KDE Quality (problems)

[John Longer]

Interesting comments on this thread. I have recently moved to suse
11.4 which runs KDE 4.6.0. Only a few problems in KDE really. Slow
response at times. I've put that down to the file indexing feature and
disabled it. Seems to have worked. Machine is also running ext4 which
I haven't delved into but from brief info - why is this in kde?
Probably because some one some where thought wow I would love to do
that. Understandable really, The dog thing in 3.x was much worst.

Worst problems are migrating data from my past set up on late 3.x.
Mail import and bookmark import into konq do not work and have
obviously only been trivially tested. I use folders of my inbox which
may be the problem. Folders else where too. Address book - seems it
may be possible but no obvious way to do it. Apart from Konq I have
filed bug reports that seem to be holding critical. While I understand
the comments on why this sort of thing happens I think that people are
missing a rather important aspect. Dev's are in all probability proud
of there work and do want people to use it. Trouble is, as an example,
unless data migration is flawless KDE has no credibility as a desktop
for general use at all. Niggley bugs are another matter entirely. I've
worked on none pc software for rather a long time. People who work on
software have to learn that the users needs must come 1st despite the
need for change.

On KDE4 itself one of the most interesting aspects to me is it's total
functionality including the packages. What I see now is mostly eye
candy some of which is useful. One of the aspects I find hard to
understand is the time it's taken to reach this state. I suspect this
is down to another aspect of software that has to be learnt by many.
It doesn't come easily. In real terms software always has to be
maintained and evolved. How much work this actually entails is largely
down to the software architecture that is used in the 1st place. Take
what I'm doing now as a for instance. Typing. Something low down is
gathering the characters, something is spell checking them and marking
them for underline if a certain flag is set. (Yes spell check is
running all of the time.) Something is picking the font, Something
else is formatting it and finally something is dumping it all on the
screen. A bad architecture full of holes but it illustrates that much
of the code is re usable here and elsewhere and that some of it is
unlikely to ever change. More importantly changes higher up the tree
have no effect on what's below. OOD should help in this respect but
given some of the garbage kicking round on that subject it can be very
difficult to apply effectively or at all in some case and a poor
choice of the "object" can have a terrible effect on the architecture.
No doubt code documentation is also a problem really usable stuff
nearly always is. What is important and usually much easier to do is
interface specifications. What's expected to go in and come out. The
bit in the middle really once sorted is a black box. ;-) Or a black
hole if you are unlucky.

I've lost 3 mails to this address recently. Who knows where they have
gone. I don't.

PS If I have to mess about in the shell as I am now far to frequently
and with X I'm wondering about arch too.

--
John
KDE 4.6.0 Release 6
OpenSuSe 11.4
Linux 2.6.37.1-1.20desktop
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