KDE-Forum.org

I just upgraded my opensuse to version 11 and was excited to see the new KDE 4. My god, what a shock I got! Everyone else's comments here sum up my feeling too. It's a pile of crap. At first I felt put off by opensuse's ugly new green and grey 'hacker'/nvidia colour scheme, but then perked up when I saw the nice new graphical features of KDE 4, then became very annoyed and disappointed when I discovered KDE 4's nasty side.

My two biggest gripes are the gutted, windows-like taskbar and the insane idea of restricting the desktop to only being useful for holding icons as it doesn't allow any filesystem actions (either through keys or through context menu). Whoever designed that desktop should be lynched from the nearest tree. There's a good reason why point-and-click desktops haven't changed in 30 years, because they're most useful the way they are, and getting clever only spoils it. I never launch apps from desktop icons, I do it from pop out panels that I have arranged around the edges of my screen. I use the desktop purely as a temp storage and working place for files and projects that I'm working on recently. So I was devastated to see what they'd done with KDE 4. Adjusting to KDE 4 would require me to work in a completely different way. I feel like they must have replaced half their team with people who knew nothing about interface design and put the other half on drugs.

I second those comments about the crappy new KDE control panel. I looks even more casual and unprofessional that the Windows one. And where the hell are all the options gone? You can't be serious?

Also why have three quarters of the screensavers been thrown out, including my favourite one?

While I detest KDE 4 and shall never use it again it did very much like the transparency, shadows, opengl and that very nice feature of putting your mouse in the corner to see a list of your windows which you can then click on to select one - depending on your mood and working style that could even replace the taskbar, freeing up more screen space.

My advice to the KDE team would be to stick with 3.5 and add in these extra 4.0 graphical gimicks and polish, and abandon 4.0 completely. It's a disaster! Probably the worst software disaster I've seen. Fortunately the suse installer gives the option to have 3.5 instead - I hope they keep that option in future releases as well.

It's nice that the KDE team tried to have some imagination and I guess they felt the urge to create a 21st century interface, but what they've created looks like a specialised interface for a specific application, like a PDA etc., and is not suited to general purpose desktop computing. I think they spent to long staring at their iPhones! lol The KDE team need to get it through their head that for general computing on flat display panels the operating style of desktops will never change, even in 200 years time. Attempts to make things different never really get anywhere.

I really hope they get their act together and stop messing around like this. Please DO NOT remove any existing functionality that was in 3.5. 3.5 is a fantastic system, well designed with lots of configuration and flexibility. And when you add extra stuff please give us the option to disable it if we don't want it. Thanks.

Has anyone considered that Microsoft could secretly payoff individuals who are key leaders in the development of open software? Crazy? Perhaps. Yet, can it not be a possibility when suddenly, developers stop listening to users and talk of a fork happens?

Has anyone stopped to consider that this makes open software development look bad and could be used as an argument to stay with Microsoft?

Baring unreasonableness, users must be allowed to voice their opinions and developers have a greater responsibility to set their pride aside and calm the waters. Obviously, feeling have been hurt, developers have worked long and hard. Now, we must consider the big picture.

Open software is NOT in the clear yet. Many people have not even heard of it. Microsoft desperately wants to keep it that way. Open software is not the pet project of power users alone! If that were true, then we will never see most people using open software. We will never get over the restricted driver and troublesome hardware manufactures problems and we will be further restricted to non-standards; that kill real user ease, for decades to come.

We do need to simply; where new Windows converts can best FEEL comfortable. Yet at the same time, why not leave options for the power users to tweak to their hearts content. These are the new necessities. Why doesn't the new (pre) KDE 4.1 and the team address these; thoroughly?

Change must take place in order to get from where we are now, to much grater user ease. That is defined as TIME SAVING! Newbie or guru do not have the time to customize their systems and that's why it's best to hit the ground running (and even look good) even though personal preferences can be changed. Do you know how many people don't even change the background, ever?

Look, psychology observes that only about 25% of all people are technical. We have to speck to the other 75%! It's really that simple. We have got to stop pandering to us technical nerds alone. Why are we fighting this? It's not like you can't build Linux from scratch, run Gentoo or customize to your hearts content. I'm talking about building a distribution for the rest of us.

Now, we have an opportunity to build a total system bundle that beats the pants off anything Microsoft or Apple can come up with. While we must not leave ANY benefit behind (don't forget that), we need to push far into "better" than has ever been done. For this vision, I compliment the KDE team. yet we must manage change better.

