Why I won't use KDE 4
Posted by George Wright Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT
Warning: rant follows.
So today at the ‘release party’ in Toronto (I use this term in the loosest possible sense), certain KDE developers decided to have a go at me for my refusal to use KDE 4 in favour of KDE 3. Admittedly one of them was particularly drunk after only a couple of pints, so I won’t take his input too seriously, but it did raise some concerns with the mentality I’m now (more often) seeing within the KDE community that I never used to see.
For me, KDE always stood for being free to do whatever you want. Surely that’s the philosophy of free software as a whole? If I want to use my machine to herd cats in my garden whilst terrorising them with a giant torch? Sure [0]. If I want to make my desktop look like other, well down, proprietary desktop environments - why not? You get my point.
However, today my objections to KDE 4 were met with an unbelievable barrier of closed-mindedness. For example; I use bitmap fonts with my terminal. Why? Because at small font sizes (read: 6px high) I’d rather have my supremely readable bitmap font that I’ve been using for aeons than some scaled one. But Konsole4 I’ve found does not like to play nicely with bitmap fonts (admittedly this may be fixed by now). The unanimous answer from the KDE developers present? “You’re an idiot for using small fonts - it’s totally pointless”. Wow, way to go for the whole “free to do what you want” thing. I’ve also just done a quick benchmark and found its scrolling speed to be significantly slower than Konsole3’s. [1]
Second gratuitous example; I do not like desktop effects. They annoy me. I do not enable composite. I’m entitled to this opinion. Furthermore, it seems that enabling desktop effects increases power consumption. I spend a lot of time away from power (for example: at shooting ranges), and wish to maximise my battery life accordingly. Again, I was greeted with comments such as “why do you need to have good battery life?”, “it’s a ridiculous use case because you’re never away from a power socket for that long” and “you’re a corner case” (referring to the rifle range example) [2]. Nice to know that apparently wishing to minimise power consumption is a corner case now.
I was also greeted with a barrage of what I can only describe as sheer stupidity when I explained that I do 99% of my work in a terminal. This is also, apparently, frowned upon now.
Has KDE now become a desktop environment only useful to people whose usage patterns fit with what KDE prescribes as acceptable? Is there some sort of judge now in KDE who is able to decree whether someone’s usage pattern is “acceptable” or not? I do hope not. [3]
Very disappointed. [4]
[0] - OK I don’t actually do that, for a number of reasons really.
[1] - http://lwn.net/Articles/88249/; Konsole3 on my machine whacked out the whole thing in about 30s. Konsole4 (SVN trunk from a few months ago) took nearly 2 minutes. Both used the same font.
[2] - A fine example of deliberately missing the point to try and win an argument; the case of “wishing to extend battery life” is not a corner case. Mine is simply a specialisation of that.
[3] - To be fair, I am unfairly extrapolating the views of some KDE developers to the entire community, which I know does not as a whole think like this. But other people may not be so understanding. Fix it.
[4] - I don’t actually care all that much about KDE 4 as I’ve assessed it for my needs and have concluded it does not fit my requirements as well as KDE 3 does. I’m sure it’s fine for a lot of people. However, as stated at the beginning of this rant, I am somewhat dismayed with the direction the mentality of an increasing number of developers is taking. Just accept that I don’t like it, and sod off.
Edit: due to popular demand, comments are now enabled. Flame away.
I think it’s going to be hard for anyone to argue with this, but I don’t expect that’ll stop them.
Dolphin’s Miller Columns tempt me quite a bit… but I’ve gotta have my global menu bar.. KDE3, Gnome, and Mac all have it, KDE4 doesn’t.
Hey, we have 0.2% of the market, who should we alienate? I KNOW! The corner cases!
Uh… guys?
IIRC, Gnome does not have universal menubar. All the apps have their menus in the app-window, just like Windows does.
Now, on to business: so, you don’t use KDE4 because of a bug that might be fixed by now? You also don’t like desktop effects, even though you can turn them off even in KDE4?
And like it was said elsewhere, you are perfectly free to use KDE3, no-one is forcing you to to run KDE4.
It seems that you believe there should be a judge, and it should be you. Even if you don’t do the work. Whatever the philosophy of free software, it doesn’t involve developers being required to implement any and all feature requests anyone happens to demand…
There are actually several more reasons I don’t like KDE4, ranging from the way I can arrange my panels to Konqueror.
I know that nobody is forcing me to use KDE4, but I’m getting sick of people telling me I should switch and then coming up with this closed-mind mentality when I give my reasons why I don’t want to.
George, you are confusing quite a few things. For example you seem to think that composite = effects. That’s not true. You can enable composite and turn off all effects. Enabling compositing (without any effects) decreases CPU load for moving windows etc. I’ve read somewhere that enabling composite without effects does improve battery life.
If you work almost exclusively in the terminal, Plasmacon http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Plasmacon?content=108120 may be something for you if you ever switch to KDE Plasma (it’s no longer “KDE 4” for god’s sake. KDE’s rebranding was dome months ago.)
