Experiment with KDE desktop

We look at the history of the KDE desktop, and what’s on offer in the latest version

Although the Linux kernel first emerged in 1992, it was 10 years ago, in 1998, that the operating system really began to develop into something more than a project for enthusiasts.

This was the year that saw some important developments with Linux and free and open-source software; investments from Intel, IBM and Oracle, the first major corporate investments to be seen; the open release of Mozilla, the code for the Netscape web browser, which ultimately led to the creation of Firefox; and the first stable release of the KDE desktop.

At the time, the Linux desktop comprised little more than a few basic windows on a plain graphical display. Menus could be created (often by hand, with complex text configuration files) to launch programs you would typically otherwise run from a terminal window. From such a sparse desktop, the early versions of KDE were certainly playing catch up.

Comments such as “it is almost as good as Windows 95” were not only common, but considered to be a good thing. KDE did, of course, develop substantially over the subsequent years. Technology introduced in KDE 2 (released in late 2000) was substantially better, including the use of a network-transparent input/output architecture (kio-slaves), the Konqueror web browser, and the KOffice suite.

These new features were to be more mature and integrated in the KDE 3 series, initially released in 2002, and still developed and enhanced today. And so, 10 years on, KDE 3.5 has grown to become a stable, integrated and advanced desktop, offering a number of features not found in any other desktop environment.

This progression of development has now ceased, however, to make way for the new, and fundamentally different, KDE 4.

KDE 4
KDE 4.0.0 was released in January 2008. It was a rather controversial release, however, and not one accompanied by the fanfare you might expect from such a major new version. The developers have tried (somewhat in vain) to emphasise the difference between KDE 4 as a project and KDE 4.0.0, the latter being the first ever official release of the new desktop, and not a stable, production-ready desktop.

The developers see KDE 4 being good enough to last the next 10 years, with the new technology improving and developing with each release. We’ll take a look at some of these new underlying features to see some of the things that have changed. KDE 4 also provides a number of frameworks, each given a marketing-friendly term to describe its function.

The biggest underlying change comes from the new version of Trolltech’s Qt toolkit. Qt 4 improves upon efficiency as well as design. Together with the improvements in KDE 4’s architecture, the memory usage of the desktop is reportedly set to drop by as much as 40 per cent over KDE 3.5, which is quite remarkable in itself. Another change comes from the licensing of the libraries.

With earlier releases Qt was available under an open-source licence only on Linux and Unix platforms, which has meant very limited use on Mac OSX and Windows. With this restriction gone, KDE applications can now run on these platforms too and, thanks to the cross-platform nature of KDE 4 and Qt, porting software between platforms is almost trivial.

Solid is the new hardware Application Programming Interface (API). This framework allows KDE applications to get information about the hardware they are running on. Previously the developer would have to understand how the operating system presented this information, which will differ completely between Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX and Windows.

By using Solid, a KDE developer need only know the standard API functions KDE provides, and not know about the operating system the application may run on. A CPU-intensive application could, for example, modify its behaviour if it found it was running on a quad-core CPU. A network utility would be able to discover if there was a network connection available or not.

Phonon is the multimedia equivalent to Solid. KDE developers now can play back video and audio by using this simple API. As with Solid, the developer would previously have to understand the multimedia system, and with so many completely different options around, developing multimedia applications was incredibly difficult.

Trollltech has created Quicktime and DirectX backends for Phonon for the Mac OSX and Windows platforms respectively. Not only does this show enormous confidence in KDE’s design, but it means that a KDE developer can write multimedia applications for all three platforms with no major code changes. Plasma is the new desktop shell.

Instead of the traditional desktop display and panel applications, Plasma creates a number of containment objects (the desktop and panel being two of these), where applications called Plasmoids may run. These can be resized and rotated, added and removed, and replace the old panel-based and desktop-based applets from earlier releases of KDE.

Plasma is one of the main problem areas for KDE 4.0.0, and is expected to improve dramatically by the release of 4.1. Using the other frameworks, such as Solid and Phonon, as well as the enhanced communication protocol of KDE 4, Plasmoids have the potential to provide some powerful functions.
Oxygen is the new visual design.

What initially began with a new icon set became a completely new look to the desktop. The icons (and there are many thousands in KDE) have been redesigned using SVG (scalable vector graphics), which allows the icons to be scaled to any size without any loss of quality. The colour palette has been chosen carefully and consistently, giving icons of importance more noticeable colours than those that are not.

The widget style has changed completely from KDE 3; a much cleaner, more modern style, available in both light and dark grey colour schemes.

Application changes
In addition to these major underlying changes, there are some substantial application changes as well. The Konqueror browser, which has acted as an advanced file and web browser in KDE 3, has been retained as the web browser, but Dolphin now comes as the new default file browser. It takes the best features from Konqueror, while simplifying the interface and making it more suited to file browsing.

Users of Gnome’s Nautilus or Mac OSX’s Finder will be familiar with the side pane, where bookmarked folders or external drives can be accessed quickly. Dolphin also allows you to rate, tag and add notes to files, a feature set to become increasingly popular with people used to using sites such as Flickr and Youtube.

Gwenview has been ported to KDE 4 and now becomes the default image viewer, again with a simple interface that lets you browse quickly through image files. The systems settings application replaced kcontrol, giving easier access to desktop, network and administration settings.

Finally, many other applications have improved greatly since KDE 3, with changes such as the bundled games having much higher quality SVG graphics. While KDE 4.0.0 is not suitable as a day-to-day desktop environment, each month will see a new ‘point’ release, with KDE 4.0.1 having been released at the end of January. The next main release of KDE 4 is expected in July 2008, as version 4.1.0.

This is expected by most to be the first mainstream version, and it will include KDE 4 versions of the PIM suite software (email, news, and instant messaging software), as well as stable OSX and Windows versions of the desktop applications.

Running KDE 4
It’s important to remember that early versions of KDE 4 are not suitable for use as a full day-to-day desktop. People looking just for that should stick with KDE 3.5 for now, and consider KDE 4.1 later in the year. Having said that, most people willing to give Linux a go are a bit more curious than that, and there are easy ways to get KDE 4 up and running if you want to explore the new desktop.

The quickest way to get going is to download a live CD that presents you with a KDE 4 desktop ready to run. Naturally, running from CD is far from ideal under normal circumstances, but may be the better option if you only want to have a quick look around. At the time of writing two such CDs were available, one from OpenSUSE and the other from Kubuntu.

For a hard drive installation, if you run Ubuntu or Kubuntu 7.10, a separate repository has been set up with KDE 4 packages. These can be installed alongside your current desktop (be it Gnome or KDE 3.5), and you can log into KDE 4 by selecting it from the login manager. Head over to Kubuntu for instructions on how to enable the repository.

The steps are straightforward, and the installation of the desktop requires little more than ‘sudo apt-get install kde4-core’.