KDE 4.2 Is The Answer

The KDE 4.x release cycle has been a real adventure. Just one year ago, we were introduced to KDE 4.0, which ended up being more of a technical preview of things to come rather than a full featured desktop. It was missing many must have features, such as custom or even additional panels. KDE 4.1 was promised to be the release that 4.0 should have been, yet it was still missing quite a bit of features, and users were asked to wait again until 4.2 to get a feature complete desktop. It’s surely been a long time coming, but KDE 4.2 (code named “The Answer”) is finally here, and I was absolutely floored by the number of improvements it contains. Of course, I found some minor issues, but no desktop is perfect, right?

Official Release Announcement

Official Feature Guide

Kubuntu Announcement

The first thing you’ll notice is that KDE 4.2 is absolutely beautiful. The default theme, wallpaper, icons, window borders and the new progress bars go together perfectly. Also (as long as your distribution includes all the packages) 4.2 comes with a great collection of some of the best wallpapers I have seen included by default in a software suite. Just about everything in KDE 4.2 looks amazing. Click on the picture below to see a normal sized image of the default desktop.

When it comes to new features, KDE 4.2 should have been codenamed “Kitchen Sink” because it contains a huge amount of improvements in almost every area you can imagine. Simply put, there are more new features in 4.2 than I’ve ever seen in a single KDE release at any point in the past (since I’ve been paying attention, at least) and surely more than I could possibly go over in a single article. Almost every component has seen at least one large improvement and several smaller ones that may or may not be noticeable. For this article, I am going to talk about the features that I discovered during my journey into the new world of KDE.

One of the most controversial changes in the previous KDE release (KDE 4.1) was the removal of traditional desktop icons, in favor of a folder view widget which you could add to show desktop icons if you really wanted to. Many people complained (although I feel that the new way of handling desktop icons was way more efficient) leading to the return of traditional desktop icons in KDE 4.2, yet not by default. In the appearance settings, you can set a folder view widget to fill your entire desktop, which essentially gives you the same desktop behavior as KDE 3 did. In fact, icons on the desktop isn’t the only feature to make its return here, you can now autohide the panel again, which was another sorely missed feature of the KDE 4 series until now. Features like these go to show you that KDE 4.2 is feature complete – this is KDE 4.0 as it always should have been.

One of the bigger improvements (and I’m not doing these in any particular order) is that individual components are theme-able now. If you’ve used 4.1 you may remember that you had several Plasma themes (and you still do) but now you can actually mix or match them on individual widgets. For example, if you use the Oxygen Plasma style for your desktop, but hate the way the analog clock widget looks, you can apply a different Plasma style to the analog clock without changing the entire desktop. You can do this with the Kickoff menu too. Of course, this depends on if your distribution of choice actually contains other Plasma themes. If not, you’ll have to download them yourself. (At this point it doesn’t look like Kubuntu includes extra Plasma themes by default, but who knows how it will end up when Jaunty is released).

Kickoff (the default KDE4 series application launcher) has received some much needed upgrades as well. First of all, the favorites menu is now customizable. Previously, when you added applications as favorites, you had to add them in the exact order in which you wanted them to appear. If you messed up, you had to clear your favorites list and start over. Definitely a pain. Now, by right clicking the favorites menu, you can sort the contents alphabetically, or even drag and drop them in any order you want. All I can say is that it’s about time, as not having that feature was very annoying. In addition, the Kickoff menu actually matches the theme of the rest of the desktop, or whatever theme you choose for it. In the below image, you can see the Kickoff menu with the default Oxygen theme applied:

Other features that you can look forward to include sorting options for running tasks, the ability to hide system tray icons, improved thumbnail previews in Dolphin (the default file manager), plasma features on the screen saver, grouping taskbar items, the ability to have multiple rows of applications on the taskbar, Ark is actually completely usable now, there is a new notification system in place for file transferring, an icon resize bar in Dolphin, tool tips with previews, and a TON more.

