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Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't You Running KDE?
First time accepted submitter mike_toscano writes "At least some of us have recently seen Linus' most recent comments on his experience with Gnome 3 — he didn't have many nice things to say about it and as you know, he's not the only one. On the other hand, there have been some great reviews and comparisons of KDE with the other options (like this one) lately. Sure, early releases of 4.x were painful but the desktop today is fully-functional and polished. So the question: To those who run *nix desktops and are frustrated by the latest Gnome variants, why aren't you running KDE? To clarify, I'm not asking which desktop is better. I'm really talking to the people who have already decided they don't like the new Gnome & Unity but aren't using KDE. If you don't like KDE or Gnome, why not?"
You can’t completely break something for a long time and expect people to jump right back when you fix it. I, like many others, had to go elsewhere when kde3 became impractical to keep running and kde4 was completely broken. What I have now works great, and more importantly, kde4 doesn’t have any killer features that appeal to me that I don’t already have in my openbox/xfce4 setup.
All I really want is good multi-monitor handling (including separate panels for each monitor) and the expected standards for managing windows. KDE 3 provided that with minimal fuss KDE 4 initially didn’t. My openbox+xfce4 setup provides it with a little work and minus all the eye candy I disabled anyway.
People will gradually migrate back. I might give kde4 a try the next time I build a machine... but for now, I’m happy with my setup and have no reason to switch back.
Why Aren't You Running KDE?
Because Xfce (personal use) and no windowing or graphical interface at all (work servers) completely satisfies all my needs?
I use Xubuntu at home on two desktops and a netbook and have yet to encounter the inability to do anything while at the same time requiring very little of my time to maintain it. I'm sorry if this sounds like a plug for Xfce, it's not. I'm simply responding by asking a counter question: what exactly am I missing if I use these machines for web surfing, e-mail and lots of hobby development? I'm forced to maintain a Windows 7 x64 partition for Diablo III, netflix and some other crappy windows stuff I can't shake so maybe I'm unaware that with KDE we can now satisfy some of those things?
Can someone tell me what Linux Jesus means when he says:
Simply because my old F14 comes with ancient X versions that don't contain all the fixes to make intel 3D really work well. And yes, things really do work better on the graphical side.
Intel 3D? Does he have a 3D monitor? Are these more than just novelties now?
My work here is dung.
Thank you, good day.
much further down in the thread Linus says, "And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse, and equally importantly they aren't the normal window manager. I'm really not that odd." - There is a lot more in the comment and if I could figure it out I'd link directly to it - but if there is a way to do it, I couldn't figure it out. Scrolling through this thread made me think there is room for lots of improvement in g+
As for me - I do run KDE and love it. I have for years and stuck with it even through the switch to 4, which was a touch frustrating at times but not nearly as horrible as so many made it out to be - in my opinion.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Because I am Enlightened
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Grossly reminds me of Windows...the one thing I want to stay away from.
Because gnome2 is still supported on Debian Squeeze.When its time to upgrade I'll probably move to kde or xfce.
Running KDE and I personally have no issues with it :) does what i need when i need to and it isn't slow as most think it might be.
http://chimpbox.us
Actually I'm running KDE for the last year, since I noticed that Alt+Tab works substantially faster and it generally feels faster than the new versions of Ubuntu with Unity/Gnome 3.
I want less crap not more.
but it keeps freezing the machine.
Not kidding. CentOS 5.8. I think it's the cmipci sound driver. I installed alsa-kmod, which allows me to use the audio subsystem in applications without freezing; I just need to figure out how to configure KDE to take advantage of this.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The newer releases of GNOME adn Unitity where the final pushes I need to dust off my old fvwm config.
And I must say, I couldn't be happier.
...like Gnome except without the bloat of Gnome (or KDE). That's why I run it too.
Run LXDE/XFCE because I prefer to use as little resources for my displays as possible.
I use KDE 3.5.11 courtesy of the trinity project. I never liked gnome and I despise KDE 4.x.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
When I looked at KDE 1.x it was immitating Windows. I decided that this project is going down the wrong path and never really looked at it again, and have no interest in doing so for so near future.
The early series 4 KDE were appalling, and thin includes upto 4.4.
4.8 is good, you should all come back to the light side.
I was using kde 3.x - migrated to gnome. Hated unity. I tried mate, cinnamon, lxde, xfce and then thought I'd given kde 4.8 a try.
It's much improved from 4.0!
Because I don't need the bloaty mess of KDE or Gnome?
Configuration? The gui tools seem to change every 5 weeks anyway, so I wind up learning which text files to edit eventually anyway.
Buttons and widgets? Tmux and pentadactyl status bars are enough visual output, for input I already have buttons...they're on my keyboard.
Menus? I have a command line, or dmenu, or just add keyboard shortcuts to dwm for common functions.
One gripe with dwm is that most browsers when combined with certain webpages (mostly flash, i'm looking at you, youtube) seem to fail to figure out how wide their tile is.
I was really hoping we could stop arguing about desktop environments when the world moved to web-based applications and mobiles many years ago. Sure, I use a desktop to open my web browser, run Eclipse, or launch Steam, but once I'm living inside application I could really care less how I launched it.
Why bother learning something new? I just switched to the Gnome 2 MATE fork.
I am running KDE on Debian Sid and it's great, but many stable systems (Cent, RHEL, Debian) have older versions and the polish of KDE really stars to shine with 4.6. Backports for everyone!
I completely gave up on GNOME back in the 2.x range as I saw features get continually moved, removed, or just made harder to configure. I loved KDE3 and tolerated KDE4 between crashes (now, thankfully, gone in newer versions) until I realized that as KDE versions got newer and newer, they also got slower and slower on my, admittedly aging, hardware. I've since switched to XFCE and haven't looked back. Much.
After Gnome 2, I switched to Mac, so running KDE is not (really) an option. But the main reason I never used KDE was that I couldn't get used to QT's look and feel. I know that's not a good argument against KDE, but I'm not arguing. I just never could get used to how it feels. Also, having Firefox not integrate as well as it does with GTK environments was an issues (again, just look and feel).
Maybe in future, after I forget how GTK feels like, I may give KDE a try. I hope I like it, because I really like the functionality of KDE.
For me, Linux or BSD is about performance. If I wanted an integrated desktop experience with bells and whistles, frankly I'd stick with Windows XP or maybe go for XFCE.
Personally, I use Openbox. It's fast as hell and exceptionally customisable. I've ran it on machines ranging from modernish laptops to a creaking old 233MHz Thinkpad 600 and I cannot fault it. For me there is nothing missing that cannot be added (i combine mine with LXpanel and PCManFM).
Openbox doesn't get in the way or chew up system resources, and IMO that is the whole point of a window manager. I'm glad KDE exists, but it simply doesn't interest me.
KDE would be more usable for us developers if the KDELibs crew would (re)implement the basic --geometry command line feature. Removed in KDE 4, available everywhere else. It has been listed as a bug since the release of KDE 4.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165355
Please vote for this and maybe the KDE developers will take notice.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
There's no KDE for Windows 7.
You mean like this:
http://windows.kde.org/
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Faster, Lighter, Prettier.
That is all.
Former big KDE fan (since 1.0) but switched to GNOME after the KDE 4.0 release. Several comments. KDE fanboys have been saying KDE 4.x is now polished and usable for every point release since the initial 4.0. After believing them and trying each new version out for quite awhile before giving up, you'll have to excuse us for being sceptical.
I was personally very frustrated by the ego of the developers and the way they responded to the negative feedback to KDE 4.0. They basically just ignored it and said they are right. When a user has years submitting bug reports and commenting on the desktop to help make it better, it feels like a smack in the face to be ignored. Plus, it used to feel like KDE was evolving somewhere. What's the point of contributing to make something better when at any moment, things will just change arbitrarily?
After GNOME made the EXACT same mistake as KDE. I'm frustrated with them too. My loyalty has been broken to both GNOME and KDE. I'm still tired after learning GNOME. I don't have the energy to switch again and if I did, it would be to one of the up-and-coming desktops.
Because I've been using RiscOS on X for awhile and see no reason to change. It's not "gnome" (though it uses gtk). It's interactively very fast even on slow hardware. It's functionally very fast; apply all sorts of filters, selections, and commands to the current window, or bring up a shell in the window's cwd by typing "x". It's an augmentation of the terminal, not a UI for casual users. It's extremely screen-space efficient, since I can do everything and keep all the menubars and toolbars off, and the icons small. It offers a nice direct-manipulation-oriented interface (i.e., comprehensive DND).
Even if KDE offers all of this, it would have to offer quite a bit more in addition to make it worth switching.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I used it for a short time. Couldn't get over how poorly designed the start menu is. All I really want is (1) the ability to start programs and (2) the ability to switch between said programs. KDE does (2) well, but (1) sucks. Maybe this has been fixed by now, but GNOME's ctrl+space+"fi"+enter is significantly faster than KDE's click+click+click+click+...
I had been waiting some time for a comment section completely devoid of any technical argument.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
because with KDE 4 they change the fundamental design philosophy of the project. I didn't want easy of use, I wanted control, which I why I originally left GNOME for KDE before that.
Now with GNOME making the same design choices, I'm left with MATE, which is just a fork of the the GNOME I want to use, but it's still lacking right now.
I understand that they want the interface to be easy for anyone to approach, but what about those of us who want to do more than just browse the web and share pictures of the grandkids?
I'm loosing all the features of the Linux Desktop that I left Windows for in the first place. *sigh
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
I tried KDE 4.7 for about 2 weeks. I ended up going to XFCE. Not because of bloat, etc, but because it did exactly what I wanted. I do miss some of the widgets and GUI goodness, but those don't merit a switch.
... oh and I forgot one thing: frames, why all those frames and borders and padding?
We're a Linux shop with around 400 desktops and have been running KDE for a decade. KDE3 was rock solid. KDE4, not so much. The KDE4 direction of "let's index everything" with nepomuk and akonadi doesn't work so well when home directories are NFS mounted. In fact, it killed our fileserver. Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?
In general KDE login times have been getting longer and longer, and the overall flakiness of KDE up to 4.6 have led us to dump KDE in favor of XFCE. Initial feedback from users has been very positive, and we'll be completing the transition this summer.
KDE4 may have some features that are fine for a standalone desktop at home, but it took a giant step backward from KDE3 in terms of usability in a networked environment at work.
KDE is one of the few environments that actually works with my setup of four monitors in a dual twinview (xinerama) configuration. Unity and GNOME3 do not work at all with this setup, they render only on half the screens, the mouse doesn't work at all, and other problems.
Currently I have to run a bastardized mix of XFCE and OpenBox to get everything to work because the XFCE window manager doesn't work correctly either. MATE (GNOME2) desktop seems to work and I have been thinking of switching (back) to it but it seems kind of buggy. It will probably end up being what I use though.
But on topic, I would love to just use KDE because it works right out of the box without me having to tweak or worry about anything. BUT, it's just too weird and often has annoying bugs/crashes (sort of like Opera actually). It looks weird and doesn't work like I think. I can't really explain exactly what it is other than "weird". It feels confusing and hard to use. If I could pick one example application that showcases the weirdness of KDE it would be the Amarok app. Good grief that thing is bizarre. The UI is so funky and doesn't work anything like what I need. For me that app is a good reflection of KDE as a whole. Bizarre, ugly, and unintuitive UI. I can't get any work done in that.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I have 3 monitors, and when I last tried it (4.8.3, or rather kubuntu 12.04), my mouse pointer started jumping around like an idiot.
I didn't spend all that much time trying to figure it out, and the only information I could dig up was trying to tell me my mouse was broken or that my X config was bad. Great, except it works just fine with both XFCE and GNOME.
It didn't let me get far enough to form an opinion other than "nope".
I always thought it had something to do with so many popular applications being based on GTK. KDE has improved it's "integration" of GTK apps quite a bit since.
Otherwise, I find KDE aesthetically displeasing. Some elements are too thin. There are too many bubbly brushed effects on things by default. The icons, especially for the animated cursor, are simply ugly. It really has an ugly retro linux thing going that I personal hate.
Now that Mate is available on a somewhat stable basis for Fedora 16 and 17 (external repo), I have no reason to change. Gnome 2 worked well for me, and I like the look and feel.
KDE still doesn't feel right to me somehow. Personal preference, obviously. And part of it might just be the way Fedora packages it. Oddly enough KDE apps look and feel great with the Gtk theme when run under the Mate desktop.
If I was stuck with Gnome 3, I'd give KDE a serious look, but since there are now good alternatives (XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon), I'll be trying them first.
If you feel Gnome 3 is too much but you don't want to part with your GTK+ apps you might be willing to try XFCE or Cinnamon.
I have a love-hate relationship with Gnome 3 right now. There's some things about it that i love and others i loathe. Working with multiple windows, for example, is a pain in the ass. I might go back to XFCE soon, which in many ways is Gnome 2 without all the Gnome crud.
We all work in the real world too. Linux is used on the desktop in real world jobs. The entire programming department at my current place uses Linux, both on the server and on the desktop.
Windows doesn't support it.
I don't know who this "Linus" guy think he is. Just because his name looks kinda similar to "Linux" doesn't mean he has the right to be jerk. The community should flame him off the forums because he apparently doesn't understand the open source ethos.
If he was a real programmer he'd just dig into the code and fix these problems. This is why linux desktop hasn't taken off -- all these moochers who just want their computer to work without putting any effort into understanding the underlying system and not being willing to chip in and help the effort.
A bloated race to the fattest!
Personally, I use xfce or ice for a "heavyweight" WM. And often run without any, only launching xterm or rxvt in .xinit . Most of the app bloatware (firefox) has their own routines for resizing, etc.
Yeah I've noticed the KDE slow down too, I briefly switched from GNOME recently as I just couldn't deal with the GNOME 3 training wheels set up. Now I'm in a kind of desktop limbo, I'm warming to GNOME again for it's minimalist looks but slowly moving towards XFCE and LXDE as the more lightweight alternatives... Back to the topic in hand though, as stated above Linus most certainly isn't championing a switch from GNOME to another desktop.
GNU/Linux is great, don't get me wrong. It's secure, highly customisable, fast and stable. It's found its niche's and that's important, but don't force me to use it on the desktop. Why? Because it doesn't work on the desktop. With all the choices of desktop environments, from Unity, to GNOME, to KDE, to XFCE, you end up with the horrible world of fragmentation. Things aren't consistent, and consistency is something you need in a desktop environment. There's no point giving me a .DEB compiled for Ubuntu if i'm running Fedora, as even if i do get it converted, it won't be tightly intergrated into my DE if it even runs at all.
And that's why i follow Haiku. It's fast, it's consistent and there isn't a billion distro's to worry about. Until all the GNU/Linux distro's can agree on one solid OS to focus on and cure the massive problem of fragmentation from one platform to another, i'll stick to Haiku.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Because fvwm does exactly what I want it to and need it to.
I upgraded to KDE-4.5 only when I upgraded my slackware distro to 13.37. This version is already quite dated, it's usable, but I still miss some kde-3.x features that still do not exist (that I am aware of) in KDE-4.
Sounds silly, but I really miss kpanel the most. It is the best virtual desktop manager I have used (from 3.5.x series), showing thumbnails of all applications (can recognize by sight), proper desktop backgrounds, and ability to move windows from desktop to desktop from inside the panel itself. KDE's (at least as of 4.5.5) panel app doesn't let me move windows, and it doesn't show image pixmaps of wallpapers or applications. Usually the text of a window doesn't fit, and it's quite unusable to be able to tell one window from another.
I also used to use Kmail heavily, but the new one seems so much more bloated, requiring SQL (is that akonadi?). Don't know why I need an SQL server running to read my email off an IMAP server (messages stored on the IMAP server, not "fetched" to the local KMAIL app).
I also don't quite get the Activities and Plasma stuff, would prefer to just have a plain virtual desktop like KDE-3.5.10.
I've thought about Trinity, but Slackware-13.37 isn't officially supported (despite being more than a year old)... maybe it would work, but I haven't had time to try yet. Probably makes more sense to try and upgrade slackware-13.37 from KDE-4.5.5 to a newer version.
I also must be one of those "older" folks who prefers the standard drop down cascaded menus. I don't need a "start" menu that isn't big enough to show me everything, and require scrolling a menu (what a stupid concept, thanks Windows7), or requires typing to find what I want. At least KDE can still be customized better than Windows7 can be.
I also prefer the older Konqueror file manager over Dolphin. Just from a user "experience", there seems to be more visual polish on KDE-4 but less functionality than KDE-3.5, in my opinion.
Is there a Subversion plugin for Konqueror or Dolphin yet (TortoiseSVN equivalent)? That's one thing that is sorely lacking from KDE-3.5.x series since SVN was only taking off about then.
Because I run fluxbox- KDE runs a load of crap in the background, which is one of the basic reasons I gave up Windows looooooooong ago.
On fluxbox (and openbox, and blackbox) everything has been customizable for years now (key+click combinations etc, window layouts) which makes it ideal for applications that demand lots of hotkeys. Okay, it might not be flashy and 3D accelerated (unless you really try to make it so) but who cares: the memory footprint of the whole window manager is negligible.
And if you miss your $favouriteKDEapp or $favouriteGNOMEapp, remember that the executable can be launched from a terminal window.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
..and switched to LXDE. Simple reason, KDE started getting toooooo much garbage. The last straw was Akonadi. There was no way to completely disable it and it would randomly pop-up error messages even after tic'ing the checkbox to "disable" it.
I don't care much about what Desktop I use, I'm just glad there are alternatives so when the one I'm using starts to suck ass, I can easily find something else. You can't do that with Windows or Macintosh.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
And please, KDE is not a windows clone, if people say that clearly they are not using KDE since years. Of course, there are themes of community trying to mimic windows look, but that is another history, and part of the power of KDE.
KDE is a really good Desktop environment, with a lot of good things for power users... I mean, a *lot* of customizations options, which is not good for everybody, but IS a big difference for many others. But, at the end, the most important thing is that people feel comfortable with their own desktop environment, whatever the name is. Be free is, also, let others be free.
I don't like the requirement of moving my hand off the keyboard and over to the mouse just so I can navigate.
It's i3 for me.
Plus, the start menu paradigm is retarded, and the last time I bothered trying KDE they were just trying their hardest to be a shinier, blingier Windows.
Both KDE and Gnome3 have various annoyances and missing features which are so bad that I've stopped trying to convert people to linux.
But Gnome3 is slightly less ugly, and I find the default fonts far more readable, so that is what I use for my computers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
I AM running KDE, you insens....
There are things you just "get used to" - actions, window actions, menu actions, whatever. For me, I've seen just the basic "ergonomics" broken again and again - along with the "artistic" bits and bobs - I've grown to use my linux machines a very particular way (via the GUI) and have my druthers to stick to certain visual perspectives along with "usability" perspectives. Gnome3/Unity truly killed that (what - every thing is now classed as a netbook or mobile device?) for me. KDE, since the break from 3.5, killed me there. XFce has always been there, but still, lacking in a way or so...Enlightenment has been awesome, but buggy, not complete. C'mon - I just want to DO, not to "keep trying". MS Windows lost out years ago with Win95 - coming from an OS/2 and *nix background. Now I'm on OSX - I *keep* trying to "live the dream" but it's too much effort. Things should have evolved to be "easy" and they're only evolving to what some corporate mind THINKS is ergonomic. Get real. Gnome2 was very useable and was very much of the "I just work" mentality...took me a while to love it, but I do, and hate to see it die (it at least gives me the perception that my desktop computer is a desktop computer with two monitors and all the power and applications at hand). I have things to do, and if the window manager doesn't allow me to do them, well, it's ditched and I'll just do it myself. I have to thank Ubuntu and Unity for my recent switch to OSX...done and not going back...
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
So I'm a gentooer (dons flame suit).
I tried kde and gnome once, along time ago. Both broke.
