On the podcast I recently suggested running Kubuntu (KDE) as my default desktop for at least 6 months – the duration between two Ubuntu/Kubuntu releases. I didn’t actually do it at the time, but now I have.
There are a few reasons why I’m trying out KDE. Firstly I’ve really only got experience of GNOME, my KDE knowledge is limited to using Knoppix a few years ago, so when people ask KDE questions I am unable to help. I’d like to change that. Secondly there’s a lot of negative things said about KDE, some by myself, and I think a bit of education might help me to understand KDE better, and possibly be a bit less critical. Also I’d like to help KDE to be better, and as an ‘outsider’ to the KDE community I may have a slightly different perspective on things. Finally it seemed like a good idea for a regular segment on the podcast we make. Time (and listener feedback) will of course decide that one.
What finally triggered the switch was actually the look and feel of KDE. I was sat in the community room at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit where I noticed a significant difference between the desktop of Jono Bacon and that of Richard Johnson. Notably Jonos looked boring, being much like my own standard brown Ubuntu GNOME desktop. Richards KDE based desktop looked pretty swish. I watched them both using their systems, and really liked the look of what Richard had on his laptop.
I figured that it was as good a time as any to switch so I issued the following command on my GNOME based Ubuntu laptop:-
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
When that had finished installing Kubuntu a short while later I removed a bunch of GNOME stuff, primarily to stop me being lazy and reverting to using it instead of KDE.
sudo apt-get remove --purge evolution f-spot tomboy gnome-games gdm
(the list is longer than that, but you get the idea)
As a result I’m now on KDE, and have promised to stay on KDE for at least the duration of the Jaunty (9.04) development cycle. During the developer summit I did enable a personal package archive and upgrade to a beta of KDE 4.2, but this has seemed problematic. I found quite a list of issues which may be due to me running KDE 4.2. So to be fair to Kubuntu I have now re-installed a clean 8.10 Kubuntu 32-bit on the laptop to give me a fresh start. If I encounter any of the issues I did under 4.2 I will of course search for and file bugs as appropriate.
I’ve only switched one machine – my main laptop – right now. I’m not going to switch Clares laptop or the shared desktop PC because I want to keep those in a state that Clare can use when I am not around during the day. I have fully installed Kubuntu on the bare metal, I’m not just running it in a virtual machine, or on a spare machine, this is my full time daily computer. It’s a Toshiba Portege M400 tablet laptop which has the following main specs:-
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU @ 2.0GHz
- 4GiB RAM (although only around 3.3GiB is visible/usable)
- 320GB Disk partitioned into
- 9.9GB / (root)
- 199GB /home
- 4G swap
- (some other partitions used for other stuff)
- Intel 945GM Express Integrated Graphics
- Intel 82573L GbE Wired Network
- Intel 3945ABG Wireless Network
- Toshiba 3G HSDPA
- Fingerprint reader
- Wacom tablet & pen based touch screen
Over the next 6 months I intend to blog a bit about my experience with KDE/Kubuntu. I’ll talk about the fun stuff that I’m playing with and of course any issues that come up. I hope to find/file bugs against anything that I can’t fix myself, and will do that directly in the KDE Bug Tracker. I will use the system as I did under GNOME, installing the usual packages – or their KDE equivalents – that I mentioned previously. I’d like to stick if I can to applications from the standard repository rather than install stuff from PPAs or 3rd parties, but if people make reasoned recommendations then of course I’ll do whatever makes sense.
I spoke to a few of the KDE guys at UDS and I want to thank them for their support and suggestions. Hopefully this will result in some entertainment and education for me, and maybe for others too. We’ll see.
As always comments and suggestions are welcome.
9 Comments
I’m with Martin. I tried KDE4.1 recently on my lappy but literally found myself wondering where everything was/how it all plugged together right from the start. I switched back to Gnome after about 1/2hr of going “ooooh nice graphics but how do I…”
I’ll be very interested to hear how you get on.
Cheers
Al
I’ve used KDE for ages on Debian, much prefering it to GNOME. My main problem with GNOME was turning things off, I found KDE much more configurable. On a secondary level I also thought GNOME looked really ugly and it seemed painfully slow when compared to KDE.
In all honesty I’m sure GNOME can be made to look pretty and is now much faster than before and is now easy to configure, but I’m so much more familiar with KDE that using GNOME is now painful – almost as bad as using Windows. I can’t really make a fair comparison any more…
Perhaps when KDE4 arrives in Debian I’ll be in a better position to compare KDE3, KDE4 and GNOME – at least KDE4 and GNOME will be new to me…
Well, in my experience on this laptop KDE is significantly slower than GNOME. I will of course see if there’s anything that can be done to speed it up, but overall with less running it’s not as fast as this laptop previously was under GNOME.
Way to go dude! I actually told Daviey I would be impressed if you made it through UDS with KDE 4 installed
Since you are going to do this, I to am going to extend my 1 month bet loss of using GNOME for the entire cycle on my desktop.
As for those KDE 4.2 beta packages you tried, ya they can be a bit of a pain. Myself and Tonio are going to be looking at fixing any package bugs that we find hoping to make the experimental packages a bit cleaner.
If you have any questions and what not, there is always #kubuntu on IRC and if you want to discuss bugs or development then join us in #kubuntu-devel. Good luck with your endeavors!
Cool, well done, I hope all goes well for you.
What would be really cool I think is if a kde/kubuntu bod ran gnome/ubtunu for the same period. This may help them find gnome strengths they could integrate into kde/kubuntu and visa versa. Both gnome and kde have their strengths and weaknesses neither of which are that visible to the blinkered user of one desktop or the other.
I would be really interested to see the stronger bits from both get integrated into either desktop to make a desktop we can all be proud of. After all we’re all on the same side
I’ve been using gnome for many years now, but for various reasons I needed to do a full re-install when I upgraded to Intrepid, and I started by trying the Kubuntu live CD for a few hours.
I felt completely lost, and ended up sticking with Gnome. Unfortunately I don’t really have much time to learn something new, and the benefits of KDE weren’t very apparent. Add to this the fact that none of my familiar apps were there by default. Not even firefox…
Oddly, I didn’t feel the same unfamiliarity when I used XFCE for a while a couple of years ago. I guess it’s closer to gnome…
So I look forward to hearing about your experiences with KDE with great interest!
..and I have heard similar things from others, but I’d like to try it for myself of course before forming an opinion. I don’t like the idea of using Debian Sid for the simple reason that I have used it before, and moved away from it _to_ Ubuntu because I don’t like having an ‘unstable’ (read into that word whatever you will) distro on my main laptop. Yes, I appreciate that some would deem Kubuntu to be somewhat ‘unstable’ and I know that Debian Sid has a reputation for being pretty damn stable as it is, but it’s not for me, not on this machine anyway.
I take it from the article that you’re an Ubuntu user or developer, but Kubuntu has been, release after release in my opinion, a poorly-implemented version of both the KDE3 series and the KDE4 releases thus far. I encourage you to try KDE4 on Debian Sid/Experimental, or on another distro, if you can do so. People who like KDE tend to not like Kubuntu, I have noticed. Or maybe that’s just been my observations. Kubuntu tries to GNOME-ify KDE by taking out a lot of options and settings. If I wanted to run GNOME… oh I wouldn’t want that
I’m very interested in how a gnome user like yourself experiences a 6 month switch to KDE. It would be awesome if you could share your experiences (whatever they may be) in another blog article.