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

I've had an on-again off-again relationship with KDE for many years, going back to an early KDE3. I finally found it good way to use it – as a desktop, but running Thunderbird for e-mail, emacs for editing, Firefox and Chromium for browsing (since I sometimes need to access the same site with different user ids), etc. I actually like konqueror as a PDF viewer, because from the shell, I can open a new tab with a new PDF document in an existing konqueror window. But after reading this thread, I decided to look at lxqt again, and I have to admit I like it, once I figured out how to customize it (to make tap-to-click work, and to make the Caps Lock key into a compose key for UTF-8 characters. If it does well with an external monitor at work tomorrow, I'll switch to it.

Thanks for the discussion, all.

Regards

– Bhaskar

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 7:48 AM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 4:03 PM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

I've definitely seen that effect, especially in the early days of
KDE4, but for the most part I've been happy with KDE.

However, my experience is probably very different from yours for a few reasons:

1. I've generally tried to kill akodami/nepomuk/baloo and whatever
the latest incarnation of this hellspawn happens to be at the time.
In various editions of KDE that involved either compile-time options
(horray - Gentoo), or options accessible in the UI. I /think/ I have
it off now but to be honest I'm not quite sure. I don't notice it so
they either have it working reasonably well now or I have it off;
probably about time for them to change it again.

2. While I loved kmail back in the day I moved entirely to gmail as
my MUA and don't use any desktop mail software. That also helped
because at some point they made the stuff in #1 a dependency of
kmail/kontact/etc.

3. I use KDE as a desktop environment, not as an
office/browser/everything-under-the-sun solution.

Sure, I'll use dolphin or whatever from time to time - I see that as
part of a DE. Dolphin even has this nice feature where you can open
up a pane that gives you a shell where the shell's PWD follows the
file manager. If you double-click on a folder in the file manager the
shell changes directories, and if you change directories in the shell
the file manager follows. Maybe other file managers can do that these
days but it wasn't common the last time I went looking and it is VERY
NICE.

Otherwise KDE is a window manager and desktop environment. As such I
think it works pretty nicely. At least it does right now - which
means it is probably due for a complete re-write from scratch where
70% of the applications get ported forward, and 30% get the typical
Google treatment (sniff...Amarok...) where something new is introduced
in the place of something old and drops about 30% of the useful
features and adds another 30% of features, of which 5% are really
useful and the other 25% are pointless but, hey, stickers!

Ok, enough run-ons... Great, thanks - now I need to go see a
therapist. Just need to repeat the mantra: I still love KDE... I
still love KDE...

--
Rich

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