The PCLinuxOS is an interesting story altogether. The Mandriva forked distribution came up with a excellent out-of-the-box experience few years back, and started gaining a notable hype even in it’s preview versions. The final stable release 2007 really hit the jackpot being the most desktop ready and “Windows user friendly” Linux distribution at the time. In 2008 they released equally excellent 2008 MiniMe edition of the operating system, but then things started going rapidly downhill. Updates were less frequent, no new major stable release was achieved, main developer was off duty for quite some time, and all kinds of personal drama was stirring in the community. The 2009.1 release was more like a “2007.1″ release and didn’t impress anyone. Personally I was more than ready to dumb PCLinuxOS to the distro grave yard. But then came the 2009.2 with an announcement that it was in fact a quarterly update. Would a solid release schedule be able to blow some fresh air into the once great distribution?

What sets PCLinuxOS apart from Ubuntu and others is still the choice of not to include the very latest versions of certain core components. The desktp enviroment is the classic KDE 3.5.10, the Linux kernel is at 2.6.26.8, and the Xorg the 1.4. Key applications are however quite well updated to recent, or at least quite recent versions.

The resulting user experience is quite interesting – the system is very responsive, performance is good, and user experience out-of-the-box is damn near perfect. My basic installation consumed about 30% less memory than a similar configuration with Ubuntu 9.04 (180MB vs 120MB footprint)Using KDE3.5 makes you wonder once again that what the hell were the KDE4 devs thinking. All this comes wrapped in a rather pleasing blue theme and everything nice configured and ready for daily use. And if you don’t everything to be ready for you and you want to build your desktop from ground up, there is a new 2009 MiniMe edition available as well.

But there are also few areas where PCLOS should improve in the near future. First of all is the installation procedure which starts with a rather unique step 1 – the un-installation of video drivers, which could be confusing for a first time Linux user. The K-menu structure should also be reconsidered, as it contains sub-levels that do nothing but add complexity to the hierarchy. Some file associations did not seem to be in place in Firefox, which was an immediate annoyance. And I also found a bug that sometimes pressing a key on my Thinkpad T41 resulted about 10 key presses on the application. This was a rare issue but I have never seem anything like it on any other distro.

While PCLOS still is very similar than it was back in 2007 and it doesn’t have the bleeding edge core components, it still has the potential to be a very good Linux desktop environment for new Linux users and especially if your hardware is slightly aged. What the project now needs to do is to rebuild the confidence by showing that they can provide a steady flow of updates to the repositories and that they can stick to their new quarterly schedule, while focusing on quality control and implementation. It will be interesting to see how the year goes for them, and I certainly wish them all the best.

Grap your copy at http://www.pclinuxos.com

The initial impression of Fedora is very good – the new Plymouth boot scheme loads the system up very quickly, and without any flickering or unnecessary ‘geek talk’ shown on the screen. Instead there is a simplistic animation of the Fedora logo which greets you prior to the login screen – this gives a nice touch to the distribution. The post-boot visuals are not bad either, and Fedora comes with a pleasant dark blue tone and is one of the better looking desktops on the Linux market.

As the headline suggests,  Fedora comes with the very latest stuff that the world of free software has to offer. But unfortunately the edge leaves the distro bleeding on the release date. The included Firefox version is 3.5 beta 4, which means that a number of Firefox add-ons will not work on day 1, until the Firefox 3.5 is out and add-ons updated. Also the configuration of the browser leaves a bit to be desired, as it doesn’t have clue what to do with many common file formats, such as .PDF files as an example. Hell, even the “Open containing folder”-feature in the Firefox download manager asks for the associated helper application.

Fedora is also one of the more strict distributions regarding the licensing of the software components. This means that no support for proprietary formats (such as the MP3) is included, and neither is Adobe Flash for the browser. The former disadvantage is however tackled quite nicely with the automatic codec finder that finds, downloads and installs the required software for media playback. Installing Adobe Flash on the other hand required a visit to the command line interface.