I installed some random wm's trying each out in turn and settled on xfce4.
I've got used to the interface, customized it to suit me, and can migrate those customizations easily elsewhere. Why _would_ I switch?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Should I really care which system is drawing the borders around my Firefox or Chrome windows? Only when I need special software, like Photoshop or Gimp or a Java IDE or a game, the OS or desktop environment still matters. Unfortunately KDE apps are not in most people's 'special software' lists.
I'm somewhat of a X desktop transient, switching between KDE, Gnome, and Xfce (variety is the spice of life, and all that rot).
I spend most of my days in Emacs or a term window, and I frankly don't use 90% of the features these desktop managers provide. After a few months with one of the "big three," I always come back to GNUstep. It's totally minimal, and you can do EVERYTHING without touching a mouse. It's as unobtrusive as possible.
Check the wikipedia here, or dig the GNUstep website.
Another option in the "totally minimal" world is xmonad, there's a lot to like here as well. Wikipedia: xmonad,
Or, try the Xmonad website
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Because, on a Radeon 6570 running via the Xorg Radeon driver, KDE appears to suffer framerate issues when the desktop effects are enabled. GNOME 3, however, doesn't exhibit this problem with its accelerated window manager.
Having seen the KDE people screw this up once already, many aren't interested in having it screwed up again in KDE 5.0 . KDE needs to make people understand that they admit they fucked up before and vow not to do it again.
To clarify: When you create things in 3d you have a shadow, or no shadow and a reflection to create the appearance of three dimensions.
Every version of KDE I have used has some icons with the sun in one position (say 9am) and the window chrome having the sun in another position (say 3pm). It looks like a bad photoshop job where you can just tell that everything was cut and paste with no concern for the overall look and feel.
Maybe the folks over at Linux Mint will polish up KDE so it doesn't look wrong. But until then, GNOME or a consistent flat desktop is what I'll use.
Work bio at MMWD
Neither KDE or Gnome are designed with users like me in mind.
For example - I don't see the point in GStreamer or whatever the KDE alternative is when I'm always going to download the file and fire up mplayer manually from a shell.
They were, but the real problems were that this was an obvious, foreseeable consequence of the release management, and that the developers steadfastly refused to acknowledge any problem other than users expecting too much.
I'd been using KDE since the 1.0 betas, and that's why I jumped ship.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I consider a well configured KDE the best total-desktop-solution by far - and I'm a regular Mac OS X user btw. Truth is, a well configured KDE runs circles around OS X in terms of usability, consistency and featureset.
And it's right there where we have the one and only problem with KDE: Its default key shortcut configuration is a sad and sorry Windows rippoff with so many pointless, bad and potentially harmful settings that it turns many computer experts off. I know this is default and changing the keymappings in KDE is easy, but it is a downside.
Then agian, Ubuntu takes so much of the pain out of Gnome and Nautilus that I consider it good enough and couldn't be bothered messing with KDE. But should I eventually move away from OS X again - which I require for mulitmedia work and Flash development - I will probably go back to KDE, even if I have to spend quality time getting its setup right. ... Although I definitely would miss the multitouch trackpad, that's for sure. ... But Apple just needs to carry on with their ongoing lock-in strategy and I'm back to using the mouse on Linux again - no problem. Come next HW purchase I will look *very* carefully if the benefits of Apple still outweighs the downsides.
Bottom line: No Video to do? No profesional printwork to do? No application specific OS requirements? Use Linux with KDE, that's my general recommendation to anyone who requires a solid feature-rich working desktop.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have a Dell M6500 laptop with an i7 chip and a (2010-era) workstation-class AMD m7740 GPU. I'm running Linux Mint 13, with AMD's fglrx driver installed.
All of the other desktop environments I've tried have perfectly decent responsiveness. But for some reason, the Kubuntu desktop is *way* slower. Enough so that I chose to forgo it's other benefits.
I have a very old, carefully tuned to my needs fvwm2 set-up. There is no need or reason to go to this newfangled, unstable, cluttered and ugly KDE-stuff (or to Gnome for that matter). "New" is not a positive quality for desktop environments. "Efficient" and "clean" are. Example: I use the fvwm2 pager with 3x3 desktops and edge-scroll. Very efficient, fast, and gives me lots of desktop space. A consequence is that I do not understand multi-monitor set-ups. Edge-scrolling to a different desktop is faster than turning my head to a different monitor and far more ergonomically sound. There still seems to be no comparable KDE/Gnome replacement, which eliminates them immediately from consideration for me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What I have found through the years is that it is always best to stick with whatever distro you are using's default even if you are not a super fan of it. For instance when I install OpenSuSE on a system I install KDE. When I install Ubuntu on a system I go with the Gnome variant. There always seems to be bugs, issues, or lack of polish on the alternative windowing managers when trying to interface with the distro specific controls. I attribute this to the fact that fewer people tested the alternative windowing manager during the distro build process and there are fewer people using the alternative windowing manager out in the wild.
Because at work i'm forced to use windows.
At home i choose to use windows because thats what the games run on.
Oh i could run (some) games on nix. but having tried that... i'd rather play games instead of play with my os to make a game work almost right.
Both gnome and KDE have by now proven that if you use them, you *will* get screwed. Because as soon as you'll feel comfortable using any of them, they'll just stop supporting it and try getting you to switch to the new version that's awful and not what you wanted. They'll tell you "it's an just an early release, it'll get better". And indeed, it'll get better... and once it's good enough, they'll throw it all away again. I've learned my lesson and I'm now using XFCE, which I'm hoping will not go the way of gnome/KDE. I still need a few gnome config utils to get XFCE to do what I want, but I'm happy for now.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I use Kde 4.8 and like it a lot. But I have a core i7 with 4GB system memory, etc. etc. The other user in the house switches between two identical legacy laptops which are so old I don't even remember the specs. They'll run Ubu-pangolin with Mate or Mint with Mate, but Kde runs just long enough to think, "Wow. Nice. Shiny!" (which it really is!) and then crashes. (Yes, desktop effects are turned off, and so on.) Kde needs a lightweight streamlined layer.
When I open a movie from a network drive, it copies the entire file first as it is incapable of simply passing a network url to the movie application. Something that every other desktop manager out there can handle.
It is this kind of "wtf" that is rampant throughout KDE. To me, it is the kiddy desktop, where people spend ages on getting some cool feature working but the basics are falling apart. In theory, it should be highly capable but in reality, it is so fragile and its defaults so inane, that to get it working just takes to long.
That is part of the reason Ubuntu and Gnome 2 were so popular. They finally just worked. I am using Linux to be productive, KDE does not help me be productive.
Oh and one final thing KDE team, learn that EVERY single app you build has a far superior solo version out there. I don't need a complete office suite with my desktop thank you very much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's just something about how KDE's UI is laid out that rubs me the wrong way.
Long-time Gnome 2 user here, probably switching to MATE. Don't care for Xfce and LXDE is too basic for my taste, as are most of the standalone WMs. Window Maker is fugly.
My two favorite computer UIs today are Gnome 2.3x + Compiz and Windows 7 + Cygwin. They mostly just work, are good about staying out of my way, and have nice UI flourishes like live preview and Aero Snap.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It used to be that if you wanted configurability and customizability, you went with KDE. If you wanted a slick looking, unified, intuitive UI, you went with Gnome.
When they rolled out KDE 4, I found that a lot of the custom config changes that I always applied to KDE to get it just the way I wanted were suddenly no longer available or just didn't work. Additionally, KDE 4 made my system basically slow to a crawl and none of the hardware accelerated eye candy worked properly anymore (I simply could not get both stable video playback and desktop effects to work together).
So I switched to Gnome. I have since learned how to use gconf-editor to implement most of the custom UI config I like. It's a bit harder to do than it was in KDE 3.X, but what choice do I have?
Are the current versions of KDE any good? I haven't even test driven it since KDE 4 because that experience was so bad...
I've used KDE in the past and will probably try it again. I'll also try Gnome/Unity/MATE/Cinnamon or whatever is available once the dust settles. At the moment I'm happily using xfce.
The reason I change window managers (WM) is that there are a few particular config settings that I need and whenever the WM I'm currently using suffers a major overhaul I typically find one or another of these features have been removed from the GUI config menu (perhaps because the feature is not yet reimplemented and the dev team temporarily removes them from config? dunno). So I go looking for a different WM that does what I want. Later, once things have settled down I re-try the old WM's to see if they'll work for me.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
After having issues with Ubuntu on my aging inspiron e1505, I decided to apt-get the lxde setup. Seemed to work better for me and the layout is much nicer.
So after fixing a gateway M-6333 and installing a patriot Pyro ssd, I installed lubuntu, and man I'm happy. From powered down to desktop takes around 6-7 seconds compared to the 40 seconds on my dell with regular hard drive (which has a faster CPU) or even lubuntu on the same dell which takes about 25...
Either way lubuntu has been much faster and just works for me
Linus is not a good reference. He left KDE for Gnome when KDE went from 3.x to 4.x. Now he's ranting about Gnome since they went from 2.x to 3.x. The guy simply doesn't like change. Next he'll move to XFCE, and then rant when they move from 4.x to 5.x.
I do advocate the use of FLOSS where a business case can be made for it but until someone steps up and offers a package the meets the regulatory issues faced by many small businesses, we're S.o.L (shit out of luck) and yet we already have to spend outrageous sums to fulfill those regulations, thus a FLOSS package with proper support could possibly make a living, competing in those area's. The reason I say that, is I already have to buy a package to meet those issues, so why not change vendors?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Because I really couldn't care less about all of the "power" features? All of the "power user" tools worth their salt are CLI tools, anyway.
X11 is a system that lets you display applications in windows. Gnome just happens to do that, reasonably conveniently, and doesn't look half bad. Gnome 3 shell is perhaps a bit dumbed down and not particularly powerful, but it gets its job done. The reason I'm not using a lighter desktop environment is that Gnome 3 is also a reasonably modern choice, so I won't be having headaches about applications being dumbfounded by WindowMaker's peculiarities (or the other way around).
X11 is also a system that lets you show a ton of xterms at once. Gnome just calls those Gnome Terminals. Simple enough.
All I usually really need to do to get through my day are Firefox/Iceweasel, Emacs, and some graphics/video apps (MyPaint/GIMP/Inkscape/Blender/Synfig/Kdenlive). And then there's mpd for playing music in nicely Unixy way.
the desktop today is fully-functional and polished
I'm sorry, but I cannot regard as "fully-functional and polished" any desktop environment in which menus disappear just as I am about to click on them just because the desktop has received a notification. When KDE4 receives a notification it doesn't simply display the notification message, it also causes certain classes of other windows to be removed... and this includes the "K" menu. Several times a week that menu disappears as I am about to select an item, and I end up clicking on whatever was underneath the item just because I can't react quickly enough to the sudden removal of the menu.
I have other gripes with KDE4, but they pale into insignificance compared to what is, to me, the bizarre notion that it's ever acceptable for menus simply to disappear. Obviously, the developers must disagree with me, but I honestly can't imagine why they think this is reasonable behaviour.
Mostly my other gripes are along the lines of "feature X that was in KDE3 is either absent or poorly implemented in KDE4". Many things in KDE4 are better than they were in KDE3 (which I admit I often tend to forget), but the fact remains that when I switch back to the machine on which I keep KDE3, I always find myself somehow feeling more relaxed and in control.
Many years in technology have taught me one universal truth: whenever anyone says that a piece of software used to suck, but the latest versions are much better, that software still sucks. That software still sucks big time.
Unless the project has a major change in personnel, there are still the same people using the same flawed decision-making processes. The same organizational infrastructure that resulted in a bad product a year ago is almost certainly pushing out a bad product today. The only thing that's changed is that people have had more time to grow emotionally attached to the software, and have more time to rationalize that attachment, and have more time to internalize that rationalization so that it's obvious to everyone else but them.
If everyone is saying that KDE 4.4 used to suck, but KDE 4.8 doesn't suck, then it's 99.9% certain that KDE 4.8 still sucks. And, it's equally certain that in a few years, those same people will say that KDE 4.8 used to suck, but KDE 4.12 doesn't suck anymore.
Right one: "Which distro are you running? Why aren't you running KDE?"
For example, a number of distros like (K)Ubuntu like the bleeding edge versions, often leaving the users with a bleeding desktop.
While others prefer stabler KDE releases with less eyecandy and more stability.
Then in general I do am running KDE, v4.8.3 now that a large number of bugs have been fixed, partly due to the KDE itself, a partly to the patched/packaged version available in (K)Ubuntu.
If you asked me the same 6 to 9 months ago, I would have answered "I am running XFCE because GNOME is clumsy and KDE is unstable to my needs".
But this is also a religion-related question, so beware!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Has there been any public response from gnome.org about the almost universal dissatisfaction with Gnome 3? Any word from Fedora on why they include Gnome 3?
KDE is retarded. kmplayer, kwallet, Konsole, Kmail, Kontact.. it just gets annoying. Gnome is also retarded. You'd think by now that User Experience would be down to a science. Maybe they're just doing the science wrong. No reason to upgrade to Gnome3 yet.
Kde (especially apps) are still quite unstable and the desktop and Qt is much slower compared to GNOME 3+GTK3.
I'm currently using a mix of Mate, Xfce4, LXDE, and Gnome pieces along with compiz, conky, and other misc bits. Why? Because I want the features I use and only the features I use. Given two programs that both have the features I want but one of them comes in at 1/4 the size and 4x the responsiveness, I'm going to go with it no matter how many features I'll never use the other one has. But that's why I use what I use rather than straight anything.
Why don't I use more bits of KDE given an otherwise even bloat to useful features ratio? Mostly because I don't like the look and feel of QT applications after so many years of using GTK applications. Though I will say k3b is probably the best GUI burning program by a damn sight, the rest of the KDE suite isn't useful enough to subject myself to constant QT usage.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
I think that KDE is a fine environment, but, I have an older Intel dual core unit with 2 GB RAM and XFce4 meets my needs on Slackware 13.37. If and when I get a new box I will perhaps give the latest incarnation of KDE a try.
Just personal tastes. Since I can run any useful KDE app outside of KDE desktop, the choice is really this: do I want to look at purple pastels and bubbly bubbles by default? I like my environment to look (what I consider) professional. So for me, it's conservative blue or gray, not hipster purple or pink with all applications starting with a K. Even Mac OS X, with its "lickable widgets", has found the right balance not to embarrass professional users. And no, I refuse to even spend a minute to change the default look, because I have numerous alternatives to KDE.
Seriously, I'm running whatever was installed by default when I installed CentOS 6.2. I actually had to check and I'm running Gnome. It seems to work fine for what I use it for; an ssh window to servers I administer and the ability to run a browser with the occasional Open Office spreadsheet doc to review.
I really don't have a bunch of time to muck with X servers and package dependencies, and since I rebuild the box from time to time to test new distributions, mucking with the X server is really pointless.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I ran KDE from 2004 until a few months ago, and generally liked it. I struggled through the switch from KDE 3 to KDE 4, and hoped that the worst was over. However, in recent versions it was actually getting worse and worse. The akonadi / nepomuk debacle was bad enough, but I found Kmail 2 to be completely unusable. At random times, not only at startup, it would start some indexing operation that would continuously spin my hard disk for 15 minutes and make the entire system unresponsive. Navigating through folders was excruciating as it would re-index messages and update the threading view on the fly, often jerking me around in the message list and suddenly dragging me back to some arbitrary point like the earliest message in the folder. Messages were no longer stored transparently in a folder of my choice, but hidden away somewhere. And of course, there were random multi-minute wait times just to view a single locally-stored old message. There were other annoying breakages, but Kmail was the last straw. I decided that, when the mail reader can no longer read mail, that's a sure sign that KDE is no longer fit for use.
Now I'm using Clawsmail for my mail client. It's excellent. And Gnome 3 for a desktop. I don't like it as much, but hey, it works.
Long time KDE user but the change in desktop behavior to 4.x was unacceptable. I like to put the files and project folders I am working with on my desktop (a visual clue). KDE 4.x with the “widgets” garbage will not allow that. You can put stuff in the desktop folder but it does NOT appear on the screen I call "the desktop". I sat down one week and loaded Kubuntu on a test machine to try to change the way I work but no! It is just too hard to get things done. I am now using Xfce as it allows me to do what I want it to do with minimal hassel.
Sorry about posting as anonymous – it's been a while and I forgot my password
Because I don't want to spend all day tweaking my distro everytime I upgrade to a new one. I grab an all-in-one complete distro that works out of the box (at this point it is Mint Linux). And I am done. I honestly don't want to spend all day reconfiguring every aspect of it. I am to the point where I am going to start skipping the 6 month revisions and stick with the Long Term Support versions. And I will more than happily skip over any version that is reported to be buggy or poorly designed. I want something that just works.
I don't use KDE because it has WAY too many settings, menus, tabs and dialogs all mixed together with the common stuff buried amongst the advanced stuff. It's a kitchen sink of desktops and I'm pretty certain that it would have enjoyed far more success amongst end users and enterprises if it had really dialled back on this stuff. Arguably GNOME 3 goes too far in removing stuff but there is no arguing which desktop a novice would find easier to sit down and use with no experience.
Because Gnome is the default. I have to touch dozens of computers in a week, many of them freshly built, and I gave up trying to customize all of them a long time ago. Basically the only thing I customize now is the .bash_profile and the .vimrc -- both of which can be wget'd trivially quickly. I don't have time to fuck around with window managers any more.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I left KDE after 10 years because of their totally botched migration to the new kmail. Moved from kubuntu to lubuntu w/ Thunderbird. It just works.
I stopped KDE because all pim informations went in a mysql DB, and this kills the laptop with CPU/memory/disk
I do. My desktop on openSuse 12.1 is KDE you fool.
A vote for ratpoison WM on my mythtv frontends, not because I use it, but there was some bug requiring a WM, not to actually do anything, but to handle the root screen or something I can't even remember. Tradition, I guess.
http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
A vote for awesome WM on all my linux desktops. A gross simplification seems to be xmonad is to Haskell as awesome is to Lua. Doesn't really matter what language its written in, since its only purpose in life is to start a terminal and/or chrome and switch between them.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I was actually a KDE 3.x user under Debian. I then tried updating to KDE 4.something and the system became unbearably slow and unusable. At that point it was easier for me to just install Ubuntu with GNOME (which I hadn't used in years), and it was good enough so I stayed there.
Recently I had a chance to use a more-recent KDE desktop and I found it cluttered and confusing. I'm sure that given a couple of days I'd get used to it and not have any problems. But I won't migrate just for the sake of migrating, and I have to say I'm pretty happy with my current (Ubuntu 12.04) desktop, Unity and all (yes, I actually like Unity!).
So that's why I'm not using KDE.
I do run KDE quite a bit, and make it available for family members.
However, it took less than 45 minutes with a window manager-- in my case, i3 (http://i3wm.org/) to totally switch for my
work and daily purposes.
Can you please stop making us Windows users sounding so retarded?
Used KDE for years. (12 years now). It was the default with Mandrake 7.0 in July of 2000 (KDE 2.x, forget the exact version), though Gnome (with sawfish as the window manager) was also available. So was some version of Enlightenment, fluxbox, and some version of AfterStep. Oh, and XFCE. Started with KDE, have tried all those and several more but just keep going back to KDE.
KDE and Gnome are actually decently complete, the others have less in regard to major programs or simply accessories that they work with. Not that I use KOffice (who does?), but that's why I don't use E or Fluxbox or XFCE as my default. (Though honestly, XFCE is probably next most complete.) Gnome? Never liked it.
So with Gnome 3 to configure it you need the control panel, which comes built in. Except that is highly limited and doesn't include the ability to do basic things like manage window buttons, modify icons to include command line options, etc. All basic things that every other GUI includes in the control panel/properties of icons/etc.
