Luis asked if anyone had tried the KDE4 live CD, so being a funlovin’ guy I downloaded it from http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/ and gave it a shot. Once it loaded I was dropped to a login screen with a username and password. I didn’t know the username/password. While I was staring at this screen I noticed that some fonts were anti-aliased and all sexy smooth, and some were all jaggy. Looked weird. It said “linux” in a list at the side, I clicked it, and it added “linux” to the username field. Now for the password. I tried “linux”. It didn’t work. Then I tried just clicking login. It worked! Wooo. Bad start though. I know this isn’t really KDE4’s fault but rather the LiveCD, so i’m not judging it.
While using this login screen I did notice that I still don’t like the look or feel of QT. Guess I never will.
Once the desktop (plasma) loaded, it seemed like the background was running on a 16colour amiga display. Big chunks of greyscale in a clouds pattern. Then there was a blue-black-blue gradient bar at the bottom. There was an icon that had a large “?” on it. On the screen were 3 windows. One just had an icon in it and the title read “Klipper”. Then there was a crash reporter and a Tip of the Day window. Each of these had a corresponding text in the blue-black-blue bar.
On the desktop itself was an icon surrounded in a black square. Double clicking it started a calendar application. Ohhhhhh. And there was a swirly grey/green thing in the corner that said “esktop Toolbo”. Putting the pointer near the “esktop Toolbo” made a menu of sorts slide out with some things like Lock Desktop, Zoom in/Zoom out and a list of Plasmoids. The word plasmoids makes me think of the game Asteroids, and I’m always disappointed.
Anywho, I added a clock to my desktop. It gave the wrong time. I added a few more. And a few digital ones as well. Then I zoomed out and I had lots of tiny clocks on my desktop, all giving the wrong time (I assume they were anyway, they were too small to actually read). I added a few more things, and then I added some map of the world thing and the desktop crashed, and I was left with the Klipper icon. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and clicking linux logged me back in.
I set everything back up again. I tried to take a screenshot for posterity. PrtSc didn’t do anything. I clicked the mystery “?” icon on the blue-black-blue bar assuming it to be a menu. It didn’t do anything. So I drew a screenshot instead.
[Where it says “Kicker” it should say “Klipper”, I get Konfused with all these Kute KNiknames, and actually the background wasn’t that smooth, it had about 248 less colours in it – I am quite proud of my “esktop Toolbo” icon though]
So, yeah, maybe the LiveCD wasn’t working too good on my laptop. I dunno, don’t think I’ll be switching tomorrow…
but there were some nice things. I really liked how the window bar buttons faded between different states (everyone knows I’m a sucker for fading), and the idea of having some subtle animations is nice, with things sliding and growing.
Man, I’m so dead…
@heretic
Stop trolling.
@adrian
Criticism is fine. Attacks are not (unless they’re funny 🙂
@felipe
It’s great that Iain tried the livecd, but you can’t pretend that the feedback he gave is even remotely useful to anyone working on KDE. All the problems pointed out in the original article are either not KDE issues, or so blindingly obvious that everyone involved in KDE is already aware of them. So as feedback, it is totally useless, and there is no positive way to react to it. Now if Iain had actually tried some apps that were not obviously broken, and commented on what parts he didn’t like, that would be fine and very useful (always good to get a different perspective).
And yes, normally livecds are meant to give users a good intro to some software without the hassle. But the KDE4 livecds are meant for enthusiasts that want to try out some KDE apps. No one is delusional enough to think that it will “hook” new users in its current state. Perhaps that should be advertised more clearly.
*lol*
I think I see the problem here. It’s not KDE, it’s not GNOME, you are the problem.
The most(not all) of you are over 18, your birthdate says you are adult, me and I think the most psychologists would say you are stupid little childs wrangling for nothing else than who has the bigger one.
Maybe your daddy should spank you a little bit to get you smarter.
nice greets
Ghost
Felipe: It was feedback of a one year old child trying new DVD player, who cannot read the manual and even don’t know how to switch on the that DVD player. Useless.
