@ jglen490

Thanks for that. I've got some good news - there is a lot of people who are trying KDE 'cos they heard of some of new things or like the way it looks or whatever.

And they love it At least that is what I come across more often than not on the Arch forum. Even people who thought they'd never switch from 3.5 who try it are pleasantly surprised!

So there

@toad

I'm not at all angry with KDE. What I do become frustrated with is the instability, or interoperability if you wish, of various components. I know, I've seen what others say about the definition of instability, and within limits those definitions are fine. The instability that see is the inconsistency across platforms.

If you look at my sig, you see a very low-end machine. I had absolutely no problems in doing an internet upgrade from Kubuntu 9.10 to Kubuntu 10.04; it was one of my smoothest and simplest upgrades yet. Even my wirelsss came back without the need for package hunting with a wired connection. This is all outlined on the Kubuntu forum.

What I see is many people, doing the same kind of upgrade, with different platforms, and having different results. I see may people using different, valid approaches to upgrade and having many different problems with crashes, no logins available, and other sad stories.

This was one very major change that KDE undertook. QT3 -> QT4. Adding in Akonadi, Nepomuk, and their relatives. I don't know how many developers, analysts, programmers, designers, testers, and tech writers are on the KDE team. This was a huge undertaking. Some of it works well, some of it doesn't work as well. There are work-arounds, manual configurations, and the like that "might" have to be done in some cases and not in others. I don't blame any one member of the team, but doing all this at the same time is not a good idea. The result is what you see. Some people happy as clams, and others angry as a rabid dog, that is what instability looks like.

Having worked on software development teams for past 25 years of my life, the number one priority has always been to listen to the user for functional requirements, followed by listening to the other stakeholders for resource availability, and then to prioritize and publicize the work. This looks like a dedicated team of overworked, under-resourced, individuals with nothing but a potful of short milestones imposed on them. The worst possible approach to quality software development. Again, no dig at any individual, because I don't know anyone on the team. What I do see is a less than stellar initial result and a lot of scrambling to catch up; been there and it doesn't work.

Michele,

I can feel your frustration, because this is the frustration of many existing KDE3 users.

But the fact is:

1. KDE4 has to be a completely re-write, since Qt4 out and Qt3 reaches is EOL. and Qt4 is not compatible to Qt3.

2. KDE3 is too mature to surpass, as it takes many years for KDE3 to reach that state. from 1998 KDE1 to KDE3 it takes 10 years, there are no re-write since KDE1-KDE3, KDE4 is the first attempt to re-write.

if there were no KDE3 in the world, then no one will blame KDE4 and KDE4 is a wonderful project.

3. so what? after ten years from KDE4.0 the KDE4 should have a better reputation than the current KDE3.

who should be blamed? the FOSS community or the Qt4 itself?

Life is full of regression and we probably will have to accept KDE4 ---- it still isn't as good as KDE3 now, but it is already much better than all other DEs.

Goodbye KDE from me too. As of today, I am aggressively looking for alternatives. I have been using KDE day and night since 2000, but I don't know how it works anymore. It doesn't make sense. I could not get my wife's desktop folder or start menu back, despite using version 4.2 and following versions every day for the last few months. Instead, I got a random program opening, disk swapping, unwilling icons and nothing I asked for.

This is serious stuff: it's a user interface, and it doesn't work. The user is not interfaced! I made the mistake of upgrading her from 3.5 or whatever it was that the last working version of KDE was, and now I am covered in bloat and shame, with a system that cannot work, does not run, swaps intensely, and throws away important stuff in such a way that it cannot be made to come back.

Did I mention that KDE is now really bloated? I DO NOT WANT widgets. I do not want them in my screensaver. I do not want them on my desktop. I never see my desktop: I'm busy working. To dedicate huge amounts of resources to something I never see is really really a large irritation. I am not keeping count of the number of times that plasma-desktop has used up 100% CPU or vast amounts of memory to the point where things stop working. I'm not counting the number of times the system grinds to a halt on disk usage, and the fact that I have to work very hard to stop a desktop search engine from grinding through my stuff, and killing my system's performance, battery life, and hardware. (Did you know that disk bottlenecks absolutely bring KDE to a stop? Well, KDE 4 has taught me this.)