What you will need to manage Gnome 3: the gnome teak tool, gnome extensions, and alacarte to modify icons. Except alacarte is broken, and has been broken since about August of 2011. So you'll need to copy text files into your home dir and edit them by hand to have custom command line options for icons. I cover all the gory details on F17 here:
http://kurt.seifried.org/2012/06/01/making-fedora-17-gnome-3-work-you-cant-its-completely-broken/
TLDR: customizing Gnome 3 is a disaster. It's not that configuration options are hidden, they simply aren't present, you'll need additional tools, one of which is totally broken.
I haven't used the KDE for years. I started using Ubuntu with the first release. I would peak at the KDE on a livecd once every few years, but have only used GNOME via Ubuntu.
Having a normal, non-huge monitor, I gave KUbuntu a try when Ubuntu 12.04 forced Unity on people.
I was pleasantly surprised!
The KDE looked slick.
With just a few clicks I was able to get the file manager, Dolphin, to resemble something like Total Commander. First time in years I actually feel attached to linux software versus software that will run on linux.
With another click I was able to set the first day of the week to Monday, in all apps with a calendar. In GNOME the force the "standard" on you listed for your country. It takes editing config files, and doing it again with each daylight savings time update to do that GNOME.
The "File | Save As" dialog boxes also let you rename, move, delete files/dirs like you can in Windows. A feature always lacking in linux ( by THEIR choice ) that I always found to be seriously annoying.
Configuring the KDE was also very easy. All pointing and clicking with the many, many, options gracefully hidden away but easy to find when you want them. Custom keybinding were EASY, no horrid GNOME sysconfig editor.
I like the "new" KDE so much I decided to get a new PC to run it instead of migrating to the Mac.
I switched to KDE a while ago, and I've never had issues with it. You can configure it anyway you want with customization eye candy which you can dial back. Honestly, I think KDE is the best full desktop environment out there.
The solution to releasing software that isn't ready for people to use is not to release it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm not running KDE because I don't wanna be responsible of global warming.
I tried to give KDE a chance years ago and didn't like it. Since Gnome 3 sucks, I looked around and am currently using Cinnamon.
It still needs a little polishing but overall it is a great desktop GUI.
One thing I also noticed when I was running Firefox in GNOME 3 is how much space is wasted when the browser is supposed to be maximized. At the top you have the GNOME bar, then an app title bar doing essentially nothing, then a menu in Firefox. Firefox could probably make use of the menu in the GNOME bar (which normally just says Quit) and hide it's own menu by default like it does in Windows 7. And GNOME a maximized app's window with its own bar instead of showing both. A bit like Unity without that execrable global menu functionality. That arrangement would work so much better on smaller screens.
Why does this story have the GNOME footprint logo, when the thread is about KDE? That's retarded. KDE should have been the first keyword, and the KDE logo should have shown up.
Simple. It is bloated. Qt sucks (the old license from Nokia and previous lost my interest). GTK sucks. No offense, but the devs for both live in a fantasy world, not my reality. Perhaps in 10 more yrs, these will be use able again.
FVWM has rocked since 1995-ish. No need for me to change. I was done "tweaking" my desktop around 1998.
For Mom, it needs to be really easy, run on a Pentium4 with 512MB of RAM and a video card from 8 yrs ago. That means LXDE is the **most** DE I'd load and even that is a little much.
DE Devs - please come back to reality. Making something that runs FAST on ARM would be nice.
*in the Dos Equis guy's voice*
I don't run a Linux desktop very often, but when I do I use Window Maker.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
In which case, one could use Razor-qt. KDE sans all the bloat.
Actually, I run Debian 6 with KDE 4.4 on my workstation. In fact, I've been running nothing but KDE on my workstation for over a decade, so I guess you could say that it's my all-time favorite desktop environment. I even prefer using Konqueror as my web browser!
However, when I was asked to install a Linux workstations in an office environment a few years ago, I ended up going with Xfce despite my relative lack of experience with it. The reason I selected it is because Xfce is not nearly as resource-hungry as KDE and runs very well on old hardware -- even on 8-year-old machines with less than 1 GB of RAM. It doesn't look too bad either.
There are some other questions I could ask of myself, like Why didn't I switch to Gnome when things got so rough with the new KDE4 in 2009? Pure habit. I survived that period by using the KDE version of Linux Mint for a year, before going back to Debian. Or, Why did I start using KDE in the first place (in 2001)? I think simply because to me it looked more like Windows (which I used for a total of almost exactly 10 years before that) than Gnome.
In conclusion, my feeling is that a person's desktop preference is largely a question of taste and habit, so it will likely always be an uphill battle for the KDE developers to get, say, long-time Gnome users to switch to KDE even if the latter is superior. However, I think that more people would indeed consider KDE if it could also be made to run with a lot less memory and processing power than it currently requires.
Readers who have time should all load up the KDE version of Sabayon 9.
You will see how nicely polished KDE can be.
Kill your TV
I used to run KDE, but then after an upgrade to a new Kubuntu release KDE seemed to get weird(changed menu/panels) and more bloated.
Now I run XFCE, and will do so until that gets weird and bloated.
Then I will switch to something lighter, and run that until it gets weird and bloated.
And so on. It seems creeping featuritis will kill all DE's eventually. I don't really need a desktop to do much, and I don't need 3D effects, and transparency. I just need some decent menus/panels and some smoothness/speed/reliability. Beyond that less is more.
Because I'm a programmer and I just cannot support anything that forces people to use C++. All of KDE is written in C++ and, as you should know, C++ doesn't really interface with other languages. If KDE were to become dominant, you wouldn't be able to write a Linux desktop application in any other language.
I like how KDE looks and works, and I don't really like Gnome 3 or Unity, but anything is better than a world with only C++ in it.
1. All that kmail, kthis, kthat stuff. I don't want a load of apps as well
2. Lack of polish
See the latest 4.3 screenshot
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop.png
- The clock text is too big, margin too small on the RHS
- The battery icon is bigger than the other footer icons
- Capitalisation odd in the Places view (Shouldn't these all be capitalised?)
- The footer of Dolphin has too much space under 1 Folder, 3 Files
etc (Although, tbh, it appears significantly better than 4.2)
Seriously... who uses a GUI on unix? Unless its your desktop machine, there is absolutely no point. I installed KDE, my machine is on a KVM, last time I actually switched to it on the KVM I was glad I disabled KDE.
So what you basically just said is:
1. You don't like KDE's default workflow.
2. You *also* don't like Gnome's default workflow.
3. You didn't bother to take any time to customize KDE's layout (and believe me it can be customized in some MAJOR ways that Gnome intentionally prevents you from doing).
4. You did bother to take the time to customize Gnome to your liking.
5. Conclusion: Gnome Good KDE bad.
I'm not following your logic at all there. P.S. --> In KDE don't use a taskbar either, I have quick launchers on the desktop and I can use the excellent krunner to launch other applications. I also have full expose features running with a single press of a customized hotkey. KDE supported 100% of these features before Gnome 3 was even launched, so I'm not buying your arguments in the slightest.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I AM you insensitive clod!
I know that's a really stupid reason but seriously, there is a twinge in the back of my psyche about it. Growing up, the "K" meant "K-Mart" and it was a ghetto place to be. I got all of my shoes there from ages 3 to about 13. They didn't last but about 6 months if that long... they were not of good "Kuality" you know? But my mother didn't want to spend money on things we would outgrow in a short period of time.
Those old childhood memories haunt us all whatever they may have been.
Even so, the initial impressions I got of KDE were not favorable. There were many things about it in the 1.x and 2.x days which I didn't like and I was favoring GNOME at the time... actually, GNOME came after other things like enlightenment and fvwm. But once I was on GNOME, I didn't want to leave.
GNOME3 and its "not ready for prime time" release in Fedora made me ANGRY. I was simply unprepared for the change and the change was not prepared for me. In the end, I went to a distro that was less likely to surprise me in any way. CentOS. It's just like my old Fedora but less well supported with cutting-edge things which, at the end of the day, is usually not that important to me. But for those things that are, I just need to retrain my brain to seek out source and compile you know?
KDE is the "workaround UI": every time a new feature creates a problem, they seem to solve it by adding workaround features such as 2-3 additional ways to access whatever was just obscured, a way to hide the new access, and etc.
KDE is contrary to almost every instinct of an Atari/Amiga/Windows/Early-Xer. I found my virginal experience of Mac OS with OS X 10.2 orders of magnitude easier than any of my forays into KDE.
I have always found KDE to be bloat incarnate: the only consistency is that things are konsistently different and awkward, plus my machine is some how never powerful enough to run KDE smoothly.
Over the last 15 years, my Linux and BSD desktop experience has repeatedly undergone the following cycle:
1. Install new distro/release with default desktop,
2. Try for 4-6 weeks,
3. Manually try a different window manager,
4. Get annoyed at all the glitches,
5. Try KDE,
6. Allow 1-2 days
7. Remove GUI and go back to ssh/X from Windows with a shake of my fist.
Ultimately it comes down to which UI you learn first. If you started with KDE, you probably have a good grasp of the basics. If you didn't, then the only times you're going to consider KDE are when you've already been annoyed by one UI, making KDE's confusing counter-intuitive concepts a wall of hurt waiting to get you to uninstall.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
K stands for Krap.
That about sums it up for me. All the terribly misspelled apps that start with 'k'. It's like that old copy of "The Far Side" where every single cartoon is listed in the 'Index' starting with "The one about..."
What the hell is the point of alphabetizing your menus when everything starts with 'k'. And where's my chat program. Must be 'kchat' or something lik...oh...'kopete'...? Really? Huh--never would have guessed that was a chat program in a million years. What about a web brow...'konquorer'? Seriously? Is that german for 'web browser' or something?
Pass.
I'll stick with xfce and 'normal' app names...
I like i3 for much the same reasons. It's fast,efficient and doesn't chew up a bunch of screen real estate, which is important on a netbook.
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
I've used Gnome ever since Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) more than 10 years ago. Switched to Ubuntu about 6 years ago. Gnome 2 worked fine.
Then came that mess Unity. And the Gnome 3 monstrosity.
I've tried KDE in and out. KDE 1. KDE 2. KDE 3. KDE 4. Always bloated, slow, buggy. Even the late, considered good KDE 4.6 and 4.7 releases. It would crash even with just a Konqueror file browser window. It sucked.
After Unity and Gnome 3, I've used KDE 4.6 and 4.7 exclusively last year, both in Ubuntu (always the latest version) at home and Fedora 15 and 16 at work. I swear I've tried. But I couldn't stand the bloat and the bugs.
So I've switched to XFCE, and never looked back. Simple, fast, customizable enough, just like Gnome 2 was.
I am an E16 guy.
I've tried all WMs and DEs under the sun. I've been trying them all for quite a while, since GNOME 1.2 days for sure (some before that, back when the choices were more like "fvwm or afterstep?" but quite consistently since GNOME 1.2)
KDE4, in my experience, on my hardware, is crashy. I've tried running it "just to see" and found that my *entire system* locks up to the point where even a remote ssh+kill of X won't recover it. Even when it doesn't lock completely I see occasional inexplicable crashes.
KDE4 is resource-hungry. Nevermind RAM usage, which is not great, I find that it spins up my CPU and leaves it there. I routinely note high CPU usage from KDE applications and background services. Nepomuk-related things are certainly not good in this area. Often I cannot make the CPU hogging go away without logging out of KDE (and sometimes not even then!)
KDE4 isn't configurable enough. I know GNOME people are boggling at this, but I like to configure my workflow "just so," and KDE doesn't fully allow this. GNOME 2.x was worse, GNOME 3.x is far worse, and Unity... nowhere close. I say this to be fair, but if KDE4 doesn't let me make it work "my way" (and it doesn't) then it's not much good. Example: It only supports multiple desktops, no virtual desktops. This is bad, because I only like virtual desktops. I can't configure which mouse button switches desktops vs. drags windows on the pager. I can't, or can't figure out, how to reduce the panel down to just the pager. I could go on, there are a lot of little details.
KDE4 doesn't do keybindings. KDE3 had some kind of solution for this, but KDE4 is a mess. The only real option is bbkeys, which works but is a stupid kind of a solution. Technically this is a "not configurable enough" problem, but it's so huge that it deserves its own bullet point.
I want to like KDE. I promote it to less adventurous users! But, when my system doesn't work how I need it to work, doesn't have a way to control keyboard shortcuts, keeps my CPU humming at 100%, eats my RAM, grinds my disks, crashes my apps and hangs my computer... it's kind of a non-starter.
I use E16. I've been following the development of E17, which is cool-looking, but until it's "done" I don't really see the incentive to switch.
E16 is stable. In the last 10 years I have seen exactly THREE bugs in E16, one of which is arguable, one of which requires $HOME to be out of disk space, and the other of which is not a showstopper. Crashes? What's a crash? My WM *never* goes down, and I am one of those insane people who has X uptime measured in months, not days or hours. Current score: 9 months. E16 is still running, not leaking memory, not eating CPU... it Just Works. I just can't justify switching to any environment unless it can approach this level of stability.
E16 is lightweight. That's kind of ironic for a WM which was known for "pretty but resource-intensive" in its infancy, but what was resource-hungry in 1998 isn't so bad any more. By being just a WM and some applets, all of which are optional and easy to disable, the complexity is low and the footprint is tiny. Even with all of the "cool" effects enabled the CPU and RAM cost is miniscule (and I don't enable them, because I prefer functional to flashy.)
E16 is somewhat configurable. Okay, so the theme you pick matters a lot (bluesteel here, for about 10 years now) but the *behavior* of the WM is all configurable from user-discoverable GUI settings panels. It's not as crazily flexible as, say, sawfish, but it has more than enough for me. Moving windows should show outlines of the new position (with guide lines to the edge of the screen!) and exact pixel dimensions and coords in the corner. Do you care whether iconified windows are shown in the alt+tab list? I don't want them, but if you do you can have them. I like to have 4x16 virtual desktops, but the option is right there if you prefer 4x4 multiple and 4x4 virtual.
E16 has e16keyedit, a crude but effective Enlightenment keybinding management
I want my Cowboyneal
I tried Gnome 3, hated it. it's far too interruptive to my workflow, mainly due to forcing me off my focus just to switch windows & apps and stuff. I'd use the word convoluted to describe it. Cinnamon & Xfce are alright, but they didn't blow me away or make me feel there was any reason to log off Unity to use them. I also haven't heard about any. That being the case, I figure KDE probably isn't going to offer me any real benefits that I don't already get in Unity either. So I've never installed KDE. Although, I prefer a few KDE apps, which run fine in Unity.... like Kdenlive & K3b.
There's no KDE for Windows 7.
You mean like this:
http://windows.kde.org/
Yeah--exactly like a program who's website states it is considered unstable and has been in development for over 2 years. How did you know? I'm switching back to Windows and KDE right the fuck now...
Isn't KDE for Windows people that aren't ready to let it go?
Fluxbox is, to put it mildly, more awesome than Indian Motorcycles, Sean Connery, Jimi Hendrix and Six Flags combined. ...In terms of linux window managers, that is...
I first starting using Linux shortly after going to college in 2002 and haven't installed windows on my computer since around 2004 or so. In the early days I probably changed to a new distro every couple of months or so and I tried out every DE I could find. Gnome 2 is what I eventually settled on. I loved it. I could configure it to look and act the way I wanted, but it wasn't overly complicated and the UI was simplistic. Course Gnome 3 changed all of that and like most people, I can't use it. I tried XFCE and LXDE. They seemed to be very lacking to me. XFCE felt like a step backwards, but if I had to I could have used it. LXDE however left a bad taste in my mouth for some reason. I tried KDE 4 on OpenSuse and while it takes a while to configure it, I do like it. I recently installed Mint 13 with Cinnamon. It isn't bad, but it isn't great either. It still lacks some of the configuration that I would like it to have. I didn't realize I had become a KDE Guy (which would have been a crazy thought for me before Gnome 3) until I found myself missing it now that I'm running Cinnamon. I think when the next version of OpenSuse releases (which had become my favorite distro anyway) I'll install it with KDE be happy.
I am very picky about usability issues and that means your defaults are all wrong for me. If I want every window to have an always-on-top button and you don't ever want to see one, we can both have it just so in KDE. Sure, one of us will have to venture into settings to make it so, but the point is that there's a setting for it in KDE.
Some of you pointed out ugly and old fashuined "start" menu. You can take that away and pick a different one. Shading on buttons looks wrong? change it. Window boders are not to your liking? Change them. Don't want to have a task-bar? Remove it. Want a dedicated task-bar on each of your screens? Add those task-bars. Don't want semantic file indexing? Disable it. You don't have to it.
Why is it when Hollywood can't modernize their distribution method they are a dinosaur on these boards, but everyone is defending not using modern desktops? What a bunch of hypocrytical nonsense!
I couldn't agree more. I first moved to XFCE when I was looking for a lighter window manager on an older computer. This was about a year ago, and I haven't looked back. Everything just works, and failing that, is fairly simple to configure. No godawful semi-maintained nigh-mandatory extensions lists, no configurator-cum-registry, no fighting with dozens of default helper services. It's just... functional. Is that too much to ask?
for example, this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165044
keeps my wife off.
Red Leader Standing By!
Too much churn with KDE and GNOME and the distros.
At this point, I haven't had to modify or nurse along my desktop in three years, despite repeated OS upgrades.
Now I can't imagine going back to the semi-annual three-day fix-it-back-up-and-see-how-to-replace-what-was-"upgraded" hack-fest that was life with Linux. It didn't start out that way in 1993, but it sure got that way by 2009.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
All we want from a Linux UI, IMHO, is stability. You don't want your terminal window to disappear randomly, have to restart X/windows manager once a while, or try to find out why clipboard suddenly stops working.
It's not only the stability of one release, but the whole release branch. One crappy release would just ruin the perfect set up of my workspace, and force me to start from scratch.
I have tried gnome 3 and kde (admittedly, that was a long time ago), and both of them fell short of the stability requirement. There seems to be too much emphasis on functionality and fancy graphics rather than dead-simple stability. That's why I have moved on to xfce (though it's not perfect).
That might also explain why more programmers are buying Macs, which are essentially unix environment + a nice/stable UI.
My 10-year old single-core P4 plays best with lightweight stuff. Mint 13 with Mate is a pretty perfect fit for my antiquated hardware. I'm getting married in October, honeymoon in November, then shelling out for Christmas. Sometime the first of the year I hope to build a Hackintosh so I can run whatever I find works best.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
I have tried out the major desktop environments available for Linux. In the end, KDE4 remains the best DE for me.
KDE4 is very fast and responsive for me. I wasn't around during the early releases, so I can't offer a (mostly qualitative) comparison. I have disabled most of the animations and desktop effects. Desktop effects continue to remain problematic for my system. I have a NVidia Geforce GTX 465 with binary blobs, but performance is extremely poor when I have many windows open. In addition, most of the desktop effects are either too flashy or obnoxious for me personally.
Much of KDE4's appeal for me is in its easy customization. I can slightly fine tune the appearance of my desktop. I can configure some of the basic behaviors of any window, including binding a key combination to bring up a specific window, which I find is more useful than Alt-Tab when working with many windows. In fact, KDE4 has made a great deal of effort to make as much of its functionality available on configurable shortcuts. As a Dvorak user, I can easily switch keyboard layouts and keep the qwerty Ctrl+ shortcuts (Hitting Ctrl+C on Dvorak requires reaching for the qwerty I). These options are easily accessible and do not require me delving into some config file.
There are still problems to resolve. The application launcher is a bit odd to use but can be switched to a traditional menu style. I find limited to no use for widgets, Nepomuk (which in particular has given some users grief), and other trinkets. I have had problems with Apper, KDE4's update mechanism, and ended up updating my system via command line. Dolphin, the default file manager, has issues on my system with keeping up to date on file changes (I ended up switching to Thunar). However, I still find KDE4 my personal favorite DE to use.
