Episode: 109
Title: HPR0109: KDE 4 Tips
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0109/hpr0109.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:34:22

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Hi, welcome to Hacker Club of Radio. This is Skirlett from the Fedora Reloaded Podcast.
And I'm going to be talking about KDE and its wicked desktop. My background is graphic design.
And so first thing I do and I configure my system is make sure the aesthetics are the way I'm digging them.
And the main thing I'm actually seeing with the way I've seen KDE for configured is there's just not enough contrast.
And so there are just these really simple things you can do in the GUI that will be these little tweaks that can just make all the difference aesthetically.
So these things are just in the control panel, but it's not called a control panel anymore.
And here's where it's located. Go to the K menu. And if you're using a different distro, they may have branded another way.
It might be the F menu on Fedora or the K menu, on Kubuntu or whatever.
But the quickest way to get there is to hit Alt, F2, to run command and type in the word system.
The default selection should be the application called system settings, so hit return and it will open.
The other way to find the system settings is the search bar in the K menu, type in system and select from the results.
Or you can just navigate to the K menu, applications, settings, system settings.
Next window you'll see is the system setting window. And it's basically your preferences for your K desktop environment.
Now, first of all, to give KDE more contrast, go to look and feel desktop, desktop effects, shadow, add a shadow, drop shadow to the windows.
By default, there is one already, but on all the screens I've seen it's just too light.
So here are some magic settings. X offset equals one. Y offset equals one. Shadow opacity equals 81%.
Shadow of fuzziness equals seven. Shadow size four.
Now, look and feel menu appearance. Lots of customizing here. Straight out of the KDE 3.5 series.
You can change the color scheme if you like. The icon set is something less pale than the default icon set. Apply themes and so on.
Again, in look and feel appearance style, change the title bar and the style of all your widgets like the scroll bar and check boxes and things like that.
So if you're just not digging the oxygen feel, you can use any other style you prefer.
Look and feel menu again window behavior and window behavior.
Here you can configure how to move the windows from the desktop desktop, what the title bar does when you double click, etc.
It's not quite aesthetics, but I'm just throwing in a few more tips that I found that I liked. So check them out.
Computer administration, keyboard and mouse, keyboard shortcuts. Yes, you have lots of keyboard shortcuts available to you and you can define them.
For instance, Ctrl F9 shows you all the windows you have open on one desktop and Ctrl F10 shows you all the windows on all desktops.
Ctrl F8 zooms out for a bird's eye view of your desktops and you can configure more from you can just click around and open up the preferences and go crazy.
Look and feel menu back to that desktop desktop effects. Let's take one more look at this. All the cool comp is style effects that come natively in K-Win are found here.
Lots of cool and even useful effects are here. Having a dialog box dim, it's parent window is nice, having an in focus window blur.
The windows behind it is sometimes nice, fades and scales, translucency, etc. So anyway, you get the idea.
The bottom line is to look in KDE4's came in you for something called system settings and tinker around in there. All the important stuff is there and you can have fun.
Thank you for listening to Half the Public Radio. HDR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to CARO.nc for all of us to meet.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