@ethana2
We as who? :) I’m almost sure Linux has +/- the same market share as OS X. If you’re according to some sites which try to measure operating systems market share they’re probably not fair, because afaik they take microsoft.com into account (must check, and if this is true it’s possible they also take apple.com into account), so imagine how big advantage this gives. According to one of the most popular sites in my country, Linux has more market share then OS X (in my country). If you meant KDE I also don’t agree. In almost every poll I saw KDE is over Gnome.
@George
If you don’t like compositions just disable them and that’s all. It sounds like compositions is something wrong, but I know people who switched to Linux just to have such nice effects.
@Adam
No, I don’t believe that. I object to being told that my way of doing things is wrong when I give my specific reasons why I don’t want to do things another way.
@Markus
This is true; an oversight on my part.
@Everyone
I know that you can disable desktop effects. I do this every time I try a KDE 4 release. Stop telling me that I can do this.
The point of this article is that I have noticed a growing number of people with an attitude that is particularly closed-minded and goes against the KDE philosophy of being free to do what you want.
PLEASE STOP MISSING THE POINT AND COMMENTING OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN ON THE VARIOUS TECHNICAL STUFF. They are incidental, and used to show the sort of responses I have received, which I’m sure people will agree are ridiculous.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem in just KDE. Most large software projects suffer the stigma. The GNOME 3.x/gnome-shell bits are perhaps bringing that out in the open more than other changes have, in GNOME.
@ethana2
KDE4 does have a Global Menubar. You can use a XBar what is supported by Bespin and QtCurve styles. Or use the one what is on KDE Playground.
I use QtCurve anyways and I like the global menubar so i have used it since QTCurve 0.69 got support for it. Before that I used it with Bespin since 4.1.
George, I feel your pain. Myself I only switched three month ago or that, and I still miss a lot of things I liked in KDE3. Not that KDE 4 does not have some new nice things. :) And it is improving all the time (as you could state yourself with regard to the Konsole bug). So 4.5 or 4.6 might be a good time to recheck. It also needs people like you to improve the situation. Code can help :)
People making fun of you for not using the latest cool stuff in town are …, and drunk people anyway.
I find Nepomuk to be useless now except to eat up disk space and cpu cycles. Why in the world is nepomuk not optional install until the bugs are worked out. I know the semantic desktop is inevitable. But right now, for me, nepomuk forced me to take another look at gnome.
I’ve been using KDE since 0.99, and I’ll probably never leave it. But the core’s attitudes in the KDE4 era are definitely different. KDE used to be very laissez faire, just do what you want to do. Now it’s conformist and and elitist. I’ve talked with many of the old KDEers and they’re largely of the same opinion.
George, this echoes of the recent linux today editorial by Carla Schroder, and of the russelfamily blog. Sometimes it feels that if you’re not in the “less technical users” use case group, then your opinion or your usage patterns don’t matter anymore for the core devs. You just should do things the recommended way. Might even be a wrong perception, and at least aseigo seems to listen and take is time to argue the more visible cases, but sometimes it feels like the gnome “devs know best” philosophy is contaminating kde.
Adam williamson, if that is really you then shame on you. Or maybe i should say ‘thanks’ for reinforcing george wright’s premise that devs are bunch of stubborn sods who hate listening to users. Which I think sums up KDE4’s core design philosophy perfectly. Of course it’s impossible to perfectly please all users, but I agree that KDE4 has gone way too far the other way. They have their own ideas, and too bad for the users who find that this radical new vision (radical from kde3) does not meet their needs. KDE4 is all about eye candy over functionality, reinventing wheels in new and inferior ways, and I am really getting tired of the standard response that users who want it to be more functional and efficient are wanting the wrong things.
You will ALWAYS find closed minded, stupid, annoying people in whichever community you choose to take part in. Instead of posting a trollish post like this on planet KDE, I think you should just accept this fact, keep doing whatever suits your preferences and don’t let other people’s differing opinions upset you.
Please try to keep a positive attitude when posting to planet KDE, rants rarely do anything good.
“PLEASE STOP MISSING THE POINT AND COMMENTING OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN ON THE VARIOUS TECHNICAL STUFF”
Sheesh. Relax. The technical stuff is the point because KDE3 is no longer maintained, so if you’re ever gonna have a hope in hell of moving on you’re going to want to have the technical stuff addressed.
So you met a couple people that were assholes when drunk (who isn’t?). Battery life is a concern of course, I don’t think you’ll find a sober person that will argue that point. The konsole bug is getting fixed, and effects can be disabled.
So bring up your other bugs and see if they can get fixed as well! Getting all worked up about something that drunk people said seems kinda crazy.
Agreed, no one should be forcing you into using software you don’t want to use. But admittedly, at some point down the road, distributions will stop supporting KDE 3. Obviously not an issue if you roll your own distro, but I’ll guess you don’t. ;-)
I will argue that, despite what some developers say at a party, you’re being listened to on a technical level, and that at some point you may get what you want–even in 4.x (or even 5.x). Isn’t the real idea that software should get better, with the help of the users, like you and me?
I use Ubuntu 9.10 with the GNOME desktop. I installed the package called ‘kdebase-workspace’. So now I run several KDE apps without all the KDE bickering. Yes, I really like some of those KDE apps!
