KDE 4 and usability

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rafo · Post by **rafo** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:05 pm

KDE 4 has been around for some time, and recently it appeared in (stable) Portage. Being a not too adventurous Gentoo user I haven't tried it a lot yet.

I have read various articles saying that KDE 4 looks good (in a visual sense) compared to KDE 3. So aesthetic progress has been made!

However, I am wondering, if you are primarily an application user for whom the desktop is the place to run applications X, Y, Z, and a file manager, and an editor, etc, what added value does KDE 4 bring in terms of usability?

As an example of what I consider a usability improvement, some of you may remember Windows 95 and Windows 98. With Windows 98 we got the little quickstart buttons that could be placed on the {StartButton,Task,SystemTray}-bar. Quite useful, and not surprisingly they made their way into desktops like KDE.

Another example: Many releases of Windows (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, ..) offered a desktop, but just a single one. In contrast most X desktops have a "virtual desktop" feature, very convenient if you work on different tasks during a workday.

It would be interesting to hear some opinions: What are the main usability goodies when going up to KDE 4? Or is it more a matter of many little advances that play together in a nice and coherent fashion?

SamuliSuominen · Post by **SamuliSuominen** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:13 pm

If you are still using KDE3, it's about time to switch since KDE3 is about to be removed from Portage.
Or moved into a overlay, it's not maintained anymore (by upstream or gentoo).

That said, I've found KDE4 to be the first usable KDE in terms of usability. Took me an hour to strip the unnecessary candy out of it, but after that's done...

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:22 pm

The two most important things I noticed (for me!) that changed from KDE3 -> 4 are:

Suspend to ram/disk works ootb now without any problems
No more hassle with printers, the KDE4 printer setup found all network printers at my company and set them up in an instant.

SnowCrashv5 · Post by **SnowCrashv5** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 6:02 pm

KDE is completely unusable and I don't think the 4 series will be.

Kwin has huge performance issues with effects all turned of.

Kwin with any effects turned on makes X freeze (had this happen with several distros, several KDE point releases, on mesa/nv/nvidia driver.

Amarok... i could write more about this than i could KDE. The gui is awful, features are still missing, last i used it the lyrics and wiki scripts woudln't work. The compositing crap for the center column that allows you to add widgets and such would get all sorts out of wack..

Kde's panel would randomly reorganize itself.

The statusbar would continually try to load all the icons all over each other, so i could never click on the one i wanted.

Akondi's server is A) a dumb idea to begin with and B) it crashed every time i logged in anyways. It took until 4.2 to have proper dual monitor support.

Dolphin has become bloated compared to what it was before official inclusion into KDE.

Oxygen is ugly (yes i know it can be changed), it has usability problems (Lacelott and Kickoff are awful designs) Yes I know you can go back to classic menu.

This has been on Gentoo, Arch, Fedora, Opensuse, and Ubuntu (Kubuntu and kde-core). 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3.

All of this crap for what? So people can spin widgets round and round on their desktop?

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 6:45 pm

Well I now have both kde3.5 and 4 on my box.
I can't help it but I am not fond of kde4 at all.
I wanted to change the login wallpaper but couldn't.
It seems you need to write an xml script to accomplish that!
And there are lots of other things that don't work well (yet?).
When I run glxgears in kde3 I get about 205 fps full-screen.
In kde4 I get 195 with desktop effects disabled.
What's eating the resources?
It feels sluggish compared to the snappishness of kde3.
Gerard.

Edit:How and what did you strip ssuominen?

alkan · Post by **alkan** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 9:14 pm

I loved kde3 (long time user) and starting to hate kde4. I installed every version since 4.0. My opinion is that usability hit rock bottom with kde4 series. I strain myself everytime i use it. It has some promising features but GUI design is horrible. Take dolphin, how much of the precious screen estate usable, less than 50 percent? how (not)easy to navigate and do common file operations. Sure you can tweak it, but it is beside the point. I also kept open mind and assumed it is just a new thing and will take time to get used to, but that is not happening.
I am still hopefull and will keep an eye on every release.

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 10:35 pm

@gerard82: Glxgears numbers? Really? That's your beef with KDE4? Holy eff.

