Hate KDE4? Ignorance Is Probably the Culprit

Let’s bust some myths today because a majority of KDE 4 haters out there have the same reasons for hating it.  I’m pretty sick of seeing posts and news articles about “why I don’t like KDE 4″ and then seeing that the real reason the person is upset is because they don’t spend an extra few moments trying to figure things out…aka lazy and ignorant.

KDE 4 was NOT feature complete when it came out in the 4.0 version.  It IS feature complete (in my opinion) with the 4.2 and 4.3 versions.

Ignorant Reason #1 – I hate Dolphin and I Can’t Have Konqueror Anymore

filemanagerWrong, you can use Konqueror.  You don’t have to use Dolphin, but you’ll be missing out on a lot of useful stuff.  Tell you what, now that you know that you don’t have to use Dolphin, why not use KDE 4 and give Dolphin a try every so often…you can still use Konqueror in the meantime and now that you know you can, you don’t have to go around trumpeting that you can’t to everyone who will listen and saying what a piece of crap it is.  Forget that you’ll lose nepomuk and the semantic desktop by dismissing dolphin.  Don’t know what that is?  Let me google that for you…

I sure hope this solves many peoples beef with KDE 4 right out of the gate because this is one of the reasons I find all over the web.  I really think the problem is the lethargic attitude that prevails from die hard KDE 3 fans.  Honestly guys, give Dolphin a try…it’s really a pretty decent file manager and is light years ahead of any other DE file manager.

Ignorant Reason #2 – I Can’t Have Folders or Files on the Desktop Anymore

desktopsettingsWrong.  Right click on the desktop and choose “Desktop Settings”.  Select the drop down menu “Type” and select “Folder View”.  Your desktop now has folders, icons, and all other such things that you may want to clutter it with.

If you want to switch back to NOT using the folders and instead use widgets…right click on the desktop and choose “Folder View Settings” >> Select Type >> Desktop.

To top it off, if you select “Folder View”, the folders and icons act exactly like you would expect them to in KDE 3.  Not only can you select to show your desktop folders…but you can even show a folder like /home as your default desktop…show any folder you have access to, it’s up to you.  Yay right?  I give it a golf clap.  Let’s continue thinking out of the box and bust a few more myths.

Ignorant Reason #3 – I Can’t Move My Panel to the Top, Right, or Left.

panelmoveWrong.  Click the settings icon on the right hand side of your panel (it looks like a comma on the far right side of the panel).  The settings area pops open.  On that bar is something called “Screen Edge”.  Now, it seems pretty self explanatory that when you hover over the top of it, it gives you the 4 arrow icon that means you can drag and drop the panel wherever you want to…and being named “screen edge” seems to imply “which screen edge…left, right, bottom, or top…do I want this thing to appear on”.  Then again, I can see how screen edge can confuse people when you open the settings of a panel that resides on the screen edge.  Ok, maybe I can’t.  Well, at least you know you can move your panel around right?  Golf clap again?  Who plays golf anyway?

Ignorant Reason #4 – I Can’t Resize Folders and Files in Dolphin

Wrong again.  Are you sensing a pattern yet?  Open Dolphin, go to the directory where you want to increase the folder size.  Hold the control key down…now roll your mouse wheel and be amazed as the folder size increases.  Invest all your money in Yet Another Linux Blog stock and move to Nicaragua.  Golf clap on your way to expedia.com for purchasing tickets.

Ignorant Reason #5 – I Like to Use My Own Color Schemes…I Can’t Do That in KDE4.

systemsettings

System Settings

KDE4 absolutely allows you to create your own color schemes.  It really helps to look around inside the system settings tool.  Go to your Kmenu >> System >> System Settings.  Once there, look for Appearance.  You can also use the top search

appearancecolors

Appearance Colors

bar to look for any term…so if you were to type “color” there, you’d see that Appearance & Display are returned.

Click on Appearance and you’re taken into a wonderful world of color and granular control of said color.  Change anything you’d like….go crazy.  I hear pink is the new green…or is it green that was the new pink?  Whatever.  The only limits are your imagination.  For those without imagination.

