good KDE 4.1 distro
 

I have been using primarily Gnome on various distros I have been testing on my Intel Macintosh hardware with virtualization software. I would like to test out KDE 4.1 and would like a recommendation for a distro to test it in. I have been partial to Ubuntu for the most part, but when I tried to install KDE 4.1 on an existing Ubuntu Hardy virtual machine, I got dependency problems I was unable to resolve. I am also have Debian Lenny and openSUSE 11 running on PowerPC equipment, so I'm most familiar with those three but willing to try something else if it has (a) a good KDE 4.1 implementation; and (b) the tools packages of VMware Fusion, VirtualBox and/or Parallels Desktop (I have all three on various Macs) works with it.

If either Lenny or openSUSE is a good one to try, please indicate whether I can simply add KDE 4.1 to it without problems or whether I should start from scratch with the KDE 4.1 implementation of that distro. For anything else I would start from scratch anyway. Thanks!

I don't know something about the distros you mention. However you can try Fedora 9. It supports KDE4 and it is very easy to install. For further help take a look at this site.

Fedora 9 Installation Guide

If you want something more difficult you could try ArchLinux. But it's more difficult than Fedora to install and configure.

Thanks, axelfc, but the installation guide for Fedora 9 that you referred me to specifically mentions KDE 3.5.9, not KDE 4.1.

No, it doesn't. :P Please check again. :)

#22 describes how to install the latest KDE. Alternatively you can choose it to be installed during Fedora's installation process if you select something like 'custom packages'. i don't remember it exactly.

My mistake, but it's easy to see how I made it. The article header paragraph says 3.5.9, but just lower down they do refer to 4.1. Turning to the KDE section of the article, there's no mention of either. Thanks for pointing this out.

Have you used KDE 4.1 in Fedora 9? What's your verdict?

Ok no prob. :)

I have Fedora 9 running on a virtual machine for testing purposes. The only thing I don't like about KDE in Fedora is that they give the whole KDE packages in their repos. By whole I mean kdegraphics, kdenetwork etc. Thus if I want to install let's say kolourpaint I must install kdegraphics and all the other applications that come with. That makes the start menu feel overbloated since you end up with many applications that you don't need. Of course you can always delete them from the start menu. :P Apart from that I have no other problems.

If you are going to try Fedora take a look also at the services part of the guide and disable those you don't need. It will save you some cpu and ram.

In the interim I did try Mandriva 2009 (Mandriva One). It has the opposite problem; it didn't even install a file browser like Dolphin. I also ran into problems installing the tools package, even after I added the headers, make and GCC compiler. It didn't like the version of GCC that was installed and couldn't find the headers. I gave up on it.

Mandriva once upon a time, when it was called Mandrake, was generally considered to be a good distro. Never tried it though.

So I am waiting for your impressions of Fedora. :)

KDE 4.1.x backports for Debian Lenny
http://kde4.debian.net/

i use kde4.1 on opensuse11 without much trouble
seems to work much better than 4.0 which is the default.

I either screwed up something before or the problem was with VMware Fusion. I tried reinstalling Mandriva One 2009, this time on VirtualBox, and everything was OK with it. (This is one of the few times I've had issues with VMware Fusion, as it usually is better and more feature-ridden than the other virtualization programs running Linux.) And Dolphin was installed by default; I must have missed it before.

I only played around with KDE 4.1 for about an hour, but I didn't find anything compelling about it that would make me switch from the Gnome I am more used to. Customizing the panel seemed more laborious than with Gnome. For example, to add an application to the panel, I first had to change the classic menu (which I prefer) to the fancier menu, and then find the app and right-click to get the "add to panel" option. This would put it at the right side of the panel where I didn't want it, so I had to turn on the panel options menu before being allowed to drag the new app icon to where I wanted it. I'm sure there's an option for changing the height of the panel, but it wasn't with the other options. Also, I wondered whether there was still a way to double up icons vertically on the panel as with KDE 3.5. That is one feature I like that Gnome doesn't have.

At any rate, this isn't intended to be a Gnome vs KDE post, which would clearly be biased by my dearth of experience with the latter. I did at least get to see that KDE 4.1 is a lot better implemented than KDE 4.0, which I did try in the past.

axelfc, I didn't try KDE 4.1 with Fedora because I already had Mandriva downloaded and because Mandriva uses KDE as default, whereas Fedora uses Gnome. My interest wasn't distro-specific; I just wanted to try the latest version of KDE. I have tried Fedora before; version 7 with Gnome.