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I was hoping that they might finally get a fix in for this bug (and the likes thereof), which has been making printing under KDE a pain in the butt for the last couple of years (the 4th most hated KDE bug out there) - but nobody seems to care, even tho a patch is available. Nice going with that community process... sigh.

I'm using an exopc as development machine, for end-users, ARM-based devices, such as the NVidia Tegra base ones, or the Archos G9 are interesting options. Basically, as long as we can get kernel (and driver) sources from the device vendors, and the device has an open boot loader, we'll be able to get Plasma Active onto it. Here are two links showing interesting devices that run Plasma Active: http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet (Plasma Active on Archos G9) http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/24/plasma-active-arm (Plasma Active on NVidia Tegra 2)

I'm using an exopc as development machine, for end-users, ARM-based devices, such as the NVidia Tegra base ones, or the Archos G9 are interesting options. Basically, as long as we can get kernel (and driver) sources from the device vendors, and the device has an open boot loader, we'll be able to get Plasma Active onto it. Here are two links showing interesting devices that run Plasma Active: http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet (Plasma Active on Archos G9) http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/24/plasma-active-arm (Plasma Active on NVidia Tegra 2)

I fully agree! KDE left their desktop as is, and only applied their new design concepts to the tablet, where the pre-existing installed base was zero, and it made most sense. Looking @ it, it looks like it could do a good job giving any challenger to Android or iOS a run for their money, should anyone want a tablet platform w/ a differentiating but competitive interface. There is no way I'd have used such an interface for my desktop, but I can certainly see myself using it on a tablet.

Only suggestion to KDE - for a tablet interface, try giving those apps generic names like Music Player or OCR instead of Bangarang or Okular - don't let devs (w/ their knack for cute names) totally confuse your customers as to what the apps do. Similarly, try and lose the K before some of the apps, such as KSnapshot - at least for this, so that it looks less KDE centric and more user centric.

This is a good start:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation

The new generation (G9) Archos tablets look promising for running a more GNU/Linux than Android distro on them.

KDEs Plasma Active, on top of MER is being worked on:

http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet

And the general philosophy of Archos seems to be encouraging development of alternative firmwares (not without loosing warranty, though):

http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en

Have a look at Archos tablets. They support Debian on their gen8 series, but those are still a bit slow. People are already running debian on their gen9 products, and official support for that is coming soon.

See also:
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/Debian

Unfortunately I need Adobe on my work PC to enable comments - don't think Foxit handles this. Foxit 5.0 was a bit crap (broke in some ways) but 5.1 is better.

Thanks for the pointer to Okular, this might be a good option on Windows. Included in the KDE for Windows installer: http://windows.kde.org/download.php

Install the KDE Desktop (Kubuntu) then use the Kiosk Admin Tool.

KDE has had a kiosk mode for quite a while, leading me to believe it's quite mature by now. It even has a GUI setup tool.

Evince (gtk) and Okular (ex-kpdf, iirc, Qt) both seem pretty usable to me.

At work, I'm stuck with windows, and the Evince win32 port seems to work quite well there too. Only issue I ran into was that be default it tried to print things in landscape mode or something like that, and I didn't notice.
A nice feature is that it does djvu and postscript as well, instead of having multiple readers (although I seem to think ps might not work with windows in default, probably relies on ghostscript or so..?).

Heh heh, I know that one... I stopped keeping track of the zoo of new hardware and software a few years back, it was changing too fast to be worth my time since I don't build PCs for clients anymore... And it's so much easier to maintain the old stuff, besides around here that's mostly what I see. While back someone donated a bunch of Socket7/W95 machines to our user grope and I got 'em all running again and gave 'em to random passersby (except for one that was especially nice that I kept. :) Perfectly good for the minimal uses most people put a computer to, which around here means write a letter and check email on dialup.

Yeah, I remember those old ISA controllers and their unlabeled jumper hells, or worse yet, the MFM controllers that would only speak to certain families of HD and not a one of 'em labeled. I still have a couple working systems around here with not only MFM but one with Herc monochrome. Sometimes I've thought I'd like to have Herc in a 2nd monitor, cuz it's so much easier on the aging glare-sensitive eyes.

Oh, browsers. I have K-Meleon 1.5.3 installed (that's two years old) -- any huge leaps of functionality since then? I don't use it much because in some ways it's a little clunky. Anyway I didn't do anything special to install it.