After spending a few days with the installation and configuring the system for our personal preferences we found ourselves using the command line way more than we have with Ubuntu, openSUSE and other new user oriented desktops. Luckily Fedora has some excellent documentation and communities online, which makes finding support very easy – I would say Fedora is second best in this field, only topped by Ubuntu.

So who should use Fedora? As a bleeding edge and short life cycle distribution, it is hardy the ideal server environment. It offers a very nice desktop environment, but requires a bit more manual tuning than some of the competition. Performance wise it is very typical, with similar system resource consumption that Ubuntu and others. FOSS purists will enjoy the fact that no proprietary code is included. Overall I would recommend Fedora to someone who has already learned the basics of Linux and can do a bit of work on the command line. The relation to RedHad is a terrific asset for anyone interested in learning Linux for a professional career, as RedHat / CentOS has a lot of commercial and corporate users. If you are looking for the quick jump from Windows to Linux, you should probably look elsewhere.

You can grab your copy from: fedoraproject.org

I started off by giving the KDE4 live CD a whirl and I was pleasantly surprised. This is the first KDE4 distro that seems somewhat usable to my eyes. The stupid desktop plasmoid was gone and the desk top arrangement look very familiar for an ex-KDE3 user. Like always with Mandriva, and unlike Ubuntu, the visual appearance is very pleasing with rather bring blue design, beatiful desktop login animations, wallpapers and so on – this is something that Mandriva has always done well. However the Kicker menu was disappointing as always:”K-K-K-K-K….” – when do the KDE developers realize that starting every application name with a “K” looks retarded and is just bad for usability?

Over to Gnome version then and I ended up also installing the desktop and cofiguring it for my daily needs. The Gnome environment is also nicely designed with pleasant theme and graphics. The default theme “La Ora” comes in many colors if the default color scheme is too bright for you. Interesting thing in comparison to Ubuntu  is that with the same basic configuration on my veteran Thinkpad T41 laptop, the Mandriva cosumes roughly 30-40 megabytes less RAM. My laptop has 1GB RAM so this usually is not a concern in web and desktop use, but this could make a difference if your PC has 512MB or less. If you want to use the ever lighter weight LXDE desktop you can do that by installing the meta-package task-lxde as using it shaves down the memory consumption further ~20 megabytes. I also tried Mandy on a Thinkpad X31 / 384MB and it was pretty responsive and perfectly usable. Besides memory footprint the overt all responsiveness is good and my subjective evaluation is that Mandriva is noticeably faster than the latest Ubuntu in desktop usage.

Mandriva also uses a 6 month release cycle so the changes in between versions are not too big. They introduced better boot speed, just like Ubuntu, and all the applications and components have been upgraded. Unlike with 2009.0 release, I did not immediately notice any serious bugs or flawed functionality. In addition to a good visual design and nice responsiveness, Mandriva also has the benefit of the Mandriv a Control Center system administration features, which would be a great addition to any distro (it’s open source, why nobody besides PCLOS is adobting it?). Mandriva traditionally has had a top notch hardware detection,  and everything was installed correctly in 2009.1 as well (Unlike Ubuntu Jaunty which installs incorrect graphics acceleration settings for old laptop ATI Radeon cards).

So if you are looking for some distro hopping I can warmly recommend to give the latest Mandriva a whirl – especially if you are looking for a KDE4 based solution, but their Gnome offer totally fine as well. You just might end up liking it.

Mandriva can be downloaded at: www.mandriva.com

The most obvious improvements in this release are the notification system (see Shuttleworth’s blog) and improved boot speed. The notifications bring new uniform notifications of various system events for the end user, such as network connections/disconnects, volume changes from hot keys and so on. I see this as an improvement in terms of usability and visual appeal. The notes itself are somewhat dark in colors, perhaps to match some of the new themes better – on the other hand they don’t quite match with the classic Human theme which still is the default. The boot process on the other hand has really become faster – I did not clock the difference, but it is very noticeable. Also I have to give credit for the new Gnome login screen which actually looks good (and also has rather dark toned colors).

