KDE 4.2: The Desktop, Now Without Idiots

The K Desktop Environment is cutting-edge, Web-savvy, and customizable—and now, thank Tux, it’s stable. The H

KDE 4.0 got off to such a rocky start that within a year, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish brain behind Linux, famously switched to KDE’s main rival: GNOME, the desktop environment he once said was made for idiots. KDE 4 was "a disaster" and "half-baked," Trovalds told Computerworld in January, the product of a "break everything" and rebuild strategy that didn’t work out. Maybe next time, he said.

The K Desktop Environment v.4.2.2 is next time. 4.0 and 4.1 were unstable and unusable, a hideous patchwork of novel but puzzling features coupled with the shitty tendency to crash randomly like a high school computer programming project. My little laptop Dellie II cried out for the devil she knew, WinXP. But 4.2, while not perfect, is showing signs of a maturing and sophisticated desktop that, pound for pound, is better prepared for the new Web frontier than any of its rivals, commercial or not, without all of the the roughness around the edges.

That’s because, unlike GNOME and some other desktops we might know, KDE is not made for idiots. The KDE team did not obsess over ease of use, but rather stressed functionality in a new high-productivity, Web-centered era. It is customizable and powerful and, as with all open source projects that have pulled a phoenix and been rebuilt from scratch, increasingly stable. It is the desktop I abandoned years before Torvalds did because I didn’t get it. Now, it’s the one I’m setting up for my sexagenarian parents. And Dellie has never looked back again.

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The Desktop, Now Without Idiots This is my productivity "activity." Widgets are easy to add, place, and resize except for one annoying glitch where things show up randomly. Desktop folders are prominent here. Note there are no desktop icons. (Click on the bottom-right corner to see the next image.)

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Switching activities is like switching desktops, but instead of changing groups of windows, it changes groups of widgets and the screen’s wallpaper. Switching is facilitated on my system by a little two-button widget (bottom-right, left of the clock). Note that this activity has regular old desktop icons.

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The cashew, as it’s called, allows access to the most basic settings, including creating activities and adding widgets and panels to your system. Zooming is still a bit confusing, but once I realized the power of the activities metaphor, the logic became somewhat clearer.

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NetMan is utter shit as always and still needs work. The new graphics are nice, I guess.

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Desktops & Activities This schematic illustrates how KDE allows users to quickly switch between different Desktops (groupings of windows) and different Activities (groupings of widgets with customized wallpapers). The plasma panel and cursor remain constant. Image created with Blender. Cursor image: Wikipedia Commons

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The Zoom Feature Here, zooming out shows one active activity. It’s not clear if there is a limit to how many activities one can use. Either way, it’s not really clear how useful zooming is, other than to add and compare activities.

The Desktop, however you want it

The first thing that strikes new users about the KDE4 default desktop is the lack of desktop icons. That’s because KDE has dumped the old Windows 3.1-era metaphor where the desktop is the file cabinet where you can find all the computer’s file folders. Back in the day, computers were primarily creators, editors and organizers of files that exist on the local hard drive. Today, computers are portals to the World Wide Web first, second and third, and everything else—content creation, storage and organization, and gaming—are a distant hardly-anyone-does-that-shit-anymore. And that’s what KDE is designed for: the Web, and effortless access to Web applications like facebook and Twitter and flickr and Google maps.

KDE makes up for the lack of icons with Web-savvy widgets for everything from the weather to news reading to the ubiquitous (and ever useless) Twitter microblogging. You can use native KDE widgets called plasmoids, of which there are hundreds, as well as Web widgets like those based on Javascript, and even Mac widgets although I’ve never tried those out myself. Widgets are easy to place, size and rotate, and most can even be placed on panels, which are the highly customizable Windows equivalent of taskbars that includes the kickoff menu (like the Start menu, but better), the log off/log out button, and the task manager (where you minimize open windows).

Still like your icons on the desktop? Well, you can do that, too, as I have on my own computer and my mother’s. You can change the type of desktop from the default desktop containment—confused about terminology yet?—and folder view with icons in the Appearance Settings in the desktop’s context menu. But many KDE users will prefer desktop folders instead (or in addition) to regular icons. These are widgets that act like open folders on the desktop. You can have them be opened to a desktop folder (there’s still one of those by default, if you chose to use it), or to ftp locations or even remote folders.

