After switching to KDE 4.5 I noticed a few behaviours had been changed. Of course, there would be no point to upgrading software if it didn't get changes now and then.

Talking about behaviours, though, some of the changes were a little shortsighted (namely the system tray and folderview), and it gave me this thought. I don't think it's worthy of a brainstorm or report, but I'll throw it out there anyway.

The idea is, whenever a change is made that alters workflow in an arbitrary way, it should be required for devs to add an option to revert. Not as a checkbox for "old style" but as genuine options/features where 5 versions from now, they are looked at like any other preference you can edit.

Like folderview, I do miss just hovering over icons to see the next layer - the change was that now button-clicks are required. It broke my workflow and I find myself getting a little klunked down. I would consider the old style an extra feature to have - and both options have pros and cons.

When extra tray icons were moved to a drawer setup - I didn't really care - but I'm sure some user preferred being able to just hide or show (with an amount of persistence) right in the panel instead of dealing with a drawer. Now that the in-panel tray has been wiped out, I realized it would have been a good option to just have available.


it's just a musing, but if these arbitrary changes were added as defaults instead of replacements KDE could easily become far more flexible for the tweakers out there within a few versions - and I'm sure the devs would have less headaches from revolting users.

...

"The users are revolting!" "Nay! They've always been revolting lad, now they're rebellin'" (I just had to say it)


All said and done though, with just about every release I've been happy with the changes, or at least I've been so happy with most changes I forgave those few quibbles. The work is great, keep it up, I hope to join development again soon - but consider changes as options whenver possible.

I thought the popup folderviews were a hindrance to my workflow when they got introduced (in fact I stopped using kde because of them) other than that I could agree