Before I get into my rant: Don't get me wrong, KDE is really great. That's why I kept using it since KDE 2.x times and never moved to any other desktop. So, what's so good about KDE? Well, it looks cool for one. It's got great software like digikam, kstars, etc.

So what's not to like? Well, let me start by saying that I'm just a user. As a user, I don't really care why things don't work the way that would be ideal. I only notice that that's the case. And as a user, I have the impression that some aspects got worse over time. Let me give you some examples:

• There's no more native KDE Web browser that is being maintained. Yes, I can and do use Firefox. It's a good browser and very popular across operating systems for good reasons. But it's not really integrated with KDE. I can use web shortcuts like 'sp:' to find something on startpage.com in krunner and it will launch my set default browser, but I cannot use it in the Firefox address field. I cannot directly drag & drop an image from within a web page in Firefox into another application window. Luckily I can use conventional copy & paste.
  So in summary, it works but isn't well integrated. This brings me to the next item, one, which I find really important:
• I want Konqueror back! Konqueror used to be the can-do-all Swiss army knife of KDE. Yes, I know it sort of went against the Unix approach of one tool for one purpose, but it was so bloody useful. In fact, Konqueror used to be the one piece I was missing most, when I had to work on Windows. The Windows Explorer felt so limited, compared to Konqueror. Now there's Dolphin. The good thing about Dolphin: Lately it doesn't crash any more as often as before.
  Konqueror was able to show a preview of almost every type of file. Want to quickly read into a pdf file to see if it's the one you're looking for? Just click on it. No need to fire up Okular for that. Image files, HTML, office documents, whatever, Konqueror has been able to display it inline with just one click. Wanted to quickly listen into a music file? Just had to hover the mouse pointer over it and Konqueror started to play it. Man, how cool was that? And Dolphin? Yes, there's the F11 preview side bar, but that means press F11, select the file to preview, click on the 'play' icon, if it's a media file. More steps to preview media; no quick (single click) full size preview of other documents.
  I could insert a music CD and Konqueror would list all the CDDA files. If it found a matching CDDB entry, it would create appropriate file names for them. Additionally, it would offer me tabs so I could switch to seeing the files in CDDA, wav, flac, mp3 and ogg vorbis formats. If I wanted to rip the files, all I had to do was copy them over to a new destination and I would get them there in the format I wanted, properly named and tagged. Cooler than that - I can't think of much.
  And besides all of that, Konqueror was also a Web browser that was fully integrated with the rest of KDE ... and an ftp client ... and could handle many other net protocols.
• A news reader would be good. There used to be knode, but it's discontinued.
• A music player would be good. Amarok is semi-discontinued. And it isn't integrated with Baloo. Banagarang was integrated with Baloo, but it's discontinued.
• A note taking program would be good. Something as versatile as MS OneNote would be great. There used to be kjots, but it's discontinued.
• A password manager, which would be fully integrated with KDE and could sync with a kdbx file would be nice. KWallet annoys me by prompting me for the password every time straight after I've logged in. Allegedly that can be fixed by tweaking some config files, but I never managed to get single signon with any of the tips I found on the Internet. Why doesn't it work straight out of the box? If I want to use KWallet to manage the passwords of non-KDE application, such as Firefox or darktable, it bugs me with even more password prompts. I use keepass to manage my passwords across different devices, but that means I have to manually copy & paste user-IDs and passwords.
• Kontact - well, that's a mixed picture. kmail offers some great features like GPG integration (S/MIME integration is broken, but that's not due to kmail as far as I understood the problem). Kmail's settings editor would benefit from a make-over. And it's quite slow at times, although that may be due to the akonadi backend (the benefit of which I still don't see). KAddressBook could do with some love. There used to be knode and kjots.
• Did I mention that I want Konqueror back?

Yes, I do understand that this all is free software ("You didn't pay for it, so you have no right to complain."). Yes, I've read that some of the issues are not due to the KDE developers, but caused by how Linux distributions package the stuff and how they update, or don't. I do understand that most of the developers work on this in their limited free time. And I know that there are always too many tasks for far too few people. In summary, I just think that there may be a bit too much effort put into the look of the KDE ecosystem and too little into ensuring basic (from the user's perspective) functionality. That, coupled with turning the whole underpinnings upside down every now and then (KDE 3 -> KDE4 -> KDE5) seems to be dragging a bit too much on the available man(and woman)power.

So why don't I start to work on some of the issues I mentioned? Simple. I'm just a user. I can't even code.

I hope, people don't feel offended by my rant. It is not meant in any way to devalue your efforts. It is meant to give you some honest feedback and some positive suggestions on where to best direct your efforts from my (a user's) perspective.

Keep up the good work!

alduri wrote:[*]Did I mention that I want Konqueror back? [/list]

Konqueror is still there, even though the current version is still KDE4 based.

But it has been ported to KDE Frameworks5 and will be KF5 based in KDE Applications 16.12.

kjots is still available as well (in a KF5 version), and there's also knotes as a note taking app, both share the notes even.
Only knode has been dropped.

wolfi323 wrote:Konqueror is still there, even though the current version is still KDE4 based.

But it has been ported to KDE Frameworks5 and will be KF5 based in KDE Applications 16.12.

