Why people dont like KDE ?

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SR
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by SR »

I'll chip in my $.02 as well.

For me Gnome3 is a frustrating experience when working with dual monitors that aren't extremely high resolution. Too much space is wasted by huge window decorations etc. Some apps just don't work properly in a dual monitor setup. If I maximize Chrome and put it on the right screen, the second I type some thing into the URL bar the app pops over to the left side of the screen. If I maximize Renoise on the left screen and click on a menu, the menu will appear on the right screen. It's just a general "WTF is this" experience for me.

KDE works great for me even with all the eye candy going. It's not perfect but I don't feel like it's trying to change the way I use the computer. Given a choice of all the prominent Linux DE's I'd pick KDE or XFCE.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by wolftune »

to tatch:

My point isn't in conflict with yours. I think the default KDE settings are mediocre. The point is, I tried various DE's and liked none of them. Unity is nice on the surface, I don't actually mind it too much. Anyway, I really want certain sorts of things in a good DE and none of them do it by default. That said, there are desktops like ROSA's KDE that are quite nice. Different distros adapt DE's to their taste. I don't think it's crazy or wrong to judge a DE by its defaults, that's pretty normal.

But KDE is so flexible that it isn't fair to say the defaults "represent the primary vision of its developers". The primary vision is a robust system that is very responsive and flexible. Most of the time is put into being flexible. I don't even necessarily agree with that, but it's the case. The defaults are then just something they settled on with the idea that anyone could adjust them. There's a whole complex argument about the pros and cons of settings vs just doing it right and doing it one way. I don't have a strong opinion on that debate, I see both sides.

I don't think KDE is great because it has so many settings. I think that can be confusing and overwhelming. I think KDE is great because the system itself is overall great. It just has features and functions that I don't see elsewhere. I think that if you tried KDE set up my way, you'd like it. And I'm not saying you should tweak it forever and waste time, I'm saying my tweaks should just be the defaults. :mrgreen:
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ToddMWorth
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by ToddMWorth »

OK 2c:

I like options. Parameters, settings, configs, mods, gimme gimme gimme. XFCE outperforms KDE and gnome 2 or 3 by a mile... but when I saw the options in KDE, I was like, wow, awesome. I'm sold.

I think it's important not to blur the lines between configurability and bloat. You don't need one to have the other, they aren't really related.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by i2productions »

ToddMWorth wrote:I think it's important not to blur the lines between configurability and bloat. You don't need one to have the other, they aren't really related.
When you can't find the option in the system to configure what you want the way you want it, because there's too damn many configuration options spread over various menus, what good does it do you? This is my experience with KDE. For instance, what do you do when you want to change wallpaper? Because it's different than every other DE. In other DE's I simply right click on the desktop, right click on a picture on the web, or right click on the picture in a photo viewer. I can't do any of these in KDE. One of the most basic things someone would want to customize. You have to know that it in a setting menu not labeled as wallpaper. (been a while, so don't remember exact naming.) To me this is one example or why I find KDE un-intuitive. I want a "classic" desktop, and not with all the extra crap KDE seems to think I need on a simple panel.(That goes for Unity and stock Gnome-shell as well)
SR wrote:For me Gnome3 is a frustrating experience when working with dual monitors that aren't extremely high resolution. Too much space is wasted by huge window decorations etc. Some apps just don't work properly in a dual monitor setup. If I maximize Chrome and put it on the right screen, the second I type some thing into the URL bar the app pops over to the left side of the screen. If I maximize Renoise on the left screen and click on a menu, the menu will appear on the right screen. It's just a general "WTF is this" experience for me.
Not a bug I'm familiar with(though I can't stand default gnome 3, only dirivative like cinnamon and cairo-dock session), and I've used dual monitors for years. Though again, I use gnome after it's trickled down the stream, as it were.
Also I tried E17 after reading i2 raving about it and I don't prefer it either, I don't like the click-for-menu thing that E17 and other lightweight DEs have going on and I get tired of looking through all the menus trying to figure out how to change it to more conventional behavior.)
It's not my favorite, but I do find it a good OS for the RAM usage. At some level it suffers the same problem I have with KDE, that there are too many settings, but at least it groups them all into one place. I agree I don't like the left click menu, but the right click hot-keys are nice. E17 is the desktop for EVERYONE, as far as, it's only slightly more system intensive than LXDE, but provide many settings. It's really a blank canvas to design as you will. It runs in around 100 Megs or RAM with kxstudio on my pcs I've tried(less than 30 megs on the Raspberry pi). It's not the pretiest or most feature rich desktop, but if you need something less bloated than KDE or Gnome, than it's where I would look for a DE.
Last edited by i2productions on Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by wolftune »

i2productions wrote:For instance, what do you do when you want to change wallpaper? Because it's different than every other DE. In other DE's I simply right click on the desktop … I can't do any of these in KDE.
wrong! This is *exactly* what you do in KDE. Just right-click on the desktop!

