<story><title>Where KDE is Going – Part 1</title><url>http://dot.kde.org/2014/06/26/where-kde-going-part-1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Nanzikambe</author><text>I love and use KDE on both my workstation and laptop. However over the decades, and especially since v4, I&amp;#x27;ve seen it grow into something I barely recognise. Some things have to change:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   1&amp;#x2F; Remove akonadi&amp;#x2F;nepomuk&amp;#x2F;mysql - a full mysql install just to provide a data store for &amp;quot;PIM and metadata&amp;quot; is ludicrous.
   2&amp;#x2F; Make sure the Semantic desktop&amp;#x2F;Semantic Search&amp;#x2F;nepomuk is optional. I respect that it maybe useful for some, but please respect that it may not be useful for all.
   3&amp;#x2F; Ditto for consolekit&amp;#x2F;policykit 
   4&amp;#x2F; Ditto for KDE PIM. The moment Kopete, Konversation, Kaddressbook etc depended upon the PIM stuff, was the moment I dropped them for Pidgin. Why? See point #1
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It took me 12 hours to get kdelibs-4.12.5 + the rest of kde-base built without consolekit, policykit, akonadi, nepomuk, udisks&amp;#x2F;udisks2, upower, raptor, redland, gstreamer, virtuoso, soprano and canberra. But the result is a clean, usable and fast desktop, ie. the desktop I want! If I have to do that each time I upgrade, I&amp;#x27;m going to look at other options. I&amp;#x27;m most definitely not alone in this, a search on any of #1-4 will find hordes of frustrated people spending time figuring out ways to remove all these unwanted features.&lt;p&gt;For many users, removing all the above isn&amp;#x27;t an option. For users its complex and time consuming. Failing to make them optional (rather than default) KDE will suffer -- losing users, as memory consumed by an idle desktop triggers horrific flashbacks to darker Windows days.&lt;p&gt;My perception as a user is that Gnome (minimalism uber alles) and KDE (everything and the kitchen sink) have gone to extremes and forgotten their user base.</text></comment>
<story><title>Where KDE is Going – Part 1</title><url>http://dot.kde.org/2014/06/26/where-kde-going-part-1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nisa</author><text>I have huge respect for everyone involved in KDE and OpenSource software and I&amp;#x27;m writing this on KDE 4.13 but damn... it still sucks. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m the wrong user.. but I do programming and do sysadmin stuff most of the time..&lt;p&gt;First the good parts: KDE is quite stable for me. I have hardly any crashes... this is huge as Unity had some ugly bugs I could not resolve.&lt;p&gt;But I had to install the Numix theme and icons and tweak knobs to get a common look between KDE&amp;#x2F;GTK2&amp;#x2F;GTK3.. I found the default Oxygen ugly and not well designed but this is probably a question of taste.&lt;p&gt;With Numix the machine feels and looks great but I&amp;#x27;m not so happy after installing Windows 8.1 on an 10 year old Pentium M notebook with 2GB RAM and having to realize that Windows is way faster and responsive and more feature-rich than KDE and Unity and requires less RAM.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not trolling - I&amp;#x27;m talking about stuff like browsing files using the file manager and using a browser or office for writing documents.&lt;p&gt;Back to KDE: I don&amp;#x27;t understand Plasma at all - I don&amp;#x27;t use &amp;quot;activities&amp;quot; I tried it but found it useless. I don&amp;#x27;t care about widgets. I&amp;#x27;d care more if the widgets would not be so useless.. something like gkrellm that ran on fvwm95 gives me more and better data about cpu&amp;#x2F;disk&amp;#x2F;network usage than any widgets I&amp;#x27;ve found in the collections.&lt;p&gt;Memory... at least 400MB RSS after a fresh boot running only Konsole. No semenatic desktop, no Akonadi, no widgets... This is just crazy.&lt;p&gt;I have no SSD and 4GB RAM - maybe I&amp;#x27;m too cheap for KDE but Akonadi and all semantic desktop parts never worked for me.&lt;p&gt;Why can&amp;#x27;t I disable the desktop search? After some hours googling I managed to kill most of Akonadi and Desktop search but I really would enjoy something like a minimal KDE desktop.&lt;p&gt;Dolphin&amp;#x2F;Kwin&amp;#x2F;Konsole&amp;#x2F;Kate&amp;#x2F;Okular are really great tools, through and I enjoy using them more than the Gnome tools..&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m an old grumpy user - I really enjoy the Unity concept and even found Gnome3 interesting but I&amp;#x27;m still feel some longing from time to time for the speed and functionality of KDE 3.5.&lt;p&gt;But overall I can work with KDE. I would be probably a lot more happy if I had a SSD and 16GB RAM and well.. that sucks. I don&amp;#x27;t want to install Windows on this machine for it to be faster!&lt;p&gt;I know there are alternatives.. but running Windows 8.1 on this 10 year old Pentium M notebook just made clear to me that the problem is not the hardware - it&amp;#x27;s the software.&lt;p&gt;Why is it so hard to to have a highly functional and low-footprint system?</text></comment>