When KDE 4.0 was first released, it was met with quite some criticism. Even though people saw the huge potential, the lack of functionality and stability, as well as quite a few bugs detracted from the experience. The KDE developers continued to work on implementing their relatively radical vision, and with the release of KDE 4.2 creeping ever closer, it seems they're well on their way.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2008-03-17
You might not like it, but Novell (the original author back in the kde3 days) did a usability study and found most users preferred kickoff to k-menu. People are always carping on how kde has bad usability.
If you're so for usability, then perhaps listen to what the usability experts say on this one, right?
RE[4]: About the "3 different search engines"
Member since:2007-11-17
First of, KickOff was used because it was ready when KDE 4.0 was launched (contrary to Tasty, Raptor and Lancelot. IIRC, Raptor was long considered to be the top candidate for the default menu plasmoid, but has not reached maturity as of this writing, so ... ) and because people tended to complain about the "cluttered" and "bloated" nature of the KDE3 menu. As far as I know, lancelot or one of the alternatives may end up being the default in future releases, as nothing is set in stone.
Truth to be told, I was no fan of the KickOff menu when SuSE introduced it in their 10.x series for KDE3 (once, I accidentally shut down the file server of our department because my muscle memory was incompatible with this menu layout, talk about embarrasment) and while I appreciate the fact that this menu is the result of usability studies, I reserve my right to like something else better.
Which, incidentially, is one of the big strengths of plasma: Mere mortal people (even one-man-developer teams) can write and maintain their own version of a menu if they want to do it, without forking the code base and without reinventing the wheel low-level style over and over again, without being constrained by what is already there and established, even without using C++ (which seems to be an important point for many people). The treshold to do something along the lines of what SuSE did back then (undertake a study, find something that is considered to be an improvement, implement it, ship it, distinguish itself from the other distributors) has been lowered considerably, thanks to the flexibility introduced by plasma.
I wonder how long it will take distributors to realise that they can stand out from the crowd of other distributors if they put more effort in the presentation of the desktop (as in more-than-a-shiny-wallpaper-and-a-different-color-scheme).
BTW: The KDE folks made a choice and shipped KickOff as default, for the reasons stated above. Why does your distributor ship it as default?
Mine does, because it is a distribution with a change-as-little-as-possible-from upstream policy.
Member since:
2007-06-02
I know it's there... But it's not default... and it's simply plain stupid. How about developers leaving the classic standard stuff as default and adding an option for users to switch... there I see innovation... but not the contrary, trying to make users get used to cluttered confusing multi-task menu as default is plainly stupid. Oh wait, did KDE guys want to emulate Windows Vista Start Menu? I wonder why just because Uncle Bill creates a feature, everybody in the OSS community starts to emulate it as well. *Things you don't need*