Well we’re into day two on using Kubuntu full-time and I’m getting most of my personal show stoppers worked out. I want to thank everyone that left comments here giving me some suggestions. Here are my continued thoughts on using it, and what I’ve worked out.
Things I like / solutions:
- Konqueror as a web browser is not for me. I’ve installed Firefox and written a post (look for it tuesday) on installing Firefox in Kubuntu cleanly (read: no gnome dependencies!)
- The rumours are true. Amarok is sweet, sweet musical magic.
- Klipper + actions is nice.
- Loving katapult.
- Ktorrent looks a lot better than the gnome-default, allowing a bit more customization.
Things that still bug me:
- I’m not so sure about Dolphin. The few things I’ve done with it were counter-intuitive and confusing.
- Needing to restart KDE to add a simple menu bar seems.. dumb?
So far I am getting used to things pretty quickly for the day-to-day work that I do. Continued tips from the rest of the KDE community would be appreciated. Remember, I’m not completely forsaking gnome. This is a learning experience for myself and for the contents of the blog.
What are you speaking about ?
“Needing to restart KDE to add a simple menu bar seems.. dumb?”
Can you please explain this ? I never had to restart KDE to change any setting !
Personally, I can’t stand Dolphin. Can set both sidebars to Bookmarks, but both will only set the active pane (I use the Norton Commander-like two pane mode), instead of the one on whichever side the Bookmarks is… So back to Konqueror for me, it’s much less annoying, albeit single-pane.
That said though, if you do want a NC/mc/TotalCommander etc. two-pane file manager, try Krusader. It takes some time to get it comfortable but it’s worth it, I think! Maybe the problem is in me, and I’m too used to my Total Commander keys and functionality, but thing is, it can be done with a little effort, and that’s groovy.
Ktorrent was a positive disappointment for me too, I’m not a big fan of this whole BitTorrent thing, but it’s a pretty sweet client. I had a similarly good experience with µTorrent on Windows, after having used Azureus for years.
Menu bar though? What did you try to do exactly?
Check out qBittorrent:
http://qbittorrent.sourceforge.net/index.php
it’s a really nice kde torrent client and it’s written in Qt4, they also have a Gutsy repo.
For a dual panel file manager, just use Konqueror.
The Kubuntu team decided, I really don’t know why, to remove this functionnality from the Konqueror menu. That’s one of the weirdest things they did.
The shortcuts and right click on the status bar are still working.
Split Left/Right : Ctrl+Shift+L
Split Top/Bottom : Ctrl+Shift+T
Close active view : Ctrl+Shift+R
You can do really great things with this mode. You can for instance lock a view on a folder, bind this view to another view, and when you’ll click on a file in the folder, it’ll be displayed in the second view…
Pinaraf – right-click on the default panel and select add panel. I’m not able to configure the newly created panel until I’ve logged in and out again. I asked in #kubuntu and they suggested the login/out solution.
@Pinaraf: Are you sure that this feature was removed from Konqi’s menu? In Gutsy I just have to go to View –> Split View.
And I agree that Dolphin/KDE 3 is not really nice, for me it’s just a Proof of Concept for the KDE4 version which already looks cool.
I’m not running Kubuntu on this computer, but I can assure you that this behaviour isn’t natural at all in KDE. On my debian unstable, running KDE 3.5.7, I don’t have to restart anything to change the panels. I can add/remove panels as I wish without restarting Kicker nor KDE…
It looks like a Kubuntu Gutsy specific issue.
ya, I have yet become the big Dolphin fan just yet, it is supposed to be better in KDE 4 since I believe they stopped developing on the KDE 3 version. As for you having to restart when adding a menu is beyond me. Only time KDE gets restarted is when I shut down the computer at night, and turn it on the next day.
About torrents: have you tried Deluge on Gnome?… fantastic 🙂
Completely agree with you when it comes to Konqueror as a webbrowser. Too slow, and too many sites that doesn’t work as they should using it. Granted, probably not Konqueror’s fault in all cases but still annoying. Which is why I prefer my KDE-ified Firefox instead 🙂
I also agree with you when it comes to Dolphin, at least as far as KDE 3 goes. I haven’t checked what it’s like in KDE 4 yet, but I seriously doubt it will challenge Konqueror as a filemanager anytime soon, if ever. Konqueror is by far the best filemanager I have ever seen, on any platform.
Now, I don’t understand why you needed to log out of KDE to configure a new panel. That shouldn’t be necessary, and it’s certainly not needed in my Feisty install of KDE 3.5.7. The only two occasion when you need to log out and in again are, as far as I know anyway:
*When you’ve updated some core libs (i.e. 3.5.6 to 3.5.7.)
*When you’ve changed the mouse pointer theme (no idea why it’s needed here…).
Okay, you don’t have to but the changes won’t be noticeable until you do either.
Dolphin, KDE4, is a total improvement on KDE3 version. So much so, I changed my shortcuts to use the KDE4 version by default instead.
@Christer: No need to restart KDE. Although it’s a long standing bug. All you need is to restart Kicker, the KDE Panel. You can do that either through the age-old method of kill, or you can use this command:
dcop kicker kicker restart
@Pinaraf: The functionality has not been removed. Only the main menu for that has. You can still split views using the keyboard shortcuts or by right-click on the status bard.
@Jucato
It’s a long standing bug in the kubuntu gutsy packages only then. In my Debian, I don’t have to relaunch Kicker for anything.
And I didn’t say they removed the functionnality from konqueror, they just decided that it just was better to hide it (I suppose disturbing users with features partially hidden is better than showing features from their point of view)
Well i just tried 2 add a panel in my recently uppgrade kubuntu gutsy, and no problems whatsoever 2 add a new panel and 2 customize it..
Jucato,
once again you prove you are wiser than me, as I was the one who suggested the log-out-log-back-in 😉
firefox as web-browser
konqueror as file manager
amarok as media player
is a great setup.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Integrate_Firefox_with_KDE#Appearance_Method_1:_kgtk
may be useful, i just change the file picker but you might aswell have a glance at that.
does anybody know how to get amaroks menu to hide, it was hidden by devs
With Konqueror in split-screen mode (as detialed by Pinaraf above), it becomes the sweetest FTP client you’ve ever seen. I have, in the past, conducted a 4-panel Konq session between two different directories and two different FTP servers, and I could even move a file directly from one server to another without stopping on my local hard drive in between.
I agree that it sucks as a web browser (Firefox forever!) but I think Konqueror is a top-notch file manager and FTP client.
You’ve discovered the sweetness that is Amarok and Ktorrent, but have you used Digikam yet? 🙂