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