2handband wrote:What specifically do you find easier in Dolphin?

For one thing, finding anything is easier in dolphin, since there are much fewer actions and sub-menus. Navigation up more than one directory or navigating to parallel directories is of course easier thanks to the breadcrumb bar. Zooming is easier. Konqueror doesn't have the free space display or information panel. You can drag and drop files and folders on items in the sidebar, on folders in the address bar, and in 4.5 on tabs as well (although dropping them on its in the sidebar should be as much of an issue in konqueror in 4.5). That is just off the top of my head. Dolphin, in my opinion, is also laid out better overall. Tab management is also a lot smoother in dolphin with the animated tabs (this isn't just wasted visuals, it makes it much easier for me to tell what I am doing). The colored panels also makes visually separating the panels from the file browser are much easier for me.

Some of these comments are bewildering. Dolphin needs a text editor? Why? Do Amarok and GWenview need text editors too?

TheBlackCat wrote:

2handband wrote:What specifically do you find easier in Dolphin?

For one thing, finding anything is easier in dolphin, since there are much fewer actions and sub-menus. Navigation up more than one directory or navigating to parallel directories is of course easier thanks to the breadcrumb bar. Zooming is easier. Konqueror doesn't have the free space display or information panel. You can drag and drop files and folders on items in the sidebar, on folders in the address bar, and in 4.5 on tabs as well (although dropping them on its in the sidebar should be as much of an issue in konqueror in 4.5). That is just off the top of my head. Dolphin, in my opinion, is also laid out better overall. Tab management is also a lot smoother in dolphin with the animated tabs (this isn't just wasted visuals, it makes it much easier for me to tell what I am doing). The colored panels also makes visually separating the panels from the file browser are much easier for me.

Okay, I'm learning a couple of things here... zoom is a feature I never use, so I never thought to test it. The zoom feature is a bit slicker in Dolphin (although I don't understand it's usefulness; it just makes the icons larger or smaller, so what?). The free space display is nice and something I wouldn't mind seeing added to Konqueror, but the information panel seems to me a tremendous amount of wasted space which just duplicates information I already have in front of me (I use detail view). As far as drag and drop is concerned, I can drag and drop right into the directory tree in Konqueror; I really don't see the distinction. Speaking of the tree, as near as I can tell the tree makes breadcrumbs completely superfluous. As I go deeper into the filepath the tree view automatically expands, so all I have to do if I need to go back is click on the appropriate directory in the tree. The big limitation of breadcrumbs is that they only show the path to your PWD; if you need to go someplace entirely other in the system it takes a lot more clicks to do it. Exactly how is tab management smoother in Dolphin? I have to go to the file menu every time I want to create a new tab; that is incredibly annoying and once again more clicks.

Sigh... I agree, ditch Dolphin and get Konqueror back. Not that it will ever happen, I think I can see that. I have tried KDE 4 off and on for about a year; the last time was a few weeks ago on a new computer at work, and I eventually just installed the old opensuse 11.1 on it in order to get a functioning environment (had real problems getting KDE 3.5 to work on the latest opensuse).

I see the writing on the wall - the KDE devs are going to continue to push KDE 4 forward and I feel reasonably sure that much of the power user features I came to rely on will never make it back into KDE. Or if they do after 5 years, I will have taken the hit and changed my workflows, costing me time and money.

About the average user not understanding Konqueror - in my limited experience, it's not true. When I have shown the power of Konqueror to a Windows user that wanted to switch, they were thrilled with all the things it could do.

I have tried switching to Konqueror as my default file manager on every install of KDE 4. It's pretty clear that it's not supposed to be the file manager for KDE. No matter what anyone says, I truly think that Konqueror DEAD as a file browser.

About Plasma: Someone, somewhere, seems to have a very strange relationship with news and weather.

KDE4 is IMO, a disaster. I would have been SO forgiving of nearly every screw up that could have been made had this all come piecemeal, but KDE4 changes everything at once, then requires that I reconfigure settings that have taken years to get right.

And to top it off, I personally think KDE4 is ugly. I know this is subjective, but to me it went from beautiful to looking like a cheap knock-off of a Mac. I have tried many themes, but for some reason nothing looks good. At any rate, I don't have time to sift through a few thousand themes in order to get up and working.

In the 12 or so years I've used KDE I've come to seriously depend on it and all of the applications available for it. But KDE4 is such a disaster for me that I must seriously consider switching to Gnome in the hopes that I will never get burned like this again. I *really* dread leaving behind so many applications that I love, and I think Nautilus is pretty much garbage compared to Konq, but at this point I would rather have less and not get burned again.

For now I have started switching my childrens' machines to Gnome. All the machines at my office are another story, but I have put a stop on upgrades (not that anyone is interested in spending weeks tweaking their system). I will spend the money to convert to Gnome, but I will never forget that I was forced to do it.

budm wrote:Sigh... I agree, ditch Dolphin and get Konqueror back. Not that it will ever happen, I think I can see that. I have tried KDE 4 off and on for about a year; the last time was a few weeks ago on a new computer at work, and I eventually just installed the old opensuse 11.1 on it in order to get a functioning environment (had real problems getting KDE 3.5 to work on the latest opensuse).

