This is the last time I’ll address this issue, because everyone knows the KDE developers and fans aren’t going to listen anyway. However, I’m pretty sure what follows is the sentiments shared by everyone the developers and fans are trying to ignore.
Obviously your minds are closed. For those who pretend you don’t understand, it’s only possible because you don’t want to understand. I’d use foul language but it won’t help you understand, so I’m going to state things clearly once and for all, and then you can stop pretending you care. Let’s start by defining the terms:
good software Good software is software that does what I want, the way I want to do it. Since no one can read my mind, there is obviously a certain amount of compromise between my internal standard of perfection and your standard of perfection when writing and packaging the code. Thus, “good software” is that which most closely approximates what I would have if I could write my own.
better software Better software is good software with fewer bugs. Better software does what it’s actually supposed to do according to claims and promises.
When KDE 3 reached a certain point in development, it became the ultimate for an awful lot of folks, on an awful lot of Open Source operating systems. I won’t try to nail it down to details; it hit the great middle ground of what a vast stretch of humanity actually wanted. It had a huge fan base. This despite being very buggy at times. Everyone I knew who liked it agreed with me if the developers would stop adding new features and just fix the bugs, we’d think we had died and gone to computer heaven. We were that much in love with it.
Then you developers just dropped it. We were heartbroken. You stopped fixing it and started crafting all these really new features we didn’t want and couldn’t use. You took something great and screwed it up completely. Many of us who loved KDE 3 hated 4; hate it still. I can’t pretend I know an actual count, but I have read more reviews of both KDE 3 and 4, and comparisons, from more sources than almost any human I know, plus a very large amount of personal comments. What the developers and current fans don’t get is that a really large portion of us will not ever like what you did, adding all these new features we utterly hate, and dropping the ones we really liked, and changing the underlying nature of how it works to something we refuse to touch.
Don’t ask for a list. That’s just an excuse to avoid the primary issue that you don’t care what we need. Not only did you never deliver on the promises of KDE 3, but you dropped it and moved so far away from it we wonder why you bothered to keep the same name.
KDE 3 was good for a thousand individual reasons, and we loved it as a whole. KDE 4 is different enough it might as well be everything we hate. We don’t care what you think is “better” or “improved”. The only “better” we would accept is “less buggy”. If you don’t understand how KDE 4 is not as good, we have to question your intelligence.
But the simplest answer is this: You don’t give a damn for what we KDE 3 fans liked about it. If you did, you would try to understand. Since you don’t, stop pretending you care. You are infuriating, nauseating, and your attempts to sell something which actually cripples our machines as some imaginary improvement is considerably worse than lame. I’ll type it one more time, slowly, so maybe you’ll understand:
KDE 3 was good because it came close to what we wanted. KDE 4 is bad because it’s so far away from what we wanted, it’s worse than no GUI at all.
When you can understand what is actually different between 3 and 4 in terms of user experience, you may actually have a clue about designing software people will like. Right now, the commandline is better than KDE 4. Further, I could care less how you react or label this kind of rant. You have made yourselves our enemies in many important ways. We will never forgive you.
I can already anticipate one intellectually dishonest response: “People hate change.” When “change” means fixing bugs, improving the underlying libraries, or making elements of the interface more consistent and not filling up the error logs with gigabytes of background chatter, we love change. When “change” means you promise to show us the moon, then board up our house with us inside, no we do not like it. I can’t imagine where you get your information from, but whomever told you it was good and right to arrogantly presume to re-engineer your users by attempting to force upon them changes in their computer habits, it’s time you went back and took a few courses which would help you understand why computers exist. If we are approaching Skynet, it’s time we hunted down every computer geek and shot them dead. If you understand computers exist to serve human needs, then perhaps you won’t be so arrogant. KDE 4 is not a Desktop Environment; it’s a cellphone UI. We want our desktop back. We liked KDE 3 because it came closest out of all the offerings to meeting us where we lived. KDE 4 is no better than GNOME 3, and the KDE Project has become more abusive and insensitive to users than the GNOME Project. Even Macheads get more respect from their supplier than you offered us.
All I’ve done is distill the complaints of literally hundreds of people who bothered to comment at all. Therefore, if you find you agree with the above rant, you may steal the whole thing and copy at will, posting wherever you like and sign your own name. More than anything else, I want folks to blast this message in-your-face with the idiots who keep pretending they just don’t understand, as if there could not possibly be a valid complaint with KDE 4.
Addenda This is an aging post someone linked somewhere. I just wanted to note I’ve already reviewed the Trinity Desktop Project, and love the idea.
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One of the things I quickly learned about Unix/Linux was the following: Don’t get attached to any WM b/c eventually it will change in a way that you won’t like. I remember when I first tried CDE. I loved it. Then they changed it. I moved to RH6.2 and tried GnomeX.X?? and hated it. Then I tried XFCE and loved it since it worked almost like CDE. Then they changed it to mimic the apple panel; which I hate. So then I started to use KDE3 series. As you said, golden. Then 4 rolled out and I moved to Gnome2.2?? with Ubuntu and loved it. It had the upper task bar which I hate but it could be moved so with a little tweaking, I had a system that I wanted. We now have Unity and again it starts all over again with finding a “usable for my requirements” WM. But unlike fanboys of other OSs, I have no issue telling it like it is. WM are a moving target and it shouldn’t be that way.
