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.
