Is KDE 4 Stable? (was Re:Linus on Gnome 3.2)

Sun Dec 4 22:49:17 UTC 2011

On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 1:56 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 12/02/2011 03:00 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 01:18:49PM -0500, Ted wrote:
>>>
>>> people not seeing this stability yet with kde 4.x ?
>>
>>
>> No kde 4.x is fine now.
>
>
> I'm a long-time KDE user and fan. KDE 4 was hard to like for a few years
> because it seemed that a lot of time and effort was put into things I didn't
> care about, like eye candy at the expense of features that I valued from KDE
> 3, like stability, apps that mostly worked, etc. Recently, I upgraded to
> Fedora 16 from the long since deprecated Fedora 13. For a few days, I really
> couldn't use KDE because any GTK app would be very unresponsive. I read
> similar reports on-line and figured that it would eventually get fixed so in
> the meantime, I attempted to live a GTK-free existence, which meant no
> Thunderbird and back to KMail, which I had abandoned when it became unusable
> coincident with the switch to KDE 4. KMail is much better now but I still
> don't "get" the grab bag of "funny" names, Nepomuk, Akonadi, etc. I'll have
> to read up what they're trying to accomplish with that.
>
> There were a few irritants that were large enough with KMail to have me
> considering other mail clients until I thought, "Wait a minute. I use
> Thunderbird on three different operating systems. It's *the*
> mission-critical application for me. Why should I have to switch from it
> just because the desktop manager is broken, even if temporarily?" so I
> decided to try a few different desktop/window managers. I had read enough
> about Gnome 3 that I wasn't enthusiastic about trying it, and I'd never
> really warmed up to previous versions of Gnome anyway, so I installed LXDE,
> ICEWM, WindowMaker, and BlackBox. I attempted to install XFce but for
> whatever reason, I never managed to see it in the available choices on the
> login screen.
>
> The GTK issue disappeared with the other window managers but I found myself
> missing things that I took for granted, like the ability to hover my mouse
> over the clock in the bottom right corner of my KDE panel and see the local
> time in time zones of interest to me. Silly? Perhaps but that's an essential
> productivity tool for me. I also tend to have many open windows so I've
> become dependent on Alt-Tab, point and click on the list of open windows to
> bring a window to the foreground. Right-mouse click on the background to
> bring up a list of open windows as I'd have to do with some of the
> desktop/window managers I tried just wasn't the same because with many
> windows open, I usually can't see much desktop. I don't want to have to
> remember to leave a bit of desktop exposed and have to mouse all the way to
> that little bit just to see my list of open windows. Virtually all of the
> desktop/window managers support some sort of Alt-Tab cycling through windows
> but when you have many windows open, it's not especially useful to have to
> cycle through every window to get to the last one on the stack.
>
> When I analyzed the memory consumption between the "lightweight"
> window/desktop managers and KDE, with the amount of RAM I have in my system
> (8GB), it was really negligible. I was "wasting" at most 100M of RAM to run
> KDE compared to the other ones so "lightweight" really depends on ones
> perspective. ICEWM wasn't usable out-of-the-box without reading docs and
> figuring out why there weren't any applications in the menu. Once I figured
> that out, it was pretty easy to configure the application menu as I wanted
> but that exposed yet another difference between KDE and all of the
> "lightweight" window/desktop managers.
>
> In KDE, I have the option of seeing my menus by function of the program and
> then the program name underneath it in a smaller font. Certain programs,
> like XChat, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Konsole, Kate, I know what they do
> without having to be told "IRC", "Email", "Web Browser", "Terminal", "Text
> Editor" but others, like Karbon14, which I use infrequently, I can't
> remember the name without being told that it's a "Scalable Graphics"
> program. The whole point of these systems is supposed to be to make us more
> productive. If I have to spend time Googling or launching applications that
> I think might be the one I'm looking for instead of just launching an
> application that's labelled "Scalable Graphics", I would be penny-wise and
> pound-foolish. For the sake of "saving" some negligible amount of RAM
> compared to the total pool of RAM I have, I would essentially pay for that
> RAM the first time I had to spend a few minutes trying to remember what the
> name of that obscure application that did XYZ was.
>
> Getting back to GTK apps slowing down to a crawl on KDE 4.7x on Fedora 16, I
> kept an eye updates to see if there were any KDE, nVidia driver (I use the