Iain wrote something on his personal blog. It was a *tongue in cheek* look at an unfinished product, which may or may not have been ‘productive’ or funny. GET OVER IT ALREADY! It’s like a bloody medieval witch hunt over here. He’s added nuance so we can all stop bitching now!
KDE is great, it can stand on its own two feet without the need for this petty sort of ‘backing’ by its proponents.
I’m sure all of you eager beaver stone throwers are free of such terrible, TERRIBLE sins as Iain has committed here, but please shut up, leave the guy alone and go code something to improve matters. Thank you. I love you all, minor character flaws notwithstanding.
With friends like you in OSS, who needs an enemy like M$? 🙂
This poor “report” says much things about you, but the first thing that I can see between lines is that you’re really blind. It’s a shame your “report” is so stupid. Nothing that anyone can find useful. Definitely, you’re only a mischievous little boy.
“anonimous: That is true and a fair comment. I’d have played with the applications, but all I was given was a terminal and a command prompt, so I honestly didn’t know what to type to test.
Not having a menu doesn’t make it any easier (and for what its worth, beta1 had a menu, I don’t see why I should have expected that beta2 wouldn’t have one)”
What are you saying here?
Are you really saying that you fell in a catatonic state because of no menus, no icons, no flashy buttons?
Are you serious?
So, where are your tech skills, or better, your *nix skills? What are you reviewing and with wich tools?
I don’t expect monkeys to review cars.
I don’t expect dookies to review on economic matters.
I don’t expect you to review any software, because you clearly miss the requested skills.
But, let’s try to be honest here.
You were only bitching here and now, you are climbing the mirrors of your faults to get out of this shitti situation, aren’t you.
Listen to me, Complain for you ridicule kiddish behavor.. .Go for it!
P.S. forget my english.
oh, and i was forgetting a thing… i’m a gnome user but i will definitely switch once KDE4 is complete.
Come on man, that’s not a review nor a feedback nor something that a rationale can be thought around, so don’t follow my example and give no importance to such a nonsense, unless you take it for fun.
Anyway someone should remember everyone can type anything in its blog by experience 😉
I’m building a blog about the advatages of both desktops GNOME and KDE, you might find it interesting.
http://www.bbnuke.com/kdevsgnome
“Iain”, sir, you just won a six month “get off the internet” vacation to contemplate your own stupidity and lack of humor. Congratulations.
While I agree GNOME has his quirks and issues, I could never get myself to like KDE, everytime I was extremely annoyed by the way Qt widgets look. The “taskbar” is plain weird and too big for my taste, the icons are also gigantic… All these experiences ended in wiping out KDE just because of the looks.
While some might argue that looks are not enough to dislike KDE, I say it is more than enough. Some things can be fixed after some tweaking, but the inane Qt looks are still there, unchanged. I wholeheartedly agree with the author of this post, KDE is just UGLY, hard to use and plain unintuitive.
As for the trolls, they should be ignored. Just take a look at Slashdot, where ANY review that criticizes Linux, no matter how objective, is bashed. KDE is just not loved by everyone, is that so hard to accept?
waste of time
@zugu
Ironic really. I started on KDE, switched to GNOME for the subdued color scheme, switched to Xfce for less bloat, and then switched back to KDE once I had a decent icon theme and window border set up. And yet…
In all of that, I’ve found KDE icons to be smaller (on average) than GNOME ones. (I started on KDE when I came from Windows because, among other things, I wanted smaller icons to fit more of them.
KDE’s taskbar sizing is completely adjustable in the KDE Control Panel. I’ve got two of them. The main one (about the same size as the GNOME one… but spanning the top of both monitors) and the secondary one (default KDE sizing, 80% width, centered on the bottom of the left monitor, auto-hide and filled with widgets which build two-rows of GNOME panel-sized things when put on a default-sized KDE bar)
Through all of that, I always ended up keeping Konqueror around because I could never find anything that came close as an SFTP client. One of the biggest reasons I like KDE currently is the combination of KParts and KIOSlaves.