I particularly despise the fact that "plasma-desktop" renders my CPU hot, and my desktop occasionally unworkable, and yet delivers nothing of value, except a user interface that I cannot understand or explain, despite having intuitively clicked around on it. I hope I will be able to find useful replacements for konsole and kmail -- failing which I will use them in another environment. As it is, I am tempted to install twm, because I KNOW that that will not crash and hang for 5 minutes at a time because of a backlogged disk operation that is part of inter-process communication.

The only thing that KDE always did right, keyboard bindings, has finally been totally broken with "multiple alternatives exist", which is equivalent to a personal insult, and a stubborn refusal to do what was asked. I am tired of trying 3 different alternatives to get something into the cut and paste buffer, and another 2 to get them out. I've had it with not being able to accurately select text across a scrolling screen in konsole.

I have a baseless suspicion that the KDE team was infiltrated, much like the OSI committees were infiltrated and subverted by Microsoft to force through their abomniable OOXML spec. This is the only rational explanation I can think of for the remarkable decline in the quality of what was an excellent project: someone wanted to scuttle the ship, and sent in agents with a hidden agenda, who worked themselves into positions of authority, so that they could make disastrous technical decisions. You cannot blame what has gone wrong on Qt. It's not the Qt parts that are broken.

This rat is starting to leave. Cya in 5.2.

cfilorux wrote:Goodbye KDE from me too. As of today, I am aggressively looking for alternatives. ........................... You cannot blame what has gone wrong on Qt. It's not the Qt parts that are broken.

This rat is starting to leave. Cya in 5.2.

Period.

cfilorux wrote:I have been using KDE day and night since 2000, but I don't know how it works anymore. It doesn't make sense.

This is your first post on the forum. Did you ask anyone to explain it to you? Did you look at any of the documentation or tutorials showing how it work?

cfilorux wrote:I could not get my wife's desktop folder or start menu back, despite using version 4.2 and following versions every day for the last few months. Instead, I got a random program opening, disk swapping, unwilling icons and nothing I asked for.

Did you ask for help on any of these issues? You need to provide more specifics. Are you still using 4.2, which is really out-of-date? You should be using at least 4.3 or better yet 4.4 by now.

cfilorux wrote:This is serious stuff: it's a user interface, and it doesn't work. The user is not interfaced! I made the mistake of upgrading her from 3.5 or whatever it was that the last working version of KDE was, and now I am covered in bloat and shame, with a system that cannot work, does not run, swaps intensely, and throws away important stuff in such a way that it cannot be made to come back.

This sort of language is not the least bit constructive and does not help anyone. If you are having problems, you should ask for help. For most people the interface works just fine, if you are having problems it might be a good idea to try to find out why. But you are not providing anything remotely specific enough that anyone could have any hope of being able to help.

cfilorux wrote:Did I mention that KDE is now really bloated? I DO NOT WANT widgets. I do not want them in my screensaver. I do not want them on my desktop. I never see my desktop: I'm busy working. To dedicate huge amounts of resources to something I never see is really really a large irritation.

If you don't want widgets on your desktop, then don't put them there. It is as easy as that.

cfilorux wrote:I am not keeping count of the number of times that plasma-desktop has used up 100% CPU or vast amounts of memory to the point where things stop working. I'm not counting the number of times the system grinds to a halt on disk usage, and the fact that I have to work very hard to stop a desktop search engine from grinding through my stuff, and killing my system's performance, battery life, and hardware. (Did you know that disk bottlenecks absolutely bring KDE to a stop? Well, KDE 4 has taught me this.)

None of these should happen. You might want to give some details about exactly what is happening so we can figure out why. You can turn off the desktop search.

cfilorux wrote:The only thing that KDE always did right, keyboard bindings, has finally been totally broken with "multiple alternatives exist", which is equivalent to a personal insult, and a stubborn refusal to do what was asked. I am tired of trying 3 different alternatives to get something into the cut and paste buffer, and another 2 to get them out. I've had it with not being able to accurately select text across a scrolling screen in konsole.

Once again, if you want help you are going to need to provide some specifics so people can figure out what is going on.

cfilorux wrote:I particularly despise the fact that "plasma-desktop" renders my CPU hot, and my desktop occasionally unworkable, and yet delivers nothing of value, except a user interface that I cannot understand or explain, despite having intuitively clicked around on it.