> proprietary binary), or kernel updates and I would test with KDE to see if
> the problem was fixed. It took less than a week for the problem to be fixed
> and I was back in business with KDE again. When I run out of system
> resources, damned Flash is implicated every single time. I need Flash in my
> work so being a "purist" and running without Flash isn't an option. I
> noticed the same issue using ICEWM so I know it has nothing to do with the
> desktop/window manager.
>
> There are a few things that I don't have in KDE 4 that I had in KDE 3 that I
> miss.
>
> * I used to be able to sort Konsole sessions, as they used to be called in
> KDE 3, but sorting profiles, as they're called in KDE 4, is no longer
> possible. There used to be buttons in the "Manage Profiles" window for "Move
> Up" and "Move Down" in earlier versions of KDE 4 but they were always greyed
> out. Those buttons have since disappeared so now there isn't even a pretense
> that my dozens of profiles can be sorted. Sometimes, it's just faster for me
> to type "ssh foo-+RB1Aph5k6s at public.gmane.org" than to hunt through the unordered list of dozens
> of profiles for same. I'd like to be able to not only sort the profiles but
> arrange them in logical groupings in folders. For instance, I have access to
> multiple virtual machines running on multiple physical machines. One
> grouping could be physical machine -> virtual machine.
>
> * I use Kate like an "IDE", though it's not really an all-singing,
> all-singing IDE like Eclipse, et al. It was ultra-stable until whatever
> version is in Fedora 16. Now, it crashes occasionally.
>
> * KMail is still only barely usable for me. It seems to be quite slow with
> IMAP folders, which it also was back in the KDE 3 days. It doesn't report
> how many unread messages are in a given folders as it used to in KDE 3. It
> doesn't report new messages in my IMAP folders unless I click on the
> folders, which when you have hundreds of folders is a bit of a problem.
> Thunderbird started behaving the same way after I started using server-side
> filtering with Sieve. Other people have reported the same problem but none
> of the guesses have been helpful. The one that seemed credible was that the
> IMAP server, Dovecot in this case, didn't support the IMAP IDLE command.
> That wasn't the case so I'm patrolling important message folders manually.
> Sigh...
>
> * I used to use kdissert, a mind-mapping tool in KDE 3. It has since been
> superseded by Semantik. Semantik seems nice, except when you attempt to
> print the pretty diagram you just created to a PDF. It *only* prints what is
> visible in the window's view port, not the whole document and there seems to
> be no obvious way to do otherwise. That means I wasted a bunch of time doing
> a mind map of a project I'm working on only to discover after I'd done that
> there was no easy way to share what I'd done with other project
> participants, all of whom use OS X. I had to fiddle with the diagram to get
> it to fit within the view port but that's fragile because the next object I
> added, it rearranged the diagram automatically. This pushes me some on-line
> hosted application that I don't really trust, bubble.us, so I'm looking for
> better alternatives. I've seen some Java-based cross-platform app but it has
> the handicap of being Java-based, which I'm reluctant to install because
> every time I install anything Java-based, it seems to be a pig and it always
> seems to disappoint. (Case in point: Eclipse. I have a rant about it that
> I'll have to save for another day.) Yet another, "Sigh..."
>
> One general irritant in KDE 4:
>
> * The mouse is "twitchy". I gave up on using a PS/2 mouse and keyboard long
> ago with Fedora 13 because I'd lose control of the keyboard and mouse after
> some random interval ranging from minutes to hours. I've been using a USB
> keyboard and an optical mouse since then. The problem has been that the
> mouse would often jump to almost any old place on the screen when given just
> the slightest nudge. (I haven't tried another mouse yet.) This made what
> seemed like a useful feature, hotspots on screen corners to do certain
> things like expose the widget dashboard, show all windows on all desktops,
> show just the desktop, and show only windows for the current application, a
> la OS X, utterly useless. On OS X, this works marvellously well. On KDE 4,
> it's unusable because the mouse seemed to find its way to the hotspots when
> I didn't mean to have it there. I'll have to try this with a new mouse to
> see if it makes any difference.
>
> Kudos in KDE 4:
>
> * Speed, speed, speed - The "lightweight" desktop/window managers are
> supposed to be so much faster. It only takes a few seconds more by the time
> my KDE desktop is ready for use compared to the "lightweight" desktops but
> once it's ready for use, there is no appreciable difference in any operation
> that I've noticed, even with eye candy like fancy effects and transparency
> enabled.

