Mar 11 2008
Trying out KDE
It’s been a while since I played with KDE. Every few years I decide to give it a try and find that it offers nothing that Gnome doesn’t do better. However after seeing someone’s recent KDE setup and thinking it looked pretty good, I thought I’d give it another chance, see what’s new with it.
I must say so far I like it, but there are a few things that are just annoying the crap out of me.
1. Despite having a fairly extensive color configuration panel, all it’s apps seem to feel free to ignore the color settings. But only the ones that ensure you can actually read anything. For example: select a fairly dark color scheme (say, “Dark Blue”, “Blue Slate” or any of the CDE schemes but Solaris). You will get white text on a dark background. But open Kate, the default text editor for KDE and you get… black text on a dark background. Because Kate IGNORES KDE’s settings for TEXT color and has it’s own configuration panel for text color. But it does NOT let you adjust the background color. Same with Kontact, the KDE PIM. Only it’s even better there: it likes to use alternating background colors when displaying lists of things (folders on an IMAP server, messages in a mail folder). The text color is the same for each item in the list (grey) but the background color alternates like greenbar paper between dark and darker, such that every other item in the list is completely unreadable.
I fired up Kopete, the KDE IM client and moments later received a message from one of my contacts. Light grey text on a light grey background. I had to mess with it’s internal color and display settings to see what my contact had just said to me.
I’ve never been able to get enthused about KDE, even though it is prettier than Gnome, and more Windows-like.
Btw, your blog’s subtitle now says “The Life and Times a Unix Geek” — you are missing an “of.”
I’ve never been real fond of it for exactly the opposite reasons: I’ve always felt Gnome looked much better, and I didn’t want a Windows-like interface.
However after seeing it on someone else’s desktop recently I thought I’d give it another try. While the defaults resemble Windows, it can also be configured in such a way as to resemble CDE
I’ve only been playing with it for about 3 days (and going all the way: trying out Konquerer as a replacement for Firefox, Kopete to replace Gaim/Pidgin and Kontact/Kmail in place of Thunderbird) but so far I’m liking it. Of course, I’m having to adjust to not having the addons I customarily install in Firefox, and both Kontact and Konqueror have crashed at random times. Kopete, however, feels like quite a step up from Pidgin.
And thanks for pointing out the error in the title. I wonder when that happened?