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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?"
Thank you, good day.
Because I am Enlightened
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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 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.
Same here. Since being exposed to the fvwm-pager more than 20 years ago on SunOS, I am not happy without at least 3x2 desktops and usually have 3x3 with edge scroll. I also use the auto-raiser, tuned exactly to my reflexes.
Why people go for eye-candy over functionality in a tool is beyond me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I actually wasn't aware that that exists. In GNOME, clicking the "Activities" button brings up this menu, so I found it almost immediately.
your argument seems dishonest.
Or you know, it's possible to use a system and not suddenly know everything about it..
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?
ditto.
i haven't run kde since openlinux (yes, i bought it at retail way back when. wtf was i thinking).. it was gnome after that until ubuntu and gnome3 fucked that up. now it's xfce and lxde:
xfce is the new gnome2, and lxde is the new xfce.
These people do not understand the Unix philosophy and are trying for an all-integrated bloated monster a la MS Windows.
I think KDE understands it supremely well. They try to provide a collection of single-purpose components that get put together in cool ways. For example, KIO slaves provide filesystem-like interfaces to various protocols like HTTP, SFTP, Samba, etc. KHTML (and later WebKit) provides a HTML renderer, DOM, and JavaScript environment. Glue them together one way and you have the Konqueror web browser. Combine them another way and you have KMail. Neither of those are "all-integrated bloated monsters", but sets of components working together to perform a larger job. Isn't that The Unix Way?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The distro maintainers are absolutely at fault. They are under no obligation to include anything from an upstream project. To use the obligatory car analogy, suppose a car company is building a car from a big box of parts, and their job is to use these free parts to make a car that works well for people for practical purposes. One of the parts in the box is a really cool new engine, but it only runs on natural gas (not commonly available for refueling) and it has all kinds of bugs and problems. Why would the company put that new engine in their car, instead of the (also freely available) gasoline piston engine they have available, which works well and has few problems, when they can wait for the people making that engine to improve it to the point where it's better than the gas engine, or at least a worthwhile alternative that they can offer to customers?
The reason the distros include this buggy new software as soon as it's available, replacing the more stable but older versions, is because they want to advertise how they have the fancy new item; they want to look like they're cutting-edge. This is a bad way to go about things though; it just shows they don't do any real testing (obviously no user testing, so that users can tell them "this thing sucks balls! give me the old one back!"). People who want to get real work done don't want to be beta testers for every new thing out there. But by the same token, they also don't want to be stuck with ancient (and buggy) versions of software just because someone arbitrarily set a "freeze" date at some point, like they do with Debian "Stable". Pragmatic people wanting the best productivity want the latest stable versions of software, so they have all the security fixes and bug-fixes, but without any beta testing; that stuff should be left in experimental branches. They do want recent versions of the kernel, however, so they get good hardware support; highly stable software isn't much use if it doesn't run on your hardware and you have to go track down a 3-year-old system to run it on. They also want the latest bug fixes and updates for things like browsers; a browser isn't very useful if it's years out of date and doesn't show websites properly (e.g., doesn't have full HTML5 support). But a desktop environment is different; there's few compatibility worries there--it doesn't restrict what hardware you can run, or affect what websites you can see, it's mainly just a user interface. But it's how you do all your interaction with your computer, so it needs to be more stable and usable than anything else on your computer.