KDE 4.2 sucks
April 26th, 2009
… and I’m going to use it as an example of free software projects being capable of marketing crap as a good product.
I’m almost wishing KDE 3.5 gets forked and developed in a sane manner. And I’ve even considered testing out Gnome.
The people who said KDE 4.2 rocks, meant “in comparison to 4.1 or 4.0.” If KDE 4.2 is good in comparison to those, I never want to find out how horrible the earlier versions were.
Now, normally you’d start making bug reports about issues you find, but if the overall quality is sour crud, it’d make more sense to report what works.
And the answer to that is “a lot less than in KDE 3.5.”
KDE 4.2 still sucks. I just do not understand what’s the objective of the path this project took? KDE 3.5.x is fantastic and they just totally ruined a great WM. KDE4 is slow, buggy, crashes, let’s refer to it as Windows II.
The problem with KDE is that the developers stink. If you do report bugs they’ll just file them away under “UNCONFIRMED” and move on to adding more eye candy. There are major bugs in the KDE database going back 5 years or more that have showed up in every major release, still marked as “UNCONFIRMED” since no developer has ever taken the time to read them.
After having just given Kubuntu another chance, I went straight to google and searched for “kde sucks”. Thinking there had to be people who could relate to my frustration. An now, lucky blogger, I’m going to vent my frustration over this-a-way.
I like my desktop set up a certain way. So the first thing I do when I install is move things around to my liking. But:
- You can’t drag icons to the panel.
- You can’t easily re-arrange or put space between icons on the panel.
- The interface to adjust panel setting (width, screen placement, etc) is gaudy, bloated, and buggy.
- Stupid “K” fetish
- The damn wallet is required for wifi keys, then gets in the way of wifi connecting after I reboot
- Desktop on top of a desktop… why…?
- I installed KDE because I wanted to run Kompozer. Just a wild guess, but I assumed that because of the “K”, it’s happy native place would be KDE, right? Wrong. At least about the “happy” part. The insert -> form menu crashes the app every single time. I reinstalled with ubuntu, installed Kompozer, and it works perfectly.
- When I put a data CD into KDE, it pops up an empty window.. it sees the disk, but fails to mount it. Just opens a nice empty window for me, showing me where the binaries would have been had it been successful in opening the CD. Doesn’t show up under /media* either. Ubuntu, on the other hand, mounted it flawlessly.
- Stupid K menu. I don’t want to click a back arrow to go back to the root menu.
There’s more, believe me. And yeah, I know, it’s all customizable I’m sure. Buried somewhere deep under a million options and menus. But I do unix stuff all day at work, and the last thing I want to do is come home and fight with a bastardized buggy gaudy bloated version of what I deal with all day. I just want to relax and easily do my thing on an OS that I’m comfortable with. In that respect, for me, KDE 4.x is epic failure.
The KDE approach seems to be that the window manager is an application in and of itself. That people will spend hours enjoying the eye candy of changing the placement of their panel bar, messing with that goofy transparent mini-desktop, and Klicking Kopete from their K menu to Kontact their Komrades about how Kool Kwallet is.
Ugh. Sorry, I’m done.