KDE4 is still the most unusable, unstable, quirky and irritating piece of software garbage I’ve used in the last 15 years. And that includes M$ software as well.

If the KDE community (and the distro people) do not take this to heart, it is going to serve as a major step towards making the Linux desktop a crappy & unstable Windows-wannabe variant.

Konqueror is so unstable–even for basic operations–that it is practically unusable.

Konsole behaves totally different than the one in KDE3 (cut’n'paste behaviour, general UI unfriendliness)

Proxy support in Konqueror has been missing for the past half year. (Seriously; how hard can this be?)–making it totally unusable in a corporate environment.

Panel widgets get “blotted out” frequently for some obscure reason (the clock for instance)

Window grouping is apparently not possible (who the hell needs that?)–so all windows are piled on the panel.

The list goes on and on.

I’ve seen comments from pro-KDE4 people that this is probably caused by insufficient hardware (a 486 with 128mb RAM). This just proves that the KDE4 fanboys have no real idea of how a Desktop is supposed to function, and I doubt many were even born around the time 486’s were introduced (how many of those came with an option to put in 128mb, anyway?)

kde4: EPIC FAIL.

I’ve been using KDE since the pre-1.0 days. I’ve always appreciated the pragmatic approach that they took in simply copying the good aspects of the Windows UI and improving it where doing so would not break the underlying UI paradigm.

But now the KDE developers have fallen under the misapprehension that they are usability experts and cognitive psychologists capable of designing a user interface.

I’ve tried to use KDE 4, but the more I try the more viscerally angry I become. What the hell were these people thinking? There was NOTHING wrong with KDE 3.5.x. The ONLY thing that needed to be done was to fix the taskbar and the start button. Had they done this, and left everything else essentially the same, then I’d have been overjoyed.

I create Linux workstations for a living that are deployed for use by ordinary people who will expect the system to behave like Windows. Giving them something else just doesn’t cut it, especially when that something else is so fundamentally broken. How am I supposed to promote Linux as an alternative to Windows when things go off the rails like this?

Unless things improve dramatically, I’m going to have to master the arcane art of beating Gnome into shape with gconf (and prey it can be scripted) and deploying it instead as I won’t be able to keep systems at KDE 3.5.x indefinitely. I’ve avoided Gnome so far because KDE was always better, but if KDE is going to jump the shark then I have no choice.

Dolphin doesn’t have tabs… I need 7-12 tabs open so I can quickly access files from several servers around campus. This lack of such a simple feature makes dolphin a worthless pile for me.

KDE 4.0 configurability is severely limited as well. Simple things like setting the clock preferences have taken a step back and the level of customizations are a fraction of what KDE 3.5 offers. So I dumped KDE 4.0, wrote a long detailed letter to the KDE team and will probably not see a thing happen with it.