| KDE 4 sucks | Created: 01.03.2011 22:00 | ||||||||||||
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With the update from Debian Lenny to Squeeze, I had the "joy"
of trying out KDE4 yet again. Like Ubuntu and all other distributions before, Debian dropped KDE3 with Squeeze and only delivers KDE4 now. This is not surprising, as KDE3 development stopped quite some time ago. However, what surprises me is how KDE4 ist still a piece of completely unusable, misdesigned bullcrap after all this time spent in development. When the first KDE4 versions came out, they were bad, and I thought "Oh well, they still need some time to develop this". That was three years ago, and some progress has been made since then - but at a pace that, should they continue at this pace, means KDE4 will be usable around 2080. I've never seen anything crash as much as KDE4, and that includes both the basic desktop and the standard apps. When it doesn't crash, which happens rarely enough, it annoys by not being configurable at all. It seems they learned from Gnome there: "Oh no, a desktop that the user can configure so that it fits his needs only confuses users, so lets not do that. You know, the users with an IQ below room temperature, which includes both our development team and main target audience" That's probably why even with version 4.5.something it still isn't possible to configure something as central as the taskbar so that it doesn't suck, and the once so nice (in KDE3) terminal emulator konsole is basically unusable. Why is it unusable? Well, for example, the tab layout is a pain in the ass; and depending on how much text you have in the current window and which app is running, using the mousewheel will either do nothing at all, insert tons of weird escape characters, scroll your shell history (WTF???) or - and surprisingly, in about 10 percent of all cases this really happens! - it will actually scroll the contents of the window. Then there is misdesign. As it is, KDE4 is not usable in environments where user homes are on central NFS servers. Which means any university or business environment. However, bitching about that could easily fill a post on its own, so I'll skip it for now. Long story short: KDE4 sucks, and I've lost all hope that it will develop into something usable. Luckily, there are people building Ubuntu and Debian packages of KDE3.5, and they even started to continue development of KDE3.5 - they forked it into a project called Trinity. Unfortunately, they have very few developers, so I'm not sure how successful that will be - i sure hope they find some more. I use the Trinity packages on almost all my systems now (except those that are still Ubuntu 8.04). And I hope they will stay around for some time. Because if they don't, I'll have to find myself a new windowmanager - and KDE4 will not be it. |
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