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Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use." There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.
I used to use KDE 3 (Kubuntu) and I, somewhat recently, installed the latest version of Kubuntu with KDE 4. To be as clear as possible: KDE 4 is a trainwreck. At first I took it in stride and figured that a brand new release might be a little buggy, no harm. I'm using KDE 4.2 RC1 now and it's still horrible.
I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.
I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.
I got the update through Fedora and there was a mismatch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.0. The desktop was not as functional and it was just a bad experience for me. I'll revisit it when I reinstall the next machine which tends to be every six to eight months.
Which isn't exactly the same thing, and probably not many people at KDE will be all that surprised. KDE4 is new, it has teething problems. It was risk, but we'll find out later if it was a risk worth taking.
KDE 4.0, and to a lesser degree 4.1, lacked quite a few nice customization features that KDE has had for the longest time. KDE 4.2 refixes the taskbar configuration...so you can actually do something useful with it again.
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 are nowhere near as functional or customizable as 3.5, 4.2 restores virtually all of it as well as adding compelling new standard/addon features.
4.0 was supposedly 'just a developer preview', and I personally think they dropped the ball on 4.1. Everyone was expecting it to just be 'ready'.
Though, one begs the question.
If Linus is an advanced user, why was he pressured to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.x in the first place? Couldn't he have just kept using 3.5 if that's what he preferred, rather than the GNOME which he hated?
I know the 'user friendly' distros tend to be a bit aggressive about pre-planned obsolescence, but that's little excuse not to find a supported and proper way to use the software and specific versions you prefer.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
I've used KDE 4.1 for a month. Then I switched back to KDE 3.5, and was the happiest guy in the world to have my good old desktop back! I use Kate a lot for programming C++ and Actionscript projects. In KDE 3.5, Kate rocks. In KDE 4.1, they have, on purpose (by design) ruined the search function of Kate (no whole word option, it doesn't search for the same word in the different open documents), making it unusable for programming (especially refactoring). They have totally made the file managers unusable. No proper working tree. Konqueror can have a tree, but it has the most annoying horizontal autoscroll thing ever (again by design), and you can't drag anything to it. The unzip tool (Ark) is a joke (I've never seen it working). No possibility to have two rows in your taskbar. I *need* to have one row that acts as quick launch for programs, and another row that has the buttons of open windows, one for every window, and only the windows on the current desktop of the multi desktops. Terribly annoying behaviour in file managers and file open/save dialogs, it's so extremely hard, almost an annoying computer game, to select multiple files. Anything from dragging a rectangle around multiple files, to using ctrl + clicking, are all not working properly due to various reasons (such as when beginning to drag the rectangle, it thinks you want to drag 1 file, instead of dragging something around rectangles). Filenames in such lists are clickable everywhere, instead of only on the text of the name, and are in a very wide column by default, which is a second cause for making it hard to drag a rectangle around multiple files. The non-SVG cards in the card games are rescaled in a terribly ugly way, and the SVG card decks all have an ugly design.
But the productivity loss with kate and the file managers is still the worse of all, KDE has become unproductive as hell for me, and I use KDE 3.5 as long as possible.
Is is cynical to inherently distrust a Microsoft Web site called "getthefacts.com"?
We experience the opposite. We are 4:1 a Linux:Windows shop, yet spend twice as much time fixing Windows boxes. We charge for our time, so we love, and hate Windows.