Rather than just randomly clicking around, did it ever occur to you to just ask someone to explain it to you? Or did it occur to you to read the instructions? If you expect KDE 4 to behave identically to KDE 3 in every way, then yeah it is going to be frustrating. That is because KDE 4 is not KDE 3, and lots of stuff was really broken in KDE 3 but people got used to using it. If you want to learn to use KDE 4 as KDE 4 then lots of people would be glad to help you. If you want to make KDE 4 behave mostly the same as KDE 3 you can do that as well.

cfilorux wrote:I have a baseless suspicion that the KDE team was infiltrated, much like the OSI committees were infiltrated and subverted by Microsoft to force through their abomniable OOXML spec. This is the only rational explanation I can think of for the remarkable decline in the quality of what was an excellent project: someone wanted to scuttle the ship, and sent in agents with a hidden agenda, who worked themselves into positions of authority, so that they could make disastrous technical decisions. You cannot blame what has gone wrong on Qt. It's not the Qt parts that are broken.

Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe if you had asked for help you might have been able to fix some or all of these issues?

You come to a KDE forum and on your very first post outright insult large numbers of people who have worked extremely hard to make KDE for your in their spare time. You have apparently made no effort to ask for help or get any of your problems solved, you just banged your head against the wall for a few months then quit. This is exactly the useless, insulting rant that gets people who actually put a lot of effort into making KDE as good as possible so frustrated.

If you want help, we are here. If you want to provide specific, constructive criticism after making a reasonable effort to learn the software, we are glad to listen. But you apparently could not be bothered to do any of this, you have shown no indication that you bothered to try to learn how the software actually works, you have shown no indication that you have bothered to try to get any help or read any documentation, you have provided nothing specific enough that anyone could actually help you or even begin to try to fix the problems you are having, and yet despite your apparent lack of effort you accuse the hard-working unpaid KDE developers of being part of a conspiracy to kill KDE. That is not how you go about getting problems fixed, it is how you convince people that you are not worth talking to.

Wow, thanks for that rant cfilorux! Quite some energy in there...

Go use awesome, enlightenment, fluxbox, openbox, lxde, xmonad or whatever else takes your fancy.

Just one word of advice: I would never ever rant again if I were you, communication is the preferred way to get things done - kind of I scratch your back and you scratch mine. If that doesn't make sense to you go and live on the moon.

That's just the usual problem:

1) KDE is right
2) if you think it isn't, go back to 1)

I've seen that shortcut problem ("multiple alternatives exist") on 4.4 two weeks ago on my test computer - made me cackle

KDE is a community, and doesn't have a coherent and unique point of view. Let alone having dictatorial like ideas of "being always right". But if you disagree with something, you need to bring some proof of it. Those 2 points you just "brought up" bring nothing to the discussion.

Ad-hominem: play the man. I too can play the man, but I prefer do it more directly. I would use a phrase like, "You too are an ignorant and inattentive buffoon", and avoid repeated slants merely suggesting the same. Just one thing, if you make a veiled threat, don't cloak it as friendly advice.

Report problems on the forum: you must be kidding. Forums are a place for cry-babies and people leaving parting notes. They are populated by self appointed gatekeepers to terrorise newcomers, who they waste their time accumulating posts of fine word-smithing of no lasting value.

Did I ask for help? Hell no. I don't want a system that continually sends me to the red-eyed-monster forums for help. I can work it out if I spend 10 minutes with the thing, but I did NOT have 10 minutes. It's not my system: I don't want it to break. It must work. It did. I upgraded it. It was a mistake.

I did report problems as bug reports, and the refrain remains "you really should try the latest version, we have no idea what those older versions did". Too many bug reports were rejected/ignored with "works for me", and "fixed in the next version". Guess what! They weren't fixed in next version (the konsole select through backward/forward scrolling is still a bug).

The disk bottleneck: it seems the ecryptfs filesystem has a long queue, and it tends to pile up a single-threaded backlog of requests if you do something stupid like grep -r . $HOME > $HOME/junk in the background. kmail, which I have used daily since almost forever does this kind of disk usage when it is doing sorting of messages for indexing. When this happens, it freezes up redrawing of windows for minutes at a time, and shows up disk-based interlocks. Test it.

When the system goes to hell while you're drinking a beer with your friends, you have a laugh. When it goes to hell when you have NO time and no sense of humour, and it should not even be your problem, you hit it with hubris.

I am not asking for help, I'm saying cheers. Fix it, don't fix it, whatever.

cfilorux wrote:I would use a phrase like, "You too are an ignorant and inattentive buffoon"

Except, there's this thing called Code of Conduct, which users must uphold when they register.

and avoid repeated slants merely suggesting the same. Just one thing, if you make a veiled threat, don't cloak it as friendly advice.

