Q4OS Forum

sudo

Member

Registered: 2017-05-31

Posts: 3

Katana Desktop

I just found out about the Katana Desktop environment , which is a fork of KDE 4, it seems to run pretty snappy on a standard Debian install. Is there a possibility to provide it as an option in Q4OS?

tlmiller76

Member

From: AZ, USA

Registered: 2016-11-29

Posts: 453

Re: Katana Desktop

Neat, I never knew anyone forked 4 as well.

My personal opinion:
I can see no good reason for the Q4os team to adopt Katana.  KDE3 makes sense due to when it was around single core CPU's dominated, so Trinity tends to be faster than completely modern WM's, much less full desktops.  KDE4 was never known for it's performance.  KDE has already managed to slim down Plasma to run much lighter and faster than KDE4 did, so while it probably is a bit lighter and faster than plasma still, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

That said, I think it would be very NEAT if they did offer a Trinity version and a Katana version.  Become the ultimate "classic KDE" distro.

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Q4OS Trinity machine - Lenovo K14 Gen1 AMD.  AMD Ryzen R5-5650U, 32GB DDR4, 1TB SSD, Vega 7, Realtek 8852 Wifi 6E + BT 5.2.

crosscourt

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,805

Website

Re: Katana Desktop

KDE4 indeed is slower than KDE5 and I couldnt see any advantage to using KDE4.  KDE3.5 in particular was really popular and very light do it makes a great choice in its modern form for older systems. I dont think people realize how much lighter KDE5 is and Q4OS has one of the fastest versions with Gemini available.

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Q4OS Aquarius 5.1 KDE   Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Tiny i5-6500T, 16gb ddr4 ram, 512gb m.2 ssd

tlmiller76

Member

From: AZ, USA

Registered: 2016-11-29

Posts: 453

Re: Katana Desktop

I installed katana desktop in a VM to play around with it.  Gotta say, it's pretty useless at this time.  It's JUST a desktop, almost none of the supporting applications.  So like for archiving, ark is the standard archiver for KDE. You'd need to install ark from Plasma, which means all the libraries for plasma 5.  So it saves you all of...nothing.  Or go with another archiver.  And that choice repeats for EVERY SINGLE K-applciation except dolphin, kate, konsole and ksysguard.

It's a decent start, but if they want to be a full desktop, they need to get applications that integrate smoothly with it without installing 3/4 of the plasma 5 desktop to get it, or there's simply no point in installing katana.

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Q4OS Trinity machine - Lenovo K14 Gen1 AMD.  AMD Ryzen R5-5650U, 32GB DDR4, 1TB SSD, Vega 7, Realtek 8852 Wifi 6E + BT 5.2.