Re: [PLUG] Rant: Goodbye KDE, My Old Friend

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Fri, 9 Feb 2018 16:03:25 -0500
Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org> wrote:

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

I met KDE in the late 1990's and felt it was much better than the fvwm
Redhat 5.1 was using at the time.

> 
> 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.  

Around 2001, I had a anemic CPU box with not much memory, and it kept
crashing or hanging. I replaced KDE with the very light footprint IceWM
and managed to use that computer another couple years.

> You had GREAT applications.  KMail was a
> little complex, but this gave me tremendous power to have multiple
> eMail accounts with multiple identities.  

Kmail was great alright. Years after I stopped using KDE I still used
Kmail, Konsole and K3b. By 2005 I hated KDE, which I called
"Krash, Delay, Expand", but Kmail was just too good to leave.

Ironically it was Kmail that made me flee KDE. In 2011, Kmail was
replaced by Kmail2, a Rube Goldberg machine multiply tenticled into
Akonadi, Nepomuk and misbehaving dbus_daemon. Using Kmail2 on folders
formerly hosted by Kmail required a one time, no second chance
conversion that   Did   Not   Work.

The following URL describes the Kmail problem, and my solution, which
was very difficult and time consuming but has given me an easy email
platform not beholden to any email client:

http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm

Once Kmail was gone, I moved swiftly to remove every KDE program and
library from my computers. Luckily, they begin most of their programs
with "k" so it's pretty easy.

[snip]

> 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.

The stone truth!

> 
> 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.

Yep. Before I left kmail, I actually made a daemon that every 5 seconds
found any instances of dbus-daemon taking more than 90% CPU. If that
same dbus-daemon was still taking 90% five seconds later, my daemon
kill -9'ed the rogue dbus-daemon. That was the only way I could keep my
(well provisioned) machine running all day.

[snip]

> 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.

I ran IceWM until I started with Ubuntu, whose Gnome2 was absolutely
good enough for me. But remember what you said about creators think
it's fun to write complex desktops. Gnome3 came along, and I escaped to
Xfce, and when I needed a WM/DE (Window Manager/Desktop Environment)
that was absolutely stable and worked the same way every time, I used
LXDE.

Nowadays, on my Daily Driver Desktop (DDD), I use OpenBox with Suckless
Tools' dmenu hotkeyed in as my main method of running programs, and
also hotkeyed in my home brew UMENU2 for running more complex things.
With my laptops, where I need to save my brainpower for the audience, I
use LXDE.

> 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.  

There are so many great WM/DE's out there. As long as you stay away
from KDE, Gnome3 and Unity (and unfortunately Xfce appears to be
drifting into monolithic entanglement), life is good.

> 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.

How you can be so unbitter is beyond me. Here's what I say...

KDE, you wannabe heartbreaker that could never even compete with IceWM,
keep flirting with recent Windows refugees and don't bother darkening my
door. You think you're hot stuff, but you're just cold slime. I cheated
on you every chance I could get, and the only reason I *ever* used you
was because I was new to Linuxtown and hadn't yet met any *real*
WM/DE's. I can make Ctwm run circles around you.

SteveT
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