Glad to see you got it all going.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dinotrac Jan 26, 2011 9:47 AM EDT |
So... KDE4 is a good desktop for people with the time and patience to overcome the disdain the KDE4 folks hold for them. All is not lost. Still not planning to switch back. |
| tuxchick Jan 26, 2011 11:25 AM EDT |
Dolphin's pretty nice, my main gripe is the default is so dumbed-down you have to do a lot of tweaks to make it useful. What is it with devs and their aversion to useful information like full file paths and 'editable location bars'? Open/edit file as root? Open in embedded viewer? Real delete instead of trash? It's Windows infecting Linux is what it is. The auto-resizing icons in the Places view are annoying. But overall Dolphin has grown up and is pretty nice. I use Thunar because it doesn't drag half of KDE4 along with it in other graphical environments. I could even live with the increased glob of dependencies if they didn't slow my system to a crawl and bog down over SSH tunnels. Sorry gang, if I want useless lard I'll run winderz. |
| Bob_Robertson Jan 26, 2011 12:18 PM EDT |
> Sorry gang, if I want useless lard I'll run winderz. Nothing to be sorry about, TC. That particular nuance is why most people stick to Linux rather than Borg. |
| gus3 Jan 26, 2011 1:31 PM EDT |
I asked my mother a couple days ago, if she gets the idea of switching back. She said that, when the fleeting thought passes through her mind, all she has to do is think of the certain BSOD she'd get on the first day, probably within the first hour. That's enough to cure her of the notion. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 26, 2011 4:22 PM EDT |
Quoting:I use Thunar because it doesn't drag half of KDE4 along with it in other graphical environments. I'm very fond of Thunar. Now that I'm using GNOME, I tweaked Nautilus so it looked more like the Thunar as it defaults in Fedora, meaning I added the 'side pane.' Debian is at least evolving: The default in Nautilus is no longer to open a new window every time you click on a directory, which leaves dozens of open windows littering the desktop. My Xfce stopper was Gigolo. It just wouldn't work for http://FTP. I believe that Xfce 4.8 allows use of networked folders in Thunar, solving that problem. |
| skelband Jan 26, 2011 5:10 PM EDT |
@tuxchick - I hear yer Crikey, I still have need to install XP in VMs these days and it is almost automatic the pallaver I have to go through to get a working system: - restore "classic menus" - don't hide file extension - don't hide system files - show full path in status bar - disable "personal" "everytime is different" menus - disable hiding of toolbar icons - disable grouping of tasks Holy cow: let's not see Gnome going down that road :( |
| hkwint Jan 26, 2011 5:32 PM EDT |
And don't forget sending the dog of and trying to regain the old search-menu where you can use *.* etc, because the 'newer' search companion (or what's it called) is really annoying. Yeah, I'm currentnly working with XP whole day again! |
| jdixon Jan 26, 2011 5:53 PM EDT |
> ...because the 'newer' search companion (or what's it called) is really annoying. ... You can say that again. |
| Ridcully Jan 26, 2011 5:58 PM EDT |
Thanks everybody.....one always has a funny feeling in the pit of the stomach before an article hits the web which has the general trend of, "Do I put on my best armour, or go out and enjoy the comments ?" There's one more thing I'd like to add which really annoyed me when I saw it and realised what the KDE4 team had done and I didn't give full vent to this annoyance in the text. It's not surprising that it took me so long to get the tree display down the left hand side. When you are selecting which panel you want to display, the names are Places, Information, Folders and Terminal. If you select "Folders" you get the tree display ~ but why in heaven's name would you select "Folders" when the main display of Dolphin already has by default, a display of folders ? This is a real error in terminology and the option should have been labelled "Tree".....or similar. And indeed I agree with the comments: One should NOT have to fight to get Dolphin into a mode where it is able to be used efficiently, it should be there by default. I showed the process to my Linux friend 40km up the road a couple of days ago and his instant remarks are pretty apt. He suggested that he could see only one reason for what the KDE4 team has done with the default view of Dolphin: "Make it so that it seems to be very new, swinging and dancing and therefore does not resemble Konqueror". Sure, from now on, getting Dolphin into a useful mode will be a matter of a minute or two in a new installation ~ the point I make to any KDE4 listening in to this thread is: I shouldn't have to do that, it should be the default display. Moreover, in its default format, I find Dolphin almost useless for my purposes, but in the "Konqueror format", Dolphin works very nicely. |
| tracyanne Jan 26, 2011 6:00 PM EDT |
Even yhough you live "just down the road", I never knew what you look like..... you look just like yourself. |
