---KDE 4 Impressions -> Opensuse 11 & Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix---

KDE 4 Impressions -> Opensuse 11 & Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix

Well, first off, let me just say that part of this review should be accredited to scooberdoober, who was the one who made me aware of the fact that there was a KDE 4 version of Kubuntu out there. KDE 4, as you may or may not know, is the next generation of the K Desktop Environment, the popular GUI alternative to the GNOME Desktop Environment. Although KDE 4 came out of its beta stages January of this year, many Linux distro developers who implement the KDE GUI in their distros still advocate v. 3.5 as v. 4.0 still has a lot of roadblocks to overcome before the majority of the Linux audience agrees that it is a mature and stable GUI for the average computer user to use. This helps explain why the standard version of Kubuntu, released in April of this year, still utilized v. 3.5 of KDE. However, as mentioned above, NBR member scooberdoober made me aware that there was in fact another version of Kubuntu released that used KDE 4 for Linux enthusiasts out there willing to give the new GUI a shot. Although the news did surprise me at first, I guess it makes sense now as KDE 4 will sooner or later become the standard desktop environment in many Linux distros as its developers continue tweaking the GUI and ironing out its bugs. The sooner the KDE audience gets adjusted to the new interface, the better.

My first experience with KDE 4 was about a year ago, back in late 2007, when I installed Opensuse 10.3 on my desktop system and opted for the KDE 4 preview release install option alongside the standard GNOME and KDE 3.5 installs. I don't exactly remember all the details now, but I do remember the preview being very, very buggy. The KDE panel was a mess and various icons on the desktop were missing their native pictures. I also remember the GUI crashing very frequently. It was, essentially, unusable, but what I did like about it was the new look of KDE, part of which almost looked to be inspired by the very attractive Mezzo Desktop Environment. That said, when I heard that the new release of Opensuse, v. 11, would be using KDE4 as the standard GUI for the KDE release, I was more than excited to give it a shot and see just how far the Opensuse team had progressed since the KDE4 preview of Opensuse 10.3. I only got around to downloading the 64-bit live CD image of the distro yesterday, which was about the same time that I figured that I'd also download the 64-bit KDE 4 Remix of Kubuntu 8.04 to give Opensuse some competition I burned the iso's on some blank CDs I stole from a friend and gave each distro an hour-long test drive today. The following are the results of my endeavor.

Opensuse 11 w/ KDE 4

I decided to test out Opensuse first just because I had been so eager to follow up on what the Opensuse team had done w/ KDE4 since v. 10.3. I popped the CD into my laptop's drive and was at a very gorgeous looking grub menu screen in no time at all. Pressing "enter" at the grub selection screen to arriving at a fully usable KDE4 live session took 3 minutes and 17 seconds.


The very clean Opensuse 11 desktop.

The vast improvement over KDE4 in Opensuse 10.3 almost stunned me at first. The new Oxygen theme really was like a breath of fresh air. And Kickoff, the new application launcher at the bottom-left corner of the screen, worked like a charm. BTW, I forgot to mention that the official KDE version in this release is v. 4.0.4.


A very handy-dandy manual to KDE4 is conviently included in Opensuse 11.

Getting wireless set up was a breeze since most linux distros support the Intel 4965AGN wireless card these days. All I had to do was right-click on "Network Manager" on the right side of the KDE panel, click on "New Connection", select my wireless device (wlan0), select my wireless network, click next, select my authentication method (in my case, it was WPA2, though WEP is an option as well), type in my passphrase, click on "Save and Connect", and watch Opensuse do the rest. Sorry if that sounded like a lot, but it really was pretty painless.


NBR on Firefox 3b5 in Opensuse 11.

The default programs that Opensuse uses are as follows:

Default Office Suite -> Openoffice 2.4 (looks almost identical to Openoffice in KDE 3.5 though)
Default File Manager -> Dolphin 1.0.2 (very clean)
Default Web Browser -> Firefox 3 beta 5 (noticed that scrolling up and down pages slowed down at times, but maybe that was because I was in a live session)
Default Music Player -> Amarok 1.4.9.1
Default Video Player -> Kaffine 0.8.6 (still need codecs for stuff like .avi vids to work)
Default Chat Application -> Kopete 0.50.1


Openoffice 2.4 in Opensuse 11

A downside to Opensuse is that it does not automount the partitions on your hard drive. I'm sure the Opensuse team created the live session this way for security reasons, but my personal preference while in a live Linux session is to have free read/write access to my drives whenever I want. That said, I proceeded to mount my all of my drives manually via Konsole (KDE's terminal program). I managed to mount my reiserfs Ubuntu partition w/o any problems, but for some reason, when I attempted to mount my Windows ntfs partitions, I would get errors. I was pretty disappointed by this as ntfs support should be standard in most Linux distros today, but it didn't bother me too much.....


