The problems with KDE4

Logging in

The first challenge after upgrading is actually logging into the new desktop. After typing in your username and password, you may find you are presented with the message “No greeter widget plugin loaded. Check the configuration.” Checking the configuration without a desktop environment to do this from may not be the easiest thing, but there is a solution.

The clock

Maybe I am unique in my preferences for how the clock in the bottom right corner of the screen should look, but it seems that no one in KDE tried the precise combination of settings I use. If they had, they would have seen almost a fifth of the width of the screen being used up by this one applet. The two main factors which cause this undesirable situation are firstly that I set the bottom panel tall enough to show three rows of applications in the task bar, and secondly that I configure the clock to show the seconds (HH:MM:SS). Of course, this is the same setup I had in KDE3 and the clock looked fine there, but KDE4 changes the layout algorithm so that the font size of the clock is increased automatically to fill the vertical space of the panel, and the width of the font scales with it. Even with the choice of displaying the date underneath the time, this still leads to a dramatic increase in horizontal space lost compared with the size of the clock under KDE3. There is a solution to this but it’s a bit hacky and involves installing some non-Debian software. In the meantime there is a bug filed about this on KDE’s bugzilla.

Task Manager applet

Also due to my preference of having three rows of tasks in the task bar (or rather due to the need to show 24 task tabs there) I found that KDE’s layout algorithm didn’t do what I wanted by default. Instead, it presented the tabs as two rows of 12, with the text in each tab too truncated to be useful and with excessive vertical padding above and below the text. This can be fixed with a simple settings change, if you know where to look.

Lock / logout applet

When I added the lock / logout applet to my panel, I found that the icons for it were wrong. Upon fixing the problem, I realised that actually some of the other icons had been wrong too, like the icon for the K menu. Fortunately the solution fixes all these related problems.

Konsole audible and visible bell

The most annoying problem I bumped into, because there is no current fix for it, is the lack of a visible bell in the new version of Konsole. It also does not produce an audible beep using the PC speaker, and there is no simple option to turn this traditional behaviour on. The only positive news is that at least there have been bugs filed about these problems.

Blue tint when playing videos

One of the first things I decided to do once I was mostly happy with the new desktop was play a video I had downloaded, and I perhaps ambitiously tried to play it using the new Dragon Player that is the standard video software in KDE4. Unfortunately I picked a video that I hadn’t watched before, and so I wasn’t aware that the blue tint throughout the video was due to a bug. It was only later after watching a different video in a different player (not being particularly impressed with Dragon) that I decided something was wrong in my graphics setup. To make matters worse, because Dragon Player was the first player I tried after installing KDE4, I assumed that the video problem was caused by some random bug in KDE4, not a specific problem in that one player. I have now managed to fix this problem though.

Missing icons from Konqueror side bar

The final two problems I had related to using Konqueror, which is a sophisticated piece of software, offering plenty of opportunities for upgrade problems to appear. One of these problems was that the side bar in Konqueror, which becomes visible when you press F9, was missing icons for the tabs. Fortunately I managed to find a workaround for this.

Disappearing status bar in Konqueror

I like to have the status bar visible at the bottom of Konqueror windows, and Konqueror lets you turn this on or off, but I was finding that after turning it on, it kept disappearing when I navigated around. Again, I was not the first to encounter this problem and this problem and its solution were available online.

Conclusion

That does look like a lot of bugs, and I don’t know if I can honestly say that the improvement of KDE4 over KDE3 is enough to justify the hassles I experienced. Perhaps I can say, though, that the level of customisation present in my KDE setup means that such a large upgrade was bound to introduce some problems. Going a step further, I might even say that as KDE actually allows you to customise your desktop appearance so much, unlike other desktop environments which think they know better than you, KDE should not be held to the same standard. Anyone can write software which transfers a set of null customisations when upgrading between major versions, but the KDE project encompasses such a large amount of high quality, flexible, Free software that it has to deal with problems that lesser projects never have to worry about.

Should some KDE hackers offer to help GNOME by fixing the awful GTK Open/Save dialogs?