So, basically, you don't have the "Name and description" on. Also, please, tell me how Konqueror/Rekonq is worse than Opera/Firefox/Chrome. Or is Internet Explorer your favorite browser because it is clearly labeled?
I switched when Ubuntu switched to Unity. Unity was too buggy, and lacked useful features and Gnome seemed to be heading in the same direction. Meanwhile KDE has cleaned up their act and ended up with a polished interface that actually works.
Their compositing has been more reliable for me as well.
I'd been running KDE 4.8 on Debian Wheezy for several weeks now. I chose KDE, since GNOME 3 fails miserably on my 3 headed display -- 3 separate X screens with no Xinerama and NVidia 302.11 binaries GTX 560 Ti and a Geforce 9600 GT. KDE at least would load. GNOME3 menu bar gets all messed up with duplicated calendars and other horrific menu strangeness ( even on a new, clean user account ).
KDE 4.8 works well, but a few anyone things like trying to open a konsole from the menu never opened on the active head. Composite would sometimes just stop working on one head, but continue to work on the other heads. A kwin --replace would fix this issue ( after several attempts ).
My biggest complaint with KDE is my computer just felt slooooooow. for a quad core with 12GB mem. Even with composite disabled, things felt slower than what I had been used to from running GNOME 2 for some time prior. Slow login and even after login I would launch a Konsole icon and sometimes sit and wait for 20 seconds while KDE continues to initialize or do something. Alt tab between apps, min/max windows and general paints just seemed very sluggish. Not a scientific benchmark, but spending years and hours in front of a Linux desktop, and you just know.
I switched to XFCE4 / Slim packages a few days ago and couldn't be happier. I feel like my computer is back again. Very fast, and it understands the 3 heads very well for placing Panels where I want them placed. And the Terminal Emulator menu actually opens the terminal on the active head with mouse focus. Compositor works well, though not as feature rich as KDE, I get nice transparencies and shadows that work.
I noticed xfce4 tears playing video in VLC more that KDE when compositor is enabled, but a quick disable of the compositor works fast and well to turn on and off which fixes the tearing. Turning composite on/off with the KDE system caused issues.
XFCE4 is now also on my laptop and it works very well for me.
Every day when i get to work i plug an external monitor into my netbook.
with gnome the first time i did this it was automatically detected, set to span with the external monitor on the wrong side. fair enough, so i open up the display control panel, drag it to the correct side, hit apply, confirm that it works and its done. next day when i come in and plug in the monitor it remembered how i had it the day before, and i can get straight to work (after checking emails and reading slashdot).
with KDE the first time i plugged in the monitor i got a dialog box telling me that i had plugged in a monitor. it had a configure button, so i press that and get the monitor control panel with a huge wall of options. fair enough, far more options than I need, but i guess they are useful for someone. so i set everything up. press apply and it all works well. Next day i come to work, and i get the same dialog again, then i have to go through the same control panel again.
So KDE would waste 2 minutes of my day, every day. I have still not found a desktop that betters GNOME2/MATE.
Nuff said
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I stopped using KDE because they messed up Amarok after v1. when it went to version 2. Clementine does the same thing so I went back to windows.
Running KDE because i like the thorough, centralised control centre, the custamisabilty, and the pretty colours. The panel is turned off and so is the desktop. Startup and background processes are almost completely culled (no need for all that indexing, etc.), and Openbox is running as the WM. Oh, and that horrendous icon theme has been nuked! In a way, you could almost say i am not really running KDE, merely taking advantage of it's advantages, and QT's libraries.
I use Mac OS X because desktop Linux is a bunch of unfinished features. They need to stop adding new stuff and fix the current features.
There are bugs in KDE which have existed for over 10 years without being fixed. I would contribute fixes but i'm just a lowly Perl developer.
Because KDE takes up too many computer resources and KDE's configuration isn't transferable from one computer to another.
On the other hand, Fluxbox's configuration is transferable from one computer to another (even on windows using bblean), and it uses less computer resources.
Read title.
Except, of course, my dear anonymous ignoramus, that your complaint hasn't been true since KDE 2.0. By default, for instance, the chat application is labeled "Instant Messanger" in big letters, and then, smaller, in gray, you get "kopete". You can find the Instant Messenger in "Internet Applications/Chat". So, you know, if xcfe shows the binaries name in the menus, it's xfce that's about a decade behind the times.
The fonts used in KDE hurt my eyes. I have tried everything I can think of to try to get them non painful but to no avail. Too bad. I actually like KDE and would use it if I could.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
My biggest complaint that drove me away from KDE was the inability to easily program keyboard shortcuts. Can I bind my "menu key" to open a terminal? Can I access the panel menu with the "super L" key?
Until Gnome 3, I was perfectly happy with it. Now, I'm trying to use CentOS because they have Gnome 2.x, but I've been trying KDE occasionally, and it seems to be getting much better.
I looked at KDE many years ago, maybe still the 3.x days or the early 4.x ones. I compared screenshots and videos of KDE and Gnome 2 and liked more Gnome. Maybe KDE looked too much like Windows, which I was coming from and not really appreciated too much.
I don't like some of the features of Gnome and I tweaked it a little. For example I removed the top panel and merged part of it with the bottom one and recently moved to minimize, close buttons back to the right (I removed the maximize one, I'm double clicking on the title, a much easier target). My dislike for top panels (and global menus!) extends to OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity. Guess what, I'll switch to MATE as soon as I find time to upgrade my pc to 12.04 straight from 11.04 (I'm giving it time to mature).
I'm using 12.04 with Unity on my eeepc and that's ok, because I'm always using full screen windows. However the top panel wastes pixels sometimes because it's impossible to hide it and not every program adapts to it. Then there is the launcher which augmented by the HUD is maybe on par with the old good applications menu but on a small screen is much less convenient than the old eeebuntu full screen launcher.
I don't like the way it looks. I like the way Gnome looks. Sorry.
- too bloated
- too many packages and dependencies (hey, how do I _really_ build it by myself?)
- too slow (I need _right now_ feedback to my actions)
- too many processes
- I just don't need it
- beginner users as scope
- just not configurable where I want it to be
I run fluxbox/blackbox and couldn't be happier. I don't know why we need "Desktop environments" that increase complexity.
A terminal is just fine for most of my stuff.
No basically I just said:
1) I did not like KDE (3&4) default behavior
2) I did not like gnome 2 default behavior
3) I found easier to customize gnome 2 than to customize kde 4
4) I like the gnome 3 default behavior
The sole exception to (4) is the shudown/suspend thing, but this is mostly due to the fact my workflow involves docking the pc in the office and when doing this there are a few glitches with the Usb hub and the serial port.
User interfaces tend to suck. KDE sucks, Gnome sucks, Firefox and Thunderbird suck for various reasons. And the same goes to other UIs on other OSes. Beside that, I am quite comfortable with Unity on my Netbook and with some add-ons Gnome-Shell is comfortable on my work desktop (two screens, with different sizes). While in the beginning both shells had too many bugs (just as KDE 4.x, they never learn) and I was very disappointed. However, I assumed that reporting bugs and using the stuff might help to improve it. For a productive environment I changed back to Gnome 2 (in those days).
Honestly, those who still complain might not comfortable with the new UI, as they cannot work the way they did before and have to change in a way they do not like it. They might be angry about the change and do not want to change because they don't like it. It is the same thing in many places: "Why should I change? I did this all the time in that way.". I guess Linus Torvalds is one of those guys.
On a technical level you can criticize Gnome-Shell in many ways. Why did their use Java-Script? This language is not designed to be used for complex programs. Even though it is used for UI-programming, it is not really suited for it. We could argue that they did not understand the user task concept good enough and there would have been a better solution. Sure. We could ask: Why have you mangled together UI-event-handling and data-model-operations? But when it comes to using the stuff, it is not worse than the old stuff, if you accept that you have to change your way to work. You could be as productive as before.
Ah yes and there are similar problems with Unity. But on small screens, like my Netbook, it is perfect (after I deactivated the disappearance feature of the side bar). Every end-user I gave Unity was able to use it in no time. Yes some "features" could be improved.
1. KDE feels even more bloated than Gnome.
Note - I said "bloated" not "slow" - I don't care how fast either of them are, there's too much of them both. They get in the way.
2. KDE doesn't do what I want any better than Unity.
Example: Here's one feature I want that even Windows fricken VISTA gets right, but that Gnome/Unity/KDE et al make so difficult my choice of WMs is limited to FVWM2 or xmonad: Mouse follows focus. It's such a simple thing. When I move my mouse to another window, I want that window to gain focus. That's easy. But when I alt-tab to a different window, I want my mouse to go to that window too. I don't want to be in a situation where one window is accepting input from the mouse whilst another one takes input from the keybaord. It's moronic.
3. I can't be bothered
KDE has lots of impressive features. I don't need or want most of them; I don't have time to wade through all the tutorials and howtos to find out what the few useful things it has are. I'm not interested in investing the time to learn yet ANOTHER interface.
At home I use Gnome because it's the default and it's a PITA to set up lightweight WMs to work with my two different-sized screens (laptop + monitor). I typically do little other than browse the web from home, so it's not enough of an issue to do anything about. At work I use FVWM2 because I've set it up to work EXACTLY the way I want it to and it does everything I need. Though I am considering a switch to Xmonad for a variety of reasons.
The only thing I need a WM to do is give me a place to run command-line shells and the few GUIs I'm developing for. KDE and Gnome both suck abysmally at giving me this. That's fine, I'm not their target audience. Trouble is, they both suck at being as comprehensive and user-friendly as OS X or Windows. We'd be better off if they were both scrapped and a new DE devised, one that didn't have the "for hackers" legacy deep in its foundations.
So.. it has come to this
I use lots of computers (around 5). I have forced myself to learn Unity. It's not perfect, but it is good enough for me. I don't have to go and hack 5 machines to catter for a different taste.
I use vim for a similar reason. I manage around ~12 different servers via ssh. I can use the same editor in all of them. It was terrible at first, but now I'm ok.
KDE is too cluttered. Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and love Unity.
OS X is, far and away, the best operating system ever made. Windows is terrible. Linux is worse. I've tried gnome, kde, and a vast number of other window managers and they all suck pretty bad. You guys just need to give up and switch already. I know most linux users only use it because they are too cheap to pay people to write a proper operating system but you guys have taken it to laughable extremes.
Think different.
Think better.
Think APPLE!
I loved kde3! When kde4 was in its infancy I went to ubuntu+gnome. Unity annoyed me and I went to Xfce4, now I've discovered how fantastic OSX is! I never spent much time on a Mac before but desktop Linux, specifically the end of kde3 pushed me that way.
I work via a terminal and ssh anyway so I've lost nothing but gained a "magical" user experience. You have to pay for it - but I've no problem when it just works.
I find kde4 "clunky" it's ui elements are massive, at least when last I tried. I think now it's all but impossible to win me back.
seriously, when I look at a screen like this http://www.kde.org/workspaces/plasmadesktop/screenshots/general-desktop.png I want to vomit. It looks like somebody took a design from the 90s and tried to make it up-to-date by adding transparency in two places.
First thing I want is something I can auto-log in which will place a set of browser windows in specific spots on the screen and then kill and replace them when I feel like it, also at the chosen spots on the screen. For my unattended network status display. When I can do this, I'll *consider* using one of them for my actual desktop. Until then, they lack utility.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I love KDE and usually run it on my desktops, excpet when I'm remoting into my system. In that case I'm already running KDE and usually logged in as the primary user, but KDE seems to be slow over remote connections, so I instead create another X session running Razor QT.
I like Gnome 3 too, but not for serious work. My wife's default DE is set to gnome 3 and she loves it. But she pretty much just uses the comptur to websurf, office document editing, printing, and some Graphic design.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
For me, KDE (4.8.1) crashes and misbehaves far more often than GNOME3 or XFCE, up to the point of being unusable. Try opening Konqueror, going to google and searching for a serval in Russian ( - yes, this requires a Russian keyboard layout configured). I cannot type the letter into the google search box! No other browser has this stupid bug. Also try going to http://icanhascheezburger.com/ - it crashes! So, I have to replace the browser with something more used and well-tested, like Firefox or Chrome.
Now to the mail client, KMail. I would like it to start with my session, in autostart. This triggers a race condition: often it starts faster than akonadi and complains about missing support. So, it is again unusable, let's install Thunderbird or Claws Mail.
And to the music player. There are many of them - juk, amarok and kscd. None of them can play an audio CD properly: kscd requires an analog wire, juk just doesn't support this at all and amarok stops after the first track. VLC or GNOME-MPlayer to the rescue.
So the general pattern is that DE-specific apps usually don't work, while desktop-neutral ones do. So, why would I need that heavy and entirely-disfunctional KDE when all that remains is a panel and a window manager to which XFCE has lightweight replacements?
And this screenshot illustrates it:
http://www.kde.org/images/screenshots/gwenview.png
KDE Still pretends it's 1999 and pack applications with plenty of visible features and redundant ways to do the same task to make them look more impressive.
However, the world has changed and people don't want to be bothered having to learn about stuff they don't care about, so the look and usability of KDE helps detract more users than it attracts.
I am running KDE, but it's still pretty unstable. With every release I have at least one "Report a bug" window popping from time to time. Version 4.7 had semantic desktop broken that would make you desktop completely unusable after a while. So I have that feature completely disabled. There is recurring problem with full garbage that can not be emptied. And with version 4.8 Krunner is not working. So I constantly have problems with my desktop.
I'm to lazy to migrate at the moment and I use only small set of tools (mostly CLI) so I still run it. But I can definitely see why other people don't.
For me it's a terminal and some bare-assed window manager like WindowMaker or awesome.
Everything else is clutter I don't need or use.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I think there is an added value in using the default desktop that comes with each distribution.
If Opensuse was more popular, I'm sure more people would use KDE.
I've been a long term Suse user (since version 6.x) and after that Opensuse and for me KDE was always the logical choice.
I've gotten feedback from people using Kubuntu and I think they blame KDE for Kubuntu's problems.
Personally, I don't like Gnome or Unity because it is too similar to OSX. For me, KDE is freedom to have many options and many different ways to do the same task. My perceived philosophy behind Gnome is that someone spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to do something, and that is way there is only one way to do a certain task.
I am not running KDE, because I run Gnome 3!
I actually think Gnome 3 is really usable and adding to the modern trend of desktop usage. :)
It does everything I want a desktop to do, so why should I have a problem with it
Because KDE, like Gnome, is slow and a RAM hog. XFCE screams...
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
You might as well ask:
To those who program java and are frustrated by the latest Eclipse, why aren't you running Netbeans?
Well I run neither, I use emacs (and vim depending on the situation). I am really just not that into IDEs for programming. Why I am not that into Eclipse is going to roughly translate into why I am not into Netbeans. Compared to emacs/vim, eclipse/netbeans are basically offering the same thing. I like the *nix approach of building a core of tools, and then building out from there. I find eclipse/netbean's big box solutions clunky and too hard to tweak when I need to. (Don't get me wrong I do get envious of junit support in eclipse sometimes.)
Now back to the original question at hand, I use xmonad instead of GNOME, KDE, or Xfce. (I have not recently experimented with anything else.) This is for essentially the same reasons as my preference for text editors over IDEs. Just not that into big desktop solutions when I select a windows manager. "But the features!", I hear the strawmen cry. Do I want floating windows, a start menu, right clicking for more options, a cluttered desktop, file managers, etc? Nope. I am sure a sufficient amount of customization could get all of these to something I could live with, but it is really not the starting point I want. Starting with xmonad and customizing my way to the features I want has worked really well for me.
Less is more!
The day KDE can open again my old files in my cd's dvd's of my locale, without saying "That file doesn't exist" , then MAYBE i will come back to KDE.
But for now, i'm pretty happy with xfce.
Slow on Intel HD 3000. Turning on vsync helps some, but Mutter and Compiz work much better on it. Mutter's actually really good.
Can you please stop making us Windows users sounding so retarded?
Ok, here you go:
I work in the real world, and so I run Mac OS X. There's no KDE for Mac OS X.
Feel better now?
I just found that KDE is very clunky and bloated. I was a KDE fan quite a while ago, running the original 1.0 version when it came out on FreeBSD. It just got too big and too bloated. Today there are just so many other shells that are either lighter on resources, easier to use or both.
Aaron and some others keep on saying that KDE has been fixed, that the ugly 4.0 mess is done and far away in the past and so on. This is completely wrong.
I've been using KDE since 1.0, I've tried as hard as I could (until 4.3.x??) to use it. It's just not possible. Even now that i've stopped using it, I'm still hurt by how KDE is bad because i need to fix all computers around me that still uses KDE (friend, family, using ubuntu). "Fixing" generally involves removing every binary related to strigi, nepomuk and such, and quite often also fix other things. I've stopped reporting bugs few years ago because it's just useless. Bugs have been piling up in the bugtracker since even before 4.0, developers just dont care about them, and they keep piling badly designed code in kde git. I could argue with technical information here, but that's not the right place here.
There are still a lot of very good developers in KDE, that's for sure. I don't really know where the problem is, but there's a lot of VERY bad code now, so i'm pretty sure some bad QA is involved somewhere. Last ugliness I've been confronted with : have a look at akregator code. Go and see, and dare come back saying it's just "good enough" as a design. I think the QA process in KDE is something around "Just accept ANYTHING so that we can have something to say in the next feature list". And there are a lot of unexperienced coders going through this hole.
But probably the problem is far more than just bad QA. The KDE communauty is very much concerned about itself, "us as communauty" is the favourite sentence of the marketing group. The focus has shifted from good code (remember how KDE was such a reference back then!), to a selfish group of coders that just dont care about users feedback, such as bugs. I'm pretty sure the recent shift toward creating companies will remove even more coders and bring more talkers to the show. It sadly reminds me about De Icaza and the mono stuff.
I used to run Debian, Mandrake, Fedora, played around with a few distros to learn them, and switched window managers every once in a while.
But for the past few years I have been running stock Ubuntu, and not even bothering with Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.
It just has gotten to the point where everything works well enough, and I don't feel that there's anything to be gained productivity-wise by futzing around with WMs. Besides, my work gets done on Windows anyways ;)
I used to run Gnome 2 on and off, switching between that and PapuaWM/EvilWM, but when Gnome 3/Unity came out I completely ditched it. I find it way too extensive and cluttered for what I'm doing (a few virtual desktops, one with a few terminals, another with Firefox and a third with misc. stuff), so I've settled with Musca --- a dynamically tiling window manager --- and a few support apps. Also, I don't like to take my hands off the keyboard and Gnome 3/Unity only allows for so much keybinding customization.
"Live free or don't."
I use fluxbox, with fluxter as a pager.
i want to change the window buttons to put the close on the left and stick,minimize and maximize on the right. Focus follow mouse, auto-hide the slit/pager/toolbar. all this can be done on KDE, but KDE have Tabs support, i want to group apps as i need then. i'm still amazed how to little WM support tabs
i also dont like the number of process kde runs in the background, where many of then eat VM memory (Virtual memory, not resident memory), requiring a large swap to a machine with high uptime and many apps. Nepomuk and akonadi are resources waste.
example: kiinit is right now eating 1.3GB of Virtual memory
Higuita
If I wanted a Windows style desktop I would run windows. All three of them make me have to deal with the question "so where is that really?", they all drag X11 network performance to a crawl, and they break X11 already convoluted clipboard buffers. If there was a current standards browser that used plain X11/Xt Widgets I would be more than happy to dump all of there massive libraries and dependencies.
I've always found Gnome to look wrong - the icons look like they're aimed at kids. KDE3 was great. KDE4 LOOKS beautiful, but I really can't put up with all the extra crap it insists on running but which gives me no functionality I want.
