Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

I have been using KDE for ~eight years in one capacity or another and it almost continually improved with every update. Regressions were quite rare, even during the KDE4->5 move.

I like that KDE applications are at least somewhat consistent in their UX and in the way they organize basics. For example, the way settings and shortcuts are handled is identical across all apps. Kparts makes embedded viewers consistent and good across apps. Support for GTK theming reduces the visual annoyance of the rare GTK app. KWin works very well, has a broad selection of useful shortcuts and has been the most stable compositor I've ever used (AMD/open source).

On the other hand, KDEPIM/Akonadi seems like it is quite powerful, but for some reason I kinda didn't became comfortable with it. Not sure why, exactly. I used KMail and KOrganizer for quite a while, though. Decent tools, but some rough edges when it comes to first-time setup, e.g. the wizards could really use some polishing.

There is a surprising number of useful and powerful utilities in KDE.

Completely agree. I am a long term KDE user and I like (and use) the PIM stuff in general but since a few years the quality continues to degrade. Akregator (RSS-Feed Reader) has reached the point were it destroys its feed list every few weeks, and doesn't even fetch updates anymore (completely useless). Akonadi tends to become an unresponsive process with 100% CPU usage every week or so. And when I remember the Kmail 2 migration... Oh god. It was supposed to be a 'no action required' upgrade and it ended with complete recreation of every account on every machine.

So yeah, while the core concepts of KDE and Plasma are great, the development doesn't look as active as it once was and once great packages seem to degrade over time.

One of my favorite features of the past years is the Dolphin-Nextcloud integration. That way you can simply right-click a synced file and 'share with Nextcloud' it via link or other users, works great :-)

I love KDE and have used it for about the same amount of time and I agree with you that PIM really is the weak point.

The other apps are generally excellent or good enough you don't notice them, which is exactly what I want from desktop.

>Regressions were quite rare, even during the KDE4->5 move.

you must joking right. KDE5 beginnings were terrible.

KDE4 was also terribly bug ridden. I used to advocate for KDE heavily but after suffering through bugs in KWin and KMail/Akonadi that went unresolved for years I gave up and moved to Gnome.

There was a KWin bug that filled the task bar with graphical artifacts over time so that you couldn't tell anymore which taskbar "button" was for which window. They kept blaming the video drivers until someone proved to them that they had a resource leak in KWin.

The KMail/Akonadi bug that I still remember vividly as it was very annoying and long lived was one where you would get messages duplicated.

One of the issues with KDE 4 was that their '4.0' release is what everyone else would call and alpha or beta, and their '4.1' release is the true '4.0'. Is there any chance the bugs you encountered were for 4.0.x?

Nope, 4.3 still had the bugs, that's why I lost hope and moved to Gnome.

I'm always updating to latest greatest KDE since 3.5 and I think you mean KDE4 instead (which actually was more of a PR fiasco than anything technical).

KDE5 really was terrible for a long time. I tried it multiple times after it was launched, but always quickly downgraded until my distro dropped support for KDE4. At first it did not even handle multiple displays properly. In fact, some areas, such as locale support are still much inferior to KDE4 [1].

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340982

I am pretty sure you mean 3->4. KDE5 was so smooth, that you were wondering why they were talking about a major release.

The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early. I started to use it with the first alpha and saw a lot of bugs during that time, but I always knew that I was using incomplete alpha software. KDE4 wasn't stable enough for every day use until 4.3 or so and many people started to use it with 4.1 which was just the first version which claimed to be usable at all (most basic programs had been rewritten, but many more advanced programs still weren't ready).

> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.

True, it also meant that distributors were replacing KDE3 too early and the system wasn't receiving much updates anymore before KDE4 was usable. I ended up using mostly XFCE, Gnome and macOS the years after. ;) Might give KDE5 a shot though.

> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.

Don't you mean that it was released too early? People will in general install and use the released version and complain if it's not good enough.

> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.

Yes, but this problem was caused by the KDE release team botching their announcement. They had an alpha release, a beta release, and then a big 4.0 release. Then, it turned out that their '4.0 release' was really what everyone else would consider alpha/beta, and they didn't want people actually using it for production environments yet. They screwed up communication royally, sending mixed messages about whether the software was actually ready or not.

source: I maintained some KDE-related packages on arch and the 4.0 release was horribly botched.

It was all mixed up due to library frameworks and application suite being released as one big "KDE" package. Kdelibs5 4.0 was ready and stable, but the KDE desktop wasn't. They tried to communicate that since the beginning, but not nearly hard enough.

> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.

IIRC, that was on purpose. KDE purposedly release KDE4.0 even though it was not completely tested in order to have more bug reports.

In retrospect, that was a stupid move.

Still in retrospect, I still miss KDE3.

Well, the way I remember it, there were a lot of people telling you to skip KDE 4.0 and wait for 4.1 at the time of the 4.0 release and I was pretty sure that there was some warning in the release notes. So I took a look at them again:

https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/

But I can't find there any warning what so ever. So even if the people who were actively engaged with the development knew that this software wasn't ready for prime time, they didn't mention it and therefore I have to agree with you that this move must have been done on purpose. :-/

Right. Not in the announcement.

But it was communicated with the community what KDE 4.0 was about [0]

Obviously there were mistakes made. But the fact that KDE 4.0 was not ready for every day use _was_, in fact, communicated with distro's.

[0] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html

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