why do they do these things?

I had a quick look at amarok 2.x a few weeks ago, and wasn't impressed at all. i disliked it so much that i'll be looking for another music player once 1.4 is discontinued/stops working. amarok 2 seems like a huge step backwards. and i'm not talking about bugs - it's pre-release so bugs are to be expected and will eventually be fixed. i'm talking about the butchering of a nice, simple, clean user interface...which WON'T be fixed, because that's the new design.

amarok 1.x excelled at organising my music collection and playlists, has an excellent mp3/ogg/flac/etc tag editor, and (with the amakode plugin) seamless transfer of music to/from an ipod.

amarok 2.x loses all of that for no good reason. i don't want 'tighter integration' with KDE (I don't even use KDE - i'm mostly a gnome user who happens to use amarok because it's better than any of the gnome music players). what used to be a reasonably functional simple no-fuss music player has become a baroque monstrosity of pointless frills.

I don't want a desktop "experience", any more than i want a web "experience". I don't want bling, i don't want integration, i don't want my computer or my desktop doing weird and bizarre crap "for my own good".

and an embedded mysql server? WTF!!

amarok 1.4 was good enough that it was worth the time and memory usage of loading all the KDE libs when it started up (amarok and k3b were the only two KDE apps that i used. I've recently concluded that Brasero is a reasonable alternative to k3b so amarok is now the only KDE app that i use)

for now, i'll be continuing to use amarok 1.4, probably until it no longer works...but i'll be taking another look at the gnome or gtk music players...maybe they've caught up in usability and simplicity to where amarok 1.4 was. whatever i settle on will certainly start up faster and use less memory than amarok since i already have all the gnome libs loaded.

unfortunately, from what i've read recently, gnome is planning to go down the same stupid integrated bling obsession path that KDE4 has just gone through. i'm really not looking forward to that release.

the future of the desktop on linux looks bleak.