[PLUG] Rant: Goodbye KDE, My Old Friend

[Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org>]

KDE, I've been in love with you since I first met you in the mid 1990's. 

You were flashy, you were cool, and you gave me lots of buttons to press
and settings to tweek.  When the gnome/KDE wars raged, I stayed loyal to
you.  Gnome was too "California", while you were shiny, modern, and
wonderful.  You had GREAT applications.  KMail was a little complex, but
this gave me tremendous power to have multiple eMail accounts with
multiple identities.  Dolphin, you were everything I could hope for in a
file manager.  Sure, Konqueror was a bit of a kludge (trying to be both
a browser and a file manager), but you Dolphin were wonderful and
powerful.  I especially liked your "fish:" protocol which let me access
remote machines via sftp from the URL line.  It was aggravating that I
had to spend 15 minutes setting up the toolbars like they "should" have
been, but it was worth it.   Kate, you were everything a text editor
could be.  If I needed a simple text file, or had a huge python source
code to hack, you were a dream.  KOrganizer was pretty weak, but K3B was
a fantastic CD burner, and I could always count on you to run Firefox,
LibreOffice, and all the other critical applications.

I stuck with you through the version 4 fiasco.   After all, you were
complex, and I gave you the benefit of the doubt.  You finally got
better in the 4.x series, so I hoped you had learned your lesson.  You
started to complain a little if I ran you as root (sorry, but I refuse
to enter my root password every time I change a printer setting!), but a
few well-placed tweeks to a config file solved this with ease.  Plasma
was another great leap, and it had its problems, but I loved the cool
eye candy.

But we're through now.  You've gotten too big, too complex, and it's
obvious you only exist because your creators think it's fun to write
complex desktops.  You really don't care about me.

For the past few weeks, I've loaded you from Debian stable, Debian
testing, Kaos, SuSE, Gentoo "~" and Gentoo stable.  You've been a mess
each time.  I've tried the proprietary nVidia drivers, and the nouveau
drivers, and they all stink.  KMail, you were the worst.  You'd lock up
my system with nary a care about what I was trying to do.  Luckily, I
moved on to Thunderbird because I needed it's very capable calendar
application.  Although not as flashy, Thunderbird gets the job done with
efficiency and grace.  But even when not loading the KDE PIM suite, you
still caused me trouble.  You'd lock up much too often, and I could
never figure out why.  Based on some of the weird error log entries, I
theorized that you simply don't like video drivers, but I'm not really
sure.  It's hard to know what went wrong when you just freeze and won't
talk to me.

Even worse, you're starting to get positively elitists about running as
root.  Dolphin now simply refuses to run as root, and neither with
Kate.  Yeah, I know, "running as root is dangerous", well so is driving
a car. (I could easily crash, or worse, crash into someone else).  
Well, I _LIKE_ the danger, and am not afraid of completely hosing my
system and being forced to do a reinstall; problem solving is what I
love about computers.  But you don't care.  It's your rule, and to heck
with the rest of us.  Yeah, I could hack the source code, but that's
getting ridiculous.


So I've moved on.  For the first time in over 20 years, I'm not running
KDE.   LXQT is not nearly as flashy as you are, but she's a
good-looking, reliable woman, and she won't try to break my heart.  Oh,
I looked at lots of other Desktop environments.   I liked MATE, and
would have stayed with it except it was brain-dead regarding multiple
monitors.  KDE, I miss some of your tweaks and eye candy, but I'm
getting by just fine.

Goodbye, my old love.  I wish you well, but it's time we went our
separate ways.

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