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

[Thierry de Coulon]

On Tuesday 06 October 2009, Anne Wilson wrote:
> Sorry - you lost me.  The device is in fstab, but you are manually mounting
> it?  I certainly can recall seeing exactly that message if you tried to
> mount such a drive as user under kde3 - that's what taught me to mount as
> root, from the command line.

Edgar already explained this point, I'll just give an example:

The device is in fstab, with lines such as:

/dev/sdb2    /<mountpoint>   ext3   noauto,users,exec,rw  0 0
192.168.x.x   /<mountpoint>   nfs   noauto,users,exec,rw  0 0

On KDE 3, you can create links to these devices on the desktop that let you 
mount/unmount them. This is especially usefull for the nfs shares when you 
have them on a computer that is not always on.

Folderview lets you create these links, but mounting/unmounting fails with 
the "only root" message, so the only way to mount is to open a console and 
type "mount <mountpoint>" as user, which works. This shows that fstab works 
and KDE 4 does not. I've searched and found that this bug is known for a 
while but has not been corrected. Once mounted, the links can open them 
though...

> Removable devices are mounted through the notifier or in dolphin, using the
> plain desktop.  You say that that doesn't work in a folderview desktop? 
> I'll try that out in the morning.
(...)
> Again, you've lost me.  The device notifier handles removable drives.  How
> can nfs shares be removable drives?

So how are you supposed to mount nfs shares in KDE 4? You can't do it on the 
folderview, you can't do it in the notifier, IIRC you can't do it in dolphin 
(I don't have my KDE 4 install running at the time).

As far as I am concerned, one of the strength of Linux has alway been the fact 
that not all partitions have to be mounted at once, what always happens in 
Windows or MacOS X. So now with KDE 4 we've lost that, because you either 
have to mount everything at boot or you must use tzhe console?

> >  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).
>
> You don't like it, others do.

My problem is simply that I don't get a choice (if you don't have the notifier 
and won't use the dolphin panel you can't mount/unmount anything!). Why 
doesn't the notifier have an option to say "don't pop up"? If I respect those 
who like it, they can respect that I don't.


> It *opens* as a duplicate of the other, yes.  What else would it do until
> you tell it what you want?  The two windows then function independently. 
> Try opening a terminal in dolphin (F4) - it opens in the directory of the
> pane that you are using.  The independence is clear.

Konqueror has profiles that let you save the directories it opens in. No 
problem for the moment as I can still use konqueror instead of dolphin, but 
how long?

>
> As long as you refuse to make a simple statement of what you want to
> achieve and accept help you are not in any position to make a judgement. 
> Thousands of people have managed to get the desktop they want.  Why don't
> you try asking how to achieve what you want?
>
> Anne

Simple: I want the KDE 3 _desktop_ functionalities back.

The KDE 4 panel is now usable, it's way harder and longer to configure than 
the KDE 3 panel but I can live with it.

The folderview desktop could be an ersatz for the KDE 3 desktop but that would 
require a real will of the developers to make it working, while I feel it is 
obvioulsy a case of "we made it because you asked for it but this is not the 
way we want it".

On a less important level, it would be nice to be again able to have different 
backgrouds on different workspaces, it made easier to know where you are

I am angry, because as of the next version of most distributions we will 
probably loose a good and working desktop to be given a beta desktop. I am 
fairly sure KDE 4 will be OK some time (4.10, 4.55?) but it is not now. 
Being "stable" is not very usefull if it misses so many features that we 
_had_ (and this is very different from a new program in development that 
slowly brings you new features that you did not have before).

And that's what's wrong in the comparisosn that are made with KDE 2 or 3. I 
have been using KDE since version 0.4. At that time, every new feature was 
nice to have and made life with it better. Now KDE 4 has to compare to KDE 
3.5.9 or later, not to KDE 2 or KDE 3.0, because the problem is not that we 
dont have functionalities  yet, it's that we _miss_ existing functionalities.

I've been looking at other desktops since I was told that KDE 3 was going. For 
the time being I still hope that KDE 4 can improve enough to qualify as a 
replacement, but as long as the folderview issue is not solved it sure can't.

Thierry