| ComputerBob Jan 26, 2011 6:18 PM EDT |
Quoting:Even yhough you live "just down the road", I never knew what you look like..... you look just like yourself. I was thinking the same thing -- in fact, you look more like you than anyone else I've ever seen. |
| Ridcully Jan 26, 2011 6:29 PM EDT |
Tracyanne and ComputerBob.......thanks......LOL :-) I look at that face every morning while shaving and eventually I too have to accept that it is me. I figured it was nicer if you could see the crusty old curmudgeon who was writing this lot so you could either: print and use for dart board centre; or ..... decide his white haired venerable appearance stopped you from hurling an extra tomato. "Just down the road" is a matter of a few 100 km however......which is a pity. |
| Koriel Jan 27, 2011 4:28 PM EDT |
Nice article, Turning Dolphin into Konqueror 3.5 mode is pretty much the first thing i do on a KDE4 installation. I do like split mode though as i was hand reared on the DOS XTreeGold filemanager which i loved and i still dont think that app has ever been bettered it was a pleasure to use although Krusader comes close in terms of functionality. I'll admit it took me about an afternoon to figure out how to convert it when i first started using KDE4 and why they ship dolphin in the configuration they currently use i have no idea, as just about everyone i know agrees it is practically useless for file management in that configuration. |
| tracyanne Jan 27, 2011 5:03 PM EDT |
I have to admit that after reading this http://dot.kde.org/2011/01/26/kde-puts-you-control-new-works... for the first time in years I actually felt a rather excited about KDE. |
| Ridcully Jan 27, 2011 5:15 PM EDT |
For Tracyanne.....isn't it odd how the same thing hits people in different ways ? And that's not wrong, it's just how things should happen. As you will see from my post on that KDE topic, I liked part of it, and felt completely swamped by others. I do think however, that there is a definite move to re-label what is currently KDE4. "Plasma" sounds so much "avant-garde" and cutting edge when compared with dull old KDE, especially if Trinity KDE takes off which it seems to be doing. And that could be the underlying reason ? |
| caitlyn Jan 27, 2011 5:19 PM EDT |
I am part of what appears to be a minority that doesn't mind KDE4 when running on a machine with adequate horsepower which is unlikely to be pushed to the max. Seriously, it does work and looks pretty. It does also require lots of tweaking. It may be the easiest desktop for people coming from a recent vintage of Windows. Want to see KDE done as close to right as a distro has managed? Want to see a really nice wizard that really is configuration for dummies? Look at Pardus 2011. |
| Ridcully Jan 27, 2011 5:46 PM EDT |
In which case, Caitlyn, I am currently part of that "doesn't mind" minority as well, although for me it's more like "very contented to quite happy". KDE4.4.4 is running like a well oiled swiss watch on my laptop (my principal computer) and it is **extremely** stable in my experience, fast enough for my purposes and I like it a lot, now that I have it running the way that *I* want it to run. As I have said in other posts, as long as I can reduce KDE4/Plasma to the KDE3.5 mode I want, I will be happy with it, but given the complexity that is now being put into KDE4, I am unsure of that.....which is why Xfce lurks on my horizon and I will definitely trial that DE later this year. |
| caitlyn Jan 28, 2011 6:18 PM EDT |
I'm playing with Pardus 2011 on my one and a half year old HP netbook. Adequate horsepower really means anything not terribly old nowadays. It runs perfectly well and I have no problems making KDE sing and dance and behave the way I want it to. I still prefer Xfce as my primary desktop but for a newcomer to Linux or for anyone who wants eye candy KDE does a really nice job. |
| hkwint Jan 30, 2011 12:07 PM EDT |
Quoting:Turning Dolphin into Konqueror 3.5 mode is pretty much the first thing i do on a KDE4 installation. Finally, this marks the spot where Linux is eventually on par with Windows! I mean, what do you do as soon as you start using your new Windows XP? Indeed, make it look like Windows98! Put back the start menu to classic, send away the green Teletubbie-hill, have sharp edges again instead of the rounded edges of the Windows, try to fix the search menu, re-enable displaying extensions, show hidden and system files and so on. A long list. And now, finally people are treating Linux as if it were Windows, starting to use KDE4 for the first time and then trying to make it look like KDE3! I think Linux came a long way. I never touched a Mac, but from what I can say, people at Ubuntu are doing their best to make their OS look / behave more and more like MacOSX, including the purple background. So eventually, we don't even need XP desktop environment anymore on Linux, because we have a native version of Windows called KDE! I think for those running Windows and wanting to try Linux, it's great. Potentially, that number is larger than the current number of people running Linux, so if it's the largest target audience, I understand why KDE is aiming at that larger audience, and less at their 'smaller-number' legacy-users. Which means the legacy users will have to go and use some 'legacy'-thingie. Last thing I heard is, KDE-legacy is now called 'Trinity', and "4" is aimed at one billion Windows users, but I'm still not sure if I understood it correctly? BTW Apple is also doing a nice job of mimicking Windows, as the first iPod I ever (accidentally) touched at AMS/Airport got stuck every time I tried to click with my finger, and went back to the start screen. Maybe it didn't like my finger prints, I'm not sure exactly how these gadgets work. |
