The KDE saga
I have been running Linux Mint for some time now.
A good friend – Kirk – suggested I try it initially, and I have been using it ever since.
I was talking to Kirk the other night and we got onto the topic of Mint 10 KDE which has been imminent for some time. He gave me the address from which to download it, which I promptly did. However, Kirk suggested I just update my existing KDE to 4.6.00, as I only wanted to have a look to see if it was worth switching over from Gnome. He gave me the address for the software repository ( ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports ) which I duly entered.
That was when the fun began.
I ran a check to see if there were any updates, knowing that there would be some, as I was running and old version of KDE. It came up with a list of 380 updates! The following morning, I told it to install the updates, but it refused, saying that I had a broken package. Unfortunately it didn’t tell me which one.
I hunted the Internet for a solution to my broken package problem and found several suggestions, none of which worked. One of the suggestions had been to run Aptitude and supposedly it would at least tell me which package was at fault. It didn’t but during the process I must have hit a wrong key somewhere because it suddenly announced that it was installing and uninstalling a list of programs. I don’t know where that came from!
To my disgust, one of the programs that Aptitude removed was Oracle VM VirtualBox which I use a lot. I tried reinstalling it from Software Manager, but it steadfastly refused. In the end, I downloaded the package and manually installed it.
At this stage, I was more or less back where I started, but still was none the wiser about broken packages. I decided to install updates a block at a time, selecting just twenty updates. That worked. The strange thing though was that I worked my way through the entire list of 380, and not one update failed. Weird?
With all the updates installed, I tried to run KDE by logging out and logging in again. No go. For some reason, I was only presented with Gnome as an option. Back to the drawing board.
I can’t remember the exact details, but my next step was to install KDE 4.6.00 directly from Kubuntu. That worked. At last.
KDE 4.6.00 running Windows 7 within VirtualBox
I used KDE for the rest of the day, and it was good. There were a lot of features I liked, but I won’t be using it. My distro download (which is now officially released) is tucked away for emergencies, but I won’t be installing it. Why not? Partly because I am so used to Gnome at this stage, but mainly because I found KDE to be a lot slower despite this laptop having 4Gb of memory.
Where I would recommend Linux Mint 10 KDE though is for someone who would like to try a Linux distro but is afraid of it being too different from Windows. KDE 4.6.00 is a lot closer to Windows than Gnome, and would be an excellent introduction to Linux.
For most of the 90s and the last decade, I was using KDE as my main desktop environment.
Then they brought out 4.0.
I haven’t been able to use it since.
I’m currently in Gnome, but sometimes fluctuate to XFCE or Fluxbox.
I’m not even sure what it is that I despise about it!
It does look good, and has that familiar feel if you are used to Windows, but apart from generally being a lot slower, it just feels clunky. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I despise it, but I certainly won’t be using it. The only reason I had KDE installed at all was because there were a few programs I needed.
Well for me KDE was a very pleasant surprise. Ever since starting with Linux I was using GNOME, but this changed when I decided to try KDE 4.5. I was blown away that day. It was almost like the day I first tried Linux instead of Windows. Sure I had to use it quite some time to get used to it but it was well worth it, since I find KDE a lot more personalizable and it already looks great by default. Also almost every default KDE app (like Digikam, Amarok, K3b, Dolphin, Kate …) is better than it’s GNOMe equivalent and also all the apps are better integrated. In addition the desktop in KDE is simply spectacular. I fell in love how everything you see is built out of widgets so you can customize it in almost any way you want. And the integrated cross-desktop tagging and commenting is awesome to, just can’t live without it anymore. I am also surprised that you find it a lot slower. I have only 3 GiB of memory here and didn’t notice much difference between GNOME and KDE (despite KDE having so many more features). So I guess it can’t be the problem of too little memory. Most problems with speed usually come from bad display drivers (I hear NVIDIA proprietary drivers are notoriously bad at this). I have ATI here and use open source drivers. Well to sum it up, I really love KDE and can’t even imagine downgrading back to GNOME anymore, I would miss to many stuff that isn’t there. Another thing I’d like to say is also that it would definitely take more than just a couple of days to get used to KDE and discover all cool features of it. I needed about two months to really get comfortable, no surprise after a couple of years of GNOME usage I guess.
You gave me food for thought there, Milan. And thinking about it, I may have been a little harsh on the speed aspect. I have GNOME installed, and KDE is then added, so the latter is not exactly running in the ideal setup.
You have me thinking now… For the sake of a fair trial should I do a complete reinstall of Mint 10 KDE? I might well give it a bash (if you’ll pardon the pun).
I think what you wanted to do when you attempted to upgrade your current KDE desktop to 4.6 was to run “sudo apt-get update” and then “sudo apt-get dist upgrade” from the terminal once when you were logged into KDE. But that’s all moot now, yes? 😉
If you do decide to re-install Mint 10 KDE and once you get it fully updated and the your video driver installed, you might want to go into “System Settings”/”Desktop Effects” and switch “Animations” to “Fast”. The slowness you perceive in KDE may well be due to the default system settings. There’s a few other tweaks that need to be done as well (like for the tiny fonts in Synaptic for example).
So much fun, eh?
Oops, I mistyped the 2ndterminal command. It should have been “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”. Sorry about that.
Unfortunately you are a little late! I stripped the machine yesterday and installed Mint 10 KDE. It all went without a hitch. However when it came to installing a couple of programmes (mainly VirtualBox) I ran into severe problems. Scraping the Internet produced loads of solutions, none of which worked.I tried a couple of different versions, but in the end, gave up.
I decided to abandon the project and return to Mint Gnome. After I had installed it, I realised I had installed the wrong version! By the end of the day, I had reformatted and installed a complete OS five times on the same machine. A record?
Honestly, Mint 10 KDE is one of the best OS’s I have ever used, I’m running it now. I am highly impressed by it, for many of the same reasons as Milan. A note on looks: I think this DE looks better than anything else out there, and on my system it uses less than a gig of RAM. The only problem I have with effeciency is when using any Flash app, but that is a problem with Flash, not KDE. But of course it’s not all about the looks, I appreciate many other aspects aswell.
I am sticking with Mint KDE unless they come out with a Mint Debian KDE with less upline dependence
Kory – You might want to check in Firefox Add-ons manager (under the Plugins tab) to see if your running the latest Shockwave Flash plugin. It should show version 10.3 and it should have been available as an update through MintUpdate. Starting with version 10.2 Adobe (stated) they put a lot of effort into improving resource usage (finally) of the Flash plugin for Firefox (Opera and Chrome as they use the same one) and by my experience it’s true. Flash based videos and apps appear to be much less CPU intensive than previous versions (pre-10.2) have been.
Since I wrote the above, I have since done a full install of Mint 10KDE in a Virtual Machine.. For some strange reason, I was able to install VirtualBox in that with no problems. Weird!