Out With KDE, In With Xfce
I want to like KDE 4, I really do. I have been running a KDE desktop
since version 2.1. I loved the changes that came in version 3.x. Most of
my favorite Linux applications are KDE-based. The numerous bugs and
instability in KDE 4 have finally taken their toll.
The final straw was the all to frequent crashes that locked up the
keyboard and mouse. Nothing ruins your work day like having your
computer hard lock two or three times while in the middle of writing
code. Add to that random bugs and glitches in various Plasma widgets and
broken printing support in Okular and you have a desktop that is
basically unusable. On a side note, I am also dismayed by the direction
that the Amarok project has taken. Version 1.3 was the finest audio
player on any platform. For version 2.x, the Amarok team has apparently
decided to toss out most of the features that made 1.3 totally awesome
and replace them with a stripped-down feature set and a confusing user
interface. I do not understand why they decided to make that change.
Rather than continue to suffer, I have decided to switch back to
Xfce. I still dislike GNOME, so I do not see that as an option.
Though at the end of the day both are based on GTK+, so I will most
likely end up using more than a few GNOME applications. In fact, since
Firefox and OpenOffice.org are both GTK+-based and are applications I
use every day, Xfce may be a better fit for the way I work. Now I just
have to find GTK+ replacements for some of my existing KDE applications.
KDE 4.3 is slated for release at the end of July, but I do not think I
am going to bother to check it out. Maybe after a couple more releases
it will stabilize into something I can use.