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KDE's UI To Bend Toward Simplicity
sfcrazy (1542989) writes "KDE Software is often criticized for being too complicated for an average user to use. Try setting up Kmail and you would know what I mean. The KDE developers are aware of it and now they are working on making KDE UI simpler. KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer Thomas prefers a layered feature exposure so that users can enjoy certain advanced features at a later stage after they get accustomed to the basic functionality of the application. He quotes the earlier (pre-Plasma era) vision of KDE 4 – "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion."
This YouTube video offers some pretty good KDE criticism as well. I personally am mostly frustrated with the clunky and cluttered notifications system.
XFCE hasn't been ultralight in a few years now. It is no longer recommended for netbooks and other underpowered systems.
Meanwhile, full Windows 7 and 8 runs smoothly on those same underpowered systems with all animations and compositing enabled, all the way down to Atom N270 systems.
Everyone can try this themselves if they do not believe it.
Who said I was happy with Gnome? I would rather use KDE, just too complicated. See this video for examples.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
The article precisely says this:
UPDATE: As I’ve seen in some discussions of my post on the Internet (not the comments here) that people apparently thought the screenshot represented the next KMail desktop UI, I’ve updated the screenshot and the caption to make clear what it is.