Excellent article! However, rumours of KDE3.5.x’s death are greatly exaggerated. It lives on as the Trinity Desktop Environment (http://www.trinitydesktop.org/), and is actively developed even today by a small group of volunteers. So, before switching to another desktop (or operating system, as some have), why not give TDE a try?
Timothy, as busy as you must be, you forgot that I posted a positive review on this blog already. That’s okay.
I’ve tested your current release and it doesn’t work for me on this Scientific Linux 6 machine. Far too many ways in which it is not integrated in the underlying system, so the older GNOME 2 which comes default is good enough. I don’t expect you to change Trinity development to suit me, and I won’t be changing to another distro chasing a workable TDE. Thanks for stopping by.
I know EXACTLY how you feel. I still, proudly, use kubuntu 8.04 and would rather go back to the abacus than use kde4. The truly annoying thing about it all is how good KDE3 was (is) – the ‘perfect’ user-friendly desktop. All they had to do was ‘look after it’, or slowly ‘improve it’, but developers want to show off. What we want doesn’t count. They want to create the ‘wow factor’. They DID.
KDE4 – WOW, what a piece of garbage!
Thank you for the heads up; I linked to this article from another source and did not realise that a follow-up article had already been posted.
While TDE didn’t work out for you, thank you for trying it anyway, and for writing your earlier review. I do understand your desire to stick with a specific distribution, being a die-hard Debian/Ubuntu user myself, and don’t ask that you change just to use a specific DE. 😉
I’ve relinked my TDE review in this post above, but it’s here.
Could not have said it better. Even if this last post is more than a year ago: KDE is still as complicated and cumbersome as it could be. I like it, and I frequently come back to it from other DEs, but, tell it like it is: it is complicated. Open the systemsettings: Options spread widely around, after using KDE for many years now I still have to search for the options I want – there is no real system behind that icon order IMHO. Look at multi monitor configuration. UI like before GNOME 2 times, 1990ies. Network manager. Cumbersome as hell, much clutter, no way to *easily* see the network status, but “nice” graph of net traffic – who has ever needed that *really*? After years of development, it is still not fluent and easy to just add a programm to the Panel. There are some ways to do it, but all lack of usability or speed, or are buggy. (try to add a shell script, for e.g. PyCharm. Good luck, you have to write your own .desktop file by hand; drag&dropped apps are created as “plasmoids” in the Panel, which have VERY weird behaviour when reordered; “Task Manager” is the best approach until now, but does not support d&d icons onto it. Embarrassing)
So.
If I had a few free wishes:
* remove that “Activity” nonsense alltogether. noone needs it, really.
* start a “modern” UI approach. Why having “Apply” buttons cluttering the UI of dialogs. Gnome is much better here.
* Remove 30-50% of the cluttering options and autodetect these settings.
I know this will not come true.
Why? Hm, therefore. It is completely done wrong, from the beginning of it’s existence.
I know almost nothing about coding on that level, nor do I have a clue who’s who in KDE development, so I’ll take your word for it. My point is that someone is trying to answer a need, a known desire of users. I wonder if you care as much about users or simply enjoy sniping? I have no idea what your position is in regards to KDE development, so it’s a question I think other readers might ask. This post was more about developer attitudes and responsiveness to users as it was about development itself.
Oh, I’m no real programmer neither. I second your position on KDE as I came across your site when I myself want(ed?) to start some sort of kde-rant blog (in Austria).
I think KDE has incredible features, and a really solid base, but they lack of knowing-the-difference-what-is-important-for-users-and-what-not.
As Martin Gräßlin suggests, it would be a really good opportunity to start a KDE3-like DE with the underlying technology of KDE4. Or, IMHO, start a really good working DE like GNOME, with KDE technology. It’s just because we all must decide: Do I want to have an easy system to get my work done, but with a bad future, and not very dophisticated tools (GNOME), and old, outdated, error-prone, insecure system (Trinity), or a shiny, new-tech, blinky system, that concentrates on desktop effects and new, immature features with every new release, but lacks of SOLID working tools (KDE).
This comparison mirrors my inner conflict, which DE to take.
Don’t get me wrong. I love KDE, really. But I can’t see why so many features are worked on (*sigh, again*), but the basic features do not work (have you ever tried in Kubuntu to copy files via bluetooth to an android device? Plugged in an android device, which on the same system with Ubuntu/GNOME both works perfectly? Did you ever find ANYTHING you wanted, in the systemsettings panel, first try? Have you tried to drag’n’drop an icon into the taskbar as quicklauncher – and desparated upon the whacky twitching of the icons – which ALL other DEs XFCE, GNOME, Unity, KDE3, LXDE, and Windows XP! do *perfectly*?)
All these “papercuts”, how Canonical calls them, are disturbing the daily work with KDE.
Using an old-fashioned version of KDE and revamping it does not help here at all.
The main-stream KDE must undergo a very clear change IMHO, if they want to get accepted as DE that can be used in an e.g. business environment (which includes stable home computing as well…)
So, If I had learned programming for work, I would definitely try to make kde better a bit. But even if I can do a few things in C++/Qt, I am no real coder, and I can only use my spare time trying to to bug reports.
Thanks for clarifying. We agree, then, that we sincerely wish developers would listen to someone besides the fanboys.
Definitely.