KDE has screwed up once too often. The simple fact that so many bugs still infest it is unbelievable. I would list the problems but what's the point? They've been said 1 billion times before. Still no one fixes the underlying issues.

"Hey why bother fixing KWIN/KHTML/knetworkmanager/KPackageKit etc, when we can make a social network plasma widget that no one will use!"

And just bye, I can't be arsed anymore.

A large part (the majority, as far as I know) of the KDE developers are volunteers, which means that they work on their projects in their free time. They don't ask for money, nor fame - they just do it for fun. Do you seriously want to tell those people "what you're doing is useless, go and fix KHTML instead"?

This is as wrong as stating that KDE4 has focused on eye candy rather than functionality. Most of the times the developers aren't artists, and vice verse. There are also different kind of developers. Someone who made a plasmoid doesn't necessarily have the knowledge to hack on KPackageKit.

I want to become a KDE developer, but I won't fix bugs in the projects you mentioned (maybe except KWin). Simply because I don't want to - I want to work on stuff that is useful for myself, and nobody can tell me to do otherwise. As little as I can tell you to stop complaining and go and fix the bugs yourself.

But hey, you're free to use whatever you want. If you don't like KDE, there are other great alternatives out there.

@RaiCoss The software that is bug-free has yet to be written. And if you can't be arsed, tell me, why should anyone else? You choose what to do with your time. Have the courtesy to give others the same freedom.

Then, perhaps, something made by "volunteers" shouldn't be touted as a stable desktop useable by businesses and individuals?

The OP has a point. KDE 4.xx has been forced down the throats of the users
supposedly because it is the "latest and greatest" yet it is so riddled with flaws as to make it, up to 4.3.1, un-useable as a stable desktop environment and even 4.3.1 is having it problems. Throw in the evil triplets, Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk, and the whole thing (4.xx) is starting to smell like that bloatware from the kids at mickeysoft. If the goal is to make KDE like winblows, then we might as well use winblows and get it over with....

Seems like I spend most of my time trying to get KDE/Linux to do what does work in winblows. Scanning is horrible in XSane/Linux, so I installed VirtualBox so I could run the HP scanning software in XP, on the KDE desktop. Ditto Faxing. Powerpoint presentations do not run correctly in OpenOffice Impress and there is no sound. It goes on and on. If I didn't dislike mickeysoft so much because of the their complete lack of business ethics, I would just run winblows and get it over with, but I won't use their products on principle. Unfortunately, the experience with KDE 4.xx over the last 1 1/2 years since its release and that many of the major Linux distributions that have forced it on the end users, it doesn't appear many in the OpenSource community are any better than the gang in Redmond.

I have a business to run and need a rock solid system that doesn't take an inordinate amount of time to run and maintain. I thought we had that in KDE 3.5.10, but 4.xx has been, overall, the WORST experience since installing my first computer 22 years ago.

cwizard wrote:Then, perhaps, something made by volunteers shouldn't be touted a stable desktop useable by businesses and individuals?

Depends on what you mean by stable I guess. 4.x (from 4.2.x at least) is easily as stable as anything I've ever used (including, but not limited to, KDE 3.x, Gnome 2.x, Windows 3.11 and onwards, and OS/2). For me that is, I realize it may be different for others. That's not to say it's been perfect and smooth sailing all the time. I've had my share of annoying bugs, but for the most part no more annoying than any of the competitors, past or present.

Whether it has all the features a given individual or business need is another matter entirely, and that's something everyone need to evaluate on their own.

cwizard wrote:Throw in the evil triplets, Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk, and the whole thing (4.xx) is starting to smell like that bloatware from kids at mickeysoft.

If you think those are so bad (at least for now), don't use them. They're easy enough to turn off and not essential.

Kryten2X4B wrote:

cwizard wrote:Throw in the evil triplets, Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk, and the whole thing (4.xx) is starting to smell like that bloatware from kids at mickeysoft.

If you think those are so bad (at least for now), don't use them. They're easy enough to turn off and not essential.

Interesing that you should bring that up, because I did just that several days ago. Then yesterday afternoon I booted up the computer, signed on, entered "startx" and the splash screen came up and froze. No hard disk activity and no icons in the panel in the center of the screen. I left it that way to get back to the football game and came back 20 minutes later to find nothing had changed.
I killed X with Ctrl, Alt, Backspace and tried "startx" again.
This time KDE (4.3.1) came up, but within seconds, in the lower right hand corner of the screen a window popped saying something about Nepomuk and that Strigi was indexing the files on the system.
So the question becomes, how does it turn itself on when I had purposedly turned it OFF???!!!!
As I've said before, this whole KDE 4 thing is starting to smell entirely too much like winblows and if that is the case I might as well runs winblows..........
Ugh!
These comments are not made lightly. I guess over the years I gotten tried of being a unwitting "beta tester."