[goes off, looks up this VCRedist] Apparently the IE5.0 installer updated all these same files. (I have an old Win2K-developer edition that unlike other IEs, didn't make W98 leak resources, and fixed the leaks from IE4.)

Been hoping the Konqueror for Windows project would get off the ground... it seems to have kept the greatest legacy from the extremely efficient and fast Netscape 3 (which I am using this instant, I can't do /. without it)... I see it's gotten a little further than it was when last I looked. http://windows.kde.org/

Wonder if Konq will play nice with KernelEx? Which I must say is the best Win98 utility I've installed yet. :D

Any box I build has a DOS boot, I can't live without it!

(is there KDE for Mac?)

Yes. http://community.kde.org/Mac

it does not. i have 11.4 with kde 4.6, and it does not work :)
see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126221, which maybe, maybe is finally fixed in 4.7 as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240912

it does not. i have 11.4 with kde 4.6, and it does not work :)
see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126221, which maybe, maybe is finally fixed in 4.7 as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240912

If you decided to go the keyboard route instead, I have been using BasKet notes. This works really well. Doesn't give you the excuse to buy the shiny new iPad, but for those running Linux on a desktop, it's a good solution.

It even comes with many different interface language options, making it ideal for children who just started reading in their mother tongue.

Your definition of decent seems to be a bit off. Decent software isn't slow, bloated, and buggy. I'll put up with slow and bloated. However buggy is never "decent" enough for use. Thank goodness there are alternatives.

well...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277010
(granted, after mere 3 month and a huge flamewar, we got a status update!)

Ctrl-Alt-t still does the trick. They haven't *improved that function yet...

Guake gives a drop-down terminal, in the style of Quake, at the press of F12. Stylish, efficient, utilitarian, and looks nice with a decent background picture (or (semi)transparency).
Pressing F12 again hides the terminal window.
Installation: sudo apt-get install guake

The KDE version is called Yakuake.
Installation: sudo apt-get install yakuake

Pressing one button instead of three sounds like an improvement to me ;)

    What would have happened if Microsoft didn't drop support for Mac when the they did? Safari came in to fill a void. The ones people are mentioning are just a few of the many out there. Beyond those, there are little projects people have done to make their own. I'd bet quite a few of us have said "how hard could it possibly be to write a rendering engine?" :)

    If MSIE and Netscape never existed, would we have something now? Who knows. I can guarantee, if there's a profit to be made somewhere, someone will try. The web browser market is tough. In itself, there is no money to be made any more. People don't generally pay for their browsers. They don't pay for support. They expect a tool that does what they tell them to, and if they don't like it, they'll pick another free one. To enter and hold the market now, you have to have an alternative income source, and that income isn't going to come from the browser market, nor can you hope donations will keep it going.

    MSIE is funded by Microsoft (obviously). Chrome by Google. Safari by Apple. Opera by Google (funny that, huh?). Konquorer is funded by KDE e.V. by member fees and donations. For MSIE and Safari, having a browser of their own enhances their product. Can you imagine an OS not coming with a web browser any more?

    I guarantee, in 10 years, there will be new browsers in the game, and some will likely have dropped out.

    Quite a few years ago, I had a boss tell me that he wanted the sites tested in "every web browser". We had a customer who complained our main site didn't look good in some browser that no one had ever heard off. I went on a quest to find "all" the web browsers. I had a beautiful collection of them, or at least those that weren't just skins on another browser. My desktop was full of icons for many of the browsers. It was horrible trying to keep up with them. At least my boss realized that "all" wasn't a reasonable request. "all" became "the major ones our customers use", so I was able to trim it down to the current versions MSIE, Netscape, and Opera. We then told the complaining user "go get a real browser." Honestly, the one he used was horrible, and didn't render anything right. It was a fun way to spend a week not doing any real work and getting paid for it. :)

Only because they HAD to. They made Webkit from opensource Konqueror (KDE) code

Open-source LGPLed Konqueror code, that being why they had to.

which ran on POSIX,

Try running it on an OS that implements POSIX and nothing else. :-) Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo.

to use in their new POSIX style OS.

"It runs on POSIXy OSes" probably wasn't a major reason for choosing KHTML; I think most of the open-source rendering engines available at the time ran on Linux etc..

http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/matthiase1.jpg

So cute... how much I miss it...

