Is KDE really usable?

[Iñaki]

Hello, first of all I'm sorry for the severity of the critic I will do to the 
whole KDE in this mail.

In my work all the people are 24-27 years old guys with a lot of experience in 
Linux systems. All of them use Ubuntu except me, I use Kubuntu Dapper.

I started working here 6 months ago and most of the people in the office like 
the "power" of KDE I show to them, for example:
 - Kioslaves
 - Konqueror with the window splited in 6 parts.
 - Applications as Kontact, Kompare, yakuake
 - Kate and its sessions and syntax.

So those days two persons in the office have installed Kubuntu Dapper in their 
work computers to use it instead of Gnome. Both of them came back to Ubuntu 
yesterday and hate KDE now. It's sad to admit it, but I understand them.

I'd like to clarify that I'm speaking about two boys working for long time in 
Linux systems, so I'm not speaking about newbies. Anyway they need a good 
Linux desktop to work in an efficient way. Is it possible with KDE? I dont 
thing so.

I'll related now all the problems occurred to one of them the day he installed 
Kubuntu Dapper and tried to use it for working:


Kontact:
***********
Any user working in an office needs a reliable PIM applicacion.

Marking a mail as "important" is an usable and typical option, but in Kmail it 
needs 3 mouse clicks or configure a special key access. The people just want 
to click near the mail with the mouse to mark is at "important" 
or "spam", "ham" or anything. Nobody wnat to learn key access for anything.

Kontact crashes, crashes and crashes. Every time. We have a webdav calendar 
and 50% of times we access to it using Korganizer Kontact crash. It's not 
usable at all. Without the webdav calendar it crahes many times too.

If you configure a remote calendar or vcard Kontact will empty it the 50% of 
times, so I deleted a Vcard with many clients data because this issue.

Using two or more mail accounts in Kmail is very difficult. Most of the people 
want a identity for each account but in Kmail is very difficult to use the 
accounts in that way, you must:
- Create X identities.
- Configure the accounts and associate them to the identities.
- Create a folder for each.
But if you dont configure it more you will have all the sent mails in the 
same "sent" folder. Confusing.
The Mozilla Thunderbird way is better and more intuitible. Kmail should have 
the same behaivor by default, and later the user could configure it with 
special features, but by default the Thunderbird model is better (when you 
create a mail account automatically are created an identity, 
and "sent", "inbox", "trash" and "dratf" folders for that account).

Kmail deletes periodically the folder properties (the asociated identity, 
maillist, icon...).



Konqueror:
************
Many times when trying to download something from Sourceforge or other pages 
Konqueror/Kget download the "download.php" intead of the file. This bug ONLY 
occurs with Konqueror, so I need to use Firefox (that I hate) many times 
because it's imposible to download a simple file with KDE/http.

My work friend needed to download a .odt documents from a web server, so used 
Konqueror for that. OpenOffice appears but dissapears in a second without 
opening the document. This bug occurs to me many times, with many KDE 
versions, in Debian, Kubuntu and so. Then, the user can't use Konqueror to 
download a simple document from a web server. Is it a OpenOffice problem? why 
does it work if I download the same file with Firefox?


Space in disk:
***************
Is there any usable and easy way in KDE to show the free space in the disk? I 
don't think so. I know some places to see it, but are not easy to find or 
intuitible for users.


Printers:
*********
Printers configuration is a pain in KDE. The Cups interface is the worst I've 
seen in usability terms. I've tested 6 users and invite them to configure any 
printer with it and all of them are confused with that interface. Ubuntu's 
interface is simple and better, but in the KDE print interface nothing 
dissapears, just new features are added, incrementing the chaos.

My work friend installed a printer but then he needed to uninstall it. 
Impossible, something like "error-client-..." appeared. Impossible, he 
couldn't do it and needed to use the console for that.



Floppy:
*******
Since KDE 3.4 it's not possible to use a floppy in many computers. Double 
click in the floppy icon mounts it (as you can verify by executing "mount") 
but KDE doesn't realize of that and shows the icon as unmounted. This bug 
occurs in the 90% computers I've installed KDE into them, and doesn't occur 
with Ubuntu.




My conclusion:
***************
KDE is very powerfull, of course, but has too much bugs and usability issues 
and bad designed applications that make KDE no usable for commons workes in 
an office.

Unfotunatelly I don't see usability improvements in the most important apps of 
KDE (Kontact, Konqueror), just new and "exotic" features that are not 
neccesary for common users who only expect a reliable OS (that KDE can't 
offer now to them).

Of course I'll try to investigate and report all the important bugs I've told 
here, but it was terrible for me when an advantage user had to reinstall 
Gnome because it was impossible to work with KDE. And I saw all the proccess, 
the bugs weren't "newbie" bugs, the problem was KDE, sure.


I'm really sorry for this mail. I know that people behind KDE are very good 
people doing a big effort for KDE, but I think I shouldn't hide the KDE bugs 
and it's better to tell of all them. In this case I tell them here to show 
how difficult is using KDE in an office with people that wanted to use it.


I hope KDE4 will be based in the usability instead of new an exotic features. 
Instead of adding features that just 2% of users will use KDE should improve 
the important things that 100% of users need.


Regards and sorry again for all.




-- 
Iñaki