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

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday, 2013-10-28, 20:36:02, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 07:54:09AM +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. 

I think the UI style was more a side effect. The main idea of Plasma was to be 
able to create adaptable and customizable workspace shells.
Quite forward looking given the time when this all started, but unfortunatly 
also hampered by the available technologies of the time (QGraphicsView).

It took Qt itself until 5.1 to have widget like styling available for QtQuick 
(a.k.a QtQuick.Controls).

> > 4.) […] 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".
> 
> Akonadi, the problem child for many, is a nice example with its (for
> this human) incomprehensible config and data file layout.

Off-topic for this discussion about KDE's desktop environment or workspace, 
but as a new project Akonadi follows the guidelines for cross desktop 
locations: config in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/akonadi, data in $XDG_DATA_HOME/akonadi

> 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 think I read somewhere tht the workspace people will be going with 2.0, 
since the next version will be the second iteration of Plasma workspaces.
But yes, it currently seems to bind a lot of their resources, however, I am 
pretty sure they still maintain the current version, after all there are more 
KDE software compilation releases scheduled which they are a part of.

> 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.

No idea about Amarok and only very little about KMail, but as far as I can 
tell its developers are working quite determined on further modularization, 
making it easier to tackle sub areas.
Still quite complicated due to being one of the oldest KDE application in 
existance, lots of generations of code and coders preferenecs in there :)

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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