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ITT we bitch about KDE4
This is a very old post from my blog; so old that it was originally hosted on LiveJournal. The page has been preserved in case its content is of any interest, but formatting errors are likely and the page's original comments have been lost. Please go back to the homepage to see the current contents of this site.
So, KDE4 eh? No offence to the programmers, they’ve certainly achieved something beyond my capabilities, but… So many irritations =S
- Despite a more streamlined codebase and less memory-hungry Qt4, it still runs slow as a dog on my EeePC.
- That's without any visual effects. Turning on compositing makes it near unusable. Oh, and even "fade in menus" (non-composited) displays an ugly mash of pixels before the menu fully renders, a la KDE 3.5.
- Plasma looks very shiny, shame there's only a few widgets with very important things - NetworkManager frontend, volume control - totally missing.
- There aren't icons for half the widgets, and a random selection of other things
- You can't drag widgets onto, or off, the panel.
- The panel has no properties. You can't move it, or resize it. My screen height is 480px, and this thing takes up 10% of it!
- Window names in the taskbar line-wrap, which is fine for two lines worth, but when there's a third line it's partly off-screen and looks ugly.
- KickOff irritates the hell out of me for various reasons, I reverted to the standard menu almost immediately.
- Though it gives you the option to apply QT colouring to GTK apps, it just applies colour to the butt-ugly GTK1-esque default
- Firefox crashed hard the first time I ran it
- I can't make Marble get past the "loading Atlas" dialog
- Plasma is damn pretty, but everything else is by default a vast swathe of grey
- Konqueror still doesn't run Gmail, even if you make it pretend to be something else
tl,dr: grumble grumble rant.