Reimagining The Desktop
August 3, 2008 – 1:55 amThe basic desktop which we are used to on our computers hasn’t changed significantly since the days of Xerox Parc. In how it operates and how we interact with it, other than the mouse and other pointing devices, it hasn’t really changed much. A few fiddles at the edges, colour and much broader use yes. Change. No. Most computer users today would be able to get around in it, somewhat uncomfortably to be sure but we’d be able to work in it.
In part this is due to the fact that it works and works reasonably well. For most of us, most of the time. In the case of Microsoft and Apple there’s also the reality of investment in their interfaces and operating systems that keeps them largely tied to the same way of doing things.
Linux has been somewhat different in that what the user sees as a desktop isn’t tied that tightly to the underlying operating system and is changeable, often drastically. That said the major desktops in Linux and the FOSS world in general have kept to the same way of presenting and interacting with the desktop as what came before. It didn’t matter if your desktop of choice was KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Enlightenment or any of the others that are available. Fundamentally they all look and work the same way.
Until now.
Disruptive change comes from the unlikeliest of sources at times. It rarely, if ever, comes from established players in a space particularly commercial ones.
For example, IBM was forced to get into the personal computer business when it became apparent, even to them, that Apple was about to move into the business and enterprise market in a big way. From that came the IBM PC.
Whether or not it was a happy accident that it was built on an open architecture that sealed the deal in that anyone could make a PC and run software on it.
Along with them by happy or unhappy accident depending on the myths and legends you believe came Microsoft and MS/PC-DOS.
Until then everything about computers, from the mainframe to the new desktops, was about hardware and only hardware. Software, if it was thought of at all was just something you ran on it to do something useful with it. What was critical was the hardware.
Bill Gates had another idea that would completely disrupt what came before it. Simply, and today obviously put, software was what was important. The hardware wasn’t the key the software was. The open architecture of the PC and it’s newly appearing clones made that easier to accomplish. It was and is the single most important and disruptive change to the industry and how users saw their machines that occurred to that point.
It was also the last disruptive thing Microsoft would ever do.
The next disruptive occurrence began when Richard Stallman came up with the GPL and the notion of Free Software. It can be argued that Stallman was grabbing onto an earlier simpler time when things worked as the GPL is designed to work but it can’t be argued that he was the first to actually codify it and create a license enforcing it. Part 2 occurred when Linus Torvalds made his now mythical posting on Usenet announcing what was to become Linux.
Since then the Free and Open Source movements, which are two different things forever joined at the hip, has caused disruptions on the large and small scale in software, distribution, development and, more recently, hardware that has practically eliminated old style UNIX from server rooms and server space everywhere. it’s also more than held its own with proprietary software notably that from Microsoft in the server world while making slow inroads on the daily desktop people use.
Through it all the desktop has stayed functionally the same, its looked the same regardless of who it came from and works the same with the same advantages and drawbacks.
From this stable world has erupted KDE 4.1. For those that don’t use Linux or one of the BSDs, KDE is one of the major desktops in use pretty much splitting that market with GNOME. The last figures I saw had KDE at roughly 48% with GNOME just a little over 50.5% and all the others sharing the remaining 2.5%.
What makes it so disruptive? I can’t really describe it in words as well as I can with pictures so let’s go look at some.
Vista users will immediately recognize this icon littered desktop. If you click on the image to see it full size, and I warn you its large, you’ll see I use Vista for graphics work that I can’t do well on Linux. Yet.
Still, imagine trying to find something there!
Oh, and to get the desktop snapshot I had to download expiry ware that I’ll have to pay for should I decide not to uninstall it. Like as not it won’t last more than a day or so.
And yes, Vista is a pig of an operating system particularly when you stress it as much as I do.
The FOSS world has been much the same till now for all of that. Linux may be fast, stable, safe, configurable and extendible beyond what most users would ever want to do but it still looks like this:
Now, look quickly and I defy you to tell me the difference visually between GNOME, on the left, and KDE, on the right.
Outside of the number of icons littering the place a Windows user would feel right at home on either desktop and in some ways that has been deliberate.
In the early days of Linux there was the feeling that unless a desktop looked, at least, something like Window or a Mac there would be problems getting people to use it much less migrate to Linux. Like as not, they were right.
