I'll confess I have a certain love/hate relationship with KDE. It was the first WM I ever used back when I first started getting acquainted with Linux. That was back in the days when Slackware was the reigning emperor - and using upstart distros like Redhat and SUSE and Knoppix was considered "rad." But lately there are times when I need (or prefer) to use certain KDE-based apps. So I thought this would be a good time to start getting familiar with KDE again.
Since I don't like to mix desktop environments on a Linux box, I went looking for a few KDE-oriented distros in order to get back into the swing of things. For those who don't know, KDE had it's ups and downs, and went through a fairly contentious period among its developers and users not too long ago. Luckily, the dust has seemed to settle. And the latest iterations of KDE look to be solid and back on track. So this seemed to be the ideal time to get back up to speed on the K{
fill in the blank} universe.
My test machine is an HP Pavilion dv7 laptop sporting an Intel Core i5 CPU with 8GB RAM w/ATI Radeon 6400-series graphics and Intel Centrino-N 1030 BGN wifi.
For testing I tried the latest 64-bit versions of
KWheezy and
Mint 16 KDE Edition. Both were downloaded and "burned" to bootable USB for preliminary testing.
Initial impressions:
I started with KWheezy 1.5 since Mint is still getting a lot of software from Ubuntu repositories. I wanted to start distancing myself from things Ubu for a variety of reasons I've gone into elsewhere. If that comment doesn't make sense to anybody, don't worry about it. It's more a FOSS cultural/political issue that doesn't have a bearing on either distro for testing purposes.
On first bootup, KWheezy displayed an attractive splash sequence that eventually landed me on an equally pretty desktop. On first boot neither sound (which can be fussy on this laptop) nor the wifi interface came up configured correctly. After a second boot both seemed to work fine with no intervetion required, so whatever happened was likely a timing issue introduced by booting from a relatively slow USB 2.0 key.
All the major apps and goodies we know and like appeared on the menus by default. KWheezy is a distro that includes everything the average PC user could want (plus a whole lot more) by default. Hardly a slender distribution. But many people see that as a plus so I won't comment. Suffice to say most people won't need to open Synaptic to add anything to the mix anytime soon if they're running a Wheezy default install.
Things were looking good. Then the problems started. The Plasma desktop kept repeatedly crashing. Fortunately, crash recovery isn't the hassle for Linux the way it is for Windows. It was relatively easy to start a new user session and muddle forward. Except...it kept happening every 10 or so minutes. I don't know if this was just an issue with running the 'live' session rather than a 'bare iron' install. But it didn't give me warm fuzzies. Especially since booting a live session is often the best compatibility test you can run. If it works 'live' it will almost always work as well (or better) once it's installed.
That's something I'll need to explore later...on to Mint 16 KDE.
Mint launched noticeably more quickly than KWheezy. Probably because it was packing nowhere near as much baggage as KWheezy. Mint butchers in around half the download size. Running live it uses slightly less than 800Mb of RAM with a few small apps or a browser open. And it seems to consume between 3% and 5% CPU utilization when mostly idle.
Sound and wifi worked out of the box on first boot. Screen resolution was set correctly using a recommended driver. There were two additional accelerated drivers also available that I'll have to play with later. But as of now, the screen looks great.
There's a lot more apps loaded than I usually use. It seems the full Calligra Suite along with Libre Office comes along by default. So there's definitely some "app overlap" in places. I'd definitely consider slimming that down at some point since I like to keep as little "stuff" on my machines as possible. FFox is the default web browser. And VLC is also included - which is a welcome surprise.
So far everything is working smoothly with no bad surprises. (I'm typing and uploading this in Mint KDE as we speak.) So it looks like Mint just might become my goto KDE distro despite my misgivings over its Ubuntu roots.
I'll have to sit down with KWheezy when I have more time to play - and ideally install it to disk first, rather than run it in a live session.
Anybody else
putzing around with any of this? Or would anyone care to share their thoughts/advice/tips/war stories?
I'm all ears.