LOL GEORGE YOU CAN USE KDE3 IF YOU WANT, WE’RE NOT FASCISTS, BUT FUCKING KDE4 IS A MILLION TIMES BETTER SO YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT LOLOLOLOL
“PLEASE STOP MISSING THE POINT AND COMMENTING OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN ON THE VARIOUS TECHNICAL STUFF”
we can have a rational discussions only about technical stuff. Feelings most of the time arent rational and we cant really have a rational discussion over your personal feelings about kde3/kde4.
a close minded person is a person who can not be reasoned with, feelings most of the time cant be reasoned with
Most of the technical points you have given are already addressed and you are at an error in most of them, The fact that you are getting annoyed at people concentrating on technical stuff implies you are mostly interested in feelings and we cant do that much about them ..
You said “KDE always stood for being free to do whatever you want. Surely that’s the philosophy of free software as a whole?”
And you’re wrong. The philosophy of Free Software says that you are free to do whatever you want with the code, and not the software.
If you want a desktop in your way, than fork KDE and make it. There’s no such philosophy that make the devs implement everything the way you like it. The KDE team (and it includes designers, artists and translators, not only developers) has the right to make software the way they want.
You think that KDE philosophy is “options to please them all” stigma that haunted us in the 3 series. This is when you get it all wrong.
And for corner cases (and i’m talking about the 6px font now): yes, you are a corner case. This isn’t bad, you aren’t wrong, but you are. Unfortunaly, a corner case gets low priority, there is no other option.
Using three isn’t a problem as far as I’m concerned, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone if continual whining irritates people.
KDE 4 for me never passed a simple test:
Use it for one hour without encountering/experiencing a major bug.
Simple as that. Plus they seem to be focusing on plasmoids and tons of other limited-use-case / tiny demographic functionality. Maybe in another couple releases it’ll be better.
Given the replies, and the tone of the post, even if it may have merit, I wonder if it would be good to make sure that people who are aggregated on Planet KDE uphold the Code of Conduct…
Interesting as this is, is there any reason for this KDE discussion to be aggregated on planet.gnome.org?
If you hate KDE 4 so much, why were you at the release party? I’m sure the developers in question found it a bit frustrating to be celebrating six months of work and having someone harshing their mellow, to use an out-of-date but fun term.
Furthermore, if you have issue with some KDE developers, why not contact the KDE Community Working Group in regards to their behavior, instead of extrapolating the drunken sayings of a few developers at a release event to the global KDE developer community of thousands?
This is just silly.
Somebody is complaining about how they think that the KDE community is becoming more elitist and forcing others to think as they do.
Yes, let’s all tell him why he’s completely wrong.
Silly silly people. I think he makes a valid point when he tells us to ignore the technical specifics. Only the people who have had a range of experiences confronting the inner circle of KDE folks should reply. Ignore the rest unless they have some really good insight.
To those who are saying that I’m taking the opinions of a few drunken people too seriously, I refer to the first paragraph… “but it did raise some concerns with the mentality I’m now (more often) seeing within the KDE community that I never used to see.”. If it was JUST their opinion I wouldn’t care. But the point is that I’m starting to see it more often.
I also find it somewhat dismaying that people have automatically concluded that the problems I have been seeing in KDE4 are now definitely fixed and are effectively telling me off for this, when in reality, you have clearly done just as much (probably less) research on the matter than I have.
Who knows, I’d love to switch to something which is actively maintained, so KDE 4 would seem a likely candidate for me. But unfortunately, as I said, it’s not fit for purpose for me yet. 3.5 is a mature codebase with nearly a decade’s worth of development effort on it; 4 is still a baby and has a lot of catching up to do.
“Somebody is complaining about how they think that the KDE community is becoming more elitist and forcing others to think as they do.
Yes, let’s all tell him why he’s completely wrong.”
QFT
@ George
My view and user experience is that KDE4, while impressive and innovative on the technology front, is still not quite as polished as KDE3. It is meant to be faster than KDE3, but on the same hardware, using the same distro (Arch), KDE4 just doesn’t run as smoothly as KDE3 did.
From what I’ve gathered in the blogosphere in the 2 years that KDE4 has been out, the general sentiment about KDE4 is the same: not as solid as KDE3.
You write that KDE3 had nearly a decade’s worth of development behind it - KDE4, after only 2 years, is already on 3.5. At this rate, KDE5 is only another 2 years away! I think that says quite a lot.
I really like KDE4, and it has improved leaps and bounds in a very short space of time (KDE4.2 was the first usable release, with KDE4.3 actually being pretty damn good), but it feels like the focus was so much on adding new features and getting them out quickly, that core functionality and stability got kinda lost in the process. Amarok 2.x suffered the same fate: in the process of adding new features, old and loved features disappeared, only to be gradually added back in again with the subsequent updates.
Surely the whole point of a new release is to build on the successes of previous releases, not losing the very things that made the old releases great and then justifying it with “but look at all the cool new things you can do!”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ll get responses down the line of “substantiate your claims with concrete examples”, but I know what I experience, and I know that I’m not the only one to feel that KDE4 just isn’t quite as solid as KDE3.