A closer inspection, say clicking in the images above, again they’re large, would show that KDE has been superficially closer to Windows than GNOME and GNOME superficially closer to the Mac. Not everyone would agree, of course, but the resemblances are there.
Beneath the skin they’re entirely different than either of the desktops they superficially resemble.
Some, like me, would argue they’re much better than either though there may be less of an argument about that with the Mac OSX environment that with XP or Vista.
In January of this year KDE released KDE 4.0 as a developer release which found it’s way onto many desktops and got roundly condemned by many people. The KDE people are partly to blame for this as they didn’t make it clear enough that the .0 release was what it was and not something you could use well or at all for daily work.
As usual in the FOSS world, people pinned their hearts on their sleeves and ill tempered comments flew on blogs, web sites and elsewhere. Some well informed and others, to be polite, less so.
On July 31st, KDE 4.1 was released although late betas and release candidates have been floating around for two months now
Some to applause, others merely served to intensify the emotional battle that had preceded them all. Including one well publicized call for a fork in the project. I’d have called this post FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) except for the fact that it’s written by a well respected and knowledgeable blogger: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols. In many ways it is though it’s not the mischief FUD that happens so often on blogs it’s more genuine concern for a project that he feels has lost its way. With all due respect, he’s wrong.
That said, when installed and running for the first time there appears to be a lot to be concerned about.
Yikes! Where are the icons! Who stole my icons! How do I use this thing?!
This has been, not surprisingly the mantra of KDE 4 allergic people since it first appeared. In short, its different. Nor does it seem close to what came before it.
And just what is that almond or kidney shaped thing in the upper left?!
Thanks for asking because we’re about to get to that.
By the way, all the screen shots here are from Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 and Beta 1. Not SuSe, Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven’t tried Fedora. Like many others I’ve found Ubuntu to be a near disaster. SuSE 11 works just fine for most things that I’ve tested. You’re getting Mandriva here because (a) it works and works well and (b) it’s what I use and is easier and far more configurable than the previous three.
Anyway, from time to time I want to give back and having some time on my hands at the moment participating in the testing for the next release seems by far the best way of doing it.
So back to the main question. How do I use the darned thing?
At the lower left you’ll see the big K menu button and you can get things going that way which is traditional enough. Other than to note that it really belongs on the left and that was a quirk in early Mandriva Alpha 2 its a traditional enough menu .
It certainly looks friendly enough and you can get to everything you want to. Nicely organized, too.
In that sense it has Vista’s dog of a menu system beat to hell.
You can get a better look at it if you click on it for the larger version of the picture, if you want but I dont think most of you will need to.
Click on a choice and the menu folds out and gives you more choices of applications which are relevant to the index. Like many things in KDE 4.1 it’s either loved or hated. Personally I’m indifferent to it. I’ll use it till something better comes along and there are a couple of “something better” in the pipe but I’ll stay with it till then.
However, to get to the ideas and power behind KDE 4.1 the menu is, in the end, irrelevant.
And no, you still can’t drag and drop onto the desktop till you have a Vista like mess. You could do that with KDE 3.5.x and you still can with GNOME if you like.
Power you say?
Yes, I said power. By way of introduction and for those who will have apoplexy about it one of the things you need to know is that part of the power comes from widgets. In KDE4-speak, plasmoids.
Plasmoids? What kind of thing is that! It sounds like a something I might need medication for!
Relax, the name comes from the fact that what powers the desktop is called Plasma and the widgets or Plasmoids are what make it all tick.
Right about now some cynic will think “Ahh, widgets. Those things on the screen shot of Vista that show the time, the connection speed, the weather and something else I can’t quite make out!” Yes, widgets.
Far more powerful than anything you’ll find for Vista, yet or perhaps ever. Don’t count on it, though, if KDE 4 adoption next year is anywhere near what I think it’ll be don’t be at all surprised if some of these ideas end up on Vista 2.0 aka Windows 7.
Enough chit chat. Down to business.
To find your way here you have to click on that little almond thingy. cleverly called The Almond. Personally i’d hav preferred The Kidney.
Up comes the Add Widget’s dialog. From there we’re going to scroll down till we find FolderView. Then we’ll click it to bring one up.
I’m sure you want to see it rather than listen to me carry on about it so…
Now I suspect I’m going to start hearing large sighs of relief that, finally, we have some icons!