As you can see in this picture, only my Ubuntu reiserfs partition is mounted. Also, the temp readings that Opensuse was giving me on my CPU gave me a little shock (surely it couldn't be that hot???). The sides of my PC felt only mildly warm to the touch, so my guess is that the temp readings were off. Also, looking down at the "Memory Information" section left me wondering "did Opensuse detect my 2GB swap?"

I also tried out glxgears, just for the fun of it ->


Since I normally get like 5000+ FPS when running glxgears in Ubuntu, I figured that graphical hardware acceleration wasn't enabled (confirmed by the fact that the display info in the fifth screenshot above said that I was still using the "nv" drivers). I couldn't find the option to enable hardware acceleration though, so I just left it alone.

What also caught my attention in this release of Opensuse was the Plasma dashboard, which is more or less the new widget framework that future KDE4 releases will use. I remember a similar feature being implemented in the KDE4 preview back in Opensuse 10.3, but it was extremely buggy. I was hoping that all of the problems would have been fixed by Opensuse 11, but I was sad to see that they weren't. The new Plasma dashboard, although much improved, still needs a lot of work. Although many of the "plasmoids" worked, they would appear on my desktop and I couldn't send back them to some sort of widget layer (like you can with the screenlets+compiz combo in Ubuntu). Whether this was how Plasma was designed or just some bug in KDE4 still remains a mystery to me.

Not all of the plasmoids worked though....


....and it didn't take very long for Plasma to crash.


All in all though, Opensuse 11 was very impressive. It breaks new ground with KDE4 while still keeping many of the features that've always appealed to Opensuse users over the past years (YaST isn't going away anytime soon). There are various issues with this version of Opensuse that are pretty annoying, but with those aside, I could definitely see myself using Opensuse 11 w/ KDE4 for simple day-to-day tasks. I'm not saying that I would replace my current Ubuntu install with it, as I cherish the stability of GNOME, but it is still very usable, and I'm sure it can be customized to suit anyone's needs. It looks great too!! Not only does this release refuel my hope for the future of Opensuse, but also for the future of KDE4 as well.


YaST2 still takes care of the Opensuse install, just like it always has, though this is as far into the installation process as I dared to go

Now all that's left is to tackle Kubuntu!


Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix

Time it took from pressing enter at the grub menu screen to a fully usable KDE4 live session: 2 minutes, 44 seconds.


The Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Desktop. Meh.

Admittedly, the Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix desktop didn't excite as much as Opensuse's did. Maybe it had something to do with the rather ugly color clash b/t the blue background and the black KDE panel. Or maybe it had something to do with the broken icon at the top left. Or maybe it was just because the whole Desktop looked so darn empty. So yeah, I just wasn't feeling it from the get-go, but I was only five minutes in and I still had another 55 minutes to spend w/ it, so I just continued messing around.


The Kick-off Application Menu in Kubuntu. By the way, the KDE4 version here is 4.0.3.

My first order of business was to set up wireless. Luckily, Kubuntu made this even easier than Opensuse did. I could set up my connection by right-clicking on the network manager icon at the bottom-right corner of the KDE panel, selecting my wireless connection, configuring all of my settings on the resulting popup screen, and then finalizing the process by clicking on "Connect."


You can set up your entire wireless connection all in one window.

Mounting the partitions on my drive was also a breeze, though that's always been typical of both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I was able to mount all three of my Windows ntfs partitions in Dolphin (Kubuntu's file manager), as well as my Ubuntu reiserfs partition. I had read and write access to all of these drives as a normal user, though Kubuntu wouldn't let me tamper with some parts of the reiserfs partition unless I went root (no big deal).


Look Ma! All my drives mounted right!

Here's the list of the Default apps in this edition of Kubuntu:

Default Office Suite -> Openoffice 2.4 (same as in Opensuse)
Default File Manager -> Dolphin 1.0.2 (still very clean)
Default Web Browser -> Konqueror 4.0.3 (bad choice for a web browser, more on this later)
Default Music Player -> JuK v. 3.0.1
Default Video Player -> Dragon Player 2.0
Default Chat Application -> Kopete 0.50.1

Of these, the only thing that was really new to me was Dragon Player.


Honestly, there really isn't much to be said about Dragon Player, as it has got to be one of the most simple video players I have ever seen (and I don't say this in a good way). Aside from clicking on "play", "pause", and "full screen mode", there really wasn't much else left to see or do. How this tiny program is going to compete with the opensource multimedia giants out there (like Mplayer, VLC, and Kaffine), I'll never know, but I do wish it the best of luck. And in case you were wondering, I couldn't play any AVIs, WMVs, or DVDs in Dragon Player since Kubuntu didn't have the right codecs (the same thing applied in Opensuse as well w/ Kaffine).