Speaking of visual appearance, Since Shuttleworth’s vision to improve the looks of Ubuntu, they have been releasing some darker themes. The Ibex introduced theme ‘Dark room’, and the Jaunty comes with ‘New wave’ and ‘Dust’ themes. Event though I have always hated the bizarre brown/orange theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that these new additions don’t really improve things. I don’t know what is it, but somehow they don’t feel complete or polished enough – the final touch is missing. And I also don’t understand that whats the obsession with rather dark color schemes? The new wallpaper, even though it should matter as it is easily changed, deserves a special recognition: It is the lamest Ubuntu wallpaper in a while. I quite liked the more artistic approach of Ibex’s or Hardy’s wallpaper, but this new one goes back to the Ubuntu tradition of delivering some kind of lame, meaningless, brown stripes on screen. Why is it so difficult for Ubuntu to make a polished looking release? The first impression is everything in attracting new Linux users.

However thing that most concerns me about this new release is that it seems to be contain some rather big showstopper grade bugs. My Thinkpad T41 using Jaunty acts very slow and the screen redraws seem to bring CPU load to 100%, making the whole system rather painful to use. Overall your mileage depends on your hardware, but I always find it surprising when some distro doesn’t correctly on this oldish laptop – that is because generally the Thinkpad’s are possibly the best supported laptops for Linux, and on the other hand this laptop has flawlessy worked on a HUGE number of distributions (for exp. all Ubuntu’s starting from Feisty), so it is always interesting when someone still manages to break the compatibility with this hardware. The CPU usage bug is reported by many, there seem to be a lot of problems with WLAN/WPA2 and more…you can track the bug squashing work by having a look at Launchpad.

Overall it is a typical Ubuntu release. Brings something new, but nothing ground breaking and is very similar to the previous relese. In this release the changes are perhaps more apparent than in the previous two (Hardy, Ibex).  The maturity to my eyes doesn’t seem as good as it was with the Ibex on day 1, so I would give it a few weeks to improve until installing or upgrading. I really don’t see why they stick with the 6 month release cycle as it obviously is too short to introduce anything significantly new, or to stabilize software. I find it somewhat paradoxical that actually the previous release Intrepid Ibex is now in it’s prime. But give Jaunty a month or two, and the huge  user base of Ubuntu will guarantee that the most common bugs are found and fixed, and Jaunty evolves into a nice stable release – just before Karmic Koala hits the servers…

If you can’t wait, you can grap it from Ubuntu.com

So what does Mint have so special that it has been able to gather a major userbase and an active community? The trick is that Mint strikes hard to the weak spots of Ubuntu, while relying on it’s solid base and maintaining binary compatibility. The improvements that the Mint developers have made are obvious from the first boot into the system – Linux Mint makes the Ubuntu suck a whole lot less.

First of all Mint fixes the ugly desktop theming that Ubuntu is often criticized for. You can’t find a single pixel of the original Ubuntu brown/orange looks in Mint. Instead you are greeted with a rather conservative but pleasant grey/black theme with pastel green highlights. The Gnome interface has been rearranged to a single bottom panel, which is definitely easier to consume by people migrating from Windows. The original Gnome menus have been replaced with a Mint menu, which is somewhat of a mix-up in between openSUSE Kickoff and a traditional Windows XP style menu arrangement. With these changes Mint is very easy to use and welcoming for people with little experience on various Linux desktops.

Another feature which is welcomed by new Linux users is the inclusion of most critical proprietary software elements that one needs for everyday basic usage. These include Sun Java, Adobe Flash and support for a number of proprietary audio and video formats. This means that a vast majority of the world’s top web pages and services work out of the box and so do your music and video files too. Mint also introduces a set of small Mint-specific tools like the MintUpload FTP client and a slightly different package update manager. However, my gut feeling is that the importance of these little tools is a lot smaller in comparison to the out-of-the-box confifuration done right. While the Linux hardcore always remind me that you can customize Linux to be whatever you want, I’d still say that more than 95% of people settle to what ever is shown after the first boot. They may change the wallpaper but thats about it and that’s why the first impression is most important.

