So I have installed KDE 4RC1 on Kubuntu and I really had very high for it but I am sorry to say it just plain sucks. Konqueror I fired it up for the first time and everything was clear to me, I am struggling with Dolphin to just get to some elementary things like show hidden files Plasmoids I managed to put them on the desktop but still haven found a way to remove them, right clicking the desktop does nothing I expect it to do....what the hell have the kde people done, kde4 is like gnome, no options no nothing, I have used a lot of OS's and desktops but kde4 rc1 has been the most frustrating and limited I have encountered in over 20 years....

KDE 4 isn't final yet, it is natural that it has all that bugs and glitches. KDE's development team promises that when they finish KDE will be more stable, flexible and more usable. I hope so. Meanwhile they postponed the release date to January 11 2008.
And here is an interesting post i've found: http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/k...sign-decisions/

I'm not fan of KDE, but KDE4 RC1 is certainly not a polished product and still has some pretty big issues. Also, there are a lot of changes between KDE4 and KDE3, so, you'll have to expect to learn a few new tricks, or relearn a few things. That being said, you may just not like the new design for KDE4, but that doesn't necessarily mean it sucks

Please tell me that KDE4 will have Konqueror...pleeeeeeease

Konqueror will be there. It's still the web browser for KDE, and AFAIK they aren't going to remove the file browsing ability. However, Doplhin may be set as the default FM on a typical install.

Konqueror will be there too but it will use the engine of Dolphin for file management. However they promise it won't loose any functionality.

If KDE4 is going to be the new Gnome, I'm pretty sure I'll use it

It sounds like KDE is heading in that direction. Some say that KDE 4 is less configurable and less flexible that 3.5. but it will be easier to modify its visual appearance (theming).

Less configurable? How is that?

I didn't try KDE myself, just heard people talking. Did you read the article i linked to earlier? It may contain some answers.

I think that Kickoff menu might keep me from using kde4 -- especially if they don't provide a way to use a standard Kmenu.

I didn't realize that konqueror was going to use the dolphin engine. I thought I could just choose to use konqueror as the file manager and then wouldn't lose functionality. If that is not the case, that is another reason I might have to stick with what I've got.

If mandriva 2008.1 ships with kde4, I might have to end up having to pass on it, until the above two items are handled with some future version of kde.

KDE4 is an absolutely brilliant concept, which is not properly implemented- YET.
Gnome will also be there- no doubt about that. Maybe after 3-4 years, but IMHO it will take a little bit more...
If you have issues with the numerous KDE4 bugs, then simply REPORT THEM. Coming here and claiming "KDE4 sucks" is pretty pointless.
I've been toying with KDE4 alphas/betas since last April, when KDE4 used to be totally unusable... but instead of complaining, i just preferred submitting bugs. Isn't that just a wee bit more sensible?

Seriously? I personally hope that GNOME doesn't follow KDE4's lead, I'd rather they do their own thing, and do it their own way. I mean, that's why I use GNOME instead of KDE...

(btw, dolphin? looks like nautilus to me)

I'm with tyme on this one. Gnome users are looking for something else than KDE users do, and vice versa. They are aiming on two completly diffrent goals, which is good (IMHO).

Don't approach anything new with a closed minded approach like that, particularly something as daring as KDE4. People love sensationalism and declaring that something sucks because one itty bitty feature changed or operates differently. The KDE developers should be rewarded for the optimistic act that KDE4 is. _nobody_ has the right to say "kde4 sucks" at this early stage and if they do... they better justify it well.

Sure KDE4 have some teething problems like any project of it's size, but that's more reason to embrace it with an open mind. Particularly the release candidates and unstable versions. If you don't like something, file a bug or feature request -- don't whine.



For a start, they probably won't entirely remove the old Kmenu, as it would have a large following. But why don't you try kickoff before you diss it? From what i've seen, its a different way of organising what's already there. A really old flash video here looks impressive: http://home.kde.org/~binner/kickoff/sneak_preview.html

Also if you had read the thread above you'd note that the dolphin engine was remarked to be as capable as konqueror.

