KDE 4 - The Big Letdown

Have you ever used KDE? Do you even know what it is? Well, I suggest you go to http://kde.org and check it out: it's by far the best-looking desktop environment for Linux users, with a look and feel that tries to mimic much of the latest Windows and MacOS eye-candy. It's really spectacular, if I say so myself.

Unlike its biggest competitor, GNOME, KDE is written in C++. By itself that's not an advantage, but it is possibly a hint at the main features of the language: inheritance chains and re-use. KDE applications look and feel much more similar to each other than GNOME apps and they seem to share a lot more functionality.

KDE 3.5, by now several years old, was a marvel in functionality, stability, and ease of use. It was far and away the best suite of desktop applications for Linux, light years ahead of the corresponding GNOME applications (with a few notable exceptions).

Then, something happened. It was triggered by a major release of the library underlying KDE, Qt. Qt is written by a company in Norway, Trolltech (acquired by Nokia a short while ago). Really, originally the GNOME project came into being because some folks objected to Qt, more specifically to the licensing restrictions that came with it.

Qt4 came into existence and required a rewrite of KDE. From release 3.5, there had to be a major jump to 4.0. Unfortunately, here the KDE developers and leadership completely failed us. They decided not only to rewrite KDE 3.5 to use the Qt4 libraries, but to completely change everything about KDE.

I should have known that catastrophe was near when I installed the first release of the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.0. Unlike standard Linux convention, the 4.0 did not indicate a stable release, but a hodge-podge of half-baked applications and pieces of software that more often than not didn't do what I wanted them to do. It was so bad that it was quite impossible to figure out why anyone would want to switch to KDE 4 at all.

Now, years later, we are slowly moving to KDE 4.4. Sadly, functionality is still not restored and even flagship applications are marred with several bugs that make life irritatingly annoying. Worst of all, it feels that what we got added into the mix is mostly eye candy, while the fine-tuned functionality that was the hallmark of KDE applications in the past is gone completely.

I'll give you an example: KDE's media player, Amarok, is far and away the best media player available for Linux. It has a pluggable architecture in which you can pretty much extend anything, and it's really flexible in recognizing media that has been added and removed. Best of all, it allows for extentions - tools, scripts, new media sources, etc. that enhance the functionality in ways that no single development team could ever envision.

Then came Amarok 2. It took forever to get used to the new interface, one that was pluggable where I didn't need plugging, but that horrifyingly decided to completely change the way extensions were handled. As an effect, the hundreds of them written for Amarok 1 (actually, amaroK) were completely useless with the new application. Not only was that the case, developers of amaroK scripts were not even treated with a guide on how to port their extensions to the new platform. We were all lost, users and developers alike.

KDE 4, I am sorry to say, was a complete nightmare, especially compared to the parallel developments in the GNOME world. There is a GNOME application you are familiar with, Firefox. It is pluggable and extensible, too. Whenever there is a new Firefox release, at least some of the old extensions still work. It's really not that hard. Besides, the Firefox team does explain how the browser changed and what an extension developer needs to do when porting to the new release.

To give you an idea of how irritating KDE has become, I will give you a simple example: the panel at the bottom. It's an old idea - both to desktop interfaces (you probably saw it first in the Windows 95 start menu) and to KDE. So it's not this revolutionary new idea that needs to be figured out first, right?

There are widgets on this menu. Ya no, like the clock, and the desktop icons. The former shows you the time, the latter shows you the desktop. Easy enough, no? You'd think.

Gripe #1: Right-click on either of them. You get a context menu. One of the items is something of the form, "Remove this widget." Remove this widget (actually, don't). Now try to get it back. Fun, isn't it? It used to be the case in prior releases that you had to find an empty space on the panel and right-click on it. In most environments, though, there was no empty space, so you were left on your own, trying to figure out how to get your clock back.

Gripe #2: OK, this is really a usability issue more than a technical problem. If I right click, left click, middle click, or completely the clock widget, I can't change clock settings. Maybe I just got used to being able to do that on Windows, but it seems to be the logical place for me to set the clock. I see a clock, I see that the clock displays the wrong time, I set the clock.

Not in KDE 4. There I have to go to the system settings, where I find "Time and Date" in the Computer Administration area (or some such).

Now, you might ask, why would I spend my first post on this blog kvetching about KDE? Because I really love a lot about KDE. It's a wonderful environment with high degrees of consistency and functionality, and in its 3.5 incarnation it was by far the best environment available not only in Linux, but in any major operating system.

Then comes KDE 4, and it's all gone. We are slowly moving towards more usability after the KDE developers have been hammered for years with complaints from users. They have even lost the crown of best desktop environment to GNOME in some surveys and polls.

I hope the KDE developers, especially the leadership, have learned from this major debacle and work on addressing both the issues with the applications and the general approach they have taken.

I mean, seriously: just this morning I tried to get the contents of my playlist from Amarok to my media player. There is no way to do that. None whatsoever. Researching the web, I found the Amarok forum, where someone complained about the same thing. After the usual vapor about things being fixed in the latest release (they weren't), the helpful suggestion to file an enhancement request.

An enhancement request? You don't consider the inability to get your playlist onto your iPod a core function of a media management application? Imagine Apple telling you that you should consider filing an enhancement request when you find out that iTunes doesn't allow you to copy your playlist to your device. Grrrr....

And all of this just because I care.