I’m looking to experiment with KDE, I’ve used Gnome distros up until this point. I’ve read multiple reviews and forum articles talking about KDE 4 still being unstable, but also have seen Pardus, Linux Mint 8 KDE, and Mandriva 2010 singled out as strong releases dealing with this issue. Any Linux users who could address the (supposed) KDE 4 instablitity issues/recommend a distro would be welcome. I’m looking to install this along side my main Mint 8 distro, not just play around with it as a Live CD experience, so any help narrowing the field without culling through 10-15 distros would be very helpful.
PS: My system is a modern one, with plenty of RAM and a 3.0 Ghz processor, so it’s more than enough to handle the resource demands of KDE 4.
kdebase-4.2.4-2.fc9.i386
The only thing I can tell you is I am running KDE 4.2 under Fedora 9. I have been running this version for several months, perhaps a year. I see no instability here.
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KDE 4 is still an utter pain. Take a look at installing Ubuntu 9.10 and running the GNOME 3 Shell which is an excellent compromise between GNOME and KDE
Ubuntu 9.10 Download
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-ubuntu-9.10-karmic-koala
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) User Guide
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Karmic
HowTo Install Gnome 3 Shell in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/install-gnome-3-shell-in-ubuntu-karmic-koala.html
LUg.
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You are right that when it was first released KDE had severe and uncappetable stability probs especially if you had NVIDIA cards and the company was – in our opinion – DISGUSTINGLY slow in introducing correct drivers but these probs have been solved now.
KDE is real fun and UNLIKE GNOME which is nice too really introduce you to a TOTALLY new and fun world have an open mind and experiment with the brand new plasma technology and amazing way KDE deals with virtual desktops a true revolution.
In our company we run linux with both KDE and GNOME but GNOME is really for ppl who are used to Windows XP easy to use but too conventional.
Needless to say as u pointed out u need a reasonably powerful graphics card to enable nice effects
RICK
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I had used kubuntu for quite some time. It’s easy to install and it’s almost the same as ubuntu but comes with KDE instead of Gnome.
I did notice that KDE is quite a bit more system intensive, but I was running it on a laptop (Dell D600 1GHz CPU with 1Gig of RAM). It was very usable and very pretty to look at. KDE 4 was very stable an I never had any issues with it.
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The early versions were buggy, but that’s been resolved now as far as I’m concerned.
There’s nothing to stop you using KDE 4 in your current distro – or any number of alternative desktops if it comes to that. Just choose the desktop you want at login time.
I have KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE and Enlightenment on this machine (Fedora 12 community edition)
It does make the menu a but top heavy though, but you can use your favourite Gnome app in KDE or vice versa if you have both installed.
There should be a meta package to drag in all of KDE’s dependencies, but kdebase and kdelibs should get most of them for you
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Well I was Ubuntu/GNOME user too until I switched to Mandriva with KDE about a two weeks ago, when Mandriva 2010 Spring came out. In my experience when trying out KDE distros I didn’t have any stability problems with them, except with Kubuntu – I wouldn’t recommend that. It looks like for Canonical Kubuntu is like an unwanted poster-child. So the other distros I also tried were Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE. I didn’t know about Pardus. All I can say now is that Mandriva is the one i liked the most. I especially like their Control Center for settings and the default layout of the desktop. And if I compare KDE to GNOME, well it is a big step forward as it has a much more polished and modern look and a lot of features not available in GNOME. Currently I think that KDE is the best bet Linux has to compete with Mac OS and Windows, as in many ways it is even ahead of theme.
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