I am, however, sticking with KDE4, as the new technologies are indeed impressive, and with each major update, KDE4 has become closer and closeer to fulfilling its potential. That can surely only be possible if the KDE developers are actually listening to what their user base says…
Obviously “KDE4, after only 2 years, is already on 3.5.” is meant to read “KDE4, after only 2 years, is already on 4.5.”
Which idiot placed the ‘3’ key right next to the ‘4’?!
Some random thoughts:
Using small fonts on one of those high-resolution tiny laptops doesn’t seem like it should be a corner case. Do none of these people have a laptop? (Ditto for battery life, although perhaps people have poor expectations.)
And yes, it would be nice if someone would go and profile plasma…. (Incidentally, in playground somewhere there is something for thin clients called blazer.)
“…some concerns with the mentality I’m now (more often) seeing within the KDE community that I never used to see.”
FWIW, I’ve heard similar concerns from various old-timers. Usually while they are telling me why they are no longer very active.I have no basis for comparison, though.
When you work on something, it is natural to become attached to it. Now take an old timer who worked hard on KDE and now sees things moving in a direction that they don`t like, and combine them with someone else who is currently working hard on it.. and it`s not suprising that they will have harsh words for each other. If the conversation is just “I dislike what you did” then the conversation is not going to be very productive, and it`s going to leave a bad taste for everyone. And doubly so if you offer reasons which are fixed or invalid. And this all goes doubly at a release party, where everyone has just worked hard to get a release out. For free.
John, there are two main issues with the way you see things. First, I did not actually initiate the conversation; I was asked why I do not use KDE 4. I gave my reasons.
Secondly, I believe the issues have not been fixed, and stating they are ‘invalid’ is the mentality I’m referring to.
Thirdly; this is not something that I have seen limited to the release party. I have noticed such a trend for a while now.
I was glad to read this blog post as it was prooving that I’m not the only one who is thinking that kde4 is all about nothing.
Plasma is broken by design. Just broken. Crashes often because of a single applet. Crashes often. Very often. And note that all use expireince of kde4 depends on plasma - it is desktop and it is panel. btw krunner and kwin are also broken :)
Kde4 is very resource hungry and crashes often. Many things are broken and crash often. Also kde4 consume significantly more than kde3 was. Now thare is nepomuk and strigi which consume even more resources.
As for amarok2 - the devs should’ve called it with some other name. We all new amarok as an ultimate music player ever, and amarok2 is just a plain simple player which only can play mp3 file and crash often.
To sum up - kde devs did a huge mistake when they stopped kde3 and claimed lde4 as stable. it will be stable near 4.6-4.7 (or may be never) while kde3 is rock solid but is forced to be unsupported without any valuable reason.
@non7top You’re are a fucking moron. Nuff said. The reason KDE3 was dropped because Qt3 couldn’t fix many of the bugs KDE3 suffered from. Qt4 did fix this and offer a lot more than Qt3 did like WebKit, QtScript, QGraphicsView, DBus, etc which Qt3 did not have. Yeah a few apps in KDE4 have a little memory usage boo fucking hoo. Go buy more memory and quit using 512MB of RAM. Stop using MP3 and rip your discs to use ogg. KDE3 was fucking butt ugly just like GNOME is with it’s Win2000 look.
GNOME is much freaking worst than anything. It lacks innovation, it lacks decent libraries, they still use that piss poor autohell crap. The documentation is crap. The way GNOME renders fonts is piss poor. It keeps trying to copy OS X. It’s so stabled it’s fucking obsolete. GNOME is like Debian stabled. Now they are trying to catch up by KDE4 they are failing.
Look at GNOME3’s shell. If you don’t have decent OpenGL you cannot even run it. Atleast with Plasma if you cannot use OpenGL you can use Raster. Hell GNOME3 failed to even depend on Gtk+ 3. GNOME is turning in to a fucking Microsoft partnership. Since stupid Icaza’s fucking arse is a fucking Micrsoft evangelist. OMFG MONO wooo it’s going to save us blah blah blah.
GNOME’s stupid developers created Vala because they are too prideful to admit programming in 2010 with C is a bitch and what not.
GNOME is full of fail and it will continue to fail. GNOME has nothing on KDE4.
KDE4 has Kross, Plasma, Qml (soon to be in Qt-4.7) when KDM starts using it. It has Solid, Phonon, and a ton of other stuff too. What the fuck does GNOME offer? NOTHING.
@bear=KDE3 was fucking butt ugly just like GNOME is with it’s Win2000 look.
In what way you think that GNOME so win2000 look. Fuck you bitch.
@bear=It keeps trying to copy OS X.
Do you know what you are writing here. Just now you said, Gnome have win2000 look. Are you the who drunken at the release party?
@bear=GNOME has nothing on KDE4.
Off course, gnome is stable and solid. Only people love sending bug report @ experience crash love bloated fucking ware KDE4.
@bear=GNOME’s stupid developers created Vala
Have you in your life created anything. Stupid people created nothing but more shout. Only clever guy have the guts to create something.
@bear=GNOME is full of fail and it will continue to fail.
Yes, GNOME desktop fail to crash compare to KDE4 which successfully make kwin crash, plamoid crash and successfully sent fucking bug report.