While Linux Mint seems to be targeted for the newbies by design, I have to say it has the weirdest start-up wizard popping up of the first post-install boot.  Yes, the first things that Mint asks for the user after installation are 1) Should the root account be enabled/disabled 2) Should there be fortune cookies shon in the terminal. I really can’t decide whether to cry or laugh when I see these questions on my laptop screen. The root account issue is obviously a very important one, but does the 1st time Linux user know anything about the significance of using ’sudo’ or ’su’? The fortune cookies on the other hand are the most insignificant feature ever in an operating system – fine, if the Mint developers like them, so put them in your distro. If not, then get rid of them, but why on earth you have to bug the new users with such a stupid question? Oh well, I guess no distro is perfect.

Overall it is safe to say that Mint delivers a lot of added value on top of Ubuntu. It looks better, feels better and sounds better on your tongue. It offers one of the very best out-of-the-box experiences on the market, while relying on the stable Ubuntu/Debian core. I been watching the website, releases and the community every now and then, at so far it has been making a good progress release after release. The Alexa statistics graph below gives you an idea how it matches up against the contenders (click on the graph for more details). Mint is definitely one project to keep on eye on in the future, and let’s hope that it doesn’t fade away as the years go by.

Find out more about Mint at: http://www.linuxmint.com

This is a review-like story about my experiences with the Archlinux Linux distribution. I’ve been using Arch for half an year now and I’ve been quite impressed with it. Before I start, I should mention something about my previous experiments with different Linux distributions.

Nine months ago I installed PCLinuxOS as my Linux first distribution. Back then I didn’t have any idea about the Linux’s filesystems, package management or any other features either. I had been using Windows all my life, so I was a complete newbie. To put the long story short: the installation went well, I got to install most of the applications I wanted, but there were few drawbacks. I couldn’t get my soundcard working and I couldn’t write to my NTFS partitions at all. When googling information to solve my problems I constantly ran into Archlinux’s wiki pages. Of course, it didn’t help me much since I wasn’t using the Archlinux at the time. After weeks of googling, I gave up and decided to install Archlinux.

As I already mentioned, Archlinux has awesome wiki pages full of information. And the “Beginner’s Guide” is top-notch as well. I read through the pages and downloaded the installation media and booted it up. The installer is text-based and has quite some options in it. It seemed a bit scary at first, but thanks to excellent documentation, the installation process was a success. The Arch’s base installation is very minimal, it includes the basic tools, such as the package manager, Pacman and the basic commandline tools. When you first boot to your installation, you’ll see just a bash shell.

That’s part of the Arch’s KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy. This gives you a complete control over your system, you can choose what desktop environment to use and what software to install. Arch is a rolling distribution with very bleeding edge software. For example, I installed KDE 4.1 on the same day it was released. Arch uses also the latest stable releases for the kernel, Xorg, GCC and other major parts of the system.

One of the greatest things in Arch is it’s package manager, Pacman. It’s a command line utility, but its commands are very simle and it doesn’t need a lot of learning. Arch also has an utility called ABS (Arch Build System) which allows you to build you packages from the sources. This way you can use your custom compiler flags to optimize the packages. There is also ArchLinux User-community Repository (AUR) which contains more packages and usually development versions of various programs.

System configuration is also done by editing the configuration files. For example, in order to get write support for my NTFS partitions, I just had to edit the relevant lines in the fstab file. If something went wrong, at least I knew where to start solving the problem. This was the problem in the PCLinuxOS, when the GUI configuration failed, I had no idea where to start fixing the problem. Of course, the Arch way requires quite a lot of learning, but eventually it’s worth it.

As a conclusion, I should answer my initial question – is Archlinux more trouble than it’s worth? Well, some times when thing break completely, it feels like it’s more trouble but usually things go smoothly and then it’s definitely worth the effort. I hear people talking that Archlinux is too hard for newbies, but I have to disagree with that. I think the main “showstopper” is the lack of patience. One must also have the will to learn new things. It may not be the distro for everyone, but if you want a decent bleeding edge distro, give it a try!

