It’s been a while since I first tried KDE 4 on Kubuntu, but as I recently bought a new machine, I figured I’d give it another whirl. Admittedly, I didn’t have much choice in this matter if I wanted to install a recent version of Kubuntu, as they moved to using KDE 4 as the default quite a while ago, but Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) comes with KDE 4.3, the latest full version that was released not too long ago.
The install process was nice and smooth, with everything just working out of the box, which was certainly a nice feature. The one thing that needed a bit of manual intervention was the installation of some non-free components, such as the nVidia graphics drivers so as to get 3D acceleration, but this wasn’t too much trouble (although editing the XOrg.conf file is probably beyond a real beginner).
Given that almost two years has passed, I was hopeful that there’d been progress, and I wasn’t disappointed. The niggles that I had previously noticed with KDE 4 were gone, and I can now have a sensibly sized panel, displaying only the current desktop’s activities in the task bar, along with a couple of useful widget on the desktop. The settings are all there, and applications that were missing last time, like Kontact, are now back and ready to go.
One of the other applications that has been updated since I last used KDE is Amarok. Now on version 2.2, a whole load of changes have occurred – including some rather drastic ones to the UI. Unfortunately, it seems to me that performance has dropped considerably – with it taking minutes and 100% CPU in order to do basic tasks such as adding a track to the play list. I’m currently wondering if this performance (or lack thereof) is down to the database, as previously I’d migrated to using MySQL rather than the default SQLite. I’m tempted to look into this again, as the performance is a bit of a joke at the moment. One other thing I’ve noticed, is that the on screen display doesn’t always work – instead only appearing intermittently and with no real consistent cause for it (not) appearing.
All in all the experience is a lot better than where it was, and it’s great to see that it’s come on in such leaps and bounds since the original release almost two years ago – and I’m certainly not looking at other desktop environments to move to!
I’m using a KDE4.3′s Amarok 2.2.0 in GNOME under Fedora 11.
Media collection operations are blazingly fast for me, the biggest delay seems to be with the UI itself, with Amarok taking up to a second to respond to clicks in the collection browser. Its wikipedia page display is also slightly buggy, and there are a few bugs in the lyrics plugin and the libnotify plugin (which should be used as it is by far better than the OSD despite being buggy).
It uses its own MySQLe nowdays, look under ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/ , so does not really have an excuse for being slow.
Overall, like the rest of 4.3 that I’ve tried, it is slowly getting there, but is still a bit beta-ish in terms of bug presence, but at least it avoids Fedora’s gstreamer + pulseaudio bugs that still plague the distribution and prevent sensible sound use by gstreamer-using applications.
Hmm. Strange. I wonder if it’s just not happy running on my machine (Atom 330 dual core), or if Ubuntu have done something.
It’s certainly not something I’ve put too much effort into prodding so far, so I may investigate what’s going on at some point.