Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (673 mails)

[Will Stephenson <wstephenson@xxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 07 September 2008 16:39:55 MH wrote:
> I've played around with KDE4.0 (which was early beta at best IMO) and 4.1
> (still beta). These are the things I don't like about it:

Ok, I'm collecting wishlists again.

> Unable to hide the panel (I've loved this feature since it was first
> implemented in Windows. Reduces clutter, increases screen area);

Implemented in trunk and planned to be backported.  The trunk implementation 
only has auto-hide, did you use the manual hide buttons?

> Unable to locate "launcher" icons on the panel where they will stay;
>
> "Launcher" icons radomly change location on the panel even at "default"
> locations;

This must be a bug.  Is it reported?

> Unable to resize icons;

On the panel?  Historical note: their size used to be configurable until about 
KDE 3.1, then they were changed to automatically take the largest size that 
fits on the configured panel height. 

Folder View takes its icon size from the configured (in System Settings) 
Desktop/File Manager icon size.

> Unable to keep icons in designated areas of the desktop without constantly
> locking and unlocking them (with 3.x you could "align to grid" and be done
> with it);

Folder View aligns pretty well to grid by default.  Have you tried this?

> Unable to assign different backgrounds to virtual desktops to make them
> easy to identify;

Go vote on https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155150 . Currently KDE 4.2 is 
a way off feature freeze, so there is still time to get things like this re-
added.

> Lack of stability. KDE4.1 has crashed on me repeatedly;

Our packages aren't just 'released' 4.1.1, we are constantly updating them 
with fixes that go into the branch.  So report specific bugs and we'll get the 
stability up.

> Lack of key native applications. Yes, the 3.x series variants can be
> installed and run, but not without a great deal of extra libraries and
> assorted cruft (isn't removing cruft and "bloat" one of the design goals of
> the 4.x series?)

Most of these are being ported.  It's true that a number will still be present 
as KDE 3 apps only for 11.1 - digikam (maybe), konversation, koffice.  You're 
absolutely right about streamlining being a KDE 4 goal, but the sheer number 
of KDE apps has made it impossible to port everything immediately.  

I don't give much weight to the 'extra libraries' argument on a general 
purpose desktop or laptop though.  On a SSD-based netbook, sure.  However disk 
space and ram being what they are, the extra cruft (a few tens of Mb) involved 
in installing KDE 3 and KDE 4 in parallel is no great increase over the bloat 
we all have from having OpenOffice, Mozilla, Eclipse and maybe a couple of g* 
apps installed.

Will