As before our focus is on typical desktop and Internet usage, seeking an open-source alternative to Windows. We value a good out-of-the-box experience, polished desktop design and usability over other features.

What went wrong since the spring of 2008

In my opinion the the ongoing half year period has been a disappointment as many distributions have been rolling out rather medium or even bad releases that don’t earn many recommendations.

In September our guest starring editor Siku raised concerns about the KDE4 desktop. The birth of KDE4 has been a lengthy process and even now, in December of 2008, we can’t say that the next generation a PC desktop is ready or even a contender to the other alternatives. Even thought the stability and features are improving release after release, the basic problem of KDE4 still exists – what is the additional value it delivers to the end user? Sure, it does introduce new features and changes some of the traditional desktop environment fundamentals, still to me it looks like it complicates things rather then resolves any usability issues. All KDE4 distros I have tried appear bloated, cluttered, more complex and slower than their KDE3.5 or Gnome alternatives. No killer applications or improved use-cases have been found.

Mandriva 2009 shipped the KDE4 as the primary desktop, but unfortunately with poor results. This release had more bugs than their 2007.x or 2008.x on release date and even though most of them may be now resolved via updates I simply don’t see the point of making beta quality releases. All they do is generate negative feedback towards the distribution and Linux in general. As release cycle of 6 months is short and the distributions come with very short support for updates (12-18 months), it is crazy that the first few months of the support period are wasted for making the release even stable!

My old favorite PCLinuxOS seems to have encountered the resource problems, as in many times is the case with small distros that focus on just a few or even a single developer. The 2008 MiniMe release was awesome and they managed to release a preview of 2009, but otherwise the updates of this rolling release distro seem to have stalled. I wish all the best for the PCLinuxOS project but at the moment their star is going down rapidly.

Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex we had a look at just a couple of weeks ago, and found it to be intermediate at best and definitely short of ‘intrepid’. Very slight improvements from the 8.04.1 Long Term Support version released in the spring and most Ubuntu experts still recommend the 8.04.1 edition as the primary choice, unless the newer software components are absolutely required for hardware support.

OpenSUSE 11.1 is ready to rock!

It seems that this release cycle is no different from the previous ones – openSUSE v11.1 is simply the best desktop Linux distribution out there. With the failures of the contenders during this fall, the openSUSE wins with a huge margin. The openSUSE 11.1 will be the baseline of the next commercial SLED release, so Novell and SUSE have put of huge amount of effort to this release. Our evaluation is based on the RC1 release candidate.

SUSE is often seen as a KDE minded distribution and some consider the 11.1 release to be the ‘make it or break it’ release for KDE4. Unfortunately it seems that even capable developers of openSUSE and Novell can’t get any real improvements out of it. Luckily openSUSE also has the best implementation of Gnome desktop out there – a very polished and usable desktop out-of-the-box with great attention to detail. The single bottom panel configuration with SLAB menu just works and keeps the most used applications at your fingertips.

openSUSE comes as Gnome or KDE4 LiveCDs with a very fast and easy installer. The hardware support is top notch, and it has the latest upstream improvements from Gnome v2.24 and Linux kernel 2.6.27. YaST configuration tools offer an excellent set of GUI based tools for managing your system. The Zypper package management seems to improve in every release as well. They have excellent repositories and good availability of backports which prolong the life-cycle of their releases. The community offers one-click installation links to typical end-user needs, such as restricted formats.

It is often asked that ‘when Linux is ready for the desktop?’ and I don’t think it can get much readier than this. No matter what operating system you are currently using I highly recommend you give openSUSE a look once the 11.1 stable release is out.

Go get it: http://www.opensuse.org

First of all I have to say that I am a big fan of Ubuntu because they do a lot of good for Linux. They productize the most popular(?) Linux distribution, provide good infrastructure for the user communities and gain a lot of positive publicity for Linux. I have also the understanding that Ubuntu contributes significantly to the upstream projects (Gnome, Debian, GNU/Linux). On the other hand I have a hard time understanding parts of their strategy, which in my opinion leads to intermediate releases. Pretty good, but boring, non-innovative and after all pretty damn close to the mother Debian.