The one thing about Dragon Player that I did like was that it remembers where you left off in a video, a feature that Mplayer and VLC still have yet to learn.

And then there was Konqueror, probably the most disheartening aspect of this Kubuntu KDE4 Remix release.


This is one version of Konqueror that you're not going to conquer, no matter how hard you try.

I think that the reason Konqueror is probably struggling nowadays is that has gotten lost in these recent years and has come to a crisis as to what its actual function as a program ought to be. Initially, Konqueror had been designed to act as both a web browser and a file manager all roled into one. There was a time when this worked well in KDE, but those times have indubitably come to an end. Most Linux developers, pioneering either the KDE or GNOME desktop environments, are bound to go w/ Firefox as the default web browser for their distros (as it is the best ), while Dolphin is gradually being accepted as the default file manager for most KDE releases (GNOME uses Nautilus). This leaves Konqueror stuck in some X-Zone between the other two, but it makes sense if you think about it, as Firefox is, in fact, superior to Konqueror as a web browser and Dolphin is, in fact, superior to Konqueror as a file manager. That said, I was very disappointed to see that the Kubuntu team hasn't grasped that concept by now and decided to leave Firefox off Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix, effectively making Konqueror the default web browser for Kubuntu (I noticed they did the same thing in the standard version of Kubuntu 8.04 as well). This was a very bad idea imho. Since I didn't want to go through the hassle of hunting down a firefox installation for Kubuntu on a live session, I was stuck with Konqueror for web browsing, and had a downright abyssmal experience. Many web pages didn't load correctly, and websites like Gmail that use a lot of scripting in the background were a farcry from what they actually ought to have looked like. All of this, in addition to the fact that the program crashed whenever it felt like, made Konqueror by far the most unstable aspect of this Kubuntu KDE4 release.


I got at least three of these. Keep in mind that this is something that NEVER happens in Ubuntu.

There were other aspects of Kubuntu that just didn't appeal to me. For example, half-way through my live session, I had to drop my wireless connection to test out bluetooth (wireless and bluetooth on my notebook are both controlled by the same switch). Not only did Kubuntu fail to detect my bluetooth (which Opensuse managed to do), but then when I turned my wireless back on again, it also failed to reconnect to my wireless network. The only way I could get my notebook back online was to connect my notebook back to my router with an ethernet cable.

Another thing about Kubuntu that I disliked was that there was no power manager. Seriously. None at all. If you look at the screenshots above, you can see that the Network Manager and Klipboard are the only apps running in the KDE Panel. There was no manager that I could go to in order to determine how much battery life I had left or something, and plugging my AC adapter cord into and out of my notebook didn't do a thing to change this. Maybe the app. fails to start at bootup? I dunno....

Also, glxgears wouldn't even work. Instead, I got this:

Code:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ glxgears
The program 'glxgears' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

This is the first 600MB+ live modern distro I've ever used that didn't have the mesa-utils package installed.

If Opensuse 11 and Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix were to have some sort of KDE4 showdown, then Opensuse 11 would win, no questions asked. It is by far the much more stable Linux distribution out of the two, and stability is one of the three most important aspects I look for in a Linux distro when I decide to test it out (along with security and usability). Kubuntu w/ KDE4 has potential, I'll give it that, but it'll have had to have gone through a lot of changes (like the inclusion of Firefox) for me to consider giving it another shot in the future. I would not recommend it as a distro for you or anyone else to use on a daily basis, but it's one of those distributions out there that is worth at least one live CD session for you to try.

Well, that's about all folks! Hoped you liked the review.

BTW, here are some things specifically about KDE4 that I just happened to notice (common across both distros):

• There was this annoying "bang" sound that would occur whenever you switched between desktops. I'm sure that the KDE4 team created it to sound aesthetically pleasing, but I just found it downright annoying. I looked for an option in both Opensuse and Kubuntu to turn the sound off, but I couldn't find it. I'm sure the option must be somewhere though.
• Many of the programs (Openoffice was just one example) looked and performed exactly as they would in KDE 3.5.9.
• On the Desktop, there doesn't seem to be an option for cutting or pasting files. Take a look at the screenshot of Opensuse below (applies to Kubuntu too):
  
  See? No cut or paste. Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V didn't work either. The only way I could cut and paste files from my Desktop was by actually having to go to Dolphin, browsing to my Desktop folder, and then move the files around that way. Also, I couldn't drag a file from the Desktop to an open folder. The file would just go behind the folder (while still remaining on the Desktop). It was really weird.
  

If you would like to download one or both of these lives distros to try them out yourself, here are the mirror sites I used:
Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix
Opensuse 11 KDE 4

Oh, and sorry for the non sequitur times if you were looking at the clock in the Kubuntu screenshots above (I had to go back and redo some of them).

