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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?"
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.
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.
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.
There's no KDE for Windows 7.
You mean like this:
http://windows.kde.org/
brandelf -t FreeBSD
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.
Because fvwm does exactly what I want it to and need it to.
What's wrong with Alt+F2+"fi"+enter?
It's been there for at least a decade, you know?
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 be fair, a good deal of that blame lies at the distributions' over-eager hands. The KDE team stated publicly and repeatedly that the initial KDE4.x line was basically a developer preview. They stated that they didn't expect KDE to be in the same realm of usability as KDE 3.5 until around version 4.5.
Nevertheless, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. decided to be "bleeding-edge" and install the early 4.x developer preview KDE as the default desktop in their newer releases, severely harming KDE's reputation. While the KDE team could have handled the releases better ("beta" label, etc.), the distributions definitely should have known better.
I've also found happiness elsewhere. A combination of XFCE + OpenBox does EVERYTHING I need *and* want.
'Impossible' is a word that humans use far too often. -- Seven of Nine
My reason is simple. I just don't care anymore. Whatever the Distribution gives me by default, ill go ahead and use. Just as long as I can put an icon for my terminal I am good.
I use to care, but then I spent more time finding the perfect GUI then I did actually doing work. So if it has Unity, Ill deal with it. Is it my favorate... No but it isn't worth it for me to try over and over again.
I am not running KDE because it wasn't my default choice. Why am I sticking to my default choice... Because I really don't care. And whatever distribution I choose I stick with the default choice because all the bits and pieces are working. No broken links, copy and paste works, and if I need help online, I can get the easy answers from the beginner page even though I am not a beginner, but I prefer the beginner pages, because I usually get the straight forward answer to the problem, vs the Advanced Pages, where I need to discuss why am I trying to do something. Vs just getting info on how to do it. Besides I usually just need help with whatever new UI crazyness that comes out that I haven't figured out quickly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm running KDE too. It has a useful file manager, and it is very configurable. Don't like the alt-tab switcher? There are 4 to choose from :D The defaults are generally OK too, so only a few things need changing. It's not perfect, there could be something better in terms of window management, but I haven't seen it yet. KDE doesn't become useless when you have about 8 windows per workspace, and that's more than you can say about most DEs...
Something you probably don't get though, is that distributions have no choice.
That is wrong. Distributions actually have all sorts of choice in the matter. There is nothing preventing them from keeping to ship the older versions KDE3 or Gnome 2 while all the upgrade chaos goes on. It's open source so if the upstream maintainers don't want to do it there is nothing that prevents them from maintaining the older version themselves, getting together as a group to maintian, or even just leaving as is and not following the upgrades.
They instead choose to foist all this on their users for reasons that escape me (though being the path of least resistances for them might be why). To say they have no choice in the matter is just wrong.
Using fluxbox, I assign Ctrl-Alt-t to a urxvt terminal...period. If I have a terminal open and want to open another...I just hit Ctrl-Alt_t again and, just as God intended, it doesn't give a crap if I have one running already. When doing development stuff I'd bet I do that a hundred times in one day. Seriously...what are these people thinking?
Simple: on a mobile phone, you're not going to be using multiple terminal windows. If you even have a terminal on there (maybe to ssh into a server from your phone), you would only run one instance. I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of any application on a smartphone.
Since we now have a mandate to make our desktop PCs function like smartphones as much as possible, this requirement has carried over. I have no idea where this mandate came from, but most of the UI "experts" are obviously following it (with the exception of KDE, XFCE, and LXDE).