KDE 4 is a huge step back in design! [LWN.net]

KDE 4 is a huge step back in design!

Posted Feb 8, 2009 19:16 UTC (Sun) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528)
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

there are capricious changes to make things worse in kde4 than before.

my two favorite examples: akregator and kmail. akregator used to display a list of feed names,
followed by a number in parens to show how many unread messages there were. now akregator has
a multi-column display: feed name, num messages, num unread. it's now much more difficult to
scan through the list to see what has unread messages.

kmail used to have a nice set of columns to show messages, with columns for things like subject,
from, date, etc. you could click on a column to sort by it. Now kmail show messages in horrid
multi-line format. it's much more difficult to scan through a list of messages by eye.

so to summarize, akregator gained columns where they weren't needed, and kmail lost columns
where they are needed!

and the kde devs wonder why people want to try something else??

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capricious changes...

Posted Feb 10, 2009 19:52 UTC (Tue) by cjcoats (guest, #9833) [Link]

Disclaimer: Like Linus, I'm a developer -- of environmental modeling applications, which means high performance computing in a mix of Fortran and C. I've a quarter of a million lines of code out there in operational use -- half of it Open Source. It also means I don't have enough spare time to re-invent the entire universe.

One of the thing I've come to expect with X window managers is some degree of menu-configurability for mouse clicks in the root window -- and I've been at it since at least OLWM on SPARC2s in the early Nineties. For the sort of work I do, it is . It's absence is an absolute show-stopper.

One good thing about KDE3 has been the best such configurability I've ever run into: you do

KControl > Desktop > Beahvior > Mouse Button Actions

and set it up any way you want.

And in at least Mandriva's KDE4.1.3, mouse button menus are completely broken. From what I hear, it may be gone forever. I had no conception that such universal functionality would be abandoned, and evidently (from the attitudes I see displayed here) my input would have been completely ignored if I knew it would be needed. Such arrogance is not encouraging.

fwiw