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My top 5 missing features on KDE4 on Ubuntu Gutsy

KDE4

I’ve been using the KDE4 from the Ubuntu Gutsy repositories for two days now, and I know there are a lot of missing features but here are my top 5:

  1. Printers: they are missing from the kde4 settings manager program. I know its not a full all bells and whistle final release, but can this be skipped from a (any) release?
  2. Widgets: Okay, the fact that KDE4 can now have widgets is nice, but why are all the widgets useless? Why not show off the widget potential with cool things, like a full RSS reader, a system services monitor, or a blog publishing widget? Or maybe just have something plain simple but useful like a calculator. No, they give us a clock and a battery monitor. Sounds like the Windows 1 TV commercial with Steve Ballmer: “A clock!”.
  3. Copy and Move: One of the main reasons I started loving Konqueror was because it had a Move To and Copy To option on the context menu. Its very helpful to move files around without having to open windows or drag them. On Dolphin, this features is missing.
  4. Shutdown Menu: I felt kind of in Vista land when I pressed the Shutdown button from the new Kmenu and then got asked again if I wanted to shutdown or logout. The Kmenu already presented me those options, and I chose Shutdown, why ask again?
  5. Switch to Next/Previous Desktop Shortcuts: I mentioned it in my last post and even there’s been updates to the packages, this keyboard shortcuts are missing on the settings. Its annoying to use the mouse to do such a thing, and the Expose-like feature is still not responding 100% of the times.

Which ones are yours?

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By Gabriel Saldaña

Gabriel Saldaña is a web developer, photographer and free software advocate. Connect with him on and Twitter

3 replies on “My top 5 missing features on KDE4 on Ubuntu Gutsy”

Printers: Yeah I also miss the powerful printing system from KDE 3.5. It was the best I’ve ever used. I think it is not that important to miss all the configurations from the very first release in a series. What would be bad is if you couldn’t print at all.

Widgets: Can’t agree with you here. You can’t say that they are useless if they are in fact used to build the desktop up (like LEGO). Background is a widget now, the panel is a container for widgets and everything in the panel is a widget. So you wouldn’t even be able to see/use the desktop if there were no widgets, therefore they can’t be useless. Yes there are only few widgets in the base package, there are more in kdereview and playground packages (including Twitter, Calculator, Note …). Not sure if there are Ubuntu packages for these. And hey KDE 4.0.0 is out only for a week now, I’m sure a lot more widgets are coming. For KDE 4.1 (comming this summer) they are even planing to add native support for Mac OS widgets.

Copy and Move: I have not used this much in KDE 3.5, so can’t say much about this. Did you report a wish to bugs.kde.org to bring this back?

Shutdown Menu: Yeah this one was also funny to me. One really strange bug in KDE 4.0.0. I guess this will be fixed as soon as in 4.0.1.

Switch to Next/Previous Desktop Shortcuts: Sam comment as with Copy and Move above.

What I miss the most is the configuration to show only the windows on the current desktop in the taskbar widget.

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