KDE 4.3 Beta 1: A Short Preview

The KDE team made the first beta of version 4.3 of their desktop available to the general public on May 13th, 2009. As a KDE fan myself, I couldn’t wait to try it out. It took a while before Kubuntu packages were made available, however as soon as they were released I jumped on it and installed the beta on my laptop, overwriting version 4.2. What did I think of it? So far, it’s amazing and is shaping up to be yet another stellar release from the KDE team.

Please note: this isn’t a review by any means, as I am reserving final judgement until KDE 4.3 is completed and released to the public in full form. However, the following is a summary of my experiences with KDE 4.3 so far. If you’re a beginner, don’t install this beta yet, as it can and probably will destroy your KDE installation as some of the packages had to be force installed. (See below).

Installing KDE 4.3 Beta 1 proved to be my first obstacle, there were installation errors with quite a few packages when I tried to run the upgrade. (This is very typical behavior whenever I test KDE beta’s on Kubuntu, and I’m not certain if the packages just aren’t being tested by the packagers or if the problem lies within the KDE source code). Regardless, I had to issue the “apt-get -f install” command repeatedly, and even force packages to install that were stubborn. After a little battle, I emerged victorious and was able to get the beta installed.

After rebooting into my newly installed KDE 4.3, I had another small problem, all of my plasmoids were all over the place in a seemingly random order. This was easily fixed, all I had to do was move them back to where they were supposed to be. In addition, I had a problem with Digikam as well. The current Digikam compile in the Kubuntu repositories is simply not compatible with KDE 4.3 and image previews do not appear. (There is a fix, however).

Other than those problems, I had no other issues at all. Once I configured and set up my desktop, everything else just worked. Considering the current stage of KDE 4.3′s life, not having everything broken is surprising. (Previous KDE beta’s at this stage were barely usable). The overall desktop in fact feels much faster and more responsive than before. My battery life even increased. I don’t know why.

KDE 4.3 features a new Plasma theme, called “Air”, though for some reason when I first installed 4.3, it was set up with the old Oxygen theme instead. The Air theme was uploaded to KDE-Look.org by one of its users, so I went ahead and installed it on my machine so I could get the full 4.3 experience. (Warning: If you install that theme on an earlier version of KDE, it won’t look as good). I must say, the Air theme is lightyears ahead of the previous Oxygen theme, in my opinion. It can be hard to see text on the desktop with the new theme though, but that is easily rectified as you can change the text color on the desktop to whatever you want.

One problem I’ve had with KDE 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 was the braindead way that the application icons were sorted on the Kickoff menu. Having the application icons sorted by description rather than the name of the program was very difficult to follow. (Instead of looking for “Firefox” to launch your web browser for example, you would instead look for it under “Web Browser”). I’m happy to announce that after I have bugged the KDE developers about this issue and mentioned the problem in countless articles and reviews, there is finally a way to configure the menu to sort the applications by name. Hallelujah! It may sound like a small thing to be excited about, however if you’ve used KDE 4 you probably already know what I’m talking about and how annoying it was.

There are a ton of features in KDE 4.3, more than I could possibly mention in one article. It seems that there are improvements all over the place. The Folder View plasmoid received a major update though, in the form of “contextual browsing”. (That’s probably not what it’s really called, but that’s what I’m calling it). This is huge. Basically what this allows you to do is browse your files without clicking anything. If you have a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop, just point your mouse to one of the icons. As soon as your mouse cursor touches a folder icon, a context window opens up showing you its contents. Hover your mouse over any of the folders that come up in the popup window to show another popup window with the contents of that folder. You can keep drilling down into your folders this way until you find the file you are looking for. This feature is just plain genius.

Overall: While this is just a beta with its share of problems here and there, KDE 4.3 is shaping up to become the desktop of the year when it is released in July. The amount of innovation the KDE team is able to put in their releases these days is astonishing. KDE 4.3 is fast & responsive with many improvements, and is just plain beautiful. Make sure you give it a shot when the final version is released this summer. You won’t regret it.

You can check out a screenshot of the new desktop below. Click on it for a larger view.