The reason I don't like KDE4 is bloat. By that I mean stuff I don't care about like the whole "widgets 'r' everything" craze that everything is into nowadays (meaning ,I don't particularly care about plasma), and the whole "semantic desktop" and "desktop search" stuff (nepomuk, strigi, and company). I really don't care about that stuff, I don't need it. I also don't like the oxygen theme and even less so the oxygen icons, but at least that is easily changeable.
All in all, when KDE3 is removed from portage I'll either follow it to the overlay, or I'll switch to LXDE.

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 8:47 am

@gusar,
You can't read English?
Gerard.

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:22 am

SnowCrashv5 wrote:Kwin has huge performance issues with effects all turned of.

Without effects you have performance issues? I neither have any issues when effects are turned on nor off (ctrl-shift-f12 for instant turning on/off btw.) And I have a damn onboard chip that has no own memory.

SnowCrashv5 wrote:Kwin with any effects turned on makes X freeze (had this happen with several distros, several KDE point releases, on mesa/nv/nvidia driver.

kwin never freezed X on my machines since kde 4.1 on intel 965GME notebook and nvidia GeForce9800GTX+ desktop system. Everything is dead stable here.

SnowCrashv5 wrote:Kde's panel would randomly reorganize itself.

The panel never organizes anything on it's own. You organize it.

SnowCrashv5 wrote:The statusbar would continually try to load all the icons all over each other, so i could never click on the one i wanted.

never seen that either...

SnowCrashv5 wrote:Akondi's server is A) a dumb idea to begin with and B) it crashed every time i logged in anyways. It took until 4.2 to have proper dual monitor support.

Worked fine since KDE 4.1
...man... I sense "+kdeprefix" and old config folders...

SnowCrashv5 wrote:Dolphin has become bloated compared to what it was before official inclusion into KDE.

but it can be configured almost too much. Yes, it took a while to get the hang on dolphin...

SnowCrashv5 wrote:All of this crap for what? So people can spin widgets round and round on their desktop?

Yep. Because when installed and configured properly, it works like a charm, at least for me. If it is not working for you, well, then it's not a good choice for you...

gerard82 wrote:I wanted to change the login wallpaper but couldn't.
It seems you need to write an xml script to accomplish that!

Splash screen can be changed as a user, KDM theme as root only. ("kdesu systemsettings")

But of course there are things I don't like either.

"...the whole "semantic desktop" and "desktop search" stuff "
++! Why are those enabled by default? First thing for every user: Turn 'em off!
The default dolphin layout isn't really good for me. I need more buttons in the toolbar and an editable address bar for my daily work. But configuring dolphin took about 10 seconds, so never mind that.
While the normal desktop _is_ useful, enabling it by default without further notice was a bit too much at first, and I had to switch to "Folder View" for the first couple of weeks.
Luckily the kmenu can be set to the KDE3 type menu, because this new one, like with the desktop view, took a while to getting used to.

However, these are all personal views, and anything that is working for me is not necessarily working for someone else and vice versa.

On the other hand it is utter rubbish to complain about things that can be configured quickly and easily. Sure, I don't like the default layout of dolphin, but others do, and it takes what? 10 seconds? to configure it so it looks like I want and does what I want. (And is more powerful than konqueror imho)

But hell even if this is not an option for you, you can have the file manager of your choice configured in systemsettings! The same with window manager (Don't like kwin? Take compiz-fusion if you like!), web browser, e-mail, default text editor, instant messenger and console program.

And no, I have never seen anything that has to be configured via text files with KDE4. But then I don't claim to actually having seen everything...

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:39 am

@Yamakazure,
Of course only root can change login wallpaper.
Same as in kde-3.5.
When you open the system settings in 4 there's no button "Administrator Mode".
You have to start system settings with alt-F2 kdesu systemsettings (crappy).
I wanted to use the recently published 10 years Gentoo wallpaper but that won't work.
Gerard.

Post by **toralf** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:42 am

Gusar wrote:All in all, when KDE3 is removed from portage I'll either follow it to the overlay, or I'll switch to LXDE.

I'm wondering whether 2 appropriate files within /etc/portage/package.mask/ and /etc/portage/package.keywords/ would be sufficiant to stay at KDE 3.5.10 until 4.3.X is useable (X >= 3 ?) or whether I have to use layman anyway ?

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:53 am

@toralf,
I now have both 3.5.10 and 4.3.1 installed.
Fortunately it's possible to choose either one at startup.
I have my /home on a diiferent partition.
What I do is make a backup of my / on a usb-disk.
In case kde-3.5 gets clobbered I will replace it with the saved one.
I don't want to mess with overlays.
Gerard.

