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Articles > KDE 3.2.1 review
I felt the results of my trial-by-KDE might be of use to a newbie or three looking to try out Linux and seeing what there is to offer. I've found that a newbie tends to want to use the things that come with their distro, rather than downloading, compiling, learning to use rpms, etc etc, and might offer myself and others perspective by using things in a newbie fashion.
I have ended my experiment a bit earlier than planned, because I feel I have accomplished what I set out to do - to use only KDE components wherever possible. A lot of distros come with KDE as the default, especially the ones favored by newbies, such as Mandrake and Knoppix.
For this experiment I am using Fedora Core 1 and KDE 3.2.1. I know 3.2.2 is out, but looking at the changelog I decided that what I write will hold accurate for those using it. The hardware is newer, with a 2.7Ghz P4, 768MB of ram and 40 gig harddrive. Performance wise, I found everything to be snappy and responsive. The occasional lockups occured no more often (generally) than I have experienced in Gnome. I experienced only a few crashes, none which required the restarting of KDE. It has come a long way since I first used it back in 2.2.2
Desktop
First I'll cover the desktop itself. I am thoroughly impressed by both the customizability of KDE and the cute-factor. I'm sure minimalists (and everyone else with differing tastes) will disagree, but I found it to be both stable and easy to set up. As the desktop picture shows, I've managed to make it look rather different than the default, and enjoyed the ease of doing so. The KasBar is incredibly useful, and by adding SuperKaramba I've been able to set everything exactly how I like it. The documentation was clear, everything in the Control Center thing was explained as clearly as one could reasonably ask, and I had no troubles at all.
I really love being able to set programs such as the worldclock, or in my case xplanet, as my background.
Browser
Konqueror is a bird of a different feather. While responsive and fairly easy to configure, it doesn't work as advertised. I experienced several crashes with it, found many of the menu items to be in counter-intuitive places or with bad descriptions, and I never figured out how to change the home page. Plugins were a bit of a hastle to set up, but when are they not? I do like how my theme (acqua) carries over to Konq, and my significant other found it to be much prettier than Mozilla. Builtin spell checker was convenient as well, especially for other forums where they are not available. However, the lack of obvious bookmark import ability, excessive options (Do we really need the ability to validate a webpage from the menubar) and ugly bookmark bar were all negatives.
The greatest failing for Konq was fonts. I've been using Linux and KDE for almost 4 years, and have yet to get Konq fonts working right, after much STFW and RTFM. I ended up using the font-size changing buttons whenever I would go from one site to another. I would imagine any newbie would find that equally annoying: things like that are so fundamental they should just work. This goes far beyond simple anti-aliasing and good font selection.
Konqueror has come far, and it is pleasently fast and generally renders things as I have come to expect, but it still needs some work.
Having used Evolution for so long, I was a bit apprehensive about switching to KMail. I was surprised with how well it works after I got used to it. It has seamless integration with Kgpg for signing emails, a huge plus for me. I like how it colors emails based on the trust level for each signature: green for ultimate, red for bad, etc. The interface is simple yet powerful, integrates perfectly into the Address Book, and even ties into Kopete (more on that later). Setting it up was a breeze, importing my mail collected over the ages with Evolution was simple, and it has handled a pretty impressive load of mail flawlessly.
I am never going back to Evolution again. Evolution has a lot of perks, especially in a workplace environment, but for home use on my desktop it's the tops. Simple, light, and stable: everything a linux app should be IMHO. The address book had a few stupid things (like longitude and latitude: c'mon!), and I don't like how adding to the address book requires you to click the save icon instead of doing it automagically, but my impression was still good. Kgpg is a great application, and I recommend it fully to anyone.
Talking
KDE comes with two apps for talking: Kopete for instant messaging, and KSirc for IRC. Strangly/redunantly Kopete also can handle IRC. For any newbie using KDE, I would strongly advise you stay away from Kopete. gAIM is still by far a superior product, both in usability and stability.
The interface for Kopete was illogical and poorly done, and turning off the default ctrl-enter to send an IM was too much work. Some things were nice, such as the ability to make the background transparent, but if you have a dark background as I do you have to use a light font, and unlike gAIM there is no setting that I found to over-ride sending that to the person you're talking to. More annoying was not being able to make the entry box transparent, so that with a light font you have trouble seeing what you're typing. Cute, but not functional. I know I could set the background to a dark color, but that also gets sent and is thusly an annoyance.
KSirc was pretty good, though. It handles everything I do well, but I haven't really put it through serious trials. For example, I never used DCC to send files. The interface was logical and simple, the menus were helpful and contained what you would expect them to, and it hid itself in the tray nicely. The only real annoyance was how the server screen would be seperate initially. Other than that I found it usable, and will probably keep using it because it matches my theme.
