Hi peops, I somewhat force myself to use KDE (once again), even though I am very likely to get annoyed rather fast when it comes to the KDE-specific kind of issues. Issues, I have never seen with any other project to that extent. And I ask myself, if others are annoyed too there or am I just a whiny little bitch and no one else really bothers there?
To describe the kind of issues I am referring to, some examples: 1.) KSysGuard: I just closed a program via its own menu (file -> close), wondered why even after several minutes (and even now, half an hour later) KSysGuard still showed that process, so I did look with "ps" and to my surprise, the process is *not* there anymore, but KSysGuard shows it nevertheless in the "process table". https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261255 2.) Panels: Changed the "alignment" on one panel (for DualHead "mirrored" panel setup), one should think now the alignment is changed like in any other tool (mostly word processing tools I guess) but well, it is not, widgets and stuff still want to "fall" to the left. I guess because of that and other "bugs" there, several issues arise. http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=94642 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248186 http://askubuntu.com/questions/116040/how-to-right-align-widgets-in-panel-in-kubuntu-11-10 3.) Widgets, plasmoids, generel KDE features: Yeah well, really nice design (mostly), but from a usability standpoint? Often a mess. First one sees a feature and thinks "Great" and later on he might realize how bad that feature is implemented. I don't want to get into details yet, as this mail is going to be long enough already, but if there is any need and someone has no idea what I am talking about here, just ask. But remember, I don't say all and everything is implemented badly, with KDE-stuff it just looks to me the tendency is there that stuff gets implemented in a rather weird / bad / less- to un-usable way. 4.) Weird messages and... stuff: Be it annoying phonon messages that a audio device was removed, though it definitely was NOT, power-manager framework telling me it doesn't work because of... yada yada, but it does work nevertheless, starting others DEs stuff while KDE is running (or the other way around) might screw things up bigtime, configuration tends be be trashed every now and then, from one moment to the next (in the process of configuring KDE for example, so no change to the installed packages or other changes to the system) KDE may start to behave "weird". Like starting KDE-apps (dolphin) takes several minutes while other apps just start fast as before, context-menu might need *minutes* to open, shutdown-, reboot-, logout-popup takes minutes to show... And a bunch of other stuff that might just happen when using KDE that somewhat feels... well... awkward, weird, annoying. Bottom line, it feels like a lot of rough edges and that those edges might be smoothed out eventually, but apparently it looks like they don't, as where I pointed out links to bugtracker or forum-posts, the issues are as old as Methusalems grandpa. With other DEs (Gnome2 + 3, Mate, Xfce, LXDE, e17) I have never seen that amount of "roughness". They might have other "issues", like the apparent need the Gnome-devs feel to get rid of every useful feature ;) (well, I could be more fair there, but I am on a KDE list anyway, so no need for gnome-devs-understaning, right? *g*), but I always had the feeling the "rough" edges were smoothed out from release to release. I was not always happy with the way issues were addressed, but at least I could understand why it makes sense for some or even most users to have an issue resolved in that particular way it was addressed with. Granted, not all issues will face on every system, something triggers the issues, sure. Not all users will think some stuff is implemented weird and in a rather un-usable state (even if I think something must be wrong with them then, as I can even understand the Gnome-decisions and way of implementing things!), not everyone has the same need and idea for a feature and how to implement it. Some may never have any issue whatsoever, be it just coincidence or they just don't use that particular feature or at least not in a way that the issues would show itself. So, that all said, what do you guys, users and maybe even developers of KDE, think? I don't want to come around as rude or overly harsh, as really, I think KDE is a great Desktop Environment, it just has some really rough edges. Is it just me, or are others also thinking KDE could / should invest more efforts in QA and maybe less in implementing new stuff? I know, "send patch" yada yada... that does not apply here, at least not well enough. Optimistic greetings Michael ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
