KDE 4, Ready or Not Ready?

Before we go to the topic, I just want to say that this post doesn’t suggest you to be ready to use KDE 4, but in contrary I just want to review and give my opinion about the brand new KDE 4.

If you are the Linux user, before you log in you can choose the type of sessions (except if you are Ubuntu users), there are Gnome, KDE and XFCE. Every users has their own preferences, I don’t know about Indonesia, but as long as I know that American users prefer more to Gnome and European users prefer more to KDE since Gnome is from US and KDE is from Germany.

I used to be preferred more to Gnome because of it’s more customizable, but since KDE 4 launched and released officially, it has attracted me with the widgets and it’s Vista-like layout. So I could show it to my friends and prove that Linux is cool!

I’m running Kubuntu 8.04 (not an official version but a community development version with KDE 4 inside) at my laptop and OpenSuse 11 at my desktop. Then I found several problems in using KDE 4 :

Add icon to the panel

With KDE 3 or Gnome you could add your favorite program to the panel, so you can access it quickly without opening the main menu. But in KDE 4 you can’t do that, there is “add widget” facility and you can choose the option “icon” there, but that’s just a plain icon without script or option that you could change, all you can change just it’s name not more. OpenSuse 11’s KDE 4 is better with Konqueror and “Home” icon at the panel that automatically provided, but still, you can’t add other program’s icon to the panel. Despite KDE 4 have the “Favorites” section at the main menu, it’s still faster when you access your favorite programs straight from the panel.

Create an Archive

If I want to create an archive, just block the file I want to be archived at window manager, right click and choose the option “Create Archive”. But I couldn’t do that at KDE 4’s window manager (Konqueror or Dolphin), there is no “Create Archive option. I should make that from an archive manager program.

KDE 4’s Ark (the archive manager program) make the situation even worse, because you can’t add a directory to your archive, so you should add the files one by one, couldn’t just click it’s folder, it’s not good especially when you want to archive a web page complete with it’s folder. Luckily I still have File Roller at my programs that could handle “add folder” option.

Akregator

Akregator is a feed reader, the function is like an email client (you could read the email without open the mail service from the browser) but it’s for blog. When I add feed from Typepad or WordPress blog there’s no problem happen, but when I try to add feed from Blogger, it crashed, when it restarted I found that the site haven’t subscribed yet at Akregator. I retry the subscribe process but the same thing happen again, I never found the problem when I used the KDE 3 version Akregator.

Well, I think that KDE 4 and it’s programs still need to be repair and undergo the development process again. It’s premature to be launched, despite it could give us a new facility and function such as the widgets, but it couldn’t run some basic facility. I hope a better or revised version of KDE 4 will be launched soon.

—
Anton Hermansyah

Tags: Linux