Koming Back to KDE

By: Kurt Wall
Monday, March 15, 2004 10:36:17 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5289/1/

What's New in KDE 3.2?

KDE has come a long way in usability, stability, compatibility, and features since I first used it. The latest release of the K Desktop Environment, 3.2.1, was released March 9. But for this review, I initially looked at KDE 3.2, which shows that Linux is increasingly competitive on the desktop.

Candidly, I was concerned that KDE's size and complexity would result in a desktop that was virtually unusable. I'm pleased and surprised to report that the KDE of today is a far cry from the bug-ridden, crash-prone, bloated pig of a desktop that I abandoned with disgust in the last millennium. Read on to learn why.

NOTE: In a classic moment of ill timing, just as I finished this review, the KDE Project released KDE 3.2.1. I've decided to leave the 3.2 review in place and add some updates at the end of this review that cover the new features of 3.2.1.

The executive summary of KDE 3.2's features includes:

  • Better overall performance, enhanced support for desktop interoperability standards, and increased compatibility with Web standards
  • New applications and utilities for messaging, graphics, games, personal productivity, and accessibility
  • Usability improvements in menus, tool bars, dialogs, and control panels
  • Cleaner default appearance, new icons, and updated artwork
  • Almost 10,000 bug reports resolved and some 2000 feature requests implemented
  • Developers get better KDE API documentation, new language bindings, new versions of the development tools, and UML support

KDE 3.2's usability and performance has improved. One of the first changes I noticed was significantly better speed in application start-up times and Web page rendering.

I Gotta Get Me Some!

To run KDE 3.2, you will need, in addition to KDE 3.2 itself, the following minimal set of applications and libraries:

  • Qt 3.2.3 or newer
  • XFree86
  • Perl
  • Bzip2
  • zlib 1.1 or newer
  • Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions library (PCRE)
  • The libpng PNG reference library

There is a long list of additional packages marked as "Recommended" and another list of packages tagged "Optional." The "Recommended" packages, which include common applications such as Ghostscript and Gnu Privacy Guard and "standard" libraries such as OpenGL and libjpeg, enable you to take advantage of many of KDE's extra features, bells, and whistles. The "Optional" packages, which include less essential libraries such as LDAP and SDL, deepen KDE's abilities to interact with other applications and enrich the overall KDE usage experience, but are not necessary. You can find the complete list of requirements at http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.2.php.

If you will be building KDE 3.2 from scratch, the KDE Project recommends either GCC 3.3.1 or the compiler "shipped with a stable Linux distribution and which was used successfully to compile a stable KDE for that distribution."

For Slackware, at least, I downloaded the following packages from my favorite mirror site:

  • arts-1.2.0
  • kdeaccessibility-3.2.0
  • kdeaddons-3.2.0
  • kdeadmin-3.2.0
  • kdeartwork-3.2.0
  • kdebase-3.2.0
  • kdebindings-3.2.0
  • kdeedu-3.2.0
  • kdegames-3.2.0
  • kdegraphics-3.2.0
  • kdelibs-3.2.0
  • kdemultimedia-3.2.0
  • kdenetwork-3.2.0
  • kdepim-3.2.0
  • kdesdk-3.2.0
  • kdetoys-3.2.0
  • kdeutils-3.2.0
  • kdevelop-3.0.0
  • lcms-1.12
  • qt-3.2.3
  • quanta-3.2.0
  • taglib-1.0

They installed into /opt (installpkg *tgz, for the Slackware-challenged among you). To start it, I exited Blackbox (my current favorite window manager), dropped to a console window, typed startkde, and, after going through configuration wizard, eventually got to what's shown in Figure 1.

Blemishes and Beauty Marks

As always, KDE is easy on the eyes. I love the anti-aliased fonts, the more or less consistent user interface, and the ability to share data across applications. The number and quality of applications and utilities that ship with the standard desktop is hard to beat, too, but what has always impressed me is the availability of hundreds of high-quality KDE-ready applications. There seems to be no shortage of applications that are "K-ready," that is, programs that have been adapted (or, just as likely, written from scratch) to fit into the Qt-based KDE application framework.

Konqueror and the KDE Control Center, shown in Figure 2, are two of my favorite KDE programs. For better or worse, I appreciate having a single unified interface for system and desktop configuration, and KDE Control Center does a nice job of it. Konqueror, the file and Web browser, was fast and easy to use. I especially like being able to switch seamlessly between viewing local files, Web, and FTP sites without having to change how I interact with the viewer. I know most people take it for granted these days, but drag-and-drop ain't half bad...

On the warts and misfeatures side, the KHTML library appeared not to loop animated GIFs. The GIF would loop properly in Mozilla and Firefox. As impressed as I was with Konqueror, I didn't care for it crashing when I used the "Find files" functionality on a directory with about a thousand small files. I gave Quanta a fair shot, too, as some friends had recommended it as a Web page editor. While I was editing some PHP files, the editor slowed to a crawl. After some research, I found this was an oft-reported bug that seemed to revolve around parsing source files for display purposes, the developer was aware of it, and was working on a fix.

NOTE: These three bugs are fixed in KDE 3.2.1.

Update for KDE 3.2.1

KDE 3.2.1 is a maintenance release. It fixes bugs logged against the 6-week old KDE 3.2, extends KDE's legendary language support to 49 languages, now with Bengali, Icelandic, Japanese, Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Latin Serbian, and Tajik flavor crystals). Among the major bug fixes, kdevelop saw a lot of work, as did the KHTML component. Other applications that were the focus of fixes and enhancements include the Quanta the HTML editor; the KGpg GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) wrapper; the KMail email client; the Kopete messaging (IM) client; and the Konqueror Web and file browser. The change log for 3.2.1 lists sundry other tweaks, mostly minor, in almost all of the major packages that comprise KDE.

The library and package requirements haven't changed that I could see, although the version numbers bumped (3.2.1, naturally). See http://www.kde.org/info/3.2.1.php for the details and access to pre-compiled packages. After downloading and upgrading the newer packages, I didn't notice any immediate user interface differences, which is consistent with 3.2.1's nature as a point release, but neither did I have a lot of time to probe deeply. In all, if you run into one of the bugs listed http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3_2_0_to_3_2_1.php, you might want to grab the maintenance release. Otherwise, I would stick with 3.2. As always, your mileage may vary, offer void where prohibited, and if it breaks you get to keep both pieces.

Wrapping Up

As I wrote at the beginning of this review, this isn't your paternal unit's KDE. Today's KDE is bigger, more complicated, longer to download, and slower to build than any previous version. It is also significantly faster, easier to use, more consistently implemented, and easier on the eyes than any previous version.

As readers of my previous reviews in this space might recall, I'm a minimalist: less is more, and I'll trade eye candy for performance almost every time. KDE 3.2 hasn't made me change my mind on this point; I'm still a minimalist. I honestly don't need the level of integration and interoperability that KDE provides. Moreover, the ease-of-use features and familiar interface that make KDE so compelling to the growing number of converts from Windows are irrelevant to me.

But, and this is a big but, it is precisely integration, interoperability, ease-of-use, and a familiar user interface that will give Linux a wedge onto the Windows-dominated desktop. These qualities, combined with improved performance, stability, and usability, make KDE 3.2 a terrific product.

Kurt Wall is an all-around Linux geek. He has written all or parts of eight books about Linux and UNIX programming and system administration and is the technical editor for over a dozen other Linux- and UNIX-related titles. Currently, Kurt works for TimeSys Corporation in Pittsburgh and lives in South Park, Pennsylvania. He receives entirely too much email at kwall@kurtwerks.com.

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