KDE 4 sucks big time
I’ve been a KDE user for many years. Maybe it’s just me, maybe the UI world is changing, but the newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All glitter, all bloatware. And what’s with the desktop icons? Where’s the simplicity? Do you want to confuse new users to death?
The first releases were so buggy that only serious promotion through blogs and news articles kept people’s interest alive. Then came “bugfix releases” that didn’t change anything from the overall look point of view. Mimetype icons still missing.
Let’s be frank here: KDE 4.0 didn’t deserve it’s version number. I wouldn’t have even called it a “Release Candidate”. It was alpha quality. Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon - they’re all good concepts, but when it comes to the user experience, the 4.x series is a total disaster. Plasmoids crash, the Panel crashes, applications crash, everything keeps crashing. And please don’t give me that “work in progress” crap, i’m not buying it.
Want my honest oppinion about KDE 4? As a user, I feel like the developers rushed to copy Vista and Leopard and failed lamentably. Forget the latest fashion and focus on functionality. Who needs sparkling windows when avery fifth click gives you a segmentation fault?
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June 6th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I absolutely and totally subscribe to your comments. I love KDE 3.5, but KDE 4 seemed to me terribly intimidating and with focus on glitter and a Mac-like love for shiny glistening things on the screen. As a Linux newbie it has scared me away. I don’t like Gnome much either, but luckily there was KDE 3.5 to save me. If KDE 3.5 dies, I don’t know what I’ll do because KDE 4 seems to be going in the exact opposite direction that I would have liked it to. I guess I’ll have to give Gnome a second change, or perhaps turn to XCFE or Fluxbox…but it’ll be such a shame to see a good thing die just because its creators wanted to fix what wasn’t broken…
Better is the ennemy of good, they say; it sure applies in this case.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Looks like you have already forgotten how it was when KDE 3.0 came out. There was far less new features and far less deep changes in the arhitecture yet it was not as good as KDE 4.0 is. And just look at how very good KDE 3.5 today is. KDE *.0 releases have always been the very start of completely new series and have always been targeted at developers and not at end users. Their purpose is to get the new technolog out the door and into the public. To get things moving faster so that next versions like 4.1 and 4.2 come faster and are better then they would have benn if 4.0 was not out. I sure hope you did report bugs for problems you found (or vote for exisitng bug reports). Because versions *.0 are definitely not meant for pople who don’t care to help by reporting bugs.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I have to agree about sucking, I hate the new start menu
its so slow to use and all these widgets and stuff just
get in the way. When I’m at my computer I don’t see the
gui, all I see is the web browser, firefox. And when I
want to look at pictures I want a file manager that doesn’t
waste most of the page on god knows what, I just want the
.jpg files so I can open them with eog and see them full
screen. I don’t think the developers asked the community
what they would like to see in a new KDE, they must use
vista and thought it was great so copied it.YUK.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I made some screenshots on my experience with KDE4, check it out:
http://deadcabbit.blogspot.com/2008/06/kde4-second-encounter.html
Though it might seem to be funny, in short I really really don’t like kde4 ;( Now I’m back to fluxbox with a krusader on my side.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Honestly, I think that they made a classic mistake of trying to rewrite everything to make huge gains. That often doesn’t end up accomplishing what you hope for, and it didn’t this time either, IMO.
Hopefully they will get it cleaned up over the next few point releases, though.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Hey, this comment is just incomplete, if you WANT to make your point provide examples!!! and provide your hardware resources (sure you have a 486 with 128 mb ?AM).
To believe in you you must give the COMPLETE information, not just your unfair RANT
Juan
June 6th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
[…] KDE 4 sucks big time Why must everything be newbie-friendly? Five things I hate about Linux […]
June 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Couldn’t agree with you more.
I mainly use gnome and enlightenment, but I can see why people would use kde 3.x.x.
After testing kde 4.0 I new they messed up big time.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
I agree with you there. I discovered KDE4 by downloading the KDE4 version of Kubuntu. I do not recall it saying anywhere that it was beta, a work in progress, or a concept demonstration. It was passed off to the naive user as a new GUI option. THAT is what is most wrong with KDE4: the premature promotion of it as working software.
I had many frustrating times with it before trolling the web to find the truth: that I should have waited for July.
A flashy desktop, yes, but it drove me to seek alternatives in a hurry.
