For many years, I have been an exclusive Gnome user for a couple of reasons:
- Its interface is pure and usable (aka. the nazi interface)
- It’s usable directly with the default Fedora installation, no tweaking needed
- Many of the UI ameliorations for PackageKit, NetworkManager and a ton of other small improvements have hit Gnome recently, thanks to all the major Linux distributions using it as their default desktop.
- I’m too lazy to try something else
So what’s wrong with Gnome? Well, nothing. I’m perfectly happy and productive with it, but there is also this shiny thing called KDE looking at me with sad little puppy eyes.
I know that the Fedora KDE SIG has worked very hard to propose a quality desktop experience in KDE, so I want to give it a shot for the Fedora 12 cycle…As usual, my mind put up a fight and refused change; what if I don’t get all my usability tools back? what if KDE was buggy? what if it was slow?
The only real way to give KDE 4.3 a fair shot was to reinstall my laptop with the Fedora 12 Beta DVD, only with the KDE desktop environment…so that’s what I did a couple of days ago. After the initial reboot, I found myself swimming in a scary world of unknown concepts. Here are some candid thoughts and problems I faced as a new user:
- In the default theme, the text under the icons on the desktop is black with a white halo. This is almost unusable as soon as you have a dark-ish background; so I switched the colour from black to white, like in Gnome.
- One feature I use everyday at work in Gnome is SSH Menu. It turns out that you can also save SSH bookmarks and group them in folders in Konsole. In the current version, you can’t open whole SSH groups though…it’s an already fixed bug so I guess that it will come in the next update.
- By default, file indexing and searching isn’t activated, and if you try to activate it via the GUI you will get an error. I found an explanation here and have rebuilt the soprano-backend-sesame2 RPM for Fedora 12 x86-64 if someone is interested.
- At each login, I have to unlock the keyring for the NetworkManager applet to be able to connect to WiFi networks, that’s annoying.
- To get an “usable” desktop for my work needs, it took 5-6x more time to configure the interface than in Gnome, there are LOTS of options everywhere.
- If like me you installed a standard Fedora (Gnome + GDM) and the added KDE, you may notice that your laptop doesn’t go to sleep when you close the lid. To resolve this problem, I had to switch from GDM to KDM as explained on the wiki.
Once tweaked, I’m pretty happy with KDE 4. The composition performance feels faster than Gnome + Compiz, and much better integrated.
It still doesn’t match all my needs but it’s very close to being as usable as Gnome…right now, you can feel that it isn’t as tightly integrated and tested with Fedora as Gnome is. Some things like special function keys on my keyboard work in Gnome and don’t in KDE for example.
Unfortunately, that Konsole patch has been committed to the trunk only, so it will be only in 4.4.0, not 4.3.3. (It seems they consider it an added feature, not a bug that warrants fixing in a release branch.) That said, if you ask nicely, we may backport this to our 4.3.3 Fedora packages.
As for the NetworkManager stuff, try installing knetworkmanager and removing NetworkManager-gnome, that way you’ll 1. get rid of the annoying keyring password prompts (it uses KWallet instead, so if you set your wallet to passwordless, at least the one you let knetworkmanager store its keys in (you can have multiple wallets), bye bye password prompts!) and 2. help us test knetworkmanager so it can be a rock solid default for Fedora 13.
For the Soprano stuff, it looks like you found a temporary solution, but with KDE 4.4 you should get something working out of the box (the Virtuoso backend). There’s also ongoing work (by Mary Ellen Foster) on getting soprano-backend-sesame2 into Fedora, it’s just hard because we aren’t allowed to just ship the binary JARs as is, we have to rebuild everything from source code and that’s a lot of dependencies. And in the long run, Virtuoso is probably the better solution anyway (it’s also much more likely to fit on our live CD).
As for the special function keys, we and other distro folks are working on it, we got Qt to recognize those keys already (one of the kde-qt patches does it), and KMix should be handling the volume keys (if it doesn’t, let us know so we can look into fixing it, the shortcuts are there and set by default, so it’s expected to work). Brightness keys are an open issue, PowerDevil will be handling those, we recently brought this up with the upstream PowerDevil developer, so there’s hope it’ll be sorted out soon.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the knetworkmanager tip, it works perfectly now. About the Konsole patch, I won’t die to wait until 4.4, so if it takes more than 5 minutes to backport it just don’t bother…it’s an usability feature, not a showstopper.
The brightness control keys are exactly the ones that are not working, but the volume keys perfectly work. So it’s the “expected” behaviour.
“all the major Linux distributions using [Gnome] as their default desktop”
openSUSE not a major distro?
Nice article though, and as a KDE and Fedora user I echo your comments about the great work the KDE SIG does.
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Good article! Only one thing:
“To get an “usable” desktop for my work needs, it took 5-6x more time to configure the interface than in Gnome, there are LOTS of options everywhere.”
