whistler’s blog

I first tried linux around in the year 2000 or maybe it was ‘01. Although I’ve used both along side, I found KDE better then Gnome as it has more features and lots of things to configure and tweak. I had mainly been using Redhat and then Fedora. In 2005, I shifted to Ubuntu and loved the simplicity the gnome desktop had to provide. Recently, I took a look at KDE 4 screenshots and was really impressed. KDE has a completely new polished look, and has evolved a lot since I last used it. Therefore I decided to check it out.

There are lots of cool new things: New Icons, amazing desktop widgets such as the desktop folders feature. There is the awesome alt+f2 program launcher. I love the way the USB harddisks are handled, same goes for the network connections. The KDE menu is very organized and searchable. Several of the compiz-like desktop effects are also available. The dolphin file manager is way better than Konqueror and of course the Amarok, the awesomest music player, integrates nicely into the environment. All this made me swtich to KDE 4 as the primary desktop environment.

But, still there exist a few usability issues. There are no mouse+keyboard shortcut keys. Hotkeys can only be a combination on the keyboard, which makes window management not nearly as fun as compiz does. Although I have four desktops, its hard to make complete use of them because of this. The thumbnail previews in Dolphin are not as good as in Nautilus. I have never felt the need for a password manager, so KWallet just seems annoying. Although the Klipper tool looks very neat, I hav’nt found myself using it at all, even when programming. I like Pidgin better than Kopete. The groupings in the panel are not that configurable, there is no option to show windows from only the current desktop. The GUI’s package management tools are not as good as what gnome has. My extra keyboard keys for music were not mapped to Amarok automatically. Vlc has a bug that shows videos in a seperate window. This turned out to be a Jaunty related bug.

At first I thought it would just take me a little time to adjust, I did adjust to some of the problems. For example instead of using tilda(~) as a shortcut for a terminal, I started using alt+ctrl+t, because KDE would not allow me to use tilda as a hotkey.  But it turns out that I cant use KDE as productively as Gnome even after giving it a few weeks to adjust. Although I give great importance to user interfaces and am a big fan of all the UI eyecandy, you shouldnt judge software by its screenshots.