| vainrveenr Jan 30, 2011 10:46 PM EDT |
Quoting:So eventually, we don't even need XP desktop environment anymore on Linux, because we have a native version of Windows called KDE! As far as the "target audience(s)" for KDE, also see the related back-and-forth comments at LXer thread 'Well said Carla....why, why, will not the KDE4 team listen ?' found at http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/31457/ |
| Ridcully Jan 30, 2011 11:53 PM EDT |
@Hkwint.......dear heavens, I absolutely, definitely, completely, conclusively, indubitably, certainly, postively did NOT think of anything in the way you are describing. :-) Not even the slightest idea of a Windows comparison entered my mind.....promise !!! All I considered was that KDE3.5 was simple, easy to use, relatively quick, intuitive and an all-round delight as a desktop manager and environment. I never use the KDE4 "pretty effects", I find them useless. I strongly prefer a simple text launch menu......and I insist on using a file manager that behaves like KDE3.5 Konqueror......so I fixed the cushions on the KDE4 lounge suite the way *I* like them arranged. I've never seriously used WinXP, so I have absolutely NO idea on what people did to make it work like Win98SE.....and curiously, I really did love Win98SE........of all the Microsoft releases, that version still seems like a winner to me. Fast, simple and dead easy to use. But I do think your comparison of KDE4 with Windows is not as far fetched as some might think......"Complexity thy name is Windows"......and in my opinion, KDE4 is making a darn good try at taking over the winning spot. |
| hkwint Jan 31, 2011 7:41 AM EDT |
Well, recently I had to refurnish a new Windows XP desktop to make it usable for me, and it reminded me of what you wrote about your 'adventures' with molding KDE4 back into something which resembles 3. I have to admit, in XP I used the text-launch menu too, to launch cmd.exe, probably one time the registry editor and I use it to start calc.exe, the Windows calculator. I don't like all the clicking. And when I needed to have some work done which Excel obviously couldn't handle (reading 600 non-opened files consecutively), I resided to a DOS batch script with 'findstr' (the Windows-grep wannabe) and gawk.exe/sed.exe, which I couldn't live without. Tried some VB, but my VB-fu was simply not up to the task, so I handled the problem by using streaming text processing techniques probably invented in the 80's. Even if much moderner techniques such as Power Shell and VBA were available. Thing is, you tend to solve problems with the techniques / methods you've probably always used, even while better more efficient solutions might be around the corner. Nonetheless, believe it or not, most '98 users like me after a few years became accustomed to XP and then they didn't want to switch back anymore, even while in the beginning days of XP they longed for '98. The same must have been true for the KDE2 -> KDE3 switch, though I was not using Linux back then. |
| gus3 Jan 31, 2011 12:53 PM EDT |
Quoting:I don't like all the clicking.Interesting, now that I think about it... because that's what typing is. Mouse-clicking is like typing with just your left thumb (or your right thumb, if you're a south-paw). Aim, press, aim, press, woops, undo that press, aim, press. Every action is sequential, rather than one digit pressing while two other digits are already aiming for their keys to press, the way most typists type. I wonder if the CMU CHI group has anything to say about that? |
| dinotrac Jan 31, 2011 1:24 PM EDT |
@gus3 - Physiologically, it isn't. Much more damaging, much more likely to lead to repetitive stress syndrome than typing properly. |
| ComputerBob Jan 31, 2011 1:48 PM EDT |
Quoting:Mouse-clicking is like typing with just your left thumb (or your right thumb, if you're a south-paw).That sounds like a really awkward way to mouse-click. I prefer to use my index and middle fingers to left- and right-click. ;) |
| gus3 Jan 31, 2011 5:42 PM EDT |
Since none of my pointing devices have middle buttons, my middle finger tends to get used for other methods of input to the computer. Sadly, such input has always been rejected so far. |
| dinotrac Jan 31, 2011 5:48 PM EDT |
@gus3 -- Sounds like a job for Kinect hackers. |
| gus3 Jan 31, 2011 6:39 PM EDT |
Bringing a new meaning to the term "flip off the system". |
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