All I want in a desktop environment is something that manages my windows and provides me with a couple of toolbars for launching applications and switching between them. And I can never really feel confident enough to rely on KDE after the debacle with Kaddressbook. I'd always be scared that any update might break too much functionality
i used KDE4 for a long time after i switched away from gnome 3 because was just so restrictive and difficult to tweak and use. I really liked kde4 but ultimately switched away becasue it was heavy and i didn't like many of the kde version of applications. I preferred the gtk based apps. Now I use Enlightenment DR17 because it is lightweight, fast, and looks great. Its a bit difficult to install sometimes becasue its not a stable release yet, but as i am on gentoo, installing from source isnt really a problem.
I tried to run with Unity and with several forms of Gnome3, as did many here, and found them horrid, so I jumped over to KDE 4.7. I had an older laptop, and KDE simply would not run well at all, it was far too resource heavy, so I quit using it.
A bit later I got a new computer, and tried KDE again, 4.8 this time. It ran better, but still had tons of bugs, like sound failing to work consistently and programs I had no need of being forced on me worse than Windows does. I spent more time on forums and tweaking config files than I had in any other desktop, and all just to get the most basic functionality to work. And this is before even getting started on the unnecessary and buggy mess that plasma and widgets present.
So to answer this question, your statement that KDE is now fully-functional and stable is where you are incorrect, it's not, and that's why people aren't using it.
Someone else mentioned XFCE, and that's not bad I think. For my money I'm happy now in Mint 13 and MATE. Gnome 2 still beats KDE 4.x, Gnome 3 and Unity hands down.
Sometime last year I went through every DE available from Ubuntu repositories. KDE and Kubuntu shared the feature of making me nauseated when I had to use the mouse. It seemed like everything on the screen responded to pointer crossing. For all I know they track the pointer, treat it as a light source and adjust colors, shadows, and highlights all over the desktop as it moves around. I doubt they do that, but it felt as bad as I imagine that would feel.
I had hope for XFCE, but the menu bar was broken and there were so many icons and colors that it looked like the DE had been through gangland and tagged by everyone.
GNOME3 might have been OK if they both put the menu bar in the right place (just one, top of the screen) and didn't waste so much screen space with huge title bars.
The rest weren't worth more description.
Maybe I'll get bored enough sometime to try the new offshoots like MATE or whatever, but for now Unity puts the menu bar where it belongs and mostly stays out of my way. Too bad there isn't a decent spatial file manager anymore; I suppose I could settle for Miller columns, but we don't have those either.
Oh, GNUstep might do the trick, but putting it together correctly (no WIndowMaker) is too much trouble for now.
KDE4 silently fails to copy or move some files when handling a large number of files. Developers are not worried, I am not a KDE user anymore.
on LXDE...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
KDE 4 is slow and ugly! :p
This fucking trend of throwing a compeletely functional and perfectly useful desktop out the fucking window is intolerable. I switched to Openbox and I'm not exactly loving it but it blows having to deal with the absolute travesty that is GNOME or KDE or Unity out the fucking window. The Linux desktop will never be popular because the developers are fucking assholes and it's a fucking shame.
as modern KDE and GNOME installations, I salute your exceptional patience!
Double points if you have Andrew running as well.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
When I switched to KDE, it was a breath of fresh air.
ALL of the keyboard shortcuts in my apps Just Worked, and they worked /right/. And Konsole had support for the bitmap CP437 font I like, and working "fullscreen" mode. It seemed great. ...Then KDE4 happened, and they made the decision to:
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I have exactly zero programs installed which use qt. I have programs installed that I use daily which use gtk+. So I have zero interest in installing and running a desktop that uses a completely different toolkit from any of my software, and I have zero interest in retraining myself to use all the qt-based equivalents that may or may not exist. If I'm going to switch (and I have) it certainly wouldn't be to anything that isn't either A) gtk+ based (e.g. xfce) or B) tiny (e.g. fvwm). KDE's not even on my radar, and from what I've seen of it when I have looked at it, I'm very happy with that fact. I hear 4 is an improvement, but with 3, the developers seemed unable to distinguish configuration from option. I don't want to have to pick through 500 options every time I click the mouse. That's why I configure my fvwm to work the way I want.
It's funny to read that G+ post how Linus goes on ranting how sucky one of his own OS kernel's desktop flavor is. Maybe it's sad at the same time. Most of what he describes is similar to the brokenness of desktop Linux in general. The kernel itself seems to be in pretty good condition.
Short answer: Because I'm running Windows 7 and OS X Lion.
Long answer: I'm a busy person, I've not been infected by Stallmanesque zealotry, and I'm over the age of 25. The Linux desktop civil war is a game for the young and/or those whose time isn't valuable. I've better things to do on a Friday night than figure out why my soundcard doesn't work or what obscure bit of X config I need to modify. And finally, Linux is a third-rate desktop operating system. Yeah, I said it. Servers and desktops are diametrically opposed. Linux is a top-notch server OS. Do the math.
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Is anyone using this one for those who loved old KDE v3.5.x? I was going to use it, but was worried about support, compatiblity, etc. It is not official in Debian too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I use to care, but then I spent more time finding the perfect GUI then I did actually doing work.
From my perspective i just want to load up my apps and go. The desktop environment doesn't actually do anything--it is the container for the applications, and the applications are what make the computer useful to me. By an large any of the desktops are adequate in that regard. If a dsektop gets in the way of me using my favourite apps then it is a bad desktop. GNOME 3 has not yet gotten in the way so I am not motivated to switch (in fact, it has done quite well in staying out of my way).
I've generally not had issues with KDE in the past, but then it is much less often the default desktop of distros that I use so I haven't stayed up to date with it. When KDE went up to v4 though it was an utter failure an order of magniture larger than anything I had to deal with on GNOME 3. That is becasue KDE 4 really REALLY got in my way of doing that I wanted to, which is let me launch my apps and havigate amongst them with ease. The lack of speed and stability was absolutely appaling on my gear, and so off to GNOME I went. Since then GNOME and xfce have been quite adequate for my needs and I've become familiar with that architecture. The only thing I've really added was the "advanced settings" app and extension (aka gnome tweak tool). That has filled in whatever holes in configurability that I've had--and loking at the slowly growing number of extensions available it looks like the potential is there to do much more with the environment that way. I like that approach better than the "put everything PLUS a kitchen sink or two" right into the desktop.packages like KDE seems more apt to do.
Besides just being happy with what I got on my Debian Testing install by default, I just have this unquantifiable impression of KDE that makes me think it isn't really the future. It seems to represent the "old ways" to me and I like to try different things. KDE on the desktop at least is a bit to much of a "windows derivative"--perhaps that will work well for them when Metro becomes the only offering from Microsoft though.
I want a "window manager" to manage windows, and not burn my CPU cycles and disk/network bandwidth running junkware.
A pox on both the Gnome (since 2) and KDE houses.
I really miss OLVWM and Sawmill/Sawfish.
The desktop that helped to draw me into Linux in the first place was Gnome + Enlightenment (Mandrake 6.1). During my first Linux install, I discovered other wm's and desktop environments installed (I installed EVERYTHING) and explored them. KDE was most like Gnome, but far faster on my machine (K6-2 450 at the time) and I took a liking to it immediately. Through every version of Mandrake I used, I always stuck with KDE as my primary desktop environment with trips to the land of Blackbox or Windowmaker if necessary.
Oddly, on my FreeBSD installs, I always preferred Enlightenment e16 by itself (even now, my FreeBSD 7.3 install has e16)
In the corporate world, Red Hat was king and so was Gnome by default. I got used to that at work, but always settled in with KDE2.x or 3.x at home. KDE4 shipped and I was thrown off at how bad it was and stuck with KDE3 where I could. Years have gone by and about 6 months ago I worked with a client that used SUSE on their servers, and I set up an OpenSUSE 11.3 VM on my laptop to mimic their environment. Using KDE4.x on that wasn't as bad as I remembered my first exposure to KDE4 to be, but it was still annoying (seriously... is there a race to see home many clicks users can be forced to make to do simple stuff that we're not aware of???).
My current CentOS 5.8 machine runs KDE3.5.x. It does what I want with minimal fuss, unlike KDE4.x.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
You can find it under Trinity Desktop Environment.
I like the 3 series but was put off by 4 and am glad that someone else picked up the ball for 3 and is running with it.
Both Gnome and KDE are becoming obsolete. They are heavy, slow, overcrowded, non-functional. I am not talking about Gtk+ or Qt, just their corersponding desktop paradigms. There is a reason why iOS, Android, and now Ubuntu do not use Gnome or KDE.
I've long been a KDE user, switched to it in the KDE 4.1 days and never understood why people were so unhappy about it. I found it to be slick and useful, despite the regular problems with the NetworkManager applet in Debian Unstable. I just used the Gnome applet instead, which fit without a hitch.
Last year, finally frustrated enough with juggling between the windows of my various terminals and editors, I chose to give a tiling window manager a good try, and spent some effort on the ill-named Awesome (seriously, how do you SEO that?).
Though it's certainly not aimed at Joe Six-Pack in that you actually have to edit the Lua-based config file to configure it yourself, I found it extremely powerful and perfectly suited to my needs. The "tag" system to organize your window is supreme in allowing me precise control over which windows to display.
I discovered that I didn't have a use for all the frills of Gnome and KDE, except for USB-key and Wifi network management which are both accessible from the CLI anyhow (see udisks and nmcli). ... does this mean I've turned into a greybeard?
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Because they all run off X11, and I hate the whole concept of a socket-based windowing protocol. I also have a great dislike for POSIX, which is the whole reason why I'm stuck on Windows still... at least until (if) Metro becomes the norm, then there will be something I hate more than X11 and I may switch.
I observed the opposite, KDE becomes faster and faster especially 4.8
I'm going to take a look at that when I get some time.
Thanks.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
kde 3.something on opensuse is running on a server somewhere. .. okay works, but i want .. "maka launcher" for example.
it can do everything same like win2000 and easy too, with yast.
used ubuntu 10.04, tried unity because in ubuntu it's easy
to add a printer and/or get proprietary grafic drivers.
plus, there's tons of repositories.
tried ubuntu 12.04(?), you know, get new 3.x series kernel, yeah! saw the GUI-gnome3.0 = instant give-up : )
used opensuse 12 for a while on LXDE
gnome!
finally found mate/mint. all the ubuntu goodness, repositories, howto-google-for-help entries, 3.x kernel -AND- gnome 2!
so why have i not used kde 4.x? i assume it will need a properietary grafic driver to function correctly, which i can live with -IF- it doesn't interfere with REAL programs that acctually really use the GPU acceleration, say to play a video or a game or such.
also one time i tried kde 4.x (can remember exact version) and after login, i closed a "window" by clicking on a "x" of that and then i was stuck. i had a blank desktop. amazing. right-clicking the desktop gave me a menu but "cryptic" options
i was stuck. i think this was the first time i have installed a GUI without even bothering to start firefox and get on the internet. that version of kde4.x was installed for less then 5 minutes.
i still like opensuse; having a real root and yast, but with 12.4 it has, for me anyways, no "real" GUI unless you like LXDE.
same goes for ubuntu 12.04. monster big repos selection, apt-get, lots of howtos via google but again .. no "real" gui.
mate/mint is the answer!
I'd been running KDE since the early 2000's, before KDE2 came out, using dev. versions. I've used KDE3. Then came KDE4; well, I could live with how unstable it was, since after all it was supposed to be a development version (although the idea of a "development version release" always sounded completely idiotic to me). Time went by, and while it became slightly more stable, it also became even slower, more bloated, and more prone to weird crashes caused by the interaction between a dozen different pieces of software.
So I went back to using WindowMaker as a window manager, while still using a few KDE apps (Dolphin, Kaffeine, K3B...). And I'm really happy about it.
Sort of unrelated note: I've also gone back to using actual xterm's instead of Konsole. Simply put, the idea of tabs in a terminal just doesn't work out for me in the long run.
Slightly off-topic, but it seems Unity is universally hated by Slashdot, so this comment will probably end up modded six feet deep - but I find Unity awesome to work with, and it impresses me more with each Ubuntu release.
Actually, back when Ubuntu changed to Unity, I found it weird and unlikeable - just like everyone else in here, apparently. It was unintuitive and confusing, but, being a lazy kind of guy, I didn't bother changing it and I just rather started trying to avoid letting it get in my way.
Fast forward a few years, and I really love Unity, it has really grown on me. And I really "get" the "idea" of the interface too; for every program things are in the same place - hence Unity. And the "unintuitive and confusing" has turned into intuitive and innovative. The first feature that grew on me was starting programs quickly just by touching the windows-button and typing the first few letters. No more search around with the mouse or clicking around (like I used to do on Gnome). The second feature that has blown my mind, is the menus inside the application: in every application, just hit tab and type the first few letters of whatever the hell you want to do. I never have to use the mouse anymore!
I'm the only one singing a praise to Unity in here, but in my humble opinion, Linux needs more innovation - just like Unity - not less, and I hope Ubuntu never give up on innovating (and Unity) despite all the haters out there. Keep up the good work, Ubuntu!
Because you can't trust a project which
1- pushes out features that are way out there for most of us, and obviously mainly there to make devs look cool to their devs peers, not to be useful to users. That's a basic failing of governance that spells trouble for the project in the medium-long term, and sends me a strong message to steer clear
2- pushes out very broken *releases* (not betas, not alphas: releases !), reinforcing 1-
There are plenty of good alternatives that don't seem to be so ego-driven, nor to value features checklists over ... actually working.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
no bloatware
I do run KDE, and have for years, but the changes that have been made in 4.x are, generally, frustrating and annoying. Yes, the later releases have fixed a lot of the most egregious problems, but my main problem is that the new paradigm is counterintuitive and gets in the way of what I want to do as often as not.
So yes, I still run KDE but wish that I didn't, and will switch to something else as soon as I have the time & energy to devote to making the change.
Because if Windows look and feel had appraised me, I won't be switching to Linux at first place.
QT is pretty damned nice to program. GTK+ is not that nice.
But I feel comfortable using Gnome 2 and nothing else.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I was a faithful KDE user up until KDE 4. I couldn't care less how it looks, I want something that:
- mostly works as I expect it to out of the box, and isn't too hard to figure out when it doesn't
- is fast
- doesn't require a lot of fiddling to get stuff running, but is highly configurable so I can customize it to taste
KDE3 did that. It was virtually plug and play, worked a lot like Windows which was fine since I often had to switch backand forth, but let me configure everything. Controls and options were easy to find. I greatly preferred it to Windows, and gnome was horrible.
But KDE4 was so hideously ugly with huge space-wasting icons and frame borders so I didn't try it for a long time, plus at work everyone used gnome 2 on Ubuntu or Fedora and it was easier to go with the flow. And by all reports KDE4 was unstable. In the end I have to get work done, not futz around with a half baked alpha-ware. I never really liked Gnome 2, it was simplistic and unconfigurable, but I got used to it.
When Gnome3 came along I hated it, so last year I tried KDE4.I kid you not, I logged in and couldn't even figure out basic stuff. Just launching an app or configuring the screen background was a chore. The mouse seemed to trigger everything, making menus and windows popup and disappear seemingly at random. There were weird hot spots. It was frustrating jsut trying to shut the awful thing down. I tried maybe a half dozen times to log on and figure out what was going on, but in the end it was just way too hard to use, I had no real interest in figuring it out by trial and error, it is counter-intuitive as all heck, and it is horribly slow as well. So I said goodbye forever to KDE and decided to make a try with Gnome3.
I tried Mint after hearing they had improved Gnome3. I tried Gnome3 but it has a horrendous interface, not as bad as KDE but still really weird with hotspots and weird popups. The start menu is a multilevel fixed-size thing, like a retarded throwback to Windows 98 or something. So awkward. Cinnamon and MATE are awful as well, well maybe slightly better, but I always hated gnome 2 so thats not surprising. At this point I'm going to start exploring alternatives. Fvwm worked well for me in college, and there are others.
It's really sad. Linux used to be a breeze to use with KDE2 or 3, or fvwm, a much better experience than windows. Now Destktop Linux has self-destructed. WINDOWS 7 IS A FAR BETTER UI than current versions of Gnome or KDE, despite being annoying in its own right. Sorry but its true.
I still prefer Linux in many ways, and Windows 8 promises to be even worse than KDE4. The quest continues...
In addition to having no imagination, you must have a leaky memory as well. Didn't you see Universal Android Laptop Dock: Microsoft Nightmare, Or Toy?? Wherever paltry imaginations congregate, the Toys! have it. Those of us wise to the ways of generativity work hard to avoid consulting availability heuristics altogether.
But don't take it bad. Canonical couldn't figure out why any user would configure dual-head displays, and this was after providing the feature for seven years.
So long, Canonical, and thanks for the use-case siesta.
Just to name a few of the features that i want..
- Multimonitor.. - unity sucks here.. gnome3 does have some issues. Have not tried KDE4
- Session saving. - not available in Unity or Gnome3 as far as i know
- Good integration with pulseaudio - that works all the time, not just sometimes.. - unity and gnome3 does deliver a bit, but do still have issues
- Compiz type management of windows. (using only window and desktop overview) - available in both KDE4 and Gnome3, unity does have big issues since they seem to just focus on the eyecandy
- Be able to customize it a bit more than changing border type and color.. - unity has allot to catch up with. KDE4 is limited to
- Not use tons of resources... Yes, computers are fast today but i prefer a usable and fast UI over eyecandy.. - neither unity, kde4 or gnome3 comes even close here.. My own preference would be Gnome3 for performance vs usability, but it still do have issues depending on what driver you are using.. the free ati driver seems to be the most stable one, but also the slowest.
- Be stable with more than a limited amount of drivers. - Have not seen any crashes with unity, but both KDE4 and Gnome3 do have issues.
So to sum it up... Neither KDE4, Gnome3 or Unity works the way i want so i switched to xfce + compiz and with a minimal configuration it got it the way i wanted with less important features missing...
But this is also the power of the linux-desktop, if something does not work the way you want it just switch to something that does.
Think i will switch to Gnome3 when/if it gets better theme-management and session-saving and a bit more configurable workspace-configuration. Would also be nice with getting default-options for open new window when adding icons to the slit-list and also the possibility to remove the need to go to desktop overview to start applications that are not added to the slit... And the final nail in the coffin for Gnome3 is possibly a permanent task-bar that does not hide.. too easy to miss notifications with that idiotic forced autohide..
** The issues i mention here are from the last time i tried the different window-managers. Things might have changed since then...
... it is kitchy...IMO.
I find it too flashy and not as elegant as GTK+ and other window kit environments which offer a more plain and pleasing appearance. I would also feel inclined to pick all new apps that used QT. XFCE does all I need, and LXDE is darn close to replacing it for me. The more a desktop environment is tied to specific apps, that less useful I find it. What I want it this: for it to launch *my* apps, switch apps, page screens, show me the time, have a plain and pleasing appearance. It should do all this with using as little system resources as possible. I run my computer to run apps, not interfaces.
KDE 4, at first, was a massive resource hog; for quite a while it would not start up and stay running without programs or even the whole desktop crashing if you didn't have damn near 384MB RAM. I "accidentally" found that this is not quite the case not too long ago when I forgot to increase the memory in a virtual machine to 384MB after installation of the OS and shockingly, not only did it successfully load, nothing crashed. It was left at 256MB--I would have never done this on purpose after my previous experiences with KDE4; I was expecting a complete failure for the desktop to load.
Still though, with my typical use (one or two file managers, a terminal with one or more tabs, Geany with a couple dozen text files open, Firefox/Iceweasel running with anywhere from 50-100 tabs or more with only 1GB RAM) a standard desktop environment just causes too much swapping and too fast. I used Xfce and GNOME 2 before finally settling on CrunchBang with Openbox, and for the most part I like it; I'm happy with the resource savings of memory it provides, allowing it to instead be used by the programs I'm using.
