Thinkpads Forum

I saw this just posted at the Mandrivausers.org Portal.

Groklaw - KDE on KDE 4.0

Groklaw wrote:There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed.
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11 Myths About KDE 4
~ by Sebastian Kügler, KDE e.V. Board of Directors
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this article is pretty much everything I had to track down after not realizing kubuntu 8.10 would wipe out kde3 on my x31.

it's really nice to have it all collected in one place, thanks for posting. for some reason groklaw has dropped from my habitual morning news perusal, I'll have to remedy that.

as much as I dislike kde4 right now, I do get that it's not nearly complete. eventually it will, I hope, get back most of the functionality of kde3. much of that is basically applets/widgets that plasma has yet to replicate; this seems to be the main complaint of most users.

I don't particularly dislike the new vista-style menu even though I still prefer the old-style menu. it's pretty sad that root/admin mode is still missing from the new system settings / kcontrol replacement.

as the article mentions, a lot of work had already been done to support kicker and kdesktop in kde4. in fact, on my x31 even though most of kde3 is missing, I was able to run kicker and get back some of the tray applets that are really important to me (e.g. kima)

I have this feeling that there is a lot of bloat in terms of animations and compiz graphics and plasma visuals. I was able to turn off all this sort of stuff in kde3, but with phonon and plasma becoming so integral that won't be possible anymore. it's not like kde3 didn't have more than its fair share of bloat and it's not like my machines don't have enough grunt to run kde4. guess I am just turning into a crotchety old man... maybe I will dig up my beos5 cd and run that instead, or qnx or something.

I may switch to xubuntu or the like. but there are always kde bits that I love and would use regardless: k3b is amazing; konqueror is not bad as a browser (still use firefox half the time) and pretty kickass as a file manager; amarok also superb; kaffeine can be quirky but decent, sometimes I still use mplayer cli; digikam is brilliant; gwenview is not bad; knetworkmanager has been quite buggy in past but getting really better; kvpnc is solid and useful; krfb/krdc is perfect. my favorite of all: yakuake -- it seems like such a small thing but has made such a difference in my daily life.

kopete I cannot stand, and much prefer pidgin. same goes for kmail, thunderbird is just so much better. not too many other gnome apps I use these days. I do have to credit kde for making much better mozilla integration in kde4, the change is really quite noticeable.

DKB, thanks for the link, highly informative. I want to try out KDE4 just for kicks to see what the hullabaloo is all about