In view of the upcoming release season (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Mandriva, Fedora...), what is your position now regarding KDE4?

Mine is to avoid distros which do not offer KDE3.5 at least as a choice (all my favourites do).

By the following release season I'll see how KDE4.2, or even 4.3 is doing and decide what to do next.

BTW, I find myself very much in agreement with this guy:

http://thelinuxrant.com/kde-4-sucks-big-time.html

"I do not like KDE4", said Sam I Am.

GNOME is so much better. (Except on openSUSE lol ) If I have to use KDE, I'd personally use 3.5

KDE4= crap.

I tend to agree here. Leave standard GNOME alone, it is fine as it is.




Two people who feel like me.

Well I tried openSUSE 11 with KDE4.1 and also like KDE4. I'm now using Gnome on Ubuntu 8.04, great performance and better graphics support (KDE4.1 doesn't work with my Nvidia card).

They just made KDE to bloated now.
I like a lot of the stuff it has but i want to add it myself so I can choose the kind I want.

Having been a long time KDE 3.x user before coming to OS X, I can't stand the current look of KDE 4.x

Icons are generally too big by default and layouts are less than optimal.

Just compare KDE System Settings window to OS X's System Preferences window and the difference is remarkable.
Simple things such as a slight shading between groups makes readability so much easier. (Vista's Control Panel in Category View doesn't do it either.)

Maybe in a few years KDE will approach this level, but for me, my days of "playing"/experimenting with the OS are over and I'm just looking for productivity.

Broken.

I think that KDE 4.1 is fine.

I don't understand why the UI is huge and then they slap on this tiny font.

Ugly.

Actually somebody said that "KDE3 is the best DE of the last 25 years".
I tend to agree with them, at least in terms of usability and features.

KDE4, OTOH leaves a lot to desire from those points of view.

Doing a pretty face is not all. KDE4 is just that. They need years of hard working to make it useful again

That is why I hope somebody keeps maintaining KDE3. Hell, that isn't a fork. That is keeping a DE loved by millions alive.

Viva la Gnome!!!!






Oh, oh I am sorry. What happened? I think I blacked out or something...

I'm a Gnome guy since 2.18

KDE 4 is the way forward, though I feel the "4.0" status was given far to early

Fluxbox is my favorite, so customizable, shame only a few distros (most of them obsolete) use it...

Make that three.

technically, KDE4(.1) is the best DE ever made. with its frameworks like phonon its really simple to build apps and integrate them in KDE.
the problem atm is that the designs and layouts aren't "finished" yet. they have to be refined to get the user experience people have with kde 3.5 but also see the benefits of the changes made to enhance KDE.

KDE4 vision is the right path to follow, it will take time, but once everything is pluged with everything, it will be even more user friendly than OSX. Everything will work with everything (akonadi, nepomuk, strigi, kjobs, plasma, solid and phonon have been designed to do that). The "port" will be long (KDE application are basically the same than in KDE3.5, just with QT4 and bigger toolbar). You will see, all will be better, it is a meter of time. The path that KDE took is hard to follow and will required a lot of effort, but it will pay. Gnome vision (or lack of) suck, they have met their goal and now add some useless bloat to it. They even start to copy the KDE3 roadmap (at least 1 apps for each task), this is the opposite of the original Gnome goal (leave it to 3rd party but provide a totaly open API). Gnome will eventually die out of progress while KDE accepted to recive some critics to be sure to move foward to met future desktop standard.

Elv13

I hope you are right. But then the problem is that distros started too soon shoving KDE4 down users' throat's.
What happens if you use openSUSE or Mandriva? You don't find KDE3.5 among the default De's selection. In the case of Mandriva you don't find it on the DVD at all (imagine if you are on dial-up).
Many new user tried KDE4 and hated it. Typical scenario: a lot of people downloaded openSUSE 11.0 KDE LiveCD: available only as KDE4 (later somebody created an unofficial KDE3 one).
It was hated by most and I can't blame them.

I still use KDE 4.1 from time to time.
I personally think it's nice, but I can't wait for:

-easier way to build custom qt4 themes.
-More custom icon packs.
-More plasma themes.

And the big one:
-Overall fixedness.

I love the ideas and implementations, but it still needs to radically mature.

That said, what IS there is awesome.

And even better, most KDE4 apps will have Windows, Mac, BSD, WinMobile, and Solaris ports, so you'll at least be able to enjoy Amarok or KDEnlive on another OS without too much hassle. (And, some plasma dev has been working on getting the entire Plasma desktop shell to work instead of Explorer.exe in Windows. Neat.

Yeah, that would be very nice.And i wish they ported K3B, that would be awesome, IMO.

I tried KDE 4 and immediately abandoned it. Yuck. I already hated KDE enough as it is with their neverending joke of prefixing everything with the letter "K."

