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A first taste of the new KDE

by · 18th March, 2005

The new version of KDE, one of two major “desktop environments” for Unix-type operating systems like Linux, was released on Wednesday, and like a lot of users, I eagerly awaited packages I could download and install. Novell (the company which distributes SUSE Linux, which is the operating system I use on my laptop) is usually pretty good about issuing such packages (known as RPMs), and sure enough, they were on Novell’s website ready for me to download last night.

The first packages I went for were, of course, the base packages. This gave me my first real experience of what’s commonly called “dependency hell”: the frustrating search for the packages you need in order to install the packages you’ve got. There is a system which allows you to specify a package and it will download all its dependencies and install them (called APT), but Novell doesn’t use it. I ended up uninstalling a bit and downloading far more than I thought I’d have to.

As ever, the startup screen has changed, the icons are still the same (at least, the same as they usually are in SUSE); the control centre has a “theme manager”, allowing the user to make and choose packages of user interface settings: typefaces, window styles and an icon set in one package. I’m not sure if it’s new for 3.4, but I’ve not noticed it before. I’m not sure why anyone would want to use some of those themes - they include one containing all yellow objects on a bright blue background - but some of them are certainly useful. And one funny thing about 3.3 has gone, which won’t be missed. When you go to log out, the colour goes out of the background gradually. With 3.3, the screen (apart from the window asking you whether to log out, shut down or reboot) would go black and white starting at the top and working its way down. This gives the impression that the effect is working at a slower rate to the rest of the machine, and I’m not sure if it was a bug, or a deliberate effect. It looked bad, and I’m glad it’s gone.

Konqueror, KDE’s integrated file and web browser, has the same bugs it always had, which it appears to share with Apple’s Safari, based on the same technology. It doesn’t handle Javascript properly, so that the editing buttons known to users of WordPress and Movable Type don’t work properly, and the “Empty” button in Hotmail’s Junk Mail window doesn’t work at all. I’m using Konqueror to type this, and the spell checker recognises the word Konqueror - with a K - and KDE, but not “KDE’s” as written above. I’m surprised the authors didn’t make sure that their spell-checker recognised a legitimate derivative of the name of their colleague’s work. Konqueror also detects RSS feeds, and if you select them, the dedicated aggregator program “aKregator” handles them. Personally, I don’t have much use for RSS, but if you like it, it’s there.

The login screen has changed - it now has a big system messages window, and the menu has changed a bit. It now recognises my installation of XFce 4, a more lightweight desktop system, which the old version didn’t.

All in all, I like this product a lot - it has much more visual consistency than older versions, and seems to work faster as well. KDE has a reputation for being over-featured and “bloated”, but its underlying technology (Qt) itself is faster than that on which other Linux desktops are based (GTK). Bloat or no, this upgrade works very well on my system.

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