Ignorant Reason #6 – The Default Menu is Cludgy and Different and I Can’t Find Anything in KDE4

Now there is no right or wrong here…you could be right depending on who you talk to.  However, the nice part about KDE4 is that they include the previous menu for you.  Right click the Kmenu and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”.  Now your menu is the exact same as it would be in KDE 3.5.10.  Please remember that answers are out there…you just have to search for them.

Closing the Door on Myths

Hopefully, this closes the door on many misconceptions helps people who are ignorant to the leaps and bounds that KDE4 has made just in the past few months.  I’ve grown very tired of journalists and bloggers taking swipes at KDE4 and spreading misinformation about it.  If you have any questions about how to do something in KDE4, please leave a comment below and let’s work together in finding a solution.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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  • Gergo

    I appreciate the huge amount of work that’s gone into KDE4, it definitely seems more and more stable. Full respect to the developers for that.

    To be honest, I had even greater respect for the work the was done up to 3.5, when it was actually usable.
    And they kept up usability and supporting existing use cases despite adding more features and candy gradually.
    They resisted the temptation of the Big Rewrite, respected the merit of years of good work, usable applications (rather than screwing up everything).

    In general, a rewrite should never be released unless it obviously doesn’t break existing use-cases. If it does, ignoring existing users’ feedback, the only one to be called ignorant is the project itself.
    Many projects are falling into this trap (even one of mine), so I don’t really want to bash KDE developers for that. It was just a mistake, even if a very painful one.

    (For the record, using KDE 4 since 4.1. I had plenty of time to get used to it – I really tried to approach everything with open mind – as opposed to ignorantly bashing on how stupid it is.
    It’s now 4.3.2, the one that everybody has been waiting for(?), and I still find the it fundamentally unusable, especially Plasma).

    In short, the more I’ve done all my homework, the more I hate to hate it..Sorry.

  • Andy Gracia

    I used kde 4.3 for a month, now i’m again an happy user of kde3.5.10
    Why?
    Bugs everywere, from an easy copy/paste in dolphin or the inability to delete (shift+canc) files from time to time for no apprent reason (fired up konqueror from kde3 and no problem at all with the same files) to huge memory leaks (i have to kill plasma-desktop and restart it every hour).
    I kept my pc up for a week with plasma-desktop open, no widgets apart from folder view and plasma-desktop memory footprint went up to 60% of the total memory (2GB); killed it and (magic!) here comes free memory again.
    What i’m missing from kde4 now?

    Well… nothing, really.

    • Gergo

      now i’m again an happy user of kde3.5.10

      Wow, how did you do that? Which distro is that? Did you downgrade the whole system?

    • http://linux-blog.org devnet

      Depends on what distribution you tried it with…most developers don’t take the time to figure out if they have bugs or not when compiling from SVN for installs on their distro. For example, Mandriva 2010 is probably the best implementation of KDE4.x I’ve ever seen…you should give it a try and see what you think. I find that most of people’s gripes and moans are due to crappy packaging by distros and no time being spent on integration problems they might have.

  • Gergo

    I appreciate the huge amount of work that’s gone into KDE4, it definitely seems more and more stable. Full respect to the developers for that.

    To be honest, I had even greater respect for the work the was done up to 3.5, when it was actually usable.
    And they kept up usability and supporting existing use cases despite adding more features and candy gradually.
    They resisted the temptation of the Big Rewrite, respected the merit of years of good work, usable applications (rather than screwing up everything).

    In general, a rewrite should never be released unless it obviously doesn’t break existing use-cases. If it does, ignoring existing users’ feedback, the only one to be called ignorant is the project itself.
    Many projects are falling into this trap (even one of mine), so I don’t really want to bash KDE developers for that. It was just a mistake, even if a very painful one.

    /* For the record, using KDE 4 since 4.1. I had plenty of time to get used to it – I really tried to approach everything with open mind – as opposed to ignorantly bashing on how stupid it is.
    It’s now 4.3.2, the one that everybody has been waiting for(?), and I still find the it fundamentally unusable, especially Plasma */

    In short, the more I’ve done all my homework, the more I hate to hate it }-; Sorry.

  • The Dude

    EDITED for cursing by blog author.

