KDE's rough edges... what are your experiences?

[Michael]

Hi peops,

I somewhat force myself to use KDE (once again), even though I am very
likely to get annoyed rather fast when it comes to the KDE-specific
kind of issues. Issues, I have never seen with any other project to
that extent. And I ask myself, if others are annoyed too there or am I
just a whiny little bitch and no one else really bothers there?

To describe the kind of issues I am referring to, some examples:
1.) KSysGuard: I just closed a program via its own menu (file ->
close), wondered why even after several minutes (and even now, half an
hour later) KSysGuard still showed that process, so I did look with
"ps" and to my surprise, the process is *not* there anymore, but
KSysGuard shows it nevertheless in the "process table".
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261255

2.) Panels: Changed the "alignment" on one panel (for DualHead
"mirrored" panel setup), one should think now the alignment is changed
like in any other tool (mostly word processing tools I guess) but well,
it is not, widgets and stuff still want to "fall" to the left. I guess
because of that and other "bugs" there, several issues arise.
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=94642
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248186
http://askubuntu.com/questions/116040/how-to-right-align-widgets-in-panel-in-kubuntu-11-10

3.) Widgets, plasmoids, generel KDE features: Yeah well, really nice
design (mostly), but from a usability standpoint? Often a mess. First
one sees a feature and thinks "Great" and later on he might realize how
bad that feature is implemented. I don't want to get into details yet,
as this mail is going to be long enough already, but if there is any
need and someone has no idea what I am talking about here, just ask. But
remember, I don't say all and everything is implemented badly, with
KDE-stuff it just looks to me the tendency is there that stuff gets
implemented in a rather weird / bad / less- to un-usable way.

4.) Weird messages and... stuff: Be it annoying phonon messages that a
audio device was removed, though it definitely was NOT, power-manager
framework telling me it doesn't work because of... yada yada, but it
does work nevertheless, starting others DEs stuff while KDE is running
(or the other way around) might screw things up bigtime, configuration
tends be be trashed every now and then, from one moment to the next (in
the process of configuring KDE for example, so no change to the
installed packages or other changes to the system) KDE may start to
behave "weird". Like starting KDE-apps (dolphin) takes several minutes
while other apps just start fast as before, context-menu might need
*minutes* to open, shutdown-, reboot-, logout-popup takes minutes to
show...

And a bunch of other stuff that might just happen when using KDE that
somewhat feels... well... awkward, weird, annoying. Bottom line, it
feels like a lot of rough edges and that those edges might be smoothed
out eventually, but apparently it looks like they don't, as where I
pointed out links to bugtracker or forum-posts, the issues are as old as
Methusalems grandpa. With other DEs (Gnome2 + 3, Mate, Xfce, LXDE, e17)
I have never seen that amount of "roughness". They might have other
"issues", like the apparent need the Gnome-devs feel to get rid of
every useful feature ;) (well, I could be more fair there, but I am on
a KDE list anyway, so no need for gnome-devs-understaning, right? *g*),
but I always had the feeling the "rough" edges were smoothed out from
release to release. I was not always happy with the way issues were
addressed, but at least I could understand why it makes sense for some
or even most users to have an issue resolved in that particular way it
was addressed with.

Granted, not all issues will face on every system, something triggers
the issues, sure. Not all users will think some stuff is implemented
weird and in a rather un-usable state (even if I think something must
be wrong with them then, as I can even understand the Gnome-decisions
and way of implementing things!), not everyone has the same need and
idea for a feature and how to implement it. Some may never have any
issue whatsoever, be it just coincidence or they just don't use that
particular feature or at least not in a way that the issues would show
itself. 

So, that all said, what do you guys, users and maybe even developers of
KDE, think? I don't want to come around as rude or overly harsh, as
really, I think KDE is a great Desktop Environment, it just has some
really rough edges. Is it just me, or are others also thinking KDE
could / should invest more efforts in QA and maybe less in implementing
new stuff? I know, "send patch" yada yada... that does not apply here,
at least not well enough.

Optimistic greetings
Michael
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