Thursday, July 16, 2009

KDE4 DOES NOT SUCK (very much)

This is my opinion of the present state of KDE4, and my opinion of anything does not matter very much. The world does not revolve around me. In fact, the last time I checked, I'm not even mentioned in wikipedia. This essay, however, revolves entirely around me. I am not only mentioned in this essay, I am the only person mentioned.   You may not want to spend a lot of time reading my opinion, so you can skip to the last two paragraphs if you want to get to the point.

In my unimportant opinion, the most welcome thing about KDE 4.3 is that Konqueror is finally usable as a file manager again, thanks to the long overdue restoration of the dirfilter toolbar. The lack of a filterbar on Konqueror had pretty much driven me past the point of madness.

The way the filter bar works is like this: I type a string of characters into the toolbar, and every file that doesn't contain those characters in its name disappears from the file manager window. Once you've used the filterbar, any file manager that doesn't contain a filterbar is crap. Dolphin has had the filterbar since it first appeared, and of course, Konqueror 3.5 had it, but with KDE4, whenever I wanted to use the filterbar to locate specific files out of a big directory, I had to open dolphin. There's nothing wrong with Dolphin, but I prefer konqueror because that's what I've always used (and also because I'm a bitter old man who HATES THE FUTURE and FEARS CHANGE!) The rational thing to do would have been to switch to Dolphin as a file manager, but I felt that I was being pushed toward that conclusion, manipulated. I became paranoid, conspiratorial, convinced that "Konqueror" (the awesome filemanager) had been crippled, marked for death, in order to make room for "Konqueror" (the mediocre web browser that almost no one uses). Later I became convinced that the dirfilter must be there somewhere, and it was my fault for not being able to find it. I did google searches. I posted inquiries on forums. No one replied, so I did more google searches, which mostly turned up my own inquiries. I clicked all over the konqueror interface searching up and down over and over. Over several months, I'm sure I spent hours at this. I got madder and madder, crazier and crazier. I posted evil messages in the KDE forum. I started to develop a facial tic. I got into a crazy flame war with an equally insane KDE4 fanboy, who was convinced that I was a paid agent for Microsoft. A moderator banned me from the Kubuntu forum, and I sent him an email thanking him.

So now the filter bar has finally been restored, thanks to a konqueror plug-in.  It's case sensitive, which is not a good thing for this kind of feature, IMO. There may be a way to fix it, but I'm too happy to complain, or to start another round of frustrating google searches.


Here's my opinion of Plasma at this time. Now, this is where usually someone tells me that I'm wrong about the facts, and I often am. If it happens, I'm not going to be surprised, and we'll all learn something, or at least I will. I never learned a goddamn thing in my life without being wrong first.  So let's just go through the "blackbelt is wrong again" dance, if that's what it comes to.

KDE4 doesn't suck-- not very much, anyway. The plasmoids suck... because they don't hold information after you close them, and the plasma themes suck... because they tend to be based on sameness. There is no plasma theme that I know of that allows for different colored widgets. And the transparency that is so common in plasma themes causes visibility problems. So does the tendency to make themes that are supposed to look three dimensional, and themes that are supposed to look shiny. Some flat, opaque, non-shiny themes would be awesome.

For me, the solution is to use folderview, one or two plasma widgets (I like the analog clock) and to use opera widgets instead of plasmoids for the rest of the widgets. Opera widgets are opaque, flat, not shiny, and colorful. They retain information. If you close them and reopen them, they return to the same spot.

But you know what?  Actually, as a rule, Widgets on the desktop suck, period. Again, that's just my opinion, but why the fuck do I need to have all my applications and all my information in front of me all the time in a world where keyboard shortcuts, multiple workspaces and flashing notification in the toolbar have already been invented? It frightens me to think that, in the future, no one is going to create applications, they're only going to make widgets. Kpager no longer exists, it's now the Pager plasmoid. The disdvantages are that I can't open it with a keyboard shortcut any more, and I can't use it outside of KDE anymore without using the ungainly plasmoidviewer. The advantage? It's now available in a bunch of shiny, transparent, 3 dimensional themes.

Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time mapping out my desktop space, trying to line up all these widgets for the maximum effect, both in terms of form and function, something that I never used to think about. I'm been dragging and dropping and locking and unlocking my way to carpal tunnel syndrome surgery. Fuck it, I'm going back to using my Desktop as a dumping ground for files.


And I have that option.  Almost everything that sucks about KDE4 is optional. If you use the folderview mode, and you don't use the plasmoids, what you're left with looks and acts a lot like KDE 3.5, although setting up and adjusting the panels isn't as easy. So if you're me (and granted, most people aren't) KDE4 sort of feels like a slightly downgraded KDE3.5, which doesn't suck very much.

In other words (here comes the important part) I can live with it. It all boils down to a few extra clicks on the panel, and some overdone visual themes for the panel,  big fucking deal. It's a minor inconvenience. We're supposed to be a community, and I can take the hit, so that the crazy people who actually like all this plasmoid business can have what they like, so that the KDE developers can be creative and (no doubt about it) brilliant, so that we can all have the benefit of where this is going to lead us. Sometimes, the price you have to pay for rapid development is... rapid development!   I can see the day when all this plasma technology is used to create  a desktop that is less distracting, not more distracting.  Even the bad parts arent all bad. I like the analog clock widget and the notes plasmoid. They're actually pretty handy.

So have I stopped complaining about KDE4?  Fuck, no!  When I stop complaining about goofy shit, please bury me... and if I'm not dead, please kill me and then bury me!  I don't think anybody should stop complaining, ever.  However, here's the wrinkle: I have resolved to have a sense of humor about the whole thing.  I think everybody could use a little more of that.  Let me say it again in italics:  a sense of humor!

1 comment:

  1. So now I'm using KDE4, and I can almost guarantee that my opinion of it KDE4 is going to change, one way or another, like it always has. Most of this essay is a snapshot of my view at one moment in time, except for the part about how I can live with it.

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