Where KDE is Going – Part 1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#31

Post by vacri » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 2:34 AM UTC

general_failure wrote: post #16

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

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,…

I tried Cinnamon and used it for quite a while. But if you're not on Mint, it seems to break regularly. I didn't like KDE4 when it first came out, but now I'm loving it.

And if you don't like a theme... change it. Guh-nome and Unity don't really like to allow you to do that. I never liked the jellybean XP theme, and would change any of my XP machines to Win Classic theme. It seems an odd complaint to make for something that is easily changed. Complaints on the code side of things... fair enough.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#32

Post by superflit » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 2:49 AM UTC

after so many struggle and slowish kde I quit and went XFCE all the way..

It is not fancy but does the trick

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#33

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 2:56 AM UTC

lake99 wrote: post #24

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

> Why can't I disable the desktop search? After some hours googling I managed to kill most of Akonadi and Desktop search ... That's not the way to do it. Maybe there are some GUI ways to disable it, but in effect, your ~/.kde4/share/config/nepomukserverrc should have: [Basic Settings] Start Nepomuk=false [Service-nepomukfileindexer] autostart=false [Service-nepomukstrigiservice] autostart=false ... and some more stuf…

I've implement this fix previously - and a few others earlier in the Akonadi/Nepomuk and whatever issue cycle - KDE has in the past prided itself on configurability. I'd have thought the buggy, resource hogging and much maligned desktop search facility would have been a prime candidate for a simple checkbox in the systemsettings interface. This has now appeared but I'm not sure by itself how good that checkbox is at preventing the shocking overuse of system resources for desktop search that was becoming the KDE signature.

I see that the devs have been trying to create a new paradigm in desktop use but sacrificing the user base on that altar seems strange for so little benefit.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#34

Post by nisa » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 3:02 AM UTC

anonbanker wrote: post #26

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

Running KDE on a dual core atom netbook with 2gb of ram (no ssd), and not experiencing any of the sluggishness you're talking about. In addition, I've added the kxstudio repositories, run a full JACK setup (considerable CPU overhead), and a digital audio workstation (ardour3) along with fl studio in a wine session. I plug in a second monitor, and I still have none of the problems you talk about. Granted, I'm only usi…

> So I'm curious as to what you're doing wrong.

I really enjoy KDE. I just don't like fighting it. Likely a combination of using stock Kubuntu and having tons of files in my home-folder caused the problems. I'm now using a subset from the PPA without KDE PIM and things run smooth.

I _really_ like KDE and enjoy using it most of the time. But I think it's not unreasonable to assume that it could be much better. From my subjective point of view is Windows 8.1 on the Pentium M 1.6Ghz notebook with 2GB faster when using the explorer than dolphin on a Core2Duo 6550 with 4GB RAM (with a quite fast Ultrastar A7K1000 HDD). Opening and saving files and things like that. It's still reasonable fast. I really can't complain. I just don't like the defaults and as I said I think KDE could do a lot better than that. When using Eclipse and doing Java development every megabyte RAM is worthwhile :)

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#35

Post by shmerl » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 5:01 AM UTC

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

Note, KDE didn't work hard on optimizations lately, because they are focused on the deep redesign of the whole underlying structure. For example log in procedure in KDE is ridiculously slow. I have a high end machine (4 cores with hyperthreading, high end GPU and 16 GB of RAM), yet logging in feels very long and for a while the desktop is simply unresponsive. Obviously hardware is not utilized to the full potential to speed that process up. I expect them to start working on optimization as a next step though so I don't mind. KDE team is doing a great job and I'm gladly using KDE every day as my DE of choice.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#36

Post by AceJohnny2 » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 5:16 AM UTC

ris wrote: post #10

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #9

Glad to hear things are still moving along and there are interesting things on the horizon. I was a longtime KDE user until a couple years ago when I switched to Awesome and a desktop-environment-less desktop (i.e, neither Gnome, Unity, XFCE...). I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release), and the following iterations. Plasma wasn't useful to me (as a coder, I like to have an…

"I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release)" I think you mean 4.0

Quite right. My, how time flies.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#37

Post by varkson » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 5:24 AM UTC

jeorgun wrote: post #23

general_failure wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Really? I'd been under the impression I was the only KDE user left who actually liked the Oxygen widget theme. Everyone else seems to be cheerleading for the new look being shown off here ( http://dot.kde.org/sites/dot.kde.org/files/plasma-main_0.jpg ), which… uh… is the single lamest attempt to jump on the flat design bandwagon I've ever seen. I guess you can't please everyone.

I find that image specifically to be a bit uninspired, but the other, more complete designs are actually pretty good IMO.

That said, I still like Oxygen, just not the taskbar design. I think they could have iterated on it and got a really really awesome and unique design. In there situation, I'd make the gradients a lot more subtle and smooth then work in more of the idea of lighting into the design. The icons could be abstracted a little more too.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#38

Post by overgard » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 6:12 AM UTC

I'm not a KDE user (at the moment, though I have been in the past), but I have to say my first reaction to those screenshots were: "it looks like a shitty windows 8".

I'm not saying that's the truth, that was just the first thought that popped into my head looking at those screenshots.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#39

Post by jgani » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 7:24 AM UTC

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

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

+1. This is why KDE has been my favourite desktop for 10 years. I don't do fancy stuff on my computer. I code. KDE gets the basic, essential tools right. Dolphin is better than Mac's Finder, Windows Explorer and Gnome's equivalent. And so is Konsole.

I hope KDE keeps going strong.

Re: Where KDE is Going – Part 1

#40

Post by oelmekki » Fri, Jun 27, 2014, 7:45 AM UTC

nisa wrote: post #12

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…

I use kde for the same reasons than you (programming and sysadmin), and I'm a big fan actually.

I don't use activities, dolphin, konsole, kate, nepomuk, etc. I just don't care about all of this, my kde environment basically consists in fullscreen terminals (real fullscreen, with no window decoration and no space eaten by menu bars) and full screen browsers. No menu bar (I use the run command for everything I do not launch from terminal), no plasma widgets (my tmuxes give me hour, which is all I need), no whatever desktop integration. I even don't use compositing.

So, why am I using kde, would you ask ? Because I never found any desktop environment as much configurable. Kde is over-featured, but still never get in the way if you want to.

Each window has an incredible set of configuration to make it looks like what you want. Those settings can either be temporary or be persisted, using regexp on various attributes allowing to target specific applications, or even specific popup created by specific application.

The list of keyboard shortcuts you can define is massive. And every application allows to redefine its shortcuts individually. I've actually never found any action I wanted to redefine and it was not allowed (and keyboard is by far my main interface). Damn, you can even define keyboard shortcuts for calling your own scripts.

I'm a big fan of gentoo for the control it gives me over my system, and kde is just the perfect counterpart in the desktop environment world.

So yeah, they can do whatever they want with themes, fonts, plasma widgets, etc, I won't mind :)

Performance is indeed a problem. In the past, I've switched a lot between kde and wmii, which offered the same kind of configurability (through its plan9 virtual fs - not sure it's still the case since wmii developers are obsessed with removing features) just because of that. Today, I have the kind of computer you have after being developer for a while, so it's a non issue.