[NTLUG:Discuss] SuSE and the KDE folks (finally!) have their act together?

[Chris Cox]

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 16:00 -0500, Stephen Davidson wrote:
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> http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=11243&tag=nl.e550
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> Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Whoever wrote the article doesn't have all of their facts
straight.  Bonobo is the predecssor to Mono?  No... I don't
think so.

My thoughts:

KDE 4.3 still isn't "baked" yet.

ext4 is an "ok" filesystem, but NOTHING new.  New I suppose
for ext3 users, but ext4 doesn't present anything compelling.
Even recent benchmarks show crummy old reiserfs as being better
in many ways.  Ext4 needs more work... even so, then it will
be a ho-hum filesystem at best.  There's a reason why
XFS and reiserfs still reign in the datacenter.

I'd look to btrfs and nilfs2 to supplant ext4... and then,
I believe that there will have to be something even more
radically different coming in the next few years filesystem
wise.

(begin slam)
But ext4 will be entrenched, but that's mainly because Red
Hat can't seem to deal with the idea of different filesystems.
(end slam)

>From my standpoint, users want a UI that works.  KDE 4.3 probably
comes the closest of the 4.x line, but it still falls short
of the ease of use of 3.5.x.  The article says that the problem
with 3.5.x is that the interface is Windows-like.  But in all
fairness, the interface for 4.3 is Windows-like as well.

Non-openSUSE users probably have never seen the kick-off like
panel that replaces the menu... something that was desgined by
using tests with the general non-Linux user community.  I don't
like it that much, but in all fairness, isn't it ALSO more like
the interfaces in Vista and 7?  Whatever...

Back in the VERY old days, I was an Interleaf user (the competitor
to Framemaker).  What I like about Interleaf was their UI.  You
selected with the left button and right clicked on the selected
item to manipulate.  It was very consistent.

>From that standpoint, KDE 3.5.x was much more consistent.  KDE 4
is a hodge podge of UI experiements.  And IMHO, some do NOT work
very well.  But in a way, that's good.  Because some of the UI
components are so bad in KDE 4 that I'd hate for them to become
the "standard" across the board.

Things that fundmentally stink in KDE 4:

1. Panel option handling.

2. Sys tray handling.

3. Menu handling.

4. Configuration of the UI handling.

5. Hot plug media handling.

It's a myriad of tightly integrated and loosely coupled
interfaces.  Frankly, it's hard for me to see where things
in KDE 4 are going.... it's chaos from my point of view.

Lots of options do not work still... some are just plain
missing.  Dialog and menus have gotten BIGGER, thus screen
real estate is missing (true of the general desktop UI AND
most of the KDE 4 ported apps... beware!).

KDE 4 has some nice ideas... but a lot of it is for doing
things that were easily done apart from KDE.  For example,
KDE 4's window manager is now composite aware.  However,
the combination of KDE 4 (non-composite) combined with
compiz is still (IMHO) vastly superior.

KDE 4 still frustrates me.  However, I know that KDE 4.2.4+
is mostly usable.  I just expect a whole lot more... I want
the usability of KDE 3.5.10+ .... the underpinnings of KDE 4,
the things that are all so wonderful... I'm not against.  But
the UI needs to WORK.  Right now, it's a downgrade from
KDE 3.5.10.  It's a very PRETTY downgrade... and I suppose
that's what is confusing the masses.