Anyway, George Wright in this post commenting issue on KDE3 over KDE4. Why are you making such comment by dragging GNOME into this matter.
OMG!!!!! It’s you the one who drunken at the release party? close minded fucking crap….
Go back and learn more from KDE oldtimer. They will teach you about code of conduct before let you barking here.
@bear=Look at GNOME3’s shell. If you don’t have decent OpenGL you cannot even run it. Atleast with Plasma if you cannot use OpenGL you can use Raster.
Hell, you know nothing at all. Gnome-shell is preview realease and not complete final release. It’s make sense that preview release doesn’t have all features.
‘You think that KDE philosophy is “options to please them all” stigma that haunted us in the 3 series. This is when you get it all wrong.’
And here I was thinking that KDE3 “stigma” was “users matter” as opposed to Gnome’s “developers know best”.
Anyway, Moult has already summed up both arguments perfectly.
Really it’s all just a question of how do we encourage each other as a community, to make everyone welcome whatever their preferences are.
Welcome to what the rest of the world is trying to figure out… ;-)
@Azwar If you are even a developer bug reports happen no matter what? Oh I forgot you’re not one that’s why you’re saying that. I rather see bloated than an incomplete piece of shit that is so stabled it has no features. I don’t know about you, but I like new features and something different, not something that gets ugly and boring and never changes. If you knew anything, KDE4 was a complete rewrite dumbarse. Yeah Plasma has the single process bug. It sucks but it will change soon.
Yeah right. I bet 1 million € that GNOME3 ships it just like that. GNOME is too busy sucking on Microsoft’s nuts with Mono and rewriting a new language with Vala to even pay attention. With Icaza with his stupid Microsoft loving arse, I wouldn’t doubt I’d see GNOME being completely rewrote in C#.
GNOME needs to create innovation rather than just making it too stabled that it’s left in the dust.
But I’ve notice something about GNOME people on this blog. Nothing but fucking bitching whinos. Always bitching about something.
My only grief with KDE4: It is slow. Loading the desktop and/or apps is slow, (re)drawing/(re)sizing of windows is slow and/or flickering. Tested on multiple combinations of hardware/drivers.
Sometimes i can even see how the redraw happens, e.g. when i switch between 2 windows. Also tested on several hardware combinations, mostly nvidia/intel.
Remember all those blog posts about Qt4 (and even KDE4) being so much faster than Qt3/KDE3? I am often thinking about switching back to KDE3, just because of the speed…
@Jan I have an AMD 64 X2 box with a nVidia 250 GTS and I have no slowness with KWin effects turned on.
Well just remember if you go back to KDE3, no one will fix the bugs you report and will be marked INVALID or WONTFIX. And also no security bugs will be fixed. Why don’t you see what happens with KDE-4.4.0 is released on Feb 9th.
@bear: so i have to use high-end hardware for KDE? Sorry, cant understand that… I have 3 machines, all with Core2 and 2-4GiB RAM and either intel x3100/x4500 or nvidia 5200, and i cant say that KDE4 runs fluid on any of them.
The nvidia machine is the worst, even with no load on the cpu i can see how windows are redrawn step by step. And dont ask me about composite on all of these machines, its just too slow…
Remember: these are modern machines, just without a graphics chipset that needs its own small power plant ;)
Sorry, i dont believe it anymore when people say KDE4 runs without slowness, because my own experiences say the opposite. Not only on my machines, but also others (with different distros too).
My lord, you are quite the drama queen, aren’t you?
Oh, my poor self, had geeks nerding out at me about my fonts at a party. WTF were you talking about your 6pt fonts at a PARTY anyway? God, were you asking for it, or what?
Let me guess, you get your feelings hurt a lot, don’t you?
@Jan my system is a piece of shit. Btw Intel has crappy drivers, nvidia 5200? wtf get a decent nvidia card. No wonder your drawing is slow. I like to see how that is with GNOME3 you’d probably complain about it too.
Just because yours is the opposite don’t make my experience “wrong”.
@Joe Well GNOME people are a bunch of whiners. Remember that little sexist joke RMS and how Planet GNOME complained night and day, you should know how GNOME is.
@bear “If you are even a developer bug reports happen no matter what?” =yes, crash & bug report happen but not as frequently as KDE4. that should make things clear.
if your preference is KDE4 let it be. you are free to choose.
it doesn’t mean when kde4 suit your need also suit for everybody. personal preference may vary… take this into consideration before you making such slanderous comment.
Is it that hard to understand? People are insulted by you still using KDE3 because they feel that you dont like their work. Thats not your fault and there is nothing you can do about that.
I have a NVIDIA FX5200 and 1.5 GB RAM 10 virtual desktops run FLUID on KDE 4.3
What about closing the comments now? they are not a solid and civilized talk anymore, just a bunch of fanboys attacking kde and gnome, that didn’t had anything to do with the original thread…
What I can comment is: I was a heavy user of KDE 3.5, and KDE 3.5 always crashed on me in the most funny ways. Composite on KDE 3.5 never worked well, and I always resorted to use KDEmod or something more cracked than that.
