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!

It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.

Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great – especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) – I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.

Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.

I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these – but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.

All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.

Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.

I therefore decided to give this a look and have installed some of the things that I use on my KDE install at home. First up, naturally, was the kdenetwork package containing Kopete. The installer itself is quite simple, you tick the packages you want, and it goes off and grabs the right dependencies and whatnot. These packages are then downloaded into a folder of your choosing, installed (again into a folder of your choice) and away you go.

As the downloaded files included Qt, kdebase and kdelibs it took some time, but this was not unexpected (especially over the wireless connection on this machine).

In the previous post I did suggest that ideally I’d be after a portable solution. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t really fit this at the moment due both to being over 1GB in size, and also requiring environment variable settings (which obviously won’t be possible everywhere).

Once it was installed and I’d set up my environment variables I ran kopete.exe… and it crashed. So, reading the other information on the wiki, I ran kbuildsycoca4.exe by hand and then re-ran kopete.exe, and hey presto there was the Kopete GUI (along with a whole host of other apps that I tested such as kwrite and konqueror – although that had some issues browsing HTML it seems).

Unfortunately it seems that there was something wrong with the Jabber implementation, as I couldn’t add that account, and there seems to be something else that’s not quite there with Kopete as it seems not to want to connect to the MSN servers.

Obviousy with this being a pre-release version I wasn’t expecting great things. The fact that it runs at all is a great indication to me that there is a chance of this all being pulled together very soon. I’d also like to see the install being more automated, with setting environment variables and whatnot, but we’ll have to see.