Ironically... having several Slashdot tabs open is one of the things that still seems to suck up resources and cause swapping like there's no tomorrow.
This is exactly why XFCE is refreshing. I have a 7-yr old convertible tablet that I love like one of my own children--it's an extension of my self and makes me vastly more productive than any other hardware I've ever encountered. I bought it from EmperorLinux (those guys are phenomenal, BTW) and it has run like a top all these years.
Except, when I upgraded Ubuntu to oneiric and they put Unity on, I wanted to chew my eyes and hands off to get away. And I gave it an honest-to-goodness 2 months to get used to in case I had simply turned into an old curmudgeon while I wasn't looking. Nah, it was crap. So I switched back to Gnome, but Gnome3 was only slightly less a disaster.
I happened upon XFCE by accident, and it is great. Back in business. And it occured to me that there are productivity gains, tangible, measurable productivity gains from not messing with user interfaces just for the heck of it. And being able to stretch old hardware well past the planned obsolescence of Windows, Apple, and now (dammit!) certain linux distros has many benefits, only half of which are financial.
But one of the benefits is intangible, and more philosophical--discovering XFCE and considering the larger hardware & software picture around it has reminded me that in our game parsimony is always a good idea. But more than that, it's a way of life that will always serve us in good stead. After all, hardware mostly tends to keep pace with demands, until new demands arrive that dwarf the capacity of old hardware; at such times hewing to a philosophy of parsimony will always triumph over those who squander cycles just because they think they can.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
As many others have said, I already have a WM I use and I don't see a real need to move. Just like XFCE, Icewm is lightweight enough yet complete enough to fulfill most of my needs. For the little bit left, I use ROX for the rare GUI file management I do. And when ROX isn't enough, I launch Dolphin. The point, of course, isn't that Icewm is perfect or anything. It's just that it does the best job for me: it's lightweight, it can be setup to avoid most window focus stealing, and it really hasn't moved much in its design goals--at least since I've been using it--, so I have little fear or reason to really consider another WM as the primary one I use. That isn't to say I "can't stand" Gnome 2 or 3 or KDE or whatever. I just don't go out of my way to use them. :)
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
If I'm going to use a desktop for hours on end then I'd prefer that it had aesthetics that don't make me barf. Primary colours everywhere, sharp specular highlights, drop shadows, grey gradients, chunky 3D bezel effects, even the spacing between visual elements and their sizes are just all horribly wrong. I can't understand how anybody could stand looking at that, but I guess KDE has a sufficiently large user base that at least some people disagree.
GNOME 3 might not be ideal, but at least it looks nice. Actually, in my opinion, I think it looks even nicer than Apple's stuff, but again that's just my personal sense of aesthetics talking. If they made the workspace management a little less rudimentary (e.g. if they went back to having a fixed number of workspaces that you could create and destroy on the fly, and allowed you to re-arrange the workspaces themselves as opposed to just the windows on them), then I think I could get used to it. It's still extremely bare in terms of currently-implemented functionality, but hopefully this will improve over time.
I've been running KDE4 since 4.1. I've never had much trouble with it; I dunno what all the bitching is about. Until then I ran KDE3 with no problems.
... It's the sound of the joke going right above your head.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
A few reasons.
1. Just plain don't like the UI. Enough said. I can't say I'm too fond of Gnome 3, but it's better than KDE.
2. Philosophical opposition. I severely dislike any system that uses machine-level compiled code for its programs that forces a specific language to be used. I consider C++ to be 'forced,' as using things like C wrappers will gut performance gain one might get from C, whereas with a C to C++ wrapper it's just another layer of abstraction in the already-abundant bloat, and can even become a bit advantageous as it can be customized more readily.
3. KDE's supporters. I've seen plenty of them essentially speak as if they know that KDE is OBVIOUSLY the best fit for all situations, OBVIOUSLY so superior to Gnome that it defies comprehension, and the only people who use Gnome can't be trusted to not pee on the floor without diapers. I really don't want to associate with that kind of person, or the software they espouse. A subset of these assert that using C++/OOP is the One True Calling and all fans of procedural programming are obviously missing one hemisphere of their brain. I want nothing to do with these people, either.
Since Windows 95 was new and fancy I have never really liked overlapping Windows, icons on desktops behind windows and some other things desktop systems offer. I still call directories directories and files files, never thought of them as "folders" and "documents", and while I was still using KDE 3.5 (I never used Gnome much) I found I didn't use file managers any more but preferred terminal windows and tab completion to navigate through directories and start programs. So at one point I thought: why do I use a desktop system if I don't like desktop systems? I looked at what else was available and settled on Awesome, which turns out to be near perfect for me, using a computer has never felt so natural to me as it does now.
When Debian moved from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4 I was still using a few KDE programs. Starting them slowed down my computer to a crawl, and it turned out that these programs depended on a KDE service that insisted on indexing my entire home directory. I hate it when software decides what's best for me, I want to be in charge of my computers and I'm the one who takes initiatives. I certainly didn't ask for an indexing service and I have no need for it, I have no trouble finding what I'm looking for in my home directory. So I found alternatives for those programs and I decided to stay clear of KDE software. KDE and I are moving in opposite directions.
I just switched to KDE about 3 weeks ago. My old laptop had finally decayed to the point that I felt justified in buying a new one, and
so I bought a new Toshiba, and slapped Fedora 16 on it. After about 15 minutes of Gnome 3, I had had enough, and switched my default environment
to KDE. It took me less than a day to feel pretty comfortable with KDE, and I couldn't be happier with it as things stand.
Sadly, the only *real* reason I stuck with Gnome as long as I did, was because it had always been the default on RH based distros, and I was just too lazy
to invest the energy to switch and learn a different environment. Well, that and at one time there was sort of a perception that KDE was less "mainstream" somehow because their libraries were GPL licensed. But since KDE went LGPL and as the new versions have improved since the 4.0 release (as I understand it), I don't see any reason to favor Gnome any more.
Label me a convert. KDE all the way.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
KDE3 was good enough as it was. Completely ignoring what their users actually want, KDE devs simply canned it and tried to force everybody to KDE4, instead of developing it parallel to maintaining KDE3.
I know that the same user abuse will happen with KDE4. Once the devs feel that KDE4 is "finished", they will simply can it too, and leave their users in the cold, or try to force some other unusable buggy bloated and overdesigned piece of shit named KDE5 on their users.
KDE devs have proved that they are unwilling to maintain their software in the long term, so I dont care to invest time into learning their software (any more). I've been fooled once with KDE3, and wont make that mistake any more.
KDE is an irresponsible hobbyist playground and should be treated as such.
I have just carried on using for the last 11 years, I initially tried Gnome when I started with Debian and it just locked up the first time I used it, I have revisited it many times since but it just felt like a lower quality product than KDE (in fact Fluxbox felt better, it did a lot less but what it did it did well). As I've got older I have lost a lot of interest and am on XP at the moment because I'm working on SQL Server and after all this time XP still feels fine. The main reason I like Linux is still the command line because as Powershell just is horrible.
I've been using Xmonad for two years now. After you get a hold of the shortcuts, it pretty much stays out of your way. There's no menu bars or start menus or anything stealing screen space, which I really appreciate.
KDE (the desktop environment) was ready for release, that's why it was released. The problem is that all the services and applications that come with it weren't.
They could have handled it better, but when the software developer says "please, don't put it on anything important yet", you'd better comply.
Rethinking email
Maybe it's something that Ubuntu did to it, but I ran Kubuntu Netbook Edition on my netbook, and it was unusably slow.
see subject
I'm a long time Linux desktop user. I watched all the different desktop environments evolve over the past 15 years and KDE has become far and above the best with Mint Linux's GNOME based MATE and Cinnamon a solid 2nd place. Lightweight desktops still are viable alternatives too but I wouldn't put desktops like XFCE, LXDE or Enlightenment in the same class as KDE, GNOME 3 Shell, MATE/Cinnamon and Unity. Not because the lightweight desktops are inferior but because they serve a different purposed and to that end, serve it really well. Overall KDE is well polished, simple and intuitive enough for beginners but doesn't get in the way of power users. If you haven't tried the latest versions of KDE I would recommend you do. You might be presently surprised.
I use linux on my laptop, And I have to use it where it gets pretty hot in the summer. I've tried many enviroments and I stick with the one that runs my laptop the coolest on idle. KDE is like Gnome 3, they run my laptop pretty hot. MATE (Gnome 2) and XFCE were the least demanding out of the more functional enviroments. I'm glad someone kept Gnome 2 alive with MATE and I'll keep using it since I used it the most these past 6-8 years. (using mint right now) KDE has been pretty nice when I had it on my desktop. 3.x ran pretty good on a really crappy AMD K6-II laptop and I I'd never get any work done playing with the sheer amount of customization you can do on the fly. 4.0 is pretty, but its not feaseable at least on this laptop.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
The newest version of gnome 3 is awesome. KDE lacks a certain refinement of what is in gnome. KDE draws too much from one platform, windows, and then puts in customization features that go too far and actually hinder productivity. I'm talking about the task bar and how its managed. Some of the stuff in KDE is good. The desktop widgets are nice. But they don't make me any more productive. The fact that KDE has trouble with some gnome applications makes it even less appealing. There really needs to be an agreed upon standard on interprocess communications. These two platforms should be interchangeable.
KDE is not the solution. Gnome WAS the solution for the KDE problem earlier.
back in the mid nineties, everyone was using KDE, and it started to suck when it tried to be more than a window manager. and everyone joined gnome.
now, gnome is trying to be more than a window manager. and failing miserabily. Meanwhile KDE did not improve, infact it got worse. there's an "activities" button on the friking desktop that can't be removed... who the fuck even knows what activities are used for?!?! when you click it there's "desktop activity, photo activity, other shenanigan activity" wtf?
That's why i only use mouseless window managers. they do not get old enough to get cocky. ratpoison? sweet. now it's dead and everyone uses Ion. ops, too late, now it's wmw. i mean, awesomewm. o fuck, here comes ion2, i mean3... ah, screw that. let me install kde. *after 3 day long start up* ...duh!
If I wanted a bunch of shit I don't need running all the time I'd use windows. XFCE let's me do pretty much everything I want to do; and if I want to add something I can.
I liked KDE when I first tried it in the late 90s, but never loved it. I've been living in Gnome since switching to Ubuntu in 2005 or 2006.
Whenever I try it after a hiatus, KDE always feels too visually busy. Little things seem to lack polish: the fonts, the stock clock app, things like that. The file manager is nice, but these days most file managers have a decent baseline level of functionality. (It's not the 90s anymore.) I also like some Gnome apps better: the system-monitor panel applet and terminal for example.
Unity and vanilla Gnome 3 are atrocious, but Gnome3 in the latest Ubuntu with the 'gnome-classic' session is basically Gnome2 with bug fixes. With two panels on the bottom (one with a window list, one with menus, app launchers, and widgets/panel applets) I have the familiarity of KDE (I can't stand the mac-style menubar-on-top layout) with the more-pleasing-to-me visuals of Gnome.
While its not perfect, and not every release has been stellar, its consistent, which is important in a 'desktop' environment.
It was also more about getting work done and not being 'cute', until recently.
And early license issues aside, QT has always been more mature than the other tool kits.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I dont want to watch the windows on my screen jitter while running a 6880.
I like icons on my desktop without having to read a fucking tutorial.
I dont like the feeling that Vista era Aero just vomited on the Windows 3.0 Program Manager, or "desktop" as you call it now.
I never really have liked KDE anyway, why start now?
Gnome3 and Unity was unforgivable, it broke my work flow and didn't offer anything better. This is a sin in a business/effecient enviroment.
Gnome 3 didn't just break my work flow. I found it a complete show-stopper. I never tried Unity, since I seem to be one of the minority of Linux users who don't care for Ubuntu.
Even Windows 95 at least had the advantage that anyone could just sit down and use it without having to RTFM. Gnome 3 completely ignored this principle in order to push some obscure philosophical agenda, and succeeded mostly in pissing off a lot of formerly loyal supporters.
I had been one of these happy Gnome users since about 1997, and until comparatively recently had always shunned KDE as cluttered, gaudy and ugly.
When Gnome became unusable, I spent a couple of months revisiting XFCE, but as KDE has really got its act together, I am now quite happy with that.
This is entirely petty, but is indicative of a larger problem:
I don't use KDE because after I install the kubuntu-desktop package from the Ubuntu repositories, it stomps all over my settings - I'm talking the cursor changes to a gray, rounded, bouncy piece of crap, the splash image changes to the Kubuntu theme, so my login goes BIOS POST (white text, black background, Intel image with crappy blue to black gradient) -> Grub (white text, black background) -> Blue Kubuntu bootsplash screen -> Purple/Black/Brown Ubuntu/Gnome login screen -> Normal Gnome desktop. It looks awful! Why is the kubuntu-desktop stomping all over my settings WITHOUT ASKING ME? The assumption that it is the only desktop environment installed (or the only one that matters) is obviously fallacious if the kubuntu-desktop package (a) exists in the first place, or (b) is optional by default. Pissing off users because they installed your software is not promising for them that they've made a good decision installing the software to begin with.
Furthermore, everything is flat gray. All backgrounds on buttons, textareas, blank spaces (fire up KOffice/Calligra and just stare at all of the flat ugly gray that is shown) are flat ugly gray, and the buttons do a rounded border effect that doesn't differentiate them apart from the background until you hover over them - what's the point of that? I could forgive this if installing the kubuntu-desktop package didn't mess with the default settings, but to stomp all over my settings and to look and act like a complete piece of crap (tell me: where on the pointer is the pixel that is actually the cursor?) is unforgivable in my book.
If the Kubuntu/LinuxMint people paid a little more attention to detail the experience would be much better. Things like:
- During installation, if there is already a selected cursor theme (eg: another desktop environment is installed), don't change the default cursor theme to KDE
- During installation, if there is already a selected boot splash (eg: another desktop environment is installed), don't change the default bootsplash to KDE's
- Move away from flat gray - it looks ugly, like a step up from Windows 95/98. Seriously! Try for different sorta-glossy effects (see Ubuntu's default theme) with a dark (read: off-black) background, a light (read: light gray, like the Mac) background, or a light blue background (like Microsoft Office 2003). Gradients are great, but they have to be non-linear as well, to give a rounded (as opposed to razor-straightedge) look. Everything in nature is rounded, straight edges are abhorred.
- Separate buttons before they are hovered over - you can still group common ones (look at Mac menus or Microsoft Windows 2007/2010 for examples) while maintaining the look that they are individual buttons. Human-computer interfaces are basically supposed to mimic object interactions (read: look AND feel) in the real world, so making a bunch of button widgets blend together because of a crappy theme is a horrible design decision.
Other minor nitpicks that didn't turn me off:
The OpenSuse installer is not as polished as Ubuntu's. Seriously. The user should feel like they are doing a beautiful thing by installing an alternative operating system, not trying to hammer one onto the hard drive. Presentation matters - I'm talking about antialiasing on rounded buttons and the world map, having sane defaults for partitioning the hard drive (and putting a lot of effort into making more advanced partitioning easier). Partitioning is the most difficult thing for users to understand - the partitioning software should figure out what the best option is for creating the primary/extended/logical partitions without bugging the user about setting things up, it should not default to allowing unused space (rounded to cylinder sizes is okay). Normal users, and I would argue all but the most anal advanced users don't really care HOW something is done, so long as they have the expected result. Asking the user to specify the expe
I'm currently using 3.2. I stuck with it for a couple of days and now absolutely love it. Even though at work, my crappy 850 series intel 3D gfx chip struggles with it on 2 monitors.
I got used to the lack of minimising very quickly. That workflow is replaced by the "always one free desktop" thing where it opens a new one every time you use the last free one. So I just use alt-up/down to switch desktop, alt-tab to switch app,and alt-` to switch windows of the same app. So whereas in the past I would have about 4 desktops open and just opened windows everywhere creating clutter, these days I have morelike 8 running. With the extension which forces certain apps onto certain desktops at startup, I've worked out a system.
With 2 monitors, desktop switching only works on the main monitor. At first, this annoyed the hell out of me. Then I started to get it. I have my real work on the other monitor, and check email/web/etc on the main monitor, switching between them. You can also drag a window onto the secondary monitor before switching desktops so it doesn't disappear when you switch. You can use it as a way of "carrying" windows between desktops.
I'm also a touch-typist and hate having to reach for the mouse. Hitting the windows key, followed by the first 3 letters of an app is far more preferable.
The main thing though is I don't seem to have shit open everywhere any more. I think more about which desktop I want my windows on. I'm a sysadmin with about 20 terminal windows at once. Now, whenever I get distracted from one job and have to do something else like fix a broken server, I'll flip to the empty desktop and start firing up terminals on there for that specific job.
Finally - the lack of taskbar. GOOD. It's dated, it uses real estate, and I really don't miss it. I don't have 15 windows open on every desktop any more, it's usually a max of about 4 terminals. I never used the start/footprint menu (always alt-f2). The overview page is like alt-f2 on steroids.
I do like kde, and I'll give 4.8 a try when it's out, but going back to a taskbar-orientated desktop would be as painful as my first 2 days with gnome 3.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Real men use GNU Screen.
Aaron J Seigo led the charge down the KDE 4 rabbit hole with the entire user base kicking and screaming that they didn't want to go down there. He said, the users just don't realize how good it's going to be "real soon(TM)".
The worst thing is that KDE had risen to great heights in terms of user base; in no small part, because Gnome users had fled Gnome because its "leader" had decided on a direction and was summarily dismissing users wishes. KDE should have seen that they were repeating history. Certainly enough people pointed it out.
Well, KDE blew themselves up. They've spent the past few years struggling to achieve feature parity with KDE 3.5 and they're still short in some areas. Why don't people use KDE? Because of KDE!
Sadly, this message was typed using KDE 4.4 and it still sucks! I hate you Aaron and Co.
Exactly. I found happiness with LXDE. It's a little rough around the edges and there's a couple of features missing that I used, but overall, I like not having to run around making everything functional again. Instead it just mirrors many of the defaults I'm used to from a good usable Win2k/KDE2 style interface. Sure it's archaic, but the menus are keyboard navigable, the shortcuts work as I expect them to. There's no extra junk. And I can customize it to have the latest usability features, if I want to; which I don't for the most part, although I do now have two tool bars. 1 Up/primary, 1 down as an app launcher like the apple bar.
I'm not an OSX fanboy by any stretch (their keyboard navigation leaves a LOT to be desired), but I do like having a single click quick menu as well as the standard tree full menu.
And to combine relatively easy maintenance, it's Lubuntu for me. A desktop with all my security updates and a desktop environment that is lightweight, fast, and who's longterm goal isn't ooooh, let's do what they're doing just because they're doing it. for they = {microsoft,apple,kde,gnome,villain of the week}
KDE's current version is outstanding. We could spend all year talking about history, but KDE4.8 works pretty well, and frankly is a great option over Unity, Gnome and some of the lightweight desktops if you value functionality over light weight. If you like lightweight, don't go with a desktop, go with a window manager.
Incidentally, you can tell someone who hasn't really used KDE by comments like "it lacks refinement" or "it isn't pretty" or "kde4 is slow". There's really not much I can say for people who say "I don't want to customize my desktop" as the default isn't bad and KDE's biggest feature is it's customization capability.
That said there are two components that need to be better explained and left to the user to decide if they want them: symantic desktop and Akonadi. Symantec desktop (nepomuk) is basically text search engine and tagging toolkit that lets you rate, comment on and tag files. The search engine works now, but for people with networked home directories, it is not the right answer. Akonadi is the backend for the personal information manager applications. If you are not going to use Kontact (the KDE outlook clone), Akonadi probably doesn't need to run. If you are using Kontact, Akonadi offloads sending/receiving so the front end applications can be light and fast.
