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Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't You Running KDE?

Posted by samzenpus on from the what's-your-flavor? dept.

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?"

14 of 818 comments (clear)

  1. Found happiness elsewhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Found happiness elsewhere by hmmm · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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 used and really liked KDE for a long time, and along came 4.x . Suddenly I was left with a half working GUI, and was told that "well you shouldn't have upgraded should you?" and "it'll get better when we fix all the bugs". This is my problem now is it?

      MS are about to run into the same issue with Windows 8. Taking a well known and, maybe not loved but tolerated, GUI paradigm of a desktop and discarding it. It's going to cause chaos and resentment amongst their user community, many of whom will look at alternatives.

      I greatly respect everyone who contributes to open source, and I know you put your heart and soul into it, but for most of us our computers are not toys that we sit and tinker with endlessly to display snazzy new GUI effects, they are the tools we use to get things done. Once you lose the trust of the user that they can rely on you to provide a stable and easy to use OS you will have an incredibly hard job getting them back.

    2. Re:Found happiness elsewhere by GPLHost-Thomas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Something you probably don't get though, is that distributions have no choice. They don't make decisions for upstream authors, THEY decide to fu**-up, and package maintainers just take that, because that's going to be the only thing that upstream does support for.

      This being said, I 100% agree with your "WTF" moments, and the fact that I don't like the GUI I've spent so much time with may change radically. In fact, I'm currently using GNOME 2, and I still think KDE 3.5 was better. I'll probably switch to LXDE when I'll have to upgrade form Squeeze to Wheezy. It's getting worse on each upgrade...

    3. Re:Found happiness elsewhere by doublebackslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've found XFCE to be a VERY sweet spot for me as well. I use the default WM, just heard of OpenBox via this thread.

      My favourite thing is raw speed. Absoloute unquestioning speed. XFCE doesn't get it my way, it doesn't take time to play an animation whenever I do something. It snaps to attention and that is a BIG deal when I'm developing. Alt-Tabbing around, switching virtual desktops (with keyboard shortcuts, natch), raising and lowering windows, etc are all things that should happen fast. The next screen update if possible. The other desktop environments have forgotten that. I like animations and all the eye candy at first, but when I went to get something done they just got real annoying. Not to mention all the things that they want to change just... because? I don't know.

      Unity wants me to change my workflow, lack(s|ed) basic configuration, has the "unified menu" (really hate those) and a whole slew of other problems that I never found because when I realized it wouldn't let me launch more than one instance of an application (a terminal, for example) without performing some ritual (I never found out how) I restored from backup as quickly as I could. Unity, in my experience, is slow braindead garbage designed with goals nearly orthogonal to my own needs.

      Gnome I've not tried since it arrived stillborn in Ubuntu 11.10? (I think? It crashed for me hourly. Didn't take long for me to change when that started). The last time I looked at KDE it simply didn't give me controls to do certain things, forget what but it was keyboard shortcuts for window management. It might have been virtual desktops but I could be wrong. I like to be able to swtch desktops with *absoloute* keyboard shortcuts instead of relative ones. I don't give a half a rat's tail about the "geometry" of my work spaces. Hint: There isn't one! Its all just an abstraction! I don't want to have to give a moments reflection on "where I'm at" in my virtual desktop space to know how to get to my "destination"! I know that I want to get to virtual desktop 3 so I hit ctrl+alt+down and I'm there. I make habits of putting certain things in certain places so it is reflex to jump to the right place to find them, no thought required and no distraction from my train of thought.

      Anyway, KDE seemed incomplete. Lack of controls that irked me (and I DID try. I like the look of it and I recall it being speedy enough. Just felt like I was typing one handed, for lack of a better analogy)

      XFCE fit the bill for me in every single way. Right now everything else seems like a pain in the neck that is trying to get in my way, change my workflow to a painfully slow one, or is jsut plain broken / incomplete.

      --
      md5sum /boot/vmlinuz
      d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e /boot/vmlinuz
    4. Re:Found happiness elsewhere by smi.james.th · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You make a good point . Slackware continued with KDE3 for quite a while after 4 started shipping, and Mint forked Gnome2 as MATE and they're still shipping it. They also made Cinnamon which uses some pieces of Gnome3 but with most of the features you loved from 2, I'm using that at the moment and personally I think it's brilliant. So the distros do have a choice.

      --
      One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
    5. Re:Found happiness elsewhere by s.petry · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A majority? Probably not. The terminal is fine for lots of things, but when it comes to things like developing, email, browsing, etc. it does not cut it. Sure, I could sit and create a long list of aliases to make access to those things easier, but.. then I have to worry about things like window placement when I launch something, and managing the running applications. Also, how do you show someone from Windows world how Linux is friendly when that's your option? How much of a performance hit is it trying to hand manage all your applications?

      I have been an avid KDE user since it first started shipping with RedHat (yeah, I'm an old mother f&*ker). KDevelop is an awesome IDE, window management and performance have always been better than Gnome, it's extremely flexible, and for businesses a very important feature is the Kiosk controls (Gnome was supposed to have these in version 3, however after a year of waiting for a management tool and bug fixes I gave up.).

      The other nice thing with KDE is that I have graphics that look better than Windows, but similar enough that people can follow what you are doing. Most of the time, after an hour long session with Engineers I have them asking what I'm running so they can ask their boss for it. If I want to be flashy, I can hot key Compeze and make people "ooh" and "ahh", especially those in Windows that are used to Aero's poor performance with effects if the effects work at all.

      Were there changes that were maybe too drastic from V2-V3 then V3-v4? Hard to say, I mean.. they are trying to build something that competes with the massively adopted MS Desktop. All in all, I'll take a day learning curve in a new version when weighting the pros and cons.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  2. fwiw by stoolpigeon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  3. I am by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  4. Because GNOME is too stupid and KDE is too slow. by Uncle+Warthog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Unwilling to (re)implement --geometry by kmahan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  6. Re:Between Personal Life and Work by Rhaban · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I use xfce on mint (lmde).

    I tried several flavors of kde, I really like it, but it just isn't good enough. I had huge problems with Kubuntu (several years ago: kde 4.2, I think): no simple tool available to set up wifi connection, an update that broke my desktop entirely... I decided I'd try it again later.
    Some months ago, I installed an opensuse with kde on my work laptop (a dell e6510). I had some performance issues and I didn't know where they came from: some database update scripts took almost 2 times as long as on my coworker's similar pc to complete, and sometimes the load would freeze the desktop for several seconds.
    I did not think it was kde, but I tried and installed xfce. The performance problems disappeared instantly. And they came back if i chose kde as my desktop manager when turning my computer on.

    More recently I decided to change distribution, and went for lmde with xfce. I don't think I'll try kde again.

  7. Pretty damn simple by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Why the GNOME logo? by unixisc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Why am I not Running KDE? by GPLHost-Thomas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TWM is one of the oldest window manager. Its long name is "Tab Window Manager". I remember using it on a Dec Alpha 120 MHz (using OSF1, also called digital Unix), in the 90s. Wikipedia has some nice screenshots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm

    olwm (OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager) is quite old too... http://xwinman.org/olvwm.php