KDE4 was released last week, and I’ve delayed posting my thoughts on it, hoping that I would find solutions to the glaring problems that I experienced.  As of yet, I have not.  I understand that the KDE developers did not intend this to be a “finished” released.  Unfortunately, calling it a new release, announcing it, and celebrating it all illustrates the contrary.

Here are some of the reasons why I am not currently using KDE 4.0 despite having it installed:

1. Plasma, all-in-one the desktop, panel, widget system is simply not finished.  Desktop icons don’t work, panel icons don’t work, sometimes the background image doesn’t load, there are no, absolutely no panel options.  Those used to resizing the panel, changing the color, etc will be mortified when faced with the generic plasma panel

2. Applications tend to crash or behave erratically.  Dolphin, the file manager, gives me an error everytime I click on a file to open it.  Open a text file, get the error, “Could not open Kwrite”.  That’s not the strange part.  The strange part is that Kwrite actually does open, despite the error.  Other applications, like Kopete just crash.  The Kword version is an alpha version.  The apps simply aren’t ready.  The one set of apps that do look and work nicely are the games.  Mahjong Solitaire on KDE4 is simply magnificent.

3. Konqueror - Once the be all to end all, there was a time when KDE was synonymous with Konqueror.  It is a web browser, file manager, ftp transfer program, and many more things.  It has to work.  If it doesn’t, KDE doesn’t work.  When using it as a web browser, most of the web sites I went to did not work.  Google, Yahoo, and a few other sites did.  I couldn’t get a coherent error out of it, only something about not being able to paint widgets correctly.  This is simply not acceptable for production use.

As I mentioned before, I understand that this version is not a finished product.  I remember when Mac OS X was first released.  There were few apps for it and plenty of usability issues.  After a few versions, most of those issues were worked out and more people started to adopt it. My hope is that something similar will happen with KDE.  I like the direction they’re headed, and aside from the problems I’ve mentioned, it is beautiful, faster, and more organized that any desktop environment I’ve seen.

At this point, however, it’s simply not usable for me.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.