Now, I use KDE 4.4. The new interface is a delight with a touchscreen, and it does have rough edges, but it works. To all of you who say that KDE doesn’t work without slowness, you are right, but install 4.4 please and see if it changes. My 2 nVidia boxes (including one with the super-slow 6150 chip) feel as fast as Windows 7 with KDE 4.4.
@Markus: I for one had no idea that KDE4 had rebranded. So excuse George’s mistake there, and perhaps the rebranding is not as finished as you make out.
If you don’t appreciate the work of others, so be it. But why do you have to spam the planet with such nonsense? Stop whining and start patching, otherwise STFU please.
@Tomaz: This was probably what author of this post desired. His post was was in planet genome. A good recipy for flamewars :>
First off, excuse me for cross posting this to both blogs, but I got to the conversation a bit late and felt that the same comment is relevant to both.
I was one of the apparently nefarious developers at the Toronto release party, so I’m aware first hand of people’s behaviour at the time. I’m not sure if George has a backlog of frustration and that our get together was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I have to say George: your account of people’s treatment of you id pretty melodramatic and not very fair.
To characterize the tone of conversation that night I’d like to fall back to sports metaphor. Imagine a room full of basketball* fans. Their team drafted a new point guard two years ago and after a shaky start he is now taking most of the minutes away from the solid veteran who used to man that position. Some fans like the new guy. Some fans like the old guy. The new guy is exciting, is the future of the team, but like any player, has some faults. The old guy was great in his day and can still do the job really well. He too has some faults…. So to conclude my already tired metaphor, our table fell to (what felt like to me, anyway) good natured arguing over the pros and cons of each player. Stats were sited. Appeals made to emotion. Math-ups versus other teams debated. The discussion was passionate but I’m sad to see that George seems to have taken it more to heart than it was ever intended.
In the end, my metaphor really breaks down when you compare free software to sports players because if my favorite player has an ugly shooting action, I can’t turn up to the practice facility and start giving him pointers. At least with free software, I do have that chance to make things over in the way I’d like to see them.
George, do you recall razzing me about who one the ashes? I’m sorry if the tone of discussion seemed to coercive to you; hows this for a deal? next time we sit down for a few beverages I’ll refrain from blogging about Englishmen sticking it to me about my choice in cricket teams and perhaps you might want to reciprocate WRT desktops?
[*] insert the sports team metaphor of your choice. George, I have no idea if an equivalent exists for marksmen, sorry ;)
I appreciate that you may like 6px bitmap fonts in a terminal, but they make your blog very hard to read ;)
Well, this is quite a “discussion”.
I had a quick point I wanted to make. IIRC, one major reason for the decision to start from scratch with KDE 4 was because of the clumsiness and unmaintainability of the KDE3 codebase. In Aaron Seigo’s words, they made this decision with the resolution that [working with the KDE codebase] “should never be this hard again”. So, while from the user’s perspective, KDE 3 was liberty and freedom, chock full of every feature an option anyone could ever want, all things to all people, as it where, from the developer’s standpoint, it was like mixing everyone’s favorite food into a pot and expecting a culinary masterpiece. Nothing works that way, not even software design.
So, maybe the seeming reluctance of the dev team to throw in everyone’s pet feature has something to do with the desire to avoid turning KDE 4 into another mess pot? Could this be a, maybe unconscious, pushback against the mess they bug themselves out of before? Making long term design decisions that benefit the future of the product rather than caving into everyone else’s whim?
I can’t say I’m confident this is the reason but it’s at least worth considering.
So much for a quick point…
I feel with you. I had to switch to kde4 (because of new technical stuff needed, and really: there is no real alternative to kde in configurability-competition) but after a few months it still does not feel as good/smooth as kde3, altough I switched my hardware to a new system. Mainly because of some speed issues, which are likely caused by qt4 (and maybe its new mvc-separation?).
It would be so nice, if more distributions would provide qt4 builds with graphicssystem=raster. That would solve kde4 speed problems for many people, who can’t work on the newest high-end gfx-hardware.
about the attitude of developers: I think there are still many kde4-devs who really care about what users say, if they explain why they want feature xy. On bugs.kde.org it depends on the project you are reporting: I made good experience with dolphin, gwenview, kopete, but also saw bad attitudes in many reports. Politeness/respect would really help much as a start.
Exactly these were the reasons why I switched to GNOME after almost 10 years of KDE!!!! I hope, Gnome won’t make the same mistakes with the release of version3.
A few people do not speak for a community.
Just because a few developers don’t think something is a big deal doesn’t mean every single developer agrees with them.
Have faith man, there are those of us out here who agree with you.
For me it looks like this:
You shouldn’t ask your self rather you choose between KDE 3 or 4 then choosing between KDE or anything else.
If 99% of all your work is done on the console. You might want to check out some other desktop.
I mean. If KDE3 works for you quite well it’s ok but I gues there are better desktop environments then KDE for basicly just using the console.
You might even want to consider using a console in general.
I was a happy user of KDE3, and now I’m an unhappy user of KDE4.
The only reason why I switched is because KDE3 is not supported anymore, and exhibits some crashes on new systems (using gcc 4.4), and has other problems with newer systems.
Its annoying that when KDE finally got good enough to be usable, they just drop support and start all over again.
