This morning, as I drifted into consciousness, it finally hit me, that which I haven't been able to articulate before, even to myself. I finally understand exactly why over two years I have written hundreds of anguished forum posts, why I am have installed and uninstalled KDE4 at least a hundred times, and why I have finally started working on my own GNU Linux distribution. Like every great truth that eludes you for a long time, it's incredibly obvious.

It's Konqueror. I mean... duh! What really brought it home for me was when I installed Vector Linux Light on my old old laptop. Vector Light uses icewm as the default, but there's a nice feature that lets you pick a default web browser and open it from the desktop with an icon. So I picked Konqueor, only I didn't use it for a web browser all that much, I used it as a place for launching everything, including firefox 3.5. There I was, giddy as a schoolgirl, running Konqueror3 from ice wm, which I used to hate, and it was awesome. Like XFCE with Konqueror3, or fluxbox with Konqueror3. My favorite desktop environment is any desktop environment that has Konqueror3 at its center. Konqueror was all the power of KDE in one application. Whatever you ran it with, it made that one thing better.

We all know what's up with Konqueror; it's less of a file manager now, and more of a web browser, which to me is sort of like Jack Benny deciding to put comedy on the back burner to concentrate on his violin career. Konqueror 4 is actually not that bad, and neither is Dolphin. In fact, I'd go so far to say that Konqueror4 and Dolphin are probably the second and third best file managers I've ever seen, but neither are all-powerful any more.

Bottom line is Konqueror 3 used to work great with everything, and I had a great time figuring out creative applications for it. but Konqueror 4/Dolphin are much better thought out. They fit much more closely into a planned idea of a desktop environment. I used to hate KDE4 because I found it frustrating, but in the back of my mind I figured I'd eventually love it when I got to know it, because that's what usually happens. But KDE4 went from being frustrating to being boring. So much creative thought has gone into it that there's no room from to have my own ideas, and I know that there's a sense in which that's not true, but that's because places for having my own ideas have been worked into the plan.

Still, once again, I completely support this project. I think it's important and well done (if still a little immature), and there are people for whom careful planning is not a negative. This is the right direction to take for mainstream KDE development, but I'm going to keep searching for alternatives, possibly based on KDE3. At least I finally understand what the problem is.

There are some things I miss from Konqueror 3 which I hope will eventually get into Konqueror 4 but I agree with the general sentiment. I've never forgotten the wow factor I got from Konqueror after having initially used Krusader - itself a huge advance on anything else at the time.

I agree 100% well actually (kde3)konqueror was what attracted me to linux in the first place, as a file manager it seemed to almost perform magic, I mean click on an archive containing picture, it opens it just like a directory to change it's interface to become an image viewer....wow this amazed me so much this together with file size view (kde4 has it but it's not as good, you can perform file actions on files, in kde3 you could)

Just curious... What's missing in Konqueror 4?

I've been using it as both my filemanager and web browser, and overall it feels pretty much like the old one...

Alec wrote:Just curious... What's missing in Konqueror 4?

I've been using it as both my filemanager and web browser, and overall it feels pretty much like the old one...

either places or devices tab, gwenview integration, file size view not working properly, a whole bunch of kio saves missing amongst others

john_hudson wrote:There are some things I miss from Konqueror 3

Do you have konq-plugins installed? Some of the features are in that package.

aapgorilla wrote:

Alec wrote:Just curious... What's missing in Konqueror 4?

I've been using it as both my filemanager and web browser, and overall it feels pretty much like the old one...

either places or devices tab, gwenview integration, file size view not working properly, a whole bunch of kio saves missing amongst others

Yeah, the Gwenview KPart is definitely awful in KDE4. For devices, I just use kwikdisk, so it isn't a problem. And filesize view works fine for me

Alec wrote:Yeah, the Gwenview KPart is definitely awful in KDE4. For devices, I just use kwikdisk, so it isn't a problem. And filesize view works fine for me

You mean you are not plagued by this bug in file size view?:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180579

aapgorilla wrote:

Alec wrote:Yeah, the Gwenview KPart is definitely awful in KDE4. For devices, I just use kwikdisk, so it isn't a problem. And filesize view works fine for me

You mean you are not plagued by this bug in file size view?:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180579

You could do that?

I don't think I've ever actually tried that... How does it work? I remember that there's a info dialog when you run it the first time saying that it does not reflect changes in the file system, so I assumed that actually changing anything in the view is impossible.

Then again, I usually use Filelight to gauge file usage. It's available as a KPart too, and you can delete stuff from it

Alec wrote:Just curious... What's missing in Konqueror 4?

I've been using it as both my filemanager and web browser, and overall it feels pretty much like the old one...

Legacy encoding problems, general unstability, other encoding support in searchs and probably more. In KDE 3 I only use Konqueror 3 for anything in KDE 4 I found that an alpha Chrome is more stable for my daily usage than a, supposed stable, Konqueror 4.

I held a lot, over 10-20 crashes a day, but the cookies bug was the point when I stop using Konqueror. I'm now more happy with my unstable (really stable) Chrome 64 than with my stable (really very unstable) Konqueror 4.

Alec wrote:You could do that?

In kde3.x: Yes

I don't think I've ever actually tried that... How does it work? I remember that there's a info dialog when you run it the first time saying that it does not reflect changes in the file system, so I assumed that actually changing anything in the view is impossible.

Just like you would normally do a file operation, you just had to reload to get an updated view

Then again, I usually use Filelight to gauge file usage. It's available as a KPart too, and you can delete stuff from it

I don't like filelight it's just not as intuitive as file size view

Ignacio Serantes wrote:I held a lot, over 10-20 crashes a day, but the cookies bug was the point when I stop using Konqueror. I'm now more happy with my unstable (really stable) Chrome 64 than with my stable (really very unstable) Konqueror 4.

I'm not defending Konqueror in any way, but having used Konqueror as my main browser for probably the past 5 years (it wasn't always great back then either), I guess I'm pretty used to it.

So I'm curious - what is that cookie bug? And, are the crashes caused by Flash or is it actually Konqueror crashing? (I've set plugins to load on demand which seems to have gotten rid of most of the crashes, and when I need to view a video or something that might cause a crash, I click the "Open with Arora" button on my toolbar)

Alec wrote:So I'm curious - what is that cookie bug? And, are the crashes caused by Flash or is it actually Konqueror crashing? (I've set plugins to load on demand which seems to have gotten rid of most of the crashes, and when I need to view a video or something that might cause a crash, I click the "Open with Arora" button on my toolbar)

Could be this one https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191318 or other one, I'm not sure because after two weeks of login in all my sites again and again I change to Arora + Dolphin until Chrome was available to linux. I testing now Chrome 64 with flash 64 and I only have a crash in about two/three weeks, not really bad considering that both are not stable versions and is the fastest program in my KDE, !!!even load faster than a preloaded Konqueror!!! and is a Gtk+ application. Really amazing.

About konqueror crashes, I have two kind of crashes, flash related and back in history related, but now really don't care because Konqueror 4 loose me as an user.

What version is this? I do have some problems with Konqueror, but that kind of instability isn't one of them.

annew wrote:What version is this? I do have some problems with Konqueror, but that kind of instability isn't one of them.

Time ago, with KDE 4.3.1 or maybe 4.3.0, I don't remember. I just remember that I only need ten minutes to crash Konqueror when I browse imdb.com.

I don't know if current version is rock solid or not because I don't use it. The only think that I miss was "Search Engines", but in KDE 4 are encoding broken so there are not really useful for me.