Preface

I wrote this, because I really needed to do this. I'm starting to like KDE 4, but I've been **** about the flaws in it to my online friends so much they probably can't stand to hear much more about it. My style of criticism is generally cutting and sarcastic, though swearing is kept to a minimum here to give it some sense of decorum. I hope it is in at least some way constructive.

As an aside, I also crossposted this to my personal website for the purpose of posterity. I post it here in the hope I can get some feedback on my many, many problems with KDE 4.

What is wrong

As you are about to see, a lot in my opinion. This will cover everything from Plasma to KWin to KDE applications. I've tried to avoid swearing, but I refuse to pull punches.

Panels can no longer be adjusted by exact pixel heights or percentages of screen width, the best I can get is 'about 50 pixels, and something like 80%'. Not good enough. Bring back the KDE 3 behaviour so I can make the panels exactly the size I want them to be.

The upper right cashew. I will decide what consists 'the design' of my desktop, I'm considering 'the design' broken by the fact that there's some ugly and totally unnecessary 'cashew' sitting in the top right of my desktop obscuring the wallpapers that I worked so long and hard to unobscure. Why the hell should I install a plugin to remove this thing? A plugin to that removes a feature? Have the developers gone mad? Move the whole thing into a plugin so people can install it if they want the extra cashew!

The window switching is just dumb now. Under KDE 3, I set 'Focus stealing protection' to normal. This was fine, and everything worked nicely. But the KDE 4 version of 'normal' is apparently different. Opening an article from Akregator in Firefox did not switch desktops under KDE 3, but it does under KDE 4 despite me leaving focus stealing protection at the same level. Setting it to 'high' kills this behaviour, but now Amarok won't take focus when activated from the system tray, and new applications started from Kickoff hide behind already started ones! Give me a happy medium again!

Notifications of new messages from Kopete bring Kopete to the desktop I'm on. I don't want this, I left Kopete on another desktop for a good reason. I'm not going to state what it is, because it doesn't matter, KDE should assume I have one. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to tell KDE this, making notifications damn near useless to me.

Panels are a bit inconsistent. Sometimes the bottom panel (where my pager is) stays in place when I switch desktops (which always happened on KDE 3), but sometimes it vanish. When it does vanish, simply moving the few pixels down to the auto-float point does nothing for some reason (it seems Plasma still thinks the panel I was using still is floated), so I have to move up, wait a bit, then go back down to refloat it. Additionally, sometimes the top panel floats but doesn't go away when I move the mouse away, meaning I have to move the mouse back up to it, then away again to make in unfloat. Further to that, if the top panel is floated on desktop 4 and won't unfloat, then I move to desktop 1, I can't make it float there! I have to go back to desktop 4, unfloat it, then go back to desktop 1! Finally, I have had instances where the panels simply won't float at all for no reason, I have to kill and restart Plasma to get them back. All nasty glitches, all shouldn't be there.

Why exactly does Konsole tell me that Ctrl+Shift+W closes the current tab when it does no such thing? Also, why can't I right click on tabs and bring up a menu to close them rather than going up to the menu bar? Further, why are the tabs in Konsole extremely wide with no option to make them smaller, and why the hell does it keep cutting off the first two letters of the names of each session despite the massive tabs having enough room to tell me the entire life story of each session? Enquiring minds need to know!

Now for Konqueror, why did you change the tab behaviour? I already thought Konqueror 3 had a weak tab bar compared to everything else, now Konqueror 4 has that plus a strange and incomprehensible auto-scrolling function that moves the tab I select to the far right unless it's already there. I've never seen this before, I hate it, and I wish there was an option to make it go away.

Additionally in Konqueror, where did the tooltips go? These were nice for images in Konqueror 3, because they would give me a larger thumbnail and information like bit depth, resolution, and the exact file size of an image at a glance. Now I have to go into properties to find the exact file size, and open the image up in a whole different application if I want the other info! Why the regression?

Amarok. Oh yes. My favourite KDE 3 application and the biggest faller in KDE 4. This needs a whole list to itself. Here's what I don't like about Amarok 2.0.2:

1) The GUI. I tried to like it, I really did. But it's hideous. A complete mess. Uglier and less usable than Amarok 1.4, with a massive widget in the center displaying information I'd really rather have in the playlist. It also has ostentatious playback controls that are in the wrong place (bottom left or bottom right please), cannot be moved, and seem to be a parody of themselves as they represent everything people say is wrong with KDE.

