Steffen's Tech Blog

Following the instructions on KDE 4.1.1 Release News I updated to KDE 4.1.1 on my Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron PC. Some of the instructions were a little confusing: enable "Recommended Updates (backports)" in "Software Sources" --> as "backports" are also used to describe "Unsupported updates" (--> which is not recommended for a productive system), it must be a mistake There is no authentication key for the repository containing the updated packages deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main . This results in warnings when updating packages from this repository which leave some kind of uneasiness as using authentication keys seem an useful security measure. Besides this, the update worked well and I found now KDE 4.1.1 much more stable than KDE 4.0. In addition, most of the functionality that I used in the GNOME desktop is available. Furthermore  I like the new KDE look as well as some of its new applications (as alrea...

After reading the following article about the status of the GNOME project http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence I decided to check out the KDE 4 desktop by installing the "kubuntu-kde4-desktop" package (via Adept or apt-get) and I have to admit: I really like the new KDE 4 desktop. A lot of improvements have been made compared with its predecessor. I especially like the new version of the image viewer Gwenview and Okular, KDE4's document viewer. Check out http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/applications.php for more details. Unfortunately, the KDE 4 desktop seem not to be stable enough for production use. At least I experienced some crashes that required reboot via " R aising E lephants I s S o U tterly B oring" . In addition, I missed some functionality. Therefore I can't recommend switching to KDE4 right now. But I decided to give it another try as soon as KDE4.1 is available from the Ubuntu repositories in the hope that ...

If you like KDE besides Gnome on your Ubuntu installation just follow the tutorial How to install KDE on Ubuntu and type sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop in the terminal to install Kubuntu.