This week-end I upgraded my KDE 4 test installation to KDE 4.0.82, which is now included in Mandriva Cooker. Time to follow up on the bugs I reported last week and to take a deeper look at Plasma, the new desktop concept introduced in KDE 4.

Plasma

The good news is that the Folder View widget, which is used to display desktop icons, has been fixed so that right clicking on a file now gives a meaningful menu. So finally you can easily trash or rename icons in the folder view widget or execute other common actions for normal files.

However, the more I use KDE 4, the more problems I see with this whole Plasma thing. Especially the Folder View widget is problematic, not only because of bugs, but especially because the whole thing works rather counterintuitively.

In other desktops (including KDE 3.5, GNOME and XFCE), icons can be placed on the whole desktop surface and those files and application launchers are saved in the ~/Desktop directory. KDE 4 takes a radically different approach. All items on the desktop are Plasma widgets. Plasma widgets can be small applications (like an RSS readers or a clock) but also file and application launchers and they do not correspond with a file in ~/Desktop. To circumvent this limitation, the folder view widget was created. It's actually a widget which shows all the files in a certain directory. By default, a folder view widget showing the contents of the directory ~/Desktop is added to the desktop. This creates a highly confusing situation:

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