KDE 4 sucks big time

The glory of evolution is that "progress" is in all directions, not just good directions.

Hopefully, the experience of KDE4 will provide further evidence of what people actually want to use, and the useless mutations like the new main menu will fade away.

Bob, now now, there is no accounting for taste. Remember that some people actually like Vista too.

*/humor*

I have high hopes that the 4.1 iteration will do away with a lot of the irritating problems of the 4.0x series.

I suspect that 4.0's often unpleasant and largely unconfigurable UI has more to do with the KDE team focussing on a getting a single lowest-common-denominator design to work adequately in order to get the 4.x series out and tested quickly rather than abandonment of the capabilities in 3.5.

At least, I hope so. I suppose we'll find out in the next month or so.

I knew you were joking azerthoth, :-) I inadvertently borked my Vista machine..for the THIRD TIME! recently and said "screw this" and installed PCLOS on it. And in the week and a half since it has done nothing but do EXACTLY what I have told it to do.

I swear to you that I did not even actually try to bork my Vista machine, but it happened anyway. I fixed it the first two times but after this third time I couldn't get it to do jack so I tried to restore if from the restore partition and guess what? It presented me with no less than 5 errors and would not re-install under any circumstance!

That's when I said a bunch of words that I cannot repeat here, but I can tell you that my vernacular tirade was of legendary proportions. So after I was done and had calmed down, I installed Linux over the top of the entire hard drive. Now I will have to actually try, in order to bork it now. What a gift!

When you cannot even re-install Vista on the hardware it came on in the first place? Take it from me, Vista sucks. Period.

Oh I was just agreeing with Bob. IMHO KDE4 is the Linux equivalent of Vista in all it's bloated useless glory. Thats not coming from a devout non KDE user either. The only other DE I despise as much as KDE4 is Gnome. KDE 3.5 on the other hand is number 2 in the top 3 of my most used.

> IMHO KDE4 is the Linux equivalent of Vista in all it's bloated useless glory.

That might make sense, if not for the fact that kde4 is less resource hungry than kde3

herz, sorry should have been clearer. For all it's bells and whistles and hype in the run up to it's release, KDE4, like Vista offers no clear benefit except reduced functionality to that of it's predecessor. As for less resource hungry that KDE3 ... I didn't call KDE4 bloated, I called Vista bloated.

yes azer KDE 4 is pure crap, I've just been playing with the KDE 4 Demo distribution I got with one of my Magazines, GNOME is preferable. The KDE people are going to have to do a lot of work with this, before it's a viable desktop.

For example, they have this thing that sits in the top rh corner that has this expand desktop, so you click on it and the background area becomes a quarter it's original size and site in the top LH quadrant, What's the point.

Wow, tough crowd. Doesn't everyone want a desktop that pulsates, throbs, oscillates, and behaves unpredictably according to where your cursor is positioned? Oh and it's fun when you find hotkeys by accident. Really, some people just don't know a good thing when they see it.

The thing is TC, KDE 4 is crap because it isn't release version material, it should never have been released as anything but Alpha. The Demo version I have been using is a 4.1 release, touted by the KDE devs as "wait until you see 4.1, it will have all the issues taken care of". They are their own worst enemies, making claims they are not delivering on.

I was being sarcastic :). I don't care for eye candy at the expense of getting things done. I've played with it a little bit, but not enough to form any opinion either way. So far all I can say is "it's different". I thought 4.0 was clearly labeled as not ready for prime time?

Quoting:I thought 4.0 was clearly labeled as not ready for prime time?

That's not what the hype says. Which means people are disappointed.

> That's not what the hype says. Which means people are disappointed.

There ya go, that makes a lot of sense. It could very well be that all the "disappointment" with KDE4 stems from mistaken expectations.

Someone at KDE (or GNOME or the rest of them) must realize that people tend to get comfortable with a particular style after a while. If the "desktop" changes radically and I cannot control that, I'm going to be upset.

I'm all for less resource hungry. Bells and whistles don't bother me if I can turn them off (or not enable them in the first place), and optimization of the things that are not in my face is a GoodThing(tm, reg us pat off) at any time.

KDE3 had a "theme" called "KDE Classic" which works for me. I fully expect that by the time KDE4 is fully fleshed out, there will be just such a theme still.

Which means that my expectations will be crush if there _isn't_. :^)

As a non-user of KDE, I have significant worries. A much older version of KDE my son placed on one of my Linux machines reminded me of Windows, hence, I could not dispatch it quickly enough. Now you are saying the recent version looks like Windows, great.

What am I going to do when the Gnome crowd goes too far in the MS direction? For example, some groups within Gnome have supported MS OOXML over ODF. Moreover, I have not seen them review their stance after the fast track "vote" that was so obviously corrupt. Then there are those that are questioning the dumbing down of Gnome for the "users'" sake, citing the latter as their reason for supporting KDE and complimenting its mature development direction. [These were comments on lwn.net on either a Gnome or KDE topic entry.]

Now, what about the flak Canonical caught for not including KDE 4.0 as the default for the new 8.04 version of the Kbuntu? From the posts I read, 4.0 was great just slightly rough around the edges. There seem to be unanimity of opinion here, but this conflicts with the assessments i have read elsewhere. Are those all those others fanbois posts? If so there were a lot more voices than here.

Unlike my usual posts, this one is serious, should I have prefaced it with a tag? I am a bit lost and I want to be able to opt out of Gnome despite my preference for its cleaner look if they follow Novel down the tubes.

Text,

I don't think we'll ever be without options. KDE and GNOME applications run just fine on XFCE or any other window manager, so if the KDE or GNOME "desktop" ever gets just too ugly, you can switch without losing functionality.

Heck, I've got at least a half-dozen "desktops" installed on my machine here, with super-minimalist WindowLab and TWM, to ancient OLWM, XFCE, KDE, Cromm knows what else.

TxtEdMacs, KDE 4.0 has more than just a few rough edges. It's a complete overhaul, starting with a mass migration from Qt3 to Qt4. Then there are wads of other changes I haven't even tried to keep up with, and there is no way it's ready for prime time. I doubt 4.1 will be either. I'm just waiting for the dust to settle and for a nice stable release to emerge.

I never thought KDE looked much like windoze, and features and functionality are light-years beyond anything poor old winduhs can do. Sure there are some similarities- how many variations can there be on program menu/systray/eye candy/iconsnthemes stuff? But it's gazillions more capable.

tuxchick, that was not me saying that there were only a few rough edges. It was the attackers demanding to know why KDE 4 was not the default on Kbuntu 8.04.

Below is a link I picked up off of lwn.net that shows some of the features of the upcoming KDE 4.1. The comments were interesting, because many included not liking the feature on 4.0 (or earlier) but saw value in the changes.

Other than the preponderance of green, it does not look that bad to me. However, I have no real experience with KDE, on my machine I might still hate it. Nonetheless, I would not reject it based solely upon its appearance as I did previously.

http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-4-progress-new-plasmoids-akon...

The best I can say about KDE4 is that it looks pretty.