KDE Kwestion

Posted on June 8, 2006

As I’ve mentioned before, I run the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu on my home PC. Recently, the Ubuntu team pushed out a new release of their distro, named “Dapper Drake”. So I decided yesterday that I should update my Ubuntu to Dapper, the latest and greatest.

However, I decided at the same time to complicate things a little bit: rather than sticking with plain Ubuntu, which uses GNOME as its window manager, I decided to try switching to its KDE-powered cousin, Kubuntu. (Mostly this was due to curiousity aroused when I heard Mark Shuttleworth, the zillionaire behind the Ubuntu project, say in an interview that he preferred Kubuntu to standard Ubuntu.)

Blowing away my old Ubuntu install and replacing it with Kubuntu was easy enough, and so far I’m pretty satisfied with the user experience — KDE isn’t nearly as geek-oriented as I remember it being the last time I tried it, a couple of years ago. GNOME’s not bad either, but I can see the appeal of KDE.

However, there is one KDE-ism that I can’t figure out: application defaults. I want to set Firefox as my default browser, in place of Konqueror. But the “Set as default” option in FF doesn’t seem to work, and I can’t find a control panel or config file where I can specify this manually. How’s it done? Anyone out there know?

And as long as we’re at it, which do you prefer: GNOME or KDE? (And here’s a third option: I’m told you can get seriously lickable eye-candy in Linux by using Xgl as your window manager. But installing Xgl looks hella complicated. Anyone tried it?)