KDE 4
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| shyster Jul 25, 2009 11:24 AM EDT |
Ignorant, yes...lazy, no. I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn a new gui when the old one works fine. |
| softwarejanitor Jul 25, 2009 12:16 PM EDT |
Link to full story broken? |
| Scott_Ruecker Jul 25, 2009 2:28 PM EDT |
Works for me, still not working for you? |
| ComputerBob Jul 25, 2009 3:38 PM EDT |
Anyone who spends any time in support forums, quickly learns that there are plenty of reasons to hate KDE4 besides the few that the author chose to address. That makes me think that the author is the one displaying ignorance. |
| caitlyn Jul 25, 2009 4:31 PM EDT |
I'd also point out that personal preference is a perfectly valid reason for loving, liking, disliking or hating a given desktop environment. Just because my personal preference may be different from the author's doesn't make me or anyone else ignorant. FWIW. I don't hate KDE 4. I don't particularly like KDE and generally don't use it because it's just too bloated and resource hungry for my taste. That was true of KDE 3 and is more true of KDE 4. |
| Bob_Robertson Jul 25, 2009 6:08 PM EDT |
I like KDE3, but KDE4 is (in comparison) still disfunctional enough to be annoying rather than helpful. |
| softwarejanitor Jul 25, 2009 6:26 PM EDT |
@Scott_Ruecker It is working now. Earlier it was bringing up a download dialog and the downloaded code was raw PHP. Happened with both Firefox and Konqueror. |
| softwarejanitor Jul 25, 2009 6:31 PM EDT |
That was a useful article... I didn't exactly hate KDE 4.x, but there were some things about it that I found annoying... The article gave a couple of suggestions on how to tweak things more to my liking. |
| dinotrac Jul 25, 2009 8:02 PM EDT |
I wonder if the ship has sailed on KDE 4? I wonder if I'd give it a whirl at this point (using XFCE and GNOME at the moment) even if it were wonderfulness? I still feel a sense of betrayal and mistrust wrt KDE developers. |
| caitlyn Jul 25, 2009 8:17 PM EDT |
Quoting:I still feel a sense of betrayal and mistrust wrt KDE developers. I've felt that way about the GNOME developers for a long time. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 25, 2009 8:27 PM EDT |
I might actually try out KDE4. One of the KDE folk told me during the ODF plugfest that one of my biggest pain points has finally been solved. They have finally done away with code generation for Qt UIs and started loading XML files like Glade does on Gnome. |
| Bob_Robertson Jul 25, 2009 9:00 PM EDT |
I built up a server with Debian Sid, which has KDE4, and have found it usable if not as smooth and seamless as KDE3. If my memory serves, the transition from KDE2 to 3 was no where near as contentious as 3 to 4, but then 4 is being hailed as a re-write, not just an upgrade. |
| softwarejanitor Jul 25, 2009 9:04 PM EDT |
@Sander_Marechal Do you have any more details on that? I've always liked Glade even though I have generally preferred KDE. I have found myself using Gnome more since KDE4 came out, but now that I know how to fix some of the things about KDE4 that annoyed me I may be back to spending most if not all of my time in KDE again. |
| tracyanne Jul 25, 2009 9:31 PM EDT |
I keep trying KDE4, but it still has that clunky feel to it. Whereas my transition from KDE3 to GNOME was relatively without issue, and I'm discovering that it's actually quite easy to configure the way I want. |
| krisum Jul 26, 2009 3:42 AM EDT |
Quoting: If my memory serves, the transition from KDE2 to 3 was no where near as contentious as 3 to 4If we go back further, then KDE1 to 2 was probably even more contentious. But then there were not as many users as now, so the dissatisfaction was not as loud. |
| setec_astronomy Jul 26, 2009 6:45 AM EDT |
@krisum The migration from KDE 1.x to 2.x is indeed a better yardstick to compare the 3.x -> 4.x transition with, because the changes between 2.x -> 3.x were mostly concerned with porting KDE to the new Qt3 version, therefore KDE 3.5.10 can be seen as the end product of polish (and feature creept) from a period of seven years ( 10/2000 - 10/2007 for 3.5.8, the last "real" KDE 3.x release prior to the KDE 4.0 kickoff). We can argue until the cows come home whether the KDE devs made a failure when they decided to change a lot of the inner workings of the deskto while they were at porting to Qt4. Especially since it will - unfortunately - take more time than anticipated until we see more of the "pillars" of KDE4 working as expected (sonet, decibel, akonadi and zui/activities being the main areas that currently underdeliver, imho). Personally, I think it would have been suicidal to wait one or two more years for KDE4 to mature further before freezing the API (remember KDE4 is guaranteed to be binary compatilbe troughout the whole 4 series). Enlightenment, while technically brilliant and very capable of running on lower end hardware, serves as a warning example how mindshare, developers and community participation detoriates when releases stagnate. My speculation would be that KDE with its "plattform" nature (cf the large number of applications in extragear/playground, not even to mention koffice, amarok and k3b) would have suffered even more from a longer delay. And while I still don't buy the "distros were tricked into shipping KDE4" excuse (frankly, whatever happened to cautious testing software?) and wonder what blogs and newsfeeds people were reading prior to this ill-fated release announcement (the ones I was reading used the "will eat your children" line quite frequently), a lot of errors and misconceptions in the process of releasing software and handling community reactions were exposed. This is, ultimately, a good thing. At least if KDE and other projects can learn from this episode. It seems that the 2.0 releases of amarok and koffice - while being of a similar