James

At this early stage? The first release candidate is out, surely that means it's not an early stage any more!! It means what's out there might be the one which goes productive!
And there's only a few weeks until Jan 11th, if they plan on sticking to that release date.

Open Source projects seem to have a disregard for the terms alpha/beta/RC. Rarely, if at all will you find a project that will release on it's first RC. Take as a prime example, the kernel. By the time you run 2.6.23, it's typically been through 6 or so rc's. rc1 never had a hope of being released, and would be more correctly labelled beta - but that's inconvenient.

Look at KDE3... _that_ is years old and has been through many iterations. KDE4 has yet to have a stable release, so it has barely even entered it's release cycle.

KDE4 has not had a stable release, so by definition, it's unstable and things will change. It's been delayed once too, so we might not see come Jan 11.

The many comments listed in the post above is what makes me worried. There was no mention of keeping the old Kmenu as an option, and many of the things people did not like about kickoff didn't seem to be adequately addressed as far as I could see.

I wouldn't mind dolphin if the things it can't do could still be done by konqueror. My cause for concern was that it was said above that konqueror would use the same engine. Therefore, if dolphin can't do something, presumably konqueror wouldn't be able to do it either. If konqueror retained its old functionality then I would have no problem.

I agree that these terms are misused, and I don't expect all RC1s to be released. But I do expect that by the time they say "here is a candidate for release" then at least the major functionality is frozen and only unexpected bug fixes, tweaks, minor changes and so on will be made from here on. That means to me that it should be FAR from "unstable" and very very much time to start criticizing it as though it were very nearly finished.

You can't have it both ways, either it's an RC1, in which case people are entitled to express their opinion that it sucks (and will suck when released), or it's a beta (with a projected start date very probably later than Jan 11th), in which case it's too early to write it off. I don't see where the pressure comes to release it so soon if it's not yet ready, why not just push the release date back? There seem to be enough concerns and issues to warrant that. It would impact 2008.1 and Hungry Hippo and other distro releases, but they didn't have problems releasing both KDE3 and KDE4 with 2008.0 so they can do that again, surely?

I couldn't have said it better. Further to that you find that most projects do follow that ideology. The argument that the "alpha/beta/RC" labels are "commonly" misused is no defence, although I'd have to argue that the misuse isn't really common in the general sense, but definitely common when talking about badly managed projects.

Why a flash video for kickoff, when 2008.0 has it, just right click the kmenu and choose kickoff menu...

And there's lancelot (if I recall correctly), the kde4 implementation of the old kde menu.

I read quite a bit by now, and it seems that many people are really convinced that the kickoff style menu is the better one, basing on usability studies by Novell.
There seem to be videos of these studies as well, so you can have a look.

What I don't get, why this sliding thing, why not the regular openup style?

For browsing at least, kickoff bites the dust compared to kmenu.

When it comes to having direct access to the few apps that are used regularly: that's why you can put those programs on the panel, just drag the icon.

In any case, for me it's quite moot, I launch most apps from the cli, and since cf I can put kicker and my external taskbar onto a widget layer, so I normally don't even see them. More screen space for me!

Not using Mandriva until they deal with my long standing installation regression that I filed on the bug tracker months ago.


likewise. I've got gmrun on a shortcut key, and important apps on their own shortcuts, so most things are just a few keypresses away.

Reiver_Fluffi, neddie: Just stating my observations, there's a lot of projects that abuse 'rc' and many that release blindly unstable things as rc's just to get extra testing. It's not as uncommon as you think, some projects treat rc as the "feature complete" stage, enact a feature freeze, then do the bug hunting through the rc series. kernel is one example which follows a similar pattern.

The foundation libraries are stable (or so they say) and that's a good sign. Maybe there's no way to e.g change your wallpaper from a menu but the needed C++ functions are ready.

KDE4 was already postponed twice. Originally it supposed to be ready about the time Mandriva 2008 came out but they postponed it to December. Then they postponed it again to January.

