(Ex)gnomer's mini review (but long story:))of KDE 4.2

panosk · 2009-01-27 11:57:41

Hello all,

I've been a long time an Ubuntu user, and very happy with Gnome. I always considered KDE too bloated so I was feeling right at home with Ubuntu and Gnome. Because Gnome looks "flatter" I was thinking that it "should" be lighter than KDE. Well, I was wrong. I don't know what the KDE devs did, but KDE4 is faster and lighter than Gnome, although it is much "richer".

My story starts some 10 days ago, when I decided to solve my laptop's battery life problem. With Ubuntu 8.10, battery lasted only 4-4.30 hours, while it should last at least 5 hours (this was the average battery life under Vista when I first got my laptop some 8 months ago - needless to say, Vista went to the trash 2 weeks later). So I started once again the usual distro search and decided to give KDE4 a shot. So there I was dual-booting with Kubuntu 8.10. To make a long story short, battery life returned to its usual performance and I was very impressed with KDE4.1. But (K)Ubuntu's customizations - why on earth do I have to install so many gnome libs just to get Firefox through the official repos?? - and the 6 month cycle policy made me consider again of Arch.

I tried Arch some months ago and I was very excited because it is exactly what I want: a very fast, customizable, rolling release, cutting-edge but stable distro. But I couldn't get fonts to render nicely under Gnome, no matter what I tried (arch's wiki, ubuntu patches, etc), and since I work with text more than 8 hours per day I can't make any compromises with fonts. Anyways, few days ago I was back in Arch and KDE4.1. Battery life improved even more (5.30-6 hours ), font rendering was just nice, and speed was stellar. Bugs were there, but I was hoping 4.2 would correct them. And I was perfectly right!

A few hours ago I updated my arch to KDE4.2 through pacman (btw, amazing package manager!) and I was shocked when I logged in for first time. IMHO, the release number could have been easily 4.5 and not 4.2. Font rendering and antialiasing is perfect with default settings, major bugs are no longer there (dolphin's inability to connect in samba shares with utf8 file names, trashy notification area, just to name a couple), and kwin received so many additions that can match compiz. Note that I want visual effects because they improve my productivity. I can no longer live without cube rotation, exposing all windows with a mouse movement, tranferring windows among desktops, etc. And kwin has them all now. Also, some sound problems I had when I was logging in got ironed out too (the login sound was jerky and interrupted), and the kmixer's channels are correctly named and assigned (there was no master channel, but 2 front channels instead). Also, the oxygen theme integrates better now, and there are no longer truncated fonts or widgets inside windows.

The upgrade to 4.2 also gave me the chance to see how smoothly major changes are incorporated to arch. All I have to say is kudos to the devs for their work and their responsiveness. Those who tried the upgrade very early faced a minor problem, but a dev showed up after a few minutes and confirmed that kde-bindings had been removed and everything was ok - and it was .

I am no fanboy, and I think Gnome is very fine (I've been using it non-stop for 5 years), but KDE4, at least with 4.2, has taken major steps forwards.

I could praise KDE4.2 forever but I have to convert my desktop to an archer right now. Finally, I think my distro and DE suffling has come to an end.

Have fun, upgrade, and enjoy!

Panos

Edit: Couldn't resist to add that kopete now works with my laptop's webcam. Before the upgrade, I couldn't get my webcam to work with kopete, although it worked flawlessly with skype.

Last edited by panosk (2009-01-27 14:02:48)

fukawi2 · 2009-01-27 22:01:22

Thanks for the mini-review... I'm a Gnome user since IDK when, but I've been toying with trying KDE 4.x, now I might actually do it

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-27 11:57:41

(Ex)gnomer's mini review (but long story:))of KDE 4.2

#2 2009-01-27 22:01:22

Re: (Ex)gnomer's mini review (but long story:))of KDE 4.2

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