Since I’m just now getting down and dirty with KDE 4 I decided to explore the “Kickoff” menu.

I was initially pleased that Mandriva had set up a traditional menu, but I started to get “Icon Creep” on my panel. There are a few key applications I use often, and I don’t want to dig through menus, and sub-menus to get to them.

In previous versions of KDE, I always added (if not there by default as in Kubuntu) the “Quick Launch Applet” to my panel, which allowed for 2 rows of smaller icons for frequently used applications, and also taking up less real estate than adding full sized icons for each application. While I was able to find a Quick Launch “plasmoid” in the Mandriva repositories, I wasn’t quite successful in getting it working. I decided to go ahead and give Kickoff a try. Here are a few steps for you to do the same if you’d like.

First, here is a quick tip. I have my widgets locked, so if you’ve done this, unlock them now. You should now see a funny little half-circle w/ a “comma” in it to the far right of your panel. This is your key to adjusting anything on your panel (moving Icons around, etc.). Once you get things the way you want them, you can “re-lock” your widgets and that annoying little bugger goes away

To start, right-click your Mandriva menu and click remove. Now right click the panel and “Add Widget” and choose “Application Launcher”. It will probably show up all the way tothe right edge of your panel, so click your little half-circle thingy, and you should see a “target” when your mouse is over the newly placed menu (which [thankfully] looks like the traditional K-Menu icon), and drag it far left. Now, right click and lock widgets again.

Once there, go through your applications menu and add your favorite, most used applications to Favorites, and they are just a mouse-click away!

I was just reading a blog-post on Planet KDE, and I noticed someone who appeared to be running KDE 4, but with Plastik window decorations, so I looked in Desktop Settings, and sure enough - there it is - my beloved Plastik window decoration.

Life is complete

EDIT: Also, I wanted to note that “Plastique” is a KDE 4 widget style similar to Plastik, and there is a KDE4 port of the Plastik color scheme which can be found here.

EDIT AGAIN: See here for another KDE 4 Window Decoration/Widget Style combo I really like.

Just a couple of days ago, I wrote a post about my initial, just after install impressions of Mandriva 2009 (with KDE 4 as the desktop environment). This post has been getting quite a number of hits (~1,300 so far), and has seen incoming links from a number of sites. I’m really happy to see such a positive buzz and vibe around this distro, as even after living with it a few days, I’m still quite happy. Since the release of KDE 4 back in January I’ve yet to load up a distro with KDE 4 as the desktop and be happy. This caused me to flip over to GNOME and explore that for a while, and I just can’t get comfy in GNOME. It has sent me into a tail-spin of distro-hopping that I’m happy to report is over. Have you ever had that feeling that something was just “right”? I get that feeling with Mandriva. I’ve never really given this distro a chance in all of my distro-hopping, and I’m honestly quite sad that I hadn’t until now. I really like the way things are laid out, I like the configuration tools (Mandrake Control Center), and I can “feel” the amount of work and effort that went into making this a quality, professional piece of software - not just a bunch of packages lumped to gether. It “feels” like a complete system.

If you regularly follow my blog, you will have seen just about a week ago, I finally sat down and typed out “my” personal Ubuntu setup guide - basically, the steps I go through setting up an Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu system. Mandriva has made me feel silly for going through all of that - honestly! First off, it feels much faster out of the box, so I have felt less of a need to “tweak” as much. I’m not going to go into great detail, but let me outline what I’ve done so far.

I did “trim-down” some of the default services

I’ve installed just one extra software package that wasn’t installed by default (I installed “Free” from the Dual-Arch DVD, basically doing a net install and selecting Custom, w/ KDE and Development tools and games). That additional package was VirtualBox OSE, which I was quite happy to find in the repo’s (and also to find it actually worked as expected). Although several other distributions include VB in their repo’s, I’ve had less than stellar results with distro-provided builds of VirtualBox, but Mandriva was the exception for me here.

I like Mandriva’s default theme, although I did make one minor change. For the KDE color Scheme, I didn’t feel that black text “fit”. I’m not sure if it was an oversight, but I simply changed it to white to match the Minimize, Maximize and Close controls.

Although the out-of-box font rendering was beautiful, I did turn on subpixel hinting, and I did import some MS fonts. I have set up my fonts according to these screenshots (KDE and Firefox respectively).