Yes, we do. The default in Mandriva is to bring up the user’s home directory with all it’s assorted folders and, in this case, some files.
Now then, I hear you say, what’s so special about this? Can’t I just get the same thing from a file manager like Windows Explorer or Dolphin or Konqueror? Well, yes, you can. But there’s more if you’ll be patient.
I was patient for this!
Well, yes, you were.
What we have here is a FolderView with the contents of a specific folder. It may not seem like much but wait for it because there’s more.
Unlike a file manager FolderView(s) is persistent. It just stays there till you close it. For example, if you’re writing a novel or, like me, writing a blog heavy on illustrations then you bring up the FolderView and you can do all your work from that until you’re finished using whatever tools you want to use.
In other words you don’t just open a folder and have the file view vanish on you the way a well behaved file manager would.
What this changes is how you have to work with your desktop. You work with it your way and now how the desktop manager says you have to work with it. At the risk of violating someone’s copyright, something I could go to jail for if the amendments to the Copyright Act in Canada makes possible should it ever get off the order paper, you can have it your way.
You’ll notice that I’ve opened a file from the folder and I’m working on it while the FolderView stays open. Should a flash of inspiration hit me I can grab another file, open it with another program, make my edits and save it again all while leaving it there. I get to stay focused on the task as hand rather than hunting through desktop icon litter or bringing up file managers to find what I’m looking for.
And yes, I’m time obsessed like most of us these days and just old fashioned enough to want an analogue clock in spite of the perfectly serviceable digital one on the panel. Hey! I’m 55, gimme a break!
For now, FolderView is restricted to just opening a persistent view of a folder on the local drive and shared folders of network drives. By 4.2 the widget will be able to assemble a virtual folder where you can collect files from various locations in one place on the desktop. And from elsewhere.
For me the ideal would be to be able to associate one or more applications to a folder so that the users work flow is improved and the association would disappear when the user doesn’t need the virtual FolderView any longer.
Again, for me, an improvement would be to be able to assign a particular FolderView to a particular virtual desktop.
For those of you who don’t know Linux desktops at all almost all of them come with either 2 or 4 virtual desktops enabled and you can enable more. You switch through them using a pager. This is a bit of a nod at character based Unix’s where you could run a job on one screen and switch to another using a key, say an Alt-Function key like Alt-F1.
One of the criticisms of the KDE 4.0 release was a lack of applications that would run on it. Looking at the screen shot above you can see KDE’s Kate, a uber-competent text editor for all seasons and purposes including programming in any language you can think of.
KDE 4.1 goes a long way to solving that dilemma. The version of Kate included in Mandriva’s Alpha and Beta is written for KDE 4 so it’s a native application.
As you can see from the screen shot on the right there are video players available for KDE 4.1, in this case SMPlayer which is the famous MPlayer surrounded by a set of clothes using the QT toolset, the same one KDE is built on.
As you can see I’ve added a couple of widgets/plasmoids. The ever present trash can and a time waster that shows daily cartoons, in this case “User Friendly” the geeks best laugh of the day! 
Having mentioned file managers earlier it’s important to point out that FolderView doesn’t get rid of these pesky pains in the butt. Particularly the one that comes with Windows called Explorer that’s buried deep in the bowels of the OS and wont to crash at the worst possible moment taking the desktop down with it momentarily.
A bias here. GNOME’s file manager isn’t awful but it isn’t good. The GTK file manager that Firefox saddles Linux users with is, to be kind, useless. In the past one of KDE’s strength has been the Swiss Army Knife of file managers. Konqueror. It doubles as a very competent web browser too.
For KDE 4 Konqueror has been replaced as the default file manager by Dolphin which really only suffers in comparison to the power of Konqueror, aka Konq to it’s legion of devotees.
A very cursory glance at Dolphin, on the right, and Konqueror on the left reveals very little between the two outside of how Dolphin largely ignores the directory tree and how Konqueror doesn’t. The other is the large preview on the right of the Dolphin windows. Both are useful and configurable to one degree or another and useful. That said Konqueror, as I alluded to , is the ultimate file manager and the same can’t be said of Dolphin. Dolphin was never designed to be. It’s designed to be lightweight and good for tasks that most users will have for it. Konq, on the other hand, is the power user tool. Toss it any protocol you care to, have it display anything in any fashion you wish, whisk files on their way from one folder to another, one disk to another and one device to another. Not only that you can have a local disk viewed in one tab and a web site in another one. Believe me, I’m just scratching the surface. There isn’t a file manager that offers this much power and control available for any price for Windows or OSX. KDE has it for free!
