Kde

I tried to make a very ordinary Plasma panel today: application launcher on the left, task list in the middle, clock and tray on the right, two rows high. The exciting new desktop framework objected chiefly to the phrase “two rows high.”

My naive attempt was to unlock widgets and drag everything until the intended geometry emerged. Instead, spacers collapsed, the task list consumed surprising amounts of space, and a widget escaped onto the desktop. Locking widgets prevented accidents but also concealed the controls I needed. The panel toolbox and I are no longer exchanging holiday cards.

The underlying Plasma idea remains compelling. Applets are not written solely for one fixed panel. A containment provides an environment, and a widget can adapt its presentation to a desktop or panel form factor. Data engines separate obtaining information from drawing it, which should stop every clock, weather display and device monitor from inventing its own polling machinery.

The current limitation is that abstraction has advanced farther than ordinary control. Layout negotiation needs better constraints and better feedback. A widget may technically adapt to a narrow panel while becoming practically useless. Removing a panel or moving an applet should be easy to undo. Multi-screen behavior also needs to preserve placement reliably; a temporary display change should not redecorate the entire desktop by surprise.

I had better results after creating a fresh panel, adding the expanding task list first, and placing fixed-size widgets around it. That is a workaround, not a discoverable interaction. The framework knows which item expands, but the user receives little explanation of why dragging another item does nothing.

Plasma’s spectacular jobs, such as transformed widgets and alternative containments, demonstrate the architecture. Its success will depend on boring jobs: stable panel sizing, predictable alignment, keyboard access, recovery from mistakes and sensible behavior when a screen disappears.

My practical conclusion is to keep the panel simple and lock it once arranged. I am optimistic about Plasma, but novelty does not excuse friction in actions performed every day. A desktop earns trust by remembering where the clock was. Rotating the clock is strictly optional.

Nokia’s proposed acquisition of Trolltech has produced the predictable range of reactions, from “Qt has won” to “Qt is doomed” with very little tedious ground in between. I depend on Qt for code and on KDE for my desktop, so I wanted a more useful answer than choosing a banner.

My first attempt was to infer the future from the purchase price and press statements. This yielded several confident theories and no information about what happens to tomorrow’s source release. Corporate language is excellent at sounding precise while promising room to turn a ship around inside every sentence.

The practical questions are narrower. Will Qt continue to be developed as a cross-platform toolkit? Will the free-software editions remain available under their existing terms? Will Trolltech’s engineers keep authority over technical decisions? Will commercial customers still see a supplier interested in desktop systems as well as phones?

Nokia has an obvious reason to value Qt’s embedded work and Qtopia. A large device company can fund engineering, testing and broader deployment that Trolltech could not easily buy alone. That could improve Qt itself, particularly where desktop and embedded needs overlap. It could also pull priorities toward Nokia’s products. Ownership does not abolish incentives; it changes which incentives attend the meetings.

KDE is less exposed than a proprietary customer because the toolkit’s free license and the KDE Free Qt Foundation provide important guarantees. Source availability also means the code cannot simply be made to vanish. But a living toolkit is more than a source archive. Maintainers, release discipline, documentation and sustained cross-platform work matter.

For now, nothing in my build process changes. Qt 4 remains the strongest general application toolkit I have used, and the acquisition is not yet complete. I will judge Nokia by releases, licensing decisions and retained developers rather than by either celebratory or funeral rhetoric.

My conclusion is cautious optimism. More resources could be excellent for Qt, and Nokia appears to understand that a broad developer community is part of what it is buying. If it tries to turn Qt into a narrow internal component, it will have paid handsomely to destroy much of that value. Even very large companies are usually capable of noticing an invoice.

I opened a long PDF in Okular today, searched for a phrase, added a note, and then printed three selected pages. The first three actions worked well. The printer produced pages two through four instead of the pages I thought I had selected.

My naive response was to repeat the job with different numbers. That merely consumed more paper, proving that printers remain the most effective mechanism for converting uncertainty into physical objects.

The confusion came from document page labels not matching the PDF’s internal page sequence. The introduction uses roman numerals, while the print dialog expects physical page positions. Okular displays both pieces of information in different contexts, but the distinction is too easy to miss when acting quickly.