2) The new playlist. I want the Excel-style playlist back. I want it back, and I want it now. I'll settle for having it in Amarok 2.1, but I wish the developers just hadn't tried to get rid of it. Not being able to see my own ratings of my own tracks at a glance is just plain annoying.

3) 'Stop after this track' doesn't work if the track happens to be playing at the time. Why? Why on earth did that sound like a good idea? Why can't I stop after this track rather than starting a new track and stopping after that one? It also displays absolutely nothing on track that I've just told Amarok to stop after, meaning I have no way at a glance to know which one it is. Fortunately I have a good memory, but I didn't need that in Amarok 1.4 as it just showed me which one it was. Please bring this back.

3) Queueing does work, but doesn't display the number indicating a track has been queued if it happens to be the track with the album title in it, if it happens to be above a track with an album title in it, if it happens to be directly above the currently playing track, or if it happens to directly below the currently playing track. Why is such an obvious defect in a non-beta release?

4) I like Phonon, but is it really ready to be the only backend with absolutely no options? I get pausing and skipping under minor CPU load that I never got with Amarok 1.4, and tracks stop abruptly rather than fading out like they did in Amarok 1.4. I think Phonon is great otherwise, but it's just unfortunate that it screws up my experience in the one application that actually matters.

5) Kanji characters display as question marks or not at all. This is a regression as Amarok 1.4 did not struggle with these, and I'm using the same fonts. Again, why is this happening in a non-beta release?

6) Amarok 2 has decided, for no obvious reason, that one of my tracks has no information any more. The track length is 0:00, the bitrate is unknown, the samplerate is 0, the size is 0 B, and every single tag is blank. This was not the case when I first added the track, but now happens no matter how many times I remove and readd the track. The track itself plays with absolutely no problems, so there's nothing wrong with it, Amarok is just glitching. Once again, a non-beta release is doing this?

7) The raw install I started with had about three dozen playlists that Amarok had 'helpfully' auto-generated. I promptly deleted all of them, and made 'Background Noise III' (to eventually be the third major entry in my lengthy and ambitious Background Noise playlists), this went fine. But as always, I expanded Background Noise III and wanted to update it, so I saved a new copy. But rather than realize I was saving a playlist with the same name and ask if I want to replace the old one, Amarok blithely saves the new playlist with exactly the same name as the old one! So, which is which now? I have rarely seen an application be this dumb.

8) The tray icon has been nerfed. With Amarok 1.4, it indicated when a track was playing by blinking a play icon or indicated when it was paused by displaying a pause icon, and also indicated how far the specific track was along by shading the icon more or less depending on how much was left. Under Amarok 2, none of this happens. Bring it back!

9) More a request really. Amarok 1.4 in Kubuntu came with track info (album of origin, other tracks by the same artist ranked by rating), Wikipedia info on the artist, and automagically pulled lyrics all by default in the Collection menu. These are now either gone or hidden away somewhere amongst the new stuff. How do I get them back?

Kuickshow is broken. Not sure why (probably has something to do with it being the only KDE 3 app I'm still using), but even enabling 'Thumbnail Previews' doesn't actually give me thumbnail previews. Did the Gwenview developers get angry that I stopped using it and decide to break Kuickshow's legs? If so, epic fail as I still use Kuickshow and will never switch back to Gwenview as it no longer does what I want it to. I will apologise though, as I want to know how to get Kuickshow working properly again.

Different wallpapers on different desktops. Please, please, PLEASE tell this is definitely coming back in KDE 4.3! Seriously, I held off on KDE 4.0 hoping it would be back in KDE 4.1, then held off on KDE 4.1 seeing it was on the planned feature list for KDE 4.2, then find it slipped from the final KDE 4.2 release! I'm actually getting lost in my pathetic maze of six (yes, six) virtual desktops because empty desktops all look exactly the same now. I really need my per-desktop slideshows back, so it's like KDE 3 again. I may just jump ship if this slides again, because after four major versions without it getting back in, things officially go from annoying to ridiculous.

