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

[Frank Steinmetzger]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 06:48:40AM +0100, Michael wrote:

> > > Hi peops,
> > > […]
> > > 3.) Widgets, plasmoids, generel KDE features: Yeah well, really nice
> > > design (mostly), but from a usability standpoint? Often a mess.
> > 
> > Plasma is a constant source of annoyance for me. I never really
> > understood the need for a second UI style next to the “normal” one.
> > The many animations that can’t be switched off and low contrasts are
> > causes of grievance for me. There are layout bugs [...], redrawing
> > bugs [...], UI bugs [...] and feature regressions [...].
> 
> I guess one has to be fair here. I guess KDE4 is designed to be
> feature-rich, beautiful, with many bells and whistles. One could argue,
> it is not designed to be stripped down to a bare minimum.

Well, different to other “modern” desktops, which only seem to offer the
lower end, KDE can be both simplistic and over-the-top full of stuff.

> I may be wrong, but I see it like a person walking in a car-salon, he
> wants to buy some means of transportation.

No, he wants to buy a car. And usually already made up his mind about
specifics, b/c salons commonly have only one or two brands. Sorry, car
comarisons are common in IT discussion, but this one’s not very
applicable. ;-)

> As he is offered some cars, he complains [...]. Don't go to a
> car-salon, if you really want a motorcycle or even a bike.

What exactly is your KDE analogy? Don’t use KDE if you want a window
manager?

> Btw. what about that netbook-design? Isn't that something specifically
> designed for lower-end hardware?

To me, it’s the same plasma, just with a specific default widget setup.
I never used it because (you might guess) it has too many animations and
requires too much clicking. I prefer the classic K-Menu.

> > [...]

> > I suppose right now the migration to 5.0 takes lots of developer
> > resources, so I imagine fixing bugs in “obsolete” 4 gets even less
> > attention. I attempted fixing bugs before (and sent a patch in two
> > instances), but it requires lots of work to get into the code,
> > especially in bigger projects like Amarok or KMail.
> 
> Oh, KDE4 is more or less in "maintenance-mode"?

That was more of a sarcastic nudge at how fast KDE 3 was dropped in
favour of the yet unusable 4.0. And I believe I read somewhere that 4.11
was to be the last 4.x release. Anyhoo, I remained with KDE 3 for a long
time, then used both in parallel and only around 4.3 or even 4.4 I made
the final switch (Gentoo provided for the parallel installation of both
for a long time).

-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service.

There are two kinds of people in this world:
Those who are good with words and those who are... erm... thingy...
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