    I tried yet again to like KDE 4.
    I simply cannot deal with it.
    Dolphin is annoying. (shifting the file tree just pisses me off)
    Klipper doesn’t work like it used to. (It fails to keep the last entry active).
    Plasma sucks big *#*#*’s
    Konqueror was fine the way it was. (Its almost unuseable now)
    Widgets piss me off as well.

    My favorite distro (MEPIS) now uses KDE 4 as the default. Its no longer my favorite distro. Gnome blows big ####’s. So now in order to have an up to date well supported distro with a reasonable desktop interface I have relented and went with Lubuntu (LXDE), even though I despise Ubuntu with a passion for their “Users are idiots and we will FORCE you to do it right” attitude.

    KDE 4 gets the crapcan from me.

  • Darkfoxcoffee

    that’s not why i hate kde4… none of those reasons, i like reductionism, i am sort of tech and i don’t like eye candy…. i LOVED kde3….. it was sophisticated….. i have always liked Linux for it’s simplicity …. i am actually quite annoyed right now….. cause i was working and suddenly a menu tool-bar thing disappeared from dolphin from accidentally clicking on something .. kind of seems like kde4 is in a beta-testing stage somehow might take few YEARS to get the bugs out of it……
    i am actually quite depressed, seriously…..

    think whatever you want…. kde4 makes me depressed … i love kde3, a lot as it was

  • http://twitter.com/UgglyBabee blackbelt_jones

    I used KDE4 for over a year, and then I happened to need a live CD for something. I chose Slax, and I found using KDE 3 such a pleasure to use that I now run KDE3 on all my machines, including the kubuntu trinity.

    I finally decioded that I’m done with KDE4. I have ADHD, and I find the glut of unnecessary features to be frustrating and distracting. After three years, it’s probably time to assume that people know whether they like KDE4 or not, even of they can’t properly articulate their frustration.

    Even though I can’t stand using it myself, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the hard work and ingenuity that went into KDE4.

  • Todd

    The developers at KDE have reinvented the wheel and decided a polygon is more suitable.
    My experience with KDE4 has been very disappointing, the menu is annoyingly difficult, title bars disappear under things making them inaccessible and now my panel has decided to shrink itself.
    They need to scrap it and start from scratch.
    I won’t be using KDE any time in the near future.

  • Alan326

    I agree with  the blogger here when saying that most of the critics on KDE come from a superficial knowledge of the system.  I have KDE on my laptop (Kubu 11.10) and I have to admit that initially it drove me nut. After some time you get you way around as with every other new system.  
    The real problem with KDE and Kubuntu in my experience is that is incredibly bugging. I have Bugs every 2 operation run (freeshly installed system with upgrades installed and no change made yet in the configuration) and there are few workarounds to be found for KDE on forums.  The kTerminal is not as functional as Ubuntu for some reasons and there is a very high statistic of unsuccessfull attemps made in my experience to work a way with kT in KDE.  It was as easy as saying squid on Ubuntu terminal.
     I still prefer KDE over Ubu/gnome unity desktop though and so I am sucking it up with the cons.
    It would be grat if I could use a KDE environment and Ubu gnome functionality on my laptop  (it is never going to work though with my Asus eeepc 1015 PEM 2gbram and 320 gbHD dual core.. sounds great I know but it has many faults with desktop effects in Ubu .. compiz cube fucks up all the tme.. docks.. forget it).

    • http://linux-blog.org devnet

      I think the KDE4 experience has everything to do with who packages it up and puts the time to make it less buggy.  As an example, Mandriva does KDE pretty good as does Fedora surprisingly.  I have less bugs in those two distros and when I tried Kubuntu, it had all sorts of problems.  I’ve also found Arch to do a good default KDE but you have to build that from scratch.

      The bottom line is, search around.  Don’t just stick with one distribution and think KDE4 is buggy…it’s not any more buggy than Gnome 3 :)   Thanks for reading!

  • Drax

    Hi

    I agree with blogger too. KDE 4 very customizable in my opinion, unlike GNOME 3.
    Its true that I have found it a little buggy, but nothing critical (it is more fine tunning).
    My experience with KDE 4 is about half year.

