Used to much prefer KDE over Gnome. Then Kubuntu 8.10 switched to KDE 4 and I found myself in Gnome more often than in KDE. Luckily my main system is FreeBSD 7.1 and KDE 3.5 works well there.

So far it feels that the new direction for KDE 4 is beauty (Vista-style) over substance. Hopefully 4.2 will improve on the latter.

I recently switched from Kubuntu 7.10 to Debian lenny, so that I can use KDE 3.5 longer. When at some time in the future I can't use KDE 3.5 anymore, it seems more likely that I switch to GNOME or something else, but not to KDE 4.

KDE 4.1.3 on my Linux work laptop, 3.5.10 on my FreeBSD home desktop. KDE4 works like **** on my home system, as it needs far more resources than I can give it. Only a 3Ghz single-core, only 1GiB RAM, only a Radeon r200 card. It handles every other desktop I can throw at it, even under the heaviest of loads, but KDE4 will bring it to a crawl.

Brandybuck wrote:Only a 3Ghz single-core, only 1GiB RAM, only a Radeon r200 card. It handles every other desktop I can throw at it, even under the heaviest of loads, but KDE4 will bring it to a crawl.

Really? My laptop is far more modest than that, and it works decently. It doesn't run at supersonic speeds by any means, but it is certainly at least as usable as KDE 3.x or Gnome (the only DE's apart from KDE 4 I've tried on it). It's an old Acer Ferrarri 3000, 512 megs of RAM, an Athlon AMD cpu of about 2 Ghz, and an AMD mobile GPU (it's not at my place at the moment so I can't check the exact specifications, but by today's standards it is is essentially ancient...). Of course, the machine I'm typing this on is more advanced but KDE4 can be run decently on somewhat older machines as well.

Kryten2X4B wrote:Really? My laptop is far more modest than that, and it works decently.

Of course, "comes to a crawl" is subjective. But all I have to compare it to is KDE3 on the same system. Login and application startup is about five times slower. Moving windows across the screen is jerky. This is with desktop effects turned *off*.

I've installed KDE4 maybe a dozen times, every release from 4.0 to 4.2 beta. Around Christmas, I finally got my hands on a reasonably really good machine, and the first thing I wanted to do was try KDE 4.1.3. For the past couple of weeks, I've barely done the dishes, or even left this room. I've been working on setting up the perfect KDE 4 desktop, and I came pretty close.

Last night I saw 4.2 for the first time, and it's just breathtaking, more agile and beautiful than I ever expected... but I was heartbroken by the loss of the KNewsticker widget, replaced by a display that... well, it doesn't work just now, but I know that'll be fixed... ...but it blew a big hole in my perfect KDE4 desktop.

I just can't take it any more. I've installed Hardy, and I'm just going to do my best to forget that KDE 4 exists until I absolutley can't avoid the fact. You guys are doing great, important, necessary work here, and in the end it's going to go way beyond eye candy, but whatever the potential is, by now, I spent hundreds of hours with it, and there's no denying that everything about KDE4 is taking me farther away from the work I need to do. I'm just **** around with widgets all the time. I'm sure it's not like this for everybody, but for for me it's just not going to work.

Someday soon, I hope to have two computers, and then I'll use KDE 4 for my media box. I'll set it up and leave it on a table and it'll be my alarm clock internet radio jukebox and my news ticker, and my digital picture frame, and it'll look really gorgeous, the sort of thing that I'd put in my living room if I had one. But I'm going to need another computer for working on. I can't write with KDE4. I can't study with KDE4. It's like trying to study in a Coney Island Fun House. It's got as much to do with my personality as the Desktop environment, but there it is.

KDE 4

Why isn't this a poll?

blackbelt_jones wrote:I've installed KDE4 maybe a dozen times, every release from 4.0 to 4.2 beta. Around Christmas, I finally got my hands on a reasonably really good machine, and the first thing I wanted to do was try KDE 4.1.3. For the past couple of weeks, I've barely done the dishes, or even left this room. I've been working on setting up the perfect KDE 4 desktop, and I came pretty close.

Last night I saw 4.2 for the first time, and it's just breathtaking, more agile and beautiful than I ever expected... but I was heartbroken by the loss of the KNewsticker widget, replaced by a display that... well, it doesn't work just now, but I know that'll be fixed... ...but it blew a big hole in my perfect KDE4 desktop.

I just can't take it any more. I've installed Hardy, and I'm just going to do my best to forget that KDE 4 exists until I absolutley can't avoid the fact. You guys are doing great, important, necessary work here, and in the end it's going to go way beyond eye candy, but whatever the potential is, by now, I spent hundreds of hours with it, and there's no denying that everything about KDE4 is taking me farther away from the work I need to do. I'm just **** around with widgets all the time. I'm sure it's not like this for everybody, but for for me it's just not going to work.

Someday soon, I hope to have two computers, and then I'll use KDE 4 for my media box. I'll set it up and leave it on a table and it'll be my alarm clock internet radio jukebox and my news ticker, and my digital picture frame, and it'll look really gorgeous, the sort of thing that I'd put in my living room if I had one. But I'm going to need another computer for working on. I can't write with KDE4. I can't study with KDE4. It's like trying to study in a Coney Island Fun House. It's got as much to do with my personality as the Desktop environment, but there it is.

Whoever wrote this is an imposter. Please disregard this pernicious and unethical hoax.

Okay, it was me, but I was feeling momentarily depressed because knewsticker was being discontinued. I loved Knewsticker because it was so deliciously retro. Whenever I looked at it I thought about "News on the March", and the words "Charles Foster Kane has died." crawling accross Times Square in the fake newsreel footage. It's being replaced by a couple of applications with a more "modern" look. Whatever.

Apparently the author has decided to discontinue Knewsticker. Are they allowed to do that? This is like the guy who donated one of his kidneys calling you up at four in the morning because he wants it back. What if Linus decided to discontinue the kernel? Huh? Has anyone thought about that? :-O

If Linus was to discontinue kernel work then others would step in to replace him because the kernel is such an integral project to far too many organisations. Unlike the situation with KNewsTicker who had a sole developer who decided to discontinue it, therefore there was no one to take over and it became unmaintained.

PS: that imposter thing gave me quite a scare... security and all that.

Gentoo kde-testing overlay 4.1.85.

bcooksley wrote:If Linus was to discontinue kernel work then others would step in to replace him because the kernel is such an integral project to far too many organisations. Unlike the situation with KNewsTicker who had a sole developer who decided to discontinue it, therefore there was no one to take over and it became unmaintained.

PS: that imposter thing gave me quite a scare... security and all that.

(shakes head sadly.)

The imposter thing was a joke. So was the rest of the post. Thank you for treating it as if I was raising a serious point, though. It makes it funnier, right?:-S

(Note: Not really thanking you. Joking again.)