Bruce Byfield's diagnosis is pretty accurate
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Ridcully Jun 14, 2010 4:39 AM EDT |
My impression is that Bruce's pretty careful comparison seems to be one of the best critiques of the two versions I have yet seen. Bruce calls it like it is and shows the advantages and disadvantages of both but for my purposes, KDE3.5's simplicity and speed far outweigh my need to have "pretty, updated, developer plasmoids" on the screen and KDE4 offers me no advantages in a desktop manager. If you want straight forward and reliable productivity, few problems, a known workspace that does everything you want at high speed and with excellent stability, then KDE3.5 is the version you want. On the other hand, if you want all the frills, bells and whistles and the pretty technology of 2009 that (according to Bruce) works but can have problems: "When these features work, they expand our thinking about the desktop. However, they require more overhead for the databases needed to run them. Moreover, when they break, they can break catastrophically, as many users -- including me -- have recently found when upgrading Akonadi, which in many distributions has been breaking such essential applications as Kmail, KAddressbook, and most of Kontact." Then obviously, KDE4 is your apple and go for it. Personally, I remain wholly convinced that what the KDE4 team is now pushing onto the users is what the developers want, not what the users wanted. It is now a developer's dream in complexity, but given the fact that KDE3.5 remains so widely used, do those users really want all of these KDE4 abilities, or are perhaps as much as 50% of them never even opened or started and were therefore a waste of time in their implementation in the code ? However, we've said all this before. Personally, I remain convinced that for all of my work I most definitely do not need KDE4's attributes and I remain firmly welded to KDE3.5 which I will continue to use as long as I can. Then it will be Gnome or something else that still retains simplicity. |
| JaseP Jun 14, 2010 9:11 AM EDT |
I agree, KDE4 turned me off so much that I switched to Gnome. Gnome was relatively featureless at the time compared to KDE,... but KDE4 changed the game so much that it really turned me off. Plus, there is the problem with font rendering on Intel graphics architecture that still persists to this day. KDE4 and a small handfull of other WMs have this problem, but Gnome doesn't. KDE4 just struck me as being a knoble experiment, but failed to be realized in the reality of everyday use. Gnome grew to become more like what KDE had offered, eventually, But now, what I use is a Gnome desktop, but primarily running Cairo-dock/Compiz as the REAL window manger(s). I have all the eye candy, which is actually productivity enhancing in the way that I use it. Plus, I have the stability that I knew under a KDE environment. |
| DrDubious Jun 14, 2010 1:18 PM EDT |
Just so that the thread here isn't a TOTAL KDE hate-fest: I'm running a full KDE 4.4 install (i.e. not a scaled down "netbook" version) on my EeePC 901 and have not noticed any particular performance problems nor font-rendering issues. KDE4 has some very nice applications associated with it (digikam, marble, and choqok come to mind. Gwenview is a nice graphics preview program, too. K3B also seems like the best program of its kind, though I haven't had much need for optical media authoring in a while...) To me, Gnome has a wierd "bondage and discipline" feel to it that I don't care for, and the "tangled mass of dependencies" is a bit off-putting. That said, I have to concur that KDE4 may be pushing a little TOO hard to be "visionary". On the other hand, at this point there's really only one feature left from KDE3.5 that I'm still really missing (proper useful metadata display when viewing file "properties" in the file manager. In 3.5, an Ogg Vorbis file would display things like encoding parameters and duration of the file, for example. In 4.4 it STILL only shows the minimally-useful basic filesystem info (file date, size, permissions). I still think a lot of KDE4's problem is that by KDE 3.5, pretty much all of the functionality people really cared about was implemented, so the developers were just getting bombarded with demands for eye-candy and the usual complaints that they're not being "innovative" enough ("just copying Windows" and so on that we often hear about various projects), so those were the focus of KDE4. I've been running KDE4 since the alpha 4.0 versions, and that would seem to explain the slow start with the focus on "shiny bubble icons" and not on basic functionality back then. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 14, 2010 2:16 PM EDT |
Quoting:To me, Gnome has a wierd "bondage and discipline" feel to it that I don't care for ... I don't have anything in particular to say about the quote above; I just wanted to repeat it ... |
| gus3 Jun 14, 2010 2:40 PM EDT |
There is a Bettie Page theme for GDM. No, I won't link to it. |
| azerthoth Jun 14, 2010 2:53 PM EDT |
Thats the best quote about Gnome I think I have ever heard. Personally I do not have any issues with KDE4.4.4, I havent experianced the crashes that seem to plague so many. So the question I am forced to ask, the complaints that abound about it's bugginess, how many of those stem from any specific distro? There is one popular distro I am aware of that when compared to others is undeniably the worst in class for KDE4 implementation. Is that distro that same that a majority of the complaints are based. |
