George Wright's Blog: Why I won't use KDE 4

Why I won't use KDE 4

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:00:00 +0000

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.

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Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:02:16 +0000

Nice post. 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.

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"Why I won't use KDE 4" by miles zarathustra

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:31:31 +0100

This article, written a year and a half ago is equally relevant today.

As a long time KDE enthusiast, I have given up on KDE4. All glitz and no usability. I mean, why do I NEED to rotate desktop icons? You give me that, but now will no longer let me create them, which is something I DO need. It’s insane.

How about not trashing the tree view in Konqueror, and how about letting me choose readable fonts in Konsole?

Truly a shame, the KDE developers didn’t recognize what they had, and now they’ve taken it away from all of us.

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Sat, 22 Oct 2011 08:02:53 +0100

I do agree with this that few things like compose and effects have been badly confused. Franchises

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