KDE 4.1 Beta 2 – Not Promising
I have to amend my last blog post that said that I was going to stick with KDE over GNOME, despite some issues. I installed KDE 4.1 Beta 2, and it’s not just going two steps forward and one step back, it’s possibly going three steps back. It crashes. Well, that can be expected from a beta, but my biggest complaint is that the stupid plasma widgets on the desktop still have the unwieldly borders and mini-icons surrounding them. I just want to be able to slap a file on my desktop and move it around without having to lock and unlock widgets to do so.
With this disappointment, I am switching back to GNOME (keeping KDE as an option) until the official KDE 4.1 release at the end of July. If the desktop widgets are still in their annoying state, I’ll have to hose KDE and go back to GNOME for the foreseeable future, except for my old laptop, which I’ll keep on KDE 3.5. Oh well.
Tags: Linux
The big icons borders and mini-icons are meant for touchscreens (there is no right click) and this way of entering data seems very popular (it is used to buy/change train tickets, in France, by people who could not use a mouse nor a keyboard).
I agree that KDE4 does not seem usable to-day, but perhaps it is in the same state as the electrical cars 15 yrs ago (they were more polluting than oil powered ones, as one could not get rid of the lead batteries)….
I also had a lot of the same frustration with the desktop icons in the transition to a widget desktop. Give the “Folder View” Plasmoid a try. Its a widget that sets aside an area of the screen to show the contents of a folder in a normal folder manner. I just set it up to link to my Desktop folder and then deleted all the widget icons.