| JaseP Jun 14, 2010 4:35 PM EDT |
Rhymes with "Smoobuntu?!?!" |
| DrDubious Jun 14, 2010 5:26 PM EDT |
I've wondered about the purported bugginess too - even in the early 4.0.x days my frustrations were nearly always a matter of functionality missing altogether rather than existing functionality breaking or crashing. Kubuntu does seem to have a pretty bad reputation (and I must admit, the one time I tried it, it DID seem astoundingly unstable, compared to Gentoo, Arch, and Fedora where I've tried it before.) I suppose the popularity of the *buntu brand name may inflate the apparent bugginess of KDE in general if Kubuntu is a problem. And for the record, if I HAD to choose between Gnome on Linux and either Mac OSX or Windows, I'd stick with Linux - I don't actually HATE Gnome. I'm just glad KDE is also a choice. |
| jezuch Jun 15, 2010 2:18 AM EDT |
Quoting:I've wondered about the purported bugginess too - even in the early 4.0.x days my frustrations were nearly always a matter of functionality missing altogether rather than existing functionality breaking or crashing. One thing that I watched with fascination is switching windows using a mouse wheel on the task bar. The behaviour changed with each version and every time it was weird in a different way. In KDE 4.4 it's *almost* back where it left off in KDE 3.x, but it goes in reverse... And the order changes when you switch virtual desktops. Truly fascinating. It's not a critical bug, of course, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. [Oh, and grouping back ungrouped stacks of windows on the task bar crashes plasma invariably since I first tried KDE4.] |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 15, 2010 4:50 PM EDT |
There's so much GNOME in Kubuntu (and Xubuntu) ... |
| j_roc Jun 18, 2010 12:13 AM EDT |
@DrDubious It's a good try but just the faintest whisper of KDE and the lxer regulars grab the pitchforks and come running. KDE4 has evolved so far that they don't really know why they do it anymore but once the herd starts running.... |
| tuxchick Jun 18, 2010 12:22 AM EDT |
LOL, "bondage and discipline". :D |
| hkwint Jun 18, 2010 7:26 AM EDT |
Probably depends on what distro you're running. I'm trying to make 'most of it' work on Gentoo. However, these DB problems always haunt me. Yesterday, I was installing Amarok, probably the 'most complex media player ever'. At least, it looked that way given what it was complaining about: My database not functioning. So, I went on the hunt, and the only thing I could find was deleting a settings folder. But I spent many time learning Amarok what songs I like and which not, and now I should delete all those DB-files? Most of my problems come from upgrading: It seems too little attention of the KDE-developers is spent on "enabling a smooth upgrade path". Kontact is still pissed at me because my DB has some assumed problems, Nepomuk can't connect with DBUS. Now Amarok 2.3.1 can't connect with the DB either. Apart from that, it always shows some weird characters as rectangles. Though I can't blame KDE only for this, probably has to do with the 'encoding mess' in Linux in general. And most of it is horribly slow. The last time I tried KWord to edit a txt file, it crashed, but not before (unwanted) saving everything in ODF format so I wasn't able to open it in VIM anymore. Recently, the lyrics in Amarok display in a garbled fashion. Nonetheless, given the number of developers they have, what they're making still is very impressive. Looking at the numbers of bugs and feature request processed... I understood several hundred people work on Eclipse, though only about eight work on KDevelop. Well, even though KDevelop isn't there yet, those eight make the Eclipse-devs look like they are nose-pickers. I guess the same is true for MS Office / OOo vs. KOffice. Taking the number of developers into account, I still think they fare pretty well. However, with less developers, it just takes more time. That's why KDevelop for KDE4 (and K3B too?) is still not ready, Kontact has only recently switched to Akonadi (resulting in bugs and angry people like me). Probably if they have had more developers and testers, they might still have supported 3.5 as well. But with limited resources, well, one has to make choices. And yes, there are also good things to metion: I was pretty impressed with the photo viewer in Konqueror I accidentally discovered, Konsole is stable as a rock and has some nice features (many of which I haven't discovered yet), and Kontact - apart from the issues mentioned - is pretty stable too. Once Konqueror uses webkit it will be better at competing against the mainstream browsers. But darn, it takes a lot of time before all of this works. While Amarok 2.3 crashed yesterday and I tried to fix the DB-bugs, I had a nightmare. I was dreaming about compiling the Gnome version of every KDE-part which didnt' work. Brrr, terrible. Then I woke up, reverted to Amarok 2.2 and while compiling 2.2 again, I started Audacious instead. |
| TxtEdMacs Jun 18, 2010 9:29 AM EDT |
Hans, [serious] About Konqueror using WebKit: didn't WebKit stem from the former originally? In the beginning it was supposed to be an Apple / KDE collaboration/team effort/partnership that the former nearly forked? I remember there were complaints by the KDE group, however, I thought those were essentially resolved. In essence, hasn't Konqueror always been based on the WebKit, albeit perhaps under a different name? [/serious] YBT |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!