KDE:

Firefox:

These settings are a matter of personal tastes, but it gives me a consistent feel to my fonts across all of the machines I use (Windows and Linux).

I wound up turning Kwin’s desktop effects off (for now). I’m not sure if it’s my card (ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, 512MB) or just a lack of maturity in the code (which I’m sure will come in time, if that’s the case), but my desktop just “felt-better” after turning it off. I didn’t necessarily have any problems, it just felt smoother and snappier when them turned off. I did like what I saw however, and I think Kwin will surpass Compiz in both looks and functionality long term.

I removed that ugly, (useless?) Folder-View thing from the desktop, and the Trash Icon. I did add both a Track applet and a launcher for Dophin on my panel however. I did add the attractive “Analog Clock” plasmoid to my desktop. I installed and tried the Weather plasmoid but I wasn’t too thrilled, so I removed it.

That’s pretty much all I’ve done. So far, nothing has crashed, Plasma has behaved itself and everything has “just worked”. Mandriva has made me forget that I’m using KDE 4, which is actually a good thing! They have made KDE feel like KDE again, and not some foreign thing that is installed my computer. Everything works, and it doesn’t feel “fragile” as every other KDE 4 install I’ve tried. So, for that, Thank you Mandriva for giving my KDE back again!

I do hope that other KDE-Centric distributions, such as Kubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora’s KDE Spin can create a KDE 4 environment as smooth and polished as this, as I want to see KDE rise again! When I first started using Linux way back when, almost everyone used KDE (or so it seemed), and lately, especially after the KDE 4 release, I’ve seen a trend towards GNOME, and even other Window Managers such as XFCE, LXDE and OpenBox. While I respect those enviroments and users, I love KDE and I want to see it prosper once again on the Linux desktop!

In closing, a lot of Linux distributions call themselves “Distro-Hopper Stoppers” or something along those lines, but for me, Mandriva was my stopper.

In my last post a few commenters were disappointed that there were no screenshots, so here are a couple for your enjoyment.

EDIT: See here for a new KDE 4 discovery and settings change, and yes another screenshot

I had to make one last “Distro-Hop”. First, I felt pretty bad about basically not even trying w/ Mandriva’s RC a few blog posts back, and I’ve read stellar reviews about how great of a job Mandriva did with implementing KDE 4. I wanted back into the land of KDE so badly, there was no way I was going to pass up the release of Mandriva 2009 today.

I had been steadily trying to try Kubuntu Intrepid 8.10, but I’ve yet to get either one of the “official” (Alpha 5, Alpha 6, Beta) builds or one of the “daily” builds to successfully boot into X on my machine after install. I have the same problem with Fedora 10 (Beta/Rawhide), and I think it’s an ATI/Xorg problem - if I’m correct, and this is the case, there will be a lot of disappointed Kubuntu/ATI users come the end of the month if it is not corrected by then. Thing is, I probably won’t find out (at least first hand anyway).

Please don’t regard this post as a review of Mandriva 2009 - these are simply my first impressions upon booting up the system.

First, I have one word: Wow!

Now that I have that out of the way, I can get on with it. I felt really bad in my previous blog-post were I talked about testing out some KDE 4 distro’s when I simply said I wasn’t “comfortable” enough with Mandriva to troubleshoot a pre-release build, and I was mildly scolded by a commenter on that account. I decided to give Mandriva another spin, to see how the RTM bits would fair on my PC, and so far, so phenominal!

I chose to install from the “mini” Free Dual-Arch ISO and do a net-install of the complete distro. I chose this method because there is no “Mandriva One” build for x86_64, and I did this install once before, and I remembered that although this is the “Free” build of the distro, not only can I add my codecs later, I’m asked during install if I want my proprietary video drivers. I was not disappointed in that regard doing this install - it went just as I expected. My only disappointment so far, was with the limited number of mirrors for 2009 right now - I ended up doing my net-install from a  European mirror, which I’m sure took longer than a USA mirror would have taken, not to mention, with so few mirrors apparently online right now, the ones that are there are probably getting hit pretty hard. All in all, it took about 1 hour to complete the install, so I can live with that.

Now, let’s get back to the item at hand - the distro itself!