I fail to see where the threats are.

They are populated by self appointed gatekeepers to terrorise newcomers, who they waste their time accumulating posts of fine word-smithing of no lasting value.

I find this comment rather insulting. The "self appointed gatekeepers" put up a whole forum from scratch, completed with customized code and a lot of other things, because there was a need for a different channels than mailing lists for users. We're all volounteers, all of us, using our free time to improve this and keep the ball rolling.
And a lot of people have found help here: I'm sorry, but you are the exception here.

Did I ask for help? Hell no. I don't want a system that continually sends me to the red-eyed-monster forums for help.

"Continually"? You must be kidding. You just ranted (see your post count) while a friendlier message would have been much better.

I am not asking for help, I'm saying cheers. Fix it, don't fix it, whatever.

And I'm going further. I encourage you not to post again (although it doesn't seem that you want to) unless you learn to respect the forum rules and the Code of Conduct.

It's fine to have gripes with KDE, even strong ones, but remember... there are rules, and as long as you post here, you must respect them.

bye bye
for some other people KDE is getting better and better.
I used to be a gnome user until kde 4.0 came out.
I knew that it was kind of incomplete at that time and therefore it wasn't yet on par with the other DEs, but i saw the potential on it and since then i've been a KDE user and i dont regret it.
IMHO kde 3 was not as good as kde 4.4 or newer, and i believe that kde is now the most powerful DE out there.

cfilorux wrote:I would use a phrase like, "You too are an ignorant and inattentive buffoon", and avoid repeated slants merely suggesting the same.

Please follow the code of conduct. Insults and personal attacks are not allowed here. I can only assume this is directed at me. I try my best to helpful and constructive and this is the thanks I get?

cfilorux wrote:Just one thing, if you make a veiled threat, don't cloak it as friendly advice.

Who threatened who and where? That is also not allowed and will be dealt with accordingly.

cfilorux wrote:Report problems on the forum: you must be kidding. Forums are a place for cry-babies and people leaving parting notes.

So which are you?

This is a subject-specific technical forum, intended specifically for giving feedback and getting help. Not all forums are the same, and lots of people have had a lot of success asking for help here (me included). The forum even has a built-in system for identifying when problems have been solved.

cfilorux wrote:They are populated by self appointed gatekeepers to terrorise newcomers, who they waste their time accumulating posts of fine word-smithing of no lasting value.

Of course, because being offered help is such a terrifying experience for most people.

cfilorux wrote:Did I ask for help? Hell no. I don't want a system that continually sends me to the red-eyed-monster forums for help. I can work it out if I spend 10 minutes with the thing, but I did NOT have 10 minutes. It's not my system: I don't want it to break. It must work. It did. I upgraded it. It was a mistake.

Right, you can't afford 10 minutes to ask a couple of questions, but you can afford to 3 or 4 times that long ranting at the same place. Which do you think is more likely to actually get problems solved? And you said earlier you worked with KDE 4.2 for months. You couldn't have found 10 minutes out of months?

And "continually"? You didn't even ask once. What makes you think it would be "continually" once you got the basics worked out? A lot of software, KDE included (or actually KDE especially) is based on certain patterns and rules, once you learn those it becomes much easier to do other stuff because the rules generally apply there as well. This is the case with KDE far more than most desktop environments, you will find yourself having to learn new ways of doing the same thing for new software far more with most other desktop environments than with KDE since they don't tend to be as good about following consistent rules (Mac Os X being a possible exception).

cfilorux wrote:I did report problems as bug reports, and the refrain remains "you really should try the latest version, we have no idea what those older versions did". Too many bug reports were rejected/ignored with "works for me", and "fixed in the next version". Guess what! They weren't fixed in next version (the konsole select through backward/forward scrolling is still a bug).

Wait, so it is <i>bad</i> that developers are fixing problems? You said you were using 4.2, is that right? 4.2 came out almost a year and a half ago. The current version is 4.4, and even it is getting old. Developers have been working extremely hard to fix bugs and implement new features.

cfilorux wrote:it seems the ecryptfs filesystem has a long queue, and it tends to pile up a single-threaded backlog of requests if you do something stupid like grep -r . $HOME > $HOME/junk in the background.

