Submitted by “KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform that provides the foundation for KDE software. Version 4.7 of these releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance.”
I’m a KDE user, and even if I would never change it for Gnome, I continue to miss the lack of focus and polish of Apple. Activities, for example, feel like a great idea in theory. But the UI and the interaction with is crap. And by this I mean: I’m a geek and I don’t use it because it’s too confusing. I always have my apps in full screen so I can’t click on the desktop, and I can’t bother to learn keyboard shortcuts, so to access the Activities UI, I’ve to go to “Panel options -> add widgets”. I don’t understand why the Activities button needs to be in the same place I add widgets to a panel (and I don’t understand why they share the same window shape). I don’t know what happens when I create a new activity, I don’t know what happens when I press the “stop” button, I don’t know what happens when I delete an Activity. I feel like I’m losing the control of what happens in my desktop, so I just don’t use it. It feels like an UI done by a software engineer…
And then there is plasma. I really like the idea behind plasma, but I don’t understand why the modularity and complexity of configuration of plasma has to show up on the UI. A normal user should be allowed to delete the default panel and the menu button? Also
And there are some small things that make me feel like I’m back into the 90’s, like these stupid “did you know… / check this checkbox if you don’t to see this dialog again” in some apps, or the “are you sure you want to quit? / don’t ask this again”.
Well, maybe this post is proof that I should try another desktop shell…one that is not kde/gnome :/
Are you talking about this particular KDE 4.7 release?
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/plasma.php
“Plasma’s Activities have seen many improvements, the Activity Manager now takes a more prominent place in the default panel in Plasma Desktop.”
If you are talking about some previous release of KDE/Plasma, exactly what relevance has your comment to this thread?
BTW, if you use all your applications full-screen, then you really do not need activites at all. So just don’t use them. If you don’t want to use them, and they don’t fit into your workflow patterns, then fine, but how does that fact constitute valid criticism of KDE4? It isn’t as though use of activities is required in any way, and other people may find activities very useful even if you don’t.
PS: How can you possibly call Mac OSX “polished” compared to KDE if you look objectively at, for just one example, the lack of a decent file manager for OSX compared to the default Dolphin in KDE4?
Your post sounds very, very much like someone who is desperate to find some kind of criticism of KDE, and is now clutching at straws.
Edited 2011-07-27 23:45 UTC
While I find Dolphin to be a much more capable file manager to Finder, there are lots of niggles that really get me down still in kde4. When I’m using linux it is my DE of choice, but for all the design faults in osx, I find it much more consistent in terms of feel than I do kde (even bugs are consistent in osx).
Edited 2011-07-28 00:01 UTC
There are indeed almost-intangible annoyances that come down to strictly user preferences. For example, I find “global menus” of Mac OSX, where the menu is miles away from the application it refers to, and can oh-so-easily be confused when there are multiple applications running, to be insanely annoying, and hence an incredibly poor design from a Human Engineering point of view.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Mac_OSX_Lion_screen.p…
Your comment makes no real objective case at all that Apple’s OSX OS is any more “polished” than KDE SC 4.7. Out of the box, KDE SC 4.7 is, however, objectively far more functional than OSX Lion.
Edited 2011-07-28 00:39 UTC
No I didn’t. I don’t really feel the need to get into long lists. But as an immediate example I’ll go for two.
Kwin. A very capable window manager, far more flexible than anything you’re going to get anywhere else. However it still randomly slows down and starts losing a ton of frames. It also starts slowing down when I have lots of windows open. It still goes bonkers when I need to plug in a second screen. Also I find it really annoying when windows dragged into the screen edges do not return to their original shape (drag it to the edge let it resize,close it, then open it again….aargh)
Plasma. Randomly starts chewing on 100% of one of my cpu cores and does not let go. Most of the time it is fine, but it is really annoying to go to my pc in the morning and finding that plasma has turned my pc into central heating overnight.
In regards to the menu bar. I generally prefer it, but I does fall down on large/multiple screens. However on small screens it is a rather good example of Fitts law.
Ahh, you are talking about performance polish, rather than design UI polish.
Point taken. However, as always, one must consider the differing situations. Apple controls the whole stack from the hardware inside to the software that runs on it. KDE just does the GUI side. I have noticed wierd performance problems from Kwin as well … with some graphics chips/ drivers. KDE 4.7 should help in this regard as its targeting a more limited subset of Open GL. This should be easier for video cards to support.
Never had a plasma cpu problem. Not sure what that is about, if you run into it consistently you may want to file a bug report on it. They’re fairly good at responding.
Just on this topic of “consistency”, there is a note made about the Plasma Workspace improvements in this KDE 4.7 release:
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/plasma.php
I think people will find that GNOME/GTK+ applications running under KDE4 are far more consistent with the rest of KDE4 applications under the KDE Plasma desktop than is the case in the vice versa situation (i.e. individual KDE4 applications running under the GNOME desktop environment I am told are quite jarring).
