While being long time KDE4 user, and deeply disliking gnome opensource geeks (due to their insistent way of pushing ideology over practical solutions). Considering all this it’s very sad to see that KDE4 seems to be just big, ugly joke released as desktop.
One of the most stupid features in KDE4 are these ”plasmoids” in the desktop. That is feature which sucks so much that words cannot simply describe it. It’s simply extremely awful. For example, I can put useless 3D earth model into desktop, but it is almost impossible to create link to some application (which was dead easy in KDE3). So practical usefull things, are replaced with useless toys.
As an another example, ”black everywhere” is normal color schema. Sadly such black color schemas seem to be ”cool” thing of current time, which is indeed very sad, since coolness is once again overriding usability factors. It simply hurts eyes to see black taskbar all the time in screen, without any appearent way of changing the color (nor location) of it.
Backward compatibility with KDE 3 seems to be only ”so and so”. I wonder when opensource geeks realize value of backward compatibility (never?). For example, M$windows (even if it sucks greatly) has greatly managed to retain such compatibility.
And more problems:
- Not possible to put quick file browsers ”launcher” etc. links into task bars
- Not possible to have multiple task bars
- Keyboard shortcuts are mostly broken. Where is my ALT + F1?!?
- Dolphin really sucks, and is very slow, and has very bad memory remembering location. For example, browse into zip -file (much slower than with old konqueror), go back, and you’re thrown into beginning of directory list. And all this happens in SLOW MOTION.
- Good old file browser part of konqueror is replaced by Dolphin. Meaning that my profiles won’t work anylonger. Dolphin doesn’t support them at all!
- Okular sucks as generic file viewer. When designing such generic viewer, loosers forgot the fact that different kinds of documents are actually requiring different dimensions of the window for viewing them. Now everything is enforced into same zooming and window size, which simply breaks the usability.
I really can’t understand how some idiot could measure that KDE4, since it’s MUCH slower. Great work!
It appears that KDE4 developers have simply forgotten good things, and replaced them with not-so-well working new things, without even thinking is it good idea to break things. Of course that is general principle of open source geeks, which generally work with the attitude ”if someone doesn’t like it we can always say that this is opensource, so don’t complain but fix yourself problems.”. Well, it should be clear to see what is problem here.”
As summary, I propably should seek some alternative Linux desktops, since Gnome I will touch only with 2 meter long sharpened steel pole (gnome geeks, please, stop pushing your ideology around). However, if after KDE3 there ain’t any working new KDE releases coming, then that doesn’t leave much options.