My first impression of KDE.
November 6, 2008 – 11:07 pm
Last week Ubuntu 8.10 was released, right on schedule as (almost) always. I am not going to write a story about the pro’s and cons of this release, as you will be able to find hundreds of those articles out there. Instead, this story will be about Kubuntu 8.10, which I installed recently on my brand new Fujitsu-Siemens laptop. The main difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is the Desktop environment, which is Gnome for Ubuntu and KDE for Kubuntu (other ‘flavors’ of Ubuntu are Xubuntu (using Xfce as desktop environment) and Edubuntu etc.).
Why did I install Kubuntu? The main reason was that I was just curious about the KDE4.1 desktop environment. After the installation I must say it just looked good! Below are just a few things that struck me using Kubuntu in the first days.
The first main difference with Gnome I noticed were the widgets, or plasmoids. Every entry in the taskbar and on the desktop is a widget, and you can add, remove and modify many of them. Even the files in your desktop folder are displayed in a plasmoid, and it is very easy to change the folder that is being displayed, changing the displayed folder for example to your ‘home’ folder will display the contents of your home folder on the desktop. You can even add a second folder viewing plasmoid, so you will be able to display the contents of two (or more) folders on your desktop.
A second difference I noticed quite fast was the single click to open files. In the beginning this was very irritating, however, I got used to that quite fast, and I have no doubt that there will be an easy way to change this setting if one wants to…(If you know how to, just post the link so I will add it here in the text).
Next feature that contented me a lot was the menu, which has several menu’s, like favorites, applications, and computer, showing icons and a short description of the application. The favorites in the menu are easily displaced by your favorite applications, folders etc. In the top of the menu, you can easily search for your application, so you can easily find the program you’re looking for. Last but not least, right clicking the desktop gives you a menu allowing you to add widgets, turn off your computer, change desktop settings, run a command etc.
These are the first differences I noticed right away changing Desktop environment from Gnome to KDE. Want to know more about KDE? Just follow this link
What is your favorite KDE feature?
2 Responses to “My first impression of KDE.”
You need to test Dolphin, enable “view as group” and “arrange by date”, previews, and there you are: better usability and visuals then Mac Finder and much more features then Windows Explorer, and much more beautiful and slick then Nautilus
By Paulo Cesar on Nov 8, 2008
Completely true. I nearly fortgot what the Explorer looks like, but Dolphin is defenitely more useful and slick than Nautilus!
By mckooiker on Nov 9, 2008