Some personal ramblings are given here. First, thanks to the development
community! They have provided a good work in progress.

I have been using KDE for a good 10 years. Some things work pretty well, e.g. menus. Over the years, the menus have changed, but by and large they have consistently worked. I like that when I install some tools, the icon and a menu item automatically gets added. In early versions, it seemed to be pretty obvious how to add a menu item and link the action. It does not appear to be so obvious now, but then I may not be a good sample because I have never really tried to add an active menu item. It would be comforting to know that I can add one easily if I want to. Over the years, the menus have become more logically grouped - a good thing for sure!

Panels have been pretty bad. They look to have gotten a bit better and a
bit more solid but they still don't work real well. Adding widgets and configuring the bar has never been an easy task for me. When I first installed Kubuntu 9.10, I accidently removed the task bar. When I tried to rebuild the panel for the task bar, the results were a mess. For example, once the original taskbar panel was deleted, adding desktops to the panel that I built did not work at all. Adding icons and then dragging and dropping the icons on the task bar would seem to be workable paradigm but I could not get it to work. Eventually, I reinstalled Kubuntu to restore the original taskbar.

It drives me crazy when features that I use and depend on are lost. Take for example, adding desktops. In the current version I can add desktops, but the following features that I have used in the past are not available:
1) use a different background for each desktop [this is a great feature because it allows each context to be easily recognized]
2) name the desktop and have the name appear on the taskbar [this was lost in the last release of KDE that I used, not in the current one]
3) control the size of the desktop icons on the taskmenu. I'm guessing that this can still be done somehow, but it is not at all obvious. Right now I have icons on my taskbar that are about 2 to 3 mm square.

Documentation is pretty bad. I'm glad to see a survey about the help topics and an indication that maybe the documentation will be revamped.

The blog and desktop additions in the current release are a waste of time for me, but at least I can kill both of these easily. I can understand defaulting to include them since they come right out of the box for those who want to use them.

I'm really glad to see that KDE now allows you to easily control the pixel settings. I can not adjust the size of display to my liking - this feature still needs some work, but thanks for this feature!

I hope this gets back to the developers/designers of KDE. Perhaps some of the older features will get restored someday - I hope so.

First of all, it would be helpful to know which version of KDE you use.

jjanderson5 wrote:I have been using KDE for a good 10 years. Some things work pretty well, e.g. menus. Over the years, the menus have changed, but by and large they have consistently worked. I like that when I install some tools, the icon and a menu item automatically gets added. In early versions, it seemed to be pretty obvious how to add a menu item and link the action. It does not appear to be so obvious now, but then I may not be a good sample because I have never really tried to add an active menu item. It would be comforting to know that I can add one easily if I want to. Over the years, the menus have become more logically grouped - a good thing for sure!

I don't quite get what you mean with "menus". Are you talking about the application launcher menus, such as Kickoff (the default on)? In that case, you can edit the items with kmenuedit like before - but I agree that it's not obvious.

Panels have been pretty bad. They look to have gotten a bit better and a
bit more solid but they still don't work real well. Adding widgets and configuring the bar has never been an easy task for me. When I first installed Kubuntu 9.10, I accidently removed the task bar. When I tried to rebuild the panel for the task bar, the results were a mess. For example, once the original taskbar panel was deleted, adding desktops to the panel that I built did not work at all. Adding icons and then dragging and dropping the icons on the task bar would seem to be workable paradigm but I could not get it to work. Eventually, I reinstalled Kubuntu to restore the original taskbar.

Deleting a small file is enough if you want to restore the default settings - no need to reinstall everything. But it seems like a quite common problem for new users, they delete something and then don't know how to get it back. Could definitely be improved.

Maybe the Plasma HowTo can help you get a better understanding of how Plasma works.

1) use a different background for each desktop [this is a great feature because it allows each context to be easily recognized]

You need to enable "Different activity for each desktop":


Link activities to virtual desktops

2) name the desktop and have the name appear on the taskbar [this was lost in the last release of KDE that I used, not in the current one]

I have this option in KDE 4.3.3. Right click on Pager -> Pager Settings -> "Display text: Desktop name".

