I'd just like to make you know that, after 10 years as a happy KDE user, I just have enough with version 4.
After KMail stopped working because of MySql that I'm supposed to have running and configured, after system monitor applets have turned into something that seems to be made by my 2-year daughter, after every piece of the interface soon or later shows signs of non-integration with the rest, etc, etc (I could list hundreds of problems if I wrote them down)... I'm just dropping it at all, even if this makes me sad.
I updated until version 4.4, just to see it becoming worse and worse, even if I could not think it possible.
I know I have no much right to complain, but this is something you must know for your good: it's my opinion, and everyone else I talked to, that a wonderful piece of work has been taken and turned into an unusable thing, the bad copy of the worst GUI systems out there. So I think you should not wait until nobody will use it anymore to realize that.
Best regards
Michele Alessandrini, Italy

Goodbye, we will miss you. Have a nice day.

I'm afraid you will miss many people, so.
Honestly speaking, have you ever thought of launching a web survey to see if I'm wrong?

"Web" and "survey" do not go well together. I don't really want to force a change of your opinion, but I would like to point out that a few points in your original posts were rather inconstructive.
It's fine that you want to switch DEs, after all, there's no "one shoe fits all" category. But writing "something that seems to be made by my 2-year daughter" could be avoided altogether.

As an addition to einar, you didn't say what parts are problely being done by your daughter.
And as i see it, this was your first post. This means, no research for a solution before. You might want to try this also.
Seriously, your post was full of "it doesn't work, so i switch" stuff. Why not just telling what really didn't work? You might get more help than expected.
But registering just to give your "i will quit from KDE4" view doesn't get you anywhere.

I'm switching DE but I'm not happy of it. Your shoe were very fitting to me, and I (as a programmer) cannot understand why a new version of a software is more similar to a completely separate project rewritten from scratch than an evolution of a previous software. A really annoying thing to me is the missing of many user customization options that was there and are no more there. I liked to customize my desktop, now I'm much more limited in that. Why good things could not be left alone?
As a concrete example, let's talk about the mentioned system monitor applets. I apologize for having used unfair language, but I don't think my judgement was too unfair. In KDE3, in both "CPU load" and "net load" applets, I could customize the colors, the scale, whether I wanted text labels or not, and others I can't remember.
Do you know how many options have those 2 applets now? ZERO. I'm stick with ugly gray bars, with text on them that cannot fit the applet space in the panel and that covers the bars. The cpu percentage even has an useless decimal digit to be more cluttering. I cannot even KNOW the scale of the net graph, so I see a bar and I cannot know if it's kilobit or megabit. Neither the popping balloon says it.
I saw those options disappear release after release. Tell me, is it a good thing? Can you give me the e-mail of the actual developer for those applets? I'd like to know if it is a deliberate spite. Those apps should be removed from the KDE.
Here is a very fresh announcement I read: the new KDevelop 4 says: "KDevelop 4.0 comes with lots of features already, even though some things had to be dropped compared to the 3.5 series due to time constraints". This has happened to all the KDE. Again, why working features cannot be left? Is the porting so brutal?
Another thing that comes to my mind in the immediate: bluetooth integration. Am I the only one to miss it?
Sorry, really, but that's the real impression I hear from many people.
Michele

A really annoying thing to me is the missing of many user customization options that was there and are no more there. I liked to customize my desktop, now I'm much more limited in that. Why good things could not be left alone?

Once more, generalisations that are useless. There is very little that could be done in KDE3 that can't be done in KDE4. If you took the trouble to ask questions you might get the answers you need.

As a concrete example, let's talk about the mentioned system monitor applets. I apologize for having used unfair language, but I don't think my judgement was too unfair. In KDE3, in both "CPU load" and "net load" applets, I could customize the colors, the scale, whether I wanted text labels or not, and others I can't remember.
Do you know how many options have those 2 applets now? ZERO. I'm stick with ugly gray bars, with text on them that cannot fit the applet space in the panel and that covers the bars. The cpu percentage even has an useless decimal digit to be more cluttering. I cannot even KNOW the scale of the net graph, so I see a bar and I cannot know if it's kilobit or megabit. Neither the popping balloon says it.

Which widgets are these? I don't recognise them from the description. Take the System Load Viewer, for example. You can choose colours for a number of readings. Hovering over the bars gives you full details of CPU, RAM and Swap usage, both as percentage and in actual terms, with the units clearly defined.

I don't see any widget that matches your description of the net applet. Again, giving some actual information might help.

I saw those options disappear release after release. Tell me, is it a good thing? Can you give me the e-mail of the actual developer for those applets? I'd like to know if it is a deliberate spite. Those apps should be removed from the KDE.

This is child-like petulance - rude and simply not worth answering.

Here is a very fresh announcement I read: the new KDevelop 4 says: "KDevelop 4.0 comes with lots of features already, even though some things had to be dropped compared to the 3.5 series due to time constraints". This has happened to all the KDE. Again, why working features cannot be left?

If you took the trouble to read, you'll find the explanation many times over. After 7 years of work from many different contributors, there are many reasons why the existing framework could never meet modern needs.

