Wow

A couple of days ago, I dug out my old laptop, the screen of which had given up the ghost a few months ago, and switched it on. To my surprise, it was working perfectly, which is great, because my work laptop is about to be taken away as they roll out a load of extremely fast desktops. Great for work, not so great for me. But at least my old laptop has decided not to be broken any more.

For the last year or so, since I had my nice new work laptop, I've been running openSUSE on an external USB hard drive (which surprisingly, benchmarked faster than using the internal drive), and I've been using KDE 4.0. I know my last post on this blog said I'd reverted to 3.5, but I tried 4.0.1 when it came out (or possible 4.0.2?), and discovered the actual show stoppers had been fixed, and the irritations were small enough I could live with them.

Anyway, onto the 'wow'. Since my old laptop had a clean install of openSUSE 10.3 on it and I didn't mind about messing it up with an unstable version of KDE, I put the unstable KDE snapshot version on instead of 4.0. And I think the word which best sums it up is 'Wow'. It's really, really good.

There are some bits in particular that I liked: being able to resize the panel; the panel for icons on the desktop; the beautiful highlight for icons; the alt-f2 thingy (I can never remember its proper name) which is brilliant, and looks and works so well I keep pressing alt-f2 and typing stuff in even though I don't need to run any programmes; the way you can style plasma easily; the way plasma styles work so much better than before; the pim programmes being KDE4ified; the sounds; the plus/minus symbols for selecting/deselecting icons (brilliant idea); everything seems more responsive (even on this old laptop); things looking good even without compositing switched on...

So, great job everyone. This beta is fantastic.

Reverted

Alas (and alack), I have reverted to using KDE 3.5.8. I wasn't going to, but yesterday then KDE 4.0.0 refused to load for some unknown reason, and I got thinking: Was it worth trying to fix it? Unfortunately, I could only think of four reasons to use KDE 4.0.0, and they weren't very convincing:

Reasons to use KDE 3.5.8

• It's a stable, well tested system which has had most of the rough edges whittled away over time - and most of the time, it just works. (This reason could be expanded into many bullet points - one for each thing in KDE 3.5.8 which works which is broken in KDE 4.0.0, but I'll leave it rolled up into a single bullet point to save this looking more like a rant than it probably already does - and leave the bug reports in bugs.kde.org).
  
• I don't have to use AIGLX (the non-compositing version of KDE 4.0.0's KWin isn't very useable), and so everything is much faster, Google Earth works and I can watch videos. (In KDE 4.0.0 kaffeine and codeine just show an empty black box)
• I can set up the panels just how I like them. (One medium sized panel at the bottom for the K-menu, the task list (or whatever it is called), a clock and the lock/logout buttons, and a small one at the top for a 'quick launch' bar, the pager and the system tray.)
• I think the style I use in KDE 3.5.8 is sharper than Oxygen currently is, which looks a bit blurry somehow - I'm not exactly sure why though. But it makes it nicer to use.

Reasons to use KDE 4.0.0

• Plasma on the desktop can be pretty (although it tends to crash a lot).
• KWin with compositing looks cool.
• Tabs in the Oxygen style look kind of nice.
• I can find bugs and report them so that KDE 4.0.1/KDE 4.1 can be better.

I am well aware that KDE 4.0.0 is actually a beta release which has been release as a .0 release to try to get more people to use it so that more bugs can be reported and fixed, so I can't complain too much (although I would strongly argue for not releasing betas without the beta moniker, but that's another rant). I'll still boot into KDE 4.0.0 from time to time (that is, if openSUSE's packages fix themselves soon!) and look forward to KDE 4.0.1.

KDE 4.0: The First Week

I've now had KDE 4.0 installed for just over a week, and I'm getting used to its quirks. I'm very impressed with KWin - it hasn't crashed on me once. At least, not since I got the right combination of options (for me, the intel graphics driver instead of the i810 one, and OpenGL instead of XRender). And it's a darn sight nicer than compiz. I always got frustrated by compiz because it didn't understand KDE properly, and I couldn't use Alt+RMB to resize and things like that. And it would crash. KWin just works, although rather slowly.

Generally, KDE 4.0 seems a fair bit slower than KDE 3.5, but I think that might be down to the compositing stuff. Also, there are quite a few little niggly bugs which I hope will be fixed by 4.0.1. I've reported a few bugs, but I'm still trying to work out reliable ways of reproducing some of them before I report them.

I said in my last post that I was inspired to start coding for KDE 4.0. Well, as usual, my inspiration has quickly waned as I moved into a new house and have more useful things to do at the moment, such as painting. So don't expect code from me any time soon.

Living with KDE 4.0

Surprisingly enough, no one has flamed me yet for being disappointed with the quality of KDE 4.0. I must try harder. I used to be able to attract flames much more easily.

Well, I've had KDE 4.0 on my machine for a day or so now, and I'm getting used to it. I've switched to running AIGLX so that I can use KWin's OpenGL mode instead of the XRender mode, and it's a lot more stable, although I can't run Google Earth any more. With the OpenGL rendering, the desktop look great, and the beauty of the desktop alone is probably enough to stop me switching back to KDE 3.5 at the moment. A few times I have clicked on a window only to have it completely disappear without warning - not sure what that's about. There are a few niggling little bugs in the behaviour of a few things, but I'm sure they'll get sorted in a minor release before too long. (Such as icon widgets not working with a graphics tablet, not being able to hide the plasma blob, konqueror not loading images or styles, etc.)

I am inspired to try writing some plasma applets to do things properly. And when I say properly, I mean how I want them to work. I've had a look at some of the source for existing stuff, and it looks relatively easy, so instead of writing any more of this, I'm now going to go off and write some code. Perhaps. If I can stop gazing at the beautiful desktop.

Giving 4.0 a go

So, KDE 4.0 is out, and I have installed it on my computer. I've had it on there for a while actually, in one form or another, but this is the first time I've used the actual released version, and the first time I've logged into my main account using it.

And what are my first impressions? Well, the first impressions are that it has, again, improved over the previous pre-release. A nice new wallpaper, a slightly sleeker panel, and a number 4 instead of a 3.97 or something.

My second impressions are that it's still very unstable, very unpolished and, to be honest, somewhere between an alpha and a beta in quality. I had been expecting the lack of features, as that was well advertised, but I had at least expected the released features to work. Anyway, I'm going to stick it out - it's going to stay on my computer for the next week at least, and I'll start writing bug reports., and looking forward to 4.0.1, or whatever comes next.

openSUSE 10.3: First Look

Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.

I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.

After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from i810 to the new intel one, and the wireless driver from ipw3945 to iwl3945, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.

Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.

The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.

The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.

I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!

KDE4 Won't Start

I can't start KDE4 any more - it fails to start dbus. To be more exact, qdbus gives this error message when it is run:

Could not connect to D-Bus server: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session


But when I run dbus-launch it works fine. I'm sure it's probably something simple, but I'm about ready to give up.