Where KDE is Going – Part 1

I have huge respect for everyone involved in KDE and OpenSource software and I'm writing this on KDE 4.13 but damn... it still sucks. Maybe I'm the wrong user.. but I do programming and do sysadmin stuff most of the time..

First the good parts: KDE is quite stable for me. I have hardly any crashes... this is huge as Unity had some ugly bugs I could not resolve.

But I had to install the Numix theme and icons and tweak knobs to get a common look between KDE/GTK2/GTK3.. I found the default Oxygen ugly and not well designed but this is probably a question of taste.

With Numix the machine feels and looks great but I'm not so happy after installing Windows 8.1 on an 10 year old Pentium M notebook with 2GB RAM and having to realize that Windows is way faster and responsive and more feature-rich than KDE and Unity and requires less RAM.

I'm not trolling - I'm talking about stuff like browsing files using the file manager and using a browser or office for writing documents.

Back to KDE: I don't understand Plasma at all - I don't use "activities" I tried it but found it useless. I don't care about widgets. I'd care more if the widgets would not be so useless.. something like gkrellm that ran on fvwm95 gives me more and better data about cpu/disk/network usage than any widgets I've found in the collections.

Memory... at least 400MB RSS after a fresh boot running only Konsole. No semenatic desktop, no Akonadi, no widgets... This is just crazy.

I have no SSD and 4GB RAM - maybe I'm too cheap for KDE but Akonadi and all semantic desktop parts never worked for me.

Why can't I disable the desktop search? After some hours googling I managed to kill most of Akonadi and Desktop search but I really would enjoy something like a minimal KDE desktop.

Dolphin/Kwin/Konsole/Kate/Okular are really great tools, through and I enjoy using them more than the Gnome tools..

I don't think I'm an old grumpy user - I really enjoy the Unity concept and even found Gnome3 interesting but I'm still feel some longing from time to time for the speed and functionality of KDE 3.5.

But overall I can work with KDE. I would be probably a lot more happy if I had a SSD and 16GB RAM and well.. that sucks. I don't want to install Windows on this machine for it to be faster!

I know there are alternatives.. but running Windows 8.1 on this 10 year old Pentium M notebook just made clear to me that the problem is not the hardware - it's the software.

Why is it so hard to to have a highly functional and low-footprint system?

I already did that and I'm quite happy with the performance at the moment. Kwin really rocks but I'm hesitant to become friends with the plasma concept in KDE. Ranting from my gut on news.yc is not really productive but I really think it's just bad design. It gets in my way and on my nerves. I don't remember such feelings from Unity or Windows.

Qt5/QML2/Wayland are all great ideas but these can't compensate for bad design. If I install a fresh KDE it feels like a Desktop to show your 16 year old friend and explain them the concepts but actually never do more than playing around with the knobs. This is of course nice and legit but it's not a Desktop for getting work done.

So maybe I just want a switch to disable activities and widgets and get some more RAM and calm for that.

This is really difficult and I don't want to ridicule any effort and the hard work that went into KDE. I'm not involved and don't have a lot of better ideas to offer. So don't take me too serious - I just have the feeling that a lot of these efforts will perish due to bad design and strange ideas about UI.

Spot on. Plasma is complete crap but nobody will acknowledge it. I was a very passionate kde user (and have also contributed a lot to the code base). I have given up on KDE since the last 4 years or so. The oxygen theme is such an eye sore. The problem is it's sacrilege to question all these decisions in the "community" (whatever is left).

And also the constant rewrites is so annoying. First Qt4, then graphics view, now QML. I don't blame them. Who wants to maintain code anyway.

/me is happy cinnamon user.

This is so, so true. And it is so sad, given that KDE 3 was a very usable, somewhat well-structured (considering the many configuration options) desktop that ran reasonably well on hardware from the previous century.

It didn't try so hard to be pretty. Actually, I always thought KDE 2/3 did have a pragmatic, technical elegance. KDE 4 (sorry: KDE-SC-Plasma-something 4) just looks like an early alpha preview uniting all the bad ideas of Windows Vista.

> I don't understand Plasma at all - I don't use "activities" I tried it but found it useless. I don't care about widgets.

This stuff constantly gets in your way. Because it is a solution in frantic search of a problem. Unworldly and counter-intuitive to the greatest extent.

I am generally very happy with KDE.

It's much more hacker-friendly than Gnome/Unity IMO. Its footprint is huge and there's enormous power in it that I don't use. XFCE is similar but doesn't have the polish that KDE does, especially around multimonitor support.

I would encourage the KDE team to focus on driving towards the hacker use case and letting that power drive the end user experience. :)