[kde-linux] Desktop widget like Windows Vista sidebar/clock thing?

[Thierry de Coulon]

On Tuesday 06 October 2009, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > It also as a flavour of good old cli *nix: you need to open a console to
> >  mount anything :)  I suppose they call it a feature....
> >
> > Thierry
>
> I beg your pardon?  Is this a feature of the folderview desktop?  (I'm not
> going to change to it, because I have to resize all my widgets when I
> change back, and I can't be bothered tonight.)  I use the plain KDE4
> desktop and have never mounted anything from the CLI. even on 4.0.  My
> fixed drives (including remote ones) are mounted from fstab and removables
> from the device notifier, or in dolphin if it's already open.
>
> Anne


On this list you wrote that on folderview "most things function just as they 
did in KDE 3". Well yes, if you use folderview as your desktop you can again 
right-click, add a link to a device and configure it as you would in KDE 3... 
except it does not work! When you want to mount the device you are told 
that "only Root can do this", despite the fact that you device(s) is 
correctly added to fstab. So all you can do is open a console and mount 
(which here works perfectly as a normal user).

Apparently this is a bug in some kdelib that has not been fixed all through 
the last KDE 4 releases. Makes the folderview rather useless in this case...

Yes, I have the device notifier. AFAIK it's totaly useless to mount nfs shares 
and partitions included in fstab as "noauto" mount. Plus the silly thing pops 
up anytime you plug something in, so you get a wonderful Windows taste, with 
messages poping up (and not removing themselves by the way).

I don't want to use the notifier, and I don't want to use the dolphin pane 
either. Dolphin is no improvement over Konquerors two-pane mode either, as 
you can't set it to open with two different directories in the two panes. So 
I must say I'm still at the same point: I keep reading people saying 
that "KDE rocks" (where? how?) and that it brings improvements over KDE 3, 
but I can't see where. People here keep saying "turn off this or that feature 
to gain speed", and big announcements are when KDE 3 features are back... 
I won't dispute the fact that big improvements where made "under the hood" - I 
can't say, maybe. But as far as the Desktop is concerned, I have the feeling 
that while they took all the best ideas from the available desktops at the 
time to make KDE 1,2,3, for KDE 4 they took all the worse and most stupid and 
useless features. I am still to find a usefull plasmoid (ok, having two 
clocks setup at the time of different cities can count as one, maybe).

Hopefully at some point we get enough KDE 3 features back and enough 
configuration possibilities so that those who want the useless features (or 
maybe they are not useless to them...) can have them and the others can get a 
simple, efficient desktop back.

As long as there is life there is hope :)

Thierry