Time to Cut Their Losses?

Beginner

Saturday, December 8th 2007, 6:14pm

I just did a SVN update and recompile of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase, extragear/base, extragear/plasma, kdeadmin and kdeutils. I complied everything as "release."

The bottom line is that, given a choice of 3,58 and 4.0, I would overwhelmingly prefer 3.58. I don't know if Cmake is to blame or a change in philosophy (I suspect the latter). The shame is that KDE abandoned incremental improvement and development. KDE4 seems comparatively "dumbed down."

A. The menus are awful. If I want XP, I'll install it.

B. The panel is huge, useless and lacks any configuration options.

C. The desktop is still clunky and terribly limited. It still does not offer the ability to do simple things like icon management.

D. Widgets are more manageable in 3.58 using Superkaramba.

Overall, usability and flexibility - what used to be core values of KDE - have been squandered. Sure, it has the potential to be prettier but that wears off rather quickly.

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marcie

Beginner

Posts: 2

2

Sunday, December 9th 2007, 2:41am

RE: Time to Cut Their Losses?

>The bottom line is that, given a choice of 3,58 and 4.0, I would overwhelmingly prefer 3.58. I don't know if Cmake is to blame or a change in philosophy (I suspect the latter). The shame is that KDE abandoned incremental improvement and development. KDE4 seems comparatively "dumbed down."

>B. The panel is huge, useless and lacks any configuration options.

>C. The desktop is still clunky and terribly limited. It still does not offer the ability to do simple things like icon management.

My worst nightmare.

What I like about linux is that I can set it up the way I want to.

I happen to like having three panels.I'm left handed and I want to be able to set KDE up for this!And I like having a choice of icons.

I agree with you, if i wanted to run Windows I would run Windows. I don't want to!

Marcie

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StringCheesian

Beginner

Posts: 16

3

Friday, December 14th 2007, 8:36am

According to blogs by KDE4 developers at http://planetkde.org/, most of that is because it's not finished yet. The panel will be configurable. Even the current look/feel isn't necessarily final. So there's still hope you might like 4.0.0.

This is what they get for calling it a "release candidate" when it's really more of a beta. Everybody will think it represents how the final 4.0.0 is going to be. Poor project planning/management.

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Trizt

Beginner

Posts: 2

Occupation: Developer/Programmer

4

Saturday, December 15th 2007, 7:05pm

I tested the 3.97.1, it's not high on my list of desktops I wish to use. They copied things from OSX and VISTA and I have to agree with other posters that those hasn't been the best choices. The new VISTA-menu is IMHO quite user-unfriendly and the OSX configuration center is difficult to navigate in, I got all to many places a scroller inside a scrolled window, and I still had it maximized, this kind of trouble I didn't have with the old configuration center.
On top it felt like developers had dummified the user in the same way as Gnome2 devels has bee done all the time.

I have just uninstalled the KDE4 and upgrading to KDE 3.5.8 at the moment. I hope things become more KDEish when they release 4.2.

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