A few thoughts on the latest KDE

As any self-respecting fan of the best Linux/Unix desktop environment in existence, KDE, knows, the latest major release (4.1) was unleashed on the general public Tuesday. This comes after a good deal of controversy surrounding the 4.0 release, which despite its nice round release number was essentially a beta not intended for day-to-day use. (See, for example, this blog.)

I tried KDE 4.0 as a frontend for several distributions, including openSUSE and (K)Ubuntu, and found it nearly unusable. For a bit of background, the big innovation (besides the shift to the QT4 toolkit as a base) in functionality seemed to be a blurring of the distinction between panel and desktop. Interchangeable widgets took the place of the traditional desktop icons and panel addons such as launch menus and clocks. In KDE 4.0 the problem was that there were too few such widgets ("plasmoids" in KDE parlance), it was too difficult to find replacements for KDE 3.5 functionality, and many old configuration options—a hallmark of the KDE philosophy—were nonexistent. To top it off, many popular KDE applications, such as Amarok, looked and felt out of place, and you could forget about GTK apps like Firefox looking anything but straight-up ugly. The whole graphical system in KDE 4.0 was unstable, and I wisely decided to ignore the forum flamewars and just wait for the promised stable 4.1 release.

Now it's here, and after reading a positive review, I allowed it to become my graphical representation of Ubuntu 8.04.1. To my surprise, it has not crashed once, and I have been able to configure the desktop in a manner that suits me. The whole system looks fantastic, from login to shutdown, and the built-in compositing window manager functions well and easily rivals Vista and OS X in eye candy. It doesn't have the same massive list of configuration options available in Compiz Fusion (a more complete compositing windowing backend), but that's probably a good thing for newbies. All the old KDE programs look fine, and it's easy to integrate Firefox and its GTK cousins with the package gtk-qt4-engine-kde4 and the "Use my KDE style in GTK apps" configuration option set in the oddly Mac-like kcontrol replacement, systemsettings.

Furthermore, the somewhat clumsy file manager, Dolphin, now has tabbed browsing, the lack of which would have been a deal-breaker and is the worst part of GNOME's otherwise capable Nautilus. (Its quick ctrl+S selection filter and ctrl+H hidden-file viewer are things I've always wished Konqueror had included.) I still think there was no reason to replace Konqueror as the file manager, but I'll give Dolphin a chance. And speaking of file managers, the accessibility of files has improved greatly with the addition by default of a file-management widget on the desktop (taking the place of the usual set of desktop icons). The cool thing is, you can now set your home directory (or any directory) as your "desktop" and have multiple "desktop" directories, as I do in the screenshot (which, by the way, shows off four virtual desktops). You can even use a remote directory for this purpose.

This fundamental shift in the way we view file management and accessibility calls to mind other possibilities as to how KDE could take this a step further. For example, what about an expandable folder widget with simple navigation buttons that can spawn appendage-like extensions for subfolders without launching Dolphin and allows drag-and-drop operations among them? And maybe you could a launch little a terminal with a middle-click in that directory to perform quicker and/or more complex file-management tasks (e.g., cp script.sh script.bak && mv *.sh subdir/ && chmod +x subdir/*.sh)? The set of possibilities for making basic computing more efficient and slicker is huge in KDE 4.1. I look forward to the community's efforts to build lots of cool little apps like this for the Plasma framework.

One test that KDE 4.1 has yet to pass is the test of time. It's going to be tough to stop using GNOME in Ubuntu (Kubuntu's KDE 3.5 sucks) and KDE 3.5 on Debian and Arch (it's so configurable!), but after an evening of putting 4.1 through its paces, I'm ready to let it take that test.

(By the way, here is the XKCD comic from the plasmoid in the screenshot, which Olga so thoughtfully sent me.)