Kryten2X4B wrote:

cwizard wrote:Then, perhaps, something made by volunteers shouldn't be touted a stable desktop useable by businesses and individuals?

Depends on what you mean by stable I guess. 4.x (from 4.2.x at least) is easily as stable as anything I've ever used (including, but not limited to, KDE 3.x, Gnome 2.x, Windows 3.11 and onwards, and OS/2). For me that is, I realize it may be different for others. That's not to say it's been perfect and smooth sailing all the time. I've had my share of annoying bugs, but for the most part no more annoying than any of the competitors, past or present....

Certainly cannot agree and I wouldn't put OS/2 in the same class as winblows 3.1.

cwizard wrote:Certainly cannot agree and I wouldn't put OS/2 in the same class as winblows 3.1.

No worries. Neither would I. The only thing they have in common is that they're both obsolete. Still, while I used them they got the job done and mostly refrained from crashing. Don't think OS/2 ever crashed to be honest...not often at any rate.

I

cwizard wrote:Interesing that you should bring that up, because I did just that several days ago. Then yesterday afternoon I booted up the computer, signed on, entered "startx" and the splash screen came up and froze. No hard disk activity and no icons in the panel in the center of the screen. I left it that way to get back to the football game and came back 20 minutes later to find nothing had changed.
I killed X with Ctrl, Alt, Backspace and tried "startx" again.
This time KDE (4.3.1) came up, but within seconds, in the lower right hand corner of the screen a window popped saying something about Nepomuk and that Strigi was indexing the files on the system.
So the question becomes, how does it turn itself on when I had purposedly turned it OFF???!!!!
As I've said before, this whole KDE 4 thing is starting to smell entirely too much like winblows and if that is the case I might as well runs winblows..........
Ugh!
These comments are not made lightly. I guess over the years I gotten tried of being a unwitting "beta tester."

This sounds like a distribution-related issue. A problem with x starting up is especially suspicious, and at least when I turn off strigi it turns off just fine.

Just because you are having problems in KDE does not necessarily mean it is KDE's fault, distributions also have problems, and some are fairly notorious for introducing lots of bugs in the changes they make to KDE.

cwizard wrote:So the question becomes, how does it turn itself on when I had purposedly turned it OFF???!!!!

I wish I could answer that. I've never had that happen, and I've used KDE4 on 4 different distros apart from my current one. True, three of those were Debian-derivatives of one kind or the other but certainly not exactly the same.

I've never used Slackware, but I would first check if your problems (or some of them) are due to some packaging/compilation error on slackware's part.

TheBlackCat wrote:This sounds like a distribution-related issue. A problem with x starting up is especially suspicious, and at least when I turn off strigi it turns off just fine.

Just because you are having problems in KDE does not necessarily mean it is KDE's fault, distributions also have problems, and some are fairly notorious for introducing lots of bugs in the changes they make to KDE.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame KDE's problems on a distribution. Slackware has the reputation of being able to run KDE better than most other distributions. OTOH, KDE 4.1.whatever on Kubuntu 8.10 was one of the worst disasters I've ever had the misfortune to run.

@Hans: basicly you say "Don't take KDE (4) serious". That's a nogo for any business.

samhain wrote:@Hans: basicly you say "Don't take KDE (4) serious". That's a nogo for any business.

If that's what he's saying, it would apply equally well to most FOSS projects. Most FOSS projects are, after all, developed primarily by volunteers. And consequently, those others can't be in such a case be taken seriously either.

samhain wrote:@Hans: basicly you say "Don't take KDE (4) serious". That's a nogo for any business.

You beat me to it...you know I really do appreciate the effort and actually loved kde3.5 and startinf to love kde4 back again with 4.3 but you really can't have your cake and eat too, either you are a hobby project or you are a serious project, can't be both...

Who said anything about being a hobby project? I wrote that KDE is largely community driven, which means that people use their free time to contribute to the project. If someone wants to make a "social network plasma widget that no one will use", should we tell him/her "you should work on KNetworkManager instead"? (Whether the plasmoid should be bundled with kdeplasma-addons or not is another discussion).

I'm not saying that a completely unstable desktop, or a broken window manager, is acceptable. I'm just stating (and this is my personal opinion) that "tell all developers to stop working on A and fix B" isn't the right approach.