In this Ghacks article I am going to show you a few tips and tricks to help you get around some of the minor glitches associated with KDE 4.5. Hopefully you are one of the lucky users not experiencing problems. If, however, you are hopefully these tips will help you out.

Compositing crashes desktop

If you have an Intel-based graphics chipset you will find that anytime you enable compositing with KDE 4.5 your desktop is going to crash. This is because the Blur plugin does not yet support Intel chipsets. You can resolve this issue by simply disabling the Blur plugin. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click on Start > Computer > System Settings
2. Go to Workspace Appearance and Behavior >  Desktop Effects > All Effects
3. Uncheck Blur
4. Enable or start compositing

Now you shouldn’t have any issue with compositing crashing your desktop.

Image previews not showing up on desktop

Image previews are a handy feature that keep you from having to open up an image to see what it is (that is, if you don’t remember it by name). In 4.5 this feature seems to have gone missing. To fix this, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on the desktop and click on Folder View Settings
2. Navigate to the Location menu
3. Select Specify a Folder
4. Point the specified folder to /home/USERNAME/Desktop Where USERNAME is your actual username.

That’s it. NOTE: If your shortcuts no longer display their individual icons, you will have to also navigate to Display > Previews > More Previews and uncheck the Text files option.

Desktop seems a little sluggish

You might find your desktop a wee bit sluggish for your taste. This can easily be resolved by upping the speed of the desktop animations. This is done by:

1. Click Start > Computer > System Settings.
2. Workspace Appearance and Behavior >  Desktop Effects.
3. At the bottom of this page change the Animations speed from Normal to Fast.

That should speed things up a bit.

Show applications by Name

I’m not sure why the KDE developers decided to show applications by description instead of name in the menus. To me, this is a bit counter-intuitive. Fortunately, it’s very easy to change back to the standard view mode. To do this right-click the “K” (or Start) menu button and select Application Launcher Settings. In this new window check the box for Show Applications By Name. Click OK and this setting will immediately take affect.

Final thoughts

KDE 4.5 has come a long, long way from its humble beginnings. But even now little glitches are showing up. I hope these tips have helped you get around some of the problems you have found. If not, report the problems you are having an hopefully we can find a solution.