Lancelot doesn't seem like a kmenu implementation to me. Reading the blogpost which ilia linked, in the second post in this topic, simply there won't be kmenu in KDE4 because nobody cares. There are two other menus being developed for KDE4: Lancelot and Raptor. But since only Kickoff is ready that will be the default in KDE4.
On the usability side. Usability not only depends on how the menu works but the structure of the menu too. And current Mandriva menu really sucks in this point of view IMHO.

Yup...

Trying RC2 from Gutsy now, things are looking a bit better but are far from what can be considered a release candidate. At least now I managed to get Dolphin to show hidden files but there are still many obvious bugs everywhere, like graphical glitches in the style, no obvious way to configure the panel, incompleteness of oxygen, kwin is dead slow etc... etc... etc.. and these are all obvious after just 5 minutes testing. It looks promising for an alfa or beta but for an RC it's very disappointing...



file size view seems to have gone, one of my favourite konqueror functions...

C'mon, it has been said in the past that KDE 4.0 will be very buggy (pretty much like KDE 3.0, or Gnome 2.0, or XFCE 4.0, or... name it here)...
Only after version 4.1 things will start running smoothly. Please understand that 4.0 is a HUGE step ahead of 3.5X, and as such many things will not work as expected.

They said 4.0 wouldn't be (new) feature complete yet but I expect all the major old features working. I know no software is bugfree but this is just
unworkable, I hope they postpone the release past jan 11 because as it is kde4 will hurt kde's reputation.

My first look at KDE4 is Mandriva's Spring Alpha.

As a gui thing, I really like it. I thought I was waiting for E17 to come about, but KDE might beat them to it. But, I lost the widgets in the "panel," and can't get them back. I can launch new plasma widgets, but the panel is just an empty thing at the bottom of the screen.

It is promising, but not working. Anybody know how to restart the panel? I mistakenly tried "kicker," but launching it brought the old panel on top of the new one!

(aside from deleting the hidden directory, of course. That works but what else can be done?)

Hey, if you want plenty of eyecandy and little real usability, have a look at fvwm-crystal.
Of course fvwm can be tuned in one gazillion different ways, but it simply is too much fuss (at least for me...).
Currently I am using the good, stable XFCE4 as default, and toy a lot with KDE4.
E17 will probably NEVER come out as official stable release.

well I did give a burn of kubuntu with kde4 earlier to give it a shot...
but I am not impressed right now.
It seems too limited, a big taskbar you cant change the size of, little to none really impressive effects (heck even kde 3.5 runs circles around it in terms of looks)
It just looks.... amateurish.
I personally see no reason to use it in its current state, the black panel just screams vista and overall it looks cheaply done...
I will give it a chance yes but not for the foreseeable future.
KDE 4.1 might be where I look at kde4 as a viable choice, but who knows.

But I just hope KDE4 isnt forced on us, I really dont want it at this point and time

Well, the good news is I'm still receiving updates for KDE 3.5, so... I'm Happy. Wait and See What Happens.

From what I have seen and read, I have this personal fear that KDE4 is going to turn out to be yet another piece of worthless eye candy just like compiz et al.

As I sit at my desk here I am surrounded by 5 hardware items that don't work, either properly, or at all, with Linux (any version) and I am using a laptop that will either shut down 1 time out of 6 (Mandriva) or will not shut down at all (any other distro) and yet I have this awful feeling that vast amounts of human resources are going to be ploughed into plasmoids (whatever the hell they are) and the rest, whilst such utter basics as I have just described, have gone, or will go, unaddressed for ever.

If Linux is to gain the credibility it deserves then it needs people to continue to improve on the basics, not to go off on wild and useless flights of fancy in some daft effort to emulate Windows (that is all that compiz was anyhow).

For the sake of Linux I really do hope that I am proved wrong in this and KDE4 does turn out to contain something useful, but widgets and kicker menus don't do it for me, and as a personal preference, Krusader is so vastly superior to any other file manager on offer there is very little point in trying to compete with it, just install it by default.

First, eye-candy is eye-candy, not trying to "emulate windows." Many people do not like eye-candy. But it seems more do.

Second, judging from the fabulous performance of Vista, it seems that getting it to just work is not any issue unique to Linux.