If there’s a one big problem with the KDE 4.x series so far is that it isn’t simple to exchange Konq and Dolphin as the default file manager. For someone like me that’s an almost unforgivable thing. Well, it’s forgivable because we’ll be able to do that with KDE 4.2.
Then there’s the question of other applications. You know, things you can do real work with or simply sit back and enjoy.
KDE 4.1 does come with its very own Video player known as Dragon Player. And the new Amarok, a much loved and much used Audio Player. Amarok is very likely the best audio player there is, anywhere.
On the right is Dragon Player and Amarok which is playing tracks from last.fm. Amarok 2 is still in alpha so there are some things missing like the funky VU metre that’s in Amarok 1.x. Still, it works and is, even at the alpha stage, powerful.
On the right is Okular, a nearly universal file reader that can handle, among other things PDF files, graphics files and many others. So no need for hunting around for a specific reader for a specific format. Grab Okular and go. It isn’t entirely universal yet but as time goes by it will read and display more and more file formats. Also on the right is the KDE 4.1 upgrade for Kontact, the KDE Personal Information Manager. As I’m no fan of Outlook or, for that matter, Evolution or Thunderbird, Kontact is my personal choice. Kontact gives me an easy choice between CPU chewing HTML mail and text mail and just who gets the honour of me allowing HTML mail. Very few I’ll tell you. I also prefer to send out text email as it’s less likely to be marked as spam or as infected with some nasty or other. It’s also simple to set up a spam filter using powerful tools like SpamAssassin or Bogofilter as well as malware detectors like ClamAV. Like most KDE apps it lets me do it all my way, not the way the programmers or marketers feel I should use it.
Of course, there’s the near ubiquitous OpenOffice.org a near perfect replacement for a certain other office package that dominates today. It reads and writes almost all Microsoft Office formats except for the .xdoc and other new formats used in Office 2007. It also produces near perfect .ODF files for those who have to exchange documents in a usable ISO standard.
What I’m getting to here is that while there is still a shortage of native KDE 4 applications there are more of them coming on stream very quickly and what there is is very impressive.
One of KDE’s claims to fame or infamy depending on your point of view has been it’s nearly endless configuration possibilities. After using it for a while it’s easy to forget how daunting it is to configure it just “right” to someone new to the environment. So KDE 4 tries something new borrowed from SUSE.
For those of us used to the old KDE Control Centre this is a bit daunting as in what the fsck is this?! On the right is the window that opens up when you choose System Settings from the menu with the “simpler” configuration choices on the right tab and the “Advanced”, perhaps scarier options in the Advanced tab on the left.
Clicking on the Desktop icon takes you to the screen shot on the left. Again, the simper options are on the right tab with the more advanced ones on the right or a button click away. You can configure Effects and and eye candy here, multiple desktops a screen saver or feedback options for what you see when you click something.
Just a minute! Where’s the themes and the wallpapers! All in good time, grasshopper. Enlightenment, KDE enlightenment not the desktop, comes in dribs and drabs as it often does. It’s no different in KDE 4.1.
There is much to configure in both tabs some simple and straight forward, some, mostly in the Advanced Tab that can seriously break things if you don’t do it right. You have been warned!
See, no different from the old KDE Control Centre, now, is it?
Just a minute!, I hear someone yell, “How do I get to change my wallpaper and theme! The defaults are pug ugly! Get to it will ya!”
OK, it has been a long read to this part, hasn’t it?
Right click the desktop and the menu on the right will appear. Click desktop settings.
There we are! We got there!
Wallpapers and themes galore. You can load them locally or from your network or It’ll go out to KDE-look.org to find some for you.
Wether or not it’s the right place for this is debatable depending on your expectations. If you’re used to the old KDE Control Centre you’ll want it all in one place. If you’re a KDE noob you’ll probably think this makes sense. In a way it does. It’s not hard to get to once you know where it is. Unlike my experiences with the old Control Centre the fetch from KDE-Look actually works!
We’re nearly at the end. So time to out the nose plugs on and prepare to leap into the deep end.
