Yet another post of KDE 4.2 impressions

[Christian Henz]

Hi.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded from 3.5 to 4.2 and would like to share some 
points that bothered me/keep bothering me.

I'm sure I could mention more positive things than I do, but unfortunately the negative 
impressions are usually the strongest ;-) 
I tried to stay constructive in my criticism though and not rant too much.

It should be noted that I am running 4.2 on Debian/unstable/experimental, so part of the problems
I experienced are probably caused by the volatile nature of that setup...


Automounter/Removable storage/Dolphin:
--------------------------------------
Positive: Devices now show right up at a standard filesystem location (/media).
Before, these devices where presented at "system://..." virtual fs paths that were useless for any non-KDE applications, and one had to find out manually (or remember) where they were actually mounted.
Negative: Copying files around in Dolphin locks up the whole Desktop (at least Dolphin and the panel) for several seconds 
before the progress notification gets shown and the application/panel become responsive again.

Application launcher: 
---------------------
What makes no sense to me at all is that applications are listed by their description and not their name.
For example there are two entries called "Web browser", and I have to distinguish them by their icons, or move the mouse 
over the Description to find out what the actual application is (konqueror, firefox). IMO this should be exactly the
other way around: List the application name (konqueror), and then show the description ("Web Browser") when hovering over
the entry.

"Add Widgets" dialog:
---------------------
I still have not quite figured out how the star icon is supposed to work. Sometimes its grey (widget not installed?), sometimes its yellow (widget installed? - but it is also yellow for "Web browser", which I cannot find anywhere in the panel or on the desktop, and grey for "Pager" which is definitely active and visible!), sometimes there is a little "-" ontop of it (no idea what that means). Sometimes there is a clock next to it (no idea either). There are also no tooltips to help me figure it out.

Konqueror (web):
----------------
Positive: The two features from Firefox I missed the most in Konqueror where adopted: There is incremental search now, and it does not block the view onto the page I'm trying to search. 
Also there is a sidebar with incremental search for bookmarks etc. 
Negative: I imported several hundred bookmarks from Firefox, and when I (accidentally) open the Bookmarks menu now, they literally fill my entire screen - including the Konqueror menu bar and the panel!

Konsole (or shortcuts in general):
----------------------------------
Way too many keyboard shortcuts are set by default! I had to manually unmap half of the shortcuts in Konsole in order to not accidentally trigger them every 30 seconds (emacs user with clumsy fingers here ;-).
Also, the defaults for tab switching feel completely wrong: "Ctrl-PgUp/Down now" lets me zap through tabs, like in Firefox or Gnome applications - only it works in the oposite direction!
On top of being "non-standard", having Ctrl-PgDown switch to the previous tab instead of the next feels completely unintuitive to me.
Finally, "Ctrl-Shift-S", which is a shortcut for "Save-As" in some applications somehow pops up Kopete instead now.

Kopete:
-------
(Note: This might be a problem of the distribution)
Google Talk does not work anymore. I have made sure that QCA and the OpenSSL plugin are installed, but it still always fails to authenticate.

Panel (Plasma?):
----------------
Icons in the System tray sometimes have screen garbage drawn behind them (very minor problem).
Crashes occur at least every couple of days (not so minor problem).

Upgrade path/importing old config:
----------------------------------
Korganizer did let me import the old calendar from "$HOME/.kde". 
Others (Kopete) had no such option and I had to configure them from scratch, or 
manually copy the old rc files and hope for the best.

Audio:
------
(Note: This might be a problem of the distribution)
There are messages on startup that my audio device does not work. Sound still works
in KDE applications, but Flash player in Firefox has problems. Often Youtube videos etc. will 
stop playing with sound at some point, and Firefox usually hangs itself shortly after that. 
Probably not KDE's fault, but it used to work before upgrading...

The "Multimedia" entry in System Settings does not help much, cause all I can seem to do is to determine 
the order of preferred devices. A tooltip popup over my soundcard's output entry then informs me that
this device will be tried to be accessed via a bunch of alsa plugins (x-phonon?, dmix) etc., but does not
let me configure this in any way.

Also, I've been experiencing studdering or glitchy audio output especially when starting to play an audio file. 
I am now trying to remove as much of pulseaudio as possible and use alsa directly wherever I can to see if that 
makes any difference.

Well, Linux audio has been a mess for a long time, and adding a new stack of APIs and servers into the mix every couple of years 
has not fixed it (to no surprise).

Conclusion:
-----------
I think the KDE project has done itself and the linux desktop a disservice by 
advertising this release as "recommended for majority of end users", because for me 
personally, upgrading to 4.2 has been a step backwards in my user experience. There are just too many things that feel unfinished.

The potential of KDE 4 is clear to see though an I am looking forward to the next release :-)

cheers,
Christian Henz
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