I’ll reserve final judgment on KDE4 for when it’s actually ready for production.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
same feeling
June 6th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I agree completely! What happened? I’ve preferred KDE for several years, but KDE4 is just a total disaster.
June 7th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
> I do not recall it saying anywhere that it was beta,
> a work in progress, or a concept demonstration.
“If stability is the feather in the cap you are looking for, then look no further than Kubuntu 8.04 featuring the KDE 3 desktop environment. If you are looking for a bit of an edge, Kubuntu has you covered with the new Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix.”
http://kubuntu.org/announcements/8.04-release.php
However I think the Kubuntu announcement is not so scaring as it should be; openSuse guys were more realistic:
http://en.opensuse.org/KDE4#What_to_expect_of_KDE_4.0
June 7th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Are you a developer? No. Well how can you complain towards having a stable desktop based on 4.0.x, it’s only intention was to stabilize the base libraries and to make a starting point for the next generation of KDE. If you’re unhappy with kde 4.0 be patient and wait till 4.1 comes out, or if you still want to spill a load of crap on the floor, about how the baby doesn’t get its rattle even though it’s not old enough, go back to your precious kde 3.5 - that -ll only get bug fixes for those enterprise users.
Like many rants about kde that have been done before. Stop it. Just make a few suggestions of your improvements that are constructive and send them as bug reports. If you’re lucky they might be noticed.
and by the way, would you rather have a kde desktop in five years + time, rather than get something that’s better tested; and actually available, unlike other d.e’s like E17. expected date 3008.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Well, that’s very disappointing to hear. I plan to install Fedora 9, with KDE 4.0, on one of my machines this coming week. I’ve been a fan and user of KDE form back when you had to download all the code and compile yourself! I consider it to be the best Linux GUI (if you’re not hardware-limited), and I have never been a fan of Mac GUIs (I won’t mention the other thing out there). It’s understandable that there are lots of bugs, because the *.0 releases usally tend to. So I expect those to be fixed in future releases. What is disappointing, however, is its inclusion in distributions such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Fedora as a mature option. Further disappointing, if it’s true, is KDE’s departure from a style that has really set it apart in the world of GUIs.
If, and I mean if, it is true that the KDE project is now bent on style, and a pursuit of Apple and MS eye-candy crap, there is at least one solution — fork it.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Amen to most of the above. I rolled back to 3.5 out of frustration with 4.0. Maybe I’ll move up. Mostly I found the release buggy, sometimes elephantine in its mobility. Eye candy is promising — but what’s the use of the eye candy if things crash on you?
KDE 3.5 almost never gets into trouble, no matter how maxed things are on my desktop. Oh well. Maybe when version 5.0 is rolling out, the developers will have perfected KDE 4.X
-j
June 8th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Yep, the devs really got too full of themselves this time. Been a KDE user since 1.x; I’m using a mix of Gnome and Xfce now. Likin’ it better each day.
Tried to like KDE 4.x with Fedora 9, openSUSE 11 RC1, and Kubuntu. It was terrible and should never have been released–it’s not going to get any better, either. –dB
June 8th, 2008 at 2:03 am
I am writing from a Gnome machine. I recently converted after seeing KDE 4.0 and working with it for a while. I suppose I could have stayed with KDE 3.5.9. However, why stay with something that is not going to be the future? Let’s hope that KDE gets it together, but isn’t fault not with the distributions that decided to include KDE 4.0 before it was fully cooked?
June 8th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Yep, it sucks. It might be better later, but for now…
The devs got bored doing what works for their users and wanted to do something “interesting”. Users don’t want interesting systems, they want systems that work. Sadly, at least right now, that’s not KDE 4.x.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:43 am
Please everyone, nothing is keeping you from NOT using KDE 4 and perhaps stay with KDE 3.5 a little longer while the 4 series matures - security updates and bugfixes are still released for 3.5. In fact Kubuntu 8.04 stayed with 3.5, and only released a community remix with KDE 4 for you, if you was ready to face the fact that you probably would find things missing or malfunctioning. I agree that some things in KDE 4 needs work, and was too a little disappointed when I first tried Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 4 out. Especially the K-Menu was to slow and unuseful for me, fortunately it seems that KDE4.1 released (for Kubuntu) today gives the opportunity to switch to the old menu style. But after all experience and early reviews from the web told me not to expect much from KDE X.0 versions, so I stayed with 3.5 on my everyday workstations without regret. And for sure KDE 4 is not KDE 3.5, you need to think different, just like when you switch from Windows to Linux….
