Techieवार्ता (TechieVarta) Blogs

Yesterday I upgraded my Kubuntu (Hardy) distribution to KDE 4.1. I use Dell lattitude as my primary machine which can dualboot to Hardy. I decided to use that exclusively for a day @ work. This post has my impressions. I am typically software engineer and use all the tools which a software engineer would. These include Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, VPN software , Internet radio, etc. Although for development tools I typically logon to a Linux machine.

First Impression

I am very impressed with the KDE 4.1 finish. Excellent eye candy. It made Mac fan club at my work place run for cover. Ctrl F2 as well as the startup program launcher has become a lot more polished. I like new plasmoids specifically the cartoon strip. The capability to change the size of plasmoid without compromising clarity (SVG) is great. I changed the desktop switcher to box style and enabled the wobble desktop effect. I think these should be enabled by default.

Once the KDE 4.1 becomes a little more stable I will retry making it my defaultOS.

Network Configuration

For some strange reason KNetworkManager refused to correctly configure my  WiFi interface. This was also problem in KDE 4.0. I had to fall back to a shell script I have always used. I know I should file a bug. I plan to investigate my issue a little more before I file the bug.

Online Music

I listen to http://www.radionri.com/ for music. I could not play the MP3 stream with any of the KDE tools so I fell back to VLC. It works. I personally don’t care about playing my music with a KDE only player and VLC can play more formats then anything you can throw at it. So I am happy.

Exchange AccessI started of with exchange wemail access but quickly fell back to Evolution. The Evolution is easy to setup and use. However, there are few things I don’t understand. Why save as the only option for attachment? Why can’t I just open attachment from the e-mails? Also, eventually the evolution froze and I had to kill it. I tried Kmail however it still does not seem to have exchange interoperability option. I am back to webmail. I will retry evolution at a later time when I have more time to analyze issues.

Documentation

I  tried using KWord. While opening MSWord documents text looked reasonably ok. However, embedded Visio drawing did not even show up. I tried OpenOffice.org next. That worked a lot better. However, since there is no way of editing Visio on the Linux, I had to switch back to Windows to complete editing the docuement.

Stability

The plasma crashed several times. This was specially bad when trying to get wallpaper from the Internet. Konquror crashed trying to browse my SMB shares. But then KDE 4.1 is still beta.

Conclusion

I love the finish, style, usability speed of KDE 4.1. Stability is not yet there but then it is still in beta phase. Several applications did not work as expected but then in open source world we always have alternatives. Visio was the only reason to force me back to the Windows world. I can possibly try a Windows VM with Visio running in it. But that will defeat the purpose. The other alternative is to use crossover office.