nature to KDE 4.0 - were received better, although I'm not sure if this is due to the raised awareness of end users about what to expect of "plattform releases" or because the communication process has indeed improved. Furthermore, it should be noted that developers acting defensive in the light of harsh (and probably not 100% informed) critisism (sometimes beyond what is reasonable and logically sound) is not a trait that is unique to KDE developers, as we have learned during the discussions of the last weeks. I was an avid GNOME user up until the transition from 1.4 to 2.0. And let me get this of my chest, it was not peachy using GNOME during those days. Prior to 2.0, there were approximately 10 Million user settings, there was no central place to manage the system, and it seems in retrospekt to have been much more common to use GNOME with different windowmanagers back then, because every distrobution I tried had different window manager settings, etc. But I was a loyal user (switched away from KDE due to the Qt license controversy) and had invested a lot of time and spit to figure out a set of configurations that would fit my workflow. A lot of people will tell you that the number of regressions from GNOME 1.4 to 2.0 was far lower than the comparable number for KDE 3.x to 4.x. And they would be right, of course, although I would like to add that my gut feeling is that the regressions : features ratio for both transitions might be of comparable magnitude. People (like me) were fed up, that the fruits of their years of fiddling with settings and configurations were more or less lost, because GNOME 2.0 radically departed from previous versions. People (I hope I was not among them although I symptised with their feelings) were screaming bloody murder because suddenly the file manager defaulted (and IIRC had not exposed option to rectify this) to spatial mode, against the wishes of a large segment of the userbase. Galeon was axed and replaced by Epiphany, an application that as of 2009 still has no way to limit the lifetime of cookies to one session from its configuration menu (2.26.3). GNOME was actually forked (goneme), because a lot of folks were feeling treated badly by the GNOME devs, and you could earn a lot of cheap laughters in forums like osnews.com using the "too many options confuses the users" meme to ridicule GNOME 2.0 design decisions for years to come. (It is either testament to the size of the KDE code base, the maturity of the alternatives or the experience with attempts like goneme that no actual fork ever occured, despite the loud demands from the sidelines for such a project). Fast forward to 2008 and suddenly GNOME is accepted even by dye-in-the-wool KDE 3.x users to be an acceptable alternative to using something (admitedly) half cooked like KDE 4.x . It seems the years of polishing and following their philosophy have paid off. PS.: I switched from GNOME 2.6 to XFCE and last year from XFCE to KDE 4.1. EDIT: s/XKCD/XFCE -> muscle memory is a fun thing :-) |
| dinotrac Jul 26, 2009 8:40 AM EDT |
Krisum - Fewer users and less reliance. To quote a comic book hero: "With great power comes great responsibility." KDE4 devlopers did not take their responsibility seriously. |
| chalbersma Jul 26, 2009 1:35 PM EDT |
KDE4 GNOME whatever! Real men use fluxbox! :) |
| jacog Jul 26, 2009 1:39 PM EDT |
and real women? |
| chalbersma Jul 26, 2009 1:40 PM EDT |
openbox? or maybe twm... |
| TxtEdMacs Jul 26, 2009 1:43 PM EDT |
chalbersma, That is a hard argument to rebut. So that makes me a Faux-Man, but I refuse to wear either a cape or a spray on costume. [No that I wouldn't look good it either or both.] Are the masks necessary? Actually, in my case, that might help. YBT |
| chalbersma Jul 26, 2009 2:00 PM EDT |
lols A Faux-Faux Man. Interesting. |
| hkwint Jul 26, 2009 2:45 PM EDT |
Quoting:Real men use fluxbox! Well, there's a point in that. I was happily using WindowMaker with lots of KDE-apps, but wmaker is not maintained anymore and a lot of methods are quite 'clumsy' and my environment lacks any integration. That means to reach a user-friendly desktop you have to do a lot of 'desktop-plumbing' yourself. Some issues seem almost unsolvable. Because all the good things I heard / saw about KDE4 (before it was released actually) I thought I might try it, to finally have a desktop that works out of the box. Indeed, it worked, and I was quite happy with it - but it was sóóoo slow (and I was unable to assign shortcuts to applications) I went back to WindowMaker. It took me over 40 seconds to start Amarok, for example. To just start KDE from the CLI/Console (I log in on the console) also took about a minute; windowmaker about two seconds. The problem is: I've fiddled with hibernation before, about a year ago was the last time I did, but I can't get it to work. Because of environment concerns I always power down, meaning 40 sec boot time till I can login, then 1 minute 'startkde' and after that 40 sec until Amarok / Konqueror booted is quite an issue for me. Sure, I compiled the thing myself so maybe that's why it's slow, but it was prelinked though. As long as KDE is this slow, it's just too big a PITA to me to use it. I use lots of KDE4-apps though. I understood KDE3 was 'bigger' when counting lines / bytes of code than KDE4, so I wonder if anyone can tell me if it's faster / slower than KDE4? Anyway, when you say "real men use lightweight environment X" there are arguments to do so. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 27, 2009 6:40 AM EDT |
Quoting:@Sander_Marechal Do you have any more details on that? Sure. See Run-time form processing for Qt/KDE: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/designer-using-a-component.html... |
| softwarejanitor Jul 27, 2009 11:47 AM EDT |
@Sander_Marechal Thanks, that is very interesting. |
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