June 8th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Agree. A lot of missing polish in KDE 4.0. UI responsiveness is hell bad. (IN a Core2Duo 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD). Menu and window drawing is slow, window resizing slow and buggy, panel and plasmoids freaky faulty… should be called KDE 4.0 Pre-alpha (Buggiest edition)
June 8th, 2008 at 8:09 am
I thought it was just me; I am glad to see that others find KDE4 difficult to use and cluttered as well. I think the KDE team was busy trying to duplicate Vista’s look and feel so much that they forgot about ease-of-use.
I think they should have concentrated their efforts more into
making the desktop less cluttered and easier to use than trying to duplicate Vista…
I am trying very hard to love linux. As a long time Windows user, I still do not understand how XP and even 2000 can effortlessly detect all my hardware but even the lastest Linux edition ( Ubuntu, or Fedora 9) is still struggeling with device drivers - that is where the energy shoild be concentrated…
Ed
June 8th, 2008 at 9:05 am
O.K. I’m a GNOME User at all. Either way I’ve recently used KDE 3.5, too. But trying KDE4 gives me the same feeling than yours. I wanted to start an App -> Crash, move the Panel? -> doesn’t work. O.K it was back in February but hearing now that there are still so much problems … If KDE 4.1 really doesn’t delay it won’t be a good release.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Okay, so it’s different. But to say that it suck is taking it to far.
One. No crash problemes on my computer.
Two. Keeps a nice speed. Not as fast as some, but improving
P4 3 ghz. 1 GB internal memory.
Seems you comments boils down to, it’s not what I’m used to. Well, nothing new is what we are used too, that’s why they call it new. Progress, not stagnation. If you don’t like it. Well, don’t use it.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
It’s not about “i’m not used to it”. Think of the different windows managers and desktop environments in Linux - I’ve used them all. USED, not “tried”. The main problem with KDE 4 is that it is too buggy to be used. I greatly respect the work developers did on it, it was a big leap. But that doesn’t change the fact that it crashes a LOT.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
[…] been a KDE user for many years. Maybe it?s just me, maybe the UI world is changing, but the newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All […]
June 8th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
The great mistake KDE team did has been calling their developement platform KDE 4.0 rather than KDE 3.99 “Please do not include me in your distribution”. A lot of people tries 4.0 and gets frustrated because it is not ready for the users.
However telling “kde 4 sucks big time” doesn’t make any sense. KDE devs do know about the shortcomings in this new 4 series; they just need the time to fix them.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3472
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/14/fedora-9-and-the-road-to-kde4
Meanwhile please stick to KDE 3.5.9 - 3.5.10 or whatever the d.m. you prefer.
P.S.: the slow resizing issue is due to Qt 4.3 shortcomings. Please wait till this fall and take a look at KDE 4.1 in F10, K8.10, M2009.0, D5.0 and friends.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I’m excited to see what happens with the 4.x series! Did anybody see the screencast done for the upcoming release. To me the work that has been done is purely impressive. It is completely changing the paradigm of what to expect out of a desktop and I figure that will put off many people, but I suspect other full desktops will be playing catch up for along time once kde 4.x has matured.
My new motto for myself is put up or shut. All the complainers with petty comments are just singing to the choir, it’s obnoxious and worthless. You are not helping at all!
June 8th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
It’s not the alpha-quality of the code that bothers me, it’s the flash for the sake of flash. The new main “menu” is an abomination, an obstruction to getting the application I want started.
Themes don’t bother me, because themes can be changed. Icons can be substituted, effects turned off (hopefully).
So unless KDE4 further evolves so that it has something like a “Look and work like KDE3″ option, I’ll be moving over to XFCE or whatever.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Users who want to stay on the cutting edge of OSS development should not complain that the guys giving their software for free are not doing enough. Nobody forced anybody to consume something that is new (unlike proprietary software). The right approach is to help in the development constructively or be patient. KDE 4.1 Beta is already looking fantastic. While development continues in 4.1, 4.2 and onwards things will get even better. At no point in time will any software be perfect.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I would counsel patience. I have a dual installation of KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 on my system. I use the KDE 3.5 for day to day stuff, but keep patching and experimenting with the KDE 4.0 to see what’s coming.