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 10:18 am

@gerard: I believe your sluggishness problems are real. Qt4 uses different rendering paths than Qt3 and if those aren't accelerated by your graphic card (or it's drivers lack support for that), you'll hit software fallbacks, resulting in sluggishness. But glxgears is in no way an indication of any of that.

toralf wrote:I'm wondering whether 2 appropriate files within /etc/portage/package.mask/ and /etc/portage/package.keywords/ would be sufficiant to stay at KDE 3.5.10 until 4.3.X is useable (X >= 3 ?) or whether I have to use layman anyway ?

I think you'll need an overlay. Think of the need to re-emerge stuff when the underlying libraries change (like the libjpeg6 -> libjpeg7 change, or the libxcb thingy). Or what if you want to install an additional kde3 app. A time will come though, when the underlying system will change so much that the unmaintained kde3 will simply not work anymore and there will be no one with the interest to fix it. So even the overlay is just a temporary measure.

numerodix · Post by **numerodix** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 11:16 am

kde4 usability is dreadful indeed. I just recently did a fresh gentoo install with kde3. How I wish they hadn't thrown away all that good work.

Sujao · Post by **Sujao** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 1:07 am

I just updated to KDE 4.3. I must say that I expected much more from 4.3. At the moment KDE is more like 4.0.

Some things I don't like:

There is too much eyecandy, transparancy and stuff. This leads to the problem that it's not obvious what is a button, what is clickable and what not. So I end up clicking everything with trial&error trying to find this out. Thats definately some steps back in usability. Example: After you pluged in a new usb device you see a new "button" in the device widget with the symbol of a usb dongle and it has a hover effect so you click it. It also says "2 actions for this device". But where are they? Where can I see them? You have to click the whole device button for the old "What do you want to do?" Window to appear. But then I see all the actions anyway, why show them earlier? And after it has been mounted, there is a smal icon on the right of the device button. But has no hover effect of its own so one assumes its just a status indicator. But NO, if you click on that symbol you will anmount the device! How should I know this? Oh and then I realize there is a smaller icon on the picture of the usb dongle too. Is that clickable too? No, not this time. You get my idea?
Most of the desktop styles look all the same. And with most of them the taskbar is almost the same color. You can't see what the active window is, because the active task is merely different from the others. Again, too much "looks over usability".
Same thing with the title bar of windows with the oxygen theme. Those 2 blue lines dont really set the active window apart. I switches back to plastique theme.
A lot of widgets don't work. I tried the Atheist Quote and it fails to reload the content. It simply becomes black. No error message. Same with weather or comic applet. Only thing to do is deactive them.
Very unstable, altough this is the third so called stable release. During 2 hours of configuring the new apps and testing stuff I had about 8 crashes.
Overall it all looks like a motley mix of styles and and UI-concepts. Much more than in KDE 3.5.10.

Do you agree? What are things you don't like? This is not supposed to be a bug collection but more a "How do I feel about it" thread.

doctork · Post by **doctork** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 1:48 am

No, can't say I agree. I've been running kde4 since 4.1 and haven't had many problems, at least not since I turned off the (IMHO) useless semantic desktop stuff. I run in the "classic menu style" so things don't appear much different from 3.5.*.
--
doc

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 1:50 am

It feels slightly... laggy? Mushy? Not sure the right word for it but it's definitely not as responsive as anything else. The OpenGL stuff even feels slower than compiz.

I've been trying KDE4 on and off since it came out and it's a lot better now than 4.0 was, but in the end I've gone back to using xfce.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 2:18 am

Right now, I' running with Kde 4.3.1 on my Quad Core with an Nvidia Top 260 and I must say that it's pretty fast like Kde 3.5.10 actually.

But, on my Thinkpad T61 with a cheap intel card, it's pretty slow actually.

So, like we used to say, Kde est une usine a gaz, I don't know if there is an english expression for that, but if we translate, Kde is like a big gaz factory.

platojones · Post by **platojones** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 2:28 am

First version was so bad as to be unusable. I dumped it right away and went back to kde 3.5. When 4.2 came out, it was stable enough, that I finally did away with 3.5. Now for me, it's relatively stable...I've run into only a few, very minor, glitches and those really don't have any impact on my day to day use.

