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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.
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.
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.