What wrong with looking like KDE

KDE was a copy of the Windows UI from the start. Here's a picture from v1.x. Circa 1996. The colour scheme, the embossed look, the task-bar (moved from bottom to top of screen), the start menu, the window furniture, the per window menus, the isometric icon style etc. etc. All straight out of Windows 95.

http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/matthiase1.jpg

The fact is that Google will or will not release Android source (the non-GPL parts) whenever they feel like it, if they feel like it, and will stop releasing whenever they feel like it, if they feel like it.

You mean, like every other open-source project in the world? I've yet to see a Free Software license that warrants access to all possible future releases. The closest thing to that is the KDE Free Qt Foundation's promised right to relicense QT in case it ever gets closed, and that's only up until the last version already published under the free Q Public License.

So far Google has given a very good reason why they don't want the one-shot temporary Honeycomb source to be exposed to the world, that it was an experiment designed to be obsoleted.

And they already have promised a date when the Icecream source will be released. I myself will reserve my judgement on the quality of their word until that date.

"What planet are you from?"

Earth, the only planet possible as far as I know.

"Stallman didn't make Linux possible, BSD did. Are you suggesting no other compilers or debuggers existed?"

Two things. BSD is not a compiler or a debugger. BSD is a license or an OS.

Compare http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php with http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

"Safari doesn't use any of Stallman's code, and if LGPL didn't exist (a license Stallman wasn't a fan of), another would have been used."

http://dot.kde.org/2003/01/07/apple-announces-new-safari-browser

In kicking off the Macworld Expo keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new Macintosh web browser named Safari. Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform). The KDE connection: "[f]or its Web page
rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive." The good news for Konqueror: Apple, which said that it will be "a good open source citizen [and] share[] its enhancements with the Konqueror open source community", has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit to see how Apple developed into a non-helpful open source citizen.

"Steve Jobs wanted to make a computer for everyone, Stallman couldn't give a damn how difficult they are to use so long they use his license."

Steve Jobs wanted to make money from everyone, Stallman couldn't give a damn how much they charge as long they use the GPL license.

"HURD:0 Apple:Billions" :)

Agreed, on many levels!

"Apple doesn't even use gcc anymore and its days may be numbered."

Don't worry, breath deeply and slowly. Apple will probably survive Jobs demise.

And if someone does not know what KickOff is:
Original presentation http://home.kde.org/~binner/kickoff/sneak_preview.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXcFB9Gc7V0 (Not so great as it is flipped around as it is positioned to top panel)

I wouldn't worry about Canonical/Google preparing free operating systems for mobile devices seeing as KDE, and others, are working towards this end already and, if they do it well, can bring GNU/Linux into the picture as a fully viable contender. The KDE work is being done under the Plasma Active banner...see the following link. http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active

Ouch. To be fair, someone on the Chrome page pointed out that

No single opensource browser can render properly this tag properties:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915 (12 year old!)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50688
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241
[let's inline Chrome's bug for slashdot's benefit: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12094 ]

To be even fairer, IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering properly where all four OSS browsers failed.

It's such a simple logical failure too... it's a bizarre case showing that IE has some silent merits... Must be sanity-wrenching to find a bug like this prior to seeing confirmation that it's not YOUR code at fault because the once-leading browser has no issues rendering it.

I wonder how many thousands of devs around the world individually break their head per year once their corporations give the green light to move to OSS browsers, but someone notices THIS exact bug and pulls back. It's little wonder doc files and PDF distributions are so overwhelmingly prefered to HTML.

It certainly can't be that many if they need to drop anything but KPW as available and supported desktops...

I wouldn't call dropping everything but KDE as proof that they have very few contributors left. SuSE includes GNOME but officially supports KDE, Slackware dropped GNOME long time ago and doesn't include them at all. GNOME 2 was tricky to build and maintain. GNOME 3 is in, "I don't even know" land. GNOME with all of its dependencies, vast array of configuration options for each dependency, and magic order of build instructions for each dependency; does not tend to be easy to maintain a workable tree from source. A couple of people have built build systems that do nothing but build GNOME. Thankfully, most builders have given up on their own build systems and have gone to JHbuild.

KDE on the other hand is a pretty straight forward process to maintain a working tree. You can check it out here. Of course, that's something that the average user isn't going to do but there again we are talking about Mandriva. They have to maintain a working tree of the DE and still include their things. GNOME/KDE aren't targeting a single distro, they are making a DE for whoever. Distro have to take that and add and remove what works for their distro. To do this with GNOME is almost like putting stitches in yourself. KDE is very easy to customize distro-wise.