KNode was a nice newsreader. It has a clean interface, sticks well to how you would expect KDE to do things, and never crashed on me. A more detailed review will have to wait, however, because I don't use newgroups very much anymore: I'm not too big on binaries, and the spam is just insane.
Multimedia
KDE multimedia sucks, no doubt about it. Arts is much better than it used to be, however, and I have yet to experience a problem with it that couldn't be solved fairly easily.
Noatun puts the No back into playing media. It crashed regularly, had horrible sound (and I'm half-deaf, that's rather bad), and was a monster to even get working. Out of box it wouldn't play anything. Newbies: Stay away!
KsCD was likewise annoying. The worst part is the little Audio CD icon when browsing your files keeps spinning, even when no audio CD, or any CD, is in the drive. YMMV, but I've read other reports of the same thing. Frankly, if you're going to play a CD, and have XMMS installed, just use that.
Back to Noatun: You even have to download a plugin just to play randomly! I couldn't get it to play video even once: For that I recommend either Xine or MPlayer (I use MPlayer). Bad bad bad.
Arts is much better though.
Console
It wouldn't be KDE if the console wasn't called Konsole. Stable, tabbed sessions, transparency, easy to configure for basic options, and easy to configure for more odd setups, Konsole handles it all cleanly. I like how you can detach sessions if you want to look between two of them, and then put it all back in one windows. Konsole takes up more space than everyone's favorite Xterm, but what doesn't? I think that for a newbie, Konsole is as unintimidating as you could expect. Even the bell is polite.
Control center
Gets better everytime they update it. Some of the audio options would be cryptic to a newbie, but that's because the audio structure is so different than in windows; nothing anyone can do about that. I dislike how you can no longer install themes by clicking the 'install new theme' button, but the improvements are vast over the old way. The peripherals section is wonderfully done, for example. I would like to see some security settings in the control center, but at the same time I see that being a Bad Thing. Over all, I think the control center is well documented, clean and easy to use, and newbie friendly.
Office
KWrite is great these days. Simple, does most of what you'd want, and great for writing papers. I probably will continue using OO.org, however, because when it comes to writing technical / scientific documents, nothing can beat it in Linux. For writing a letter to your mom, or an english paper for class, KWrite handles it all well.
KSpread sucks. Perhaps for other uses it would be friendlier, but for mine (charting data, using lots and lots of numbers in matrices, etc) OO.org was vastly superior, and Excel even better than OO.org for graphing. Something tells me that has to do with the influence of PHBs, but I digress. I think it would do pretty well for simpler tasks such as balancing a household budget or keeping smaller sets of data, however. The UI is nice though.
KPresenter is not something I'm qualified to review :)
Other
KDict works passably well, though it's still buggy. If you want a good online dictonary, something like this is the way to go IMHO.
#Thanks UGU.com#!/bin/csh -fset word=$1lynx -cfg=/dev/null -dump "http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=${word}" | moreStill not as newbie friendly as KDict.
KCron is kind of neat; it takes some getting used to, but once I had it figured out I was setting cronjobs with ease.
KThesaurus was nice, and quite useful. I'm inclined to use the same 3 words over and over, and using it was a lot faster than the old book route.
KPaint was fun to use, and my daughter got a kick out of using it. I suppose it's not better or worse than tuxpaint, but if you need to conserve diskspace it's one less thing to add. The UI was a bit counter intuitive to me, however.
Kuikshow was great for when I was using Kopete and clicked a link to a picture. It only showed the picture and a small border - nothing else. I know it's cheesy, but I really thought that was great!
Sciences
KmPlot was great! After using gnuplot for so long, it's a breath of freshair. KDE Interactive Geometry was cute, but for me it was useless. However, I see a lot of people could use it well.
Kalzium is fantastic, I'm absolutely addicted to it. I can do so many little things with it - such a total time saver, and anyone who can read a periodic table can use it. I encourage everyone to try it once just to see it: our collective inner geek will thank you :)
KStars is also just totally great. I had it connected to my telescope in no time, and you can use it by itself just as well. If you love stars, you'll love KStars. I like how I can click a celestial object and get a picture of it back from NASAs database, and how it labels constellations. Someday soon, when I get a few extra grand, I'm going to buy a new telescope and an older laptop just to go out in the mountains and use this. Looks like contributing your specs to the KStars devs was a good idea, Telescope makers :)
Thoughts
KDE has come a long way since I first started using it, and using it more than just a pretty DE has been a good idea. It still has a long way to go before coming user friendly, such as needing much better multimedia support, but I'm impressed overall with ease of use and configuration from a newbies perspective.
For a newbie, I would recommend KDE, with XMMS, MPLayer, gAIM and Firefox added on, and OO.org if they intend to do serious document crunching or windows compatability. For everything else KDE can handle it, and in the case of some things like email handles it wonderfully.
