So, the other day KDE4 was released, with a new interface and widgets and whatnot. It all looked pretty shiny, and I finally got around to installing the kubuntu packages for it this morning.
It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.
Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great – especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) – I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.
Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.
I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these – but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.
All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.
Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.
Hm the run dialog (called KRunner) is still here. I just press the usuall Alt+F2 (or right click on a desktop en select Run Command) and the dialog shows up just fine, now even more powerful than in KDE 3. I like it for example how you can do quick calculation in it (try to enter =66/3 for example).
Yeah I also miss the panel setting like you, especialy to only show windows from only the current desktop.
And for keyboard shortcuts, they are also there just fine. I just used the search field to search for “shortcuts” and so found them in System administration > Keyboard and mouse.
And finaly I agree with you that KDE 4.0.0 is not finished yet. But that should be clear, it is the very first version released in the KDE 4 series (not even a bugfix one). I still remember when KDE 3.0.0 came out, the situation was even worse then now with KDE 4.0.0 and just look how awsome KDE 3.5 became. I believe it will already be a whole lot better in KDE 4.1 now that the solid foundations are here.
Yay the fix to add an option to show only the windows from current desktop is in:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&m=120059083405119
Cheers for the comments. I’ve been meaning to have another look this weekend, especially since there have been a number of updates in Kubuntu.
Very glad to hear that the windows from current desktop change has made it in, and look forward to that hitting an update for Kubuntu soon.
I should probably have made it clearer at the time that I’d not long since got out of bed and hadn’t really played around with it that much – so as you mentioned with krunner, I was obviously doing it wrong in areas.
I’ll probably post a follow up this weekend if I get chance to have a decent play with it.
I just installed it today from the LiveCD, and there were definitely a lot of loose ends to fix after the install, but overall it seems pretty good. I think, with work, it will be pretty awesome.
Thanks for that info, I was also wondering where the dialog is, and since I’m using compiz the Alt+F2 wasn’t working correctly.
KDE 4.2 is really nice, a lot of the bugs were fixed.
[...] been a while since I first tried KDE 4 on Kubuntu, but as I recently bought a new machine, I figured I’d give it another whirl. Admittedly, I [...]