I see the writing on the wall - the KDE devs are going to continue to push KDE 4 forward and I feel reasonably sure that much of the power user features I came to rely on will never make it back into KDE. Or if they do after 5 years, I will have taken the hit and changed my workflows, costing me time and money.

About the average user not understanding Konqueror - in my limited experience, it's not true. When I have shown the power of Konqueror to a Windows user that wanted to switch, they were thrilled with all the things it could do.

I have tried switching to Konqueror as my default file manager on every install of KDE 4. It's pretty clear that it's not supposed to be the file manager for KDE. No matter what anyone says, I truly think that Konqueror DEAD as a file browser.

About Plasma: Someone, somewhere, seems to have a very strange relationship with news and weather.

KDE4 is IMO, a disaster. I would have been SO forgiving of nearly every screw up that could have been made had this all come piecemeal, but KDE4 changes everything at once, then requires that I reconfigure settings that have taken years to get right.

And to top it off, I personally think KDE4 is ugly. I know this is subjective, but to me it went from beautiful to looking like a cheap knock-off of a Mac. I have tried many themes, but for some reason nothing looks good. At any rate, I don't have time to sift through a few thousand themes in order to get up and working.

In the 12 or so years I've used KDE I've come to seriously depend on it and all of the applications available for it. But KDE4 is such a disaster for me that I must seriously consider switching to Gnome in the hopes that I will never get burned like this again. I *really* dread leaving behind so many applications that I love, and I think Nautilus is pretty much garbage compared to Konq, but at this point I would rather have less and not get burned again.

For now I have started switching my childrens' machines to Gnome. All the machines at my office are another story, but I have put a stop on upgrades (not that anyone is interested in spending weeks tweaking their system). I will spend the money to convert to Gnome, but I will never forget that I was forced to do it.

What power user functionality are you still missing? Most of what was lost is restored with KDE 4.4.

The current Konqueror version will do pretty much everything the old one did, although I do miss the ability to burn CDs without opening a separate app.

It's true that it's a complete re-write; everything is in a different place and a lot of the old settings don't work anymore. Nevertheless I was able to make the transition pretty painlessly; I did it just a couple of months ago and have only one real complaint: there should be an auto-open feature for external media. I have filed a feature request, which I hope someone takes seriously. Everything else is pretty much in place and I haven't even transitioned to KDE 4.4 yet; I'm still running 4.3.4.

Ugly is indeed a matter of taste, I guess. Personally I can't imagine why you'd transition to Gnome; Gnome is VERY ugly to me. It also has a completely useless file manager which you can't turn off because the damn thing draws the desktop.

What's your specific complaint about plasma? I like it... it gives me functionality I never had access to before. Both my news and my weather work fine.

Plasma's an interesting concept, and looking at the diffrent 'activities' I find it even more useful;

I can't really see how the themes are Mac-like at all, as a matter of fact I'd say a damn sight many of them are very windows like.

You might complain of 'wasted space' but...well, let me use an analogy here; I have a lot of stuff, but I don't always keep it close at hand, whilst you may THINK it productive to always have a quick way to do stuff, you'll find that keeping it all in the same room (application) isn't always the best way: interfaces can be bogged down (hence what is meant by 'learning curve', Konq has so many buttons I'm not even sure where to begin)

The preview pane is a tad useless if you prefer detail view; but I rather like it, in Kubuntu 10.04, I like it even more.

Dante Ashton wrote:Plasma's an interesting concept, and looking at the diffrent 'activities' I find it even more useful;

I can't really see how the themes are Mac-like at all, as a matter of fact I'd say a damn sight many of them are very windows like.

You might complain of 'wasted space' but...well, let me use an analogy here; I have a lot of stuff, but I don't always keep it close at hand, whilst you may THINK it productive to always have a quick way to do stuff, you'll find that keeping it all in the same room (application) isn't always the best way: interfaces can be bogged down (hence what is meant by 'learning curve', Konq has so many buttons I'm not even sure where to begin)

The preview pane is a tad useless if you prefer detail view; but I rather like it, in Kubuntu 10.04, I like it even more.

Take an afternoon and go through the menus and the configuration dialog in Konqueror. That's all it'll take to get you up and running, and the reward will be a smoother workflow. Less clicks, less windows. That's what working smoothly on a computer is really all about.

2handband wrote:Okay, I'm learning a couple of things here... zoom is a feature I never use, so I never thought to test it. The zoom feature is a bit slicker in Dolphin (although I don't understand it's usefulness; it just makes the icons larger or smaller, so what?)

With previews for most common file types, being able to easily make them bigger (so you can see more detail) or smaller (so you can see more items at once) makes a huge difference for me. It is a lot easier and quicker for the human brain to process images and shapes than text.