Edited 2011-07-28 01:37 UTC
I can very easily call Mac OSX “polished” compared to KDE. Oh god it flows like hot butter. OSX is polished compared to KDE. Polished.
I found a description on Slashdot where someone was trying to explain what KDE’s “activities” were all about.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2352426&cid=36915842
Mac OSX has nowhwere near the power and polish of KDE. Compared to KDE4, Mac OSX is as dull as dishwater, inflexible and awkward to use.
Dull, inflexible and awkward. Almost completely lacking in polish.
Edited 2011-07-29 05:28 UTC
Repeat it enough times and maybe it will become true….
I have a macbook pro with Lion, which I use every day. It feels fluent, easy to use, but when compared with the power of KDE, it is really a dwarf, especially in the area of window management, activities, and network transparency. Heck, even the shell in a mac is a pain. Have you ever typed “ls * -l”?
When one is used to the power of KDE, any alternative desktop environment makes you feel in bondage.
really like kwin, but Its compositing performance really gets to me. (also having to kill it every time I plug in a monitor makes me go “grrr”)
Can’t seem to make use of them, Virtual desktops are enough for me.
what does this give me beyond what I get from mounting shares?
You are not required to use terminal.app. There are others iTerm. Also, if bash is getting you down, you can always use zsh (there by default).
My main point is, yes, kde is more flexible and more powerful in many instances, but some of the rough edges (the exact opposite of polished) really irritate and detract from my workflow.
Where KDE has great power and a few rough edges, Mac OSX is simply utterly lacking in functionality and lagging well behind the pack. If it were a golf tournament, Mac OSX would be likely to miss the cut, it is so far off the pace.
Yeah, YMMV. It could be a driver problem. I did not have any problem myself. But I believe you. On the other hand, 4.7 has kwin compositing code cleaned up. may see some improvement. You sometimes need time for it to mature, like I have waited for Mac OSX
Neither did I believe it was useful, until I tried, and liked it. It is more in line with Lion’s saving application status when you quit, but much more powerful and flexible. Lion’s document autosave is still miles ahead of everyone else though.
Maybe one does not want to open up his/her server(s) with SMB or NFS, yet still wants to manage it with ssh?
So one needs to learn a new shell before he/she uses Mac? Why don’t Apple fix up those idiotic things in Mac for us?
Sure I see your point. It is just that some of us do not experience the same distraction from KDE as you did, but instead feel bondage because of idiotic choices made by Apple, and have no hope to fix it but to pray that somehow apple will have mercy on us.
That is why the command line exists. If I want to move files there are ftp programs that do the trick. Ssh has really rotten performance when treating it as mounted filesystem.
zsh is hardly new, and pretty much anything that works with bash works with zsh. Everybody who uses the shell a lot should use zsh.
zsh FTW!
Yeah, it is curious. GNOME irritates the hell out of me, but OSX doesn’t. Maybe it is because I feel that foss shouldn’t be reductive, whereas I can understand the reasons for OSX being the way it is.
Mac OSX is lacking not only the areas of window management, activities, and network transparency, as you say, but also file management of OSX is abysmal, and the UI is awkward for example with global menus.
Mac OSX is really lagging well behind other desktops for usability and polish.
This is my pet peeve with KDE, together with the restart/shutdown confirmation which is enabled by default. They are annoying because there was a time when KDE didn’t have such nonsense dialogs.
Really? It has been a life saver for me. You can’t imagine how many times I have unwittingly pressed on the power button of my Mac book pro when I hold it in my hand.
I like the new feature where you can tell KDE to restart/shutdown but load another OS on the next boot (on a multi-boot machine).
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/platform.php
AFAIK KDE SC 4.7 is the only desktop on the planet that can do that.
Edited 2011-07-28 05:45 UTC
Actually, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana has option to select boot environment from its gnome restart/shutdown dialog. So nothing new, they have had this functionality for years now
Correct, it’s nothing new. It has been in KDE for years too, in KDE 3 and 4 both(Perhaps even KDE 2). The only new part is that it now also works with GRUB 2. So for users used to distributions using different boot loaders like LILO, GRUB 1 and whatever Solaris uses, this is nothing new.
True. For example, in Windows I clicked on “Shutdown” and the system started to go down, without anything that I could do.
Plasma Workspaces become more portable thanks to KWin
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/plasma.php
Updated KDE Applications Bring Many Exciting Features
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/applications.php
Improved Multimedia and Semantic Capabilities in KDE Platform
http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/platform.php
This update further improves many areas of the KDE4 desktop experience. Having said that, the KDE-integrated Office suite component of the KDE Software Collection, now call Calligra Office, is not due for a corresponding update release until October.
Unless they fixed a lot between RC2 and final which is unlikely as some bugs are still open, there are some regressions in this release.
strigi doesn’t correctly index my files anymore.
kdepim shows a lot of ‘conflict’ messages.
