On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:12:32AM +0200, Sven Burmeister wrote:
Am Sonntag, 28. August 2011, 21:24:43 schrieb Insomniac:
KDE4 is much, much better than KDE3.
Says you and some few others. I've yet to see an overwhelming majority of people speaking up and out about it, and I don't mean just in this mailing list either, I mean all over the web.
I have used KDE3 on my laptop, which was my main working machine, for over 5 years, with Suse 9.2, and I was very satisfied. September 2010 the laptop was at its end, I bought a new one, and with it I installed KDE4, first with Suse 11.3, then with 11.4. I have put a lot of effort into it, trying to feel at least partially well with it, but KDE4 is just partially crap. The decline from KDE3 to KDE4 is for me personally the biggest disaster experienced in the open-source world. I started using Suse around 1999, I think it was 6.2 (Suse was my first Linux distribution, and since then I sticked to it), and since then I used KDE. So I have some experience with it. The current state of KDE (using 4.6.0, all updates which come with the Suse repositories, but not 4.7 -- I guess there will be too many problems yet) is regarding usability (stability) rather precisely what used to be early KDE versions: everything works partially, it's a permanent workaround. HOWEVER, different from the time then, the feeling now is very different: at that time KDE was on the way up, it developed in the right direction, and one felt progress. Finally, what came with Suse 9.2, was great, and ONLY HAD TO BE FINISHED (polishing and so). On my workstation in my office I used Suse 10.0 with KDE3 even longer, just last week I installed Suse 11.4 on it, due to some hardware problems; again, there I was very satisfied with KDE3. (Last week I destroyed the harddisk of the laptop, and there I ran KDE3 again, a last time: was actually a sad feeling, seeing a working desktop again, based on enlightenment (see below), where I feel that might never come again; I would know how to produce a desktop, however that would be an enormous effort, and I don't have at all the time for this.) My interpretation of KDE4 is that the degeneration can only be understood as mental corruption by the microsoft/apple world: a radical change in the underlying design took place with KDE4, which now tries to simulate the various Windows-versions. (This goes hand in hand with the general degeneration in society: although we see that business destroys us, it gets mightier and mightier.) The key word here are VIRTUAL DESKTOPS: this is in my vision of the desktop the key element, moving away from the bad image of a "desktop", moving towards, say, a "building" with many rooms, for the many different (permanent!) activities a complex human being is involved with. KDE4 embodies the microsoft/apply direction, with basically one big window open plus a lot of gadgets around it, for distraction. Virtual desktops do no longer work with KDE4; perhaps with version 4.11 it might work again, and then it could be tolerable. However, there will come QT5, with it KDE5, and this will then likely be the end of KDE. Just looking at current developments in KDE (and QT), one sees that it develops in a fundamentally wrong direction: it's all about tiny devices, consumers, not the enlightened person who needs a powerful system, but the consumer who needs distraction from his/her alienated work place, and who shall to be tied up in the system, without control. A fact: I have submitted many bug reports to KDE over the years. With KDE3, altogether there have been over 1000 e-mails exchanged. To everything there was a reaction, a discussion, mostly finally some solution. With KDE4 I only got two small reactions yet, which didn't touch the real subject. It might be that they are overwhelmed with crash reports. But I also think that anything which concerns the core desktop is no longer of importance for KDE. Oliver P.S. I hope very much that at some point Suse will support the Trinity project http://www.trinitydesktop.org/, which very unfortunately only considers Ubuntu etc. Then one could try it out. P.S.P.S. I think a basic design problem of KDE (3 and 4) is about the configuration. This is bad in KDE3+4, however with KDE4 I have the impression that it finally abandoned the goal of (complete) user control, but their ideal is the "automatic system", where most users just push buttons on the surface. To add injury to the insult, that automatic system (of course) doesn't work. P.S.P.S.P.S. I conjecture that the dividing line between those who prefer KDE3 resp. KDE4 is precisely the use of virtual desktops: those who prefer KDE3 will have a large (so well, just 20 is possible) number of virtual desktops, in permanent use (for example on my workstation I had always around 200-300 windows open; as I said, I want to live in a "house", or "building", not on a shallow "desktop"), those who prefer KDE4 will not care much about it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org