Late addition: I selected and copied the title of this page in GVim to copy and paste into an IRC channel. Klipper apparently didn't want to see anything, decided not to put what I'd just copied in GVim on the clipboard, and so pasted the last thing I'd selected instead. As it turns out, the last copy and paste job I'd done was to copy this article (all five A4 pages of it) from OpenOffice.org Writer to GVim. Yes it did. Irssi tried to warn me, it tried to stop me, but I didn't think Klipper would be that dumb. So I ended up pasting and earlier revision of this article into an IRC channel. My self-kicking lagged by 30 whole seconds while the server caught up. After wiping the clipboard and trying again, Klipper saw my copy action in GVim, and placed it on the clipboard. None of this would've happened were Klipper reliable enough to actually see my GVim copy action in the first place. So please, inattentive clipboard applications can kill IRC channels. Do the right thing, and make Klipper more reliable.

What is right

After that very long rant about everything that is currently wrong, it should be noted that I still do use KDE (three years and running) and will be using it at least until the 4.3 release, where I expect to see that list shrink (and I say expect because I don't plan to be using KDE at the end of the year if it hasn't). There are also things that are right, though this list is much shorter.

Plasma and KWin may have their problems, but they are quick. The compositing probably has something do with this, but whatever the reason, they feel a lot more responsive than Kicker, KDesktop, and the old KWin used to. I could certainly get used to this.

Some effects, like sliding between desktops and and the desktop wall are both attractive and useful (though they would be much more attractive and useful with an actual variety of wallpapers to look at). Proper transparency (unlike the faked transparency in KDE 3) is also very welcome, having the actual 'smoked glass' effect I wanted in KDE 3.

KSnapshot now displays a visible countdown. Archives can be opened as folders in Konqueror. Konqueror tries to remember how I like files listed in specific folders. Dragon Player just gets on the with job at hand with no fuss. KRunner acts like an awesomebar for my desktop (yes Slashdotters, some of us like it). The KDE2 window decorations now have a large gap between maximize and close, so I'm less likely to close a window when trying to maximize it. Little things that are just nice to see.

Conclusion

So, that's it. Three paragraphs of positives to three pages of negatives. I'm still not going to call KDE dead or say it needs a fork, as that would be ridiculous. I also do think the developers released at the right time, because if they'd kept it in beta until all the features I wanted were there, it'd turn into Englightenment and we'd never see a final release. It's just very jarring coming from KDE 3.5.10 to KDE 4.2.2 and seeing many things different, some things unfinished, a fair few things just not there, and a really surprising amount of things not adequately configurable.

Some of my complaints may have to do with how Canonical has shipped KDE in Kubuntu, at least some should be fixed (at least I hope so), and I'm sure a few are 'WONTFIXes' that I'll either have to live with or find workarounds for. But, I needed to get this out in the open and tell the world what I think of KDE 4. It's not great, but I hope it will be someday.

Apparently anyone who thinks that version 2 is ugly gets marked as troll @ amarok's official forums. So you may as well give up as long as developers won't change their attitude.

klerfayt wrote:Apparently anyone who thinks that version 2 is ugly gets marked as troll @ amarok's official forums. So you may as well give up as long as developers won't

Most of the comments were rather unconstructive. Also, the Amarok developers have stated multiple times that a lot of artists that offered mockups stopped just at that, i.e. mockups, while you need a long time (and collaboration) to get art into code.

Personally, I don't really get the flaming of at the interface. Most of the time Amarok (2.1 beta 2 at the time of writing) stays minimized in my tray...

einar wrote:Personally, I don't really get the flaming of at the interface. Most of the time Amarok (2.1 beta 2 at the time of writing) stays minimized in my tray...

Well, same for me. But I have to look at the GUI at some point, and I don't like it when I do. Considering how similar the functionality is to Amarok 1.4, I have to ask what was wrong with the Amarok 1.4 interface? If they had no good offers for a whole new GUI, why have a whole new GUI? Just make tweaks to the old one until such time that you do. It seems they were just making changes for the sake of change, couldn't find anyone to actually make all of those changes look right, and now get antsy whenever points out the ugly results.

Maybe it'll look better in Amarok 2.1 when I can get the Excel-style playlist back and make it dominate the window, like it always had and always should.

The problems were more or less the same that prompted kicker, kdesktop -> plasma migration. Unmaintainable code that made adding new features impossible.

Also, I like the idea of the Context View: a starting point for someting extremely customizable.

einar wrote:The problems were more or less the same that prompted kicker, kdesktop -> plasma migration. Unmaintainable code that made adding new features impossible.