As someone else mentioned, the transition from KDE2 to KDE3 was painful. If memory serves, KDE3.3 was the first, really usable KDE3 release. I was expecting the same with KDE4 as the transition from Qt3 to Qt4 was huge. Yes, it’s not ready for prime time, and yes, the distributions should not be hyping it as a ready-for-prime-time desktop. But please don’t hammer on the KDE folks - they’ve been very upfront about the limitations, and have even stated there won’t be a complete release of some of the major applications (e.g. PIM) until 4.1.
I don’t think folks truly appreciate how radical the rewrite had to be for this code. Qt changed so much between versions 3 and 4 that KDE had to be pretty much rearchitected from scratch to take advantage of the benefits of Qt4.
They are slowing addressing the complaints (menus, etc) about usability. Some of that was adapting the old systems to the new architecture. Let’s have a little patience and see how things play out.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
man you’re late. kde 4.0 was out, like half a year ago?
June 8th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
you got your visitors, including me. But, I won’t ever be back here to linuxrant.com. your argument is transparent.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
There’s a certain amount of “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” at play here.
I tend towards pretty utilitarian UI preferences, so I’m with everyone complaining about the emphasis on the “giant glassy bubble-icons” at the cost of actual functionality (like being able to resize the “task manager” and still see the “widgets” on them [e.g. being able to read the clock]).
Still, I do recall quite a lot of whining from the other camp about how “flat” and boring the 3.5x series looked. Judging by the complaints at the time, it certainly seemed as though shiny eye-candy was the biggest issue. I suspect they just ended up over-prioritizing on it, not realizing that the reason the eye-candy complaints seemed to be a majority was that most of the other types of shortcomings in KDE had been taken care of by 3.5.9.
I’m ambivalent on the labelling of “4.0″ as though it were a “real” release. It’s true that it’s really more of a “tech preview” than a ready-for-prime-time thing. On the other hand, the developers had been saying exactly that for some time, and if they had labelled it “3.99-pre” it almost certainly wouldn’t have become available on most people’s desktops, and the developers would never get the feedback they need to make the 4.x series practical.
I’m holding out hope that 4.1 will be a substantial improvement.
(Incidentally, I’ve been assuming that the whole reason for the KDE4 rewrite was simply to shift over to QT4.x from QT3.)
June 8th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Yea - I have been playing with 4.0 - waste of time (should be classified as beta or earlier). Start thing stinks! The old 3.x gui was quicker to use, could put icons on desktop that we ok size, and the Gwenview remake for 4.0 is a backward step from the wonderful ease of use Gwenview with all the Kipi Plugins from before (don’t want a DigiKam, as Gwenvew was better than that, now, the new version stinks… and so it will be sad that the old Gwenview will fall away with no support once KDE 4.x is launched! If you wanted a GUI that worked then look back at NT 4 or Win2000 - simple and to the point, everything MS has done since is a disaster (and KDE 4.0 is just following that stupidity)!
June 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
KDE4 made me turn to Fluxbox, at least for now. Too cute and unstable for me.
I seriously hope it becomes more stable in 4.1.
June 8th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Yes, KDE 4.0 is actually 3.9; yes, there’s a lot of revolutionary changes; but still, users expect software to work. In my opinion KDE guys had unrealistic expectations about their capabilities, and now are facing the reality. I think they should have followed a more cautious plan, but now the only thing to do is hope they pull through.
June 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Guys, please… understand that KDE4.0 is not KDE4! KDE4 was all about stabalising the underlying infrasctructure, since even Qt4.4 (on which KDE4 is based) was only released in May.
KDE 4.1 (aka the real KDE4 shebang) will be released on July 29′th. Keep your hats on.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I really hate being a troll.
But this blog post is ridiculous.
NVM all the it’s free so you don’t get to complain bullshit.
KDE4 is a landmark in Linux development in so many ways. Just in it being cross-platform alone.
All the eye candy comes in at much lower resource cost because of QT4, and it helps the OS look up to date. If you don’t like the start menu just use the old one, or could you not figure out how to drag and drop it into the panel?
Files and directories utilizing metadata has been an ideal for years and has finally come into play thanks to KDE4.