Is the porting so brutal?

Yes it is. Again, if you had done any research you'd know that. You say you are a programmer - in that case you should know why that is so. Meanwhile, instead of pointless rants maybe you could help to improve something that is important to you.

Another thing that comes to my mind in the immediate: bluetooth integration. Am I the only one to miss it?

No. But then if there is no programmer who uses it and can therefore work on it, who has suitable hardware, and enough spare time, it will not be available quickly. Again, if it's important to you, help to do something about it.

Sorry, really, but that's the real impression I hear from many people.

Of course it is. Satisfied users don't rant, so you'll never know how many of us there are.

Use Mandrake/Mandriva ever since 1999.
And never had another DE than KDE.

So experienced many (big) changes.
Whatever happened and changed, it never let me down.
Yes, i was also a bit surprpised by the introduction of KDE4.
But always believed the product would grow by every following update.
And nowadays i can firmly say, that i will never get in discussion with myself, whether to change my choice for desktop-environment.

To be critical is okay, but try to be constructive in that.
That is the only way to make the product even stronger alltogether.

Which widgets are these? I don't recognise them from the description. Take the System Load Viewer, for example. You can choose colours for a number of readings. Hovering over the bars gives you full details of CPU, RAM and Swap usage, both as percentage and in actual terms, with the units clearly defined.

The widgets called "System Monitor - CPU" and "System Monitor - Network", at least that should be in english. They're in the list together with the other ones.

Yes it is. Again, if you had done any research you'd know that. You say you are a programmer - in that case you should know why that is so. Meanwhile, instead of pointless rants maybe you could help to improve something that is important to you.

Being a programmer, I tend to not destroy what good I've done and rewrite from scratch when I want to update a piece of software. You're all right that I have to be constructive, and that I can contribute, but here I'm not blatantly asking for new features, I'm talking about features that were already there. It seems like to be a little bit "destructive" from the developers' side.

Of course it is. Satisfied users don't rant, so you'll never know how many of us there are.

You're right, but maybe you too will never now how many are ranting. Has someone tried to count them? After all, I admit I may be paranoid or among a minority of users, but I wonder how developers choose the direction the software must take.

Essentially we probably can agree that ranting is not good.
The thing is, the whole desktop metaphore was rewritten when Qt4 was introduced. It might still have drawback, as annew stated. So the best thing you could do is to report it in a constructive manner.
Just take it to bugs.kde.org or discuss it here. But really, registering and then talking about goodbye is a no-go
We could work it out together, that is the benefit of OSS. There might be some non-agreements, but still, you are able to make a difference.

m.alessandrini wrote:Being a programmer, I tend to not destroy what good I've done and rewrite from scratch when I want to update a piece of software.

That wasn't their choice. The switch from Qt 3 to Qt 4 meant that KDE developers had to rewrite large portions of the KDE code base from scratch just to make it functional. Further, other parts of the code had become unmaintainable, which meant that they had to be rewritten just to be able to fix bugs, not to mention implement new functionality.

It is great in theory to say that you shouldn't rewrite stuff from scratch, but that assumes that the existing code is in a good state and that the software your code depends on has not changed. Neither was the case for much of KDE 3.5.

I recommend you read the threads following some of the other rants, we have explained the situation in considerable detail a number of times.

Yes, now I realize that ranting that way is not good, but it was the result of a series of compressed little annoyances.
Anyway, thanks everybody for your attention, I hope I delivered the feedback from a part of the users right to the core.
Michele

First, this forum isn't "the core", many if not most of the people here are volunteers with little or no connection to KDE besides the forum itself (besides the forum they are users). Second, you still provided very little constructive feedback, that is you provided almost nothing specific enough to actually be acted on. If you really want to give feedback to people who can do something about it, you should submit bugs to bugs.kde.org. But they need to be specific enough that people can actually do something about them, and they shouldn't be duplicates of existing bugs either.

If you want help you can ask for it here, but most people here aren't in a position to force developers to do anything nor do we have any special communicate channels open to us that would allow us to transmit feedback to developers any more easily than anyone else could.

Michele,

you are on Debian. They still maintain KDE 3.5 - go and use that.

And btw, have you tried gnome? Dreadful! Well, matter of taste, I suppose. Otherwise go for lxde based qt4 - you get to keep your trusted software and don't have to cope with those horrible things your two year old daughter designed (I feel for your daughter, but who needs enemies if you've got parents).

m. may be speaking from frustration and generalizing, but the way you react to criticism says a lot for your position in life. I, too, have been very frustrated with the outcomes of various KDE releases based on QT4. What I have done is to express my own frustration, along with what I have done about it.

I like a lot of what comes from KDE. I don't like those things that I have written about before, especially those things where it appears that a small group of very overworked people have bitten off more than they could chew. Taking on the move to QT4 AND major foundational changes such as trying to incorporate Nepomuk, et al, into that major rewrite, results in a product that has "target" written all over it.

I'm still down with KDE, with certain exceptions, but watching closely.

So let's not gang up on one very frustrated user, you just end up chasing more away. KDE can't afford that.