    Features which I liked so far are:
    - activities!, I have setup 2 different activities (I would set it few more, but I am limited currently by hardware) and I like way that they work
    - widgets/plasmoids/addons/applets!, call it however you want, they are great + if you really want you can use Screenlets too without problems
    - design!, it looks great to me comparing to other desktop environments (exception is GNOME 3)

    What I dislike is:
    - bugs!, it have few bugs that I found, however they are not too much annoying to me currently, and I believe that they will be fixed in near future
    - mouse in shortcuts!, it is impossible to set eg. mouse click as some shortcut natively – workaround is xbindkeys which I don’t like much, but it does the job partially

    What I would like to see to be added is (besides implementing disadvantages):
    - mouse gestures!, if you use Opera browser, you probably know what I mean
    - better folder “auto-refreshing”!, in GNOME 2 I was used to folders which I am viewing currently to refresh automatically whenever there is added/modified/removed file or folder, this is not a case with Dolphin (it does sometimes auto-refresh, but mostly it doesn’t) – I am not sure is this a bug or not, so I putted it here

    Also, I have to say that I tried years ago KDE 3, and didn’t liked it much so I picked GNOME 2, which I was using for long time. Now when GNOME 3 came out, I gave it a try, but I found it VERY uncustomizable.

    Currently I am running KDE 4.6.5 (planning to upgrade to 4.7.3) on Debian Squeeze (with some packages from Lenny and Sid).

    Regards
    Drax

  • Trond Solbakken

    It’s still a piece of shit, it’s NOT kde 3.5 that was frickin awsome!

    • http://linux-blog.org devnet

      Opinions vary. I have found 4.7 to be wicked awesome.

  • Moreejt

    Can someone tell me if it’s just Kubuntu?  My titlebars dont change colors.  Active and inactive titlebars are all the same color.  It doesn’t matter what color I choose in the advanced settings (which I found myself soon after installing)  This problem has been in Kubuntu for years.  Any other distros run into this?  Googling so far has not yeilded useful results.  May have to download and install/live cd other distros just to see.

    • Moreejt

      Found it.  There was a huge battle between artitst and users over themes (Oxygen,etc) and window titlebars.  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160627
      The link details a long disagreement between KDE artists who want desktop to look pretty and users who want to actually be able to distinguish between active/inactive windows.
      Kubuntu has a workaround that may or may not be provided by people arguing:
      System Settings -> Workspace Appearance And Behavior -> Workspace Appearance -> Window Decorations -> Configure Decortions (button) -> Fine Tuning -> [x] Outline active window title
      I turn this on and get a colored titlebar in Air/Oxygen themes.

    • http://linux-blog.org devnet

       Give Linux Mint KDE a try.  http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1927

      I guarantee it will be a better experience than Kubuntu.

  • Eric Fitton

    It is a desktop. I want to use a desktop to get to my applications and switch between programs. It is my applications where I actually work and where I actually play. I have no desire to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to get KDE like I had it back in 3.5. One of the things that I miss most about 3.5 was how EASY and FAST it was to get to configure it. I’m not going to spend days getting my desktop the way I want it. It simply isn’t worth it. So like many others I’ll be using Xfce. I don’t actually like Xfce, I certainly liked KDE 3.5 more (I actually liked it more than any other desktop I’ve used including every version of Mac and Windows and various Unix Desktop Environment) but like all sorts of others I’m taking refuge from KDE and Gnome to something that works good enough. Probably time to look at Trinity.
    Eric Fitton
    PS: Can I pin windows, can I auto hide panels and have them activate from the corners, is Kaskbar back? When everything works again can I trust the developers not to rewrite the entire system from scratch again?

  • David S.

    I have been using KDE 4 for nearly a year. I had tried to use it in the past but couldn’t. The basic problem was the composite effects, which I successfully disabled. Then I haven’t been using Dolphin since day 1. And I have been using the classic menu and folder view. It works. As for the memory usage issues, I found it is better to start a new session (the default is to preload a session, compare 400+ MB for using a preloaded session vs about 100 for using a new session, i do not remember how i did it but loading a fresh session does make a noticeable difference). The thing I like is that KDE4 includes good looking memory sensors by default.

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