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.