Fedora Linux 16 with KDE: surprisingly high-quality

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-16-kde.html

by Tsiolkovsky • 15 years ago

46 11 15 years ago

slug• 15 years ago

"Then, there's the lack of address bar search, i.e. if you type in sentences there, the string will not be forwarded to your search engine of choice, it will most likely be declared as an invalid protocol, which is fairly annoying and counter productive."

This is not true, you can select what behavior your want the address bar to have, for example to redirect to "I'm feeling lucky from google". It even allows you to use prefix keywords, like "wp janitor" or "fm gcc" to search for example wikipedia or freshmeat. All of this is configurable and you can create your own prefixes.

Not only that, you can use fish:/ or any other protocol like lan:/ smb:/ to directly connect to ssh accessible machines, samba,etc. Konqueror is actually one of my favorite browsers , since it's very well integrated with the rest of the system, although it feels a bit sluggish sometimes.

Unfortunately it's hard to find a decent KDE distribution. Kubuntu for example has many flaws, and imho makes a disservice to the KDE people.

One problem and something that you would think to work without a fuzz is kmail and its default akonadi configuration: kubuntu comes with restrictive access to mysql and you have to run a command in the shell to fix it, not exactly user friendly or someone new to the system...

Not only that, KDE heavy use of effects (which can be disabled) exposes many bugs with the binary drivers from nvidia and ati. If you check the their changelogs is quite amusing to see some binary releases with "this x.y.z beta release fixes [problem] with KDE 4.x.x"

If Canonical would scrap unity and give more attention and resources to KDE, we would have a really good desktop environment be now. Saying this, on my laptop I use xmonad or fluxbox and for desktops a mix of kde, xfce and gnome 2d. I tried unity, but honestly, it doesn't feel right.

tikhonj2• 15 years ago

Do you use XMonad as KDE's window manager or by itself? I've been considering trying XMonad with KDE, but I'm a college student so I actually like the silly effect :)

sleighboy• 15 years ago

I've been running KDE desktops on Gentoo for years and always find it to be solid.

jdpage• 15 years ago

For the record, as a Fedora 16 KDE user, I don't have any problems running the desktop effects. Also, my screensaver functions just fine thank you. Printing is a bit iffy though.

lallysingh2• 15 years ago

Huh. I've really had my fill of Gnome 3. I'm an xmonad user, and the new shell's addition has only complicated my situation --- all the code that was taken out (for, say, customization of gnome's look & feel) was useful to me, and the new code (the shell) isn't useful to me at all.

If KDE's stable, it may be time for me to have a look. I just use chrome, emacs, a shell, and a file manager anwyays.

andyking• 15 years ago

You might want to consider XFCE as well - the look and feel is very similar to Gnome 2 before they started adding all the bling.

The deal-breaker for me with XFCE is the lack of network folder support in the default Thunar file manager, but that may not be an issue for you.

But personally, I'm still using Gnome 2!

qjz• 15 years ago

Since switching to dwm, I can't even remember what I used a desktop environment for (I went from KDE to Gnome to XFCE to (black|flux)box to dwm). Based on your usage, I'm surprised you'd consider leaving xmonad for something as alien as KDE4. Give me the speed and screen real estate of a tiling window manager any day.

lallysingh2• 15 years ago

Oh I'd still be running xmonad. Just the launcher, theme setup, and file manager from kde.

kijin• 15 years ago

Doesn't anyone have first-hand experience with Fedora+KDE versus Kubuntu? Is one of them more stable than the other?

sho_hn• 15 years ago

I can't answer the "versus Kubuntu" part so I'm not sure how happy this comment will make you, but I've been using Fedora KDE since fall 2009 and personally haven't had any problems with stability.

In general I'm quite happy with how Fedora distributes KDE. They don't patch it very much and leave it mostly vanilla, focussing their work on system integration instead of modifying to differenciate their offering. That's reflected in the work they've contributed upstream, like PolicyKit support or PackageKit integration for widget installation in the desktop shell (for automatic dependency installation). Nothing flashy, more under-the-hood work, but somebody has to do that as well.

Their KDE packaging team is very competent, and the leader, Rex Dieter, is one of the nicest fellas I've encountered in FOSS. Others can be a bit stubborn at times, but are still useful and supportive, making #fedora-kde on Freenode one of the better user support channels I frequent.

Very nice for me as an upstream developer is also that they explicitly strive to support KDE development, so they will generally swiftly package any new dependencies required by KDE's development branches.

tikhonj2• 15 years ago

I tried Kubuntu about a year and a half ago, so it might have changed in the meantime. What I remember is just a lot of little annoyances and things not working; however, since this was my first Linux box, I didn't really know what I was doing. I also remember that KDE distinctly felt like a second-class citizen.

For a while, I used OpenSUSE, which has great support for KDE--I was very happy with it but decided to try something new on my newest laptop.

Now I use the Fedora KDE spin and it's awesome--almost everything works exactly how I want it, and everything else is configurable. I've also had no stability issues with Fedora 16--I had some graphics problems and small annoyances with 15, and they all seem to be fixed.

As far as packages go, I've missed nothing on Fedora--they even have a decently recent version of the Haskell problem in their repos. Emacs mysteriously came without Tetris, but that's an issue I can live with :) I would definitely recommend Fedora over Kubuntu for KDE.

Also, the newest version of KDE--regardless of distro, I think--is a nice improvement over older versions. One think I suggest is switching out the default menu for Lancelot, which I find much nicer.

Fedora Linux 16 with KDE: surprisingly high-quality

Related Stories