The second stop of my DE/WM hopping found me with KDE on my EeePC as previously stated. The only other time I’ve actually run KDE installed was for about five minutes before I realized that it just wasn’t going to run on my netbook. I can’t quite remember when that was but, it had to have been nearly 2.5 years ago. So when I decided to give it a spin this time, I expected much the same. I was extremely surprised to find that not only did it run, it has run quite well on this little box. It’s run so well that I may have to come back to KDE on here after all of the hopping is done.
I started with another clean install of Arch so that there wouldn’t be any conflicting configs laying around from my previous Gnome3 install. And then, I just took the lazy way out and installed the full KDE group. This followed much the same path as I did with the Gnome3 install, providing me with the full KDE experience. After the install and initial configuration, I had the base, base-devel and kde groups installed out of the main Arch repos.
On first boot into the new desktop, I logged in and after a bit (it did take a bit before it finally got to the actual desktop making me think that it wasn’t going to work), I was looking at a shiny new KDE desktop. And it was actually usable on my EeePC.
I did disable nepomuk, akonadi, klipper, and a few other services that I didn’t need or want. I also found that my EeePC couldn’t handle much tweaking of the desktop effects. They are enabled by default and the default set works quite well as they are. I did disable a few of them and turned down the ‘blur’ effect as that one in particular could cause quite a bit of slowdown (especially after enabling the window decoration theme that I ended up with). Of course, just being able to run the effects and still having a usable netbook was nice.
The themes I ended up with with was Xenon for the window decorations, Amakage for the plasma theme and using the Obsidian Coast color settings on the Oxygen widget style. And of course, the Faenza icons with Roboto handling the fonts. The wallpapers seen in the screenshots in this post is The Heavy Azor which contains 23 different colors and is by MustBeResult.
Now, on with a few screenshots.
Anyhoo, KDE turned out to be a pleasant experience on my EeePC. So much so that I ended up installing it on my desktop so that I could continue playing with it after I move on to the next stop on this tour.
And speaking of the next stop, I think I’m going in a completely different direction and am going with DWM. Should be interesting.
