Thanks for the great time, KDE
After years of being a dedicated KDE user it seems like it's finally time for me to go "back" to Gnome. I once tried KDE 4.x from the Debian 'experimental' branch knowing that it's probably unstable and will require a lot of patience. But I was willing to report bugs and dive into new things. It didn't take long though to find out that graphics were extraordinarily slow with the new "desktop effects". The worst was resizing a 'konsole' (KDE terminal window). It took 25 seconds until the window was resized and redrawn! On the interweb I found KDE developers rant about NVidia who didn't support some special extension they needed. They suggested to get an ATI card instead. (No, thanks, I was struggling with the crappy radeon and fglrx drivers on my new work laptop and am sick of ATI for Xorg.) Or I could use a bare XTerm instead. Yeah, right. So I couldn't use the desktop effects. After all I used the non-free NVidia driver for years and it never let me down. I don't mind doing without eye candy. But the desktop effects were about the only serious way to switch between virtual desktops. Point the mouse into a corner or edge of the screen and get a "zoom-out" bird's view of the virtual desktops. Nice but quickly annoying. Besides you had to push the mouse pointer a few pixels "into" the edge (it's not sufficient to just hit the edge) which means that after 10 desktop switches I had to lift the mouse and set it back on the mousepad. Another annoying issue is that up to now I can't assign functionality to every key on my keyboard any more. I had a neat trick by having 3x3=9 virtual desktops and use my numpad keys 1 to 9 to page through them. "0" on the numpad opened a new shell window. "+" on the numpad maximized a window. But now I couldn't assign any of those numpad keys. I pressed the "1" but KDE didn't detect "Numpad_1" but just "1". Guess how useful it is to not be able to type the "1" any more. There is a low-priority bug report for KDE from users who want this fixed but it will likely not happen any time soon. So the only way to switch desktops was to poke on the tiny pager widget in my panel. Yuk. Not to mention that I couldn't put icons on the desktop any longer. There was just a sissy widget that I could use for that purpose but it didn't work like a conqueror or dolphin at all. It was pretty amusing when in KDE 4.2 there was suddenly a feature to re-enable the old behavior. Let me guess, KDE developers - I wasn't the only user you couldn't persuade of the new paradigm? Next evil thing was performance. KDE 4 takes ages to load. Simple window managers get me started within seconds. Even Gnome. But KDE takes 30 seconds until it's loaded plus some disk grinding in the background. And memory usage wasn't nice either. And what finally made me mad was stabilty - or rather lack thereof. Everytime the screen saver ran my kbluetooth module crashed. kmail crashed even more frequently than before. (I loved kmail for it's great customizability and feature set.) plasma (the actual window manager) died at least twice a day. Suddenly the panels were looking ugly or crashing. As a Debian developer I have to follow the 'unstable' branch on my workstation. And there is no distinction between KDE 3 and KDE 4 any more so a 'dist-uprade' inevitably gets all of my applications upgraded to KDE 4 (plus an hour of manual engineering in 'aptitude' because half of my applications weren't upgraded automatically due to different application names and I had a mixed environment). So there I was with KDE 4.2. I really worked with it for a month. I tried hard to get acquainted to its bloatedness and instability. It's really a nice technological preview of what might be possible in the future. Everything is really automatic. Mounting external media. New ways to find programs (although I'm not happy with the new K start menu). Funny effects and nice eye candy. But it's far from the rock solid desktop environment that I was used from KDE 3.5.8. So there I am on Gnome now. I was switching back and forth. One day working on KDE 4.2 and the other day using Gnome 2.26. And although it makes me feel sad I think it's finally time to say goodbye to KDE 4. I have invested a good amount of time and energy into it - even just from a user perspective. But it's not ready. And I finally need to get some work done. A number of projects suffered from my playfulness (my ispmail tutorial, screenshots.debian.net, debexpo, my kids) and it's time to get back to work. And Gnome was pretty surprising. With compiz I have the KDE desktop effects working (here they really do) and they are all customizable. I can assign keys properly again (even the numpad). Everything is pretty fast and stable. I have replaced kmail and its buggy "shared calendar" feature by Icedove (aka Thunderbird) with the "Lightning" plugin. Worked from the first minute and hasn't crashed in a week (just have to remember next time to install libstdc++5 to be able to use Lightning). With enigmail I finally have a proper simple working PGP key management that doesn't die and is buggy like hell like in kgpg. And there's the nice "Nostalgy" add-on that allows me to file emails into IMAP folder quickly again - a feature that just kmail seemed to support so far. Oh, and I see new mail instantly because Icedove supports the IDLE command while kmail has never learned that neat little trick. The Gnome file manager isn't really great for my taste but it's doing its job (dolphin is just much nicer). It's not as nice as KDE but I had to learn that working and stable weighs more than nice. The hard way. And many things I liked about KDE 4 (like starting a new program with Alt-F2 and having a smart application finder and simple calculator in one) are built into Gnome, too. So why bother. Thanks, KDE, for the years of fun and service. I'll surely miss you. Get back to me should you grow up one day.
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12 comments
I know its probably too late,
I know its probably too late, and the overhead might be too much but it is worth remembering that you don't necessarily need to run unstable to upload.
With pbuilder, virtualisation, or just plain chroots, you can develop and upload and keep your system running Lenny.
@Steve: You are right. That
@Steve: You are right. That would allow me to run Lenny on the workstation. But somehow I'm schizo because I'm interested in newest version while desiring the stability of 'stable'. :) Most of the time working on 'unstable' is fine for me. It's just a pity that the packages for KDE 3 and KDE 4 can't be installed side-by-side. I could imagine that many people would like to stay on 'unstable' but use KDE 3 for a while.
>> There was just a sissy
>> There was just a sissy widget [...]
