Those guys spent months delaying their work on akonadi just so they could port their poor excuse for user data services to kde4. Need I remind them that such data services should not be even dependant on any desktop being installed. It's no use trying to get through to them though so many developers are wedded to copying bad windows designs. And these guys are worse because their wedded to KDE and won't hear development of anything else. I'm surprised dbus managed to get anywhere.

Bah, who needs to get work done fast and efficiently, give me those wobbly windows and special fx. Months of development time to make those windows wobble!

Paris because her wobbly bits look better.

I have been using KDE 4 on Fedora 9 for about a week now and I am loving it.

...is what gnomes eat for breakfast.

I hate the wobbly effect!

The genie effect in MacOS X communicates useful information: where the application has been minimised to.

The wobbly effects in Linux desktops convey no useful information at all and sometimes convey misleading information (e.g. minimise to the bottom of the screen when my menu of running apps is at the top). It's completely pointless work that is more about stroking the egos of the graphics programmers than delivering useful features to users.

Whatever. Carry on using OSX. Do what you like. What's the problem?

I've been KDE since 1.0 (now that was an article of faith) I enjoy using the desktop and applications. Roll on KOffice too (hah hah).

I find the wobbly desktop cool to watch but it actually makes me seasick after about 30 seconds. So I've turned it off. The cube for six desktops is fairly nifty though.

Of course, everything KDE developers do is beneath the contempt of the glamorous Apple, that why Safari isn't based on KHTML, err.. wait a moment

KDE 3 is nice and neat, If I resize the menu bar all the bits scale down, not it KDE4.

The menu structure is nasty, just keep a nice plain tree please.

And that silly thing in the top right that can't be removed.

And what gives with all the gumph around icons. What's wrong with the good old right click rather than wait for the sub icons to appear.

I want to like KDE4, I really don't like Gnome, but I don't like the way KDE4 seems to be heading. Maybe time to try out Enlightenment.

Yanno thats the beauty of opensource software... you have a choise!

If you dont like KDE4 then dont use it there are tons of other desktops out there. Pick one and stop frustrating yourself.

gnome + compiz > all

That's a very imaginative paragraph you've come up with there. As one of the 'worse' guys, I'd like to point out that Akonadi, the data storage layer we're developing for KDE-PIM, has in itself no KDE dependency. It's designed to be cross-desktop and cross-platform. It runs on WIndows and Mac already, and we're courting Gnome developers to write a glib client library.

Anyway, I can't stop to chat, I'm off to browse the depths of MSDN while wearing my KWeddingDress.

I'm still using KDE3 after having tried 4.0 for a time, and found it wanting. I'll almost certainly give it another go after my next OS upgrade though. Hopefully by then they'll have achieved feature parity with the latest KDE 3.

KDE 4 does seem in many ways like a practise in mental masturbation for desktop-3d-graphics programmers. Wobbly windows (Gnome+Compiz love these too) do indeed seem to be little more than a silly gimmick. Not to mention their interference with edge-docking.

I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to have desktop widgets rotated to arbitrary angles either, other than to be awkward.

Fear not though, AC, you can (or could in 4.0 at least) replace the new-style menu with a classic-style application-tree menu - it's just another panel applet you can add.

I've used Linux as my main desktop for years, so it does matter to me when the desktop experience becomes worse, and Compiz and the wobbly effects definitely make the experience worse, breaking features, showing misleading transitions, etc.

My point was that, unlike in Apple, there's no pressure encouraging OSS programmers to use the graphics power for good and not for evil (or at least, not for showing off).

I like what I see and I like where it's going. It's not there yes, but it's got enough going for it that I'm watching the project with a lot of interest.

Oh that genie effect? I believe that's in Compiz already... Me? I prefer the more understated Zoom effect (which also happens to do what you say genie does).

Wobbly Windows *does* actually have a use. Maybe it does reduce efficiency, but it feels less jarring. It's the same as having menus fading in.

My 0.2 on KDE? Too much concentration on copying OSX and Vista if you ask me (KDE4/OSX are about the same look and feel these days). Long live Gnome - efficiency uber alles!

Same feelings here. I upgraded this box from FC8 to FC9 a week or so ago and was surprised to find that the kde 3 I had come to love was replaced with the practically unusable kde 4.0... so I'm stuck with using Gnome, which isn't a bad desktop, just not as nice as KDE 3 + bits like kmail and kopete.

I sort of wish someone would take kde 3.5.9, rip out all the shit that shouldn't be there like attempting to "configure" things and instead munging up config files, and release a fork.

looks great

How is this not bloat?

Yeah, I run Fedora and have played with the desktop effects. I have more than enough poop (256 MB nVidia 7300 GS on my main desktop) on my systems to run them, but other than to occasionally show off to someone who's never seen them before, usually just leave them off.

Maybe I'm too old, or maybe just used Gnome and Linux too long to really care all that much for that kind of glitz. While the desktop switcher applet, and of course virtual terminals, may not look as cool as spinning cubes, they work just as well.

Nothing against the new stuff, but I usually just leave it turned off.

Jim

You missed my first comment. The transitions in Compiz don't take into account how you have configured your desktop. If you put the window selector in the top right corner, as I do, Compiz still animates minimising windows downwards to the bottom of the screen. If one moves the dock around the screen in MacOS, still windows minimise to the true position of the dock icon.

Compiz has copied the feature from MacOS with no attempt to understand how Apple actually designed it and why they designed it like they did, and no attempt to actually provide a useful, usable feature for the user.