Most of what people say about Gnome or KDE being slow is totally
without basis in fact, they're just repeating what they've heard in
the internet echo chamber.

> * Configurability - I like being able to configure my environment as I like.
> I don't want to have to use the default out of fear of the distro clobbering
> my changes as I upgrade. I upgraded to Fedora 16 from 13 by doing a fresh
> install. Just to be on the safe side, I physically disconnected the drive(s)
> that has /home on it during the installation, which meant a bit more work
> after installation but I could then be certain that an installer bug
> couldn't screw up my /home. After I rebooted after reconnecting the drive(s)
> containing /home and enabling them in fstab, my old configuration was
> completely preserved. All told, the upgrade/fresh install took me about 1.5
> hours from start to finish. It was pretty much painless but I knew about
> things like volume UUIDs, etc. so I had done some prep work in advance that
> made things go smoothly. After I restored /home to the one I had before the
> upgrade, the only thing that had changed in the look and feel of KDE for me
> was the wallpaper. That was a pretty smooth upgrade compared to the upgrade
> from KDE 3 to KDE 4.
>
> By the way, I don't expect "ordinary" users to be able to disconnect the
> drive(s) containing /home, fiddling with volume IDs and correcting fstab
> after installation, etc. so I have no idea what the experience would be like
> for the average Windows or OS X user. Actually, I do know. They'd be
> completely lost. For Windows users, the upgrade path is buying a new
> machine. For OS X users, it's a bit smoother. I'm not sure I care since I
> doubt Linux will ever be viable as a mainstream desktop OS. Even in
> countries where the cost of a Windows license represents a monthly, or in
> some cases, an annual income, people use Windows because it just so happens
> that those countries have a vibrant counterfeiting market so licensing is a
> non-issue for them.
>
> * UI - I think the KDE team have done a great job of creating a modern
> interface that is competitive in terms of look and feel with the other two
> mainstream operating systems. To anyone who is familiar with Windows, it
> doesn't seem like an alien environment. For instance, my 11 year old
> daughter can (and does) sit in front of KDE 4 and with no training
> whatsoever figures out what she needs to do in order to use the applications
> she needs, which are word processor, spreadsheet, and web browser. Things
> work as I would expect them to work.
>
> By the way, I use multiple desktops only because I want to isolate certain
> applications, like GIMP, on their own desktop. GIMP opens a mess of windows
> and bringing one window to the foreground doesn't bring all windows
> associated with GIMP to the foreground as it should to be usable so rather
> than grumble about it, I just open it in its own virtual desktop and switch
> to that desktop by clicking on the pager I have in my panel when I need to
> access GIMP. There might be a keyboard equivalent for switching desktops but
> I haven't found it to be important enough to me to find out.

That's the same with me, I like to keep Gimp on a different desktop.

> What it boils down to is that KDE 4 is really stable and fast and it has
> features I value. I can't say the same about all KDE 4 applications though
> but the only KDE applications upon which I have dependencies are Konsole and
> Kate. I used to develop pyKDE applications but I don't do that any more so I
> no longer have a dependency on KDE as a developer. I use XChat, though I
> would probably be fine with using Konversation. I use Thunderbird and I
> might be able to live with KMail if I had to. I use LibreOffice but I
> haven't tried any of the KOffice stuff. The last time I'd tried, which was a
> couple of years ago, KOffice apps were not even half-baked.
>
> As I think about how I work, I could probably live happily on OS X if it
> were not for the stupid keyboards on Macs and the fact that without a
> coherent way of managing packages, it tends to be more of a pain than it's
> worth to use MacPorts and such to install software I care about. I might
> even be happy enough on Windows 7 for my desktop environment but I haven't
> used Windows 7 very much.

I think this is what I'm not getting: I really don't see that much
difference between the desktops.

KDE has some weird features that Gnome doesn't and vice versa I
suppose, but nothing that's ever been so shocking to me. The only
difference for me, and I suspect for a lot of people whether they are
aware of it or not, is the look and feel. Once someone settles on
something that feels right to them, it's of course only a matter of
time before they mould it to their individual procedures. After that,
other desktops, with their default configurations, are of course going
to feel awkward. That's exactly how I found KDE when I tried it out. I
could not find the things I wanted, I was wasting huge amounts of time
navigating menus trying to find configuration dialogues. But that's
not because KDE is designed badly, it's because I'm not used to it.
The only thing that kept me from using KDE was I could not find any
way to configure it that didn't look gaudy to me. Everything was too
shiny and colourful. If I had tried harder I'm sure it's there
somewhere, but I couldn't find any glaring difference in KDE that made
it worth testing as an alternative to Gnome.

Honestly, I don't even see what's the big difference with the Windows
interface. It has a menu, it has alt-tab, it has favourites, it has a
taskbar. The focus model is annoying if I remember correctly, but
seriously, is it REALLY that different?

This whole Gnome vs. KDE thing has always struck me as totally overblown.

-- 
Thomas Milne
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