I will say, like all KDE versions in the past, it is very configurable. So you can turn off those eye candy features you don't like. Also, you can make it behave a lot like KDE 3.5 in general.

Re-writing the entire code base and changing so much of the interface behavior was a big risk by the KDE team....and I think the results were mixed. But having used it exclusively now for many months, I'm comfortable with it. Still prefer it over gnome.

rahulthewall · Post by **rahulthewall** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 7:33 am

Running 4.3.2 on a laptop which is now 3 years old.
Processor: Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2300 (2M Cache, 1.66 GHz, 667 MHz FSB)
Video: Intel 945 GM
RAM: 2.5 GB

And I say that I do not have any problems at all. It runs pretty fast, is very responsive, and does not lag even when I have more than 6-7 programs running.

rafo · Post by **rafo** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 7:40 am

Thanks all of you who commented! It appears that progress has been made with some features: Suspend to disk, suspend to RAM, and the printer setup tool. At the same time there seems to exist a bunch of annoyances.

The dolphin file manager was mentioned. IMHO the file manager is an application that Microsoft did very well ever since Windows 95, and many X-based file managers have been less fun to use. Not surprisingly my favourite so far is 'xfe'. Now since Dolphin is highly configurable, is it possible to set it up so that you can use it more or less like Windows Explorer?

(There is a kde-misc/dolphin package that I was able to emerge against KDE 3.5. A typical example of all those less usable X file managers since it does not provide a tree view. But maybe I should look at the KDE 4 version instead, kde-base/dolphin-4.3.1.)

energyman76b · Post by **energyman76b** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 8:05 am

shift+alt+f12, eyecandy gone

also, there is more than just the two bars to mark the active window.

also ever tried the right button on your mouse?

oh - and if you can't distinguish the active button in the taksbar, you are definetly using the wrong theme. With all themes I ever used it was very, very simple.

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 11:46 am

I have searched the system settings but I can't find the classic menu style.
Another thing I'd like to have the same as in 3.5 is ctrl-tab desktop switching.
How do I set these in kde4?
Gerard.

Apheus · Post by **Apheus** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 2:13 pm

gerard82 wrote:I have searched the system settings but I can't find the classic menu style.

Every part of the task bar is an applet. You can remove the "K Menu" applet and add the applet "K Menu (traditional)" via the "Add applet"-dialog. I'm not sure about the names because I don't have an english desktop.

Sujao · Post by **Sujao** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 2:23 pm

energyman76b wrote:shift+alt+f12, eyecandy gone

True, but also all the effects. And they are not only eyecandy in my oppinnion. For example in 3.5 you also had the title bare of a window fly to the taskbar when you minimize the window. I find this helpful to see where this window went to. In 4.3 only a composite effect is available. Actually NO effects without composize are there.

energyman76b wrote:also, there is more than just the two bars to mark the active window.

In the default theme I don't see more than this.

energyman76b wrote:also ever tried the right button on your mouse?

Hey I am not your enemy. I just wrote down my oppinion. No need for sharp toungues. Just say what you know and help everbody to use 4.3 better.

energyman76b wrote:oh - and if you can't distinguish the active button in the taksbar, you are definetly using the wrong theme. With all themes I ever used it was very, very simple.

Well this might be true. But I would expect the default theme to be very usable as probably 80% of KDE users never change it. I used 3.5 for over 4 years and beside some playing around in the beginning I sticked with the default plastique theme because I found it to be the best in terms of usability and looks.

platojones wrote: I will say, like all KDE versions in the past, it is very configurable. So you can turn off those eye candy features you don't like. Also, you can make it behave a lot like KDE 3.5 in general.

Can you name me one desktop theme with no backroung images in the taskbar, a proper contrast between active and deactivated taskbars and simple colours which also looks good without composite? I am serious. Look below, I tried a lot of them and didn't find one.

Ant_P wrote: It feels slightly... laggy? Mushy? Not sure the right word for it but it's definitely not as responsive as anything else. The OpenGL stuff even feels slower than compiz.

Composite support seems still to be bad. Resizing windows (not moving) is very slow for me, too. Need to search the forums for some solutions.

After activating compsiting I found that things look better but still not as "usable" as in 3.5.
When trying out new desktop themes the window manager crashed after abaout every 7th click to "Apply". So I had to restart the KDE Session about 6 times.

KDE 4 and usability

KDE 4 and usability

Usability in KDE4.3 is worse than 3.5.10