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Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished DE. It's a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I try KDE now I'm still disappointed, it doesn't take much to get the first crashes and bugs...

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I’ve been running KDE 4 and 5 on a variety of different hardware since the day KDE 4 reached v4.0. Granted the first few releases of 4 were a little bumpy (as had been thoroughly discussed on the internet at the time) but it’s been super stable for me ever since.

Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro packing KDE badly? The few times I’ve tried Kubuntu (for example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too.

I’d also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with software rendering would work better (though if you’re going to do that then you’re probably better off with an older DE or WM).

As an aside, I’ve been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.

Not GP, but I was also KDE3 user who ran away after the KDE4 (in my eyes) fiasco. I never went back because customizing and learning to use a desktop environment is an investment on my side, and if the DE doesn't respect that and doesn't understand why I use it, I will not waste my time with it. But hearing the praise in this thread, maybe I should give KDE another chance?

I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.

Interesting that you mentioned GNOME because it was only a couple of years later that GNOME 3 was released and that was a far more significant change to the UX than KDE 3 to 4. Around that time there seemed to be a lot of changes to the FOSS DE landscape.

I’ve not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal preference, though the leaner footprint was a big incentive.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day, but it’s often interesting hearing what peoples preferences are.

I wasn't using Gnome before that so the changes didn't affect me much... :) Iirc I switched to xfce very quickly too.

I agree, every person has a different set of preferences and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and not get in my way, and design is less important. But I still try to make my desktops look good.

GNOME 3 and KDE 4 both committing usability seppuku at around the same time was really odd. Both these disasters were immediately preceded by the release of the first iPhone. I think maybe iOS broke the devs, made the KDE and GNOME devs feel inadequate so they started flailing around and hurt themselves in an attempt to reinvent things and prove to themselves that they could reinvent like Apple can.

The winds were already changing for PCs before then. Compiz and Beryl had been out for a good few years and really showed off what desktop compositing could do. Then Windows Vista was released and, putting popular opinions aside for one moment, visually it looked next generation compared to XP. So it’s only natural that the leading two FOSS desktop environments follow suit.

iOS certainly would have helped fuel the change too but you could see this trend in desktop UX even before the first iPhone was announced.

I too had a certain distaste for the leadership decisions of both camps.

Nah, I have the same story. I spent a lot of that time distro-hopping and tried all sorts of combinations of hardware, different distributions, etc (for reasons unrelated to the KDE fiasco). KDE4 was extremely buggy on all of them, including the later KDE4 verions (and even earlier 5 IIRC). After reading comments like yours, I re-tried it several times (maybe 10 in total) and was always left disappointed. Maybe it's time to revisit once more (OTOH how many times do you touch the stove before learning not to do that anymore?)

Tried different distros, same results. Last time I tried it was with KDE Neon "user edition" and the start menu didn't even align properly, the button was on the left and the menu opened somewhere in the middle of screen. How does that even make it to release?

My comparison is Windows because after KDE 3.5 was dropped from ArchLinux I was just too fed up with all the issues at the time. Around that same time they also started messing with the sound subsystem (switching to PulsAudio) and I couldn't even play mp3's without stuttering under load (this worked fine before). I just needed something that worked and it's been like that ever since, I don't have the motivation anymore to get under the hood and fix things, I just want my computer to work.

If I had to guess, resolution issues due to a monitor reporting badly, bad drivers, or a combination thereof.

You may already be aware of the Trinity Desktop Environment, and if not:

"The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3.... Trinity is an independent fork..." (from the "About" page)

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php

For me KDE 3.5 was the epitome of Linux on the Desktop, KDE 4 felt like a huge step backwards when introduced (may not be true anymore).

Agree, and KDE 5 is KDE 3.5, modern for me. Latest version of KDE 4 were already pretty good.

KDE 5 is much better than KDE 4 was, but I agree that KDE still hasn't reacquired the heights they had in the 3.5 days. Things are still less configurable than they used to be. And Plasma is still buggy for me, whenever I try to use Plasma I end up having to manually restart plasma-shell several times a month because it crashes and KDE doesn't manage to start it again, leaving me with no task bar until I restart it manually...

Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE applications are top-tier.

XFCE is very customizable.

There's a project called Trinity, which is essentially KDE 3.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org

Try https://trinitydesktop.org/ then?

Logging in the morning, opening a website, a word doc and a spreadsheet in tabs in Konqueror, editing stuff over SSH in Kate. It genuinely felt like KDE was trying something new back then, creating a more object oriented desktop. I don’t know how much of that survives but it was exciting at the time.

I agree. It seems kde 4 was the reason it was really dropped from most of the major distros.

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