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

[Michael]

Hi Duncan,

Hell! Don't take it the wrong way, but I strongly suggest you rethink
your way of "communicating" on mailinglists. You went in such lengths
in absolutely unrelated topics and even with slightly related topics
you went by far, far, far, far to deep. It was really no pleasure at
all to read it all, which I had to as courtesy demands it, as I did ask
for feedback. And what I took from your 25.457 characters in 441 lines
and 4270 words would fit in roundabout 10-20 lines.

If you really feel the urge to go into such detail, do everyone on the
list a favour and divide your mails in two parts. One where you try to
stick to the topic as closely as possible and a second one which you
mark as "detailed stuff" or whatever fits the situation. So others
can choose to read it all, or just get the essentials out of it. As for
me, I am really in no way interested how you configured your KDE, how
much you like gentoo, what features gentoo has, what assumptions and
possible ways to debug all those possible issues have, especially not in
SUCH DETAIL (including the redundant repetition that happened several
times).

But enough critics... let's get to your mail.

 Am Sun, 27 Oct 2013 16:47:08 +0000 (UTC)
schrieb Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net>:

> Michael posted on Sun, 27 Oct 2013 07:54:09 +0100 as excerpted:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> There are certainly issues with most desktop environments.
> [snip]

All software tends to have issues, but this conversation here is solely
about KDEs possible QA-issues and if you folks think the situation is
worse compared to other Desktop Environments or not. So it is a rather
limited scope I follow here and I humbly ask of you to stay on topic as
good as possible as chances are the topic will get heated anyway.


> > 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
>
> [snip] 
>
> First point, most directly apropos to that bug, while I'd /think/ it 
> would be obvious enough to note as it was my immediate first question 
> upon reading the above, you didn't above and nobody seems to have
> noted it specifically in any of the bug comments either...

Well, because it is save to assume no one would be that <censored> to
deliberately set that value to "0" and because the default is something
sane as "2" seconds? And of course because it was said more than once,
that not every application / process did still show up after closing
it. So your idea does not make much (if any) sense.

 
> What do you have the sheet/tab properties update interval set for?
> If it's set to zero, it's not going to update and of course the
> information will ultimately go stale.  Similarly if the interval is
> maxed out... here the max it will let me enter is 1000 seconds, aka
> 16 minutes 40 seconds. You do mention half an hour so it should have
> updated in that time, but perhaps only once.

...

default, 2 seconds


>
> [snip]
>
> > 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.
> 
> FWIW, I'd not think that at all.
> 
> In fact, quite the contrary, just because I switch a panel from one
> end of the edge its on to the other, does NOT mean I want or expect
> the individual plasmoids to change alignment within the panel as
> well!  I'd go so far as to consider it a bug if they did!

Well, there is an option one can set for the "alignment" on the panel.
It offers right, left and middle. for What else should that
alignment be?


> > 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
> 
> In general panel plasmoid alignment and spacing in kde4 plasma has
> ALWAYS been buggy at best.

Well, figures. But at least other DEs have trouble with sane
panel-behaviour as well, even if I'd say it is not as "broken" there it
is more like they lack some feature to make it behave in a sane way,
whereas in KDE it offers features that do not work -> bug.


> At this point I'm not sure it's even
> possible to make it work correctly.  I've simply resigned myself to
> it and gradually found my own workarounds and/or configurations that
> work "well enough" for my usage, despite the continued spacing
> behavior issues.

And I really hope that is not the level of users confidence the
developers of KDE are happy with. But maybe some dev will say something
about that.


>
> [snip]
>
> > 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.
> 
> FWIW, my thinking on this is that it just happens that the kde devs
> (and in particular the plasma devs, since that's the desktop kde
> uses) have a particularly bad case of one of the traits very common
> to free and open source application development and the developers
> behind them -- the "developer scratches his own itch and stops when
> it stops itching for him" phenomenon.

That "phenomenon" does exist, but again, I really hope it is not the
main attitude in KDE-land. If I am wrong, then, developers please stand
up and say "KDE is just for us, not for users that don't contribute /
code". But I strongly believe the general human attitude is a different
one. True, you may code stuff because YOU want something, but on top of
that, most developers I know are happy to do stuff for others as well.
It might not have the utmost priority at first, but as long as it is not
ultra complex to implement, or the developer even thinks the feature
does not make any sense, most (at least really many, the good ones
anyway) developers do stuff not only for them. And if stuff is not
supposed to be for "everyone", why release it to the public in the first
place?

> As you're likely aware, this
> is in fact one of the criticisms leveled at free and open source
> software by proprietary servantware and commercial software
> developers -- that the "scratch your own itch" model doesn't properly
> serve the non-developer user.

Sure, I am aware of that critic, but I am convinced it is often
depicted in a wrong (too negative) way.


> 
> [snip]
> 
> Anyway, yes, I think that a lot of the user-visible problems with
> plasma in particular, as well as early kde4 fiasco beyond plasma and
> to some extent kde4 even as it exists today, are the result of
> developers with a WORKSFORME, it /must/ be ready to ship, attitude.
> And that problem, apparent in kde4 as a whole especially in the early
> days, seems to be particularly bad with plasma.

If so, from where I am standing that attitude should be changed. I know
that's easy to say, especially from a USER, someone who never
contributed anything to KDE. But don't read it as a demand, it is just
my opinion which no one has to agree with. At least I can't think of
any developer being really happy with his work, if the overall opinion
about that work is "buggy, alpha or at most beta quality". And I can
only try to imagine what huge negative impact that would have on my
appetite to do something. 


> > 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...
> 
> [snip]
> 
> And you know what?  Without all that junk even built at compile time,
> the problems I had with kde went down DRAMATICALLY, and performance
> went up as well.
>
> [snip]
>

With that attitude, one could argue, the we as the human race should
still live in the woods and caves. I am sure our planet and the rest of
the live-stock would be happy, but that is not how we (as a race) roll.
And apart from that, to strip down a system to the stuff you need is a
well known principle for firewalls and ascetic folks but not for the
average Joe user on his / her desktop. Again, we (in general) roll
differently. And I start to wonder why you use KDE at all and not some
fancy ion3 / awsome / Xmonad / whatever setup. 


> But plasma, in particular, still likes to lose settings once in
> awhile. Workaround time! 

No. Time to fix a bug or even rethink the way stuff is implemented that
it can even happen that configfiles get trashed so often. And to not
sound so demanding, someone (me?) should talk with the developer who
wrote that code to discuss the possible solutions.


>
> [snip]
>
> It took me a while to figure out, but eventually I realized
> that if I could setup a configurable menu on just the homepage key,
> with that menu in turn taking another key, I could chain the effects
> together and get it to work very nearly like it did in kde3.
> 
> But I'm a user and sysadmin, not a coder, so I couldn't just hack up
> an app in C/C++ to launch the desired secondary menu. =:^(
> 
> Workaround time!

No, see above, time to talk to a developer....


> 
> [snip]
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm snipping the rest, but I definitely agree with most of it, and
> while my sore points are different than yours, I certainly do have
> them, rubbed raw by all those kde rough edges!  So I definitely feel
> the pain!

Great, now for you, as you do already agree with me that the situation
is not as good as it should / could be, what possible solutions are
there? And forcing users to think about hacky workarounds is not a
proper (long-term) solution.

optimistic regards
Michael
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