As a viewer, Okular is already a substantial improvement over keeping separate programs for PDF and other document types. Search, text selection and navigation feel consistent because the shell supplies them while backends handle formats. That mechanism also exposes limitations: a backend may render well but lack annotations, forms or reliable printing details.

Annotations are useful, but I would not treat them as safely embedded in every source document without checking how that format stores them. Exporting or sharing a marked document deserves a test copy first.

My practical conclusion is to verify page labels in print preview and keep original documents untouched until annotation behavior is clear. Okular has become my default viewer, but “default” does not mean “incapable of surprising me.” That title remains permanently reserved for printing.

KDE 4.0 is out, so I installed the release packages and tried to conduct an ordinary day with them. I read mail, edited code, moved files and used a browser. By mid-afternoon I had also restarted Plasma and learned several new ways not to configure a panel.

My naive expectation was that the version number marked a direct successor to my mature KDE 3 desktop. I copied over habits even when settings could not be copied: right-click here, drag this there, expect every old control in approximately the old location. That turns 4.0 into a scavenger hunt it cannot win.

The candid result is mixed. Dolphin is quick and pleasantly focused for local file work. Okular opens the documents I need and gives them a consistent interface. KWin without ambitious effects is stable on this machine. Oxygen makes the applications look related, though a few small icons still require concentration.

Memory use is not alarmingly different in this limited test, although comparing young and mature sessions by one number would prove very little.

Plasma is the weak centre. Basic panel and desktop behavior works, but arranging widgets is awkward, configuration is thin, and occasional crashes make the entire workspace feel less reliable than the applications deserve. Some conveniences from KDE 3 simply are not present. Hardware integration and notifications also have visible seams.

This happens because 4.0 is not only a set of ported programs. Qt 4, new libraries, a new desktop shell, new hardware plumbing and revised applications all meet at once. The architecture creates room for future improvement, but users interact with current code, not future room.

I can use KDE 4.0 for testing and for a limited second session. I cannot recommend replacing a carefully tuned KDE 3 work environment yet. That is not a condemnation of the project; it is a description of my desk today.

The practical conclusion is to install with a clean user, keep important work elsewhere, and report narrow failures. KDE 4.0 shows enough of the intended system to be exciting, but the release number should not be mistaken for accumulated polish. Zero is a wonderfully round number. It is not a maturity metric.

I tried to use the KDE 4 beta for a complete workday. This was not an especially fair test, but fairness rarely survives curiosity. By lunch I had restarted Plasma twice and learned that my preferred panel arrangement could not yet be reproduced.

I began by importing settings from my normal KDE 3 account. The desktop behaved strangely: duplicated services appeared in menus, an application opened with the wrong font, and one configuration tool crashed. A clean user account fixed all three. Carrying years of configuration into a beta is not migration testing; it is inviting every old assumption to the same small party.

With clean settings, the underlying session is more stable than the desktop shell suggests. Applications launch, KWin manages windows reliably without effects, and Dolphin handles ordinary file work. Plasma remains the obvious construction site. Widgets can be added but are awkward to position precisely. Panel sizing is limited, and occasionally a widget stops responding until the shell is restarted.

That distinction matters because Plasma replaces several previously separate pieces: desktop icons, panels, applets and their containment. A failure in that young shell makes the whole environment appear dead even when applications and window management continue normally. It is a large architectural bet concentrated in the most visible square centimetres of the screen.

Restarting only Plasma from a terminal usually restored the workspace, which is useful for testing even if it is not a reasonable daily ritual.

I also encountered unfinished integration. Notifications differ between applications, removable devices do not always produce a useful action, and some settings change only after restarting a component. These are not dramatic crashes, but they interrupt the sense that one system is in charge.

After the experiment I returned to KDE 3 for work and kept the beta under a separate account for testing. KDE 4 is close enough that ordinary use finds valuable bugs, but not close enough that an ordinary user should be expected to diagnose them. My conclusion is candid: the beta contains a promising desktop framework and several usable applications, but it is not yet a dependable desktop. Calling it ready would be marketing; calling it hopeless would require ignoring everything beneath the panel.