2handband wrote:but the information panel seems to me a tremendous amount of wasted space which just duplicates information I already have in front of me (I use detail view).

That's fine if you use the detail view, but I rarely do. The problem for me is that the detail view itself wastes a huge amount of space. 99% of the time I do not need all of that information, and that area could be taken up by more files. You can also once again make the information panel a tab so it only takes up as much space as the other panels.

I have it set up to have my folders and places panels tabbed and then have my information panel above them. You can't set up a custom panel layout like that at all in konqueror.

2handband wrote:As far as drag and drop is concerned, I can drag and drop right into the directory tree in Konqueror; I really don't see the distinction.

You can't drag and drop to the places or to tabs in konqueror.

2handband wrote:Speaking of the tree, as near as I can tell the tree makes breadcrumbs completely superfluous. As I go deeper into the filepath the tree view automatically expands, so all I have to do if I need to go back is click on the appropriate directory in the tree. The big limitation of breadcrumbs is that they only show the path to your PWD; if you need to go someplace entirely other in the system it takes a lot more clicks to do it.

There are two huge advantages to the breadcrumb bar. First, it takes no space whatsoever unless you want it to. Having the folder panel up all the time takes a lot of space. Second, it only shows the path of your current directory. You take that as a disadvantage, but for most use-cases it is an advantage. You don't have a whole bunch of unrelated folders getting in your way, and you don't have to navigate upwards past perhaps hundreds of folders to find a parent folder of your current directory. I use tabs for handling folders in widely different parts of my filesystem. And I can easily pull up the folders panel if I need to. I am willing to accept a few extra mouse clicks for an uncommon activity (moving to a completely different area of the filesystem) to make it easier and more convenient to do common tasks (moving between nearby folder).

2handband wrote:Exactly how is tab management smoother in Dolphin? I have to go to the file menu every time I want to create a new tab; that is incredibly annoying and once again more clicks.

I guess you don't have a middle mouse button, and your toolbar is somehow locked so you can't add any new buttons to it. In those cases then yeah I guess opening a new tab would be harder.

Try dragging and dropping tabs in dolpin and konqueror, Ignoring the issues with using middle click to drag and drop, dolphin gives you great visual feedback regarding what the tab is doing while konqueror does not.

2handband wrote:Take an afternoon and go through the menus and the configuration dialog in Konqueror. That's all it'll take to get you up and running, and the reward will be a smoother workflow. Less clicks, less windows. That's what working smoothly on a computer is really all about.

I've done that, but as I said all the menus and options I never use just get in my way.

No thanks, I like Dolphin. Why would I want a combined web browser + file manager + everything else?

ad_267 wrote:No thanks, I like Dolphin. Why would I want a combined web browser + file manager + everything else?

Because it's efficient. But even ignoring the combined functionality, Dolphin is still missing a few things to even make it as a great file manager.

2handband wrote:Because it's efficient.

Once again, not necessarily. It depends on how you use it. It can either increase efficiency or reduce or depending on the user.

That's a no-argument.

TheBlackCat wrote:I've done that, but as I said all the menus and options I never use just get in my way.

Please stop using this line of argument. It can never be a good thing to have functionality missing. To have a tool and not need it is always preferable than to need it and not have it. (for the community at large I mean, individual preferences notwithstanding. I assume KDE is not designed specifically for you)
This argument in defense of KDE4's shortcomings irritates the hell out of me, and it is flying around on this forum all over the place.

spoovy wrote:

TheBlackCat wrote:I've done that, but as I said all the menus and options I never use just get in my way.

Please stop using this line of argument. It can never be a good thing to have functionality missing. To have a tool and not need it is always preferable than to need it and not have it. (for the community at large I mean, individual preferences notwithstanding.

Agreed. I just don't see how anything in Konqueror gets in the way... so there's a few extra options in the menu, so what? All the common-usage stuff is out in plain view; I just don't see what's the big deal.

spoovy wrote:

TheBlackCat wrote:I've done that, but as I said all the menus and options I never use just get in my way.

Please stop using this line of argument. It can never be a good thing to have functionality missing. To have a tool and not need it is always preferable than to need it and not have it. (for the community at large I mean, individual preferences notwithstanding. I assume KDE is not designed specifically for you)
This argument in defense of KDE4's shortcomings irritates the hell out of me, and it is flying around on this forum all over the place.

Sorry, but you are simply wrong. This is not just my own opinion, it is an empirically-measured fact. The more elements there are in a UI the harder it is to learn and the harder it to find things. That is simply how the human brain (and human eye) works.

Human working memory is fairly limited, the rate at which humans can shift their focus from one object to another is limited, the time it takes to process a new object is significant (especially when it is one you are not familiar with or it includes text), the visual area the human eye can focus on is very limited, and the speed at which the human hand can move a mouse from one area to another is limited (which is an issue for menus and panels/sidebars). In order for what you say to be true, all of the things I just said would have to be false.