Third, kde is one desktop. Unlike windows, there are many choices for a desktop. If kde fails, Linux does not. Unlike windows.

i agree and disagree simultaneously.

coming from someone who programs (not GUIs) for a living, i see that sometimes momentary setbacks result in a longterm gain. I'm still on KDE3.5.8.whatever weird smaller release number bc of it's stability. if you're looking for stability KDE 4.0.x is not a good idea. but they're probably doing something that is very worthwhile at the momentary sacrifice of a fanbase.

i think i do believe that eye-candy is worthwhile. it's an attraction. people stare at sexy stars because they're an attraction (crude example, i know). but the logic isn't unsound in place with KDE. the problem is that once you get people there, you've got to be able to hold on to them. so your software has got to be stable. you do need to be able to boot and shutdown your laptop. that's a must. Windows has it figured out. someone needs to put similar efforts into Linux for somewhat of the same levels of functionality (in a Linuxy way).

if you think something needs improving...contribute. that's what makes Linux awesome. even filing a bug report is a help.

(edit: i'm a doofus)

You call compiz worthless?
Why?

It's not, you know.

Some effects make my desktop much more usable.
Some effects make my desktop more fun to use.
It motivates many people to give Linux a try.
It stopped people from saying that Linux looks crappy.
Etc...



Did you contact the device manufacturers?
Will you avoid those manufacturers who don't support Linux?
Will you recommend Linux friendly manufacturers to your friends, family and colleagues?

If you don't, why would you expect your situation ever to improve?


What makes you think the people working on Plasmoids would be working on making your devices work better with Linux if they weren't working on Plasmoids?
What makes you think the people working on Linux (the kernel and modules) are not putting in all required efforts to make things work just like that, as best they can?

I believe they do, and any mildly popular hardware today that has been on the market for over a year and doesn't have proper Linux drivers/compatibility, lacks those drivers/ compatibility due to shortcomings on the side of the manufacturers.

Vote with your dollar/euro/pound/rupiah/whatever.


First, Linux has lots and lots of credibility, second, compiz is no effort to emulate windows (perhaps the windows that will come after windows 7, but ah well), and thirdly, apparently compiz-like eyecandy is coming to a mobile phone near you very soon, if the MWC in Barcelona is anything to go by.
You don't like *bling*? Well, others do, and it sells (or at least, manufacturers think so).



Merely being SVG based is good enough for me. Check the screenies in my mdv 2008 review of kde4. Awesome.

That being said, I had a look at current kde4 and yeah, it's not really there yet, from a user point of view.
As I understood long ago, kde 4.0 would be the point where all developers of kde based software should join the fun, and 4.1 where users should join in. Patience.

(BTW Krusader? I'll have bash any day, but for graphical file management, konq does fine.)

Guess you have not looked at KDE4 at all. Have you seen the work into the underlying foundations? KDE4 is an impressive piece of work that will allow some amazing sofware. Time will prove this as people learn to exploit the capabilities of KDE4. It's not just some desktop environment, it's a whole foundation of libraries to develop on. Phonon, Solid, ThreadWeaver, Decibel, etc. At first sight, they're impressive.


Please tell me what these hardware items are. I'm _really_ curious. I betcha at least some of them will work.


There's no central body. People work on what they want to work on. Nobody can marshall people and say "stop working on compiz, the kernel needs work". Nobody can redirect or move those human resources, they're working of their own will.

Besides, computer science is a broad subject, and hardly any programmer can be good at kernel programming, audio/video programming (or even those two together), office programming, etc... at the same time. I wish I was, but... no.

Yves.

I guess I owe an apology for not responding to the answers to my post earlier. Here is my excuse. Lately I have been mostly lurking on Ubuntu forums, and there if you start or reply to a post you are automatically subscribed to it and receive email notifications of replies. I naively assumed that Mandrivausers was the same and therefore that I had received no replies. I was obviously wrong.

So here I am posting this from a KDE4 desktop so at the very least nobody can accuse me of not being open minded.

