KDE and Ubuntu actually make a pretty good pair!

[poofyhairguy]

I am posting this experiance of kreating my own Kubuntu as a response to those that believe the Ubuntu is hostile to KDE.

Recently feelings were expressed on this board regarding Ubuntu's lack of support for KDE. My basic opinion at the time is that the KDE people either find another distro based on KDE, or deal with the KDE in the universe. This position seemed fine to me, an Gnome user, at the the time but now I have a different opinion about KDE support.

This all began when my girlfriend recently requested that I replace the windows XP with Linux on her toshiba laptop (I guess after hours of lectures from my of why OSS matters, some kinda sank in). My problem was that she disliked Gnome and really liked KDE. So I couldn't just install Ubuntu and walk away (like I do with my friends wanting the same thing), I had to follow my own advice and find a KDE distro.

The first distro I tried on her laptop was the VERY overrated Mandrake. It gave me a good first impression about KDE (even if Mandrake seems childish), but the Mandrake specific tools were as buggy as can be! Mandrake fit my main need in Linux (GUI for nearly everything, I hate editing text files), and my girlfriends, but is lack of packages frustrated me, and the buggy GUI tools nearly drove me mad! So after giving 10.1 Official one final shot, I switched to Fedora.

I know, I know. Fedora is a Gnome distro (like Ubuntu). But unlike Ubuntu Fedora DOES have a supported KDE. In fact, I found that its KDE experiance was the second most pleasent experiance (wait till the end for the best). See, Fedora has those GREAT Redhat GUI tools (their network tool is to die for), so I was able to set up her machine fairly easily. Yet the KDE is Fedora is also very poorly supported, and KDE packages are spread out in many Repos that don't like one another. Fedora lasted about a month, and in that time it proved (with stability) to my girlfriend that switching to Linux was the right idea. But last Christmas she got a new digital camera, which required a program called digikam to access it. Since I was tired of hunted down Fedora Repos to find digikam, I switch her laptop yet again!

This time the switch was to SUSE 9.2, what is considered by many to be the finest Distro in the world. I knew that it had many easily accessable packages...so picking it next was an easy task. It installed well, looked great, seemed like the perfect distro at first. YAST (Suse's GUI configuration tool) didn't crash like Mandrake's did and it seemed to have every configuration she (I)ever needed. Digikam was in the base install, and it recognized her new camera in the first try.

At first SUSE was a dream....almost lured me to the dark side. But then the problems came. The biggest problem was the fact that I could not get YAST to correctly set-up her wireless network. Its didn't crash like Mandrake's wireless tool did, but it also just wouldn't work and I could never find out why (its best forums are in German). Then I realized that the problem with SUSE was that YAST is the only GUI way to configure ANYTHING, so if something didn't work in YAST I was screwed. I even tried to pop into SUSE's Gnome to get it set up (Gnome network tool -especially Hoarys before my last dist-upgrade- is almost as good as Redhats) since I knew Gnome could do it. Problem is that SUSE's Gnome has its GUI tools gutted! Only YAST for everything! So last night SUSE was erased.

Then I found myself in an ackward situation. I tried every "big" KDE distro and they sucked! My girlfriend REALLY didn't like MEPIS's artwork, and the Kanotix (like Knoppix) hard drive install simply didn't run well. What was I to do? Then I remembered the discusions here and talk of Kubuntu. I decieded to try and make my own Kubuntu box.

So I put Warty on, and once again marveled at how well it installed itself (SUSE couldn't find my wireless with every bit of info in its YAST, but Ubuntu finds the access point without me telling it ANYTHING). Such a high standard for Hoary to live up to. Then I popped into Gnome's synaptic and installed the Universe's KDE. It was an older version than SUSE (3.2), but it had that one program I just had to have (digikam, alebet an older version).After a LOT of downloading and installing, my Kubuntu box was complete.

So I boot into KDE and notice that.... Ubuntu has a nicer KDE than most KDE distros do. The plain KDE is pretty nice (I can now say that Knoppix comes closest to plain KDE) and it seemed to install well. Gnome's trashcan applet found its way on to the desktop, but besides that everything seemed cool. The wireless just worked. I got her Camera working with Digikam on the first try, and I was able to just plug it and unplug it at will (SUSE required me unmounted the Camera for it to work again without a reboot- Win 2k style. Ubuntu's hotplugging (I think its called "project utopia") is one of the small things that shames the big dogs!) In short Kubuntu kicked ass!

Well...actually I do have a few complaints. First of all, the Warty Kubuntu would not take things that were plugged in (say a USB drive) and mount them on the desktop. This annoyed me, as Warty's Gnome puts everything on the desktop every time you plug it in. Mandrake and SUSE's KDE always put stuff on the desktop (Fedora's KDE didn't), so I missed this feature. (In Kubuntu's defence, currently Hoary sucks ass when it comes to putting things on the desktop so I guess this is hard. If its still this bad come the preview release I plan to file a pile of bug reports about it!) Also I was annoyed that the digikam and KDE in Warty are sooo old. I know that the Kubuntu team has KDE 3.3 in Hoary, but the digikam package in Hoary is still its old version and it does not include the awesome digikam pluggin package. Hopefully that will be fixed by the time Hoary releases (hint, hint).

