Saturday, November 08, 2008

KDE 4.1.3 (again) on ArchLinux

I tried another silly thing with Linux, ArchLinux. The setup is quite rough as you have to edit many config files manually. But if you know a bit your way around it takes only a few hours to have everything running well. The installation manual on the wiki is detailed enough to correct all eventual mistakes humans do.

I decided to try once more KDE 4 on it, as at first it was just a silly experiment: I was really not sure ArchLinux would be workable. In the end I am pleasantly surprised, KDE 4.1.3 is way way better than any other versions of KDE I have tried before. It is stable and quite pretty. It took the team a lot of time to get there but now I think KDE 4 is a very good window manager, pleasant to use.

It's a big change from older versions which were too unstable/had too few features to be of any use.

I am not convinced with ArchLinux compared to Ubuntu. The setup is much more complex, less packages are available. True you learn a bit more with ArchLinux. We will see if it can keep working well for a few years.

2 comments :

  1. didn't you find archlinux faster than ubuntu?

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  2. It is faster to boot. But I can't say apps are really faster. I don't see much difference. Java compilation time (my most time consuming task) is about the same as it was with Fedora/Ubuntu.

    What I like is that it is officially not simple to do things. So you are not surprised to fiddle with config files. But on ubuntu/fedora, most things work out of the box, but never all. So they are deceiving. Also I hope I won't have to bother with big upgrades that breaks stuff.

    Another thing, it does not force pulseaudio crap on me.

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