Anixx wrote:

Anixx, I believe you're in love with KDE 3.5.

I am OK with Gnome, KDE3, Windows and many other DEs (I think E17 would be good as well if it was not so buggy, also I am OK with OS/2 workplace, BeOS, IceWM and so on). There is nothing special in KDE3 and it is definitely worser than Windows is. The problem with KDE4 is not in that it is worser, but in that it is unusable.

Spoken of course out of your opinion and observations based on your experience (opinion which may well be shared by others - granted). Do keep in mind that there are many of us who find KDE4 perfectly usable, and that's why we are here trying to help resolve these apparent shortcomings that you are running into - most of which can be resolved by following the suggested changes in config/setup, the rest which require changes to the desktop itself will require the appropriate requests (in brainstorm for ideas new to KDE4, in bugs.kde.org for things that are already part of KDE4 but are broken).

What's wrong with embracing the resources that KDE 4 presents, like plasma with its widgets? Yes they use a different widget style from the rest of the applications, but most of the themes for plasma look a lot better than the general widget styles anyway. If you want the widget appearance to disappear entirely, there are (or should be - shouldn't be too hard to make) themes with completely transparent backgrounds that you can use. So icons for removable media on your desktop = transparent theme + device plasmoid (with the added functionality that the plasmoid provides). Plus you get the added benefit of having all of the devices nicely organized in their own container (similar to the Places gadget in e17, if you use that).

Why do you really need spatial mode for a file browser? Are you really that visually oriented that you can only recognize a folder by the location of the file browser window on the desktop? I can kind of understand spatial mode for a few select folders which are used frequently, but with very complicated (depth*breadth) folder structures the usability of spatial mode breaks down due to the quantity of windows whose locations you have to memorize in order to reach par for efficiency as compared to navigational mode. How is it really that much more usable that it is a blocker for you? BTW, plasma's Folder View widget provides a nice folder preview which provides a rudimentary spatial mode (albeit limited in that you can't move or resize the preview and the size and position of the items in the previews are fixed).
On the other hand, the use spatial mode setting in Konqueror being broken is a bug that needs to be fixed, so submit a bug to bugs.kde.org to get that resolved.

KDE 4 is unusable? This is 2011, not 2008. You obviously don't need your hand held through the process so either accept how to use it or stop trolling.

It is unusable for me. It is feature-incomplete, buggy, extremely unstable, has visual garbage and so on.

What's wrong with embracing the resources that KDE 4 presents, like plasma with its widgets?

I already said what is wrong with Plasma. Aside that Plasma creates totally perverted user experience, its very design is a complete negligence of the reliability theory. Plasma will crash forever.

So icons for removable media on your desktop = transparent theme + device plasmoid (with the added functionality that the plasmoid provides).

This sounds like hacking: making a window's background transparent so than its contents looks like as it it is on the desktop. And no, I do not want transparent panel.

Why do you really need spatial mode for a file browser?

Because navigational mode in perverted and unusable. when you enter a folder, you cannot access the previous folder any more. You cannot copy and move files by mouse. To move a file you have to "cut" it and then insert, compared to just moving by mouse. And also navigational file managers look completely ugly (Dolphin looks ugly even when embedded in Konqueror).

Spatial mode is THE BASIC feature of any desktop. It presents in any desktop strting from mid-1980s, starting with Xerox Star: In MacOS, OS/2, GEM, Windows (starting with W95), Gnome, KDE3, ROX, E17, LXDE, BeOS, Haiku - everywhere. Only in Win 3.1 and Xfce this mode is absent (in the letter because it is considered "light desktop" with limited funbctionality. That said KDE4 cannot provide even the very basic desktop features. What to say about more advanced?

Anixx wrote:

So icons for removable media on your desktop = transparent theme + device plasmoid (with the added functionality that the plasmoid provides).

This sounds like hacking: making a window's background transparent so than its contents looks like as it it is on the desktop. And no, I do not want transparent panel.

It isn't a hack, it is part of how plasma is designed. Plasma makes it easy for widgets to look like they are part of the desktop or not, depending on what the user prefers. There are actually quite a few transparent themes, indicating that this is a pretty popular feature.

Second, you can have an opaque panel with transparent desktop widgets, the screenshot I posted earlier had that (when I say opaque, I mean either completely opaque or partially transparent). And it doesn't depend on the theme, either, you can set an opaque theme for the panel with a different wholly transparent theme for the desktop widgets. The theme I showed came like this, but another one I tried had a fully transparent panel as well.

One of the big advantages of plasma is its flexibility. Things that would require ugly hacks in other desktop environments don't in plasma.

Anixx wrote:

Why do you really need spatial mode for a file browser?

Because navigational mode in perverted and unusable. when you enter a folder, you cannot access the previous folder any more. You cannot copy and move files by mouse. To move a file you have to "cut" it and then insert, compared to just moving by mouse.

That is why we have tabs, split view, breadcrumb bar, tree view, columns view, and ctrl+n. You can even put a "new window" button right in your toolbar. The advantage of all of these is that you don't need every single folder you visited to remain open, you only need the folders you know you are going to work with. This eliminates a lot of clutter from windows you don't and won't need, making it much more efficient.