From the live CD boot the latest Ubuntu looks and feels…well Ubuntu, and there has not been a lot of development for the last couple of years (6.10 Edgy Eft was the first Ubuntu version I tried). I have to say that the improvements so far to the visual aspects were a big turn-off. They consisted of a few changed icons, slight gradients in Gnome panels and a new (rather good) wallpaper and thats it. Oh yes, there is the new theme called ‘dark room’, which is even more brownish than the default. I really expected a bolder approach in re-working the user interface as Ibex is the first release after the previous Long Term Supported edition, so it would be justified to drive more radical changes and development. There are many small distributions that have been able to come out with slick visuals, so the required pieces for the puzzle do exist. For an example openSUSE, Ubuntu’s strongest contender on the Linux field, is able to deliver much more pleasing visuals that are more professionally finalized, well thought and more intuitive.

Under the hood the Ibex brings many improvements from the upstream. Gnome has been updated to 2.24 with slight improvements, the new Network Manager being perhaps the most interesting one as it now provides improvements for Wiress and GPRS/3G connectivity. The 2.6.27 Linux kernel should improve the hardware support in many areas, which is always welcomed and always an issue with Linux on the latest or less common hardware. New X.org 7.4 brings improved multi monitor support, but caused a gap in graphics card drivers which have not been updated to latest X.org revision yet (this should obviously improve over time).

The word intrepid mean something like ‘fearless’, ‘brave’ or ‘courageous’. Unfortunately the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex does not live up to it’s name. It lacks any ground braking changes, innovation in design or brave new approaches on the visuals and usability. I would really like to see the most popular Linux distribution to innovate something that would make it stand out from the crows, and especially Debian, more. Competitors like openSUSE and Mandriva are much better in this sense as they are delivering their own value adding features like YaST or Control Center for system administration. Version 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is a small incremental upgrade on the solid foundation of Ubuntu (or Debian), but are these changes worthy a new release? They seem more like a ’service pack’ to Ubuntu v8.04 Hardy Heron, if a Microsoft Windows expression is allowed here.

Unfortunately my short test period with the latest Mandy turned out to be such a turn-off, that it ended up being a very short one. Few times in the past Mandriva (formerly known as Mandrake) has hurt their reputation but slipping out a premature release, and unfortunately the history seems to repeat itself. The live CD worked as expected and followed the similar routines as the previous Mandriva releases, except for the fact that it was running KDE4 now. User is prompted for language, keyboard, and timezone settings before the desktop launches. The installer was fast and easy to follow as used to with Mandriva. First quirk I discovered was the fact that the live CD did not shut down properly, and interestingly I was able to reproduce with two very different kinds of PCs that I have handy (the Thinkpad, and an oldish desktop).

After the installation and a hard reset I had my KDE4 desktop up and running. At this point I have to emphasize that I have always favored KDE3.5 over Gnome, so I was hoping the KDE4 experience to be a pleasing one – unfortunately it wasn’t. Instead of simplifying the computer usage, the KDE4 seems to complicate it further.

The Kicker menu (KDE alternative to Windows Start menu) had no surprises, and Mandriva had wisely chosen the old-school menu rather than the Kickoff by Suse. I was very disappointed to see that the over extensive use of the letter ‘K’ in the application names has continued even in KDE4. Kontact, Ktorrent, Kopete, Kmail, Knode, KNetAttach, Kdebluetooth4…that just sucks and looks very unappealing, especially for a new user coming from the Windows land.

The KDE4 has the ability to put all kinds of widgets on the desktop, but unfortunately none of the included ones bring anything useful for the end-user. Analog clock? Dilbert comic strips? Is this really what the next generation has to offer? One very irritating detail is that whenever the mouse pointer moves over an icon or a widget, an ugly toolbar appears from out of nowhere. And what is the use for a desktop applet on the desktop containing the application icons?