I heard about that too, the playlist code was apparently beyond all hope. But this is about looks, rather than the underlying code. It's perfectly possible to strip out all of the underlying code by make the resulting app have the same basic look and feel, but the Amarok developers went down a completely different road and changed just about everything they possibly could. I'd understand it was a commercial project making sure 2.0 was NEW and BETTER with a BRAND-NEW, BETTER-THAN-EVER LOOK & FEEL, but it's not! There are no shareholders to please, just a load of technically-minded users who hate losing their favourite features.

Yes, I know most of this applies to KDE as a whole as well, though I actually like how KDE 4 looks a whole.

einar wrote:Also, I like the idea of the Context View: a starting point for someting extremely customizable.

Maybe I'll get used to it, I fought the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox before finally coming to like it, but I'll need Amarok 2 to be a full replacement for Amarok 1.4 before I feel comfortable enough to start exploring it. For the same reasons, my KDE 4.2 desktop looks a hell of a lot like a flashier KDE 3.5 desktop. I can't think about exploring until I've regained what I lost.

Edit: Really, what I want from this topic is for someone to come in and say this to me:

"I've used KDE 4.3 beta 1, and it understands the concept of different virtual desktops having different wallpaper settings. It's feature complete now, and even if the main developer behind it is blown to smithereens in a freak gas mains explosion, it'll still make KDE 4.3 because the code is in good shape with no bugs that other developers couldn't hammer out well in time."

I really want to see that feature back, and soon.

Serenity wrote:Preface

I wrote this, because I really needed to do this. I'm starting to like KDE 4, but I've been **** about the flaws in it to my online friends so much they probably can't stand to hear much more about it. My style of criticism is generally cutting and sarcastic, though swearing is kept to a minimum here to give it some sense of decorum. I hope it is in at least some way constructive.

It's constructive in the sense that it is generally precise and detailed, with a clear "this is what should happen in circumstance A vs this is what actually does happen in circumstance A", but the "cutting and sarcastic" tone negates this (for me, at least) to quite some degree: it's annoying and abrasive but, even worse, just completely and totally unnecessary. It serves no purpose other than to antagonise the very people who (I assume?) you are asking for help in the first place One must always remember that not only is sarcasm tricky to get across in plain text, but it is doubly difficult when dealing with an international bunch such as KDE, not all of whom have English as their primary language.

Panels can no longer be adjusted by exact pixel heights or percentages of screen width, the best I can get is 'about 50 pixels, and something like 80%'. Not good enough. Bring back the KDE 3 behaviour so I can make the panels exactly the size I want them to be.

Is the complaint here that there is not enough granularity in the set of heights that can be obtained via the current input method, or that the granularity is fine but you don't have a good way of measuring the actual height once you have adjusted it? I.e. is a case of "There is no way of adjusting it to 50 pixels" or "I can adjust it to any height I want but can't easily find out for sure that the final height is actually 50 pixels".

The upper right cashew. I will decide what consists 'the design' of my desktop, I'm considering 'the design' broken by the fact that there's some ugly and totally unnecessary 'cashew' sitting in the top right of my desktop obscuring the wallpapers that I worked so long and hard to unobscure. Why the hell should I install a plugin to remove this thing? A plugin to that removes a feature? Have the developers gone mad? Move the whole thing into a plugin so people can install it if they want the extra cashew!

This one seems to be something that Aaron will simply never budge on. Your options are to either install the plugin or wait for someone to write a containment that does not have the cashew (the latter of which Aaron has recommended several times but which no one seems to have done, yet)

The window switching is just dumb now. Under KDE 3, I set 'Focus stealing protection' to normal. This was fine, and everything worked nicely. But the KDE 4 version of 'normal' is apparently different. Opening an article from Akregator in Firefox did not switch desktops under KDE 3, but it does under KDE 4 despite me leaving focus stealing protection at the same level. Setting it to 'high' kills this behaviour, but now Amarok won't take focus when activated from the system tray, and new applications started from Kickoff hide behind already started ones! Give me a happy medium again!

File a bug report: bugs.kde.org (without the "cutting and sarcastic" commentary, please )

Notifications of new messages from Kopete bring Kopete to the desktop I'm on. I don't want this, I left Kopete on another desktop for a good reason. I'm not going to state what it is, because it doesn't matter, KDE should assume I have one. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to tell KDE this, making notifications damn near useless to me.

The notifications are very new and it is highly likely that author has simply not considered this use case (remember: not everyone uses software the same way you do, and something you've done 100 times a day since you started using can easily be something they've never even considered. Yes: this really does happen and is likely more common than you think ).