Cool, looking forward to have it back again.

kjots is still available as well (in a KF5 version), and there's also knotes as a note taking app, both share the notes even.
Only knode has been dropped.

I forgot to mention that I'm running Kubuntu 16.04. kjots isn't in its repositories any more.

Maybe I should give Neon a try. What's holding me back is that I'm not sure whether it will have the same level of support for the non-core KDE apps (e.g. digikam, darktable, libreoffice, etc.) as I do get from Kubuntu.

alduri wrote:I forgot to mention that I'm running Kubuntu 16.04. kjots isn't in its repositories any more.

Well, then you should "complain" to your distribution.

kjots has indeed been dropped in kdepim 15.08.0 (the first KF5 version), but the KF5 port has later been released separately.
See https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-dist ... 00125.html

And e.g. openSUSE does ship kjots 5.0.1 (and the KDE4 based konqueror, there's nothing that prevents running KDE4 applications in Plasma5).

Maybe I should give Neon a try. What's holding me back is that I'm not sure whether it will have the same level of support for the non-core KDE apps (e.g. digikam, darktable, libreoffice, etc.) as I do get from Kubuntu.

AFAIK, neon is basically just an addon repo for the latest Ubuntu LTS release.
I am not involved in neon though and never used it.

Is there any music player, that syncs with baloo? If I rate a song, I'd like that to show up in other applications, e.g. dolphin, as well.

Amarok used to sync with Nepomuk, although that never worked well. Bangarang synced with baloo, but is apparently not supported any more. Is there an actively maintained alternative?

alduri wrote:Is there any music player, that syncs with baloo?

Well, it doesn't actually have to sync with baloo at all.
The ratings that dolphin shows/uses are stored in (more or less) standardized file attributes (xattrs).

Baloo is just a file indexer (unlike Nepomuk), and it should reindex changed files in the configured folders automatically, but dolphin should show the ratings even for unindexed files IIANM.

I cannot tell you whether there is a music player that supports those file attributes though.

Amarok does have an option to write back tags to the actual files, but I don't know if that applies to the ratings too.

Btw, regarding Konqueror as Web Browser: a webengine part for browsing has been added this weekend, so the upcoming KF5 based Konqueror can now use QtWebEngine (which is based on Chromium) as rendering engine too (in addition to KHTML and QtWebKit, the latter seems to be in active development again as well: http://qtwebkit.blogspot.co.at/).

wolfi323 wrote:

alduri wrote:Is there any music player, that syncs with baloo?

Well, it doesn't actually have to sync with baloo at all.
The ratings that dolphin shows/uses are stored in (more or less) standardized file attributes (xattrs).

Baloo is just a file indexer (unlike Nepomuk), and it should reindex changed files in the configured folders automatically, but dolphin should show the ratings even for unindexed files IIANM.

I cannot tell you whether there is a music player that supports those file attributes though.

Amarok does have an option to write back tags to the actual files, but I don't know if that applies to the ratings too.

I noticed an FMPS_RATING_AMAROK_SCORE tag on some of my music files. However, dolphin and Baloo don't seem to do anything with that.
Clementine offers to write the ratings to the file tags. But then, it stores them as FMPS_RATING tags, which dolphin and Baloo again don't read.

Why can't this be standardised? One tag label to hold the rating, which can be read and written by all software that deals with music meta data (tags). Same thing for play count and maybe the date and time when last played.

Btw, regarding Konqueror as Web Browser: a webengine part for browsing has been added this weekend, so the upcoming KF5 based Konqueror can now use QtWebEngine (which is based on Chromium) as rendering engine too (in addition to KHTML and QtWebKit, the latter seems to be in active development again as well: http://qtwebkit.blogspot.co.at/).

An up-to-date Web browser that fully integrates with the rest of the KDE world --> Great!
Will it still also be a better file browser than dolphin (although the latter has been getting a bit better and more stable as of late)?

alduri wrote:I noticed an FMPS_RATING_AMAROK_SCORE tag on some of my music files. However, dolphin and Baloo don't seem to do anything with that.
Clementine offers to write the ratings to the file tags. But then, it stores them as FMPS_RATING tags, which dolphin and Baloo again don't read.
Why can't this be standardised?

Baloo/Dolphin use extended file attributes for this, they don't store the rating inside the file (like media players do normally).
Wouldn't work with most file types anyway:
Most Multimedia file formats do support additional metadata inside the file (and that's what media players use), but what about text files e.g.? Adding metadata inside a text file (and actually most other non-multimedia file-types) will basically "break" it.

An up-to-date Web browser that fully integrates with the rest of the KDE world --> Great!
Will it still also be a better file browser than dolphin (although the latter has been getting a bit better and more stable as of late)?

Konqueror uses an embedded dolphin for file browsing since 4.0.

To be precise: Konqueror is neither a web browser, nor a file browser.
It is just a shell for embedding other applications, so called "KParts". There is a KHTML part, a webkit part, and now a webengine part for web browsing, there's e.g. an okular-part for viewing documents (PDF e.g), and there is a dolphin-part for file browsing (since 4.0, before that Konqueror came with its own that got dropped in favor of just using dolphin).
In theory, one could of course write a new file browsing kpart too, but what's the point.