The buzz about KDE 4.0

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 27 June 2008, Kimberly Lazarski wrote:
> KDE team: you might want to check out this thread: it touches on quite a
> few things I've been disappointed in when running KDE 4.0
>
> http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-12554-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=49110
>
> KDE's growth may slow as a result of decisions made to dumb certain
> things down like gnome does. The whole reason I use KDE (3.x) rather
> than gnome is it doesn't cripple usability.

I think we can agree that the customizability of KDE is valued by quite a lot 
of people, ranging from users over developers to sysadmins.
The perceived reduction of these options is mainly based on misunderstandings, 
e.g. configuration done differently, configuration options not yet exposed 
yet through a GUI, user visible parts of functionality not implemented yet, 
etc.

Additionally a lot of KDE4 code is more open for alternative configuration 
methods than comparable KDE3 code, i.e. traditional configuration dialogs 
could most likely be done as an addon/plugin/extension.

This kind of flexibility is currently not as visible to users as it is to 
developers, but once the knowledge about it spreads, other people than those 
working on the default implementation can create and deploy alternative 
feature sets without the need of a fork or from-scratch development.

Unfortunately these kind of architectural changes come with a price, either 
delaying release and future development of "finished" parts until all 
replacements reach feature parity or release some replacements with just a 
feature subset.

Both options have their drawbacks and it is quite sad that those developers 
who agreed to the release in favor of those who alredy had complete ports 
take so much beating for not having reached their respective feature parity 
yet.
No good deed goes unpunished :(

> (dolphin) is about as functional as gnome's nautilus. People in that
> thread accuse it of being as bad as Windows Explorer, but it has /less
> /functionality than Windows Explorer.

I have to admit that I don't have very recent experience with Windows 
Explorer, but the one I used to use on Windows XP didn't even support KIO 
like protocols.

> extremely capable and configurable. Also, I missed the desktop/folder
> metaphor. I put current and ongoing work on my desktop, and most other
> people I know (on Macs, Windows, and Linux) do the same. Taking that
> away was definitely a mistake. Does KDE4 still lack the
> desktop-as-a-folder metaphor?

Also a quite common misunderstanding.
Not porting the traditional implementation of a desktop handler (e.g. KDesktop 
in KDE3) doesn't mean that the use case of using it as a kind of intermediate 
storage has been abandoned, far from that.
Rather than "simply" porting the limited variant the developers decided to aim 
for a solution which would allow the traditional usage but would also allow 
new ones, e.g. showing results of search engine results.

Again it's quite sad that the *temporary* absence of some particular details 
like fullscreen capability resulted in mudslinging.

> the modularity, configurability, and power KDE has given the users. If
> you must, dolphin and other apps can stay simple by default, but please
> make it possible for users to turn on power user options (such as an
> editable address bar, tabs, a built in terminal windows) people have

I am pretty sure the location bar is editable in the traditional sense, 
the "bread crumbs" navigation is just one possible visualization.

> depended on for so long. I know konqueror is still there, but with two
> separate file managers there will be temptation to not keep konqueror's
> way of doing things up to date, leaving only a very limited file manager.

While it is most likely not as visible to users as it is to developers, the 
way KDE's architecture and applications are designed allows allmost immediate 
reuse of the simple variants features in the advanced variant and allows the 
advanced variant's developers to concentrate on "their" features.

It is actually more taxing on the part of the simple variants developers 
because the can not just implement a one-to-one mapping of their user 
interface's capabilities but have to remember all implications the advanced 
interface will introduce.

It takes very dedicated engineers like Dolphin's maintainer Peter Penz to go 
this extra mile.

> I'm going to give KDE 4.0 another shot next weekend - Although I keep
> going back to OpenSuSE and KDE for desktop machines, I periodically
> evaluate different distros and desktops, but my first experience with
> KDE4 was a disappointment.

In this case I recommend not evaluating the same, feature frozen, version 
again, since it is highly unlikely that much has changed (the sole purpose of 
a freeze).

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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