, transparency, sliding windows as I change desktop…. nice
Bad:
* I can’t roll up my windows?! wth?
* I don’t seem to be able to switch virtual desktops with the mouse wheel on the background…. pet hate…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Debian, KDE, Linux, Window Managers, X11
I installed it on my workstation HP laptop and it worked like sh*t pretty much. I’m using an Nvidia graphics card and it doesn’t like it very much. Just moving or rotating desktop widgets would freeze it up.
I switched to Xfce4 and it worked fine, it’s much simpler. Once KDE4 gets it’s act together I’ll probably switch. I found that KDE4 doesn’t have any more options than KDE3.5 and other than it’s looks it’s no better than most other desktop environments right now. In the next few months I believe it’s going to really brighten up.
What kind of Nvidia card do you have? I’ve got an FX5500 (AGP), which is pretty old, and I haven’t had any trouble yet… I find that the desktop effects function better than Compiz does on my system. I kinda get the impression that my Compiz problems are due to a lack of RAM rather than anything else tho (I only have 512MB RAM atm)