So how's KDE doing these days?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dinotrac Nov 20, 2010 2:45 PM EDT |
Reading this headline made me realize how distant a memory KDE has become for me.
After years of keeping my KDE desktop up-to-date with the latest and greatest, it's a funny feeling. So -- People use it and are happy? |
| tuxchick Nov 20, 2010 3:24 PM EDT |
Pfui. If you liked the earlier KDE4 incarnations, you'll probably like the latest ones. Me-- nah. Just more polish on all the stuff I didn't like before. |
| dinotrac Nov 20, 2010 5:54 PM EDT |
About what I figured. Finally getting the hang of XFCE. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 20, 2010 6:11 PM EDT |
I've been putting off the retirement of my Debian Squeeze main machine just because it's still running KDE3. But it's XFCE on both laptops now, latest kernels, Debian Unstable, etc. Oh well. I've noticed that the newer K3b correctly verifies DVDs, which the version on my main system doesn't do correctly, but that's hardly a life-and-death crisis. I just came up with a diff script to do the verifying for me. |
| tracyanne Nov 20, 2010 6:29 PM EDT |
What TC said. |
| hkwint Nov 20, 2010 8:28 PM EDT |
I use some KDE4 applications and are very happy with them. The ones I don't like, I don't use. Amarok is overkill in my opinion, I never understood the idea of anything 'beyond Winamp' anyway, so now I happily run qmmp (thanks to some LXerer who suggested it). Kontact - well, you only have to look at my last article to see how it is faring: Still not that stable, throws errors all the times - but you can't even rely on them to appear. Apart from that it's good enough to handle my mails, KMail is pretty stable, but don't run development version! Dependencies such as Virtuoso, Nepomuk etc. clog your computer though, and make it feel like Windows Vista. Maybe 200-line patch can solve some of this issues. Spamfiltering took ages though, and almost halted my computer, but that turned out to be a spamassassin-issue which can be prevented by one single switch (think it was -L) which is turned of by default. It doesn't lose my mail, I'm really fond of the filters, and the mail-part is pretty stable (if you forget contacts / akonadi back end and such). Konsole makes me pretty happy; especially after I found out you can drag other windows and 'change' them to a tab in an already running window. Has lots of nice features which I never use. Ktorrent is pretty good as well, it just does what it ought to do. Kate - I will steer clear from it the rest of this century, as I lost lots of work because it segfaults from time to time and sometimes suddenly - without warning - halt / quits without saving. I use Scite / vim now, and are very happy with it. Konqueror is blazingly fast compared to the KDE3 days, and IMHO nowadays is ready to use as your default browser, though it lacks add-ons. I used to play Freecell (an advanced non-MS version) using a Windows-executable via Wine, but thanks to KPat I don't need that anymore. Once, I tried KNotes, but it seems it loses my notes after closing. Probably because I don't use the KDE desktop, I'm not sure. Hence I ditched it and save my notes the old fashioned way. KDE desktop itself (Kwin?) takes ages to start and feels slow. Of course, when you're used to a light window-manager (I'm on WindowMaker), almost everything is slow. Tried KOffice2, but it's in the midst of a rebuilding. Like lots of other KDE projects too few devs, and as a result it doesn't feel ready. I hope one day it will replace OOo however. KSpread is much better than the old KOffice1 though, where you had to manually start recalculation after you changed a number. Also works quite well for importing MS-Office proprietary stuff, and works well with ODF as well. I kicked out XCalc as the same function is already in KRunner (if you start your command with the = sign). I don't use KRunner as an app launcher though, because yeganesh / dmenu at the moment seems to be a better option. I don't have the idea KRunner counts frequencies / calculates popularity of apps; while Yeganesh otoh. does. Yeganesh/dmenu do pull in a whole Haskell-ecosystem nonetheless, and some of it doesn't work (Haskell on Gentoo isn't that well-maintained). As I was once trying to write a few 3-line programs in Haskell, I didn't mind the extra cruft. That's about it I think, I don't know what else there would be. Nepomuk BTW is fun, I read at some website it does index your files, but cannot be used to actually search the resulting index though. So guess what, the result of clogging up your system can't even be put to good use ATM. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 20, 2010 8:28 PM EDT |
Oh, one additional datapoint: Since it's so easy to do with Debian, I have KDE4 installed on those laptops too. To use the applications I like, such as K3b and Konqueror. My daughter (7 going on 15) used KDE4 as her environment, playing games and such, after I updated her laptop to Unstable. After a couple of weeks, she came to me and said, "Daddy, I don't like KDE any more. What are you using?" "Xfce." "Can you set that up for me, please?" She's been happy with xfce ever since. It's also the dual-boot Win7 system, so that she can play Wizard 101 and Pixie Hollow well. And she also discovered that Astro Boy is on Hulu. Windows partition as a dedicated gaming machine. Who'd'a thunk it? |
| hkwint Nov 20, 2010 8:34 PM EDT |
Bob: Still no VirtualBox? |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 20, 2010 9:28 PM EDT |