It’s hard to mention KDE without mentioning Amarok. Amarok 2.0.1 has been available for a little while now, and it makes a perfect compliment to your KDE desktop. Sure, this review is about KDE 4.2, but if you’re going to use KDE 4.2 you might as well treat yourself to this wonderful media player. I took a look at it with my Linux.com review some time ago, and even though I’ve originally found it to be clunky and hard to get used to, it’s not that bad once you get to know it, and you (like me) may just end up loving it. It’s too bad that Amarok’s release schedule isn’t synced with that of KDE, they’d make perfect compilments to eachother. KDE does come with the Juk media player by default, yet Amarok dwarfs it without a doubt.

Although KDE 4.2 is darn good, I did run into some minor issues. In fact, several of these issues I talked about in my KDE wish list that I wrote back in the early days of KDE 4.1, and most of those ideas never came to fruition. First of all, you still cannot sort application icons in the Kickoff menu by application name. You can do that now if you use the classic menu, but not the default one. Instead, the Kickoff menu sorts applications by the descrption, which is confusing as hell. For those of you who haven’t seen the Kickoff menu yet to know what I’m talking about, imagine looking for “Firefox” and having to look for it alphabetically under “W” because it’s a web browser. Talk about annoying. I even reported this a very long time ago, but it’s not been fixed yet. I don’t understand how anyone can be expected to search for applications this way. There is a way around it, but to do that you have to right-click the K button, choose to edit the menu, and remove the descriptions from every icon, one by one. From there, it will be sorted correctly, but there should be a setting somewhere to do this, but I was unable to find one. Below I took a screenshot of where the Firefox icon is in the Kickoff menu so you can see what I’m referring to:

For whatever reason, the system tray icons randomly look corrupted. Sometimes the deformation corrects itself, but overall these icons are a real pain to look at when they get corrupted, which is extremely sad considering that the rest of the desktop looks gorgeous and this bug was reported almost a year ago. (At the time of this writing, it’s marked “resolved” but don’t let that fool you, it’s still happening). This was blamed on a QT bug, but I don’t buy it because I’m pretty sure that KDE3 didn’t have this problem.

There is another problem I noticed, but it may not effect everyone. On some computers, when desktop effects are enabled, KDE 4.2 is slower than molasses. (And these are machines that handle desktop effects respectfully in other desktops, such as GNOME). Naturally, my AMD Athlon X2 5200+ computer with 6GB of RAM runs KDE 4.2 like a dream with or without desktop effects, yet when I try that on my Intel Pentium Dual Core laptop with 4GB of RAM, I have up to a ten second delay added to opening any application or file. This isn’t a huge issue, because you can disable the desktop effects, yet KDE doesn’t look as good without it. I hope that in the future the KDE developers work on increasing the speed of their desktop.

My final issue with KDE 4.2 also has to do with desktop effects. When you play a full screen computer game, the performance of that game will be cut in half while desktop effects are running. This isn’t a new problem by any means, but my problem is that even Windows Vista is smart enough to know when to temporarily pause desktop effects, why isn’t KDE? For those of you reading this that also suffer from this problem, you can press ALT+SHIFT+F12 to easily turn desktop effects on or off, yet it would be nicer for KDE itself to suspend the desktop effects when performance is an issue like other desktops already do.

CONCLUSION

Please don’t let the minor issues I have found with KDE 4.2 detract you from trying out this stellar release. Other than a few gripes, this is the desktop to get, with more improvements in one release than any I have ever seen since I started paying attention quite some time ago. For the first time, the KDE 4 series achieves feature completion to make it a great rival to KDE 3 and a perfect choice for future KDE distributions. Sure, I found some issues with this release, but all the great features and improvements more than make up for it, and not everyone is as picky as I am. Overall, KDE 4.2 is used happily on all of my comptuers and I look forward to further developments from the KDE team.

The Good:

• Insane number of new features
• Great default theme & wallpapers
• Feature completion on par with KDE 3

The Bad:

• Slow desktop effects, and lack of auto suspend for OpenGL applications
• Kickoff sorts icons by application description, with no option to change this behavior
• System tray icons often get corrupted, and are often ugly to look at

Final Score: 8/10
(Not an average)