Solid Block of Ise

I have a history of not liking KDE. For those of you unaware of what this is, it’s one of the several popular Desktop Environments for Linux and similar operating systems. It’s complicated, but essentially a Desktop Environment consists of a whole bunch of applications designed to present the user with a usable… well… environment.

Gnome is one of the other popular environments, and comes as standard on Ubuntu-installations. There are variants of Ubuntu that have other desktop-environments. Two of those are Kubuntu (with KDE) and Xubuntu (with XFCE). They’re still Ubuntu, but with a different look and feel in the GUI-department.

Each desktop-environment (DE) has their merits and drawbacks, as well as aims and goals in the usability department. It’s also very easy to start a flamewar with fans of various DE’s. However, the availability of several DE’s is one of the many flexible offerings of Linux.

As I stated in the beginning of this post, I never really cared much for KDE. I briefly ran it back before it was 1.0 and every time I’ve tried it since it has always rubbed me the wrong way somehow. I never cared for it’s garish and plasticky color schemes, it’s waste of screen estate, and it’s (in my opinion) confusing way of handling things.

And before some fanboy quips that I never gave it a chance let me say that - no, I never did. To get me to run KDE would involve a lot of brute-force and I’ve almost always preferred the Gnome-environment. It never had quite the same amount of extreme customization ability as KDE, but I’ve never felt constricted by it. Gnome has always done what I’ve wanted, while KDE always initially scared me away.

This, however, might change.

Today is January 11th. Today is the day that KDE 4 was released, and I’ve tried it. I wouldn’t say that I’ve USED it, since I just installed the packages and logged into it. I fiddled with it a bit, admired the stunning beauty of it and realized that my previous opinions of KDE as an unsophisticated and annoying DE might have to be re-evalued.

KDE 4.0 is plain gorgeous. The re-design of the UI is overwhelming and no longer does it have that plastic and overdone look of previous versions. In fact, I think KDE 4 would give MacOS X a run for it’s money in the beauty department. It’s just that good-looking. Everything about it says gorgeous and subtle. Even the icons and the sound-effects are gorgeous and subtle, and the KDE-team have outdone themselves in that department.

Sure, I did find quite a lot of things confusing. But nothing that was as off-putting as before. KDE 4 looks great, and works great. What I found annoying is probably easy to configure away. Some things were kinda funky, but I assume that’s because my box is primarily a Gnome-box, and everything on it is configured to work with Gnome. I got some weird error-messages regarding sound, and sometimes the sound cut out. But like I said, I think it’s due to this being a primarily Gnome-computer.

In fact, in a few days when things have settled down I’m going to pop one of my smaller drives in and install a fresh setup of Kubuntu on it and see how it works. I’m really curious, and the plain gorgeousness of KDE 4 has really got me hooked.

Who knows? Maybe in a week or so I might be a complete convert.

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