I have recently been posting little blurbs about centOS and how nice it is to be using centOS and kde3 via my identi and twitter and got some comments back about why I don’t use kde4 or like kde4. Well needless to say I cannot fit all my opinions into 140 characters so here are my reasons why kde4 is not the desktop it was or should be.
#1 Plasma
This is a big one, plasma has done nothing for me but cause crashes, at least twice a day, or when adding a widget or trying to configure a widget or for no reason at all. So there is a big WTF! right there. To me plasma is nothing more than SuperKaramba on steroids accept that SuperK actually worked and was pretty damn stable. I applaud all the “innovative” ideas and such that goes along with plasma but there should be an option to turn it off, and go back to just a regular panel like kicker, with desktop icons, although I don’t use desktop icons but alot of people do just google “kde4 no desktop icons” and see that backlash from this idea. For me plasma widgets take up too much space and provide no added functionality that I need or want, its just eye candy nothing more. So give the user the option to turn it off.
#2 Unfinished
This has become the new trend and kde4 started it. With the release of 4.0 and the backlash that ensued all of sudden the statement was released that “oh this is a preview more of a developers release and is not feature complete, we just want to get it out there so people can test it” ok WTF #2! Hey thanks for this you have released something that is nowhere near comparable with what I have been using for years, brilliant! Let’s face it even the kde 4.2 series isn’t even close to having the features that kde3 has. To me the whole focus has been on fancy graphics and effects more than usability. Alot of apps have been left in the dust and either don’t work or barely work. Along with this Amarok which is got to be the most popular media player in linux which is very closely tied to kde has done the same thing. Completely borked over a awesome player to rewrite it all change the ui completely and it still lacks most of the features the 1.4 series did. They keep releasing new versions as well and all you have to do is go read the comments and see how people feel about what they have done to Amarok. Koffice has recently followed suit with this releasing koffice for kde4 but wait its not feature complete either, whooohoo more good news. So here we are into the kde 4.2 series and still lacking features and nowhere near a feature set that kde3 has.
Ok those are my top two that bug me the most but here are some other things that have irritated me about
kde4. Most of the apps that people have gotten used to over the years have not been ported over yet from kde3 to kde4. Now why is this ? k3b, konversation(in progress) and others have not made it to kde4 yet. So this just confuses the user coming from a kde3 environment. Now some distros still include these apps but they look so out of place. Quassel is a decent replacement for konversation but is pretty much overkill for the average user.
I could not get gpg signing with kmail working right on any of the distro’s I have used except for Fedora 10 and that was using the old qt3-pinentry yet, this was truly laughable.
Also what is up with Konqueror for web browsing, some sites just don’t work right at all on it anymore. What happened here. I have always like using konqueror as my web browser. It is much faster and more responsive compared to firefox any day of the week. Why can they not get this one right.
Following my konqueror train of thought. Making dolphin the default file manager, huge fail, dolphin has nothing on konqueror as far as file browsing is concerned. Dolphin should be delagated to a third party addon application if you want it not as default or even included in a default install. If your gonna include dolphin in konqueror together then you might as well throw in Krusader as well with a default install. Cmon konqueror can do it all there was and is no need to re-design the file manager. Now it is true you can now set konqueror as your default file manager but even it is lacking some of the features the old kde3 version had.
Kwrite, Kedit and Kate three happy text editors, lets simlify this right now get rid of kwrite and kedit, Kate should be default, why on earth would you need another one when kate can do it all. But instead kate was delagated to the SDK package instead of default, more billiance shown here.
Lets face KDE did not go back to their idea of simplicity and speed, their main focus is to make the prettiest desktop they can with the egregious use of desktop effects and plasma widgets all over the desktop. Its not about usability anymore because kde4 just isn’t usable, its shiny and sleek but nothing more. Once again they have decided to re-create the proverbial wheel instead of focusing on keeping kde at the top. To come from using kde3 for years to kde4 is a huge disappointment for users as they try to find all the happy options and features that were there to make them productive have now disappeared.
Now of course different distro’s package things up differently and who knows what patches or how much they are screwing up kde4 from the basic packages that are released from kde. So I am sure there should be some blame placed on the distro’s as well. One major issue is kde4 should not be the default in any distro yet. It should be set aside for now and only installed if the user wishes to install it, but if I were to recommend a distro for kde4 it would have to be Fedora or Mandriva both were pretty usable in my opinion.
Personally I think its time for kde3 users to join forces and take the kde3 branch and make their own port to Qt4, I think much like xfce is a very welcome addition to the gtk world a new Qt based desktop that is somewhat based on the kde3 version would be very widely appreciated and accepted by a wide variety of people. Not all of us want or need shiny and widgets and windows that explode when we close them.
And on a side note if your gonna develop applications with Qt4, just use Qt4 don’t build them specifically for kde4 that way those of us who don’t want to run kde4 can run your applications without having to install kde4 and its dependencies, thanks.