Panels are a bit inconsistent. Sometimes the bottom panel (where my pager is) stays in place when I switch desktops (which always happened on KDE 3), but sometimes it vanish. When it does vanish, simply moving the few pixels down to the auto-float point does nothing for some reason (it seems Plasma still thinks the panel I was using still is floated), so I have to move up, wait a bit, then go back down to refloat it. Additionally, sometimes the top panel floats but doesn't go away when I move the mouse away, meaning I have to move the mouse back up to it, then away again to make in unfloat. Further to that, if the top panel is floated on desktop 4 and won't unfloat, then I move to desktop 1, I can't make it float there! I have to go back to desktop 4, unfloat it, then go back to desktop 1! Finally, I have had instances where the panels simply won't float at all for no reason, I have to kill and restart Plasma to get them back.

Almost certainly a bug; file a report.

All nasty glitches, all shouldn't be there.

All software has bugs unless it is written by Donald Knuth.

Why exactly does Konsole tell me that Ctrl+Shift+W closes the current tab when it does no such thing?

Bug

Also, why can't I right click on tabs and bring up a menu to close them rather than going up to the menu bar?

Honestly, I have no idea and am rather peeved about this myself. There's bound to be a bug report on this: please find it and post it here so we can figure out whether it's "by design" or not.

Further, why are the tabs in Konsole extremely wide with no option to make them smaller

No idea. May or may not be "by design": you know what to do!

and why the hell does it keep cutting off the first two letters of the names of each session despite the massive tabs having enough room to tell me the entire life story of each session? Enquiring minds need to know!

Bug report, with screenshot, please: I've never seen this.

Now for Konqueror, why did you change the tab behaviour? I already thought Konqueror 3 had a weak tab bar compared to everything else, now Konqueror 4 has that plus a strange and incomprehensible auto-scrolling function that moves the tab I select to the far right unless it's already there. I've never seen this before, I hate it, and I wish there was an option to make it go away.

I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to, here Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

Additionally in Konqueror, where did the tooltips go? These were nice for images in Konqueror 3, because they would give me a larger thumbnail and information like bit depth, resolution, and the exact file size of an image at a glance. Now I have to go into properties to find the exact file size, and open the image up in a whole different application if I want the other info! Why the regression?

There were several regressions when the Dolphin part became the file manager part in KDE4, many of which I've fixed. This particular one will have to wait for KDE4.4 due to the feature-freeze (see e.g. http://ppenz.blogspot.com/2009/04/infor ... panel.html ).

I'll skip all the Amarok stuff as I've never used it.

Kuickshow is broken. Not sure why (probably has something to do with it being the only KDE 3 app I'm still using), but even enabling 'Thumbnail Previews' doesn't actually give me thumbnail previews. Did the Gwenview developers get angry that I stopped using it and decide to break Kuickshow's legs? If so, epic fail

If, when writing, you feel you have to craft an apology for the previous sentence, you should probably consider not bothering and simply exercising your Delete key instead

Different wallpapers on different desktops. Please, please, PLEASE tell this is definitely coming back in KDE 4.3! Seriously, I held off on KDE 4.0 hoping it would be back in KDE 4.1, then held off on KDE 4.1 seeing it was on the planned feature list for KDE 4.2, then find it slipped from the final KDE 4.2 release! I'm actually getting lost in my pathetic maze of six (yes, six) virtual desktops because empty desktops all look exactly the same now. I really need my per-desktop slideshows back, so it's like KDE 3 again. I may just jump ship if this slides again, because after four major versions without it getting back in, things officially go from annoying to ridiculous.

Gah - I can never remember the status of this. I think it ended up making it in the end(?)

Late addition: I selected and copied the title of this page in GVim to copy and paste into an IRC channel. Klipper apparently didn't want to see anything, decided not to put what I'd just copied in GVim on the clipboard, and so pasted the last thing I'd selected instead. As it turns out, the last copy and paste job I'd done was to copy this article (all five A4 pages of it) from OpenOffice.org Writer to GVim. Yes it did. Irssi tried to warn me, it tried to stop me, but I didn't think Klipper would be that dumb. So I ended up pasting and earlier revision of this article into an IRC channel. My self-kicking lagged by 30 whole seconds while the server caught up. After wiping the clipboard and trying again, Klipper saw my copy action in GVim, and placed it on the clipboard. None of this would've happened were Klipper reliable enough to actually see my GVim copy action in the first place. So please, inattentive clipboard applications can kill IRC channels. Do the right thing, and make Klipper more reliable.