Clearly I can discount anything you say about KDE now because the only example you've given is exactly the opposite of reality. :roll:

I don't mean any personal offense, but nobody should be expected to tolerate criticism that is simply false. Of course, I mean to still respond politely, but there's no point in further discussion of the invalid critique.

But this does further drive home my point: there are a few places in KDE where it is unclear which preference section will have what you are looking for. This clutter needs to be better organized. Thankfully, I can just search in the preferences and it will identify where to go to find a setting. Anyway, this is simply an example of a place where improvement is needed, not something inherent to KDE. I am sure that future versions will improve the preference locations to make it more logical. But it's still functional as is.
Last edited by wolftune on Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by i2productions »

BUT then you have to know that you have to go into settings, and then click on another menu that ISN'T LABELED WALLPAPER OR BACKGROUND or anything one would think.

It's all spelled out. Yes you can get to it by right clicking, but it's not clear.

So discount what I say, you've had an agenda for KDE only the whole time.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by wolftune »

i2productions wrote:BUT then you have to know that you have to go into settings, and then click on another menu that ISN'T LABELED WALLPAPER OR BACKGROUND or anything one would think.

It's all spelled out. Yes you can get to it by right clicking, but it's not clear.

So discount what I say, you've had an agenda for KDE only the whole time.
I have no such thing. I don't want KDE-only. I installed a system with Unity for a friend recently. I'm happy to try things. You're interpreting positive statements about KDE as KDE-only? Find me one example in which I said anything substantially negative about any other DE. I'm not even hating on anything. I'm just saying that I like KDE.

Why would I have an agenda?? I have no conflict of interest. I have no profit in this. I am not a KDE dev. The only reason I have to support KDE is that I like it. That's a perfectly valid reason to support it, so the idea that you discount my points because of an "agenda" makes no sense here. It implies something else that is not true: that I have a conflict of interest. At the least, you are implying that I am biased and not open-minded to consider other views, but I deny that and you haven't shown that.

If your point is simply: the right-click on the desktop should be called "change wallpaper", that's not much of a KDE critique. That's the sort of thing that should just be made a bug report, someone should fix it, and then it will be more clear. A perfect example of the need to say, "the current version has some unclear wordings" which is something I will agree with completely. This isn't an inherent unsolvable issue, it just shows that it isn't perfect and needs more developers and work to further improve.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by i2productions »

wolftune wrote: Why would I have an agenda?? I have no conflict of interest. I have no profit in this
You and Brummer did a great job of stopping me from producing the YALS distro. And most of what I got from you was that anything that needed to be changed could be done in KDE. And it's just not true. Then here I'm getting the same thing from you.
wolftune wrote:If your point is simply: the right-click on the desktop should be called "change wallpaper", that's not much of a KDE critique. That's the sort of thing that should just be made a bug report, someone should fix it, and then it will be more clear. A perfect example of the need to say, "the current version has some unclear wordings" which is something I will agree with completely. This isn't an inherent unsolvable KDE issue.
It hasn't been changed in this many KDE releases. Why would i expect it to change anytime soon?
wolftune wrote:At the least, you are implying that I am biased and not open-minded to consider other views
After dicussing this in more than a couple of threads, yes I'm starting to believe that.
wolftune wrote: so the idea that you discount my points because of an "agenda" makes no sense here
I never discounted you points, but you've already said you're discounting mine, for something that is true, and you want to obscure the truth by saying that my concerns are:
wolftune wrote:not much of a KDE critique
They really are a KDE critique. So, if the default feel of KDE is not liked by even you, than why not choose a desktop that doesn't have these issues and feel good to most people out of the box? And if you're just saying my one example(that I remember off the top of my head from not using KDE in over 6 months) is lame, it kind of is, but at the same time it seems like the most basic thing a graphical desktop can do, and it's more difficult to do than any other. Give me a week of solid KDE play time, and I'll give you the whole list of what I like and dislike.

Wolf, you and I have had some great discussions over the past few years, and I really respected you. But some of your posts come off as totalitarian, when you tell people what right and wrong is.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by wolftune »

i2productions wrote: It hasn't been changed in this many KDE releases. Why would i expect it to change anytime soon?
Is "Default Desktop Settings" (the name that happens if you right-click when you have a default desktop started) all that confusing??
If there is an issue here, maybe submitting a bug-report would make a difference.