One of the criticisms of KDE 4.0 was that the panel, which used to be called Kicker, didn’t seem at all configurable. Things like font sizes and all of that. Some folks just don’t seem to like huge fonts that simply scream at you, or icons. Worse yet, the icons are supposed to be SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) which are resizable and ought to look good at any size. Ok, almost, too big or too small will look kinda funny.
Right click the panel and up will come a panel that allows you to configure the panel.
This magic panel allows you to set the horizontal size of the panel (or vertical if you use it that way), the alignment and a number of other options. So far I can find no way to reduce the size of the icons in the panel though I do wish I could.
The major improvement is that it isn’t the same screen real estate hog it was in KDE 4.0.x.
I’m not going to pretend that KDE 4.1 is without problems. There are some plasmoids I can’t load for the life of me. Then, suddenly, one day I can! That it doesn’t make much sense to me doesn’t seem to matter much but that’s the way it is right now. It could be distro specific but I suspect not.
A similar issue exists with the free X server driver for some or all NVidia desktop and laptop graphics cards. You need to install NVidia’s closed source driver to get it to work. The problem seems to be with compositing in the free driver. Nor do I believe that it is distro specific or a specific KDE problem. For now, sadly, the free driver can’t take the stress that KDE 4.1 puts on it.
There is a distro specific problem with audio and some data CDs and DVDs in the Mandriva beta and that’s being worked on. It seems to affect KDE 3.5.9 and KDE 4.1 with GNOME and XFCE working properly. I’ll update this post when that’s fixed.
All in all my impressions are that KDE 4.1 is usable, it’s blisteringly fast compared to the sad Microsoft offering in Vista, easily as fast as GNOME on a moderately powered machine, faster on a high end machine where it’s nearly as fast as XFCE.
It’s still a work in progress and not really usable in a production environment or by end users who are put off by the quirks that I’ve found and will find.
KDE 4.1, like KDE 3.1 before it, is an early adopter desktop which shows a lot of the promise that the developers want to give users and that future is both compelling and doable.
What KDE 4 is is a break from the past. The desktop reimagined. Once you try it with an open mind and get used to it’s differences you’ll find it hard to return to the old model. And the potential is literally limited by only the imagination.
All the fuss and furor over KDE4.0.x seems wasted energy now. This not only rocks it promises to change how you interact with your computer and make you far more productive with far less effort.
What it is, for early adopters, is stable and largely trouble free, and can be used daily if you wish. If you want all the goodies then you’ll have to wait till KDE 4.2 this coming winter.
Monday, August 11th. After using KDE 4.1 daily on one of my boxen I see no reason to revise my feeling that KDE is on the right course here and, even better, taking me a place where I can finally get a desktop that works the way I want it to. Or anyone else for that matter.
Some things don’t work well or at all yet. For example K3B a remarkable burner application still sorta just sits there and sulks. There are one or two others as well but as I can log out and dive into three other desktops to get what I need I’m not all that concerned at this point. Remember, this is serious early adopter time. The ride can be quite bumpy.
Or more to the point it’s rather like hiking The West Coast Trail because you’re never all that sure what will come next and there’s always the worry you didn’t pack the right things. There are no corner stores or 7-11 conveniently located on The West Coast Trail so you can see the worry if you didn’t pack your wellies.
That said there is one, to me, spectacular thing about KDE 4.1 that has come to my tired eyeballs and it’s this.
When the first GUIs appeared for Linux font rendering was, to be charitable, comical.
The world and the GUI’s have changed.
Until now Apple’s OSX has had the tastiest font rendering available. Dey was da champ!
Vista isn’t bad either though it’s not in the same ballpark as OSX.
KDE and GNOME are sorta, kinda ok. Not spectacular, far from comical but not all that crisp and easily readable by old farts like we who are near sighted and have progressive lenses resting on the bridge of the schnoze.
I hadn’t noticed this until I cranked up Kontact to use on a daily basis and, for the first time, I’m in love with font rendering in Linux. Sharp, crystal clear and beautiful! In my not terribly humble opinion my poor eyes tell me that KDE 4.1’s font rendering has leapfrogged OSX. It has GNOME and XFCE beat too. As for Vista that’s no longer on the same continent much less the same ballpark.
Of course, like everything else KDEish it’s configurable. Meaning, of course, that you can fiddle until your eyes fall in love too.
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