People HATE change. I generally like change but I was shocked by KDE 4.1. I like much of it but it was a shocking change; that raised many questions. Where's the transition? Where's the "classic" choice? What's going to happen if I fall back to KDE 3.x? How long is it going to take, to stabilize it? The point is, we have to ease people into "better" and it better then BE better. Don't scare people like that!

If you remember one thing...manage the change.

Ok, I accept that most people are really not competent enough to be using a computer in the first place, and just want to use a word processor or spreadsheet etc. While I refuse to sacrifice the "power user" functionality in order to appease and attract these people, I do welcome any attempts to make it easier for these people to use linux. I agree with what the previous poster said. Maybe KDE needs to retain all "power user" functionality but doesn't necessarily show it to the user unless asked to do so - like in mozilla where typing in the url of "about:config" will give you a huge range of options that far exceeds what you can see in the preferences dialog. So maybe KDE can use an Age of Empires type approach whereby the user can select between a simple interface and a complex interface. Ok this means the dev people have to construct two GUIs but if that's what makes everyone happy then it's more than worth it - besides all the backend preferences code only needs to be written once and you just have two GUIs connecting to it, or maybe one GUI that is self-modifying like these dynamic ajax webpage forms you see now. Another option is to retain the complex interface as it is in 3.5 and provide a control panel wizard that at a click of a button takes you through the simpler most used preferences in a nice easy computers-for-dummies style. In other words, leave 3.5 as it is and throw in a big system utility that says "hey, if you're of average intellect of lower, please use me to configure your KDE desktop!" The user can ignore every other button or utility that they don't understand or are too afraid to use. They get to tweak their desktop within a limited Windows-like way, and us "power users" can carry on as normal and not miss anything we like...in fact to us is seems nothing has changed, we just don't install the dummies system utility.

When the dummies system utility is installed it shows in the KDE menu and also as a dialog at first login, much like the welcome dialog and KDE tips dialog on opensuse KDE.

It seems to me that you cannot make advanced users and novice users both happy at the same time with the same interface. Therefore one can only conclude that you need two interfaces, one for each type of user. There's just no way of getting around that. Maintaining two branches of KDE seems stupid when 95% of code would be indentical. So best course of action would seem to be to take 3.5 with all of its complex functionality and just provide and additional novice interface in addition to the standard advanced interface it already has. KDE doesn't lose functionality when you switch to novice interface, you're just not aware of, or presented with, that functionality in the GUI any more...but it's still there for any programs or plugins to use. KDE tries to appeal to as many people as possible by having themes and styles available so you can make your system look however you want. Surely the next logical step is to extend that to the actual GUI content itself. Every single option in every KDE dialog or system utility could be set to be visible or not visible. You could use a config dialog to set this property of every option individually, but also have a quick method of asking whether the user is novice, intermediate or advanced and then set all option visibilities automatically according to a predefined script. I know this is quite a bit of work but surely less work than what went into KDE 4.

If some devs really are sick of KDE 3.5 and want to do something radically different then I think they should respect the 3.5 community by going off and starting a new community for this radical mutant and let the maintainence of 3.5 continue as usual. I think the KDE team need to forget about trying to be the coolest or most popular interface - because in your attempt to keep up with fashion you'll up end changing your interface so often that you'll just piss people off and reduce your user base - and focus on pleasing their loyal users, the ones who've been using KDE for years, have stuck with it and love it for what it is. Did we ask for a radical mutation? I for one certainly didn't. I was just hoping for some bug fixes and maybe a few extra little treats. I mean come on, what can you expect from an already mature interface? What can you make KDE do that it already can't? Maybe the developers got bored and wanted a new project, hence the new radical deviation. But people should expect that development will slow down and become somewhat boring as a project matures. But it's not right abandon loyal users so you can dash off and start some new excitement. If KDE 3 maintainence isn't thrilling enough for these devs then maybe they should find something else to do.

What the hell happened to the philosophy of maintaining a good strong product? Modern society, that's what! Nobody gives a shit about tradition or long standing things any more. People get bored in fives minutes and everything has to be exciting. People will look back and say that the buzzwords and lifestyle of 1960 onwards was excitement, thrills, emotions and globalisation (a euphorism for fascist socialism). Sigh, here I go ranting again...