I don't think I've ever run into a "failed copy" such as this. Can you reproduce it at all?

at least some should be fixed (at least I hope so), and I'm sure a few are 'WONTFIXes' that I'll either have to live with or find workarounds for. But, I needed to get this out in the open and tell the world what I think of KDE 4. It's not great, but I hope it will be someday.

You've probably noticed the "file a bug report!" motif I've got going on here, and the reason for this is simple: a bug has a vastly higher chance of being fixed if the developer is made aware of it through the proper channels. If you do indeed want them to be fixed, then posting here in an obscure section of the KDE user-support forums probably won't really do much good

GeneralZod wrote:All software has bugs unless it is written by Donald Knuth.

If you ever tried to set text flowing around a picture in LaTeX, you must know that this statement is not true... it's almost true
About the cashew: openSUSE use by default a desktop containment without it (as Aaron asked )
Fun fact: as a demonstration that you cannot please all the people at the same time, I changed the desktop containment on my openSUSE 11.1 to use the cashew...

Panels can no longer be adjusted

you can resize the panel in precision of single pixels. set it to a size that you feel right with visually - it does not have to be standard size like 16 32 64

if you resize it slowly youll see that at some step the kickoff icon stays the same size for a while. those stops are most likely the standard sizes

The upper right cashew

drag the buddy to behind the panel

Amarok

amarok 2.X is designed for hype only as seen in the splash screen. i stay with noatun and amarok fast forward (and with the entire kde 3 on the pentium 3 box)

4) I like Phonon

back then everyone liked to flame at arts. in fact arts worked great (with the only exception when you attempted to open a viedo in noatun). and there still is no good replacement to arts builder and the noatun audio effects

Kuickshow is broken

os packagers remove a lot of kde 3 related libraries. its likely something with your distro team

Different wallpapers on different desktops

there are different activities (that you can customize a lot) but when you switch them the windows are kept as is

Late addition

you did not yet try folderview on a 600 mhz pentium 3. that HURTS

Serenity wrote:The window switching is just dumb now. Under KDE 3, I set 'Focus stealing protection' to normal. This was fine, and everything worked nicely. But the KDE 4 version of 'normal' is apparently different. Opening an article from Akregator in Firefox did not switch desktops under KDE 3, but it does under KDE 4 despite me leaving focus stealing protection at the same level. Setting it to 'high' kills this behaviour, but now Amarok won't take focus when activated from the system tray, and new applications started from Kickoff hide behind already started ones! Give me a happy medium again!

This is a Firefox bug, not KDE. The Firefox devs thought it would be cool to have Firefox take over X when the user wants to open a URL no matter what, even if the window manager tries to stop it. Use a different browser like Opera or Konqueror if you can't stand it (Unless your like me and require Firefox).

Serenity wrote:Late addition: I selected and copied the title of this page in GVim to copy and paste into an IRC channel. Klipper apparently didn't want to see anything, decided not to put what I'd just copied in GVim on the clipboard, and so pasted the last thing I'd selected instead. As it turns out, the last copy and paste job I'd done was to copy this article (all five A4 pages of it) from OpenOffice.org Writer to GVim. Yes it did. Irssi tried to warn me, it tried to stop me, but I didn't think Klipper would be that dumb. So I ended up pasting and earlier revision of this article into an IRC channel. My self-kicking lagged by 30 whole seconds while the server caught up. After wiping the clipboard and trying again, Klipper saw my copy action in GVim, and placed it on the clipboard. None of this would've happened were Klipper reliable enough to actually see my GVim copy action in the first place. So please, inattentive clipboard applications can kill IRC channels. Do the right thing, and make Klipper more reliable.

A failed copy is more likely to be caused by X copy mechanic, not Klipper itself. I have had troubles with mixing GTK+ and Qt applications before in regards to the clipboard and I should note that I do not use Klipper at all. The problems usually happen when you press the copy shortcut and extremely quickly change windows or something, it's like it doesn't have enough time to update the X clipboard before it is interrupted.