Red Hat and SUSE are successful because they have stuck to a single and coherent vision for their brand of Linux, because they have a good sales model that pushes support for their brand of Linux, because they have played major roles within the Linux community in general which attracts community contributors to use and support your distro, and because they have had strong word of mouth within the community.
Mandrake had that as well, but as you can tell from some of the comments here on Slashdot, that all changed with when they purchased Conectiva. I don't know if they got inflated head syndrome or what, but the quality of software and the number of upstream contributions began to cool quite a bit. Bug reports were not being followed up by Mandriva engineers and the community wasn't taking up the slack either, so bug reports would go on for months and months with no answer. Hardware support issues abounded as not incredibly smart defaults were chosen, the most famous (infamous) example is the decision to ship the distro with the main volume on mute.
The distro has had its hard core followers and commercial users who have stuck around, but as I noted in my last post, the politics behind the distro have played out into two things: Focusing on KDE alone and better release schedule. Those two things will make it easier for the community and Mandriva to support the distribution.
Finally, you have to remember that we are talking LTS for their free product. If you are a company you can purchase their "enterprise" Linux which has a different support cycle than the community version. Also, Mandriva has forty-five engineers to date, most of them are in Brazil (which by the way is very KDE heavy country.)

It's all command-line anyway; how much resolution do you really need?

You never heard of Xorg, Freedesktop, or KDE?

Here you go. Paragraph 2

thanks for the link. I'll post the quote.

The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.

Here you go. Paragraph 2

Apple stone walled KDE for a couple years until their own lawyers pointed out to them that they had to ad-hear to the GPL.

No. Safari (and what was to become Webkit) was announced at Job's 2003 Macworld keynote. The code was released the same day.

You are correct that the form of the changes was unusable according to KDE developers (which was soon rectified) but Apple contributed code from day 1 (actually, before day 1 in the case of JavaScriptCore.)

That's a very good question. One that they don't seem to be willing to answer on their website. Even googling for "list of software installed in edubuntu" came up with nothing, and I'll be damned if I'm going to download a LiveCD just to boot up and actually *check* what's installed.

What I do know about are programs like Stellarium, Inkscape, and LibreOffice. Notice that those are all available for Windows? Even the KDE Education Project is available for Windows. That's to say nothing of the wealth of programs out there that are available for Windows and not Linux.

So tell me again why they should throw a legal license for Windows XP out the window in favour of Linux?

Thanks. If this is related, then please comment on it (it looks Cisco related):
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264189

I looked at 54 VPN bugs and that looked the closest, so if that's not the bug then please file a new one. Thanks!

I agree with most of your sentiments, and I think that you will find this Thunderbird extension great for editing the From line of your emails automatically:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/virtual-identity/

I've been trying to get this functionality in Kmail for years:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72926
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159251
Please comment in support of those two bugs. Thanks!

I agree with most of your sentiments, and I think that you will find this Thunderbird extension great for editing the From line of your emails automatically:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/virtual-identity/

I've been trying to get this functionality in Kmail for years:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72926
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159251
Please comment in support of those two bugs. Thanks!

> I am fed up reporting bugs to KDE4, because the general attitude is that nothing is broken and that
> as a user one should adapt to KDE4's behaviour.

That was the reaction by a particular prominent KDE dev when people told him to make KDE 4 like KDE 3 without quantifying and issues or actionable items. Whenever something concrete is mentioned, people like myself jump on it, triage, and file bug reports. Of course, filing a bug report or feature request should have been the first point of contact for the unsatisfied user.

> The most annoying thing for me is the total nonsense of system monitoring, which was perfect
> in KDE3, where you could adapt values, drag&drop sensors, adapt individual colors and select
> every imaginable sensor and put it into the panel.

Please speak up here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172312

> These days you have very, very limited options, no chance to integrate a remote host via
> ssh, have a sensible readout of stuff like network throughput. These graphic representations
> are no more than estimates and basically useless for true monitoring.

> Oh, yes, I reported this as a bug and the resulting "discussion" was what put me off KDE4 for good:
> http://old.nabble.com/-Bug-216002--New%3A-Useless-display-of-system-load-(and-network-usage)-in-widget-td26502388.html

That looks like productive discussion. Why would that put you off? The devs were very helpful.

Usually when Plasma segfaults a crash-reporting dialogue pops up. That would be the best way to report the crash. The dialogue will even help you install debug symbols if you don't have them. That would then be reported right to KDE.