Things don't just change on their own. People bring them up. That's the whole idea of community involvement. KDE is far from perfect, and I'm sure there's lots of things it can learn from other DE's and vice versa.
So, if the default feel of KDE is not liked by even you, than why not choose a desktop that doesn't have these issues and feel good to most people out of the box?
I'm not opposed to other DE's! I think Unity seems great out-of-the-box and I wonder if E17 or LXDE or xfce might also. I'm not bashing them and never have been. And I'm critical of things in KDE, except I'm working to fix them instead of reject KDE over them. The thing about other DE's is: they might be great, I haven't fully explored them all. They all lacked some amount of control that I greatly appreciated in KDE. But this may change. And I still haven't tried E17.

The only thing I've been saying all along is basically this: the reason to use the other DE's is *not* because KDE is bloated or slow or bad or whatever. KDE can be excellent and there are many reasons to like it. That's not a reason to avoid other DE's. I'm rejecting unfounded conclusive judgment that you've made about KDE and I am not saying anything at all about other DE's.
Wolf, you and I have had some great discussions over the past few years, and I really respected you. But some of your posts come off as totalitarian, when you tell people what right and wrong is.
i2, I don't mean any disrespect. Please understand this: communication is two-way, it involves delivery and interpretation. You bear as much burden for interpreting totalitarianism from my posts as I do for implying it. That they "come off" that way is, in this case, an indication of how you are reacting, because I tried to make it completely clear: I am talking about what is reasonable, fair, what is good discourse, etc. and that's all. Please give me the benefit of the doubt and drop your defensiveness.

Here's an example of what I mean that is more concrete: wrong (both factually and for reasonableness): "KDE doesn't let you right-click to change desktop, see, it's a bad DE", right: (both in style and accuracy) "the wording of things in KDE made it hard for me to figure out how to do things, I didn't like it"

How is stating my judgment about the validity of these ways of approaching this "totalitarian" ??

Respectfully,
Aaron
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by GraysonPeddie »

Okay...

How To Change Wallpaper
  1. Click anywhere in the desktop.
  2. Hold down Alt and hit D and S in that order.
  3. In the "View" section, open the Wallpaper menu and choose "Image" if it's not selected.
  4. You get a list of wallpaper to choose from.
  5. Do the following or step this step:
    1. If you have your own wallpaper, click "Open..."
    2. Navigate to your wallpaper of your choosing.
    3. Click "Open..." when done.
  6. Select the wallpaper of your choosing.
  7. Click "OK."
And you are done. How hard can that be? :)
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by i2productions »

wolftune wrote: Please give me the benefit of the doubt and drop your defensiveness.
Exactly what I was thinking. Now I have a thread that's supposedly started by me, that started with 2 sentences about KDE, as part of a much more positive discussion. Those two, polite, simple sentences, that had little to nothing to do with describing KXStudio in part, or as a whole. But falkTX took it personally, and you seem to as well anytime anyone says something about KDE. All I basicly hear from you is that I should rephrase my problems with KDE? I'm giving a detail description of what's wrong. Why does it need to be more simply rephrased. I thought I spelled it out so that it could not be misinterpreted. I'm wondering, if me testing KDE 4.10 is even worth it. As soon as I find more things I don't like, and post anything about it, we're going to degenerate to this again. I never wanted the "distinction" of owning this thread to begin with.

Grayson..apparently you and everyone is missing the point of my example. It's 1 example I had off the top of my head. It's more steps than other desktops, and not well worded, as I found MANY of the settings in KDE to be.
(Gnome and LXDE for example and most are the same)
1.)Right-Click on desktop
2.)Left click on 'Change Desktop Background.'
3.)Click Browse
4.)Choose Image
5.)Press Ok
Why is KDE's instructions THE ONLY one in all the desktops that's more complicated than these steps?

This board has a way of taking all the fun out of life sometimes.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by GraysonPeddie »

That's very similar to KDE. Right-click, left-click Folder View Settings, Open..., browse for image, and hit OK.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by tbritton »

i2productions wrote:
riffmastergeneral wrote:is it that people dont like KDE ?
One reason. Bloated (yes more than gnome)
Didn't your mother or a girlfriend ever tell you it is not polite to use the word "bloated"? Not ever? In any context? ;-)

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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by Alwaysanewb »

I don't use kde or any programs with kde in the name just for the reasons there are specific people named katie I know i despise. Not that everyone named katie is bad there are plenty of great katies I'm sure. I know that's a dumb reason not to use something but honestly it's the only reason I have never even tried it and never will.
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Re: Why people dont like KDE ?

Post by i2productions »

Alwaysanewb wrote:I don't use kde or any programs with kde in the name just for the reasons there are specific people named katie I know i despise. Not that everyone named katie is bad there are plenty of great katies I'm sure. I know that's a dumb reason not to use something but honestly it's the only reason I have never even tried it and never will.
Finally a light in a dark place. So would it be ok if kxstudios next tool was Catie, as long as its not with a K? :lol:
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