But overall, 4.7rc2 was very usable and very fast.
Hopefully 4.7.1 will fix the remaining bugs
“kdepim shows a lot of ‘conflict’ messages”
you mean those where you have to choose between left or right version, and i have no idea what i end up with when selecting either of those? anoyiiing as hell!!1!1
I don’t know about you but I’m waiting for 4.8. Just one more version and it’ll be perfect.
1) The webpage http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/platform.php says “In order to get the most out of these releases, we strongly recommend to use the latest version of Qt, as of today 4.7.4”, but Qt’s webpage http://qt.nokia.com/ indicates that the latest release of Qt is 4.7.3.
2) One ‘Anonymous’ user at http://dot.kde.org/2011/07/26/release-47-new-features-improved-stab… claims that they totally changed in the indexing code of Strigi and Nepomuk between KDE4.7RC2 and KDE4.7.
I really, really hope that he’s only a troll, otherwise new code == buggy code..
New code might also mean “working code” since what we had before didn’t.
Sure but why not add a RC to check if it is working instead of releasing untested code?
There are two possibilities:
– either the code is not very important, then you make it optional and if you don’t have the time to properly test it then you make it disabled by default (with the documentation which explain how to enable it for those who want the feature)
– either the code is important, then you take the time to properly test it, delaying the release if necessary.
Any other option is just unprofessional.
It might be properly tested and still new. I honestly don’t know. They obviously had a whole six month cycle (if not more) to develop and test the code. In perfect world, they wouldn’t make it live unless it had been tested properly, but I know that the Akonadi/Strigi/Nepomuk folks don’t seem to care much about that.
What is much more serious than Akonadi/Strigi/Nepomuk folks not testing properly is that the other KDE devs let them release their code this way, enabled by default.
They should really understand that what is enabled by default is part of the “core” of KDE and any bad part reflect badly on the whole..
My main wish is to get an easy way to totally disable akonadi, nepomuk and strigi.
I keep my files very organized, use thunderbird as my email client and, frankly, don´t have a use for supra-cited facilities.
I welcome the others improvements, big thanks to KDE developers
I’m mostly with you. They are very badly implemented and the developers seem too arrogant to care that their products are shite for most people.
However, even if you keep your files organized, it’s still nice to be able to do what amounts to a google search for your files from the main menu or KRunner. On Windows and OS X, it works pretty well and I make much use of it there, even with proper file organization. It’d be great if KDE could get it to work like that (or better).
I have the same gripes with the search crap. I need none of it. But on the other hand i only use KDE as a desktop once or twice after a new release is made, then always go back to AmiWM. The software collection is just awsome in other regards, and QT is just amazing as a toolkit in some usages. As it stands at the moment i find it surpassing GTK+2* in every way i can think of. It might change, but i removed most GTK apps that i do not need and use the QT equivalents where applicable, (there is still a few that does not have one though.) and i do not miss the removed apps.
I am working on some code to get AmiWM to render fonts with antialiasing in the window titles and desktop, a full icon theme, and finally a way to display the icons from within the DE globaly to scale every icon to a certain size. I do not know if marcus will accept them to his repo, but perhaps he will. And i will for certain share them as modules in any case.
I just have to say i would love if you made that code available. That is a feature i have wanted in Amiwm for ages!
(I made this account just to make this comment.)
EDIT: If i commented improperly, it was ment for judgen.
Edited 2011-07-28 17:10 UTC
Also, what apps that you use does not have a QT equivalent? Just curious.
I completely agree… I’ve lost track of the number of times akonadi and nepomuk have crashed… they’ve been some of the longest-running crashers from the 4.0.x series all the way to the latest I tried, which was 4.5.x or 4.6.x (can’t remember). Either way, the crashing never fails to piss me off still, and all for some stupid file indexing and search tools? Seriously? Some distros seem less prone to crash, but still–nothing would beat just disabling the damn things. They serve no useful purpose as far as I can tell, and if they did, their instability would crush it.
Edited 2011-07-28 17:19 UTC
Just installed KDE SC 4.7 through the Kubuntu backports ppa. Amazingly, Nepomuk and Strigi *finally* work as advertised. I was able to do a search for a show I tagged back in KDE 4.3, and every episode with that tag immediately came up.
This pleases me.
Edit: Tagging large numbers of files crashes dolphin. Oh well, baby steps.
Edited 2011-07-30 03:38 UTC
I installed 4.7 on a openSUSE 11.4 laptop and it’s nice. The KDE announcement page claims it’s a “one click install” but in reality, as with many things linux, it was many clicks (YAST conflicts) and no average-Joe user would have been able to do it. In that regard, I think it fails as an upgrade option for many KDE 4.6 or less users.
Yes, it lacks a lot of visual polish but is functional and helps rather than hinders.
Edited 2011-08-01 05:45 UTC