First, I’m simply amazed at the amount of polish that the Mandriva team has given to KDE 4. It looks better than I thought it could possibly look! I love the theming, and just poking around the desktop, this is the first KDE 4 install of any distro I have done where I didn’t feel like I was going to break my computer simply by clicking the mouse. I need to find some wood to knock on, but I have yet to have Plasma crash on me yet! Besides KDE 4 (or is it?) I’m blown away by the default Font config. My fonts look better on my screen than they ever have, regardless of distro or operating system. Also, I haven’t seen any of the visual inconsistencies I’ve seen with other KDE 4 installs, such as garbage around the system tray icons, etc.

I’ve only made just one settings changes so far. I got rid of the Trashcan widget from the desktop and added one to the “Panel” (Kubuntu habits die hard, I guess ) I also love the more “Traditional” menu by default - I never could get used to “Kickoff”. I also had to edit my Xorg.conf to add compositing (it was set to Disabled) so I could enable Kwin’s desktop effects.

This is honestly about as far as I have gotten, but I wanted to get these initial impressions “down” so to speak while they were fresh. I haven’t gotten deep into the system yet, and I’m sure I will have some things to re-learn.

I’m beginning to question if Ubuntu really is better than other distros, or have I always perceived it as better because of familiarity, and not having to re-learn something. I have never seen this amount of polish in a “just relesed” version of any (kx)Ubuntu to date. This is phenomenal.

Great job Mandriva team! I think you have a new user. I’m going to stick with 2009 through it’s cycle (personal commitment) without distro-hopping (if you know me hold me too this), and if it’s successful, I plan to purchase the 2009.1 Powerpack. Would I pay $59 for Ubuntu? Heck no! Would I pay $59 for this, with all codecs pre-installed, and a few commercial apps? Heck yeah!

Rock on Mandriva! I remember with “Mandrake” was always No. 1 on Distrowatch - perhaps with this release, the tables could be turned!

I’ll be the first to admit it - when it comes to Linux, I am a habitual “Distro-hopper”. I don’t like being a distro-hopper, and I haven’t always been a distro-hopper.

I started off with (and used briefly) Red Hat (before Fedora) on the recommendation of a friend, and I used KDE (long-term) because he said it was better. I soon migrated too (and loved - well, still love) Slackware, and I used it for a few years. I used Slackware exclusively until I got my first AMD64 machine back in 2005, and I wanted a x86_64 distro to run on it. I had been hearing a lot about this new distro called Ubuntu - it was quickly becoming the most popular Linux distribution that had ever been created, and I checked it out with version 5.04. YUK! GNOME! and it was BROWN! I soon discovered there was a “sister-distro” called Kubuntu that used KDE instead - “ahhhh - much better” I said to myself. I used Kubuntu almost exclusively (with some experimenting, and side-tracking) from 5.04 all the way until 7.10 when things majorly broke apart for me. I never could get the 7.10 release of Ubuntu (in neither Ubuntu nor Kubuntu form) to work for me. This resulted in some major distro-hopping. Once I started, I simply couldn’t stop - I had to see what was out there, and if it was better, and once I found something I liked, I’d read a blog-post about some other distro, and I’d have to try that out - even if what I was using was working. Since around November of 2007, I have loaded (and ran for at least some time), Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, CentOS, Scientific Linux, SLED, openSUSE, Frugalware, Slamd64, BlueWhite64, Studio64, Slackware (yes I even abandoned x86_64 during the process), Foresight, Mint, Zenwalk, sidux, Pardus, Parsix, DreamLinux, Arch, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon - and probably a few others I’ve forgotten about!

Some of these I blogged about, some I didn’t. There was always SOMETHING that didn’t work in some distro that would send me looking elsewhere. Recently, I’ve burnt myself out on all of this, and I had decided I’d had enough, but I wound up doing the same thing in Windows - with different variants, so I had to step back - take a break and “cleanse my palate”.

I gave myself a week to play - find what I wanted to test - test in a structured environment (taking notes) and making a decision, and committing to it, and to finally stop all of this non-sense. So here, are my trials, tribulations and some of my notes about what I tried, what I liked and what I didn’t like.

Folks, this is gonna be a long one, so only read on if you are truly interested in what I found, and what I picked.

My first decision was that although I’d been using GNOME for a while now, I wanted to step back in and see what was up with KDE 4.1.

First Test (short): Fedora 10 w/ KDE

Fedora 10 Beta KDE x86_64 Live CD - wouldn’t boot on my machine - no matter what I did! (not getting into details - trying to keep this as short as humanly possible!)

Second Test: Feodra 9 w/ KDE

I discovered by browsing the updates repo, that I could install Fedora 9, fully update it and be on KDE 4.1. Initial boot and install went beautifully! I did my full update and I was on 4.1 - yes, it was a lot better than 4.0 - by a mile. Here is where Fedora failed - no ATI drivers (even in Livna). Not Fedora’s fought - ATI’s fought for not supporting the new version of X11 that is in Fedora.

Third Test: Kubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6

Yes, I know it was an Alpha version. It installed perfectly, would boot, but I couldn’t get X at all - I could switch to Virtual Terminals, and access the console, but never could get X to start.

Fourth Test: Kubuntu 8.04 w/ KDE 4.1 packages from PPA

I discovered that Kubuntu had packages for 4.1 via this news post (at the time of this writing there are 4.1.2 packages in that same repo if you are interested in trying them out). I made two attempts at this one. On the first attempt I installed from the Kubuntu-KDE4 Remix CD, which installed 4.0.x, and then followed the instructions on the news-post I linked too earlier to upgrade to 4.1. Somehow, I ended up in a huge mud-puddle of instability. I’m not sure what went wrong, but something definitely did. I then re-installed, and hit F4 at the boot prompt and chose to install a Command-Line only system. I added the PPA repo, and did the 4.1 install. This time things went much better, but it still wasn’t right. I had occasional plasma crashes (at random), and overall, using the desktop, I felt as thought I was going to break it. I knew this couldn’t be a long-term solution for me.

Fifth Test: openSUSE 11.0 with 4.1 packages from the Build Service

Having learned my lesson from installing Kubuntu 8.04 and upgrading form 4.0.x to 4.1, I added the Build Service repo at install time, and installed KDE 4.1 fresh. Initially, I thought this was it! However, although it took a little longer to start happening than it did with Kubuntu, KDE 4.1 started dissolving around me - Plasma crashes, and the general feeling I was going to break the Desktop by simply clicking on something. I was very disappointed in this trial, because I actually fully expected this to be my solution.

Sixth Test: Kubuntu 8.10 Beta

By this time, the Beta for 8.10 was released. Same problem as Alpha 6 - no X.

Seventh Test: Mandriva 2009 RC2

Sorry - I just can’t get used to Mandriva - I don’t feel comfortable here. Also, had some random Plasma problems as well.

Side note: By this time I actually considered returning the RAM and going back to XP Pro

Sorry KDE guys, I’m just going to have to step away still - KDE 4.1.x just isn’t ready (or at least I’m not ready for it) just yet. I will check back w/ 4.2, but for now, I’ve gotten used to GNOME, and I actually like it better now.

The real results of this test aren’t distro specific, they became desktop specific. I could go down that same list of distro’s, and with the exception of not having ATI drivers available for Fedora, any of those distro’s would work for me under GNOME (including Mandriva). What did I pick?

Eighth Test (and defeat): Ubuntu 8.04.1

It just works. Plain and simple. It works, and it works better (at least for me) better than anything out there - Plus, it’s an LTS release so I can relax and just run for a while.

I think it’s great that there are hundreds of Linux distributions out there, and dozens of Window Managers and desktop enviroments, but Ubuntu (running GNOME) has become insanely popular, and has come closer than any Linux distro before it of becoming “Mainstream”. Dell is offering how many machines with Ubuntu pre-installed now? I think it’s 6! Can you get any more mainstream than Dell?

For me the choice was simple - Ubuntu (in my opinion) is going to be the future of Linux on the Desktop - like it or not. I’m not trying to be a “fanboy” so don’t flame me here, but I think like it or not, Ubuntu isn’t going anywhere, and it’s only going to get bigger and more popular than it is now. There will always be the countless number of Distro’s available, and there will be die hard users of both the “big ones” and the “little ones” but I think slowly, but surely more and more people are going to discover that Ubuntu is a distro that simply works, and works better than others out there.