All in all, I was wrong to tell KDE users to look elsewhere. Right here in Ubuntu there is a quality KDE desktop. Without all the buggy GUI crap that the "big" KDE distro's have. I hope that Hoary's KDE development continues to improve, and I hope that the Kubuntu project finds success. KDE people deserve a distro this nice as well.

At the days end though, I like Gnome better myself (if anything tempts me to leave Gnome now its XFCE. I have it running (in warty) on my 400 mhz celeron laptop and it works like a charm. Divx movies that couldn't be decoded well in Gnome or KDE on it- because the desktop envirnoment sucked up too many resources- look great in XFCE. I advise it for anyone under say 1ghz and 256 ram). But I want Ubuntu's KDE development to advance to the point that KDE people feel comfortable running Ubuntu. Some KDE people have a lot to add to the community, just ask jdong- the backporting moderator that primarily uses KDE. SO GO KUBUNTU!

[DoubleDangerClub]

Well written experience. I'm glad you found Ubuntu to be on top. I also tried many distros before ubuntu and I have to say Ubuntu has a lot to offer over the others and this board has also been a huge reason why I've been happy with it. Lots of real people and real help.

DDC

[az]

You probably would have an easier time just installing debian and using kde...

[poofyhairguy]

You probably would have an easier time just installing debian and using kde...

I had that idea. But even the best Sarge installer does not install hardware like the Ubuntu installer does. And I HATE the Debian way of configuring things the installer missed (mostly involves commandline tools).

Only also regular Debian does not have things like hotplugging by default, like Gentoo you have to do everything you want yourself (bleh).

[Pink Floyd]

I simply installed the KDE packages and it runs like in the other distros I've tried.
I prefer GNOME but I need to run applications for both the environments, and sometimes I start a KDE session and it works great.

[jdong]

I run KDE from Universe with Warty. It works wonderfully. KDE 3.3.x from Hoary also runs quite well. I don't see why everyone's complaining about KDE support in Ubuntu.

[JeffS]

I'm liking Ubuntu a lot. And I've been gradually preferring Gnome over KDE more and more as time goes on, so it's Gnome centricity is just fine with me.

However, there are some KDE apps that I like. Plus my wife, who spends most of her time on Windows, likes to play KDE games on my laptop, which is placed right next to the Windows machine (btw - I've set up that machine as a tri-boot with WinXP, Mepis 2003.10, and Mandrake 10 PowerPack).

This laptop now has Ubuntu Warty. It previously had Mandrake 10 powerpack, then SimplyMepis. So my wife got used to bringing up KDE Klickety, Ksirtet, and Kpatience while she was waiting for her message boards to download. So once I decided to install Ubuntu, I knew I had to install the KDE games (regardless of whether or not I intended to install the whole KDE). So I used Synaptic to install KDE games, and it installed perfectly and the games ran just fine. I did, however, have to manually add those games to the Gnome menu.

One other unrelated thing I'd like to throw in, in praise of Ubuntu - Everything with apt-get/Synaptic has worked perfectly with Ubuntu. By contrast, I had some major problems with SimplyMepis (I had a release candidate, which was probably out of sync with the Debain KDE repositories). It seems to me that the Ubuntu team has made sure that the default repositories, whether Ubuntu, restricted, or universe, are all safe and work well with Ubuntu. Apt-get and the Debian repositories are not no-brainers. If you dont' know what you're doing, installing the wrong thing or doing an upgrade can screw up you system. Not so with Ubuntu. They've done a good job of avoiding this problem. This gets back to the original poster on this thread. He was able to seamlessly install the full KDE desktop without problems, and it worked perfectly.

[wallijonn]

...my wife, who spends most of her time on Windows, likes to play KDE games on my laptop ... KDE Klickety, Ksirtet, and Kpatience ...

Did you do a google search for 'mozilla cardgames'? http://cardgames.mozdev.org/installation.html 27 card games that can be played under FireFox; I prefer "Twin-Peaks".

[nocturn]

You probably would have an easier time just installing debian and using kde...

Yes, but he would have been stuck with KDE 2 or have a distro with no security updates whatsoever. Not a good choice.

[nocturn]

I run KDE from Universe with Warty. It works wonderfully. KDE 3.3.x from Hoary also runs quite well. I don't see why everyone's complaining about KDE support in Ubuntu.

Not complaining, I installed KDE for my wife and it works perfectly.

The one thing I do regret is that the fact that KDE is in universe means no security updates to it and no fixing it if it breaks because of any change (even a security update) in main. Granted, with Ubuntu's policy this is not likely to happen, and I think this will in the future be handled by the kubuntu team.