"KDE 4 is seen by many to be the next big step on the free software desktop, while others think releasing 4.0 in its current condition was misleading and a mistake. Either way, it's an innovative release and inline with Fedora's goal of providing the latest and greatest free software it is set to be the default KDE environment in the next major release of Fedora. We caught up with two members of the KDE SIG to talk about the work they're doing to get it ready for release, their own opinions on the software and what they think about the progress made by Fedora in getting over its GNOME centric reputation."
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Member since:2005-09-21
Its funny when people restate their opinions in the collective to give the illusion of importance. Why do you bother? What you are really saying is "I tried to use it on a daily basis for doing real work and simply found it to be unusable in its current form". That's fine, KDE 4.0 has a lot of rough edges, but don't pretend to speak for anyone but yourself.
Member since:2005-07-13
I use it on a daily basis for doing work, and have since 4.0 was released. It's fine. It may not have the fit and polish that 3.5.x does, but it works. When I come across the odd glitch, I report it, because that's what the devs are looking for.
And for those apps that are missing from KDE 4.x, the KDE 3.5.x ones work just fine within KDE4, as do GTK apps, etc.
Really, it's not that bad. It doesn't crash. It doesn't flake out. It doesn't eat your children. It's a starting point, and it portends many good things to come...
Having said all that, I'll agree that it may not be ideal for production use, but then it was never positioned as that.
And that's not the market Fedora targets, so all is well.
Member since:2005-07-24
uhmmm...
Yes it does. Even 3.5.x does. I still see way too much of even the 3.5 crash dialog. Konqueror is a particularly egregious offender.
Yes it does.
I cannot comment on this since I have none. I didn't even have any before I tested KDE4. Are you claiming that you had children before your KDE4 adventure, and that they remain uneaten at this moment? ;-)
Member since:2005-07-06
Unfortunately it still does crash, though 4.0.1 helped quite a bit. Given my workflow KDE 4.X is still unusable:
- Can not set keyboard macros for apps from the menus. This is very important to my workflow since I am extremely keyboard centric.
- Given a 1024x768 screen the current panel takes up way too much space.
- The use of xrandr to add/remove screens does not work correctly.
- The plasma desktop and panel crash (less often in 4.0.1) Usually this is due to me trying xrandr, though it does happen occasionally in other situations (I have not figured out a pattern yet) Once the desktop plasmoid crashes it is a bit of a challenge to use KDE.
- Konqueror crashes occasionally when used as a browser (though this is not really unique to KDE4)
- System Settings for display not functioning correctly.
- System Settings in general are incomplete
- please for the love of all that is holy give us an option to turn off the cashew in the top right corner (where I would normally put the hidden panel if I could move it... or hide it... or resize it... you get the idea)
Honestly I have far less problems with 4.0.1 and if that had been released as 4.0 I probably would not have complained. I can actually see how some might be able to use 4.0.1 as a daily desktop. Given its current limitations it is not usable as a main desktop for me though.
Member since:2005-07-06
I agree, absolutely. If a distro is released with KDE4 only.I'll refuse to use it, for the time being.
Heck, I am even willing to move to Gnome for now, it has a lot more features and it is *a lot* more stable than KDE4. And please consider that I have always been a KDE fan till now.
Edited 2008-02-18 04:54 UTC
Member since:2005-11-15
Member since:2005-07-06
Reminds me of a disaster I had a couple of days ago; a kernel update was released and I found that my wireless networking stopped working. I spent a few good hours trying to work out what went wrong. A couple of days later they release an update. All I can say is that if I wasn't tech savvy and had a cable to hook the machine up to the router, I would have been screwed.
These are the types of things that really piss people off when they move to an operating system - and find when updates are released, they not only cause problems, but they find that the ability to access further updates to correct the bugs introduced in that update, is made impossible.
I'm not saying any other operating system is better at this, but generally speaking these things need to be sorted out - the whole point of open source's 'many eyes' but given the flawed kernel package that was released, those 'many eyes' must have been closed at the time.
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-24
While those of us who have actually tried to use it on a daily basis, for doing real work, have simply found it to be unusable in its current form.
Fedora does not really have to worry about that, since KDE is not the default Fedora desktop. Happily, the majority of other distros also do not have to worry about the move to version 4, and for the same reason.