KDE4 mini-review

2008-04-09 11:35:08 I've been testing KDE4 a bit for the last week and this a short note (mostly to myself) of stuff I came across, made me wonder or yell at. Maybe it's getting fixed and I abandon GNOME :P

• switching virtual desktops via keyboard shortcuts- ctrl+f1-f4 is useless to me, I've always used ctrl+shift+arrow keys. So I try to search for it and get Ubuntu Bug 183782 - just that this settings dialog doesn't have the required shortcuts to set fot me
• konsole - the font looks better aliased than on GNOME - and I have no clue why, will investigate (not to make it worse, but to improve GNOME :P)
• konsole - I am switching tabs with alt+left/right, KDE4 says this is a global shortcut and I can't use it. damn
• task panel - the widgets are unlocked by default and I killed my "task manager" widget by mistake, and I couldn't get it back by going to "Add Widget"->Add, then Drag'n'Drop. You have to directly drag it out of the "Add Widget" dialog to the panel, but I don't get why you can't drag it from your desktop to the panel
• widgets - never forget to "lock widgets" - or see above
• widgets - the battery display (working on a laptop) just display X% - the system tray thingy on GNOME also showed me "time left". I know I can get any decent app to run in the system tray, but there was a default thing. But maybe because that is me running KDE on normal Ubuntu and a proper kubuntu has some better defaults (aka I made mistakes installing)
• dashboard - I have no clue what this is, I press ctrl+f12 and get a weird display of windows, but not really any use
• klauncher - the app invoked by alt+f2 - it randomly crashes every second or third run, but at least it executes the command first :)
• themes - I somehow managed to repeatedly switch my theme in the appearance dialog, I blame it on not recognizing that the default theme is platinum and the preview screenshots are too small, I really wonder why they don't scale

To sum it up it looks quite nice, but I can't work when two of my most-used keyboard shortcuts are not available - but I'll have a second look (on kubuntu I guess) when Hardy comes out.