Thanks for reading!

 

can u make the screenshots as thumbnails...
havta do a lotta scrolling..


but review's really good..
i think i'm slowly becoming kubuntu fan..!

 

Excellent review and great effort Ben! I've the CD for Suse...getting ready to check it out myself....thanks

 

Sorry, even today I still have a hard time figuring out the whole thumbnails thing w/ Imageshack

Thanks.... and I wish you a very good experience w/ Opensuse. I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it though, I sure know that I did

 

Did you even bother to read the message that was returned? It's not that glxgears "wouldn't work", it's that glxgears wasn't installed. If you had typed in the command that it had suggested (sudo apt-get install mesa-utils), you would have been able to use it.

Also, can you link to the images instead of directly embedding them in the page? It makes you have to scroll left and right to read the post(s) if your resolution isn't high enough.

 

Yeah, I get the error message all the time in Ubuntu. But I've gotten it in some other previous versions of linux and I know that mesa-utils depends on a lot of big files. So I just wasn't in the mood, especially when I already knew it was going to run w/o hardware acceleration anyway.

Again, sorry for the embedded pics, I didn't think it would be a big deal

 

Does Knetworkmanager require that you have to broadcast your SSID for your wireless to work?

 

I think after you set it up manually the first time, it should reconnect if you're not broadcasting...but I would broadcast with WPA or better.

 

+1

Good job my friend. and thanks for the mention.

I sure hope they get the cut and past thing taken care of soon.

 

+1 for me too. Just tried the LiveCD....worked well for me...nothing crashed...got online no problem. Hmm, looks like it could work for me. Tempted to copy over my /home and try it on the hard drive

 

I'd be more interested in seeing a review where the reviewer installs 3D acceleration and tests them properly.

BTW - I'm a massive Konqueror fanboy. Best browser out there.

 

Nice review, I'm not a fan of KDE much but it's nice to see reviews of it from time to time.

 

If I install it to the hard drive, I'll run glx gears in Xubuntu first, then set up properly and run it in Suse 11.0. Don't know though if I'll do it

 

I'd say go for it, it'll be a complete refresh from Xubuntu. However, keep in mind that it has a slight learning curve and it probably won't be as stable as you'd like it to be.

I could follow up on the hardware acceleration if you'd like, though I'm pretty sure it would work on either distro. The real question a lot of people will probably be asking though is how compiz fusion performs, and I guess I could follow up on that too, though I'm running out of space on my HD for more linux installs....

But you think that Konqueror is the best browser out there ???? Whoa, not by a long shot....

Thanks! Like I said, I prefer GNOME over KDE as well (just b/c it's more stable), but I like being proficient w/ both since they both are really nice to use. None is perfect though, and both GNOME and KDE have their pros and cons...

 

Well, I've found it renders pages quickest and most correctly. I don't care for frills in my web browsers.

 

You could Just post the links to the images, and not inline them. They are huuuuggge.

Thanks BTW

 

For me openSuse only takes 1 min and 5 seconds to boot in to the desktop from GRUB menu (with auto login).
at 1 min 20 seconds skype connected (wireless internet)
at 1 min 30 seconds I was able to type a document in Openoffice (clicked open office icon soon after I logged in to the desktop)

So I'd say at 1 min 30 seconds I got a fully working desktop. That is quicker than Vista to boot in to a working desktop. But in Vista I have NOD32 Virus guard (which delays everything by at least 5 ~ 10 seconds)

I have 3D acceleration enabled with nVidia drivers. ( one click installer)

Got around 5070 FPS on glxgears.

Compiz Fusion ( one click installer) is very smooth running at 1680x1050 (on my external monitor over HDMI), I don't know if there is a benchmark to test the performance of Compiz, but if you guys know of anything, and want me to test it I can do it.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop with MS fonts installed (resized from 1680x1050 to 1280x800 for faster loading)

 

I'll work on attaching the pics as thumbnails.

Opensuse takes faster to boot up on your PC b/c you have it installed on your HD. A live session from the CD takes much longer.....

But yeah, I figured that compiz wouldn't have a problem running. There should be a benchmark app built right into compiz if you installed the compiz-fusion-plugins-extra package.

 

Oh sorry, I thought you installed it
In that case 3 mins and 17 secs to boot off a live CD is pretty darn quick I'd say ....

 

ok im downloading Kubuntu 8.10 right now,but after your post im starting to like opensuse,any opinions which runs better?? Im a absolute noob at this thing,so please help me out

 

Dude this thread is ancient, please don't revive it.
As for OpenSuSE 11.1 vs Kubuntu 8.10 it's a matter of preference.
SuSE has backported some features from KDE 4.2, though.