I guess that when KDE4 gets into a usable state, they will just drop support and start with KDE5.
How frustrating.
@lameventanas get over it already, KDE3 is dead. If you want it so freaking badly. FORK IT and fix the goddamn bugs and security issues. That’s what open source is all about. Everyone else is happy with KDE4.
This performance also depends on your graphics driver a lot. On my Latitude E6500 with Intel G45 and latest intel driver with kernel modesetting and compositing enabled I get:
I don’t have KDE3 installed to compare, but graphics performance has been quite acceptable for me on KDE4.
I got for the test with 1280x1024 maximized konsole windows:
konsole/kde4: real 2m4.465s user 0m1.892s sys 0m3.647s
konsole/kde3: real 1m38.953s user 0m2.035s sys 0m3.754s
main difference was, that with konsole/kde4 the view was only refreshed while moving with the mouse on konsole, without mouse moving the view was only refreshed every few seconds.
George, thanks for the post. I totally agree. I’m a programmer / power user / KDE fan for years. KDE3 has always been fast, stable, configurable. I like programming QT4 and KDE4 looks pretty but it sure doesn’t meet my needs. Every version has been a non-starter with regular crashers and slow performance. They took out the features that traditional KDE users rely upon and leave us with something that’s too convoluted for Gnome users even if it were stable. I’m not sure who the target audience is, but it’s not going to be substantial without the old power user base.
@Nathan
Thanks for this. I accept that I may have gone slightly OTT but it’s not just the release party that actually prompted me to write this, but rather the change in general attitude I’ve seen within the community over the past few years. The release party was obviously fresh in my mind and gave some pretty clear examples of the sort of mindset that I am against. I perhaps should have made this more clear. As for the Ashes, well, I genuinely didn’t actually know who had won the last time round (and my question was a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one) but I figured it was more funny as you’d assumed I was razzing on you to leave it that way :)
However, I think I was fair in that the responses that I documented here were correct insofar as they are what were said at the time. They may have been said in jest but, as I say, it is not the first time such a mindset has been taken. This is one of the reasons why I named no names in this post (despite being asked for names).
@elprans
Right, the point here isn’t the absolute speed but rather the relative difference in speed between K3 and K4. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have not yet seen any single piece of evidence that shows that K4 is faster than K3.
As for the rest of the comments recently, I didn’t intend this to be a huge flamewar of KDE vs. GNOME, which is actually why I had comments disabled initially because I didn’t want to have to deal with refereeing a huge pointless fight.
And my final point to say before I give up entirely on this thread due to its degeneration into something somewhat resembling a mindless flamewar, I’d like to say that my intentions weren’t to start a huge flamewar, but rather to remind the developers that whilst this is, technically, their project and that they can do all they want, my opinion is that they have a responsibility to the users to take on-board their opinions and that shooting down legitimate criticism with responses such as the ones that have been documented here is not only hurtful for the users, but also to the project. It has been said many times, but if you assume your users are idiots, and treat them as such, then your users will be idiots.
The thing that most surprises me, though, is that I figured there was a good chance that I was the only person who was seeing this (and I was hoping so as well, and waiting to be told I’m an evil so-and-so whose experiences are isolated), but unfortunately, it seems that is not the case. In addition to the people who have commented on here recounting their own experiences, I’ve had several emails from people saying they have also experienced the same, and there are several insightful responses on Michael’s blog at http://www.purinchu.net/wp/2010/02/07/well-george/
I do hope we can now get on with our lives and as I say, KDE 4 is fine for a lot of people - it’s just not my cup of tea (yet?). :)
Man, you are a bit exaggerated, not about the part of the alcoholic people and others how can not accept that you use and old version of KDE because it works better for you. But for the technical part.
The one bug with the fonts is only with nvidia blob driver, so not KDE fault.
Desktop Effectas =! Composition Why do you think that Mac OS X has desktop effects (witch requires composition) enabled by default in all there computers, ipod, etc.? Of course it is better than non-composition.
With composition many things work faster, the CPU works less and the GPU works a little bit more. If your GPU drivers don’t have power management and it get hot, that is not KDE’s fault.
In my KDE 4.4 box, with an old intel 865G, using drivers version 2.9 with KMS, (Kubuntu 9.10) I get with that little benchmak:
real 0m13.805suser 0m1.810ssys 0m3.370sDon’t have KDE 3 to compare, but if it is 5s or 10s or 20s (yes I know, 20s) faster it would fell the same! (with 20s faster it would finish the benchmark before I start it, he he.)
Really, your drivers of some software component is broken.
Have you tried KDE 4.4 in other computers apart from the one that is software-wise broken? Try the nouveau driver.
Good luck!
I have already stated that I made a mistake when I said composite instead of desktop effects.
Secondly, the bitmap fonts issue I’m seeing is also present on non-nvidia devices; I wish people would stop reading the bugzilla entry which says “it may be a problem with the nvidia drivers” and assume that they know everything.
You know it’s going to start a flamewar somehow when you post it on a freaking blog you dumbarse. You don’t want flaming, etc. Don’t post it, especially on PlanetKDE dumbarse.
Just upgraded to 4.4 and my next step will be to install Gnome. Good bye KDE.
