Opinionated rant follows…
KDE died for me with the birth of the new philosophy in KDE 4. Granted, the Trinity Project keeps hope alive, but frankly that community lacks the resources for delivering the goods beyond the Kubuntu desktop. I’m not a coder and I’ve already tried to promote it so others would join the project, but it’s just a little short of where I need it to be.
GNOME is going down the same path. GNOME 3 is already proving to be the same disaster, and so far, no one has appeared on the horizon to save GNOME 2. The Ubuntu replacement is Unity — a touchscreen cellphone layout forced to fit on the desktop. Sorry, but that doesn’t meet my needs. Indeed, the whole gamut of KDE/GNOME/Unity stands back and sneers at my needs. From my experience in the computer tech support ministry, I’d say the vast majority of ordinary computer users agree with me.
For those who find the RHEL 6 clones usable, you’ll have a stable late edition of GNOME 2 for the next seven to ten years. So far as I know, that’s the last great hope for sane workable desktops. That leaves only one option on the horizon if you don’t have time to twiddle and fiddle with the vast horde of window managers, all of which are either utterly devoid of integration (thus not a “desktop”), or are so foreign they make KDE 4 or Unity look downright homey.
This one last refuge of sanity: XFCE. I’m currently using Xubuntu’s latest release. It’s sane, but it’s different enough I’m not fully acquainted with all the details of configuration. Of course, it’s not GNOME or KDE, and it’s much less configurable in the first place. That’s okay. So far, the options offered are tolerable, and a few of them prove less is more. But it’s now developed to the state it’s a respectable desktop and I’ve already gotten at least one clueless user to adopt it. I’m holding out hope the insanity of the Linux eye-candy fanboy herd doesn’t infect the XFCE project, so that we have something to offer the vast horde of ordinary computer users who can’t tolerate Windows any longer.
I whole-heartedly agree. I was a huge fan of KDE until 4, and I’m just… shocked at how the developers really don’t seem to give a crap about their existing user base.
What really makes me angry is when new users, that never used KDE before, pick up KDE 4 and tell me it’s GREAT, and you know, what’s wrong?? Why am I such a jerk to not like it? And these guys have no idea what sort of power KDE 3 had.
I’m also really, really angry that things like Kate, , which I have come to depend on (every day, all day) have taken a huge step backwards in usability.
I am currently using XFCE and I like it for what it does, but I know that the things it doesn’t do are going to bite me one day. Text editing, for example. I need a great text editor for my work, but there’s no such thing for XFCE. So I end up using either the GNOME editor (gedit), but it’s light years behine what Kate3 was.
And I have used opensuse for years, and they ditched KDE3 right out from under those of us that WORK for a living.
For now I continue to use gedit, limping alone. But I will NEVER forget the ¤%!!! the KDE devs have put me through. I truly despise them at this point.
Yeah, Bud, I liked Kate, too. I’m down to using Cream/Vim for XHTML and Gedit for blogging. My needs are probably much simpler than yours.
I’m not too pleased with Unity either. It’s not intuitive enough. Where do windows go when you minimize them? Why can’t I launch another instance of a web browser when I click the icon? I don’t mind Mac OS type menus (top menu bar changes to match the app that is on top) but why does 3/4 of the app name get obscured when you mouse over the menus? The side bar is really distracting too. It’s a train wreck of a dog’s breakfast. I understand why the Gnome project rejected Ubuntu’s ideas for the future of Gnome.
Gnome 3 isn’t perfect either, but I like the spartan minimalist aesthetic. It is much less cluttered and behaves more consistently than Unity. I think with a couple of more relese cycles, it will be a nice desktop.