Help! I'm being sucked in!!!

So I have blogged previously about KDE 4.0 and 4.1, and how they weren't there yet (though 4.1 was a definite improvement), and how impressed I was with 4.2.

A week ago I tried to install a PPA so I could try Amarok 2.1, but the PPA also happened to contain the latest beta version of KDE 4.3 as a whole. Oops. So anyway, I went with it, and aside from the odd crash now and again it has actually been pretty stable.

With the first release candidate I got the new Air theme, and very nice it is too! A far fresher and brighter look.

Also included is the ability to connect to a hidden wireless network: a quite shocking deficiency in previous versions, but better late than never I suppose.

The fade desktop switcher is also quite nice, though I still can't decide whether I prefer that over the spinning cube or not. The thing I like about the spinning cube is that it enhances the impression of my desktops bring physically adjacent in the 3d world, while other switchers don't.

Desktop effects now automatically suspend if things become too much for the system, which makes sense and should help out if you have a runaway process that you need to kill, or if you are doing something like running a game.

Another new feature is a panel spacer, which is the solution to the problem I commented on earlier about widgets wanting to occupy lots of space. Unfortunately, I find it quite fiddly to use. I also still don't understand why the clock widget needs to try to occupy so much space either. Shouldn't it just use what it needs to show the longest time string possible with the current settings and leave it at that?

The system tray has also had some attention: there is now an expand/contract widget that I hadn't noticed before to allow you to see hidden icons, and icons can be manually configured to be hidden based on category.

There is a new launcher menu called Lancelot, which has an interesting "no-click" user interface feature. I'm trying it now, and it seems to be pretty useful.

There are quite a few other changes, but these are the ones that I've noticed the most. In general, there is just a sense of greater polish than 4.2, which suggests a very welcome trend in increasing quality.

The reason for my title post though, is that I've now found myself being drawn a little bit more into the KDE world. After the upgrade to RC1, my GTK apps lost their widget theme and reverted to the very ugly standard GTK look. I fiddled a little bit but could not fix it.

I hate ugly user interfaces, it makes me sad to use them. :) So I thought I'd try kmail again. I have tried kmail a number of times in the past (indeed my accounts were all set up already when I fired it up as a result), but it has never grabbed me and I have always ended up back with Thunderbird.

However, this time I have found myself sticking with it. It's hard to say why, but it's probably more to do with it doing what I would miss in Thunderbird if it didn't do it. Things like sorting threads by the most recent message in the thread: I couldn't cope without that.

But there is also a feature that it has that I don't think Thunderbird does have. You can exclude folders from being acted upon when new mail arrives in them. This means you don't get any notification, and the folder doesn't count towards the unread messages total that sits in the system tray.

I've never used an unread message icon with thunderbird before (if one is even possible) because the nubmer would be meaningless: it would include folders that I don't want to read often (such as mailing lists) and some that I keep unread as the number of unread is actually what I'm most interested in. I have a folder which contains exception emails from work which I have filtered to keep only the last 24 hours of emails unread. So if the number of unread goes up, it is an indication that something is going wrong.

So the total number of unread is basically meaningless. But with kmail I can exclude those folders from consideration, so I end up with a smaller count that represents email that I actually want to check.

Aside from that, kmail just seems a lot more snappy than Thunderbird (KDE 4 as a whole seems really snappy, so this just continues the impression). The memory usage also seems to be quite a bit lower too.

The downside is contact integration with gmail: I have seen example of people getting this (and Google calendar synchronisation) working, but so far have not figured out how to do it myself. Hopefully soon!

So another KDE app draws me in. What's next?

Why I can't use KDE 4 (yet)

I've always been a flip-flopper when it comes to desktop environments. When I first started with Linux I think I was using KDE. Spent a bit of time playing with things like Enlightenment and black blox before settling for quite a while on XFCE4.

After a while I got itchy feet and tried gnome again, and I've been a gnome user ever since.

KDE3 just didn't do it for me, for many reasons that I mostly can't remember now. I do remember that its default themes were as ugly as hell, and I could never for the life of me get other themes to work well at all. They required weird contortions like compiling (for a theme?!?!), and never looked as good as the screenshots would have you believe.

So I stuck with gnome. Simple, clear and crisp. Compiz has given it a really nice boost, and I think the combination works really well.

But, I'm still a flip flopper, so I'm always on the lookout for something new. Unfortunately, E17 appears to have become to Duke Nukem Forever of desktop environments, so it was in the end KDE4 that got my interest.

I tried KDE 4.0 shortly after it first came out, and quickly switched back. It was unstable, and didn't have everything in place. I figured I'd try again with 4.1.

That I did, and this time it fared better. I decided to give it a week and make notes on what bugged me about it so I wouldn't forget. This way, when 4.2 comes out I'll be able to see if they've sorted any of the issues that bug me...

My work environment involves a desktop machine and a laptop, both of which are running (k)ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. I use the keyboard and mouse of the desktop machine and control the laptop via synergy. My KDE4 experiment has been run on the desktop machine (with the laptop continuing to run gnome).

So, without further ado, here is my list:

1. Taskbar entries don't appear to be movable. That is, I can't change their order. This bugs the hell out of me: I like to have specific things on the far left, and if they aren't there I get lost.
   
2. The taskbar is too chunky. Having just one at the bottom is nothing like enough space, so I opt to have one above and below in the gnome style, but the size of the taskbar means that quite a significant amount of vertical screen space disappears.
3. No applet for Tomboy Notes. Yes, I know that KDE has its own note-taking application, but it's not as good, and I'd rather be able to use the same notes whichever desktop environment I'm using. It doesn't even have to use the same backend: just standardise on the file formats and that should do the trick.
   
4. Is there any decent integration with MetaTracker? If there is I can't find it mentioned anywhere...
5. Grabbing windows seems to be a bit sluggish. I'll point click and drag, and find that the window was never grabbed. So I'll have to go back and do it more slowly.
   
6. There is no applet for the Revelation password manager
7. Many applications appearing the notification area have a horrible white box around them. Something nasty going on with transparency I'd imagine. It only seems to affect non-KDE native icons too...
   
8. Trying to assign CTRL+ALT+Left/Right to allow me to cycle through desktops doesn't work. They keys assign, but they don't actually do anything when pressed.
9. Created a new panel, added a clock and System Tray to it. I can't get them to align to the right. The clock insists on taking up about a quarter of the panel's horizontal space, while the System Tray does even worse. Can't see any way to force them to behave.
10. It is worth pointing out that gnome hosts KDE apps far better than KDE hosts Gnome apps. Not in terms of look and feel integration, but in terms of things actually working properly. Gnome apps in KDE seem to have weird quirks such as scroll bars disappearing.
    
11. It makes really horrible things happen with the clipboard on the Gnome machine that this KDE machine is controlling (via synergy). I simply cannot paste sometimes: it just keeps pasting things I copied previously (and yes, I am trying both methods of pasting). Clearing Klipper seems to work around the problem, and it seems that this happens when Klipper's list gets full, which is rather annoying...
12. Kopete doesn't do IRC.
    

There were other minor things too that I just forgot to write down.

And it is interesting to find that a number of the complaints above (such as the window grabbing issue) transferred to the laptop machine too. I wonder if this is indicative of it being a simple configuration issue?

Anyway, KDE 4.2 is now in beta, so it won't be much longer before I'll be able to give it another go...