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KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look
dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."
The killer feature for me -- seriously, the reason I use KDE rather than Gnome -- is the ability to make the panel vertical. It's the only reasonable way to work on a widescreen netbook.
(Yeah, Gnome kinda has vertical panels as long as you don't mind them looking horrible and lots of things breaking. No, I do not want to read sideways text, Gnome. And when I looked at some "make vertical panels work properly" bugs, the basic message from Gnome devs was "we don't use vertical panels, go fuck yourself".)
PEBCAK. KDE is useful in its default settings. As a rank n00b, you probably should try to get to know it before fiddling with settings you don't understand.
Really? This is the attitude you chose to go with?
What we have here is an OP who gave an honest and accurate critique of his/her experience with KDE. Simple as that. They thought it was too complicated, and that the complexity wasn't valuable. It didn't work in a manner that they desired, and that resulted in them disliking the software. This is exactly the kind of feedback the KDE team wants. All of the OP's problems should not exist - that's one of the KDE team's design goals. The OP's impressions, experiences, and feedback could, if funneled down to the right people, result in a superior desktop experience for everyone.
Instead you are quick to dismiss and blame the OP as incompetent and useless. This valuable feedback, while dismaying in the sense that it depicts a KDE team failure, is extremely useful for both parties. The user seems open and interested in thoroughly using the product, and the design team wants to create a product the user wishes to use. A person with the slightest (a) intuition, or (b) training in psychology and human-computer interfaces would tell you that this type of cooperation between developer and end-user is priceless. But here we have you, whose attitude is one of the stronger cancers on the open-source community.
Not every product is for everyone, but mainstream desktop environments and window managers are the exception. Creating a central piece of software as complex and feature-rich as KDE is extremely challenging. For any given use-case scenario, KDE has to provide a direct and obvious path to an end-goal while ensuring that every other feature keeps a low profile. This is hard stuff, and KDE is groundbreaking in their approach. Their team has developers, artists, engineers, managers, and designers all striving for this goal. The OP is a critical piece in that puzzle.
And as a disclaimer, I do, and probably always will, love KDE. KDE4 started out weak (by design) and is building towards an amazing desktop environment. Every subsequent release provides marked progress towards that ideal. I hope we get an entire gamut of feedback from every possible class of user, because that gives the KDE developers the kind of information they need to make good design decisions towards an ideal desktop environment.
Assholes like you really need to stop getting in the way of that ideal.
Q: ... then why so few distro's use it as their default DE?
A: Because there was a time, 10 years ago when Gnome was created to address a licensing problem with the library that powers KDE called QT. Gnome was built using GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit), which was GPL. KDE's QT was under a permissive commercial license that was not 100% GPL compatible. So most distributions that cared about free went the Gnome route, despite it consistently lacking features vs. KDE. At this point, KDE's QT is GPL licensed, and has been for some time and KDE has advanced significantly in capability over the past two years to the point that it's really not even close, so far as features, flexibility and technology under the hood go.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5. So far as performance goes, if your GPUs drivers are decent, KDE4 will run rings around Gnome (especially if you turn on OpenGL rendering for QT which effectively uses your GPU for rendering everything).
Really when it comes down to it, it's GREAT that there is a choice for users between KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Evolution and GNUstep. Giving users a real choice in how they interact with their computer is a really good thing because new and better ideas come from competition and exchange of ideas. It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war, because the holy part of the war died when QT was released under the GPL.
-- $G