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I spent yesterday playing with KDE4.3. The good, the bad and the ugly. (Damn those old spaghetti westerns!)
I'll start with this morning's discovery. After upgrading amorak to deal with 4.3, my LJ client FAILS to detect my music. A minor annoyance that will probably go away if I recompile the client.
Now about the new KDE. They have "fixed" various horrible problems with plasma. Unfortunately, they won't fix the worst problem with it -- its existence. It is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW. And it is still too buggy to really use (at least on my Dell). It has pretty good crash recovery, so I got to watch my monitor go black and recover about every 15 minutes while I was playing around.
It has the possibility of becoming something Really Good. A possibility fed entirely by "activities". Right now, I use virtual desktops and a directory hierarchy to keep my projects (activities) distinct. Activities seem to be a replacement or sorts. REAL BUGGY. So I didn't get to play around too much. It is something like creating a IDE for each product by giving a workspace dedicated to that activity with the desktop icons one wants for that activity. This could be a great way to work. My jury is still out, though.
Unfortunately, the 4.3 release seems just as rushed as the previous releases in the KDE4 series. Many, many apps have not caught up, some don't work at all, others have lost a lot of functionality. It might be 4.5 or 4.6 before I will be comfortable moving to KDE4 from 3.5.
My biggest complaint is based on my aversion to change that is perpetrated solely to change something. This is not just an issue with KDE. This problem extends to every operating system and app I've every used. Changing the look and feel might give the average young geek and orgasm, but I don't want to relearn an application just because some geek thought it might be prettier to rearrange things.
I think there are some strong reasons to migrate to a new kind of desktop, so I am willing to give it all a try. I just want something that IS stable; not just called stable.
I'll start with this morning's discovery. After upgrading amorak to deal with 4.3, my LJ client FAILS to detect my music. A minor annoyance that will probably go away if I recompile the client.
Now about the new KDE. They have "fixed" various horrible problems with plasma. Unfortunately, they won't fix the worst problem with it -- its existence. It is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW. And it is still too buggy to really use (at least on my Dell). It has pretty good crash recovery, so I got to watch my monitor go black and recover about every 15 minutes while I was playing around.
It has the possibility of becoming something Really Good. A possibility fed entirely by "activities". Right now, I use virtual desktops and a directory hierarchy to keep my projects (activities) distinct. Activities seem to be a replacement or sorts. REAL BUGGY. So I didn't get to play around too much. It is something like creating a IDE for each product by giving a workspace dedicated to that activity with the desktop icons one wants for that activity. This could be a great way to work. My jury is still out, though.
Unfortunately, the 4.3 release seems just as rushed as the previous releases in the KDE4 series. Many, many apps have not caught up, some don't work at all, others have lost a lot of functionality. It might be 4.5 or 4.6 before I will be comfortable moving to KDE4 from 3.5.
My biggest complaint is based on my aversion to change that is perpetrated solely to change something. This is not just an issue with KDE. This problem extends to every operating system and app I've every used. Changing the look and feel might give the average young geek and orgasm, but I don't want to relearn an application just because some geek thought it might be prettier to rearrange things.
I think there are some strong reasons to migrate to a new kind of desktop, so I am willing to give it all a try. I just want something that IS stable; not just called stable.