I'm a python developer most of the time these days I use emacs, Wing, iPython, yEd (for charts and process diagrams) and do some documentation and proposals in LibreOffice. There are a few that have been part of KDE for a long time that make it especially nice:
* opens a terminal in many apps. Handy.
* KIO - allows you to open files pretty much anywhere without the need to mount drive. You get very used to being able to open and save files on all kinds of remote systems and services from the highly functional file save/open dialog.
* Dekstops and workspaces - multiple desktops and multiple dashboards. Most are an away.
* Plasma Desktop - You can pretty much customize it however you like. Want a start menu and panel ? OK. Want a mac like menubar? OK (xbar) MacOS like dock? OK. Mac style dashboard? Got it. Windows style widget bar, ok, you can do that. Want a quicksilver like launcher? (that's been there for almost a decade). Want files on your desktop? OK. Want remote files on your desktop? OK. Don't like the look? Change it.
* Konsole, the KDE terminal app just works. And has a ton of features with an easy to detach tabbed GUI and some pretty nice automation features.
* If you did a file manager shootout, it would probably finish Dolphin, Konqueror, Finder, MS Explorer, Kommander and everything else. KDE's file managers give you a lot of flexibility and outstanding integration with tools. Dolphin is designed for ease of use, Konqueror is an MS Explorer style kitchen sink and Kommander is a Norton Commander style app. All leverage KIO to be able to browse remote systems as if they are local and launch background tasks to move files around.
* Amarok - Music player. Very well done. Probably the best one out there short of iTunes...
* Kmail - A very well done feature rich mail client.
Is KDE perfect? No. KDE went through its rearchitecting four years ago, and has emerged to be very, very good.
-- $G
I am just out of points. Best idea I've seen here in years.
I run KDE with openbox instead of Kwin, as it gives me keychains (I have approximately 75 custom keybinds), and because of the MoveResizeTo function - basically, I can semi-tile my windows with keybinds, while still floating others. The only thing I prefer about Kwin is the desktop grid plugin.
I also forgo the plasma desktop. It's too much, and the beautiful way the themes work is not a beauty I like. I prefer setting the background with nitrogen and running conkies.
Really, the only reason I *run* KDE is that it makes qt programs theme their icons appropriately and it causes the kgtk-wrapper to work.
I used to run KDE but it got to be a bit much, I prefer a cleaner-looking setup.
I do think it's the best fully-featured DE out there though - different activities for different desktops? Awesome.
tolerated KDE4 between crashes (now, thankfully, gone in newer versions)
I'm normally not that sentimental, but I really felt a sting of sadness reading this comment.
I remember ~15 years ago in uni, where I discovered Linux and found it was rock-stable compared to Windows. But nowadays, it doesn't feel like that at all, and I really feel sad for that.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I'm allergic to cashews.
Windows can run KDE?
Too many posts to read to see if anyone has said this, but ...
My reason is I do not find it very intuitive and I have not found, or spent much time looking for, a good tutorial on its use or cistomization. Mostly the latter I guess, but much is very non-intuitive if you did not grow with it and I did not. I have tried it years ago and again with 4.5? Much has changed, but its lack of obviousness has not.
Fvwm2 does all I need, plus runs rings around KDE performance-wise. The only thing it doesn't do (which might be handy), is support multiple screens properly.
It is just Ubuntu + XFCE, instead of the horrible Unity interface.
I've used GNOME2, GNOME3, KDE4 and XFCE each for at least a year (some 2 or 3), and I've enjoyed all of them. I felt GNOME2 was solid and featured, though perhaps a little stale in some areas. XFCE was fast and efficient, though at times felt a little cold/empty. GNOME3 feels solid and has plenty of interesting ideas that are worth developing, but I found it hard to feel grounded (perhaps due to it being so unusual). I'm currently using KDE4(.8) and have been impressed by the k* range of software. It certainly has the most in common with the Windows 7 experience (as a result I tend to encourage new users towards Kubuntu), and has an average bugfix turnaround I've been very pleased with. In my opinion KDE is also by far the prettiest (I judge by the default "theme" since I deliberately avoid heavy customisation (I don't enjoy it)).
I haven't used other DEs for long enough to comment fairly (LXDE, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, etc), but I've come away with a strong opinion that debating the best DE is as pointless as debating the best Linux distro. We all have different tastes and priorities, and different solutions must exist to cater for them.
kde is too big a resource hog, and id prefer lxde or xfce. Im going to go out and buy the new macbook pro retina, so i really havent used any linux desktop environment that much, but i prefer to leave my ram open to applications instead of glittery desktops
KDE 4 takes too long to start up, Gnome 3 uses javascript to implement the desktop. Both are laughable. I want windows that I can drag, drop, resize, alt-tab between, that will start quickly. All that is missing is good control interfacing / drag and drop dock in XFCE to make me switch.
First Blackbox and now Fluxbox. All I need is terminals and a web browser, KDE and Gnome just get in the way when developing.
Long-time Gnome2 user, and have mostly switched over to Xfce-based distros. At the moment I'm liking Mint a lot, with Cinnamon on my faster machines and MATE on less capable ones. I also recently discovered that Ubuntu Studio uses Xfce, so my Ubuntu machines have been moved over to that. I have a really old (~1999) dual processor HP workstation which has not been very tolerant of newer distros, although I have not yet been able to install Mint with MATE on it. I suspect it will work well.
I tried KDE back in the 1.x-2.x days and just never really fell in love with it. It just seemed too toy-like, and it's really annoying as hell that every app seems to be named ksomething. Maybe it's not like that today, but I still see a lot of ksomething apps in the repos.
Yes, like that. Read what you linked to. It is NOT ready to be used on Windows 7. I know, I tried a few days ago because I could not get Debian to work smoothly off of a thumb drive and I do not have enough space on my primary drive to dual boot.
I am unsure why you are marked as informative... perhaps the mods did not actually check what you were linking to just as you did not read it. Meh.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
launch a terminal, su to root, type "init S" - that gives you the least crap
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I used KDE until the 4.0 train wreck. Then I learned that KDE devs didn't care 2 shits about their users. So I took my stuff and went to play elsewhere.
Trying it again? Sorry, KDE fanboys. I actually have work to do and a life to live. In other words, I have better things to do than to be constantly trying new desktops for the sake of trying.
FYI:
- Running Gnome something on the "Red Hat Enterprise Bla" work laptop (yes, my employer actually gives me a Lenovo laptop running RHEL to work on);
- Running Ubuntu+LXDE on my old private laptop;
- Running "Ubuntu" on my private desktop.
Xfce can show generic applications names, you just have to active the option for it in the Applications Menu plugin configuration dialog
They should skip working on a KDE desktop for Windows 7, which will be very similar, if not identical to Windows 7, and instead do a KDE desktop for Windows 8. If that can be done, and made to sit completely on Windows 8, then Windows 8 will be bypassed as far as UX goes. Of course, if Windows 8 always has Metro running, that could cause it to get even slower, so in any installation of KDE over Windows 8, they should do what they can to turn off as many Metro services as they possibly can.
Oh, and given how bloated Windows 8 already is, they should rein in the temptation to throw the kitchen sink into this one as well, and just have the capability to stage Windows apps.
I agree, since I usually use emacs for most of my work, the only functionality I really need from the window manager is to keep emacs in full screen. And as for terminal windows, whenever I want to do something complex in terminal windows, I make sure to do it in an emacs shell buffer.
I actually like the concept, but the implementation is BAD.
For some unknown reason, IMAP hangs, nothing tells me what hangs, it works again when you restart it via Akonadi but then suddenly refuses to access certain IMAP-Folders but not others.
In other words, unreliable.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Two reasons:
1) Gnome and Unity are still faster options in my machine,
2) I really dislike to press "Apply" for every action I want to be taken.
Same thing as it was years ago. Bugs. KDE killed my GMail account and made every piece of mail sort as if it were received on the day I connected KMail when I connected KMail with Google years ago. To this day, a pristine installation of Kubuntu 12.04 will pop up messages somewhere about 6/7th of the top of the screen, while they should be locked to the taskbar.
Plasma continually resetting *everything* which is forgivable where it not for the Notes that I had there - and only there.
Give me seven days of tweaking, and I'll have a broken KDE that's only fixable with a complete reinstall.
KDE is, feature-wise, the pinnacle of a desktop experience today, IMHO. But, it's pathetically broken. And it has been the KDE way from day one, or at least from day-about-ten-years-ago when I started using it.
KDE needs to fix the horribly broken desktop before adding features, simple as that. KDE, as visioned, it not only ready for the desktop, it's a killer desktop. KDE, as functioning, is a broken piece of crap.
I stuck with Gnome3 for a little while and it did start to grow on me. But then I discovered Cinnamon Desktop and I simply love it.
I have never liked KDE, and probably never will. Seems and feels weird to me.
I loved GNOME when it was released, but later GNOME releases messed it up for me.
Limited resources. My main computer is a netbook with limited resources. I tried KDE4 for a few weeks as recently as last january, but nepomuk, akonadi, etc. quickly brought my computer to a halt. I guess it's possible to manually disable all the features I don't need, but I don't have any motivation to do so when there are simpler alternatives.
Limited screen estate. Due to the limited screen estate, I only keep 1-3 applications per virtual desktop, and they're maximized or tiled. In order to keep things simple, my window manager automatically places chromium windows on one desktop, evince windows on the next, shotwell and spotify on another, and I litter the rest of my desktops with terminals. This setup is really easy to get using a tiling window manager like XMonad, but seems like extra work using KDE.
No need. I see the point of a desktop environment like KDE when you use the applications: you get a convenient integration of all the desktop components. However, I do all my file management and text editing in a terminal; use gmail, facebook and irc for communication; and I prefer chromium to konqueror. The only KDE applications I end up using are okular and konsole.
Indeed I switched straight to KDE when I had to realize that GNOME would not be "fixed" this time. I have occasionally been using KDE since 1998, so I was anyhing but new to it. I also took a look at XFCE (I had used it for the last time when it was in a very early state), just to see where that had gone - and I'm still there. XFCE might partially be a little too spartanic but it is by far the best overall experience of all. Simple, clear, unsurprising ...and not annoying.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
KDE is a case where the visuals get in the way of productivity. The shine, transparencies, gradients, visual effects, etc., are very obtrusive and frustrating. There's far too much visual clutter.
I am unsure why you are marked as informative
Perhaps they didn't know KDE worked on Win 7. Perhaps they did and were glad someone corrected it. Perhaps they looked into the matter and saw many examples of people successfully running it. Perhaps they tried it themselves and it worked.
In any case, they likely have more tech skills than you and aren't intimidated by anecdotal, completely made-up FUD.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Hi Galactic Dominator. First, thank you for the insults. You are right that I am a total technical moron.
Now that the stupidity is out of the way, your reasons for the marking of the previous post informative do not make any sense whatsoever.
Perhaps they didn't know KDE worked on Win 7.
It does not work on Windows 7. It is essentially alpha with major bugs in the code and major features missing. Being able to run portions of code is not release quality code no matter how you slice it.
Perhaps they did and were glad someone corrected it.
Ummm. Say what? I am the only one providing any informative corrections here.
Perhaps they looked into the matter and saw many examples of people successfully running it. Perhaps they tried it themselves and it worked.
Hm. Not sure how they found the systray stuff working and perhaps they did not run it long enough to see any bugs, but the bugs are there and they are even admitted to on that page. Perhaps running pre-beta software is great for people who want to help a project along and do not care if any data is lost, but to present KDE on Windows as a viable alternative for anyone who is not interested in being a beta tester is just absurd.
Here, this is in BOLD on the page that is linked: KDE on Windows is not yet in a final state, so some applications may be unsuitable for everyday use.
So I am spewing FUD? ROFLMAO. I am merely repeating what the KDE folks themselves are saying.
I have to wonder what your agenda is. Trolling or just a mouth-huffing basement dweller who has trouble seeing reality?
Kind regards,
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Weirdly, I have the option of moderating in a thread I posted in. Again.
I will not mod your post -1 moronic partially because there is no such mod but mostly because I will follow the spirit of the rules and not mod in an article I have commented in... Today is a lucky day for your karma.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Once a year, I hunt the net for any desktop environment/window manager I can find and try each one out for a few days to a week. I use Linux because it affords me the luxury of learning new things and new ideas of what it means to be productive. Each WM/DE has its (dis)?advantages. When I am on an older computer, I use LXDE. When I am on an even older computer, I use Ion. But when I am at work or at home, it is Gnome 3, because I have never been more productive. Sure, there's a bit of a learning curve, but it is even moreso with KDE4. I never could really get the hang of KDE4, and the KDE/Qt4 widgets seem a little dated to me. I like Gnome 3's interface because it is minimal, uncluttered, and I can change the look and feel with a few lines of CSS(-like) and Javascript(-like). Theming in any other widget set reminds me of using the L&F classes in Java - a real pain! However, Gnome 3 does have one drawback for me - it doesn't run on systems without decent OpenGL support, something I really like about Enlightenment. Nonetheless, I really like Gnome 3 and have never been more productive!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick." --Arthur C. Clarke
It's worth mentioning, because some folks load a different distro to get a different WM, that you can load quite a few different WMs and try them out.
This lets you switch between them to gain a comfort factor.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
1. KDE has a very large memory footprint. I never needed those fancy shiny icons, and the single click for open annoys me. Plus, the desktop I do most of my work on is aging.
2. The entire desktop environment is around 350 MB (could be wrong with the numbers there), which is frankly too much, especially if you are running a distribution like Arch that does not have delta packages in its repositories.
That's the reason why the last time I ran KDE co-incides with the last time I ran Fedora on my desktop.
3. Need more freedom. Awesome is awesome. DWM is awesome.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
1. I am using KDE with openSuse (perhaps only major distro which doesn't place it in back seat). A lot of distros keep KDE as second option. Thus lot of third party utilities and features are not integrated with KDE. The default GUI people see on disrto's homepage is GNOME, so they choose that. The recent flux of Linux users just use GNOME because the download link was on the front page. Initial releases of KDE 4 furthered that. Distro's shouldn't just pick the software even when developers are saying its not ready.
2. GTK is default for so many non-KDE applications like Pidgin, EasyTag, Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, Compiz etc. So these still show up those gnome/gtk dialogs which look out of place in KDE. And KDE/Qt replacements are not so full packed in functionality.
3. (This is my guess) Continuation with above point KDE takes up a lot of application development. e.g. Amarok, Krita, Kopete while many of popular applications shipped on a regular GNOME distribution are simple GTK applications. So the development focus on KDE's core environment is not so intense.
I was a user of KDE3. Then KDE4 happened. It (temporarily?) lost keyboard hotkey configurability, a feature that I regarded as definitive (i.e. *the* reason to run KDE vs. GNOME). And it had that newfangled gimmick named Plasma, designed for people who see their desktop more often than they work.
At roughly that time, GNOME got the equivalent keyboard shortcut settings panel, so I migrated there.
Afterwards, GNOME3 happened and it lost *its* definitive feature (the customizable and multimonitor-friendly panel). So I migrated to the next DE that had that (Xfce).
I was very upset with Unity and Gnome, and essentially remained with UBUNTU 10.4 for the longest time. With Fedora 17, and with downloading and installing the tweaks package, gnome has a menu option located on the top left of the panel.
One click and I have a list of topics displayed vertically. Slide down to the topic of interest, click on it, and immediately below it is a list of all the programs in that category. Very easy to use.
What Gnome and Unity fail to provide for multiple configurable viewable shortcuts (icons) to either rapidly (one click) switch to another desktop, or switch to a designated folder (other than home), or to open browser to a dedicated webpage. I code in C++ or C and am teaching myself some other languages, and the browser is set to point to the list of classes or functions that I need.
Gnome 3.4 does not support 2 instances of the file manager. This means I click to open the file manager, I search and click to open the next level, and I click to maximize or resize and I click until at end of day I have carpal tunnel pains in my arms or forefinger.
I did use XFCE, but with the Gnome tweaks, I found Gnome back in favor until you SDotters find and report something better.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I AM running KDE. Many thing such as Dropbox work MUCH better and MUCH more automagically with KDE.
The 2 things I've found that don't work as well with KDE are installing software from an .rpm (because often, some "services" is not running and for some reason it won't tell me WHICH "service" needs to be running. And software/OS updates. These things just work better in Gnome on my system. SO, when ever I want to install from an RPM, or about once a week I check for updates--I log in using Gnome, do what I need to do, then BACK to KDE.
I agree with you, my needs are satisfied by a lightweight window manager like Xmonad, and although I work from time to time with a KDE desktop, it's true that I only use a terminal and a browser.
Firstly I wanted to say that I like KDE (how it looks and how it is keeping the classic desktop paradigm, while also improving itself for the tablets).
Buuut, I am not using KDE (but Cinnamon and Gnome2) because of a bad implementation of the KIO slaves. I am tired to wait for a patch to the default behaviour when trying to edit a document or watch a movie over the network (from a NAS server). Why Dolphin doesn't use a similar architecture to gvfs. It's annoying to see how KDE firstly downloads the entire file, makes changes to it locally and then it moves it back on the NAS. It's an outrageous behaviour. Until this gets fixed I won't try to get back to KDE.
Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman or Kensington Slimblade ,either one.
Treats both like they have two button, left and right.
After everything else is said and done, my computer is mainly 3 things- my keyboard, my screens and my trackball,. I need these things to work.
Fix it and I'll bite.
Since I dicovered "Gnome Do", I don't care much about the window manager.
I actually like the screen real estate I get with Unity.
-- Miki Tebeka The only difference between children and adults is the price of the toys.
KDE use to be my favorite desktop but it was always the last to be released by Mint and Ubuntu (don't like Red Hat and I always had hardware problems with Suse). So I got use to Gnome and the Unity.
I tried to load Kubuntu and Suse about six months ago and I experienced one crash after another so I went back to Unity.
What I don't like about KDE (other than the instability) is the the wifi manager. It's pretty lame compared to Gnome and unity. What I miss about KDE is the tweekability.
I may try KDE in the future but Unity hasn't pissed me off enough to go back to KDE.
Gentoo hasn't forced me to Gnome 3, yet, so no need to switch. I'll make my decision on what to do when Gnome 2 becomes too much of a hassle to keep.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
For the most part I love Gnome 3 and find it the most intuitive UI ever. Sure theres some room for improvement and the arrogant attitude of some of the Gnome devs concerns me but last time I tried KDE I couldnt make head nor tail of it and Gnome 2 and its look-a-likes just look old hat now.
I'd run KDE if I could disable those annoying decorations. Recently I have tried KDE 4.8 and I couldn't switch of those huge shiny tool tips that appear on the desktop. I find them very distracting. I don't use desktop to admire all fancy effects and decoration, but to do real work. I hate when lots of huge shiny tool tips pop on the screen when you move mouse. I spoke to my KDE loving friend and even he didn't know how to switch that silly thing off. I have used KDE3 first it was OK, later I have discovered Gnome2 and I think it was equal or better than MacOSX. KDE has potential of being best desktop environment, but somebody has to enforce some decent usability.
I second that opinion! Tried xmonad and got completely hooked. Configuration that actually does what I tell it to. Fast as heck. And most important of all: never need to mouse around to put the terminals where I want them. Because it knows where I want them. Eerily well.
I use KDE, so I'm stretching this question a bit.
The thing that most annoys me about KDE 4.x is Plasma. It';s completely out of keeping with the rest of the system, full of metaphorical re-implementations of the wheel.
Plasma seems to have its own version of everything, not quite as well-implemented as the main version. Why do there need to be two different sets of UI widgets, two different colour schemes and two different UI themes, just so that Plasma can have one of each all to itself? It's ridiculous and very visually jarring. It's like there's a fight between Plasma and all the applications, as if Plasma aspires, ultimately, to take over the role of everything else.