The fact that nobody submitted a bug report about the spatial mode in konqueror being broken indicates how just how important it is to users.

Anixx wrote:

What's wrong with embracing the resources that KDE 4 presents, like plasma with its widgets?

I already said what is wrong with Plasma. Aside that Plasma creates totally perverted user experience, its very design is a complete negligence of the reliability theory. Plasma will crash forever.

What is this "reliability theory" that you speak of and where is your proof that plasma's design/architecture neglects it?

Why do you really need spatial mode for a file browser?

Because navigational mode in perverted and unusable. when you enter a folder, you cannot access the previous folder any more. You cannot copy and move files by mouse. To move a file you have to "cut" it and then insert, compared to just moving by mouse. And also navigational file managers look completely ugly (Dolphin looks ugly even when embedded in Konqueror).

One could come back and say that spatial mode is perverted and unusable. You clutter your workspace with a mass of unused windows. On the other hand, you can achieve mouse-only navigation in Dolphin by utilizing the split-window feature (typically called twin-panel file management): navigate to one folder you want to work with, hit the split window button and navigate to the next folder in the new pane, perform your move/copy using the mouse. When you're done you can un-split the window or close the single window. No need to close the half-a-dozen different intermediate folders that were only opened in order to navigate to the destination.

Spatial mode is THE BASIC feature of any desktop. It presents in any desktop strting from mid-1980s, starting with Xerox Star: In MacOS, OS/2, GEM, Windows (starting with W95), Gnome, KDE3, ROX, E17, LXDE, BeOS, Haiku - everywhere. Only in Win 3.1 and Xfce this mode is absent (in the letter because it is considered "light desktop" with limited funbctionality. That said KDE4 cannot provide even the very basic desktop features. What to say about more advanced?

If it is so "BASIC" then why do most modern desktop environments set their file managers to navigational modes by default? Windows switched at least as early as XP, Gnome (nautilus) switched not too long ago in version 2.30. I don't recall it ever being the default in KDE3.5. Granted most of these have options to switch between one or the other.

airdrik wrote:

Anixx wrote:I already said what is wrong with Plasma. Aside that Plasma creates totally perverted user experience, its very design is a complete negligence of the reliability theory. Plasma will crash forever.

What is this "reliability theory" that you speak of and where is your proof that plasma's design/architecture neglects it?

This issue is that a crash in one widget can bring down all of plasma (although not javascript widgets, which are sandboxes). This is a valid issue, but it Annix presents it as the only thing they should have taken into account when designing plasma, that no other consideration could possibly justify not following it. However, it is often necessary in a great many software and hardware designs to not follow this rule because it interferes with basic functionality, greatly reduces performance, or makes it too complicated to be feasible in practice (or, in plasma's case, all three).

It is also not like this is unique to Plasma. A crash in your windows XP file browser will bring down your entire desktop and taskbar, and a crash in your desktop or taskbar will bring down all your open file managers. Yet annix is quite happy with XP despite it breaking the same rule that justifies rejecting all of KDE 4.

airdrik wrote:Granted most of these have options to switch between one or the other.

As does konqueror in KDE 4, technically, but the option is not working.

TheBlackCat wrote:

airdrik wrote:What is this "reliability theory" that you speak of and where is your proof that plasma's design/architecture neglects it?

This issue is that a crash in one widget can bring down all of plasma (although not javascript widgets, which are sandboxes). This is a valid issue, but it Annix presents it as the only thing they should have taken into account when designing plasma, that no other consideration could possibly justify not following it. However, it is often necessary in a great many software and hardware designs to not follow this rule because it interferes with basic functionality, greatly reduces performance, or makes it too complicated to be feasible in practice (or, in plasma's case, all three).

Hopefully that'll eventually be fixed too. Have you read Aaron Seigo's blog post plasma in 18-24 months?

QML needs some adjustments to take advantage of this, but if/when that work gets done it would allow Plasma to run each Plasmoid in its own thread. (Note: this is different from multi-process.) That would mean that any pausing in a given Plasmoid or other user interface components would cause no annoyances in the rendering or interaction with any other part of the user interface. It would also enable fairly trivial resource management: we could then track per-Plasmoid memory and CPU consumption, for instance.

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/10/plasma-in-18-24-months.html

Annix presents it as the only thing they should have taken into account when designing plasma, that no other consideration could possibly justify not following it.

No. I just said that Plasma is unreliable by design. For some people Plasma crashes are not so important because it provides other functionality they like.

Yet annix is quite happy with XP despite it breaking the same rule that justifies rejecting all of KDE 4.

The difference with XP is that the file manager and the panel were not designed to be indefinitely extensible there. KDE4 supposes that there should be hundreds of plug-ins, including those by third-parties, and some not updated for the most recent API, with different functions, including access to hardware, each of which can cause the plasma crash.

On the other hand, I agree that this one thing was done badly on XP: when a file manager tried to access a bad-written CD or a network drive over unreliable connection, the taskbar became unusable. The separation between the taskbar and file manager was one of the advantages of Linux over Windows desktop I experienced.