> That specific problem happens on the qalculate plasmoid. If you use a keyboard shortucut to activate
> it you'll still have to click on the window to change focus.

In KDE 4.7 I added Qalculate to the panel and set a keyboard shortcut to it from within Qalulate's settings dialogue. Now, typing in Firefox I press the shortcut and Qalculate slides open with the text box focused. I enter my calculation and press enter, getting the result. I now press Esc and Qalculate closes, returning focus to Firefox. I never touched the rodent.

By the way, thanks for introducing me to Qalculate! That is a great plasmoid, I'm leaving it on the panel!

> About that third scenario. It happens on Debian squeeze. If you open a KDE session on more than
> one computer (with a shared home), and opens Kmail on one of them, the error dialog appears. Again
> I don't know if it's a bug in kmail, or nepumuk (the dialog is from nepomuk). Again, do you get bugs from
> Debian's reportubug? Should I file it elsewhere?

Go ahead and file it here:
http://bugs.kde.org/

I see that another commenter made a similar observation. I can't triage that but somebody should take a look. Thanks.

> And thanks a lot for the attention.

Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

User base. It's a wiki... if there is something missing, and you find out how to do it, add it.

Most notably in the 4.0 release announcement. It didn't state it was perfect, but it sure didn't give the impression that it wasn't ready for normal users. see: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0 [kde.org]

They made countless comments leading up the 4.0 release that it wouldn't have feature parity on day 1, and that it wouldn't be for everyone on day 1. Just because they didn't repeat those statements in the release announcement doesn't mean they lied.

In addition, the KDE team had been pimping the 4.0 release for months prior to the actual release date.

The KDE team was bragging that the 4.0 release would feature a lot of new tools under the hood like Solid, Phonon, Akondi, Nepomuk, Plasma, etc. Those tools would help developers make killer KDE apps. They didn't claim that everyone was already ported over. Claiming otherwise is the lie here.

No, he isn't. After taking a step back and looking at the whole debacle of 4.0, it's simply stubborn to claim that it wasn't a total disaster, or at the very least misguided.

You have to have a release for developers to build off of. Would you have preferred that they didn't release? It would have taken that much longer to reach feature parity then. And it wasn't like KDE 3.5 disappeared overnight. No one forced you to migrate any faster than you wanted to. In fact, KDE 3.x series is still maintained by others.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/screenshots.php

Yet every single tech blogger says they were lied to in this massive fiasco that KDE 4 would be perfect on day one. Where exactly was that statement? I think the problem is that a few distros were pushing KDE 4 as a default desktop before it was fully ready for primetime, and Kubuntu in particular was shipping really broken packages.

Most notably in the 4.0 release announcement. It didn't state it was perfect, but it sure didn't give the impression that it wasn't ready for normal users. see: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0

In addition, the KDE team had been pimping the 4.0 release for months prior to the actual release date. When the betas were released in a horrifically unfinished state, users were told to keep calm because they were just betas, not the final release. When the final release was released, users were told to keep calm because it was never meant to actually be used by users. When 4.1 was released, users were told to keep calm.... and so on.

I think what actually happened is that the KDE team was very rushed at the end as they neared the release date, and decided to just dump out what they had rather than delay. After all, the google kde4 release party had already been planned and scheduled.

So Aaron is justified in saying 4.0 wasn't a disaster from a developer standpoint.

No, he isn't. After taking a step back and looking at the whole debacle of 4.0, it's simply stubborn to claim that it wasn't a total disaster, or at the very least misguided.

There are too many DE projects, so the already scarce human resources are scattered among them. The final result is the slowness in bug fixing, where not in the development itself.
Then there's a lot of focus on "user experience" which I translate with "eye candies" and "cosmetic features" and not enough focus on "real user experience" which I translate with "real life use" and "meat".
Try reading the latest release notes for KDE and GNOME (both core and apps).
A few examples.
NetworkManager GNOME's front end is quite usable. KDE's is not working properly, especially with system wide connections.
CD/DVD burning KDE's (K3B) can do almost anything you need, while GNOME's (brasero) is too basic.

Then you have a number of GTK+ (GNOME) pieces of software with no real competition in QT (KDE) and vice versa, And a few which don't use either and are real leaders like Mozilla Firefox 5.
And, finally, the bloatware is spreading everywhere. It's almost impossible to run KDE without running MySQL at the same time (bacause of the Akonadi PIM)!

