A few weeks ago I wrote a review of Gnome 3 (With stuff I hated and stuff I liked separated). Since the ‘hated’ one was viewed many times more, I decided to write about the good, the bad, and the ugly about KDE 4.6.3 in a single post.
As a hardcore GNOME user, switching over to KDE felt weird. Not in a bad way, but I kept on bumping into things that GNOME did different (Not better, different) and kept missing some of GNOME’s defaults.
The Good
- I really like the plasmoids and the desktop itself. I loved the built-in Plasmoid Downloader.
- Everything can be configured to fit your needs. This is a GNOME user’s wet dream.
- The app launcher is separated neatly into categories and sections. I really like this launcher.
- There’s a billion themes I can choose from, and KDE has a built-in Theme Downloader.
- You can actually add buttons to the title bar and customize the themes.
- Alt-F2 launches KRunner which is the best damned thing since the wheel was invented.
- The Notifications and Jobs plasmoid is extremely neat. It pulls all queues like transferring files and alerts into a single button.
- GTK2 apps, like Firefox, look great on KDE.
- K3B works waaaaay better than Brasero Disc Burner. In fact, it always works, unlike Brasero.
- KDE has an awesome amount of screensavers. Gnome has one.
- I can yum remove gnome* safely.
- There’s a semi-hidden option to display preview tooltips on Dolphin. It’s awesome!
The Bad
- The defaults. I hated a lot of them. (But guess what? They can be changed!)
- One-click opens folders and files. Again, this can be changed, but I hate the default behavior.
- Clicking links on Pidgin sends it to KDE’s queue (To see if the link is an image, to open in gwenview). This makes clicking links take forever.
- I could not figure out how to play music on Amarok. I’m using Rhythmbox instead. (For the record, I loved KDE 3′s Amarok. New one’s weird)
- Krappy Names. It’s not “klever”, its lame. Please drop it.
- KDE’s plasma has died on me several times.
Nautilus used to give me a preview of text files, thumbnails of videos and pictures. Dolphin can’t.- File-Roller > Ark. I couldn’t move the contents of a .zip or.tarball without uncompressing and recompressing on Ark. File-roller lets me.
- Ctrl H doesn’t display hidden files on Dolphin. Ctrl . does. This can be changed.
- I can’t get the App Launcher to bind to ‘Super’. I had to bind it to ‘Super’-Space instead.
- Sometimes I stare at the screen for a while and just get sad.
The Ugly
- I could not get KDE to recognize a Bluetooth Mouse. I had to go to GNOME 3 to configure it.
- I had KDE freeze completely, where the only cure was to mv .kde .kdeold.
- GNOME 3 apps. They look ugly on KDE. (GNOME 3 apps on GNOME 3 look ugly too)
KDE feels really stable, despite the few bugs I’ve found so far, but for some reason, just doesn’t feel like home. I guess I’ll have to adapt myself to this.
You can enable text/image/video previews in Dolphin, either in the icon view itself, in the information sidebar, or in the popup tooltips.
Woah! I had never used the popup tooltips. These are awesome!
What problem did you have with the Bluetooth mouse? if you had it configured by GNOME then it should be configured within KDE since we both use BlueZ.
Also, can you check what version of bluedevil do you have? 1.1 I hope.
Thanks! and if you could report a bug at bugs.kde.org that would be awesome !
I didn’t have it configured in Gnome. After leaving Gnome 3, I bought the mouse. I tried several Bluetooth configuration tools, including BlueZ 4.87.
I totally meant to report a bug, but after it worked on Gnome (And the configuration keeps working on KDE), I admit I totally forgot about it until today.
Would be awesome if you could give me the BlueDevil version and try to configure with it again, Bluetooth Mouses are supposed to work :p
Well yeah, they’re supposed to work, they’re very very basic devices
Try Clementine as a native qt alternative to rhythmbox. It’s a qt4 rewrite of amarok 3. You should love it:)
It is not a rewrite, it is a fork/port iirc
“Everything can be configured to fit your needs. This is a GNOME user’s wet dream.”
I disagree with that statement. GNOME is uncustomizable by design. This is one of the basic principles of GNOME. If a user has such a dream she is not a GNOME user.
Been a GNOME user for a long time. I really like customization, but a lot of that has to be done fiddling with annoying gconf files through gconf-editor or passing obscure commands through the command line.
If GNOME Users didn’t want customization, why do tools like “gnome-tweak-tools” exist?
Pues, le vés un montón de defectos a KDE porque venís de GNOME y notás la diferencia a lo que estás acostumbrado. Si hicieras lo contrario, escribieras algo diferente. KDE tiene otra filosofía de uso, por lo tanto la forma de trabajar, y obvio que no va ser como GNOME.
Eh, no los consideraría defectos, la mayoría de estos es comportamiento default al que ‘yo no estoy acostumbrado’. Todo este comportamiento lo puedo modificar a mi gusto. Esto me encanta.
> “Everything can be configured to fit your needs. This is a GNOME user’s wet dream.”
You mean “nightmare” ?
I always feel lost in KDE. It seems like I have to change so many things before I can use it, but I don’t want to. And when I actually want to change something, there are so many options everywhere that it takes me half an hour before I give up.
> “If GNOME Users didn’t want customization, why do tools like “gnome-tweak-tools” exist?”
Because those users didn’t realize that they were in complete disagreement with the very basis of the GNOME philosophy, and yet they seem to force themselves to use a desktop environment that doesn’t suit their needs. Talk about being masochistic…
That, or because sometimes the defaults are not good **yet**, and thus an alternative need to be made relatively easy, while the problem is being fixed.
BlueDevil no te funcionó para el Mouse? Raro… O.o
Bueno, tarde que temprano espero que te guste más KDE que Gnome
Yo empecé con Gnome, traté de probar KDE en Mandriva y me desesperé, pero en cuanto lo probé en Fedora se convirtió en mi favorito.
Saludos!
What i didn’t like about KDE4: 1. Scattergun approach to buttons 2. using far too many resources!
“GNOME 3 apps. They look ugly on KDE. (GNOME 3 apps on GNOME 3 look ugly too)”
If you use Oxygen, install the oxygen-gtk package.
>Krappy Names. It’s not “klever”
Oh please stfu about this already!!!
Do you REALLY want to do this?
Because I got a list of dumb ass G names for you:
Gparted, gbrainy, Gcaltool, gCompris, gDesklets, GStreamer, gthumb, GDM, gConf, gedit, gevice, Gget, Gwget, Gnac, glabels, Glom, Gnumeric, GOBm Gossip, Galeon, Guppi, Gtranslator,
(btw, I like gossip and Jai Compris is brilliant in french)
Do you want me to continue?
People will always whine about names but stupid naming schemes is NOT a KDE trait only.
Maybe you find the K more jarring than the G visually but there is NO better or worse in this race…. only prejudice and repeating of meme’s.
Both have equally stupid names and BOTH have a letter fetish.
I don’t like g-stuff either.
It’s my blog, I get to rant about inane things if I want to
Yes it’s a port but the point was adequately made I think.
For what it’s worth my forays into the K_verse weren’t horrible. Stability was usually an issue (plasma has gotten better but is still not stable enough for my machine), very configurable but the more I configured the more I wanted to configure but found I couldn’t change everything the way I wanted (obviously an issue with this much configurability is that I start seeing things I slightly dislike and I get annoyed I can’t change them)