Internetling

Note: I refuse to call the reviewed product the KDE Software Compilation. Sorry, I just feel it’s an ugly name for such a beautiful piece of software.

21,000 closed bugs later, the KDE team has announced the new KDE 4.4 and I simply had to take a look. After all, the last time I took KDE 4 Series for a spin was back when I still thought open source was one word. To think I actually praised this thing:

Most of you will remember the flak KDE got for releasing an immature desktop environment experiment as “gold”, and rightfully so: even though many Linux distributions almost immediately included it, nobody could really fit the unstable KDE 4.0 into their workflow.

But since then a lot of time has passed and I have to admit this is the first release in a long time that tempted me to switch. I downloaded a Fedora-KDE nightly build and tested it in a virtual machine.  Before you bury me in angry comments, please keep in mind this is my first KDE experience since 4.1 so I might mention some things which are already known to you.

What a sight! Let us begin with the aesthetics – the window manager theme, with its round, grey buttons, reminds me a bit of Mac OS X, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I probably don’t have to tell you about how gorgeous the new icon theme is – this is the first time I enjoyed waiting for Konqueror to load (a small version of the program icon jumps alongside your mouse while the application is staring up). Speaking of loading, the wait is worth it because of the absolutely delicious progress bars. Ironically, the default theme is so good that it doesn’t encourage you at all to make modifications, an ability KDE excels in. I don’t remember where exactly, but I’m sure I’ve already mentioned in some article how I enjoy the KDE Desktop concept: your desktop is not just a folder with a pretty background, it works more like a workspace, you can actually do things from your desktop.

Widgets, or Plasmoids, are a big feature of the 4 Series and while they don’t enable you to electrocute or incinerate your arch enemies, they offer a convenient way to insult them via their Facebook wall, directly from your desktop. The included widgets are standard, like a battery monitor, by pressing “Get new widgets” you can access the online library. There is a very nice Dropbox plasmoid, however the Gmail plasmoid is down right hideous. New in v4.4 is the Social Desktop and the widgets around it: this way you can interact with the KDE community directly from the desktop environment. The tightly-integrated compositing engine KWin got some improvements, too. You can now group windows together to get a tabbed interface, and is it just me or are the widget animations much better now?

The flexible Plasma framework, on top of which the desktop environment is built, made it possible for KDE to get a netbook mode, and now it is an official feature. Unfortunately I couldn’t try Plasma Netbook on my machine, but for those of you who find netbook interfaces useful, or necessary, can read Ars Technica’s lengthy article on the topic.
To my surprise, I’ve noticed that the Kickoff menu hasn’t changed a bit – if I were not familiar with the way KDE 4.1 did things, I’d have trouble navigating back and forward through the context menus. Luckily, the search dialog works a bit faster now. Konqueror is not an integral part of the KDE experience anymore, although Fedora’s community still includes it in their builds. Dolphin (now with Nepomuk integration) is a very mature project and can fully replace Konqueror’s awesome file-browsing capabilities. All in all, it would be nice to see a light file explorer option as well. Lots of new improvements have also been made under the hood, e.g. Akonadi is a new cache that manages data in your address book and similar applications.
This review of course depended greatly on the quality of the KDE 4.4 integration in Fedora 13, so take it with a pinch of salt, though I’m confident you will get pretty much the same experience on production releases. I recommend you try KDE 4.4 only if you have a decently powerful machine, I wouldn’t run it on a netbook, to be honest, it consumes more resources than other lighter desktop environments. The KDE guys are doing an excellent job and they deserve more users, so give v4.4 a try, it might just be a keeper!

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