KDE4 : the impossibility of it's existence

Most users of KDE4 would have found it to be irritatingly dumb.

A regular OS GUI user would appreciate the importance of the desktop. The benefit of a shortcut on the desktop can be realised only if a folder has to be opened to access a file in it. The sheer number of clicks that can be saved as a result of this shortcut leads to significant savings in time and resources. KDE4 completely makes it impossible to drop shortcuts on to the desktop, edit properties of existing desktop shortcuts and in anyway use the desktop productively. No useful menu pops up when right clicking on the desktop. The more one uses it, the more irritatingly dumb it seems. I tried KDE4 in Opensuse 11.1, and the default file manager is Dophin. Compared to Konqueror, this is a pretty obtuse application. Simple tasks like being able to set all folders to show ownership details of files is a mind boggling task which I haven't managed to complete. Then there is the issue of being able to manage the default view, it seems that Dolphin will by default only show folder contents as icons, not as detailed list. And there seems to be no way to modify this default behaviour, and manually setting the detailed list view in one folder isn't carried on to it's subfolder even.

How could something so obviously crippled be the outcome of a community? One of the core arguments in favour of the opensource movement is that problems in code are rectfied faster that in closed source apps, since there are many peers reviewing the app and the source. If Vista is a failure, it can be explained by the limited access the target market had to the beta version. But KDE4 cannot use this fig leaf.

One finds it hard to believe that the final product after so many peer reviews still managed to reduce the desktop to just a place holder for the wallpaper. It is just impossible that such a piece of code could see the light of the day. And yet, KDE4 is here, impossibe. Luckily, opensuse 11.1 thoughtfully bundled KDE 3.5 as well, which though also tweaked with, retained most of it's productivity features.

The loss of functionality is a big shame on the Linux community. It will have long term ramifications, since most new users will find KDE just too inefficient to bother with Linux. This is sad indeed.

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