6 months with KDE 4 wrap up

About 6 months ago, I wrote a blogpost  entitled “I’m giving KDE 4 a shot in Fedora 12“. Fedora 13 is now just around the corner and it’s time for some feedback!

Performance

Overall, I deployed the successive KDE versions showing up during the Fedora 12 life-cycle on 4 computers. What struck me the most compared to Gnome is how diverse the experience was. Gnome + composition feels much the same on each machine, you don’t really notice a big difference in terms of performance if you have an integrated Intel chip or the latest ATI graphic card.

Due to KDE’s higher usage of composition features (and nobody wants to run KDE without composition), it was much more a hit or miss situation. On 2 of my computers with ATI Radeon HD 4550 + the open source driver, KDE was just unusable. Ironically, KDE feels the fastest on integrated Intel chips. Even there, the kickstart menu opening behaves strangely sometimes, it feels sluggish the first 3-4 times you open it; you can see it open “transparently”, then redraw the real menu content on top of it 0.5 seconds later.

I’m well aware that it’s probably a driver issue and not KDE’s fault, but what end-users see is simply a slow desktop…they don’t want to know why it’s slow. Installing ATI’s proprietary driver probably helps, but as ATI seems to only release new drivers following the Ubuntu release cycle, we are out of luck.

Usability and complexity

Usability is what I was the most concerned about. As with every new environment, you have to get used to the tools it provides. Here I have to thank the Fedora KDE SIG for quickly migrating to new KDE versions, I could really see a better user experience at each release. All my initial complaints were addressed, which speaks for itself regarding the huge work they (and upstream) do.

What is really nice compared to Gnome is to have only one task bar/panel (like in Windows). On modern 16/10 and even more on 16/9 displays, it gives you more space for your programs. It feels cleaner. After some weeks, I found replacement programs and usage tricks for everything I was doing in Gnome, no problems there.

All the features constantly integrated to KDE also make a huge difference once you learn how to use them. Take tabs merging in KDE 4.4 for example, it’s just genius. KDE is filled with these great little tricks, the only problem is to even know that they exist and learn how to use them.

Fortunately, they do a good marketing and information job, have a look at http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/ for example.

What I had the most problems adapting to is the file browser…renaming files is a pain for example. I just can’t get used to it; it breaks any convention set by any other desktop environment. It’s all nice and shiny in demos, but in a production environment I just wanted to shoot myself sometimes. I don’t know if I’m using it wrong, but damn…6 months. Ok, I agree that you don’t spend your whole day in the file browser.

On a lighter side, what I also don’t like are the tons of different programs installed by default with KDE, all of them having different icon artworks and styles. It feels bloated with a diverse patchwork of software from the beginning and I somehow have a psychological problem with that

What now?

I installed Fedora 13 with KDE and the file indexing feature is now enabled by default, which is nice. So, will I stay with KDE for Fedora 13? No. Let me explain why…

• First of all comes the performance problems mentioned above. It’s just not usable due to the drivers’ composition support. Working with a slow GUI is a no-go for me.
• Regressions. During all the different KDE updates I got, there was some kind of regression or big modification in the way a specific KDE feature works. It seems that this is the way KDE does its development, but I’m not sure I want these changes during a Fedora cycle.

Don’t get me wrong, KDE is very cool; it’s perfectly usable and nice on a machine which can give it good performance. I want to love it and will definitively give it a try at each new version; I’m pretty much convinced that at some point it will replace my Gnome desktop, just not yet. It’s just not as polished as Gnome right now.

What I could see during my 6 months with KDE is a very fast moving community which listens to their users, bringing innovative concepts to the desktop environment. I’m still convinced that the only way to give KDE a fair shot was to “force” myself to use it. I really tried to use it from a “naive” point of view without prejudices.