In the end, XFCE still needs bits from GNOME for full functionality. LXDE and friends are either too embryonal or are actually toys.
The same seems to happen with Linux distributuions.
The only thing to fear is that the whole Linux world will be exiled to servers and not spread on desktops and portables, where the DE is among the main components.
DE developers, unite!

Me too, I moved to KDE briefly, but after a couple months of periodically running into a bug (weekly) that made KDE unable to open new windows I started to look for alternatives. I'd already tried and rejected Gnome3 and Unity, so I switched to xfce and haven't looked back - runs as well on my 1GB laptop as on my 8GB desktop, which was not the case with KDE.

Did they return the multiple desktop and individual backgrounds? Locking Apps to specific Desktops?

Others have already explained how to do the first, and as for the second:

• Go to the title bar of the application you want to restrict to a desktop
• Advanced
• Special Application Settings
• Geometry
• Check Desktop, Force, Desktop

While you are at it, you'll see that you can set any attribute of that application's windows from here, even some that you most likely didn't even know existed.

No they haven't and they're still pushing Dolphin as the File manager instead of sticking with Konq, which worked quite well for that and browsing the web. Hell I found it quite useful when accessing an ftp site that I had write privs as it allowed me to simply copy files from the system to the server.

I don't see what your problem with Dolphin and FTP is:

Is FTP access possible? Dolphin uses the KIO slaves like Konqueror and hence can access all common protocols like ftp:// home:/, file:/, system:/, media:/, remote:/, applications:/, sftp:/, fish:/ and smb:/.

As a 3.5 user, I would have preferred them to simply bug fix and transition 3.5 over to QT4. Some of the restructuring was needed but the complete change to the UI was totally unneeded. Instead they had to copy MS and Vista and loose the one feature that made KDE stand out for me, which was the configurable desktops, background images and locking apps to specific desktops.

All those things still exist, and they are also some of the reasons I use it too.

my biggest complaint is that they took away the desktop icons. it's a big deal.

Nope. To enable desktop icons, right-click on the desktop, and select "desktop settings". In the dialog box that opens, if widgets are locked, unlock them. Using the pull-down selector labelled "Layout", change from "Desktop" to "Folder view". Click "Apply".

Voila, desktop icons. So much for your biggest complaint.

it's graphics accelerated but not snappy.

Au contraire, it is wicked fast and very snappy.

one annoying thing is the file manager's configuration fragmentation. in the file manager, you can right click lots of different things and configure them but not everything. it's really annoying to have to open eight different configuration windows instead of just one with a well organized system for configuring everything in the file manager.

WTF? You cannot get a more configurable, snappy, flexible and powerful file manager than Dolphin. None exist.

http://dolphin.kde.org/features.html

and please dont tell me KDE is for "advanced users and not you, noob!" or some BS because i've been on the Linux scene over a decade using everything from kernel configuration frontends to IDEs to that damn fish applet. i know what i'm talking about.

Clearly you do not.

Such questions are better posed to bugzilla. See bug 204340, which will show you that this was fixed between 4.6 and 4.7.

Did they return the multiple desktop and individual backgrounds? Locking Apps to specific Desktops?

Yes.

No they haven't and they're still pushing Dolphin as the File manager instead of sticking with Konq, which worked quite well for that and browsing the web. Hell I found it quite useful when accessing an ftp site that I had write privs as it allowed me to simply copy files from the system to the server.

Yes they have. Konqeror is still there, and can be set as the default file manager if you want.

As a 3.5 user, I would have preferred them to simply bug fix and transition 3.5 over to QT4. Some of the restructuring was needed but the complete change to the UI was totally unneeded. Instead they had to copy MS and Vista and loose the one feature that made KDE stand out for me, which was the configurable desktops, background images and locking apps to specific desktops.

As I said, all these features are available, accessible, and are arguably better than they were in KDE 3. I honestly don't know how you haven't been able to discover them.

it actually turns out that the KDE system settings shell is *always* shown (regardless if your using Gnome, XFCE, LXDE or whatever), and the maintainer did not accept the "OnlyShowIn" tag fix: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/102038/ - the Gnome system setting shell correctly sets the "OnlyShowIn" tag, so that it is only shown under Gnome (or Unity). and yet Gnome gets bashed because the gnome-control-center maintainer decided to give a more descriptive name for something that, unlike in Gnome 2.x, will appear as a launcher. the power of the FLOSS community: eating their children since 1991.