What does this have to do with KDE? Sounds like a kernel issue if I am understanding you correctly.

cfilorux wrote:kmail, which I have used daily since almost forever does this kind of disk usage when it is doing sorting of messages for indexing. When this happens, it freezes up redrawing of windows for minutes at a time, and shows up disk-based interlocks.

This is a known problem with kmail that far predates KDE 4 (it goes back all the way to KDE 3.0.0). It should be fixed in 4.6 at the latest, perhaps even earlier.

cfilorux wrote:When the system goes to hell while you're drinking a beer with your friends, you have a laugh. When it goes to hell when you have NO time and no sense of humour, and it should not even be your problem, you hit it with hubris.

You updated a system without having any clue about the software you were installing, what it does, how to use it, what issues it might have, apparently even what the most up-to-date version is. I'm sorry, but what do you expect? You took the responsibility of managing the computer, but made no effort whatsoever to actually educate yourself about what you were doing or what the implications of your actions might be, then blame everyone else when it didn't go as you expect. I don't mean to be rude, but you really have no one to blame for what happened but yourself. If you can't be bothered to understand what it is you are doing, then things are not going to go how you expect. That is the case with any software, not just KDE. Actually, its the case with anything, not just software.

cfilorux wrote:I am not asking for help, I'm saying cheers. Fix it, don't fix it, whatever.

Then why are you here? What is the point spending all the time registering then posting a long-winded rant that is not going to help anyone?

Sometimes ranting is good for you, get it all out and then maybe you can think clearly and come up with a logical solution to your problem. My only suggestion would be to do it in the newsgroups where flame wars are more active and you don't have to be nice and you can let it all hang out.

TheBlackCat wrote:You updated a system without having any clue about the software you were installing, what it does, how to use it, what issues it might have, apparently even what the most up-to-date version is. I'm sorry, but what do you expect?

Working system, I think. If I'm not wrong, cfilorux updated the system which worked well. What should people expect when they are updating the system? Fighting with bugs? Filing bug reports? I think expecting old bugs fixed in a new release is more reasonable, isn't it?

TheBlackCat wrote:You took the responsibility of managing the computer, but made no effort whatsoever to actually educate yourself about what you were doing or what the implications of your actions might be, then blame everyone else when it didn't go as you expect.

Hmm... So, you think that every time when we update the system we should RTFM about everything? From kernel to SELinux and KDE? And, what if someone use the same language and post something like this: "You took the responsibility of developing the software for millions of people, but made no effort whatsoever to actually educate yourself about what you were doing or what the implications of your actions might be, then blame everyone else when it didn't go as you expect." That's not about you, perhaps, but it could be said about a developer who breaks functionality of previous versions of the software and releases the new version making people suffer where they did not even expect.

Just one example, on January 16, the bug was filed about impossibility to use distribution lists (or contact groups) after updating KDE. That annoyed some people who rely on this functionality of kmail. I omit the migration problems with akonadi, let's see only this specific bug. Some things had to be made manually instead of convenient methods used in previous version. More than three months passed until patch was submitted and the bug was declared as fixed. So, users might think they will get working distribution lists again in 4.4.3. Wrong! While the sending to distribution lists works now, nevertheless I can not create or modify these distribution lists. I reported that a few days ago. Nobody replied back from developers team. Today, just to gather attention, I wrote in this bug report:

Is anybody from KDE development team watching this? Do contact groups (or distribution lists) work for them? When they fix something for distribution lists, do they check other functionality like creation and modifying contact groups?

I'm sorry, this might be offtopic here but I, and, probably, many others, got an impression that developers do not feel any responsibility when they break the functionality which was working in previous versions of KDE, and then it takes months to fix anything... What is going on? I perfectly understand that this is free software contributed by volunteers but there is no excuse if someone starts writing from scratch, breaks a lot of thing that people used in previous versions and then left it in half-functional state. I think that even in free software developers must feel some responsibility when they release anything for thousand and millions of people.

This comment is not for starting a discussion. I really do not want to offend developers who spend their time for free projects, but it seems to me that it would be useful for them to know what users feel when they have to use broken software.

So, if you write about someone's responsibility, don't forget about yours. Visitors of this forum are required to be productive. I agree. But so must be developers even if they design software just for fun. Productivity means not just suggesting patches and pointing exact origin of the problem. Productivity includes also accepting responsibility, hearing people and trying to help them to recover from their frustration if it is caused by buggy application. And I believe that both groups, developers of KDE and maintainers of this forum, should accept and share their responsibility for mistakes inevitable in complex software. Just be kind.