"Mark Haney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:45:50 -0400:
> I swear I think I missed the threads on KDE4 after it was released. I'm > sure by now at least some people are using it, so how is it on amd64? I > know it's buggy and all that, but is it functional? Are there any > showstoppers you've seen? > > I'd like to throw it on my dev box, but I'm not sure I want to spend a > lot of time mucking with compiling it if it's not at least somewhat > usable. Well... I've been compiling KDE-svn from the overlay for some months, but unfortunately hadn't really had any time to decently test it until this last week. Because I was doing the SVN version, it was more crashy but more featureful than the current 4.0.x release will ever be. Here, after actually getting a bit of time to test what I had been compiling, I gave up. Due to lack of what I consider necessary features, it's simply not worth any more of my time until at /least/ pre-4.1.x feature-freeze, and at this point, honestly, it could easily be pre-4.2.x feature-freeze. Individual applications may have a bit of eye candy and be worth running, but the desktop as a whole isn't, at least not for "power users" like me that tend to use the powerful customization and productivity elements of the mature KDE-3.5 desktop such as multiple panels and personalized hotkeys and colors. Huge swaths of GUI customization simply isn't there or doesn't work as originally advertised that KDE-4 would work. True, users that are as comfortable configuring text files as clicking a button or dragging a slider can already configure a lot of that stuff manually, but what's the point of spending time in a GUI if you can't even configure itself with itself? (That BTW is one of the points I've brought up against GNOME any number of times, advanced GUI config can only be done by editing text files, or worse yet for those of us who still have MS nightmares from time to time, registry edits.) Granted, there's the bit of limited functionality there that GNOME style users who prefer NOT to have advanced GUI config options to worry about (either because they configure them manually or because they just accept the defaults) should appreciate -- they may in fact /love/ it -- but for those KDE-3 users who've grown to love its GUI tweakability, there's a LONG way to go yet before KDE-4 gets even close, let alone has all the fancy new KDE-4 features we were sold as worth the long wait. It may indeed ultimately be worth the wait, I certainly hope and expect so, but if so, that wait isn't over yet. So put simply, I recommend staying put with KDE 3.5.9, for now. There will be time enough to try out KDE 4 after 4.1 comes out this (northern hemisphere) summer, or 4.2, early next year I'd guess. Right now, the rumors saying it's little more than a developer's preview and base on which to build are all too true. As an example... remember all the talk about plasma and the ability it was supposed to have to move apps seamlessly from floating to panel to desktop and back again? Well, desktop to panel sort of works, but there's no way to move stuff around in the panel at all without deleting it and re-adding it, let alone back to the desktop, and there's no hint of the formerly promised moving between a floating app and either the desktop or panel. That, coupled with the fact that there's no way to create additional panels, and on dual-head displays, the panel can apparently move to any side -- of ONE head -- it can't move to another head at all, means the desktop is essentially useless for me with my five separate panels each with separate functions and configuration on KDE-3. It was nice to be able to move applets from the panel to the desktop and I tried using that as a bit of a workaround, but it's not the same, and there then seems to be no way to remove the panel. Further, even just being able to set the size of the panel at all is a feature brand new to KDE-4.0.2, and not much older in SVN-trunk. As I said, there's a LONG way to go! No way could I recommend it at present, except for those (like myself) that simply have to see for themselves, and have the time and the energy to do so. It'll be nice when it gets there, but it's not there yet. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