At the moment I cannot say that the changes I see are at all for the better, but it is in an early stage of development and I might change my mind later, but not now. For example, my most used application on any linux system -krusader root mode- is missing from the start menu. If I switch to 3.5.9 it is there, but not in 4.0. That is not the problem though, the problem is that as far as I can tell there is no way to actually put it there. I can easily put useless stuff like moon phases or comic strips there, but anything useful that I might actually want to put there is impossible (as far as I can tell).

This just goes to reinforce my point about eyecandy and bling. OK some people are impressed with it but it doesn't make anything work better in fact at the moment it is worse. You could impress people by including naked pictures of Britney Spears as desktop wallpaper, but it wont help launch the application that you want to launch from where you want to launch it.

I thoroughly accept the point that people coding KDE4 or compiz or anything else for that matter may not have the ability or the will to code for anything else. I have never written a single line of code in my whole life and almost certainly never will, but if I did then I would want to work on what I consider to be useful and if that happens to be wobbly windows then so be it.These are very valuable individuals and have an absolute right to work on what they choose to work on but from my selfish point of view I don't see this as being much of a contribution to Linux as a whole, but I grant you it is a lot bigger contribution than mine.

Anyway if anybody can tell me how to add Krusader root mode to my KDE4 start menu or my desktop or my taskbar, I would love to know.

AFAIK krusader 1.80 does not work at all under qt4/kde4.
For that, you need the new 2.0 version, which isn't available everywhere.
Build instructions are here if you want to try compiling it.

Is there a ~date on when KDE 4.1 is going to be released? I'm going to give KDE a go when it's 4.1.x

http://tuxenclave.wordpress.com/2008/02/02...d-future-goals/

That is not quite right scarecrow, Krusader 1.8 works perfectly on kde4 (at least it does on my computer) the only problem I have is that the 'root mode' does not appear anywhere in the menu and I can find no way to add it. The normal (ie non root mode) appears in the menu, and if you launch that then you can successfully launch the root mode from within it. The difference is that in kde 3.5.9 'root mode' has its own entry in the start menu and in 4.0 it doesn't.

Thanks.

KDE Sucks period, regardless of Version

Fluxbox FTW

I'd rather say that Fluxbox sucks, compared to FVWM. You see- choices!
BTW ATM I'm very happy with XFCE4, which is my main desktop (complete, simple enough even for stupid people, very fast), but I'm toying a bit with a personal mod of FVWM-Crystal. It might not come up to something useful, but it's quite a lot of fun!
Oh, and I do toy a bit with KDE4- it's flawed for sure, but darn interesting. By comparison, KDE 3.5.9 is rather too perfect for my taste.

Can anybody tell me how I can completely rid my 2008.1 installation of KDE4? I first tried deleting the meta package but that did nothing, I then went through the 'installed' packages and deleted everything with 'kde4' in the title but still, every time I try to update my system I am presented with a whole bunch of KDE4 updates and I just cant get rid of them. If I were at home I wouldn't bother, I would update them and forget about it, but I am away from home and have a limited bandwidth available and I can't afford to waste it on useless updates for a program I have no intention of using.

Any ideas?

Unfortunately uninstalling such a complex software like KDE is not straight forward. So I'd like to encourage everyone to use urpmi.recover before installing KDE4 or any other big piece of software. Your life will be much easier.
As for uninstalling it now There is topic about just that somewhere in the club forum but I just can't find it. It includes some command line magic.

urpme libkdecore5 kdebase4-runtime kdebase4-workspace should do it

Dexter/ffi, thank you both for those replies.

I tried the commands that ffi proposed but I just got the response that the files were unknown, so I guess I have already deleted them.

Dexter, your 'urpmi.recover' command sounds very interesting but it is something I have never heard of can you give me any links as to where I might read more about it?

In the meantime I have come up with my own workround to this it simply consists of copying all the KDE4 update file names into /etc/urpmi/skip.list. They now no longer bug me.

Urpmi.recover is not installed by default. Here's what rpmdrake writes about it:It's 9KB so it shouldn't be a problem to install even on low bandwidth systems.

Thanks dexter11, I didn't realise it was a program I thought it was a shell command!

Anyway I have downloaded it and will experiment.