On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Philip Webb <[email protected]> wrote: > I unmerged all the kde-base/...-4.2.1 pkgs preparatory to remerging them > with USE="kdeprefix" & it hit me: why am I wasting time on this rubbish ? > > KDE 4.2.1 is not -- as someone bluntly pointed out -- a successor to 3.5 : > it's a whole new concept, not yet clear even in the minds of its developers. > So I'm faced with something I don't want & it's also full of bugs: > I don't want desktops to slide to/fro when I change them, it's nauseating; > Konsole profiles don't work, Dolphin won't start as I want, > add the wrong item to a panel & Plasma freezes with 1 CPU at 100 % . > > I cb content with Fluxbox, if KDE 3.5 disappears one day, > but I do like the KDE 3.5 environment & many of its applications: > they're reliable, highly-configurable, attractive & tasteful. > There is an urgent need for a fork of KDE to improve 3.5 -> 3.6 , > while leaving the silly candy-babies to ape Microsoft & Mac. > > I've removed the rest of what I installed to support KDE 4 (except Qt 4 ) > & may install Xfce 4.6 next weekend to see how far it's come > since I last used it in autumn 2004 (a poor 4.2 then). > As I've said, I'm impressed with Thunar, > which is way ahead of Dolphin & cb installed without most of Xfce 4 . > > There was an article in the Linux press last week about a plain user, > who had had enough of Microsoft & tried out a Linux distro: > what she loved most was the simple practical Fluxbox desktop ... >
While not a KDE user I echo your thoughts. I'm personally a bit worried about Gentoo overlords sort of pushing this hald thing with reasons like 'Gnome's automounting depends on it'. If I wanted automounting that's OK, but what if I don't? Eventually someone will remove hal as a USE flag and then what do we do? I started in Linux about 12 years ago and the best environment for my needs at that time (audio recording, 32 channels of live audio, real-time kernels, Ardour, etc.) was fluxbox. Low overhead. Easily customizable. Every time I get fed up with Gnome I go back to fluxbox. Takes a few minutes to build, not hours like Gnome or days like KDE. Not a great environment for my wife and kids, so they get Gnome. I hope the future of Linux desktops doesn't look anything like Windows. Sometimes it seems to me we're moving too far that direction too fast. - Mark