Well I tooltips do work in Konqi at least for me, try turning them on in Dolphin then trying in Konqueror.
Just to prove it: http://omploader.org/vMXEwbQ/konq-tooltips.png

The Right mouse button opens a menu for me in Konqueror....
Obligatory screenie: http://omploader.org/vMXEwbA/konq-rmb-menu.png

GeneralZod wrote:Is the complaint here that there is not enough granularity in the set of heights that can be obtained via the current input method, or that the granularity is fine but you don't have a good way of measuring the actual height once you have adjusted it? I.e. is a case of "There is no way of adjusting it to 50 pixels" or "I can adjust it to any height I want but can't easily find out for sure that the final height is actually 50 pixels".

It's the measurement aspect really, I could give KDE 3 exact measurements, and that's what was used for the panels. I could tell you right now exactly what height and width I want each panel to be, but how do I tell KDE 4 that?

I could deal with the 'fuzzy' measurement though, if I could make it so the top and bottom panels resize at the same time. So if I make the top panel wider, the bottom panel follows. The only way I can figure out to do this though is to get one panel right, open up the GIMP, get a screenshot, and make that into a wallpaper I can use as a guide to resize the panels to my exacting standards. But that's the sort of solution where my brain goes "But the computer already knows how big the top panel is, why can't it just make the bottom panel the same size? Why am I using the notoriously fuzzy human brain to make exact measurements when I have a computer, which can do this in nanoseconds, sitting right here?!?".

There must be a better way.

GeneralZod wrote:This one seems to be something that Aaron will simply never budge on. Your options are to either install the plugin or wait for someone to write a containment that does not have the cashew (the latter of which Aaron has recommended several times but which no one seems to have done, yet)

This is unfortunate. I can see no reason why a desktop cashew absolutely MUST be there, given that the only setting it has to itself is zooming out (which I never use, since I see no point to it, especially with Desktop Grid doing pretty much the same but better).

If I may be frank (and somewhat brutal), this is not helping the users. This is just the establishment of a fiefdom, and he should give it up. I'm sure some people like it, but I'm also sure very few people actually need it, and a majority wouldn't miss it if he'd never came up with the idea.

Also, hiding it under the panels is not an option. Firstly because they're transparent now, so I'd see the cashew anyway. But mostly because the only time the cashew is an annoyance is when I have no windows open, both panels hidden, and what should just be me and my bare desktop. Except for that one cashew that I can't hide because one of the KDE developers decided no desktop could ever function without it (I would actually take an auto-hide function, anything so that I don't have to look at the damn thing).

GeneralZod wrote:The notifications are very new and it is highly likely that author has simply not considered this use case (remember: not everyone uses software the same way you do, and something you've done 100 times a day since you started using can easily be something they've never even considered. Yes: this really does happen and is likely more common than you think ).

Well, that may be so, but I also forgot to note that notifications sometimes break entirely here. For example, a notification from Kopete appears, I click on 'View', and nothing happens. I then click on 'Ignore', and still nothing happens. When this happens, I have to find and focus on Kopete myself in order to make the notification go away.

GeneralZod wrote:Bug report, with screenshot, please: I've never seen this.

I'll file a report later (assuming I find nothing already filed on this) but right now I've managed to get a screenshot of the clearest case showing this. The tabs should be saying "rhapsody : screen.real", "backgrounds : optipng", and "backgrounds : bash", and there's clearly more than enough space to do so, but the first two letters of the first tab and the initial letter of the second tab are cut off.

The really bizarre thing is that on the second tab, it must take more space to display those three dots than it would've taken to just display the 'b' instead.

GeneralZod wrote:I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to, here Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

I haven't talked to any other KDE 4 users at length about it, and the behaviour is confusing and esoteric enough to me that it takes a lot of time simply to explain what is happening, but I'm certain I've never seen anything else do this.

I first have to open enough tabs that the scrollbuttons appear and there's more than one tab off the right-hand side of the screen. I then move over to the end, and select the right-most tab. Once I'm done with this, I now select a tab four tabs to the left of this one. If this happens to be a tab I haven't already clicked on before, Konqueror now instantly scrolls the tab bar exactly four tabs to the left, so the tab I just clicked on is now the right-most tab.

As I said, this is the only time I've seen an application do this. Everything else I've seen will not auto-scroll the tab bar unless I've clicked on a tab that is partially off-screen, at which point the tab bar scrolls until the tab is fully on-screen.

