[kde-doc-english] kde4 documentation

[Roger Horne]

I made a major mistake the other day. Having used KDE3 for many years and 
having taken the view that early versions of KDE4 were not for me, I was 
taken in by the hype surrounding the new version of KDE4.3 and installed it, 
with some difficulty, in the Suse 11.0 version. 

Almost immediately I managed to turn off the icon bar at the top of Dolphin 
and could not find anyway of turning it back on again. Since the icon bar 
included the help button there was no way I could discover what to do. And 
there was no documentation that I could find ion the net. It was purely by 
chance that I clicked the right hand button between the folders displayed on 
the Dolphin page and so recovered the icon bar.

But I then tried to read something that would explain KDE4.n to me. And found 
absolutely nothing. The documentation for "The KHelpCenter" which appears on 
screen bears the rubric:
  "Revision 3.00.00 (2002-01-18)"
and so is unlikely to show much about KDE4.
(I am sending this message from the link on that page.)

Indeed I can find nothing to show me how to produce a desktop which is of any 
use to me. On a wiki I read a message saying something like "I cannot find 
any documentation, but I am looking forward to some hours working out what 
things do for myself". Well I don't want to work out things for myself: my 
computer is not a toy - I use it for work and for nothing else. I am not 
interested in pretty-pretty stuff: I am interested in function.

Under KDE3 I kept the applications I wanted on the bar at the bottom of the 
screen. 

eg I look at mail every so often - I do not have Kmail running the whole time 
since (i) I use a number of different computers   during the day and I want 
to read mail on the one I am using at the time, and (ii) I do not want to be 
disturbed by the arrival of email when I am in the middle of something 
difficult.

The installation of KDE4 installed KMail4 - which nearly gave me a heart 
attack since all my mail folders had disappeared and a message came up on 
screen saying "it appears that you have not used Kmail before". There was no 
documentation to show me how (or indeed whether it is possible) to move my 
KMail3 to KMail4 or whether I still had any old mail. When I had recovered I 
looked in the relevant folder for my old folders and found them safe, and I 
then discovered how to change back to Kmail3 and use my old mail : which I 
did - I have for the time being abandoned Kmail4 since without documentation 
it is useless to me.

But I have found no way of putting Kmail3 on the bottom bar. Yes, if I look at 
Kmail and read my messages the icon appears temporarily on the bar. But If I 
close Kmail3 then it often goes away. 

I like to have my home directory, kmail(3), konqueror and firefox, and several 
other programs I am using constantly on the bottom bar so that I can click on 
them to load them quickly. having to click on several menus to get to them, 
or to search among the icons on the page itself, is not what I want to do. I 
am sure that this is possible on KDe4. but where is the documentation which 
tells me how to do it? 

Ths is the problem with Linux. The programs are fine, but there is very little 
obvious documentation. the KDE site says something like "update to the modern 
KDE4 unless you want something outdated or are very conservative in which 
case use KDE3". It should read something like "Load KDE4 if you want to play 
with your computer. If you want to use your computer for serious work load 
KDE3."

Of course, if there was some decent documentation readily available the 
position would be different.

Sorry for the rant. But I am now trying to reinstall KDE3.

Roger
-- 
Roger Horne
roger at hrothgar.co.uk
http://hrothgar.co.uk/YAWS/