Sunday, February 22, 2009

Cleaning Off Some Blood

My regular readers (why are you looking at me like that) will recall that about four months ago I tried out KDE4.  To sum that up very, very briefly: I hated it.  A couple weeks ago though, KDE4.2 entered the testing branch of Gentoo, and what I'd seen elsewhere in the internet suggested that people who were nothuge fans of previous iterations should try it again.  As this is in testing/unstable branch for Gentoo, I'm dealing with a final release version from upstream, so just in terms of stability I knew it was pretty likely to come out ahead, but how usable is it?  Well, let's compare and contrast with last time.

The only thing I was particularly happy with last time was the move to a 3D composited desktop like OSX's, Windows Aero, and Compiz.  Well, now more than just being 3D compositied, it has basically every useful effect from them too, and now has my favorite implementation of a few of them.  In OSX, you can trigger some of the effects like Exposé and showing the desktop by hitting the corners of the screen.  Compiz-Fusion had a similar effect, but it was slightly more finnicky.  KDE4 is more stable than both of them, by requiring you to push against the corner rather than just getting near it.  Sure it's slightly more effort, but it removes false positives in the process.  All the rest of the features are basically clones of Compiz ones, with a few trivial omissions; there isn't an alternate window switcher key command set for using multiple effects active at once, and the features that map desktops to polyhedrons are slow, but worthless anyway.  Additionally, I can't seem to drag windows across borders to other desktops, but it's still easy to get them over there via the context menu.

When I was complaining about keyboard shortcuts last time, I primarily was referring to mapping Meta+Space to launch KRunner, as it's much better than Katapult (though worse than Gnome-Do, which looks like ass in KDE4 sadly, though under KDE3.5 it's glorious) and that sort of functionality was welcomed.  Well, I'm happy to report that it works exactly as expected now.

My next complaints were directed at Phonon and Amarok2.  I can't really speak to Phonon this time since I don't have any audio notifications running for any apps, and I'm not running Amarok2.  Sadly, the majority of my complaints with Amarok2 were intended features of it, or else low priority omissions, so there isn't much reason to try it again.  It's probably never going to be the music player I want, though it may become a music player I can live with eventually, in case the 1.x series dies out too badly.

I had two specific complaints with KTorrent: lack of RSS plugin and the UPnP plugin blocking all other UPnP use.  Both of these are remedied with the current release, though the RSS plugin is not as good as I'd hope.  It fetches fine, but I can't override how often (the one stream I use a lot of often runs out of new spots faster than it defines the update, so letting it auto update at its own pace misses things), and the filters are still appallingly bad.  The regexp support is simply broken, as valid regexp completely fail to match things they really should.  This isn't exactly a regression though, as the KDE3 branch was no better about this.  I can live without automated downloading, I just wish I didn't have to.

Akregator is a bit of an interesting experience.  The issue I had last time was back again, but I'm no longer convinced it was a broken app so much as it was ridiculously buggy rendering.  You see, I did eventually find a handle that allowed the resizing of the Articles pane, it was just closed all the way.  Maybe it was there last time too and I just missed it.  I can't tell, and don't feel like installing an old version just to find out.  This is definitely a bug, but it's hard to tell exactly how big of one so I'll just leave it at the fact that it works now, and is slightly more readable due to using Qt4 widgets and color themes throughout, and after my last foray I actually switched my KDE3 apps over to it with mixed success.

I wouldn't suggest everything is perfect though.  K3b is still a non-starter, but it's not in testing in portage yet either, so I don't have to care.  Plasmoids are now called widgets, and most of the old issues apply, though there are sort of replacements.  OSX widgets still fail miserably with the Alpha channel for whatever reason (why even bother with the feature if it's this bad?) but there is a servicable if finnicky weather widget that's supplying me with outdoor data without going outdoors.  Also, I do definitely still need kdelibs-3.5.10 around for Amarok and a couple other old apps, as well as Qt 3.3.8b since Qt4-Qt3support still does not allow use of Qt3 itself, as that's not its goal.  Apps like Konversation still seem to not even be attempting to update and with K3b and Amarok still in KDE3 varieties there's not a whole lot of option but to keep around the old subsystems.

In order to keep the article in the same path as last time I wound up skipping over a rather obnoxious little bug that I hit immediately upon launching X for the first time after the update, and one that would probably be a bit of a game ender for people who aren't used to weirdness; upon finishing the load process, there was nothing but a wallpaper on the screen.  My first guess was that the desktop program didn't actually load, but it turns out that they just spawned it with no panels whatsoever, so adding a panel and adding a task manager, clock, and system tray to that quickly made the place livable.  It's just a little scary to see nothing after launching, even if there isn't really anything wrong.

So, the upgrade to KDE4 is not going perfectly for me, but it's good enough.  Not relying on compiz to make my system not ugly as sin is a blessing all on its own since its development has stagnated and my build was glitchy at best.  I prefer the look of Oxygen widgets to Plastik, but there was probably an easier way to get nicer widgets for my apps than this if that mattered too much.  The positives, all in all, outweigh the negatives for me, so I'll stick around as everything starts coming together completely.  If I'm perfectly honest, this should have been KDE4.0, as 4.0 was intentionally beta and 4.1 simply wasn't very good, but the real deal is finally here, and it's good... -ish.

No comments: