First time really running KDE

[enoy21]

So as far back as I remember I've always been a bigger fan of Gnome than I was of KDE visually but always felt like the coolest Linux **** was in KDE..... Well these days I think KDE has come a long way so I decided to give it a shot.

After the following distros over the years:

Redhat>Fedora>Open Suse>Mint>toyed with Ubuntu shortly I think I have settled on Debian.

I did the Net install of Wheezy and added the KDE-Base for a minimal install on an older model laptop.  At this point the only real additions I've added manually are :

KDE-Plasm-Desktop
Network-Manager-kde
B43-installer for Damn Dell Broadcoms (I hate broadcoms on Linux but it seems a bit better over the past year or two.... So glad to no longer need ndiswrapper)

That's pretty much it so far.   I have been using Firefox 11 ( Nightlies) on my Windows machines and may try and use the Firefox 8 instructions to try and get them running here as well.  Chrome is getting a little too much like "the other" corporate Giant that I don't hate but I want to keep honest by staying with the open source Firefox.



So any suggestions for basic apps on a stripped down system that you found necessary for everyday web browsing ?   I will add flash-plugin tonight but am not sure what media player I want. Lots and lots of monitoring tools and can find one of those easily.  But this system will primarily be for the Fiance' to play on and to keep her off my work laptop with her Perez **** and celebrity gossip sites.

[alaricljs]

Hmm, never used KDE or Gnome for my own system... Audacious for tunes, but it uses GTK even if it doesn't look like it.  I don't think there's a comparable KDE alt.   kopete for IM doesn't look too bad, never used it tho.  Some form of PDF reader? acrobat reader works for me, but I don't know how Debian feels about it these days.  KPDF looks dead.

[fireball87]

KDE was always my environment of choice from a design standpoint.  I generally like the way it works better then any other primary interface, and the things I don't like can be easily tweaked.  On a stripped down system though, XFCE is my favorite desktop environment though (it's very fast and highly functional, less "flare", for example, last I checked there is no support for different wallpapers between work-spaces, but it is quite fast, and functionally, one of the best), on a really stripped down system , I may invest in a custom configured 'box'.  

For KDE, you should pretty much run your favorite application for everything.  Unlike gnome you can't really "avoid the competing toolkit" as almost everything will use GTK (firefox, chrome, whatever).  KDE is a bit of a strange base for a minimalist system for that reason, that and KDE4 is far from minimalist.  I would personally suggest pidgin, email client, I'd probably just use thunderbird.  They're just my preferences though.  Whatever you do, I'd avoid Evolution as a mail client.  If things are the same as the last I toyed with linux several years ago, a lot of the gnome defaults are co-dependent on other parts of gnome, meaning if you load evolution, you'd be better off using the entire gnome suite.

KDE is a very good desktop environment, you should consider XFCE though for a conservative build.

[sordna]

I love XFCE even for high-end machines, and use it together with compiz. They work really well together. Compiz provides for the "missing" features of XFCE like zoom desktop, multiple wallpapers, raising/lowring windows with extra mouse buttons, desktop cube, etc. Basically I'm on Xubuntu + Compiz. The result is a very functional, good looking, feature rich and very configurable desktop, that's faster than KDE. I was a KDE user, but jumped ship as it became too huge and bloated.

[fireball87]

Yeah, I was considering that kind of build for my next linux box in reality.  I'm not quite sure I like the direction KDE4 is taking, and of the features they provide that I do like, compiz can provide most of them to other environments.  I may just be influenced by my brother though, who has been an XFCE fan for quite a few years... when he's not running pure console mode... which is most of the time.

[iindigo]

Last I tried KDE, it was many years ago (something on the order of 7 or and I didn't like it at all. At that point it took the whole mac gel/shiny/plastic theme and ran way too far with it, and for some reason nearly all KDE apps had roughly 384,295,193 buttons in their toolbars. I've used the more simplistic Gnome or WindowMaker when running Linux ever since.

Has this changed or does KDE still have these problems?

[slueth]

amarock media player is really good for kde, you can use it on gnome too if you get all the kde dependencies.  I prefer gnome but kde isn't bad, it has alot of those plasma applets and other cool stuff,.