I’m a happy KDE user, but apparently you only feel comfortable with KDE when you have tweaked some things. If you could explain *what* changes you made, they might be suggestions for the KDE developers to think about. For me the defaults are all fine, but discussion about usability is always worth the effort imho.
The changes are all small things, for example:
- Remove the activation delay on the screen edges detection. I can’t really see what you want to achieve by keeping it at 350ms by default. It induces a “sluggish-feel” delay for the ones who use the screen edge detection while not preventing at all an accidental edge detection for the people who don’t.
- As I stated in http://www.alphatek.info/2009/11/01/fedora-configure-the-kde-dashboard-to-behave-like-in-osx/, the dashboard doesn’t behave like I think it should.
- The Nepomuk search results are available in Dolphin, but not in the kickoff search box as I firs expected. Again, I was looking for an apple Spotlight experience: an unique search box to launch programs and files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28software%29
- In the same order, I changed the keyboard shortcut to open kickoff from Ctrl+F1 to Alt+Space. This is the shortcut OSX is using to launch Spotlight. The thinking behind that is that to launch an application, I hit these easy accessible keys, start to type the first letters of an application and it launches the application. It’s something I do often, without having to touch the mouse or click.
Other things I noticed:
- The Nepomuk service constantly spams messages in my “Notifications and Jobs” area, it tells me every time it stops/starts to index files, that is around 50x every hour. This doesn’t sound right and I don’t know how to tell it to shut up
- In Cashew, how the hell was I supposed to know that clicking on “Zoom Out” would lead me to the desktop activity/dashboard configuration screen? See http://www.alphatek.info/2009/11/01/fedora-configure-the-kde-dashboard-to-behave-like-in-osx/ again.
As you may notice, I’m referring to OSX quite a lot. Don’t take it in a bad way, but they do a lot of things very right from an usability standpoint. The technology is clearly there in KDE, only not used at its full potential. All these things may seem trivial to you, but as a new user it’s not.
That Konsole patch should be quite trivial to apply.
The KDE keyboard shortcuts are more inspired by Window$ than Mac. The default menu shortcut (which is Alt+F1, not Ctrl+F1) is the one Window$ uses (as an alternative to the Window$ key, but in KDE, we can’t use the same key as a key by itself and as a modifier, so it’s set to be only a modifier (used in several shortcuts), and so Alt+F1 is the only shortcut set for the menu).
You might want to try KRunner (just hit alt+F2), that comes closer to the spotlight-like functionality you expect. It’s based on plugins and is very powerful.
Indeed sebas, that’s more like it, thanks for the tip!
I’m not experiencing those Nepomuk notifications (but I’m running an older KDE version) and the 350ms isn’t irritating me. But your tips regarding the plasma dashboard is really good to know (didn’t know that!).
And, like sebas already said, I’m attaching Alt+space to KRunner (usually Alt+F3). KRunner is capable of more than finding apps. Nepomuk searches and simple other queries (check the “?” button and plugin options!). I’m using KRunner all the time.
My last tip: I was using Alt+Tab a lot, but attached “Toggle Present Windows” to the Meta + Tab combination. Good to know is this toggle function is similar to Exposé of the Mac *and* it has the ability to filter. So press Meta + Alt and start typing the window you need. It’s much faster than hitting Alt+Tab multiple times or using the mouse to navigate
The Kickoff “spotlight” search feature problem is solved in 4.4. Kickoff now use the same backend as alt+F2. It should have been the default since 4.0, but at least its done now. Beagle was the default in KDE3 kickoff, so this was clearly a regression. But I hate kickoff anyway, I can’t beleve a Gnome user can tolerate it. The gnome menu are one of the only feature I prefer in Gnome (I am a KDE user). Fortunately, right clicking on Kickoff icon and switching back to KMenu then adding a second and a third one to act as favorite and place menu make it better than gnome.
But alt+f2 (krunner) is currently the best way to launch apps or open documents.
Yeah, I second that. Please, replace the Kickoff search box with a KRunner enabled box. It would be simply amazing.
That’s indeed done for 4.4 (to be out in January). Not sure if we’ll enable all the plugins, but the functionality is there.
Have you tried Lancelot (it’s included in KDE) as main menu? It works best for me. Lancelot for menu and KRunner as launcher.
“To get an “usable” desktop for my work needs, it took 5-6x more time to configure the interface than in Gnome, there are LOTS of options everywhere.”
That’s because you’re Gnome user. When I’ve installed Gnome it took 5-6x more time to configure the interface then in KDE (for me). There a lots of options in Gnome to. That’s the beauty of Linux – you can setup (almost) anything to work on your way.
OSX gets it’s own usability, Windows hets it’s own… it’s a choice. Anyway, I like your rewiev.
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