The abstraction of hardware will make application development much simpler, allowing the application devs to focus more on features in their program, than interfacing with hardware and subsystems.
There is so much advancement under the hood of KDE4 that it makes all other Desktop Environments seem obsolete (including KDE3).
All that being said, yes there are some bugs, but instead of whining about it, go file a bug report or see if you could be useful on an existing bug. Otherwise my recommendation is to switch to gnome or xfce, but don’t come complaining when all the best apps are being written for KDE4 because of it’s simplicity.
And to the commenter who thinks KDE4 focused on eye candy above functionality. Your just plain wrong. They’ve focused so much on functionality, that eye candy and end user experience has gone by the wayside. Which could be fixed in 4.1 with feature freezes, but could take till 4.2 to be a stable Desktop Environment.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I believe that KDE 4 is an excellent improvement over the previous series. Of course, as it is now, it is quite buggy and not nearly as featureful as KDE 3.5.x. Still, I have been following the development since before the first alpha and it is incredible how quickly the series is coming together. I’m not sure how some people came to the conclusion that KDE 4 is bloated - it actually runs faster on my old computer than does KDE 3, and it uses less RAM. Just don’t turn on compositing yet, and don’t clutter your desktop with plasmoids. It is much more responsive and prettier overall than KDE 3. I can’t wait until KDE 4.1 stabilizes, since they have added most of the missing panel functionality that existed in the 3 series. I also think that the concept of having folder views as widgets rather than the traditional desktop icons is an excellent idea, and it fixes the poor implementation of desktop icons in KDE 4.0. The modularization of the whole desktop is also a major step forward. Don’t forget, too, that KDE 4 has become even more platform independent, and that it can now be installed on Windows systems. For those of us who are forced to work on a Windows platform, we can now use the miracle that is Kate even when we are not on our home systems.
The point of this is, yes, KDE 4 is not working well right now and should not be used by people who just want a nice, stable system with few problems, but it is moving rapidly in the right direction, and in the next couple years, the new technologies developed for KDE 4 will make the platform much better than it could have been had the devs stuck with the architecture from previous releases.
In short: If you don’t like KDE 4, stick with 3.5.9 or XFCE or Gnome, but try it again with each major release. Better yet, use KDE 4.0.x now, and tell the devs what’s wrong with it and how to make it better, rather than saying “it sucks” and that’s final. Open source, after all, succeeds with constructive criticism rather than dismissal.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
[…] been a KDE user for many years. Maybe it?s just me, maybe the UI world is changing, but the newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All […]
June 8th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
[…] been a KDE user for many years. Maybe it?s just me, maybe the UI world is changing, but the newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All […]
June 8th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I use KDE4 as my primary desktop and find it very usable. I really like the new menu and dont have any probs modifying the panel. I dont know what you guys are complaining about, have you upgraded to the latest snapshot? Its a given that its going to be atleast to 4.3 before we see parity with 3.5 but we all knew that. Quit your whining and start using it and submitting bug reports. As far as stablity goes, i have a few plasmoid probs and occassionally a crash when logging out, but all-in-all for the amount of time I use it (16hours per day) I find it more than stable enough to stick with as my primary environment.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I’m one of those ancients who still remembers transition from kde2 to kde3 (God, I feel old now :( ). 6 whole years have gone by and people have partially become attached to the good ol’ stable and feature-rich kde. I can assure you though that this was not the case immediately after kde3 was introduced. Although back then I was a rather fresh linux user, I remember it crashing on a quite frequent basis and having all kinds of problems which were absent in the preceding 2.x branch. I can’t recall whether there was much complaining from the community about these issues at the time, but then again the only ones who used linux back then were pure-bred geeks. Or may be we had a lot fewer expectations in 2002 - who knows *shrug*
Regardless of the past, what is happening now is rather understandable. There has been so much publicity, fuzz and hype about kde4 for a prolonged period of time that all kde-lovers have gotten their expectations up sky-high. To be perfectly honest, I too was underwhelmed after trying 4.0.0. There were many neat ideas, but there also were glaringly absent features, tons of bugs and some choices made by the kde team that were to say the least questionable. Potential was not immediately visible (at least to me), but after reading some online documents concerning the kde4 sub-projects I would still consider that potential is very much alive and well.
