KDE 4 and usability

TheChessPlayer · n00b Joined: 01 Sep 2006 Posts: 11

Those reactions to change are natural human behavior. We often think of computer geeks as monsters of logic but the truth is that they are driven more by their emotions like all the rest of people. Once you get used to something, all reasons are good to stick to it.

shallpion · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2008 Posts: 331

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

nixnut · Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 4:40 pm Post subject:

merged some posts above
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regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

These mentionings of KDE4 being slow is not founded in my experience. About a year ago I managed to get kde4.1.2 on a PII@300Mhz. It wasn't fast but it certainly wasn't sluggish.

For kde-4.3 i've noticed a definite increase in responsiveness. On my Thinkpad x31(1.6Ghz P-M) it works perfectly fine and I have it on my C2D@2.6GHz for comparison.

The other mentions about Amarok2? That I can agree with but I got fed up of people moaning about the issue and made my PyQt4 clone.

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3425 Location: Canada

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

Aquiles · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 11:15 am Post subject:

KDE4 is working fine for me. Sure there are some things that I was used to do in a certain way under KDE3 and now have changed, which means that there is a period of transition until you are completely familiarized with the 4 series. But I think the overall experience is positive and for what I've seen so far KDE4 is clearly a step forward. Also, for those like me who usually stick with KDE programs in order to take advantage of the integration between them, KDE4 is significantly better than KDE3 in my opinion (and KDE3 was already good for that matter).
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Aquiles

rafo · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 12:31 pm Post subject:

Aquiles · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 5:49 pm Post subject:

rickj · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:23 pm Post subject:

I just got KDE4 up and running, simply because it became "stable". I'm not sure if I like it yet, not enough time using it to tell.

Two items seem noteworthy:

1. All my kmail settings vanished when I brought up KDE4, though my mail was retained. Is there some way to retrieve them, or do I have to set up all my accounts, filters, and the like from scratch?

2. Under KDE-3.5 one could run kpersonalizer and adjust the level of eyecandy with a single slider. Is there any equivalent under KDE4, or must one spend hours tracking down each individual time-waster and disabling it?

rafo · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:15 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your examples, Aquiles! I feel I have to jump into the pool myself. I have backed up by Gentoo partition and started to emerge the 60+ KDE4-related packages.

mxedit10n · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2007 Posts: 15

I'm having a rather positive experience so far with KDE4 (e.g. v4.3.2) at nearly the same "speed" as v3.5.x, no major issues (so-far) on... pretty-much RTFM.

2.6.30-gentoo-r6 (ext4)
i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.4C (OCd 3.0)
Nvidia 6200 NV44A AGP
2GB DDR-333

The KDE4 Kwin (fan of Coverswitch), Plasma[oids], and Dolphin are sweet. Although on low quality, ETQW even runs smoothly.

numerodix · l33t Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 743 Location: nl.eu

I just noticed kde4 was marked stable. Suddenly portage wants me to upgrade everything, which I don't want. I'm not sure what to do about this.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9280

If you don't want it, there's a guide

Seeing though how 3.5 lacks any kind of support now you can only postpone the switch to 4 or another DE/WM, and will have to mask more and more dependencies from upgrading to not break 3.5.

numerodix · l33t Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 743 Location: nl.eu

Thanks, hadn't seen that one!
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numerodix · l33t Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 743 Location: nl.eu

Hm, it seems to require Portage 2.2. Is that "safe"?
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d2_racing · Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 12:11 pm Post subject:

rafo · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 8:48 am Post subject:

Having emerged KDE 4 now, here are two early observations:

- The promise of reduced compile time seems to hold. I haven't made measurements but I remember KDE 3.5 as taking really long to emerge.

- The Dolphin file manager is nice, I can make it look pretty much the way I want.

- The panel has me worried. At work I have KDE 3.5 on a 1920x1200 screen, and my vertical panel holds 1 menu button, 5 quicklaunch buttons, 9 virtual desktop thumbnails in 1-column vertical arrangement, up to 20 buttons representing active windows in the current virtual desktop, 7 thingies in the system tray, 1 lock-screen button, and a date/time applet. All of these items are carefully engineered to be small and yet readable. I sort of doubt that a KDE 4 panel can be equally informative, but I have to check when back home.

rafo · Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 12:16 pm Post subject:

Another recent KDE 4 usability discussion thread:

http://www.kdenews.org/2009/10/21/kde4-demonstrates-choice-not-usability-problem

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3425 Location: Canada

OK, I decided to try kde4 on my desktop, but I would like to have relatively minimal, but still functional installation. For me desktop is primarily an effective window/desktop space manager and configuration tools for that. Networked in a sense of VNC. And applications of my choosing that integrate well. I have no need for pim services, NetworkManager, PolicyKit, file managers, HAL, automounting, hibernate/suspend functions through desktop, other web browsers besides Firefox or Google Chrome, office applications, pulseaudio-type sound servers, etc. Less of that I can get away without installing, happier I am.

