In the KDE developers defence, I don’t think it’s possible for complete overhauls of software to ever be embraced whole heartedly by the userbase. Particularly not right away. I will continue to resent the fact that Kubuntu took up KDE4 so soon. I liked KDE3.5 because it was a work of art, but also because it was fully functional and intuitive for anyone who is used to MS Windows. At that time I couldn’t understand why Ubuntu picked Gnome for the flagship considering KDE3.5 was so much more suited winning over the users afflicted by Bug #1. My first impression when KDE4.1 was thrust upon me was of some retarded mutant desktop environment from a future that I don’t care to participate in. KDE4 turned my entire desktop experience inside out!

I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a stubborn person. I like to work in a particular way which I’ve refined over years, dating back to MS DOS and Windows 3.1. I switched to Linux because some of the more restrictive and intrusive features in Windows Vista had well and truly crossed the line as far as I was concerned. I wanted to get back to a basic desktop without all the useless eye-candy. KDE3.5 was the best fit for me at the time.

I’m quite busy as well. I soon learnt with Linux distro’s, every time there is a distribution upgrade to postpone it for at least a month and ensure I dedicate a couple days after it to get myself settled back in. With KDE4 it was more like a couple of weeks of pointless frustration. Wrestling with KDE4 just proved to be too much hassle for me at work and I’ve now fully switched over to Gnome. I found it easier to customise to my liking than KDE4. At home I’m still on KDE4.2 because it doesn’t matter so much if I’m spending 6 hours trying to figure out how to customise the desktop theme in vein, and I still hold out for a glimmer of hope that the developers may resolve some of my issues with it.

KDE4 is not easy or intuitive to use. I don’t like this widget based desktop paradigm and I don’t understand how it’s useful in anyway. Most of the time my desktop is hidden by windows anyway. I have to wonder if KDE4 was ever designed for using or if it’s just for looking at. KDE4 is a contradiction in my eyes. To be a desktop environment which gets in the way of letting users do what they want, yet to do so in the name of flexibility is bizarre. It makes me anxious and I don’t like it.

I still see KDE4 as the lavalamp of the desktop environment world. It chews a lot of power and looks pretty, but it’s not all that useful. You also have to be careful about touching it because you might get burnt. I have a feeling it’s the new development philosophy that’s flawed, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that flaw is as yet. I think I’ve reached a turning point in my thinking about KDE4 now though, and I find my self walking peacefully in the opposite direction.

I had issues with Compiz in particular, there are problems with the latest nVidia drivers. The latest Compiz has a workaround for this, but it’s not available for the KDE3 version. I found the simplest solution was just to switch back to the 177 driver version and then it was all good.

So yeah, I recommend just switch to Gnome, or try KDE4 on Jaunty and enable the folder view desktop. It seems like pointless overhead to me, the folder view is just a full screen widget. Note also that it doesn’t span screens, so if you have a dual screen setup and you want some icons spattered on the second screen you’re out of luck. KDE3′s days are numbered so eventually I’ll have to face reality and move on. I’ve prolonged it for about another year now I reckon, but eventually I’m going to have to face the music.

I wanted to post this sooner, but the recent Word Press update broke my WYSIWYG. Luckily it was just a javascript conflict with one of my plugins, some people had much worse issues with the update. Still it’s embarrassing since I was just bragging to my mate the other day about how fantastic this application is, particularly the update management. Bloody updates, they are the bane of my life!

This looks to me like the root of the problem. This KDE developer, in all his infinite wisdom, just simply ripped out the code that supports file icons on the desktop. Apparently it just doesn’t look nice to him or something. Too bad if you don’t like the whole widget based desktop experience, this guy has just forced us to either take it up or switch to Gnome. Suffice to say, when I read his article I was fairly taken aback by the action.

In all fairness though, he doesn’t see it the way I do. Yes, this post was originally fueled by rage. I quickly changed my initially confrontational title of this post to something a little nicer. Aaron’s intention appears to be to create a more flexible experience for the user (by culling features?!?). My tinfoil hat keeps telling me it’s really just a Microsoft conspiracy (joking of course).

One of my machines was recently updated to KDE4 via the Kubuntu Intrepid distro upgrade. I’ve been using it everyday, but I haven’t been liking it. The version that came with Kubuntu Intrepid is not nearly mature enough. Personally, I love KDE3 and I’d like to stick with it as long as possible. I don’t need the new Plasma features and many old features seem to have been dropped. Thankfully, I found this… https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty which should allow me to keep my systems up to date without having to touch KDE4. I’ll try the process out tomorrow on my work Kubuntu 8.04 machine.

Update:

You can re-enable the normal desktop behaviour in Jaunty simply from a desktop right click menu. But not Intrepid. In Intrepid you could try editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc replacing plugin=desktop with plugin=folderview, but that didn’t work for me.

Another Update:

You can’t drag and drop your icons on to multiple screens. It only works on the primary because it’s still some kind of crappy complete waste of resources full screen widget.