It's completely unnecessary. If you're going to re-implement half the bloody desktop as widgets in a widget engine (which is a fair enough idea), at least do it in a way that goes through Qt for standard widgets. As it is, not only are there innumerable visual and functional glitches, but if you want to change anything more complicated than the order of the widgets or the size of the panels, you need to build a whole god damned theme package. Matters are made worse by the butt-ugly, high-school-design-project-style Plasma themes that are included by default. It's a very un-KDE-like way of doing things, when traditionally everything has been configurable in the user interface without having to crack open any kind of editing software.
In KDE 3, the overall system colour scheme was applied both to applications and to the desktop panels and panel widgets; everything automatically matched everything else, and if you wanted a different colour, you could change it in KControl. You could even specify a bitmap to use as a panel background, if desired. It was just about right in terms of usability. Sure, it needed bringing up to date a bit (and by all accounts a complete rewrite), but the general concepts were quite sound.
Plasma seems to be a solution looking for a problem. A high-level, technically-led concept about how a desktop environment should work. But when I'm using it, I don't care if there is some valid technical or architectural reason why things have been done that way. The user experience should drive the design, not the other way around. The user experience is currently wrong, and therefore the design and probably the entire architecture is wrong.
Apart from that, KDE 4 is pretty solid now, although I wish the window geometry display option when moving or resizing windows had not been changed. It used to show dimensions and location. Now I am not sure what it is telling me, but I would need a calculator for it to be of any use (it also appears to have been Plasmafied and no longer uses the system widget theme).
Because I kept going kde -> gnome -> kde -> gnome ... seems one is always worse than the other, and everyone keeps expecting us to support which ever they think is the 'good' one at any one time. So, in the end I just stuck with gnome2. But for those with the time, better to stick with one and help the community improve it. When it gets a bad release, that's when using it and finding the problems is a must. Jumping to the other and then back again might be voting with your feet, but it isn't as helpful to the develops. That only tells them that you don't like what they've done, it doesn't tell them why you don't like it.
KDE kept my computers broken. I got tired of it. Gnome is bearable.
Well, why don't you take the time to help? What program is crashing for you exactly? Please consider reporting bugs if you find any and if you are able to reproduce.
I used KDE 3,4, Gnome 3, XFCE, and LXDE for a while, but once I really started taking a look at some of the more minor players- icewm, awesome, even dwm, I realized that they worked faster, used far less RAM, and were just as easy to customize (ok, maybe not dwm). The reason I don't boot into KDE is because I can go POST to logged in on icewm in 10 seconds flat, off a 7200 RPM SATA. There's no reason for me to want hundreds of megabytes of RAM wasted on see-through eye-candy. GUI environments have almost exactly the same job they did 10 years ago- and since my computer is now 32 times as powerful (Moore's Law), I'd rather have that power put towards performance rather than some designer's idea of what an intuitive menu looks like. KDE works fine. So does basically any other GUI environment you name. Why would I choose the least efficient one for my OS?
If more distros had standardized on KDE instead of Gnome, I believe Linux would have taken a much larger share of the PC market. It is much easier to get started with KDE if you come from a Windows environment.
i'm lazy
There's no reason for megabytes and megabytes and megabytes of wasted memory.
I haven't used KDE, Gnome, XFCE or LXDE ever since I tried out Awesome WM. It takes a little getting used to, but after a day of spending time with it, I just couldn't do my work as effectively without it.Its snappiness and functionality completely overshadows my need for fancy transitions and window decorations. Now, visual effects basically seem like unnecessary clutter.
I can't recommend it enough to anyone not familiar with tiling window managers such as this. It makes everything you do feel much more efficient and fluent. Just give it a day or so to sink in :)
Hi All, The moment GNOME 3 / Unity came out my first reaction was this is not good. I have been hearing a lot about KDE 4 getting all matured and so that was my next stop. I loved it initially as i have been a long time KDE users back in the days of KDE3. However the more i digged down the more problems started to surface. 1) KDE didn't played too well with external display. (caused lots of issues for me at one of the conference (I know its my bad why i didn't checked it before).) 2) Sound system with new pulseaudio kept switching to my HDMI output as default making it a pain in a** to switch it everytime i want to hear. 3) simple stuff which i liked to get done quickly by mouse in Gnome example SVN integration (Rabbitvcs is just plain awesome) KDESVN gave me options but still lacked with list and simple options like create a branch seems to be missing or can only be used when i have complete tree as local copy. (I am a wordpress plugin dev and for me this single option was a deal breaker) 4) Desktop Zoom in : (not used for fun but while taking sessions its good to have zoom facility) compiz gives me customizability so my SUPER+scroll is zoom in and out. not able to configure just this simple setting anywhere in KDE. all i could get is SUPER+"+" and SUPER+"-" Although i liked some simple stuff like the desktop and folderview where in i can select which folder to show on desktop was brilliant. (I replicate same on MATE using screenlet) Now all these forced me to look at alternatives. and MATE came as a good alternative. right now all my settings are working smoothly and i don't have to worry about my laptop going bonkers in last minute or so.
I don't run current KDE or Gnome because current KDE and Gnome are driven by developer boredom and nothing else.
I hear a lot about how KDE's functionality is so much better, but every time I try it, I'm blinded by the glossiest GUI on the planet, and it feels ridiculously slow. If someone bothered to make a version of KDE that wasn't glossy, and ran well, I might really like it! 'till then, I'll probably just use wmii or XFCE, or even LXDE.
Linux user since 1998. Haven't used KDE since around 2005. Every distribution that I tried to use with KDE had tons of buggy applications. KDE would be installed with a gazillion apps and 25% to 30% would simply not work. I now use Linux Mint 9 with xfce where everything works right out of the box, Am experimenting with xmonad on an older laptop which is pretty cool so far. I keep books for a living, and have to use Windows software because of my clients. KDE tries to pretend that one simply does not need to open any file formats that are used on Windows. I wish them well in never never land.
bob mccarty
aka curmudgeonbob
card carrying member of the great unwashed.
Firstly, the KDE team has started on KDE5 before they've even ironed the bugs out of KDE4. I don't want to get abandoned by them yet again when their desktop is jsut starting to become usable.
What stopped me up until now? The network transparency is not as good as it was in KDE 3.x, the desktop is still way too buggy for my liking - I can't even set up a top and bottom panel with loaders for my favourite apps and expect it to look good or load the same way each time KDE starts. Dragging items within the panels comes up against invisible barriers which p revent putting them where I'd like to. Applets which should resize with the bar end up with weird broken borders or don't scale properly, or require far too much width when they do scale up. KDE3 allowed placing several launchers in a container and ordering them within that container. KDE4.7.x just feels like a huge quantum leap backwards compared to KDE 3.5.10 as far as reliability and configurability. The dependencies are way way too big for what it does. XFCE or gnome classic do it all and very well in a fraction of the resource footprint, and even though support for gnome classic has been dropped you can bet that it will be available for years to come.
3. You didn't bother to take any time to customize KDE's layout (and believe me it can be customized in some MAJOR ways that Gnome intentionally prevents you from doing).
Ok, how do I disable screensaver in KDE? Right, chmod -x {find the executable resposible for screensaver}; last I checked.
How do I prevent okular from trying to save the password for a protected PDF? right, chmod -x {find the executable used for kwallet}; last I checked.
Awesomely configurable, I must say.
Gnome gives UI for configuring these 2. To say nothing of KDE forcing semantic desktop / desktop killing SSDs and thrashing HDDs unlike Gnome.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I installed a fresh ubuntu 12.04 on a couple of computers and at first I thought I'd give unity another shot. I'm not entirely against change, as long as it's not simply for the sake of change. Anyway, unity put me off due its lack of configurability. This would not be "that" much of a problem if the default settings were tolerable. Most of them were but the real killer was alt+tab. I have to use windows in my dayjob so I can't actually learn a new alt+tab method unless it is applied everywhere.
I am a long time gnome user but from time to time I try out KDE. Last time I tried was quite a while ago (near the beginning of the 4.x saga) so I thought it deserved another shot. It is not as...polished...as gnome in many respects.
Integration of some important software (e.g. firefox etc) is non-existent leading to annoying situations (e.g. download something and try to open it from the download window or even right click > open folder will not work out of the box).
I'm a java developer so I work with zip files a lot, Ark does not seem to function as well as it should. For example I can only add a file to the root folder, not a subfolder. If this is actually possible, it is not intuitive as to how.
Dolphin is no match for nautilus in some respects, most notably the "type the name of the file" which is basically the primary way I navigate my file system. In nautilus you can actually backspace, scroll to next match etc, dolphin resembles the windows explorer in terms of features. I have also tried the other main file navigator which does have this feature in KDE (can't think of the name) but it does not integrate nicely in other ways.
In gnome I can open any file and (unless it is tied to an application), it will suggest opening it as a text file. In kde it will simply show you the list of applications to open it with, typing "kate" every 10 minutes becomes annoying real fast.
The "start button" equivalent is really nice except that once again I usually type the name of the application and there is a small delay between typing and it actually listing the applications that match. Again this becomes annoying really quickly.
Yes I realize that there are probably workarounds for all the issues, but it's simply not worth it for me.
After that I tried gnome 3 and I love it....after I install at least one extension to fix alt+tab. The extensibility of the gnome 3 desktop is awesome and by far it's main draw for me. The little problems (delay in typing application names etc) all just vanish in gnome, it works as it should.
So for me: gnome 3 wins handsdown (even against gnome 2) BUT only with at least one extension.
Linux is a support nightmare, that's why. I can support a handful of versions of windows, but with the constant changes in the hundreds of linux distributions, with thousands of support programs and utilities each having their own development teams and streams for updates... ouch, it's just a support nightmare. For a couple thousand standard computers using just a web browser and TN3250 client to an AS400, it's a dream, throw cPanel on my Linux Web Server and I'm set and give me a team of techs who understand what they are supporting at SoftLayer and I'm happy - but for everyone else - Linux creates a huge almost unsupportable user base for software engineers like myself.
I'll stick with Microsoft on my desktop. It may be slow, it may be clunky, but the devil I know is better than the support nightmare I don't.
Well, I have worked with Gnome 3 and with xfce and with cinnamon and mate recently and KDE as well. I have tried KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x, my daughter loves KDE, and I have supported her machine for a few years (kubuntu, Sabayon, Pardus, and.... oh I forget) and, while I can use it, I don't. Just like the way gnome is more than other DE's. Yes, I like gnome 3, but I also started with a late alpha and then went through the beta testing process with them for part of the cycle, so i should probably be rated a fanboy if i was a fan for anything (and i'm a pretty lazy fan at best).
But KDE just doesn't float my boat.
This is why we love Linux, KDE makes my daughter happy. Cinnanmon makes my wife happy. I like gnome3. We all are comfortable with this, so where is the problem?
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
bur i prefer gnome 3 over kde or unity, but i think everybody have his opinion.
Tarot Gabinete
You can’t completely break something for a long time and expect people to jump right back when you fix it. I, like many others, had to go elsewhere when kde3 became impractical to keep running and kde4 was completely broken.
+1 this. I'm sick of distributions which I've gotten used to and liked who suddenly throw themselves (and my productivity) off a GUI cliff. I don't care if you're putting in place the building blocks for some super duper new GUI, I use my computers to get things done and don't like having a "WTF?" moment when I upgrade.
I feel the same, stick with the gui that came with the distribution. On the other hand the HUD with Ubuntu 12.04 is interesting, but I would have preferred it as an option rather than as the default. Unity, IMO, is "fashion victim" interface, and I'm hoping the fashion changes soon. I ended up going with Mint Cinnamon.
With each distribution there are more things broken that used to work. Eg, latest Ubuntu (12.04) and its heirs all have a problem with my wifi adapter that has been working solidly since 8.04. After half a day of tinkering I went to ndiswrapper and after another half day of no success with that then discovered that it too had 'issues.' I then downloaded the version under development and at least have some network connectivity. It took several days to get a somewhat solid system in place.
And this was without tinkering with the installed gui, other than adding entries to menus and the like. I can just see more things not 'working as advertised' needing attention, and perhaps eventually discovering, after much toil and puzzlement, that there is no fix -- somewhere someone in development got this to work on their configuration and that was good enough, if it doesn't work for you download the source and get cracking.
Some of us just want an OS, not a job or a demanding hobby.
I have tried Unity, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, openbox and they were increasingly usable in that order. Then I tried Cinnamon in LinuxMint 13 and I love it.
LinuxMint 13's Cinnamon desktop is clean and fast with a touch of polished style and the desktop/app switch in the top-left corner was a very pleasant surprise. I have added K9Copy which includes KDE libraries, I'm sure, but I wouldn't notice any difference on my system anyway. I also added updated GIMP 2.8 RC, RedShift, Blender, and ZIm-Wiki. This is very close to my ideal desktop and I have hardly lifted a finger-- even my VisTablet Mini works out of the box!
I used twm for over 12yrs. I do'nt get even these desktop things. There's a tendacy to replace all good old unix things with broken replacements. Let's replace X with something without networking support. Yeah really? Let's replace a somewhat decent wm with a euhm what exactly, it's not that you can manage your windows anymore. I guess i'm growing old or something. I don't like changing a winning combination.
I started an iPhone app project so I acquired a MacBook to do it on. I have to admit I'm not liking the MAC UI at all. I totally dislike the way my programs don't close when I tell them to, they just hide. I don't like the shared menu-bar thing. (Never have.) And moving windows around, seeing multiple apps at once, switching back and forth between two applications, none of that was any good at all.
(I also didn't like option/apple clicking, the 'missing mouse button', the keyboard layout and the central settings area. Basically, while I was expecting to fall in love with it because I finally got to use the 'Legendary MAC OS' there was very little about it that clicked. It's possible part of the reason I didn't like it was because I'm not typically a laptop user and that might have contributed to the annoyance factor.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
I have to admit I'm not liking the MAC UI at all.
And I think you will have to admit that this is because you didn't allow yourself the space to comprehend the metaphor. And I have to admit that one size doesn't necessarily fit all. There are probably folks out there more productive on Gnome than anything else.
I use OSX, XFCE and MS WIndows on a daily basis (as I type this on my linux box, a macbook is to my left, and a windows box to my right). After initial frustration with the Mac interface back in 2007, its elegance (indeed it's superiority) has slowly become more and more apparent. Ironically perhaps, my small epiphanies tend to come when I'm working on the nix box (eg. AHA!. I was wrong! The close, maximise and minimise buttons DO actually belong on the left of the window (for a right handed person)... took me a long time to grok that one).
I totally dislike the way my programs don't close when I tell them to, they just hide.
Close!? See, there is your problem right there. A program can't close or hide, it can run or quit. It's individual windows which open and close. You are used to Applications quitting without being asked to, ie. when the last window closes.
In OSX you tell a program to quit, by quitting (or using the command-Q key combination) and you tell a window to close by closing it (or command-W). It's REALLY simple. [Now Lion changes this a little by reserving the right to quit, without explicitly being told to, any application for which all windows have been closed (a la Windows), should additional resources be required elsewhere.] Once you grasp the clear and sharp distinction between closing and quitting (and train your fingers to cmd-Q and cmd-W without thinking) you will begin to understand how confused the concepts of quitting and closing an application really are on other UIs.
But the real question isn't whether an application quits or not, it's why a human operator would object to the quicker response an already loaded application gives when asked to open another document?
I also didn't like option/apple clicking, the 'missing mouse button'
Agreed, it's awful. The command-click is an all but an admission that the one-button mouse simply does not work. That's why serious mac users throw the vanilla apple mouse as far away as possible, dunno about the 'Magic' mouse, I just use an old Logitech one or the pad.
the keyboard layout
Huh? Appart from the Apple/Command keys how is the macbook layout much different from any other laptop? I just fix the [Caps_Lock] to be the [Ctrl] (as I have on this keyboard as well), and Bob's your uncle.
I don't like the shared menu-bar thing. (Never have.)
And if you are as stubborn as Steve Jobs was about the one-button mouse you can keep not liking it indefinitely. It is, however, and even without taking the space saving into account, a far more elegant solution. And I never liked the Dock as an interface idea, but I have to admit it saves a lot of time.
And moving windows around, seeing multiple apps at once, switching back and forth between two applications, none of that was any good at all.
Windows move, you can see multiple applications at once and it's a breeze to switch back and forth between two applications. Mind you that applies to any modern UI really. What was your problem?
It's possible part of the reason I didn't like it was because I'm not typically a laptop user and that might have contributed to the annoyance factor.
Perhaps. But it sounds like you simply didn't give yourself permission to appreciate the design quality of the UI on it's own terms. And that's fine too. If something works better for you, and your primary interest isn't in UI design, you shouldn't really have to make that effort.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
something that worked just fine under Gnome 2 and now XFCE did not work under KDE or was extremely clumsy to achieve there.
XFCE has a number of smaller bugs, quirks and nuisances but it still is offering the best experience on systems where Gnome 2 is not available any more and the only other serious options would be Unity, Gnome3 or KDE.
So I was about to call you a troll, because I've changed the screensaver on KDE a few times. Then I remembered that it's in the display and monitor section of the system settings, which makes sense, but could be in other places. I've never had to use a password protected PDF, but if it's anything like Kmail, then you just hit no to saving the password when it asks, and you can tell it to not ask again with the little check box. Yes, I think you are just may be trolling.
sent from my slashdot browser.
Right so you have changed the screensaver instead of disabling, and never used a password protected PDF with okular, but it is I who am trolling.
Obviously I didn't persist with KDE, so I don't know the latest state of things. Doesn't look too encouraging from your statements though.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Considering the option to disable is right there in the choices to change it? Yes. Now, there isn't a setting called "enable/disable," but it can either start automatically or not, so I think that counts the same. I'll admit I was a little quick to judge, but most of the KDE issues I've seen are people giving up before they find the setting they are looking for, when a couple minutes of following xkcd's computer troubleshooting flowchart would've worked great.
I've never had to use a passworded pdf, and I don't really see the need for one (for me); they just don't come up in my workflow.
I found it odd that you would "chmod -x" a bunch of things instead of looking, so that was part of why I thought troll.
sent from my slashdot browser.
'coz Gnome 2 is still an option in Ubuntu Natty and works great.....with metacity, with openbox......all good and civilised
I vaguely recall there was once a thing called KDE, which stood for K Desktop Environment and was a sort of freeware implementation of the CDE, (C Desktop Environment,) with K replacing C as the letters have the same sound in many cases of each letter's use. I recollect it was one of the major X-Client/Window Managers, along with Gnome... that it tried to mimic and become sort of like Windows 95, at some point, for Linux, with a whole collection of widgets, applets, etc... and like Microsoft's Windows application system, KDE became too slow and kludgey, and I found myself more and more annoyed with each successive version, that instead of having applications that didn't necessarily need a graphical front-end not having one, being runnable from the terminal window, each thing had to be specially hand-crafted for KDE, and everything had to have a GUI, whether it needs one or not. and if you install anything with "K--------" in the name, the installer made KDE (and what IT depended on,) all REQUIRED packages, resulting in having to install a huge amount of extra stuff, that you didn't think you needed, usually to just be able to open or ready her mail.
So yeah, I headed for greener pastures, and chose a different flavor of Linux, which I now enjoy BECAUSE there isn't any kind of shenanigans like these again.
I use default FVWM. Starts up like I'm turning on a light switch and runs anything I want
Koz it's komplete krap.
Next kwestion ?
I don't run KDE anymore because of the semantic desktop crap that you can't seem to disable or remove in most / all(?) distros.
Sure you can disable it in your settings but the nepomuk, virtuoso, mysql, etc. processes keep running in the background chewing up CPU and memory resources, plus, the notification system keeps nagging you to death when semantic desktop is disabled.
Besides, KDE4 has become even more of a resource hog even without the semantic desktop crap.
I've adapted to Gnome 3.