Epic Fail: KDE 4.x
Failure refers to the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. -- Wikipedia, "Fail"
Hits the nail on the head.
I used to be a KDE user. I loved the whole modularity and how customizable KDE 3.5 was. I loved the fact I could emulate any other interface I wanted, and that the code for the widgets was simple enough that I could look at it and understand what was going on. I liked it because it was stable. It worked with Beryl. And, it wasn't that much heavier weight than GNOME.
So. Good. Full View
But then they cut its support. And brought it in. KDE 4. Naturally, expecting cool stuff, I upgraded. It brought both my computers to their knees. Slow, and overly shiny. This was around the time Vista was released, so I just assumed they were in a shine-off competition, to see which could moon the user more with Aero and Oxygen, respectively. Plus, in order to pull this off, KDE integrated Compiz and made its own configurations, rehashing the way the whole windowing worked. Bewildered and disappointed, I switched to using Fluxbox mostly.
In time, though, yearning for a prettier desktop without expending valuable system resources, I started looking for a fuller desktop environment. KDE 4 was still forbiddingly high-resource. E17 was sadly incomplete, while pretty. XFCE, just no. So, I settled on GNOME.
I actually liked it. It was intuitive, responsive, cooperated properly with Compiz/Beryl, and fairly lightweight. It wasn't quite as configurable as KDE was, but hey, I had a highly themable environment that I could make myself feel at home in. Since then, I've come to truly admire the GNOME project, and most of its offspring.
Now, I don't know what posessed me, but KDE 4.3 got good reviews so I decided to try it. After all, I have a couple new computers which should be able to take the load with no problem. Well, the experience in short can be summed up with one word:
FAIL
Let's see what went wrong. I started with my laptop, running a quick
fsufitch@centauri:~$ sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
Okay, maybe not that quick, but you get my point. It installed with no problems, and I switched to KDE, and was greeted by this impressively shiny "desktop":
The whole "Desktop" folder being a separate widget weirded me out for a bit, but that's allright. Next step: try to get on the internet! I start Firefox, but see I'm offline because KDE doesn't share wifi info with GNOME. That's perfectly fine, and the way it should be, so I pull out my USB drive to try to get to the wifi key on it, and plug it in.
Nothing. I try the other USB port. Nothing. I plug my second flash drive in. This one gets read, but it's empty. I plug the first back in. It gets read, but only for a few seconds. I unplug it, plug it back in. It gets mounted, but is accessible only by root. I try again. Not found. This goes on for another 10 or so attempts until it finally reads my USB drive properly.
So, I get the wifi key and stick it in. KDE is stuck in "Acquiring network address..." for a while, then it drops me out to this frustrating dialog:
Argh!
Key wrong? Can't be! I used the same in GNOME's nm-applet and it works fine there. After half an hour of frustrated attempts to connect, I gave up. I then proceeded to trying to tweak with it without internet. I tried configuring all that I had before, and it all worked allright. Except for the Compiz configuration. Their utility was convoluted as heck...
Then I discovered an unpleasantry. If I clicked on any link, it got opened in Konqueror. No problem, I can configure this, right? Wrong. In the KDE configuration, there is a dropdown for browsers to use for links. Containing a single entry: "Konqueror". Same goes for chat clients: "Kopete". What is this, vendor lock-in? Come on, guys, free and open source people should know better than this!
You're doing it wrong.
And, to twist the knife in my wound, it went and saved the seession of useless applications upon log out, crippling my computer next time I logged in. It earned itself a swift:
fsufitch@centauri:~$ sudo apt-get remove kde*
After that fiasco, I actually decided to give kUbuntu a second chance. Maybe it didn't work all too well because it was installed on top of an existing Ubuntu installation, instead of fresh. So, I downloaded the kUbuntu 9.10 ISO, burned it, and got cracking, using my desktop computer, on which I could afford to wipe my current Ubuntu install. It loaded much more slowly than the regular Ubuntu disk, and its functioning as a LiveCD was sluggish because of proprietary drivers not being installed yet, and its Qt version of the Ubiquity installer worked much more slowly at reading my hard disks and scanning the partitions than the Ubuntu one does. But, you know, don't fix what ain't broke.
Unfortunately, this was... broke:
FAIL FAIL FAIL FIAL FAIL!
So, I give up. I don't even know why I tried. For reminiscing? I dunno. I'm now perfectly comfortable in GNOME, and I have a pretty desktop configutation as is!
P.S. Clearing up an issue here. It has been suggested that I mistakenly ran apt-get install winME instead of apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. My bash logs clearly indicate that I ran the latter.
I tried Kubuntu Karmic... it was OK but not great. Lots of unresolved issues. The *buntus are good for Gnome / GTK centric stuff... probably the best. You should try a distro that has KDE4 as its main DE.
I have an old laptop (Sempron 3000 with 768MB RAM and integrated SiS graphics)... Pretty low end. I used to run Mint Fluxbox CE but I wanted to try KDE4.3. After giving up on Kubuntu, I went hard core with Arch + KDEmod.
I highly recommend it for above average user. Arch makes you work for the installation and setup... not as much as Gentoo. But it is totally worth it. My desktop now looks like it's from the 21st century and runs just as fast as with Fluxbox.
If you can handle it, try Arch. You won't regret it.
that sounds...painful.
btw, dear, you should add an option to your poll: "pff, I run windows because my parents FAIL"
Uh, wait, what?
Since when do the file browser, wireless network manager, and other random worthless features of desktop environments matter? xterm does all of these things and more, and I assure you it runs perfectly fine in KDE...
And FYI, you can run GNOME apps in KDE. There's a slight memory overhead as you have to include both gtk and qt, but you use firefox and not konqueror, so you're loading gtk anyways.
Finally, if stuff doesn't work for you, that's the point of this open-source thing you've been preaching: FIX IT YOURSELF! Stuff doesn't magically work under Linux. If you want it to, use Windows. Windows is good at that. That's why it's so popular.
KDE major version numbers follow the Qt release cycle, meaning that KDE 4 is based on Qt 4, while KDE 3 was based on Qt 3. Still, usability and feel is good.
Desktop Hard Drives [go.iomega.com]
*is reinstalling ubuntu as a direct result of said: 'sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop'*