Now I have installed 4.1beta1 and I can tell that there are improvements. I can certainly not find any arguments which would make me move away from my 3.5.9 at this very moment though. That said, I am sure that at some point or another (probably around 4.2 or 4.3) things will change for the better. All old 3.5-features will be implemented and new will start arriving. The KDE-community is rather active one, so don’t despair.
So, boys and girls, hang on to your 3.5-s and your pants, in time we’ll be there. Nonetheless we are in for one long wait.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I think people are trying to kill KDE4 before it’s ready here.
As explained in previous comments KDE4.0 is a developer release (consider it post-beta testing) and the aim of 4.0 was to give developers a base to port their applications from 3.x to KDE4. Now I am trying KDE 4.1 and I have noticed a massive increase in responsiveness (bear in mind I’m running a 64 bit version on a AMD 6400+ and found 4.0 sluggish) and I can hand on heart say the desktop is really coming together with this release.
Plus, to people complaining about flashiness - does a desktop environment really have to look ugly? I hated the look of KDE3 (though liked the way it works) and find KDE4.1 has captured the essence of KDE3 quite nicely.
June 17th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Are you to young to remember the gnome2 series? Or the kde3 switch? People whined as hell back then, and they learned. You obviously didn’t. The underlying libraries ROCK, and developing for kde is a dream, even compared to mac os x. KDE 4 will, as kde3 does now, rock.
People whining and not doing what they can to help is what I hate the most about open source.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Wait for KDE4.2
June 19th, 2008 at 1:44 am
I think the author is being kind. The only question I have is why aren’t major distributions who include KDE 4 also alowing for installation of the older stable 3.5 KDE until 4.0 gets to be stable enough for widespread use?
June 24th, 2008 at 10:55 am
KDE4 is plain horrid. I’m done being a beta tester, I don’t care about the KDE 2-3 transition, I got job to do now, not in 6 months. I’m heavily disappointed, they should have waited for another year to release it. It doesn’t even have proxy support and they keep ignoring it as a priority. KDE is the only window manager that I like, now I have to admit the sad fact that I switched back to xp after 4 years. *That* sucks, even more than KDE4. 3.5 won’t be supported for ever so I’m making the transition, the last thing I want to do is use KDE4. I’m not angry or resentful, simply disappointed. I always been a heavy supporter of KDE but recently I’ve been put down by the way Aaron Seigo treates everybody on his blog. This is not the friendly community I fell in love with years ago. Oh well, moving on.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I have to agree, KDE 4.0 and that abomination known as dolphin both suck. Talk about limiting the users ability to tweak and fine tune! I have tried KDE 4.0 with OpenSuSE 11.0 and while it’s pretty, it’s completely useless when it comes to getting things done efficiently.
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.
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
KDE 4 is a very good example of second system syndrome in action.
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.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Perhaps these issues will be fixed, but in the mean time, is there a way to get kde3 back! ?
July 14th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
KDE4 sucks! It really sucks! I had great expectations. Anyway, I totally had all the problem said before. KDE guys please do something about it. Few moves, why dolphin??? are we trying to please kids? If so have options - Novice / Intermediate / Expert level customization. I hated gnome so much now I do KDE4. I have been using KDE for last 5/6 years or so. Why this big changes??? Why? There are huge usability issues with KDE4! What a blunder!.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:03 am
kde4 is a pile of crap. if you want to see the difference between a well managed linux distro with a highly polished desktop environment and an alpha-grade conceptual snapshot of something in development, just run ubuntu hardy 8.04 next to fedora core 9, and try adjusting the desktop settings of both to suit your tastes. the difference will be crystal clear in minutes.
kde4: EPIC FAIL.
August 5th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
slow qt4 kde4 crap!the old 3.5 was much faster.
gues we are forced to use fluxbox,lxde,icewm from now on. bye bye kde… RIP or should we start a safe/fork kde 3.x campagne?
August 6th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I never did like KDE. Too many redundant programs. K-Word, K-Write, K-This & K-That. Gnome is far more streamlined and usable. KDE has always been, in my opinion, way too messy. This would be a great time for all you KDE users to switch to Gnome!
November 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Yep, KDE4 sucks badly. It took a step back. The previous KDE concept was just fine in my opinion. For my usage, there was nothing else more that it needed.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I’ve been using KDE since 2000, and I am currently running Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), with all the recommended and other updates installed.
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?)