I'm personally digging minimalist desktops using Fluxbox.

Translation:

"Yes, KDE4 is completely borked now, but you just wait, you just wait. Oh yeah, Gnome sucks"


Oh, please.

That's about the most fanboy-ish load of crap I've ever read. Of course it will improve over time, duh.

As far as your thoughts on Gnome go, it's pretty obvious that you don't use Gnome or at the very least haven't in quite some time. Gnome is not only usable every release but improves by leaps and bounds because of the decisions the devs make. That's more than anyone can honestly say about the direction of KDE at this point in time.

In any case, while everyone is entitled to their opinion, and everyone of course has their favorite, it's just childish and pathetic to wish disaster on any Open Source project. Less choice benefits no one. If choice is not important to you then I think you're using the wrong OS.

I personally love the fact that there are so many choices, Enlightenment, XFCE, GNOME, KDE, etc, and that they each have their quirks.

Oh yeah, KDE Sucks!

dies,

Right now I partially agree with you. If KDE3.5 was no longer available, and the choice now was between KDE4 and Gnome, I'd rather use Gnome, it is a lot more usable.
However I can't be sure about the future. If KDE4 becomes just as usable as KDE3.5, I'll reconsider my position.

@dies:
Your the fanboy. Between 3.5 and 4.1 I used gnome, so yes, I used recent version and I developped apps for both DE. I can talk as a programmer and as an user. KDE4 desktop is a complete rewrite, it will take time to complete it. No, it is not complete, it is "mostly" complete for day to day use. The "just wait" is because it is an in progress rewrite, not because today it is crap, it isn't, you did use KDE4 since a lot of time. It was needed, kdesktop+kicker suck and they had reach their limit (still more powerfull than gnome, but gnome does not need as powerfull panel, they have no use of these extra/useless functions). Plasma is more flexible. It allow all old features to be rewriten, but keep them out of the codebase with plugins (plasmoids). You can't say that KDE4 apps suck more than in KDE3, because they are the same, so can you point 3 major weakness of plasma that make it so bad? And 3 things that gnome do better (exept the default panel/menu -layout-, I admit that the gnome one is better but you can copy it with KDE4 in 10sec)?

I have no use for comparing what one DE does better than another, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Besides you're obviously not understanding my posts anyways so...

You're right. Why don't we just leave it there.

BTW, Ladislav of DistroWatch believes that KDE4 could be usable by release 4.4, probably available in 2010:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20081027#feature

So it has clearly been a major mistake from some distributions pushing KDE4 so early, a mistake which could put off many potential new Linux users.

One person = absolute judgement...

this kind of thinking is what holds linux behind.....

That person is not Joe User, he is respected as one of most knowledgeable Linux experts.
I happen to agree with him, even if I realize that my knowledge is nothing by comparison.

And besides, what he writes is just common sense.

As a long-time Windows user, and on-again, off-again Mac user, I found KDE 4.1 in Kubuntu 8.10.. kind of depressing. I can't help but think that deep in the bowels of KDE HQ there's people sitting around believing that this thing can really be taken seriously. On a few occasions I found myself thinking "this thing here would probably be cool if it didn't look like a half-finished high school programming project." I think I spent about 12 hours trying to use it, then ran back to Vista.

My personal favorite is on the main menu there's an icon that looks like a terminal, but in the section that icon is for, there's no terminal. It's in a completely different section. Good job guys!

Wow !

Are you serious?!?

Did you even bother to think, even just a little before you wrote that?

No of course you didn't, if you had then you would have realized that a lot of so called "issues" on the Linux side are due entirely to the amount of choice and freedom. The fact that people are free to disagree and do their own thing. Open Source, have you heard of it?



Ok, Ok, so let me get this straight, according to you what is holding Linux back is exactly what makes companies like MS and Apple so successful?



Man, I've seen a lot of ignorant posts by you but this one takes the cake by far. Nice job, idiot.

Its because everyone thinks they are the best benevolent dictator of design... really there can only be one. This is why Apple is good. Jobs makes his design choices then pays engineers to do it.... Linux doesn't work like this... the engineers debate...

He would be the best, if he could make a design for everyone... however he cannot. People are different and have different needs. Aqua is almost impossible to work with for some of us.

I've been playing around with the nightly builds of 4.2 this past week, and the improvements are tremendous.

-Better theme. No more ugly scrollbars. Oxygen in general looks fantastic.
-Better Configuration options: Phonon now works with my Logitech headset, Plasma can be customized piece by piece visually.
-Webkit in Konqueror: Yay.

And it's much, much faster. Hardly ever crashes compared to 4.1 and 4.0.

I figure, just give it time. If you don't like it, don't use it.

But, it's definitely getting somewhere now.