3) control the size of the desktop icons on the taskmenu. I'm guessing that this can still be done somehow, but it is not at all obvious. Right now I have icons on my taskbar that are about 2 to 3 mm square.

Icons in the taskbar, or in the panel? Was it possible to change the icon sizes for the latter before? You can do it now in some more advanced taskbars, such as Smooth Tasks.

Umm... how can you accidentally remove a panel? To remove a panel:

1. Click the toolbox icon;
2. Click the, "More Settings" button;
3. Click the, "Remove Panel" button;
4. See a, "Do you really want to remove this Panel?" dialogue and click, "Remove" anyway.

Or:
1. Right-click somewhere on the panel;
2. Go to, "Panel Options";
3. Click, "Remove Panel";
4. See the same dialogue as above.

Either way, it should be plain in sight that what you're doing is... well, removing the panel, even before you click, "Remove Panel". I don't know how this could really be improved, beyond removing the ability all together, which is infeasible...

Your other points, I can agree with - especially about configuring the menu - but removing the panel by accident? O.o

jjanderson5 wrote:Some personal ramblings are given here. First, thanks to the development
community! They have provided a good work in progress.

I have been using KDE for a good 10 years. Some things work pretty well, e.g. menus. Over the years, the menus have changed, but by and large they have consistently worked. I like that when I install some tools, the icon and a menu item automatically gets added. In early versions, it seemed to be pretty obvious how to add a menu item and link the action. It does not appear to be so obvious now, but then I may not be a good sample because I have never really tried to add an active menu item. It would be comforting to know that I can add one easily if I want to. Over the years, the menus have become more logically grouped - a good thing for sure!

Interesting , you should view 10 reasons why GNOME is better than KDE:

EDIT by neverendingo:
Original post was just copied over from this source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=570
But without telling the sources, so it was removed due to copyright issues.

definitly. since kde4 was introduced to debian testing i had a hell of testing for 6 months.

my focus moved from "how can I make this monster usable" (in may) - which I was not able to do - to "is there a way to get konsole running stable for more than some minutes" (now). you see, problems are getting wore for me from release to release.

From my point of view kde4 is as a configuration hell as fvwm was. but fvwm has at least a well documented config system. and with that useless desktop I hardly see any advantage to fvwm.

Maybe kde4 will be production ready in the next 2 years. I for my own do not beleve so. sorry to see so much work go down for nothing.

Much of your problem seems to stem from bad video drivers. In various threads you have had suggestions about changing them. What driver are you using now?

ATI: proprietary did work somehow. radeonhd works better - that is, if not running kde4.
IGMA: xorg driver. works, even with kde4.
NVIDIA: proprietary, works on everything despite minor graphic glitches on kde4.

I cannot believe that all problems that occure using KDE4 are graphic driver issues. these problems occur only when using KDE4 and are related only to KDE4. it does not affect non-KDE4 programs running on KDE4. It does affect KDE4 programs running under KDE4 or any other window wmager/desktop environment.

The logic way to eliminate the problems is not to use KDE4.

The logic conclusion is that KDE 4 exposes problems in the drivers that no one else noticed because it's using features that were thought not to be useful by the driver develoeprs(see the issues with NVIDIA's proprietary driver). So, drivers are getting fixed or need to be fixed.
BTW, I'm not experiencing any of these issues on both Intel (i915) and ATI (Radeon 3870; I'm forced to use fgrlx here as proper OSS support will come around later, though).

Einar is absolutely correct. The fact has been acknowledged by ATi, NVidia and Intel, so it totally indisputable.

thanks, but the utility to edit menus is panels/KDE3..

Works for everything but favorites, but that's fine because you can right click on a menu item and copy to fav's...

Landis.

Every now and then QT4 is responsible for a few of the graphical errors in KDE4. You have to realise that QT4 is still sort of 'new' as well. Personally I like KDE 4.3.3 even though I miss KDE 3.5.11. I think by the time KDE 4.5 comes around things will be much more stable:) And yes einar brought up a very good point about the drivers. Personally I'm not experiencing problems with my Intel card either.