The second-to-last thing you need to know about the KDE system is the so-called cashew, or toolbox, a menu at the top-right corner of the desktop. There, you can lock, unlock, and add widgets, open the Appearance Settings dialogue, or do something that at first is both confusing and infuriating called "Zoom Out." That has to do with something called Activities, maybe the most puzzling, but in the end, the most revolutionary, part of KDE.

Activities are awesome

Most KDE and GNOME users are long familiar with multiple, or virtual, desktops, as are Mac users who use OS X’s Spaces function. Imagine having, say, four monitors on one system arranged in a 2x2 grid. Each monitor can have different groups of windows—one with Firefox open, another with a chat program, another still with a word processor, and the last empty. Now imagine having just one monitor, but being able to switch between these four other virtual desktops. It’s like multiplying the real estate of your desktop by four without buying new monitors.

Activities takes this idea to a new level. You can still switch between up to 20 virtual desktops in KDE, but now you can also switch between containments of a second kind, called activites, which have different configurations of widgets, not windows.

Now imagine that you have two activities: one for work, with a couple of important folder widgets, a calculator widget, and a widget with links to key pieces of productivity software, like OpenOffice or Dreamweaver; one for play, with a microblogging widget, a weather widget with a 5-day forecast, a fancy analogue clock, and one of those freaky googly eyes that follow the cursor around the desktop. Each has its own customized wallpaper, one with a photo of your pet shih zhu, and the other with another photo of your pet shih zhu. Using a widget on each activity, you can easily switch between each. But unlike switching between desktops, the windows, whether they be open or minimized, stay put.

Basically, activities are awesome. They bring a whole new level of functionality to the desktop metaphor. And like just about everything else KDE, they’re extremely customizable.

There are some problems with the current build. One is that you can’t tie desktops to different activities, like in OS X’s Spaces. I don’t see this as a huge drawback, but others do.

KDE has been very good at allowing highly customizable bindings, or key combinations, for a whole array of functions through System Settings. For example, I set up switching windows to be Alt+Tab, like in Windows, and switching desktops as Meta(or Start)+Tab. But I can’t for the life of me find out how to make a key combination for switching activities. I’m stuck with two widgets, one on each activity, to allow me to switch activities quickly, which is OK, I guess.

I really don’t mind the cashew, unlike others. What I don’t get is the Zoom Out feature you find in the cashew menu. It allows users to add, delete, compare and arrange different activities. But it doesn’t do anything else, so far as I can tell, except take up lots of system resources. Isn’t there an easier way to make and delete activities?

It gets buggier. When zoomed in on one activity, you can use the Appearance Settings function on the desktop’s context menu to change the kind of activity you have, i.e., between one with icons like regular old Windows, and one without. But switching between these options seems to generate a new activity that, when zoomed out, is annoyingly stacked on top of the old one. It’s hard to figure out which one is the one you want (seems to be a clone but with a different icons setting), to move the activities, or to even get rid of one. And worse, when this shitstorm happens, the widgets get all bunched up and you are no longer able to move them without their popping up somewhere else, whack-a-mole style. These are annoying bugs that I’m sure are scaring away the faint of heart.

The good

Let’s go through some of the perks of KDE 4.

Dolphin

Dolphin, the new file manager for KDE 4, is more powerful than Konqueror, its predecessor (which is still available). It has a couple things which I really like: Users can select several icons at once with multiple (CTRL+) clicks without selecting with a box or using SHIFT to pick only ones that are in a row. Also, there’s a built-in five-star file rating system like that on your MP3 player, except it’s for all kinds of files. Me likee.

Nepo-wuh?

There’s also something called Nepomuk, an integral part of Dolphin. It’s some fancy next-gen project that supposedly helps with file search, collaborative content creation, and updating. Since I don’t do much of any of those things, all it is is a huge resource hog on poor little Dellie, whose processor is barely out of the stone age.

