2008/10/24 Tero Pesonen <teropesonen@tuffmail.com>:
Err, sorry to butt in with something not too important, but frankly, KDE 3.5 never was very stable -- at least not in the kinds of use of I have put it through. Where my desktop use differs from the average user is in that due to my accessibility needs I have to employ high contrast colour settings. Not a big deal, one might say: Simply change the colours in KControl and be done with it. Too bad almost everything in KDE breaks once you deviate from the "black text on a whitish background" thinking. (Unlike, say, on Windows XP) Konqueror's accessibility stylesheet feature is more or less broken, too. And for some reason the option to load plugins only on demand has not worked since 3.5.5 or 3.5.3 (can't remember.) KMail renders HTML mail with no heed to Konqueror's style sheet settings, resulting in HTML mail that I simply cannot read. There are many other bugs in Kmail, too, and it leaks memory when transferring messages between IMAP accounts. (Thank God there's always for Pine for jobs like that.) The Kontact suite adds more problems.
There are even very basic text editing bugs in the text editor part that Kate and others use. So I have to run Emacs in Konsole. These are known and reported bugs, but will not be fixed as 3.5 is dead and buried. The sheer number of serious UI rendering bugs in 3.5 under high contrast mode is astonishing. (Serious=Text disappears or is forcefully rendered as white on top of white background or vice versa) I personally give a damn about prettyness -- having been using accessibility modes for years has alienated me from anything even remotely "pretty" -- I only need things to work. I even force my own colours onto web pages and have them to use sensible fonts and font sizes. The other day I had to use for a moment a desktop with default UI settings and had to access a certain web site. I was surprised how nice the web looks these days with normal font sizes and colours, instead of the white-on-black web I live in. LOL.
I have reported KDE bugs over the years. I don't know if even one has been fixed despite their being reproduceable. I think KDE developer community is undermanned, but that's probably true for most open source projects these days. There are not enough developers.
But that won't change the fact that KDE 3.5.10 is not polished or stable. I've been forced to use Windows at work for the last couple of weeks (first time since 2001), and I was surprised how well it works under highcontrast settings. I almost got the feeling that some one has had the mode tested before sending the code to CD presses.
The problem with Windows is that it is very difficult to use and inefficient to work with. Also, most of the software that I use and have got used to is native to *NIX and probably not available on Windows.
I've narrowed my next desktop options down to Gnome and Windows, though Vista is not exactly what I would like to run on my desktop. Still, I don't know yet which will come on top. Probably Gnome. At least it runs with SUSE and is much more consistent than KDE is, which lessens the number of (and the risk for) stupid UI bugs with the price of being less configurable. And KDE 4 looks like a disaster anyway -- a poor man's version of Vista or something. KDE 3.5 was, despite its numerous bugs, always a user's desktop. It is very unfortunate if KDE developers no longer want to carry that heritage, but simply content with adding fudge onto a Windows-like core.
I'll build a new system next spring or thereabout, so we'll see then. Gnome looks like the most promising environment for the next couple of years or so. Unfortunately, SUSE is not exactly a GNOME-distro (I've never quite gotten it to work under SUSE, or at least not since 8.1), so a switch to Gnome would likely entail a switch to another distro as well, which I would not like to do if I'm to stay on Linux... ah well.
Could you post links to the bugs? I'd like to triage them. I also have accessibility issues, in fact, the one thing preventing me from moving to KDE 4.x is an accessibility issue. Other than that, almost all of the bugs that I have filed with KDE have been addressed. -- Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת ä-ö-ü-ß-Ä-Ö-Ü