John Woodhouse posted on Sat, 28 May 2011 02:26:40 -0700 as excerpted:
> Disappointed to too weak a word but as mentioned feelings like that in
> my case do not just relate to kde but other aspects of linux as well. I
> have always hoped that linux plus kde would become one of the major
> installations alongside mac and windoze. It has lead the way in some
> respects in the past but now I feel it is falling behind and in some
> areas, not kde, is showing strong signs of not evolving at all where as
> windoze is.
It has seemed, lately, as if people are giving up on the "power-user"
Linux desktop. Of course Linux in the form of Android is going great guns
in mobiles, and Linux continues to be strong in servers and seriously
dominates the HPC/supercomputer market. And there's still the Ubuntus and
Fedora/Gnomes of the world going for the "hide the controls, here come the
l-users, and we'd not want them to hurt themselves!" desktop segment. But
for those not afraid of a good configuration dialog... kde may have its
problems, but perhaps unfortunately, at least at the full-feature end, it
remains the only really viable choice.
Fortunately for me, I've always tended to be a bleeding edge beta kind of
user (which was what so frustrated me when kde was saying 4.2 and 4.3 were
ready for normal users, when they were giving even this seriously leading
edge beta guy problems that would have had him putting it off a few more
versions... if kde wasn't at the same time dropping support for the truly
mature and stable 3.x, forcing the issue, at the same time -- they were
calling a clear alpha, not even beta quality, ready for normal use, while
at the same time pulling the rug out from the real stable version and its
users!), so I'm I'm not too terribly uncomfortable with all this, and have
bisected, bug reported, and applied patches, to prove it. So unless the
trend of the last couple releases continues downward, I'm used to having
to work around and bisect/bug-report/apply-patches, no big deal, and I'll
be fine. But it was /nice/ to be finally able to honestly recommend the
later 4.5 series to other more normal users, and I *MISS* the ability to
be able to do so! =:^(
The second most viable alternative, and it's a way down the list for me
but honestly I'd be looking at it if I hadn't already invested the time in
switching to kde4, would have to be to "go light", with enlightenment or
lxde or some such. From what I've read, enlightenment at least is quite
configurable, tho of course far less full-featured and much more bare-
bones than the full ecosystem that kde tends to provide.
> I also assume that people do of course appreciate that home networks and
> even nas's are increasingly popular even if they do not use them. These
> are also fundamental to enterprise level use.
Certainly so. I just found your statement that kde was only fit for a toy
based on that alone... overly broad on overly narrow. Widen the LAN/NAS
case to the entire scope of kde and its bugs and regressions, and I
believe the case is defensible, or conversely, qualify/narrow-down the
"toy" claim with either a "for me" or even a "for heavily network
dependent users", and I can't argue with it either. It was just the broad-
on-narrow case that you happened to use, that I had problems with.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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