How to install KDE 4.1 on Ubuntu Hardy 8.01 and my impressions of it
Ubuntu, LinuxWith yesterday's announcement of the 4.1.0 release of KDE, my willpower did not allow me to go another day without giving KDE4 another shot. For a bit of history, I have been using Gnome for several years. In the past 3 months or so I began using KDE 3.5.9 long enough that I began to enjoy it and realize that it is a nice desktop environment as well. At this point I really have no favorite between the two and like different things about both of them.
When the first releases of KDE 4 started showing up several months ago, I gave it a shot but was extremely underwhelmed. While it came with all the warnings from the community that the 4.0 release was nothing more than the introduction of a new platform which developers would expand, some of the basic pieces of it just felt wrong. I can clearly say that after spending most of an afternoon using it, running my development environment, and doing basic daily functions, 4.1 is light years beyond the first peak I had of it. I am *really* enjoying it so far and I have a feeling it will be my desktop of choice for the immediate future.
One thing that seems to not be common knowledge to some people is that you can just install it and try it out without affecting your existing desktop environments, be it KDE 3.5.x or Gnome. For example, my current installation started out as Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. Shortly after installing I added Gnome by running:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
If this type of setup sounds like something you want to try out, do the following. First, add the following repo into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop kdeplasma-addons amarok-kde4 and kontact-kde4 kate-kde4 kmail-kde4
What is your impression of 4.1, though? The previous version was lame as hell. Is 4.1 ready for prime time or is it another beta in disguise?
Cheers
"I can clearly say that after spending most of an afternoon using it, running my development environment, and doing basic daily functions, 4.1 is light years beyond the first peak I had of it. I am *really* enjoying it so far and I have a feeling it will be my desktop of choice for the immediate future."
I really like it. There are a couple of small buggy things, but nothing that inhibits me in anyway.
Some of the things I just didn't understand about 4.0 are gone, like the fact that any folder on my desktop was essentially a widget. That was a headscratcher and has been resolved with a "Folder View" widget that sits on your desktop by default and can be removed.
Secondly the menu bar was completely unconfigurable on 4.0. The new one is much more customizable now.
Ask me in another week, but for now I think it is pretty sweet.
Still the total old boot except that my wicd was wiped out!
Totally unable to run KDE4.
What to do.
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