Dumped KDE - Am I alone?
 

Until my hard disk crashed I was running happily Debian Lenny with KDE 3.5.9. Rock solid, and blazingly fast on a AMD 1700+ processor with an 5 year old NVIDIA MX440.

After the hard disk crash six months ago I decided to install Debian testing. Unfortunately Debian Testing comes with KDE4. The experience was horrendous. Instable, slow, dead slow, missing applications, limited setting capabilities, lacking functionality.

At the time I posted some comments on Debian and KDE forums. The KDE gurus blamed Debian, the Debian gurus blamed KDE. The answers I received included "KDE4 is still in development now, but it will be great, one day"

In the mean time I replaced the VGA card with a faster one (FX5200) and indeed, the GUI became workable, but that is all to say about it. It still was slow. There are noticable delays between a mouse click and reaction. The system overall feels sluggish and contains many bugs. Even when I disable the graphic effects it doesn't become much better. In no way the snappyness of KDE 3 is achieved.

Almost two years ago I tried KDE4 (4.0 at the time) and I was scared. I posted some messages here and there, stating that KDE4 had become Vistalized. (Does that word need an explanation?) Two years further, and it is still on the edge of unusable.

Last week I have installed Xfce. I had seen it before, but too many things were different and I switched back to KDE. This time I put some more effort in and got used to it in a day or two. Nothing wrong with Xfce, it is not even hard to use. For the time being Xfce will be the desktop I install on new machines instead of KDE.Too bad, KDE 3.5 was a great desktop.

I am wondering whether there are more people who dumped KDE in favor of a less resource hungry bloated and Vista-like desktop?

jlinkels

The slackware forums are full of such people. I personally like kde4 and am currently at 4.3.4 on my slack boxes and am enjoying it quite a lot. Others do NOT agree as can be seen by pages and pages of dissatisfied slackers.

Xfce rulz!

KDE is far too bloated, XFCE, JWM, and Fluxbox are the way to go.

I am undecided right now on desktops. But I agree that KDE4 is waaay too bloated.

I am actually running TWM at this moment! :)

Your config is bellow the minimum spec, no surprise it does not run well. KDE 3.5 date from 2005, when your hardware was quite new, no surprise it run well. Features have been added since 5 years. And I dont think Debian Unstable come with 4.4. Anything bellow 4.3 will give false impressions of missing config. 4.4 have even more config option than 3.5 ever had. But it will never run well on a 1700. Even on an Eee PC 701, it is just too slow to run it. The way KDE4 is designed is to be able to evolve, not top like 3.5 did. It come at a cost. Plasma is too heavy to run on such low config, that's all, live happy with XFCE or Fluxbox or get newer hardware.

I gave up KDE for Fluxbox at KDE3.0...

I couldn't stand KDE4 when I first saw it, but after using 4.3.1 for a while I've got used to it.

Yep,me for one.
These days i favour Fluxbox for a window manager and Lxde for a desktop environment.
I also tried live cd versions with KDE4,such as Open Suse and Kubuntu,it's just not for me.

I think you'll find Testing far more stable now you have taken KDE4 out of the equation.

KDE 4.4 is a beauty.
Although I prefer compiz standalone. ratpoison and openbox.

KDE4 has made me fall in love with XFCE. No need for anything else.

Thanks for all the answers. If I see the responses in favor of KDE4 versus against KDE4, it seems that I am far from alone. Maybe there will be a KDE7 one day solving the problems of KDE4.

jlinkels

I never did see, what version of KDE4 are you using?

KDE 4.3

I should have mentioned that of course.

jlinkels

I saw that KDE4's initial release was a trainwreck, and knew it would take a long time to get back on the rails. So I switched to Gnome, can't remember when that was. Used Gnome on Ubuntu for a fair bit, but then last autumn I switched to LXDE on Arch.

I'm planning on building a new PC soon, and I might give KDE another try then.