All your hatred toward KDE is from “You’re an idiot for using small fonts - it’s totally pointless”?
Not to mention I don’t honestly believe that someone had called you an idiot.
the blog owner is an idiot
Errm, that’s a nice rant - but you do realise that you can automatically disable desktop effects when you’re running on battery, right? (In fact, the default settings do it automatically when your battery gets low.) Apparently, it’s such a corner case that they put in a special option for it… along with a whole other bunch of powersaving settings.
After reading some of the posts here I need to say sorry to George, Sorry your problems are valid and I’m sure with a bit of effort we can make it better. And make you happier with KDE 4.x, overall it didn’t seemed like impossible things to fix and most of them are fixed already.
But I think some people fail to see that we are trying to do a desktop that can make a wider scope of people happier with kde, a more flexible platform that can be what ever you want to make of it. Sure in the process we removed some of the stuf you could do in 3.5 in most cases it was unintentional and most of those things have returned.
But kde 4.x brought us huge improvements that have allowed us to try different markets were we used to be completely irrelevant.
Example today I had a meeting with a group doing a huge deployment of kde desktops over 60000 every year, the way plasma is constructed and its flexibility makes kde perfect for their use + the result of this will go upstream and benefit us all.
If you’re mainly using the konsole, why not use a minimal desktop like FluxBox or WindowManager? FluxBox was only using 50MB of RAM on my system when I was still using it and did everything I wanted it to, except for the eye-candy.
So use something else.. KDE is alright, but it’s nothin to get your little girl panties all twisted about. When you decide to use your computer(s) for something “konstructive” feel free to switch to big girl underpants.
amen brother, kde is a piece of shit
After reading many comments from KDE devs in other places, I’m find that I’m now ashamed to be a KDE user. Comments made above by James, Firmo, Barry White, and bear illustrate my point.
I don’t care about the technical issues or even the usability issues anymore. I’m also sure that not all KDE developers are condescending pricks, but enough of them seem to be.
There’s no reason for me to state my opinion beyond this, since it would just be “invalid” as well.
I just tried the latest release of KDE. I was hoping that it had improved from the 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 releases. I’ve been a while since I tried it. If anything, it has gotten MUCH worse. I couldn’t even figure out how to use the damn desktop. Adding widgets and panels didn’t work. I was experiencing many problems with dual monitors, etc. Aaron Seigo ran KDE right into the ground.
Please take a look at my personal solution of KDE slowness problem :) http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=82692&p=161090#p161090
KDE is actually doomed to failure as there is a gaping flaw in Aaron’s development philosophy. All this moving towards this rubbish semantic desktop paradigm is fail. 3.5 I could actually use 24/7, now if I want a desktop I can actually use, then I’m expecting too much (actually I just had to switch to Gnome kicking a screaming).
I’m just praying that Gnome don’t fall for semantic desktop as well. If Gnome 3 stuffs it up, you know there is going to be a branch of Gnome 2 to save the day.
You loose KDE, it’s not the end of the world as there is another major option in Gnome. People like me aren’t going to turn to the tools to solve their gripe just yet. Perhaps the secret Microsoft task force pat themselves on the back for a job well done subverting that project. But if you loose Gnome too, I don’t think everyone will just shrug and drink the koolaid if that happens.
I think some of the replies here adequately show the gripes I have with a lot of the “community”. Some of the responses are downright rude, intolerant and fairly pointless.
People have missed the point that my main gripe was that I don’t want to have KDE shoved down my throat; I don’t want to use something that doesn’t do the job for me. People should stop telling me that my workflow is wrong. The point is that if you want me to use KDE 4, the desktop needs to adapt itself to me; not the other way round. Telling me “it’s awesome! Switch now or you’re an idiot” just doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid.
Yes, I admit I have a strange use case, but to tell me that I’m “wrong” for having that? That’s arrogant and was not an attitude that the KDE developers of old had.
I may revisit KDE in a few years or I may just switch wholesale to a plain old window manager that does what I want. I used to use KDE for three reasons; Konsole was (and still may be) the best console app around, KMail was a fantastic IMAP email client and Konqueror was a great, lightweight browser for casual surfing. For now, though, there is no compelling reason for me to switch to KDE 4 and it just causes me more grief than any advantages it could possibly offer. I don’t want bling, I want a really fast, snappy and usable desktop. Is that so much to ask for?
I’m a relatively new linux user and I have been using KDE 4 for 5 months. At first there were a lot of annoying bugs, but now I don’t really encounter anything.
I’m using KDE 4.4.5 with Linux Mint and I haven’t experienced the kind of slow-downs you guys have; even now I am typing on a laptop with a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo Processor. No graphics card, just an Intel GMA X4500.
I used Sabayon before with an early version of KDE 4 and it was so laggy that I had to turn off many of the effects. To me, things seemed to have changed a lot since then. Not only does my desktop look more visually coherent, I have been enjoying testing out workflows made possible with plasmoids, non-app-specific window tabbing, flexible panel modification, desktop activity customization, etc.
Although I previously enjoyed using the sturdy GNOME, the little ‘win’ points are enough to make me stick to KDE.
nice post….