Then of course there is the performance. The Thinkpad T41 is not a real powerhouse, but it runs KDE3.5 distros very nicely. Unfortunately the Mandriva One KDE4 was the most sluggish distro I have tried on this hardware and I have tried a lot of them. The memory usage was not bad, but something was dragging down the system performance. And then of course there is the much discussed stability. After my first post-install boot the Mandriva’s automatic updater picked up some updates and while retreiving them the KDE4 crashed. That was after 3 minutes of usage, or so…

And to complete the bashing of Mandriva One 2009, I have to wonder what an earth is their strategy and who are these beta quality releases for? As their 2008 editions have shown, they do have a solid baseline at their hands and they can deliver beatiful desktops for the common user. Unfortunately with their current quality their distrobution will only intrest the most dedicated Mandriva fans and the people interested in trying out the KDE4 (just to be disappointed later).

And the current state of Mandriva just ticks me off, as the do have many things right in their Linux franchise. The Mandriva baseline is good, as proven by 2008 editions and PCLinuxOS. Their hardware selection is also top notch, and so are system configuration tools. And unlike Ubuntu, the people of Mandriva can actualyl make their distros look good. In many areas they have some nice edge over the competition, but as such they are unable to utilize it.

I have been using the KDE 4.1 since it was published in late July. I have used it with both, nVidia and ATI videocards, so I think I have pretty good overview of KDE 4’s status with the modern hardware. There are many good things about the KDE 4, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

So let’s start with the good stuff first. KDE 4 has a completely new approach to the deskop: there are no traditional desktop icons, but the whole desktop is build of Plasmoids. In fact, even taskbar and desktop icons are Plasmoids. There are also mini-applications, Widgets, which are similar to Windows Vista’s Gadgets. All of these Plasmoids are easily resizable and customizable, making it easy to create a desktop of your likes.

There are also several new frameworks such as Phonon, the multimedia API and Solid, the device integration framework. These frameworks are mainly ‘under the hood’ changes and are not visible to the end user. Also, Konqueror is no longer used as the file manager, as it’s replaced by Dolphin. Dolphin is basically an update to KDE 3’s file manager with better integration of tagging, image preview and places. And I must say, it’s one of the things that have impressed me in the KDE 4. It’s simple enough and it tends to just work.

There’s one more thing that is worth mentioning: the improved windows manager: KWin. KWin has finally all those cool effects from Compiz Fusion and Vista. Flip swith, cover switch, box switch, window thumbnails, minimizing and maximizing effects, shadows… you name it! This brings KDE 4 straigth to the 21th century.

But, there is always a but: with the modern graphics cards these features are hardly working. There are massive rendering bugs, crashes, white screens and performance issues. Trust me, I’ve seen it all. I first had a nVidia card which worked semi-well: just few rendering issues and increased CPU usage. But I had to disable most of the features to keep my system responsive.

I knew that nVidia’s driver is a bit crappy but that’s nothing compared to ATI. I recently upgraded my GPU to ATI to get the HD acceleration for my HTPC. I thought I had seen it all with nVidia, but no: ATI is even worse. If I enable KWin’s desktop effects, all I get is a white screen. Even without the desktop effects there are some rendering bugs, but I those are already known from the nVidia experience. And as for HTPC use, both cards are equally useless with KDE 4. It’s impossible to get dual monitor working. If I managed to get the Xorg config right (believe me, I’ve gone trough the hell and back tweaking it), all I get is a black screen on my secondary display. Though, I can see the mouse cursor on the black screen but it doesn’t help much. Ok, I admit it, there might be someway to get it working by tweaking the Xorg config. But even so, it’s far from the good user experience.

Some KDE applications have some bugs, like some settings aren’t always saved, Konsole jams sometimes so that you cannot righ-click to open the context menu, etc. but the main issues are definitely with the graphic cards. So, is the KDE 4 the future of the desktops? Maybe someday, but for now there are too many unfinished features and graphic card vendors have a lot of work to do with their drivers. I cannot recommend KDE 4 for every one, but if you like to try new things, it’s definitely worth trying. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a great desktop environment some day!