Kickoff

The KDE kickoff launcher is the Start menu I always wanted but never got from Uncle Bill. It’s broken up into Favorites which is a completely editable list of the most used applications and locations, Applications broken down into convenient divisions, Computer, which lists key locations, Recently Used for both applications and documents, and Leave for all your logging out/hibernating/etc needs. It’s highly editable through a convenient menu editor GUI, accessible through the context menu on the kicker itself. You also have a choice between this default kicker and other options, like Lancelot, with different ways of arranging program and location menus.

One annoyance is how the kicker closes. It will disappear when you click away—as it should—except when you click on a fellow panel widget.

I am still a little baffled by KDE (i.e., Linux) symbolic links, especially those pointing to programs. This is a real pain in the ass when installing programs without using one of the built-in package management systems (RPM for openSUSE Linux, and .deb files for Kubuntu). Conveniently packaged software usually creates links to the newly installed application on the desktop and in the menu automatically, but software installed through terminal line commands doesn’t. I’ve been having a hell of a time figuring out how to create these links manually, which has not been going well even when I find the program file in Linux’s flexible but sometimes labyrinthine file system. This is probably more my fault (or Uncle Bill’s) than Linux’s, and isn’t a KDE issue per se. It’s still annoying.

Favourite Widgets

Klipper, installed on the default panel, keeps a record of recent additions to the clipboard. Very, very useful.

The colour picker widget gets the value of any colour displayed on your screen and gives it to you in several formats, like the ubiquitous RGB. Application independent and very, very useful.

The desktop folder widget is great, especially since the folder source can be anywhere you have access to: a local folder, a remote folder, or even an FTP folder. Very useful, for example, for Web masters, who can drag and drop files into their FTP sites. One drawback is that you can’t navigate within the file system within the widget. You’re forced to use Dolphin, which can be relatively heavy on resources.

The device notifier pops up when new media are inserted into the computer, like a USB drive or a DVD disk. That means easy access to external media, and because of the Linux file system, no messing around with nasty drive names, the bane of my MP3 collecting existence back in the day. The notifier should make it easy to choose which devices should be mounted automatically. Right now, you can’t mount any automatically.

The quick access widget is a single button that creates an easy-to-navigate tree representing your file system, starting with the Home folder. It’s a great idea and helps avoid some extra clicks and time waiting for the relatively slower Dolphin. But like Dolphin, you can set it up to see icon previews for a whole host of file types.

Like the kicker, both the notifier and the quick access widget should close when the user clicks away, even if it’s a click on another panel widget. But they don’t.

The battery monitor allows easy change between different power profiles, like Performance and Power Saver (which are highly customizable and can be set up in System Settings). Very useful for my ancient battery-guzzling laptop, which was once the backup computer-on-the-go for a young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.

This isn’t really a widget, but it merits mention in "The Good" section. KDE updates are effortless. The little update icon shows up when you need something, and hides when you don’t. You can configure it to notify the user of less important updates.

The Bad

Bindings are highly customizable, but they need to be more so. Why, for example, can’t I create a binding for, say, switching windows using a combination of keystrokes and mouse clicks? And where the hell is the binding option for switching activities?

The KDE personal information manager is nothing to write home about. On each fresh system install, I get rid of the entire suite in favour of Thunderbird with Lightning. KMail in particular is just not refined and robust enough to compete with Mozilla’s offerings.

Would a decent weather widget hurt? The one installed by default—LCD Weather—looks pretty and is good at telling me the barometric pressure, but is bad at telling me what the weather will be like beyond the next few minutes. I got rid of that piece of crap and installed the Customizable Weather Plasmoid. (Plasmoid is the technical KDE word for widget.) Works like a charm.

Would it kill someone to have a decent panel spacer for default? The one I installed from KDE-Look keeps screwing up the panel. Sometimes the panel crashes or freezes, or screws up such that you click on what you think is a log out button but is really your clock or task manager, which is annoying. Every other startup, the panel moves to the left when it’s been set to the center.

I’ve ranted about this before, but KDE’s Network Manager is horrible, still. No discernable improvement. And what the hell good is Kdewallet?

The dashboard is not all that useful to me. I mean, I guess I get it—it’s like Show Desktop in Windows, except it’s just the widgets and panels that come to the front. It’s like a less customizablle Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s slow and pretty much a waste of time and resources.

The network monitor widget could be so much more useful. It could have a scale for its graph, for example. For Christ’s sake.