VB had _tons_ of trouble with Wizard 101, I think it's to do with 3D graphics. Although it ran (sort of) on WINE, it was dreadfully slow. Pixie Hollow would run with VB, but speed issues plagued again. Eliminating the need for VB on her system also allowed me to compile 2.6.36 for it, since the VB driver won't compile with .36, but works just fine with .35. Hartman's advice, "You can't keep up with that rate of change. Get your driver into the mainline kernel", comes to mind. Almost like Microsoft is in cahoots with the game makers to make things as difficult as possible with us non-Win users. But then I watched Jessie Ventura's _Conspiracy Theory_ today, so my mind might be seeing what isn't there. |
| hkwint Nov 20, 2010 10:32 PM EDT |
IIRC I enabled 'experimental 3D acceleration' somewhere in 3.0.2 or 3.0.4, and from then AD Inventor ran pretty decent. I think I configured it to use OpenGL though. OK, sometimes a screwup - but such can be expected for experimental stuff. |
| jsusanka Nov 20, 2010 11:53 PM EDT |
been using the last few releases of fedora and kde. I like it the way it makes all the apps I use look the same whether gtk or anything else. I installed the I hate the cashew and keep my desktop clean and just use the taskbar at the bottom so I have a pretty clean desktop. I do like their netbook interface - it works pretty well. do agree with hkwint about it loading slow. but I don't do a lot of logging out and in so it isn't an issue with me. I think the latest kde versions are very usable and don't really have a problem with them. I actually prefer their 3d stuff to compiz but that is just me. it is pretty much my main desktop for now at least until they decide to change it again. i used 3.5 all the time too and would prefer that if it was still around but kde 4 is growing on me. |
| dinotrac Nov 21, 2010 9:48 AM EDT |
so my mind might be seeing what isn't there. Oh no! Simpering self-doubt is the first sign that they've gotten to you. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 21, 2010 11:19 AM EDT |
"Simpering"? D'oh! Oh, wait, that's "Simpsoning". |
| dinotrac Nov 21, 2010 12:14 PM EDT |
Think "coquettish". |
| hkwint Nov 21, 2010 1:09 PM EDT |
jsusanka: Think you're right, if you don't care about the electricity bill or you can "hibernate / suspend" it's not that much of an issue. Sadly, when I tried the desktop I hadn't hibernate working yet and bills are a concern for me, but I might try again. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 21, 2010 1:27 PM EDT |
> Think "coquettish". Can't do that without running into a mental wall of submissive French Maids. |
| Koriel Nov 21, 2010 7:11 PM EDT |
I love KDE but unfortunately all my machines are just too long in the tooth now and the one machine that i have that is good enough to run it is a windows only gaming rig so most of my machines run XFCE.
Soon as i make some money to upgrade them they will be back running KDE except for the server which has a pretty basic install of XFCE on it and will remain that way. The 2 desktops im most comfortable with are KDE and XFCE, for some reason i have never been able to like Gnome and cant understand its appeal but desktops are a very subjective thing so this is not a dig at Gnome or anything. |
| dinotrac Nov 21, 2010 9:07 PM EDT |
Koriel - I'm with you. I have never understood the appeal of Gnome, but, what the hey -- different strokes for different folks. I'm just greatful that XFCE is there for me to turn to after the KDE team decided they didn't want users like me any more. We had a ten year run, and that's pretty good in this business. |
| gus3 Nov 21, 2010 10:07 PM EDT |
@dino, Gnome was completely Free before KDE was Free. If not for the QPL mucking things up, I doubt Miguel and Federico would have ever started Gnome. |
| dinotrac Nov 22, 2010 12:27 AM EDT |
gus3 - KDE was great (and free) before Gnome amounted to a toeprint. The issue with KDE was not freedom. No less an authority than the FPF agreed that the QPL was a free license. The issue was an alleged incompatibility between the QPL and the GPL. |
| gus3 Nov 22, 2010 12:56 AM EDT |
History here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)#Licensing |
| dinotrac Nov 22, 2010 8:08 AM EDT |
Oops! Typo -- FSF. |
| hkwint Nov 22, 2010 1:30 PM EDT |
Quoting:If not for the QPL mucking things up, I doubt Miguel and Federico would have ever started Gnome. And now Mono is mucking things up, ahem. |
| gus3 Nov 22, 2010 1:34 PM EDT |
But Mono is optional. You can still have a functional desktop without it. It's within my Linux experience, that KDE wasn't possible without the QPL. |
| dinotrac Nov 22, 2010 1:42 PM EDT |
Possible? I think so, given that KDE develpment predated the QPL by about 3 years. |
| hkwint Nov 22, 2010 2:02 PM EDT |
gus3: May agree on that. Still funny though, I'm pretty sure RMS is not condoning most of what Miguel is saying (OOXML, .NET support) nowadays. If QPL was a reason to advise people to use Gnome instead and start the Gnome project in first place, I think RMS is not very happy. I'm curious which of the two he would 'advise' from a FSF-viewpoint nowadays. |
| gus3 Nov 22, 2010 4:06 PM EDT |
@dino, the predecessor to the QPL was the FreeQt license, which was not free according to both the FSF and the OSI. Distributing modified versions was forbidden. According to WP, the QPL was first used in 1999, so that was after I started using Linux full-time. Too many TLA's! And there's even a TLA in there. Gaah! @hans, RMS wo... crap, yet another TLA... anyway, would probably say, "Just use GNewSense and then it won't be a worry." |
| dinotrac Nov 22, 2010 5:37 PM EDT |
@gus3: Yup. The FreeQt license was not FSF-apporved and free by their definition, but that didn't stop the KDE developers. The QPL was free, but the Debian folks raised boy cries wolf (my POV, others **ahem** differ) objection. |
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