[wulax]

Unless the hard drive on your computer is really small and can't handle a few megabytes of GTK and Gnome dependencies I don't think there is a reason to restrict yourself to only using QT applications. Just use the ones you are most comfortable with. If you are concerned about visual inconsistency there are a couple of ways to make your GTK apps look like QT and vice versa. Look up GTK-QT-Engine or QGtkStyle. As for interface and behaviour afaik there are barely any differences these days.

Not really related to web browsing but my favourite QT apps are Krusader and Amarok.

Last I tried KDE, it was many years ago (something on the order of 7 or and I didn't like it at all. At that point it took the whole mac gel/shiny/plastic theme and ran way too far with it, and for some reason nearly all KDE apps had roughly 384,295,193 buttons in their toolbars. I've used the more simplistic Gnome or WindowMaker when running Linux ever since.

Has this changed or does KDE still have these problems?

Just like you could many years ago change your QT theme to look like pretty much anything, you can do today only more. And yes, you can still adjust your toolbars to contain less buttons, just like you could 8 years ago as far as I remember...

[fossala]

Have you ever tried PC-BSD it is a good KDE operating system based upon FreeBSD.
http://www.pcbsd.org/

[iindigo]

Just like you could many years ago change your QT theme to look like pretty much anything, you can do today only more. And yes, you can still adjust your toolbars to contain less buttons, just like you could 8 years ago as far as I remember...

I guess what I was asking is this: Does KDE now come with more normal/practical defaults or will I still need to spend an hour or two just tweaking?

[TacticalCoder]

Linux user since the mid nineties (Slackware was my first distro and I think twm was the first Linux windows manager I was using), I've used a lot of different WMs.  I don't care much between Gnome, KDE, XFCE or whatever as long as everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts.

XMonad does look sexy that said and I should really take some time to try it : )

[fireball87]

Linux user since the mid nineties (Slackware was my first distro and I think twm was the first Linux windows manager I was using), I've used a lot of different WMs.  I don't care much between Gnome, KDE, XFCE or whatever as long as everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts.

XMonad does look sexy that said and I should really take some time to try it : )

My brother (not the same one who uses it now) did that with redhat, meaning I in a sense did that with redhat.  Those were the days, we had to reinstall that thing like every week.  We played with early gnome, which crashed early X, which thanks to EXT2, happily lead to an unbootable system.

[kps]

The reason I use KDE is keyboard-related: Gnome won't let you switch away from the stupid Windows convention of using Control for menu shortcuts. I need Control left alone.

[davkol]

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[TacticalCoder]

...which crashed early X, which thanks to EXT2, happily lead to an unbootable system.

Damn : (    That said I do remember X freezing occasionally but "vga_reset" was my friend and I never needed to "turn the computer off": I've most of the time been able to "vga_reset" the graphic card and restart X.

If it didn't work, I've always compiled MagicSysRQ into the kernel to have "magic" keyboard shortcuts allowing to cleanly reboot the system even when everything was seemingly locked up.

I've read about these ext2 issues but thankfully it never happened to me and now ext2 is a thing of the past.

These were the days indeed : )

[fireball87]

Never said we knew what we were doing.  We didn't really have internet at the time (and even if we did we probably wouldn't have found anything useful).  We mostly just figured everything out by toying with the system, for science.

I never knew of either of those solutions, though if it's just X and I can regain my console, I'd just end up rebooting the thing properly.  Back when it was an issue I lacked resources, and currently if I have such an issue, my Linux boxes are generally connected enough that I'll just resolve it via SSH.

[sam113101]

I never liked KDE. Did someone try gnome 3.2? In gnome 3.0 everything was so huge and there was barely no settings you could change.
Did that change? Because seriously, when gnome 3 came out, I told myself that I would never use it again.

XFCE is nice, I like its panels (they are the best). It's a bit like gnome 2 but even better.
I also like to run a standalone openbox (which is a WM and not a DE) session.

I might try compiz-fusion soon, it seems nice. Btw, is there a more popular fork that I'm not aware of?

Linux user since the mid nineties (Slackware was my first distro and I think twm was the first Linux windows manager I was using), I've used a lot of different WMs.  I don't care much between Gnome, KDE, XFCE or whatever as long as everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts.

XMonad does look sexy that said and I should really take some time to try it : )

You should try awesome.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Nice filco keyboard on the picture

[hashbaz]

You should try awesome.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Nice filco keyboard on the picture

I spent a year or so using awesome daily at work, and now I've been on xmonad for about the same amount of time.  Both have their frustrating nuances, but overall I think I like awesome better.