InfiniteTides

[rant] This morning I made the mistake of listening to the latest episode of TWIT (This Week In Tech). What was I thinking?! My biggest gripe about TWIT has always been Leo Laporte. He’s a jerk. He interrupts and talks over all of his guests. A good host brings up the topics for discussion and lets his GUESTS talk. Leo doesn’t do this. He states the topic, then rambles on and on about his opinions as though they are part of a question. He interrupts the flow of the discussion by interjecting his own stupid comments and weak attempts at humor. He NEVER lets two other people argue or discuss back and forth. He cuts them off constantly, and I absolutely loathe him for it. Often he won’t even let his guests finish their points no matter how coherent they are. I find myself telling him out loud to shut the “F” up! My god, just be quiet, Leo! Leo should fire himself so I can listen to TWIT again.
[/rant]

KDE 4.0 is the brash and sometimes over eager rookie who has some skill and flair, but too many rough edges to be a starter. That’s not to say that KDE 4.0 is a bench warmer though. It looks great, seems to need less memory than 3.5.8, and many of the new applications (like Dolphin file manager) are great.

Why isn’t 4.0 ready for prime time? I would start with the way it takes over at installation. Instead of letting you ease into the transition from older versions of KDE by allowing you a choice of menu styles, it substitutes its own unwieldy version (which I quickly replaced once I realized it was a widget). It either didn’t install the KDE4 version of Kmix or it just decided I didn’t need it to launch at startup. Either way, I had to re-add that to the task bar along with my notebook’s batter life monitor. Even the clock settings needed to be adjusted to match what they were on my KDE3 desktop.

What is up with all of the seemingly dead KDE3 application/shortcut icons on the KDE4 desktop? The printer, my computer, and trash icons all look to be broken links. Someone should have thought about this when they decided KDE4 was ready to be released. Clicking the little red “X” on the dead looking icon doesn’t delete it or move it to the trash. It merely sweeps it under the rug until you reboot. Come to think of it, where the hell is the trash now anyway?!

I’ve already mentioned this previously, but I have to say it again. Whatever you do, DO NOT install Amarok 2 for KDE 4.0. It is a horrendous piece of fecal matter pre-alpha software. In all seriousness, if you love your current version of Amarok, don’t install the pre-alpha, because it’s not working well for streaming podcasts, and I really don’t like its look and feel one bit.

Something else that I don’t like is how desktop icons maintain the border that has the red “X” after you remove your mouse from them. It isn’t consistent (or at least doesn’t seem to be) in when it does this, and I quite honestly don’t see any point to it whatsoever. Another things that irritates me about KDE 4.0 (and now I’m getting really nitpicky) is the default sound theme. I really don’t think most people want to hear the stupid little sounds every time something moves, opens, closes, minimizes, or maximizes on their desktop. Why couldn’t KDE4 have imported my sound theme (practically none) from KDE3? Rather annoying that I have to dig through the settings (if I can even find them) to turn those retarded sounds off.

Even though some things about KDE4 annoy me, I’m sticking with it. I already prefer it over KDE3, now that I’ve got it customized to my liking. The fact that it seems to devour much less system resources is a big factor of why I’m using it on my notebook and file server. Sure, some things are broken, and some things take some tweaking, but I figure that I’m using Linux, and that’s just the way it is. Deal with it and move on. So I’m recommending KDE 4.0 to Linux users above the n00b level (which I just barely am).