What would be your recommendation for such configuration ? I tried to start with

kdebase-meta

but currently it continously demands that I recompile qt-related things with changes USE flags (+mysql, +accesibility, +sql, +webkit).
Unfiortunately, as emerge does, it gives you such problems one at a time. So I am not yet down to emerge showing me the full list of packages that will be installed, and I already had to install things like phonon, xine (why on earth ?? ) . I hope in couple of hours I'll see what actuall kdebase-meta contains

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3425 Location: Canada

Well, got kde-4 (well, just kdebase-meta) - never though I would.

First impressions

Bad:
1) Default visual is pretty awful, needed to change wallpaper immediately
1a) Oxygen is even worse
2) Menu is pretty awful indeed as many complained. It is increasingly annoying to have to use a slider in the menu - this is two paradigms mixed up. To get something you need coordinated movement sidewise and up and with a slider everything shifts under you all the time. Bad, needed to go to forums to read about replacement
3) Can't find how to move apps in the panel ! (it is probably somewhere, but why not obvious ?). Moreover, once widget is deleted (pager) and added again, it appears in a totally different place. WELL, you have to right-click on the panel, choose panel settings,
and if you miss the panel and get into TaskBar dialog, you have to choose Panel Options and then Panel Settings.
Only then you go back to your icon and pick up your icon with left click. And if you accidently right click rather than left click - everything disappears and you have to start again ! So this is on average 4 clicks and 2 menus for such and obvious procedure !
4) Windows borders seem wasting quite some space. Also roundish windows (which perhaps contribute to the waste) are not my favourite
5) Pager is pathetic - need to get to grid view as quickly as possible.
6) New mouse pointers are quite unpleasant, they feel less accurate.

Good:
It is actually pretty sleek and quite fast ! Transparency, which I was never fan, is nice for the panel - to feels it takes less space. Also nice when you click on the window. Animations are a bit slow (I don't think it is actually taxing hardware - looks more like settings are on a slow side). In some places - like menus, I prefer instant appearance to the animations. Hope it can be configured.

Overall, I can't say I am displeased !

Edit 1
Hm, with a bit of time, more added to bads

1) How does one add app launchers to the panel ??? Well, you can drag and drop from the menu. Unfortunately, the icons does not seem to scale to a consistent size and onte panel look pretty all over the place. Perhaps because you get the ones that come with application, rather than
for a consistently designed set.
2) glxgears drops from ~6000 (kde3) to ~4000 (kde4), and we know not to take that seriously, but in KDE4 the gears motion looks jittery ! while in kde3 they are perfectly smooth (even on laptop with built-in intel card which at best makes 500 fps). I am seriously worried for people playing games under KDE4
3) Resizing windows is not good, mouse moves 4 cm, then window jumps, will be going back to the frame style resizing. Hm, actually even
with a frame it is pretty dismal. Moreover, it is not the frame around window that is draw (so you can see overall window size, but a rectangle
around the area that will but cut. So it is simply buggy.
4) konsole seems has lost ability to display meaningful titles. Not particularly informative to see 'python2.6' while doing emerge, instead of full info of kde-3.5 - SOLVED by setting "Tab Title Command" to "%w" or "Set by Shell" in "Current profile"

Edit 2. Positive

Switched to Classic menu - what a pleasure ! The person who decided that drop down (up) menus can have sliders should be politely told how wrong he is.

Edit 3. Positive
Scroll on edge, Grid and window view are the biggest selling point to me. Grid is almost as good as virtual desktop pagers were
in FVWM. If only it could show positions of windows between workspaces, and not just pieces of windows. But then we would have virtual desktop back would not we ?

Edit 4. Negative
Did not find where to disable wrapping the desktops around in the edge scroll .... Found - it is in System Settings/Window Behaviour/Focus !! Nor setting the timing of panel autohide (too fast for me) ...

To find: analog of kde-3.5 konsole panle launcher, where you get a choice of profiles