Lol, I'm sure that if you give it enough time some one will develop a... butch, manly (?) widget .
Hi! I think you're right
Hi!
I think you're right about a lot of things, but not others. The shortcuts issue... you're right, that's a bad behaviour, so I'm gonna report it (if it hasn't been reported yet).
About inestability... since KDE 4.1 was released, the only two applications I've seen crashing were KRunner (the Alt+F2 application) and Ark, but not so much. I'm using ArchLinux and KDE 4.2.2 from KDEmod, so this is not the most stable distro haha
About the "new desktop", of course you miss the old desktop but this is really nice! I love folderviews :) I used to have a messed desktop, but folderviews saved my live hahaha Now my desktop is really tidy :)
Then definitely KDE4 has to be improved a lot, but it's prettly usable right now! I think that the problems you're suffering are not normal... may be because you have a 'mixed' system like you said?
Anyway, each one can use whatever Desktop Environment he wants, so I hope you'll feel comfortable using Gnome :)
I'm using KDE4 with awesome
I'm using KDE4 with awesome as window manager an am very happy with it:
http://www.koch.ro/blog/index.php?/archives/115-Found-my-desktop-for-liv...
"The folder views are a
"The folder views are a religious issue. If the widgets worked just like normal dolphin windows it would be great."
OK, I don't get this. The "traditional desktop" with its icons, as in KDE 3.x, and Gnome, does not work like a normal dolphin window. You can drag and drop between a folderview and a normal dolphin window though, as you could with the old desktop, and I've not come across any behaviour from a traditional desktop that isn't in the folderview.
To me, it just sounds like that on this point you're attacking KDE4.2 for something that it isn't actually any worse at than any other desktop.
(Disclaimer: I'm a happy user of 4.2)
@Karellen: This may have
@Karellen: This may have changed in 4.2. I have started with 4.1 and I think it was back then when drag-and-drop didn't work. I didn't mind a desktop-like directory widget but somehow I had to perform a lot of mouse clicks. In 4.2 it seemed to have improved. I don't mind getting used to new paradigms of working on my desktop. But at least it should be no slower and less stable than before.
@Sergio: Thanks for your
@Sergio: Thanks for your comment. I was serious about the crashes of plasma and other vital parts. I do a lot with kmail and is has never been really stable with 3.5.8 but it has been increasingly instable with 4.2. I already had an icon for a shortcut to kill all hanging kio_imap4 processes. That's a pretty bad sign.
Yes, KDE 4 has improved a lot. 4.0 was unusable. 4.1 was barely usable. And now 4.2 is usable if you are patient. But it's still some way to go for a "just works well" experience.
The folder views are a religious issue. If the widgets worked just like normal dolphin windows it would be great. But you can't really drag'n'drop IIRC but you have to work yourself through the context menu. Besides I don't have many widgets on my desktop anyway because usually my background is invisible thanks to dozens of windows I have open. So if I want to see something permanently I put it into the panels.
Regarding the 'mixed' system. Actually I think I have a plain KDE 4.2 system now because I even manually got rid of the 3.5.8 parts that might have caused confusion. But I'm working heavily with several widgets and windows and switching virtual desktops like a DJ.
Gnome wasn't my first choice. But I'm not geeky enough for "awesome" which my boss uses. :)
I have 3 linux partitions:
I have 3 linux partitions: Debian Squeeze, Debian Sid and Ubuntu 9.04
Since I upgraded to KDE 4.2 in Sid I have found myself using mainly my Squeeze partition. I don't have the latest hardware but KDE 3.5.9 was working great for me. KDE 4.2 is sluggish. I don't want to have to spend money on hardware to satisfy the software so...I ll stick to Squeeze.
@Christoph I was wondering
@Christoph
I was wondering if, instead of running lenny and virtualizing or chrooting sid, if you would be better off running sid, and using schroot to use lenny's kde3?
I have been using kde for years now, and after reading your article, I'm wondering if I'll also be required to switch to gnome if I can't get kde4 to do for me what kde3 does so well.
In my spare time, I have been playing with kde4 in virtualbox (I started with kubuntu jaunty, but I'm now starting to use sid since kde4 is installable now), and I'm slowly trying to get my environment converted.
Konsole was one of the first applications that I tried to get reconfigured. On my system, konsole appears like a plain xterm, as I have the menubar, tabbar, and scrollbar disabled. It took a while to figure out how to get kde4 to have the same appearance. I've had to use the [$i] option in konsolerc to keep the konsoles starting with the same size, as without using the lockdown, the next konsole to appear will be the same size as the last one that was resized.
I think that in a couple of weeks, I'll have time to play around with kde4 again, and resume the process of converting my configuration. I might be a bit more entrenched into using kde than you have been, and I'm really hoping that I can get kde4 working for me as well as I have kde3 working now.
@Joseph: Thanks for your
@Joseph: Thanks for your comment. Usually I'd just stay on Lenny and wait for Squeeze to see if things will settle or if will still dislike KDE4 in a year or two. But I feel obliged to stay on 'unstable' ("Sid") to sort out general problems in Debian. And the more I try to work seriously on 'unstable' the more bugs I can find, report and help fix.
KDE4 in Kubuntu is actually nice to play with. Upgrading from KDE3 to KDE4 in Debian though isn't what I had expected. Lots of packages stay in KDE3 and don't get updated properly. From the package version/revision numbers it's hard to derive which packages can be removed or have to be upgraded manually.
And the 'konsole' issue was bugging me, too, a lot. First of all the konsole lost most of its configuration options. I loved the "three clicks select from the word to the end of the line" feature. It's gone. And that a new konsole gets the same size as the previously opened konsole is ridiculous. I need most windows in 80x25 and have a shortkey assigned to maximize it. KDE started forcing me to do things instead of helping me.
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