Konqueror gets more predictable when I'm clicking on tabs I've already clicked on at least once, but still pulls some other tricks. Like if I go to the real right-most tab again, and click on an already pre-clicked tab about three-quarters of the way across the screen, Konqueror auto-scrolls again to try and place that tab in the middle of the screen. Meaning if I now don't move the mouse and click again, I'm now in a totall different tab and the tab bar has moved again. I very easily get lost when this happens, because Konqueror is practically scrolling by itself.

This behaviour seems intentional to me, but it's still very confusing and feels like a lot of control has been taken out of my hands. As far as I'm concerned, aside from the edge case listed above, clicking on tabs and scrolling tabs are two unrelated functions.

GeneralZod wrote:There were several regressions when the Dolphin part became the file manager part in KDE4, many of which I've fixed. This particular one will have to wait for KDE4.4 due to the feature-freeze (see e.g. http://ppenz.blogspot.com/2009/04/infor ... panel.html ).

Right. So, effectively, 2010.

GeneralZod wrote:Gah - I can never remember the status of this. I think it ended up making it in the end(?)

Well I hope so, though I must admit that 'Kill the cashew!' is my new #1 bug. The more I look at it now, the more it annoys me.

GeneralZod wrote:I don't think I've ever run into a "failed copy" such as this. Can you reproduce it at all?

It seems pretty unreliable to me in various ways. Copy something from OO.o, try to paste into GVim, 'Nothing in register', explicitly select the copied text in Klipper, now it works. Highlight something in GVim, select copy, try to paste somewhere else, Klipper pastes whatever I highlighted prior to using GVim. The only way to make Klipper see anything from GVim is to wipe the clipboard first, which seems to get its attention.

GeneralZod wrote:You've probably noticed the "file a bug report!" motif I've got going on here, and the reason for this is simple: a bug has a vastly higher chance of being fixed if the developer is made aware of it through the proper channels. If you do indeed want them to be fixed, then posting here in an obscure section of the KDE user-support forums probably won't really do much good

Yes, behind my writing style, not filing enough bug reports is my second biggest failing. I'll have to get around to filing bugs for at least some of this though.

RGB wrote:About the cashew: openSUSE use by default a desktop containment without it (as Aaron asked )
Fun fact: as a demonstration that you cannot please all the people at the same time, I changed the desktop containment on my openSUSE 11.1 to use the cashew...

I'll have to look into doing that myself at some point, though not with openSUSE (too many lawyers with too little restraint for my taste at Novell), but again I have to say that's how I'd like it by default. If you want a desktop cashew, fine, enable it and go on with your life now better for it. But forcing it on unless you install workarounds seems like forcing the majority to do extra work so a much smaller minority don't have to.

Zarin wrote:This is a Firefox bug, not KDE. The Firefox devs thought it would be cool to have Firefox take over X when the user wants to open a URL no matter what, even if the window manager tries to stop it. Use a different browser like Opera or Konqueror if you can't stand it (Unless your like me and require Firefox).

Hang on. If that's what's causing this, then why did it never happen under KDE 3? Also, if it's 'even if the window manager tries to stop it', why does setting focus stealing protection to 'High' successfully stop it?

bcooksley wrote:Well I tooltips do work in Konqi at least for me, try turning them on in Dolphin then trying in Konqueror.
Just to prove it: http://omploader.org/vMXEwbQ/konq-tooltips.png

Well that does sort of work (tooltips return in Konqueror if I enable them in Dolphin) but not fully. See, this is what I miss, tooltips with extended information on the image. The KDE 4 tooltip gives me barely anything more than I have without it, but the KDE 3 tooltip gave me dimensions, bit depth, colour mode, compression, and interlacing settings. That's what I want back!

bcooksley wrote:The Right mouse button opens a menu for me in Konqueror....
Obligatory screenie: http://omploader.org/vMXEwbA/konq-rmb-menu.png

It works for me too, but my complaint about no right-click menu applied to Konsole, not Konqueror.

einar wrote:

klerfayt wrote:Apparently anyone who thinks that version 2 is ugly gets marked as troll @ amarok's official forums. So you may as well give up as long as developers won't

Most of the comments were rather unconstructive. Also, the Amarok developers have stated multiple times that a lot of artists that offered mockups stopped just at that, i.e. mockups, while you need a long time (and collaboration) to get art into code.

I think the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is appropriate here. The old interface looked good and functioned well. Now (as an example) it just looks like someone picked up some random button icons and used them for the controls without thinking about whether or not they looked right.

It didn't function well at all from a code perspective. It's like having a nice front for a house and behind it a mess of randomly-attached pieces.