Early Days with KDE 4: openSUSE 10.3, Kubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 compared
Arch has taught me so much and I will go back to it one day. For now, I plan to decide between three popular KDE distros - openSUSE, Kubuntu and Fedora. The desktop environment of choice? KDE 4.0. So I downloaded the livecd torrents from their respective websites and burnt them to a rewritable disc. I could have used Virtualbox but I planned to install whichever I found the best. Fortunately, I did come to a conclusion and I’ll briefly share what I can recall from using these distros.
Fedora 9 :
- Experienced a few crashes especially on logout.
- NetworkManager didn’t work for me.
- Nice wallpaper and application menu icon.
- Konqueror still had the KDE 3 icon.
- PackageKit is too simple and looks ugly in KDE.
- gtk-qt-engine-kde4 should be installed by default.
- Anaconda is fine and the resizing partition feature is welcome.
- Method of setting up printer not clear.
openSUSE 10.3 :
- Use of the Aya plasma theme with new artwork rocks.
- YaST uses an Oxygen icon theme which suits it.
- Firefox doesn’t look that ugly even without the gtk-qt-engine for some reason.
- Only KDE 4 applications present.
- YaST installer messed up my GRUB for some reason; took a while to fix.
- Printer setup was fine.
- Slow YaST (since this is 10.3) makes me wait eagerly for 11.0.
Kubuntu 8.04 :
- Detected by network and printer out of the box.
- Ships with some KDE 3 applications like Fedora for PIM
- OpenOffice preferred over KOffice (take note Fedora) for the time being.
- No crash on logout. (only Fedora had this)
- Still uses Adept for package management which is a KDE 3 application.
- gtk-qt-engine-kde4 available in repos.
- Ubiquity setup was fine.
So I’ve settled for Kubuntu for now and I plan to review it with some screenshots soon.
I have been using Kubuntu for about 6 months now. I am realy happy with it. I’m an almost ex-windows user. If you have any questions stop by http://www.kubuntuforums.net and we will be glad to answer them.
Unfair comparison! Why did you test an unoffical intentionally KDE4-only Live-CD based on old openSUSE 10.3 when you could have tested the openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 KDE4 Live-CD (which by chance includes KDE3 applications and new fast package management)?
Still fine how an more than half year old release of openSUSE competes with current releases of other distros.
I tested openSUSE 10.3 over 11 because it is the latest stable version of the distro. I’m really looking forward to openSUSE 11 because no one does KDE like SUSE does. I could end up picking out bugs from openSUSE 11 which could be unfair as well. And yes, you do make the good point that 10.3 can complete fairly well with other distros.
> # Firefox doesn’t look that ugly even without the gtk-qt-engine for some reason.
I couldn’t get gtk-qt-engine to work for some reason. I’ll need to look into that but installing the OxyGnome GTK theme made GTK applications look slightly better. If the GTK apps don’t look themed in the KDE4 environment, make sure you execute “gnome-settings-daemon”.
http://kims-area.com/?q=node/8
The reason Firefox and gnome-packagekit look ugly on the Fedora 9 KDE Live CD is a bug where KDE accidentally made GTK+ not honor the systemwide /etc/gtkrc. This has been fixed in an update, but unfortunately it was too late for the live image. (I fixed it on May 8, the images were already spun at that point, they have to be spun a few days before the public release so they can be mirrored in time.) If you install the system and fetch the updates, this will be fixed.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=443309
Oh, and there’s no way we can fit OO.o on the KDE Live CD, there’s just no room for it. The GNOME Live CD ships with Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OO.o for the same reason.
huh, no way to fitt OO on a KDE Live CD? It fits on the opensuse live cd’s quite well
Yast is amazingly fast in OpenSUSE 11, with some great new features.
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I am experiencing high rate of firefox crashes on fedora 9, suspects high I/O utilization, and in occasion drag the whole OS with it. I also have hickups with yum and repo. In addition, the network is disabled by default? But in general, F9 is not as good as F8. I still maintain my other machines as F8.